Bitterhall

by Helen McClory

  ‘Don’t tease,’ he said, ‘I know what you mean.’

  ‘Oh you do, eh?’

  ‘Tom, right? You’re asking me if I know why you’re with Tom. You want me to be the judge of you and him. But you phrase it or believe it like you think I’ve come up in my mind first with the question – the dilemma – of why you are together. Which is quite presumptuous of you.’

  ‘That I’d be thinking it was a preoccupation of yours?’

  ‘Just that,’ he said. We both took a breath.

  I saw how clever he was even for all the distraction. I saw something bright and dark in his eyes. I determined we’d get drunk and have a grand time and I’d go home without saying bye to Tom and probably never have a conversation as meaningful with this stranger again. Petty, yes. But forgive me; I’d forgive you for it. I didn’t know what the substance Tom and I had was yet, or what Daniel and I’d come to have, or Tom and Daniel. It seems so tangled now, but then it was a matter of talk. Talk gets to be tangles, later, and we were bound up in words long before we were in bodies. And I love it for that, too.

  Speech as Union

  We stayed up late in the cave of our new friendship, covenous in the kitchen while the others socialised in the merry light of banality. It turned out Daniel and I had studied partially the same things at our universities, with codicology being the common passion. Daniel had turned himself to digital replication – I knew of the basement lab, the work they were doing there in general if not specifics, because I’d seen the applications to copy out manuscripts on my supervisor’s desk and been along to conferences on digital humanities where they discussed the university’s investment in the new setup. In my mind a copied thing was a brilliant idea, faster than a facsimile and almost impossible to tell apart from the original. But I wasn’t sure how that fidelity – I wanted to say, uncanny fidelity – might recontextualise the thing itself in ways I didn’t like, and if I didn’t like it, what cause I might have to feel so, whether it was merely kneejerk or in fact valid. I wanted to press to see if he loved the physicality of old manuscripts, as I did. Surely. The fullness of a book that’s really a thousand years old and how delicate and indomitable it is.

  ‘I love how many lives a manuscript has lived in those years,’ I said. ‘How people change it with drawings or marks of wear, defacements.’

  Daniel looked sad. ‘But every time we touch a book, violently or even gently, with the tips of our fingers, we’re wearing it down and away.’

  ‘Oh no, I don’t think of it like that. We have to be careful, yes, but the book tells us in the handling what it can take. I turn the pages with clean fingers, I listen to the pages crackling gently, and the spine. I go with purpose, and both I and the book are working together, in revelation of its contents. What else is the technology of a book for but to be touched and interacted with?’

  ‘My work is to help lift those interactions into another space, and let the old book live a new life. I know some people might say, oh well you just make facsimiles, how is this special? But I make copies indistinguishable on the molecular level, really that close in, to the originals, so that people can touch those instead. So that they can keep learning. So that—’

  ‘So that nothing is lost,’ I said, ‘I don’t believe that’s possible. But good effort, anyway. Good use of the 3D printer, rather than to make tat we don’t need. Worthy. Though I’m yet to be convinced it can replicate something so well that nothing is lost in the translation from original to copy.’

  There was a pause in which we hunted for something to say, our abashed silence colouring the air. I knew I hadn’t offended him, though it might have a lesser man. There, I was already admiring him. He caught my eye and smiled, at last. A blink and you’d miss it, I thought, and smiled back at his turned-away face.

  ‘I feel like I know you, already, from so little,’ I blurted. ‘Isn’t it weird?’

  ‘Do you?’ He said. For a moment I wondered the deviousness or depth of the question – was he hinting that he and I had met? It struck me as not at all unlikely and I thought of him stepping off from the otherworld in which he clearly dwelled, the world of doubles, ascending into my dreams. His passive figure peering at me from behind a distorting toadstool, or drifting next to me as we went over a city, chatting sinuously, quietly, about the Rutland Psalter. And then another, more base, startling thought.

  ‘You’re not flirting with me I hope,’ I said.

  ‘No, I’m not,’ he said, looking aghast, before his face settled into calmness again. ‘I don’t think so anyway.’

  He seemed like he might flirt without knowing himself for it.

  ‘You have one of those faces,’ I said, ‘the way you move about. Avoiding my eye. Smiling a lot.’

  ‘Does Tom have one of those faces?’ he said.

  ‘Is it nerves—’ I began to say. Our words clattered together. And we got up a little while later and did stuff to get away from these questions for now.

  Performative Utterance

  I kept thinking, you will never touch me. Only by accident will we ever touch. I poured wine. This was another day, when for some reason the two of us were alone. I can’t remember now, why. We began to talk about art. The point of art and artists we loved – Daniel almost always giving me a male name – a must-see somewhere in a country neither of us had ever visited. We talked about the psychic toll of working with objects that will outlive us – obviously Daniel did not feel the same way, since he had agency over these objects, since he was the transformer, the source of continuity. And I was only the witness, even if an educated one. Half-way into the second bottle we began talking about desire.

  ‘Desire is the main concern of art,’ he said, ‘all art comes from the need for something. There’s never a moral side to art because of that. When artists create something they sometimes push into the grey zones of their own morality, and on past that, because the art allows for it, and one must self-define.’

  ‘Okay, but my work brings me into contact primarily with moral art. Hyper-moral: guides for the good life, prayers begging God through various intercessors for them to be cleansed of sin. All the high beautiful words, the illustrations, the body of the book submit to this. It’s not desire in the carnal sense, it’s not need in the need for hungers of the body. It’s spiritual clamour. To call it desire is to reduce a great thing into a lesser thing.’

  ‘You think bodily need is lesser than spiritual need? You think they aren’t connected?’

  I sat up straighter and nudged the bottle with my glass until he poured me some.

  ‘Uh, well.’

  He smiled, ‘they are both equals. We have our bodies and we have – don’t have – our selves. You know what I mean.’

  ‘What even is desire?’

  ‘Nothing should ever be denied. No desire should be rejected.’ He told me who had said that, but I forgot instantly in the haze of the wine. It wasn’t Blake, though I’m sure Blake said something like it. The room seemed lit with a rosy glow. Every object in it, even the light, had been placed there to make up the scene in which we now sat. I pictured Tom’s muscular back against the toiling sunbeams of a Blake illustration. I tried to see into the depths of myself and wondered if I desired something in this moment that could be understood in the regular terms that I knew. And what I would do with that knowledge. Nothing, I supposed. I glanced at his face. His eyes were squinted with drink, he kept pulling small thoughtful faces, as he tried to address my glib questions. We talked and tipped back the wine. Badr came and went, never stopping to chat, but looking on us fondly as we drank, like a mother whose benevolence is secure even in the most foolish of moments.

  ‘Do you ever get touch starvation?’ I asked.

  He looked up, startled. ‘It’s all I know. I think,’ he said, ‘if I were to be touched, I think I would jump out of my skin,’

  I thought of my books in the archive, lying, waiting to be touched. I thought of a skinless Daniel. In my mind he resembled uncooke
d sausage meat, his delicate skin laid aside like clingfilm. I pushed my hand over the table very lightly, a little above it, as if pushing a glass for a ouija board. I pushed until my fingers were hovering just over his hand on the desk.

  ‘And if I touched you now?’

  Daniel looked slightly left. I lowered my index finger. The gap between us was only a few millimetres. Voices from the otherworld addressed him from stage left. He raised his eyes to meet my eyes. That was about the whole of it.

  Dim Spaces

  Tom’s room. Dark and dingy, covered in cat hair. I would spend most of the early autumn nights lying in that bed with Tom, us fucking, touching. At first. Then later lying awake pretending to sleep as Tom lay awake pretending to sleep. Something had come to lie between us shining and sharp and his, not mine. He slept so little and try as I might to boldly ignore it each shift in the bed clapped me out of my chance at sleep, and I couldn’t figure out how best to start on it without the situation degenerating into a blowup. I might strike you as the kind who batters her way through life but I have at least an idea when not to push. I suddenly switch to a tread with a delicacy you’d scoff at. Socialisation as a woman, you might say. I’d say I saw, as through a glass darkly, the vastness of what had got into him, and wide-eyed lay watching for it to emerge. Though that might be hindsight’s untruthfulness casting me as wiser than I was.

  But anyway, before all that, that night of the housewarming, I watched Daniel covertly as he stood looking about at Tom’s room. Him commenting and prying without trying to look like he was meaning too much by it. Stop it, I wanted to say, just come out and make your move, if you’re going to. But of course, he wasn’t.

  Standing in the room I was burdened by the overwhelming stink of Lynx (I would buy Tom a nicer cologne as soon as I felt able to) but nearer, I got a waft of Daniel’s scent. I moved a little closer. Not flirting. He smelled of old books. Chewed wood. Bitter lemon on his breath. He seemed to know things and I was hunting to know. He did not move away. Something else. I couldn’t place him. I didn’t want him. I was deciding. Handsome, or not handsome? Friend or foe? Too soft, or pliant and supple? Straight or gay, or in between? The light from the hall outside shone on the side of his face as he looked about saying meaningless things. I wanted him in that way of wanting to know in the non-biblical sense. I wanted to unscrew my hair out of its bun and hug the Daniel right out of him, absorb him through my lips and eyes and skin before he was called away by whatever called to him. Yes, that much.

  We just left the room. We drank, we talked, I learned that his mother lived alone, sold done-up furniture online, and that his best friend was called Mark and lived in the most fabulous house – they’d known each other since childhood. He’d had a cat that had died and his mother said it haunted her for a year and a day. He didn’t believe in ghosts. Of course, I said. He told me more about the job at the university copying objects of infinite preciousness, which was at the planning and implementation stage, but also about some books he liked, which diverged wildly from the canon of the venerably old. I sat next to him. I listened to the scent of him. I felt his strangely soft voice. I searched out his dashing eyes and wondered if behind the shell a boldness lay. I did not wonder, then, why I wanted him to have that quality inside. Outside of our conversation the house bustled with other bodies who drank and laughed and began to depart. The last guest went, bar me. Daniel and I went into the kitchen and made food. There came Tom, stumbling. I got up on the counter, kissed him deeply, his arms got up around me. I saw Daniel watching us.

  ‘Goodnight, Daniel,’ said Tom.

  The shining end of a sentence.

  Captain Panic

  We went to see a superhero film. Tom’s idea. This was our first proper going-out date. He was on time at the cinema, driving up in the dusky light in a silver car I realised later was Badr’s. I’d got the tickets, he’d get the meal at the fast food place afterwards. He seemed excited by the prospect of the film like a small kid might be. Faffed between what sweet to get then ordered the biggest bucket of popcorn and mashed it into his face by the handful before we even sat down, while I had roasted almonds and water. There is too much sugar in our lives anyway, and not always of our volition.

  In the coolish dark we sat watching adverts with our heads pressed against the seatbacks from the push of the giant screen. I wondered if we’d hold hands like tweens. The film started, and the big explosions were so loud I had to cover my ears. The scene was a humanitarian disaster, but what was really awful was that one superhero didn’t trust another one and was rude. Who cares if I’d seen this kind of thing a dozen times already; I pulled out my hipflask and unscrewed the top. The contents smelled of the warm tinny whisky that had been in there since the year before, the last time I’d gone to see a superhero film. That time with a bunch of us from the bubble tea shop. I sloshed a bit down and resumed watching.

  It was probably due to the clamour that I didn’t notice Tom’s behaviour until about two hours in when the inevitable flirtations of lead hero and lady hero got really egregious. I glanced aside to make a joke to him and saw he was staring down the rows at an empty gap. It was unusual right enough given the film had just come out and should have been packed at that showing. Someone had booked and not shown, I guessed. I glanced over at Tom. Bored? His eyes, in the flashes between car crashes, were glazy and rolling. I leaned to his ear.

  ‘You all right?’ I whispered. He didn’t answer me, or move his gaze. It was warm in there. I wondered if he was getting panicked by the environment and needed some air. I took his arm.

  ‘Let’s get a refill,’ I said, pointing to the popcorn. He rose obediently and we went into the foyer.

  ‘I should have expected it,’ he said, wiping his eyes.

  ‘Are you okay?’ I asked again. He didn’t seem to be responding to my words, but to his own.

  ‘I knew it. Where was it – another film I think. He went into the cinema and he saw a ghost there too. Not a ghost. A demon. An it—’

  ‘Here,’ I said, leading him towards the empty concessions area. I bought a bottle of water and broke the seal and put it up to his mouth, and he drank it down greedily.

  ‘Sorry, I—’ he said.

  ‘Feeling any better?’

  ‘God, how embarrassing,’ he said, putting the bottle up to his forehead, ‘I just overheated, I think.’ He straightened his back, ‘Shall we go back in then? Up for that?’

  As if it had been me who had felt like shit. He even rubbed my arm. It took all I had not to snap at him. But what would I have said? Admit your weakness, man! Or, it’s okay, for fuck’s sake, you felt rubbish and we needed to leave and I got you out! All things that don’t require an angry tone of voice to say.

  Swallowing Tree

  You too might contemplate why I was with him, and you’d know to ask it aside from the obvious ‘just look at him’ response. So it was, Tom in the morning as the alarm went off pulling the covers off me to sleep a little longer. Under an umbrella that tilted to reveal the Tomness of him waiting for me outside of the library. Tom sullen when I didn’t give him the right response. Tom at my place pulling on his jeans, then his tee-shirt, then leather jacket. His back to me the whole time, the texture of different fabrics and skin. But also, everything around Tom. The emptiness of my bedroom after he’d left. The solid feel of it right before I brought him in again. The maleness of his room. His white cat, wandering around or watching with her beautiful hypnotic eyes. The candle I set alight while I studied, cedar scented, that I’d never light with Tom around. Without him, Effie and Anna with me in the living room of our place choosing what film to go out and see, what drinks we could make from the leftovers we had. The sound of the post through the letterbox. Picking up the post and sorting it. The sound of buttering toast, phone notifications buzzing beside the plate. Going out to work in the blue light. Leaves coming off the trees like yellow letters. The moments before I went in to see my supervisor, looking down at my phone with
veiled desperation. The weekly skype call to mam and da. The twice-weekly text to Stephanie. The weekly argument with Effie about the dishes. The twice-weekly trip to the big supermarket – with Anna sometimes since we got out around the same time of day. Waiting at the bus stop. Walking through the park. Dogs spotted. Cats peeped. And all the while yearning for Tom, a pure, scalding need, which is only really possible in the absence. I know well enough that the tender, careful, early stage of love is a momentary thing so desperately wanted to enjoy it, though I was struggling with how.

  What else is passion, but suffering – we all have the dictionary definition in mind. That which is in the old Christian sense suffering in the body and mind, and in the old romantic a gilding tawdry swoosh of feelings and fluids. At heart both types of passion are a disruption to the norm, the norms of the body and the norms of routine. And so old fashioned as to be kind of arcane, but then, I had a proclivity to that. Visionary stressors at least half cliché, with all cliché’s specificity and audacity. Tom, present or absent, was my feint at an opulent, medieval disruption. I so rarely have it, in my life. There’s too many of us on this planet to have any of the wild agonies of spirit and love from those old near hallucinatory lapis lazuli and vellum eras, was my thinking, so I had unconsciously always tried to be sensible in my desire, to keep it level, to never overstep my portion. I didn’t go looking for medieval levels of desire, just as I only took a scholarly interest in magic-as-science and science-as-morality, funny little asides as currency or full unhinging and holy suffering there. No. Like a tree whose bark calmly swallows whatever presses against it, takes it, rust and all and never begs, so were my life and my days. Some other time I’ll talk about how desire is a punishment, for a woman. It is terrible to want in this way. So we do, and it wrecks us. So then, I was hungry for the passion of him while carefully aware of his everything else and his expiry date, and trying to keep my head up. And there, Tom pushing me against the wall and tonguing me, hand on my tit. And elsewhere, Tom slighting me by turning away and a drawn out bray in front of his office mates as I came up to greet him. Singular Tom in his healthy uninterrupted incarnation. I thought I knew that was all the passion in him. What a charming uninkling, then.