Bitterhall

by Helen McClory

  Walking Wounding

  Tom called me in the afternoon when it was already beginning to get dark.

  ‘We have to talk,’ he said.

  ‘Yes we do,’ I said. I am fierce and he won’t get me down, I thought. I was all dressed up, lipstick a shade darker than my own lips and applied patted down to a matte block. Eyeliner a sharp, strained flick.

  I met him on the still-bright street, him coming languidly in his beautiful white suit like he had been born in it. I thought in fact I did not know much about his background, other than what he had thought to tell me – very little, and what I had seen and heard. That he was English and spoke with the chalky vowels that would make him perfect for audiobooks, and slightly alienating in conversation. He took my arm. We began walking in the direction of the party, two or so miles away.

  ‘Well, look at you,’ I said with an air of suave stupidity. Then, ‘Are we talking?’

  ‘I’m sorry about disappearing yesterday, Órla,’ he said. ‘I had to go and clear my head. I hadn’t slept well. I’d had the weirdest dreams. And I – I decided not to just sit about and feel sorry for myself. I went out with some friends and lost track of time. I slept on a sofa. Felt like shit when I came back. I didn’t think you’d spend the night at mine, and then when you had I felt guilty – and—’

  It all sounded right, on the surface, though it was completely different from the work away day excuse. There are some people who are so charming that the red flags they give off are such a beautiful shade of crimson you can only gaze at them and smile a little ruefully.

  We passed down a long road of fancy wine bars and pinch-points of milling pedestrians. We turned heads, us two, the way we were dressed and our frozen expressions. Other costumers would come in our wake, but none as fine. The city shifted around us, a few hydraulically huffing lorries and buses shunting ahead of us. The gangling queues at the bus stop spilling over the pavement and forcing us to edge through, break apart, blowing vapour in our faces the flavour of bad cocktails and sweet farts. I thought we should get on whatever bus would take us a bit closer to the house where the party was to take place but the kind of performance of honesty we needed to get into in that moment couldn’t happen on a bus. Sometimes your agitation comes through at the level of your cells and must burn away. I knew even so early in it that this was an apex moment for us: folk can encounter such times in quite ordinary places, others in the city of their dreams, right before the turn to dusk, on the eeriest day of the year.

  ‘What else, Tom?’

  ‘What else what?’

  We were pushing past a crowd and heading for a great stone bridge that crosses a waterway of cliffs and riverine trees. Posh flats overlooking it with the kind of view I’d imagine you’d get in a post-apocalyptic world that has grown verdant without us. My mind supplying the handful of survivors living by windows, surviving in the luxury of last days. Resting their elbows they look down on the crumbling vestiges of monumental architecture, striped trees, the slipping bodies of foxes through the ravaged underbrush.

  ‘What else were you feeling when you saw me? At the flat. Cos I think you were going to say, and forgive me if I’m wrong – jealous,’ I said.

  ‘Jealous?’

  ‘Conflicted then.’

  ‘What were you up to with Daniel, if I should have been feeling jealous?’ he said, stepping round an old woman holding an unnecessary golf umbrella as a walking stick. There was a hum in the air that was part crowd, part traffic, part swarm of inner bees.

  ‘I didn’t say you should be feeling jealous. I said what I thought you were feeling. Fuck me, I think you were jealous because you don’t like the friendship I have with him,’ I said.

  ‘You know he’s gay, right?’ He said with ugly condescension.

  I stopped. I worked out how best to present my face while my mind thought: no? But no. He isn’t, I thought. Is he? Something spun out inside of me, revealing a great depth below. I thought of our feet resting against each other. I thought of talking with him for hours, just wanting to talk and listen and never stop. What closeness means. Tom was ahead now, white suit, dapper. And there, at my centre, the truer part: what did it matter, the definitions for what he – Daniel – and I might have? I ran my hand at the edge of the bridge wall. It was there for me.

  ‘But you were feeling lonely, weren’t you,’ I said, ‘when you were at breakfast? Outside yourself and us. What’s been up with you, Tom? What’s been going on?’

  We walked in silence. Ahead of us everything stood rich and red-tinged with the sun getting low. I had used the wrong words, and I had no others. Something bubbled up from the void inside me.

  ‘I miss you,’ I said, startling myself. I cast around in my head for whether it was true at all, had been true all along, or I had made it true in saying it.

  Tom stopped to lean over the bridge. Light played over his features as they moved through various guises of the thoughts underneath, settling on nothing, looking so arduous to me that all my frustration dissipated and I was concerned, more than I ever had been, that he really was in some kind of trouble. Spiritual or financial, something else, I had no idea. The water ran gold below us, on through the darkening trees, just crying out for a dipped arm to cling to.

  ‘I can’t tell you,’ he said, suddenly hoarse. I had his arm. He didn’t seem the type to swoon, but you never knew.

  ‘What’s the big secret drama, eh?’ I said, with a bark of a laugh. ‘You had a few nightmares and, uh, you’ve been really into some book? Tell me about it, maybe? I’m listening.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Did you notice, with that diary you’ve been into lately, there’s something wrong with it?’

  He shook his head. I pulled him gently away from the side of the bridge and we walked unimpeded to the end. Sunshine was everything, before it began to leak out all at once. I had the feeling that Hallowe’en would properly start when it was dark, and I had to walk us quickly, his white coat tails and mine, black, flying. It seemed of the utmost importance to get Tom indoors before the light was gone. I spoke quickly, too, telling him what Daniel and I had potentially discovered. He said little, but I supposed he was listening. Everyone gets kicked out of their own contentment every once in a while. That could be all it was. The party, the party, I thought, rushing past old trees and the first headlights, walking ahead of Tom now, turning my head to check he was there, and stolid he always was. We were on time to be perfectly late. Daniel would be early, I guessed. He was probably carving pumpkins and throwing fake spiderweb around with – David, was it? We turned down a blueing suburban street of white and cream bungalows that at its middle point turned upwards at an angle that looked from our vantage point Escheresque. On the other side of the dip it was like a mirror image of the street’s beginning, or, not exactly a mirror, a worse copy, off tilt. Even here, in this non-iconic part of the city, the streetscapes strung themselves uncanny. That was why I was here, I suddenly thought, taking a breath. That was why I remained all this time, because I could love a city so angular and ancient, full of stone secrets, folding them open. And so it was with my man Tom. Our point of commonality. I took his hand and down we walked.

  Between

  ‘This is it,’ Tom said, fingering the map on his phone, scrubbing the highlight around our destination. We were both sweating. I made us wait in the cold a little longer – the sky still had a green tinge to it, and Tom was on the cusp of telling me something profound and delicious about his psyche. When nothing happened, I thought it might be a good idea to kiss him. He pulled back and touched his lips.

  ‘Did you get any on me?’ He looked at his fingers.

  ‘No, it’s kiss-proof.’

  ‘I never believe that,’ he said.

  ‘You haven’t tried it enough. It works.’ And I leaned in to kiss him again, but again he pulled back.

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. I wanted to ask, now. About his violent dream. But it wasn’t good t
iming – and it never would be. Suddenly he took me by the waist and spun me round. His hands remained on my waist. His gaze softened.

  ‘Forgive me?’ he asked.

  I smiled, what else could I do?

  It doesn’t only work when you know what you might really be forgiving.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘me too, if I’ve ever let you feel like you are alone. I never meant it. I like you a lot, Tom. You’re very likeable.’

  ‘Yes, I am,’ he said, ironic, smiling. He kissed me, then nothing was wrong, and we went in, and the party swelled for us and we danced.

  And We Danced

  Have you ever just waltzed into a place? I mean, really, in three-fourths time? Immediately we were in the door, Tom clasped my hand and away we went. Tom was an immense dancer; all sleek white movement, airy, as if he had practiced until his feet filled with blood, that old Hollywood glamour standard. Which he might have; I did not know him. We were white and black, fabric hanging over our bodies, we were our breaths timed with our skimming feet. I hardly knew what I was doing with my body and almost didn’t have to. That’s a lie – if I’d been clumsy that would have taken him down. But I am serviceable. We swung around the room, I held on tight. This state is unreal, I thought, the parquet floor moving beneath us and the room spinning golden and white and black from its static occupants in their costumes, clutching their cocktails and champagne. Some states of being are richer than others. The material of the moment, time itself and everything extant there and around you made proprietary, custom, of excellent quality, so that it drapes over you, satin, golden touched. We danced through the living room seamlessly into the kitchen and back again, the crowd surging around us and giving us air. We danced into the outside space, a stranger helpfully opening the French windows ahead of our sweep so we went on out onto the stone patio in the square of cast light. The music flooded the outdoors in which we turned a few times and then came back in. We must have danced unbroken for thirty minutes. But when I said I needed water, Tom dropped my hand – we were like that at the sideboard, where the drinks were – he palmed me off to one of the hosts, and when I turned to ask what he wanted, he was gone.

  Ballad of the Modernist House

  I went and sat down with Daniel and Mark. I was talking to them, gulping water, but I was thinking of the ballad of Tam Lin. Tam Lin was the lover, the passive beloved, enchanted. The maiden Margaret, or Janet the maiden, who danced through Carterhaugh woods, plucked a double rose and gave it to him, to her Tam Lin – and we all know what that means. They held each other close pressed against the blossom. Tam himself was not a fairy but a possession of the Fairy Queen’s. A human boytoy tethered to the otherworld. He tells Margaret he fears being given to Hell, that night, on Hallowe’en. It is Margaret, knocked up and vehement, who must prevent this, holding him tight, gripping the human out of the fey. Tam tells her he will be transformed into a newt, an adder, a lion, a bright bit of burning metal in her arms, and through it, she must hold him still. If she wishes to win her man, to stop the father of her baby being dragged to the devil. Which, in the ballad, she mostly does. I caught a glimpse of Tom’s white suit as he slinked through a doorway, surrounded by six tall women in sheath gowns of ivory silk. I followed him with my eyes until he was dazzling against an underfilled bookcase (vase, white hardback magazine, fern) and blotted out the back of a large man with tall hair, black as a newborn colt.

  I peered into my glass at the musky white liquid at the bottom of it. I drank it down and got another. The company bored me – Mark had a very unpleasant look to him, I thought – and I staggered off looking for something in the house, clutching my drink, climbing the stairs, bleering into rooms. Tom Mew, yes, Tam Lin, yes. I caught glimpses of him talking to other guests, to a man with a black mask over his eyes, a woman in grey satin with her hair impossibly high. Fuck you, I thought, with lighthearted venom. I should describe the house for you: from the ground floor, it was one of those millionaire’s mid-century affairs that could have easily gone wrong. In other hands that style results in crumbling office blocks and blighted schools – great heavy slabs of concrete at an angle suggesting gargantuan collapse or upheaval, giving the central rooms a grand high ceiling. But with money, there’s the design and materials to make a balanced and captivating space. Glass in long rectangular sheets, wood panelling, glowingly polished parquet, a strange, floating wooden staircase that peeled upwards to infinite height, it seemed, right before the doors. It worked beautifully. It was large and airy but still felt like someone’s home. Some of that was the decoration, all the plants everywhere, including a giant dark-leafed swiss cheese plant that must have been growing there for decades. On inspection it was planted straight into a square of soil in the floor.

  I took myself and my drink of the moment upstairs, the gap in the steps made me woozy. There was a cream-carpeted corridor that ran in a mezzanine overlooking the party’s main stage, but I chose to go back further. I found a parallel corridor, interior. It seemed larger than it should have been given the footprint below. I found two bedrooms, one with a shock of red on the wall, the other all painfully white from furniture to floor. In another a study, lit by a single green standing lamp tall and gently curved like the light on the ferry of the dead, I thought. Dark green walls incongruously lined with dark wooden shelves of cloth-bound hardbacks and framed pictures of family. There was Mark, little, with his mother and another man, not the man I’d met earlier. Sad and slight, shorter than Maggie. Mark graduating from university. Black and white Mark in front of a nineteen-fifties car – I realised it was not Mark, but some relative. In the middle of the desk, in front of a closed laptop, stood a large pink cake with a lighted candle on it. I crossed the silent, deep pile carpet towards it, holding my breath. The feeling in the room was one of intense melancholy. I despise melancholy. It is a sentimental emotion. On reaching the cake I pushed a finger to it, up to the hilt– it was dry and woolly. A completely realistic cake made of felt. The candle was glowing and flickering, but it wasn’t real either. It functioned like a candle, so I suppose it was as real as it needed to be. I blew on it; it went out, and after a moment of darkness it came back on again. I realised the small, shuttered window in this room must look out on the mezzanine. But when I touched the shutter to pull it back I had a horrible feeling that it wouldn’t – that there would be a vista outside of a night world somewhere other than here. I recalibrated, steeled myself, and flung it open. There was nothing there. No window at all.

  I left that room and found a large tiled bathroom, replete with huge, sunken bath that looked like something wholesale lifted from a Victorian boys’ school. Then two more bedrooms that were more lived-in than the others, big soft headboards and a wrinkled pair of tights on the floor by a vanity. ‘It’s a house,’ I thought. ‘People live here, and I’m intruding.’ I retreated, passing by the cupboard where Tom was briefly to lose his mind, though it had not happened yet. I heard a cheer from below. I heard a whole house seizing up around a population of strangers. I told myself I was having a damn good time, even so.

  Interlude

  Loneliness can come at you out of nothing, especially with the obscure sounds of a party and old music reeling below you. There are sound clips you can listen to, to recreate this intense effect – usually pop songs from another era altered to sound as if played through several closed doors. The feeling brought on by these snippets is a specific type of aloneness. Late in the cold hall of a dingy club, the place where the coats are or a red-lit back stair. Everyone else is in the dancing part, close and warm and sloshing beer around. You, though, you are wallowing in isolation. Run down, picking at your clothes, coming down off whatever, no one to love. It’s fucking magic that someone can do all that with tweaks to a sound file.

  On slowly and majestically descending the stair I saw out the window a glimpse of Tom’s white back. I followed. He went into the space behind the foot of the stairs – there was another corridor there, with the cloakroom to one sid
e, and doors and doors along it. Our feet clattered on the hard white floor.

  ‘Tom!’ I called. He was ahead of me, walking fast. Footfalls echoing, sounds of the party pressed hollow from all sides, muted chattering and laughing, glasses clinking. The corridor emptied us out into the back part of the house, an almost-mirror of the front. It was the place we had danced out through before. I could see clusters of guests to my right, and the merriment was set in and intractable. Tom hesitated a moment before plunging out through the French windows and I hurried after.

  We stood on the slightly raised balcony, garden sunken below and dark. Night sky with a frosty dampness in the air. I looked at him, he looked away. What was he looking for? I loathed this being the one running after; I wanted to be the one people chase. But perhaps that too would have been dreadful. He turned, eyes low. And I thought of Daniel, who never met your eye. And I thought, Tom’s been drinking, he’s been following something. He was a little out of breath. Shaky.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I asked.

  He laughed.

  ‘I’ve been listening to that music all night long,’ he said, then, lower, ‘it’s getting to me.’

  I had a strong need to touch him on the arm to prove he was there at all. I almost touched him. I didn’t. Just then Maggie, the host, came out through the doors carrying a silver tray with tiny misshapen translucent bowls on it.

  ‘Take one,’ she said, ‘you can eat the bowls. I printed them this morning, isn’t it exciting, living in the future? Don’t worry, gluten free. Please.’