‘Not hungry?’ I asked.
He lifted his food and began eating it. Not totally mechanically – he did smile when I spoke, nodded a few times. It was morning, that was normal. Daniel did the same, though he talked, too, small passing things, through his hands. The book was still on the table. We had taken turns to read it all the way through last night. And now it was there, and no less conquered for our going through it. I wanted to look at my phone, do something normal and distracting but it was in Tom’s room and I couldn’t make myself go back in. Not until the curtains were open and the day was better established.
‘Birdie,’ Tom muttered, ‘that was her name.’
‘What?’ said Daniel, but he saw Tom’s face and turning to me, said, ‘Oh, you know, I need to get out to post something. I wonder if you’re up for a walk to the shops?’
‘Me? Sure. Tom, uh—’
Tom was staring at the book on the table, holding a crust of bread against the table, butter side down. I took in what he had just said. I felt a stab of horror at it, but so vague and plunging it was hard to stanch, hard to locate the source. Birdie, is what he had said. I scratched my fingers through my hair; it was knotted and needed brushed. Tom sat staring at the book. What if I grabbed it and threw it away? But the thought of touching it gave me unholy discomfort. I’d have crossed myself, if I still did that. Delays of gesture and sloping feelings all about me. Chilled, I felt. The men in the room moved about, or didn’t move at all.
‘Go on without me,’ Tom said. ‘I’m just going to do some reading I think.’
Neck of the Woods
We went on a walk. There was a place I liked to go. I’d found it years before, in my first year in the city, following a bus route looking for adventures. Some pathways wound through a wood up to a hill, hardly a unique thing, but this place I liked for its atmosphere. First we had to get there. After breakfast I told Tom I was leaving for home. Daniel had to make a run to the post office, we’d walk out together, he’d come back maybe after the library. We went quickly round the corner.
‘How does he seem to you?’ Daniel asked.
‘Spacey. But, like, he’d had bad dreams so it was understandable.’
‘He ate his breakfast okay.’
‘I don’t think Tom’s ever skipped a meal,’ I said. ‘Anyway, it was just toast. You can eat toast at any time. It’d be the meal for the end of days.’
Daniel nodded.
We walked not saying much. We boarded the bus heading generally south, keeping silent there as well. We needed to be somewhere no one from our regular lives would chance to come across us. It was like going off to an anonymous hotel together. Daniel, sitting in the seat diagonally in front of me was wringing his hands. I leaned forward and tapped him, but he didn’t notice and kept going. Wash wash wash. I moved to sit beside him, and pried his hands gently apart, and let them drop. I think that was it, the first time we’d touched, and I could tell it did something to him. All I tried to think was, the walk would calm him down. I looked at the passing world with glittering eyes.
We got off in suburbia and walked to a pathway beginning at a doorway in a high wall. The track went through hill woodland. It ran alongside where part of a university campus had once been, and before that, a sanatorium for shell-shocked soldiers of their War to End All Wars, and before that, I’m guessing some nobleman’s house in woods that were at that time far away from the city. The woods belonged to the people now. Just in balance, the buildings that once housed the university, the old lecture rooms and admin’ and that, were now the demesne of wealthy residents who could pay for the idea of the permanent view. Can’t leave it to the students, after all, and have us hoping for too much. But I’d found it years before. And it was still in that way mine.
We set off into the woods with the sunlight streaming, followed the trail up, hardly speaking at first. It felt weird to be in nature. Everything had an edge to it. Trees massing, dropping their leaves around us in slow flashes of yellow and brown. Birds everywhere and nowhere, rustling and singing their throats out. A steep alignment of a climb and tracks that branched off to be enticing for leisure and snuffling dogs. Of which, strangely, there were none, so early it was. Near the top there was an uneven meadow hedged in yellow gorse, and the other green-brown hills of the city filled the space between the neat boxes of Victorian and twentieth century homes. I sighed. And the sky above it all with racing clouds and patches over the sun. I say over the sun, like our local weather was something grand. We forget so easily our own smallness. The great blackness of void outwith this world in miles unfathomable, blah blah blah. I tried most of the time to get locked into the physical reality of the senses and the analytic mind. Put my attention where it best needed to be. At work, at my studies. I can think to myself, here, ‘Trace with your own living fingertips this evidence of effort and diligence of numberless people. Those who made the books are more numerous than the stars we can see.’ I don’t know if that’s true. But, to centre myself I could think acutely about the scratching of their quills. Dip, raise, curve along, point. The pigment of their inks, mixed by hand from local and distant flowers, well water and crushed beetles. And here’s the moments anonymous peoples, children and adult, took just for themselves in doodles and flourishes. Centuries-old, still here is something that keeps going. I could take it and put it in a safe context.
But when you get up into a free view, ah sometimes all you can do is realise. Be forced to. Here’s this frail cage of your body against meaningless winds. And here come the questions of cosmology and of God, hammering over the sky like doom. And you realise, with only one person inside of you, you are so easily cracked open and dispersed. Hands up if you feel the same. Hands up, swishing your arms through the thin layer of particles which surrounds us all times. Our living in this fragile element contributes to it a net loss, a tiny degradation. And the world’s getting worse over time. And this so fucking predictable, like I’d been programmed to think just so, in these places – somebody’s kind of a joke. When she gets up high it really gives her … perspective. I took a deep breath in. I reached into the nearest gorse bush and pinched off a yellow bloom and smelled it and threw it away. I know I looked happy; Daniel smiled at me. Happy just to be breathing, I guess.
On a Bench Overlooking the Edge
We sat with our hands in our pockets. Shit, I thought. My hair whipped out and around my head. If I was going to be this fucking morose, I’d have liked it to have been because I was hungover from a good time. I felt Daniel shift in the seat a little; his knee fell against mine.
‘Do you think Tom is still sitting at the kitchen table?’ I said.
‘It’s bright today.’ He raised a hand to his eyes. ‘I think he probably is. That’s my mum’s house, down there. No, there.’
‘Nice,’ I said. The winds from the cosmos blew over us, hissing in the golden-red trees off to one side sending bits of them flying, and in the redoubtable gorse which made not much of a noise at all. The tilted axis of the earth made the seasons, and this was autumn. How can we believe in hauntings now? We are so little and always being obliterated, and as a species on the way to securing that completely. Belief in ghosts, in possession. However much I’d like not to believe, I can fully grasp why I do, or why I am able to fool myself: oh to be grand and full of diverse modes of being, to know extension of the self, to know God and demons and angels and the drawling, drifting spirits of enduring souls in such an epoch as this. It’s the very end of everything, I thought. Though it was autumn, so, in that too, of course I thought so. But Tom was, anyway, he was haunted. Or bedevilled. I’d take for myself the strange, exciting fear in that, if I could haul myself out of this strange mood. Daniel leaned against me, or I leaned against him.
‘What could it be in the book that’s getting to him?’ I said.
‘You don’t think we’re overthinking it?’
‘I want to look at the book again. I want to understand it.’
‘Why?’ sa
id Daniel, ‘You think it contains some mystery that has wrapped him in its claws? Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t seem himself, then last night, and this morning, and you said yourself a while ago, before I even noticed, that something was enchanting him.’
‘I said you were enchanting him.’
‘I never took you for a sceptic,’
‘Sceptic. I believe in the beauty of this world and all that’s gone before. But I think what’s gone stays gone,’ he said, ‘this is all there is, Órla. It’s enough. It’s very beautiful, right now.’
‘Aesthete. I just think he might be, you know. Something.’
‘Fine. But seriously, you think he’s – I thought you were so solid and – sharp. I didn’t expect this,’ Daniel said.
‘Expect what?’
‘You really believe he’s got some kind of devil in him. Some kind of ghost. Or he has become a portal to the unseen world. On what evidence, there can be none—’
‘All right, stop. You don’t know me. You don’t know—’
‘The things I’ve seen?’
I said nothing. Daniel got up and walked a little way off to the edge, overlooking the city. We’d missed each other somewhere and spun off. I couldn’t do this alone, I thought. I searched my head for what I knew of Daniel, in those weeks of our friendship. He was warm, twitchy, gentle, had a light comic touch, seemed to understand me on some innate level, seemed to understand everything by the map of his feelings and his mind, charmed by Tom – I’d seen it by then – keen fondness for me, responsive, clever. Yet now, when I needed his softness and feelishness, this coldness, judgement. Laughter came from behind us – a child, running with a brown Labrador. I watched them canter over the small field at the top of the hill. I wanted to be a little girl again. But I believed in ghost stories then too.
‘Tell me a ghost story, then,’ he said, ‘one from your real life. Tell me what you’ve seen.’
The Cold Bitch
Once when I was a girl, about six or so, I said, my parents ran away. It was wintertime. We had just moved temporarily into this lonely house on the coast. My da was working there on a contract, restoring the house around us for some rich guy. We’d be back home by the spring, mam told me. The house was rangy, from the sixteenth century, hauled up from the cliffs it stood on – I looked it up years later to scratch the itch it had left me with but there was not much information to be had beyond the property value – it was worth much less in those days. I don’t remember the sounds of sawing or workmen stomping through in their boots. I remember it being a heavy quiet place, even before my parents left.
My sister wasn’t born yet so I had a bedroom to myself. The walls felt thick and cold all the time. The ceilings slanted at different angles. Everything, in my memory, was painted a heavy, glossy dark green. But I wasn’t scared – I didn’t have much reference for frightening things, I think. We’d always lived in old, ramshackle places, moving around a lot. So as children go, I was sturdy and not prone to letting my mind run on in that way at least. My parents, they don’t talk about what they saw, or much of what they did. Only years later they mentioned it just the once, so I still don’t have a frame of reference for what happened.
It was winter, anyway. I was woken up early in the dark by my mother clattering into my room with a suitcase. She was oddly silent, packing some things for me. I asked what she was doing; she put a finger to her lips and pulled me out of bed. She did not ask me to get dressed, or even put shoes on. We went down the stairs and outside. I squirmed at the shock of the cold, and she slapped me on the arm, holding me up by it, and whispering. I don’t remember what she said. Behave, probably. Da was behind the driving wheel of the car, cigarette in hand. Windows rolled up. I remember that because he normally kept them rolled down no matter what the weather, to let the smoke out.
We got in the car. Da started the engine and began backing out of the drive. Suddenly, mam jabbed at the windscreen. ‘There she is,’ she said. ‘The cold bitch.’ That’s when I opened the door and let myself out of the car. Still don’t know why I felt the need to do that. We weren’t going fast, and I didn’t hurt myself. I ran back to the house, slammed the door, stood up on my tiptoes and turned the lock. After a few minutes I heard Da knocking, lightly, then hard. Proper ramming on the door. Then he stopped knocking, and, after a little bit, I heard my parents drive off. They didn’t come back that evening.
After they had gone, I put myself back to bed and, somehow, fell right asleep. I’d never been left alone before. I got up in what felt like the middle of the afternoon, made some bread and jam sandwiches, played house, put myself to bed. I wanted a bath, but I wasn’t sure I would be able to stop the taps going once I started them – that was a big concern, that I’d flood the house and be carried out on a wave of water. That Mam and Da would be disappointed in me for not being able to look after myself. Otherwise, I was calm, collected; that’s how I remember myself.
That night, the ‘cold bitch’ came to my door. I don’t know how she had been with Mam and Da to frighten them so witless, but she wasn’t in any way cruel or menacing to me. Her dress trailed on the ground below her feet. It was yellowish, hemmed with lace, like something kept folded in an old drawer. I remember wanting to touch it, and leaping out of bed to do that. The cold bitch just hovering there, in the doorway of my room, as I, chubby, little, ran at her. I tried to grab and pat at the cloth of her dress. I tried to put it in my mouth. I remember the texture of it, believe me when I say that. It was crumbling, stiff as dead leaves. She drew back. Whispering voices. A noise like cutlery being put away. I came forward. ‘Please,’ I said. Her face is hard to recall. She had a big mouth, if she had one at all.
I stayed out of bed, lying near her hanging there, for what felt like hours. I brought my plastic farm animals and played them with her until I got pins and needles and said, ‘I’m going to bed again. Please don’t let anyone come in the house.’ And no one did come for another whole day. In the morning there was a piece of cooked chicken laid out on a plate, very pale looking and damp. But I didn’t eat it. I made myself some bread and butter. And then I suppose my parents came home for me later – a day later? And later we moved out.
When I finally asked them, in a pique, why they left me, my da looked aghast. He said they hadn’t left me: they’d been locked out of the house for two days. The locksmith couldn’t let them in, the windows were lead paned and there was much debate about opening them by breaking, but it would have been very expensive, irreplaceable glass lost forever. Note they didn’t say I locked them out. They were locked out. Mam said she would have panicked, but that I knew my stuff, even then. ‘On the phone, you said you’d brushed your teeth all by yourself. No harm done.’ That was all they had to say on the matter. I know I didn’t speak to them on the phone, it had a loud ring and it didn’t ring, the entire time when I was there alone.
Healthy Things
‘And so, well, you’re the only one that remembers it like this?’ Daniel said.
‘Maybe I’ve supplied extra details over the years. Maybe she was not anything but a curtain across the door, fluttering in a breeze. But I felt like she was more. And how do you explain the time spent locked in the house by myself? My parents were freaked out, still are.’
‘Pretty strange, I’ll admit, though I really think you could be remembering it wrongly. Surely they called the police? And you were six – it’s just, this idea that you played with her, this ghost, with your toys, without getting scared – and you said you wanted to eat her dress and you put it in your mouth.’
‘You find it hard to believe?’
‘Very. Most children would have been sobbing and peeing themselves, I think. Most parents would have broken down the door.’
‘Maybe it was my upbringing. Maybe my parents were different from most people’s. I feel like I asked the cold bitch, “are you looking after me?” And I understood that she was, in her own way. Like
, she was confused what I wanted, but that she knew I wanted something from her and tried to give it.’
‘Were you that lonely? Did your parents care that little?’
‘Her energy was positive towards me. Kindly, even. Or at least, not hostile.’
‘You’ve lost me,’ said Daniel, ‘It’s all a lot of granular detail for you to remember after all this time.’
‘So. Well, I don’t have to impress you or convince you. I know what happened to me.’
‘You mostly know what happened to you. You’ve filled in, elaborated and expanded the incident, whatever it was, over the years. Your parents, for whatever reason, are reticent to talk about it. Perhaps an incident of neglect they feel guilty about.’
I crossed my arms and kept quiet.
‘It’s a huge amount to have happened,’ said Daniel. ‘Most hauntings are, like, an unexplained knocking. A cold spot. Some little imaginary face flitting past a window.’
‘The rules of the world as you understand them are innocent until proven guilty,’ I said, ‘that’s your game. The world is innocent of spirits until there’s proof – but the proof you want is not the kind that spirits give. By nature they are ephemeral and leave marks only on the mind.’
‘Of the young or eager to believe. Playful, imaginative minds.’
‘Fine,’ I said, ‘let’s get down off this hill. I’m cold.’
‘Cold bitch . . . ’ said Daniel, with laughter in his voice, ‘it’s colourful though.’
‘Tease,’ I said.
A Star Objects to Its Discovery
By the time we got back to the house, it was getting dark. Tom hadn’t texted me all day long. I knew he would not be there, and sure enough, he wasn’t. I should have gone back to my flat then, but I didn’t know how to leave Daniel.
In the kitchen, the empty chair Tom had been sitting in when we left had a guilty look. Pulled out from under the table, a wooden statement. I believe furniture can be haunted – it is haunted and smeared – even sodden – with the residue of human feelings. Somewhere Tom was guiltily and a little madly walking out alone in the darkening October dusk with the diary in the pocket of his coat. I went and washed my face and Daniel made us tea, which I took with gritted teeth and tipped into a plant pot on the window sill.
Bitterhall Page 11