Bitterhall

by Helen McClory

  I took one and put it in my mouth. It felt like putting a retainer in, but began to dissolve immediately. It tasted of passion fruit with an undertow of meat.

  ‘Delicious!’ I said, drool gathering at the back of my mouth. I swallowed.

  ‘Tom, isn’t it? Have one,’ she said. But Tom for reasons unknown had turned pale and was pushing past us, back inside.

  ‘Oh,’ said Maggie. ‘Oh well. His loss.’

  ‘Yeah, well. Sorry about him. He’s been a bit off today.’

  Maggie smiled. She was an elegant lady, in all you’d imagined an elegant lady to be when you were a little girl: tall, smoothly moving, impeccable dark lipstick, hair that looked as if it had snaked itself into position that morning, a thirties-style diadem held impossibly in place.

  ‘I’ve been watching the two of you since you came in,’ she said, ‘and I’m impressed, and a little unnerved.’

  ‘By what?’

  ‘By your beauty, yours and Tom’s. By the way you keep gliding past each other in my house. You two lovers, my dear, seem to have different objectives tonight, and it intrigues me to see it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked, more for conversation’s sake than anything else. I supposed I knew exactly what she meant.

  ‘Oh, just that you’re kind of, rambling about the place as if to claim it by touching everything – I’ve been watching. Oh, yes.’

  I kept up eye contact, and smiled – politely I hoped.

  ‘While Tom,’ she continued, ‘has been rambling about as if evading claims. He’s a furtive type. But I’d say that’s not typical for him? God, he’s a sculpture though, a classic for the gallery,’ she said. So it is with the rich, they can say whatever they like. But I couldn’t be annoyed by her, angry at being found out, made insecure by implications, or even to laugh at them, coming from her, a woman in her late fifties at least. She won me over with the devil winking in her eye and her soft fluidity of speaking, ‘You keep an eye on that one. Don’t let him slip through your fingers.’

  ‘I will,’ I said. Murmured, like a good little swan.

  ‘See you in another room,’ she said, ‘with your man by your side,’ she said. With that, vamping off indoors, to another cluster of guests who all turned their heads to her, and raised each nearly-empty or white-slurred glass.

  The Drinking

  I rubbed my face and ladled myself more of the cocktail stuff and drank it down, seething it through my teeth. Then I fetched another, and had a conversation with an austere couple and their small, bashful teenage son, who peered down at me through his glasses like a wary creature caught under a magnifying glass. His skin was a mess, like mine was at his age, and I asked him something about school, and I asked all the adults about their jobs, and pretended to listen. I was seeking reassurance that there were people who were normal – and mostly they were and I loved them for it. I asked nobody if they’d ever seen a ghost, or if they felt slightly aroused at the idea of demonic possession, or the fairies stealing their beloveds. I went back to the punchbowl. I talked to Mark and Daniel on a sofa and in the kitchen. I went to the punchbowl. Hours passed. I went to the punchbowl, but I was strong. I chattered indomitably. I frightened an old lady by pointing fingerguns at her. That was when I went to the toilet and freshened up my make-up and had a long piss. Sitting on the toilet and looking at my overlit, not entirely Grecian, side profile in the mirrored wall I was hit with the clarity all toilets in such situations provide: a good gauge of my drunkenness. I decided it was necessary to stop drinking for a bit, now, and to reassess where my drinking had got me which was nowhere. Under the layers of conversation I had attempted to pull over it, my heart obscurely stung. I also decided I was ugly, and had a small cry.

  Sometime around midnight I found myself on the stairs with Daniel, feeling empty, dizzy at the gaps in the stairs, a little anxious and drunk – party feelings. Tom was nowhere and everywhere, and a bottle of someone else’s single cask malt whisky was firmly in my slippery hands. Daniel was telling me about the diary again.

  ‘Shh,’ I said. I looked him over. He looked so awkward, then, behind his glasses. He and the teenager overlapped. ‘How old are you?’ I asked.

  ‘Tinder age, or real age?’ he said.

  ‘I can’t imagine you on Tinder.’

  ‘Lots of times. Every time was intimidating.’

  ‘I’ll bet,’ I said. Poor Daniel.

  ‘I’m thirty-six,’ he said, ‘same age as Mark.’

  ‘No way! You don’t look it,’ I said, ‘no grey at all, and you don’t have the kind of – the kind of look people have. Old and tired like. You look young.’

  ‘Well, thank you. I won’t tell Mark what you said.’

  ‘I’m twenty-eight. Sorry,’ I said, then, ‘I think I’m going to make some terrible mistake with Tom.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ Daniel was looking down the stairs and out the window at the front of the house. There was the man of the night, smoking a cigarette with a silver fox in a black tuxedo. The overhead light from the eaves lit him so that he looked like an angel in his whites. Like an angel who has sex, because if I’ve retained anything from Catholic school rumours it’s that angels don’t have genitals and so are excluded from that world of experience. In the dirty, manual way at least. I suppose they have a communions of souls or some shit. But anyway, there was Tom, like a seraph stepped out of heaven to sneak in a fag and get back before anyone saw.

  ‘Do you think the fairies can have sex?’ I said, sinking lower on the stair.

  ‘Ha, yes. They have offspring, don’t they?’

  ‘I thought that was just changelings, ugly things that get swapped for pretty human babies,’ I said.

  ‘Presumably something gives birth to them,’ Daniel said, looking at the contents of his glass; nothing. ‘Or they’re made from trees. Lumps of bog butter,’ I said. I felt a realisation wanting to come on, like a migraine. ‘What about ghosts?’

  ‘What were we talking about again?’ said Daniel, wiping his face with his hand. His eyes were soft and he was looking at Tom through the entranceway window and we were both looking at Tom through the window, and both holding empty glasses.

  ‘I think Tom needs rescuing,’ I found myself saying. ‘He stands in the light and he dwells in the darkness. And neither are particularly bad or good, but they do need to be understood as states of being, that he is at the centre of. And I don’t think he knows, Daniel, I don’t think he does.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Daniel said, stubbornly. He rose and went away somewhere. I had decided. I got up and went to my man.

  Rescuing Tom

  Outside it was bitterly cold. The silver fox saw me come swinging – metaphorically. I wasn’t moving my fists. He stepped aside and walked away to talk to the other group of white haired, balding smokers down by the driveway. Tom stood with his cigarette deft between his two fingers. It looked flimsy in my hands. I tapped off the ash. It landed on my shoe. Tom snatched it back, only to stub it against the wall and flick the stub away.

  ‘Tom, what are you doing?’

  He looked at me. Man was drunk as anything, or high, or drunk and high. Slack-mouthed he laughed, high pitched and too long, and wobbled his head.

  ‘I’m waiting for them to come and get me,’ he said, still laughing and shaking with it.

  ‘Waiting for who?’ I said. The shock of the cold air was getting to me. I was shaking too. We were both in suits, hopping from foot to foot on the doorstep like posh children who had wandered there out of the wastes.

  ‘I feel like we’re supplicants,’ I said, because it sounded better. Tom looked around. He drew me in close and kissed my forehead.

  ‘We are, Ore, we are. Someone good needs to come for us,’ he gave a gasp, then in a lighthearted singsong, ‘but I don’t think they will. No, it’s the villains for us. The villains in disguise of the most ordinary, run of the mill – ah, babe.’ He started laughing again and lurched against the door. I was just surprised he knew what
a supplicant was.

  ‘Let’s get inside,’ I said, and dragged open the door. The warm air buffeted against us, and a few people in the party turned to take us in. Uninterested faces. I looked round for Daniel. Tom was leaning on my shoulder and he was heavy. Just like that, someone will switch from independent agent of their own good time to slumping rock of drunkenness and your problem now. I decided he needed his bed. But that was miles off. I cast about looking for the answer and there she was, Maggie, smiling slyly at us from across the room at the kitchen counter. I humped Tom’s arm around my shoulder and monstrous we waddled and stumbled over to her.

  ‘A bit worse for wear?’ she said. ‘Tsk.’

  I nodded. ‘What do you think we should do with him?’

  ‘Oh, well, we have plenty of room here,’ she said, ‘I’ll have Mark help you get him upstairs. The guest bedroom.’

  ‘Brilliant,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ Maggie said, ‘brilliant.’ I couldn’t tell anything from her tone. I was drunk and eager to set down my burden some safe place.

  Mark came over and took the other side of Tom and we got him upstairs and on to the bed. Tom sat up immediately, though he should have sprawled back. He sat up and I could only think of him in his bedroom in the midst of his nightmare.

  Mark looked away.

  ‘Oh, well, um. Should leave you to it.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘No. I mean, could you fetch Daniel?’

  ‘Sure,’ Mark said. He had a very soft-focus face but when he smiled he looked more like his mother, part malice, part teenage glee at something salacious about to take place in his vicinity. I wondered if he and Daniel had ever been together.

  ‘Don’t smile like that,’ I said, ‘I just need to work out—’ hesitating because I had no really good reason to want Daniel there. Not a reason that would sound sane to others. But what did I care of that, and I said quickly, ‘He knows what to do.’ And gave him with as much dignity as I could a cold shoulder until he hurried away.

  Sitting With It

  I did not want to touch Tom. He sat up on the bed listing mildly, eyes closed. I hate the silence of people waiting for something to happen. My own silence, in this case. He probably would have sung to himself or muttered if I hadn’t been there. I tried to think of other times in my life when I had been in a situation like this and how I had overcome it. The job interview method for feeling like a successful person. It just served to make me realise how many other times I’d had to talk an inebriated man down off their short emotional ledges or make their way to a stomach pumping. And how many of those men were no longer in my life. The good ones pay you back in kind, I told myself, unlacing Tom’s fancy shoes and throwing them gently across the room. I also wasn’t sure what kind of role I had to play with Tom, now. Perhaps he would pass out of his own volition before any further drama started.

  The door opened. Daniel. He shuffled into the room and looked helplessly. I felt immediately better. An assistant. A coconspirator.

  I slapped Tom’s chest. ‘The state of him,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, I see,’ Daniel said in his low mild voice.

  Tom was unbuttoning his shirt. Daniel looked at me, his hands gripping the doorframe. I answered with a smile. I remember clearly in my mind I had no idea what my smile signified but looking back I had decided that something was happening, the crux of Tom’s moment of hauntedness, while we were all drunk and in a stranger’s house. A crosscurrent of strangeness was blowing through the room, and I was weirdly elated. That must have made my smile come across badly.

  ‘Mm, I need – I need to go,’ Daniel said, and he slipped a little way into the hall.

  ‘Just because you fancy him doesn’t mean you can use that as an excuse to leave him in his hour of need,’ I called out. ‘Get us water, then, if you’re going.’

  I could have laughed. Daniel came back. He did a good line in excruciated looks.

  ‘Oh come on,’ I said.

  ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ Daniel said.

  ‘Except for water.’

  ‘Oh, okay. But I’ll come back, I will.’

  I sat back down on the bed near Tom though it worried me, though it made me fizzily excited. His body was tensed right up, his hands gripping the bed sheet like a woman in the midst of labour. It was to me an unnatural ability in one so utterly wasted, whose muscles should have been lax as old rubber bands. In a corner of my brain I was awaiting then some violent outburst, but another part of me, the part that saves or damns us all in the great moments of our lives, was saying it would be all right and that I must stay to be witness. If it was worse than rattling windows it would be actual apparitions, heads turning around three hundred and sixty degrees, deep growls, a body distorted further than human parameters allow, random Latin and Sumerian and the like. I knew, then, that I would stay through it all, if it did happen, mad bitch like.

  I helped him get off his shirt and threw it by the shoes. He was dry and cool to the touch, his hair catching the light. I didn’t like how red the room was. But then I did: what better place for what I was willing would happen soon. And the glow from the red paint set off Tom’s blue eyes so that even drowsy they looked startling.

  ‘Do you want to lie down?’ I asked him.

  ‘No. No!’ he said, and he caught me in those swivelling eyes and I shifted back involuntarily.

  ‘What’s happening with you?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m waiting on him,’ Tom said, and he looked to the doorway where Daniel had disappeared.

  ‘You need to sober up,’

  ‘So do you,’ he said, and laughed again, more normally than before.

  ‘Who are you waiting on?’ I asked.

  Tom looked at me and I couldn’t understand the look. A shadow passed over his face. I thought about men, and the ways in which they look at me, and I couldn’t find the right place to file this one away. I was sobering up, I thought. How long since the last drink? I wanted Daniel back. For water. But he did not come back for twenty minutes and, when he did, he was drunker than before and had no water. In the interim I went into the guest toilet and grabbed the tooth glasses and gulped down one glass full after another. Five I think. I had coaxed Tom into sipping some, when he became alarmed and got to his feet. He glared at his own reflection in the dark of the window pane.

  ‘You!’ he said.

  I thought of what to do. In some stories the devil is a reflection. That of course is significant in an easy way to parse – you (as character) are playing your own devil – or the domestic space reversed. That’s our room, our familiar body but just a bit weirder. Devil double that is yourself and not you and wouldn’t that be the medium by which the devil could speak to us on his preferred direct yet unheimlich terms?

  Then, as I looked between Tom and the reflection, I noticed it too. There was no metaphor, no academic lens through which to interpret. The reflection was not his.

  Double

  In the window pane was a sketch of the room we were in, and me at the end of the bed, and a man in the bed that was the shape of, almost but not quite, Tom Mew.

  ‘Fuck,’ I said, sotto voce. In case he heard? I don’t know. I know. The face was looking up and I met its eyes.

  ‘Who the fuck are you now?’ I asked.

  ‘What are you doing?’ said Tom, loudly, and he had my arm. So, in the mirror, did not-Tom. It opened its mouth, and there was a hateful expression on its face that gave me the chills. Tom clamped his hands over his own, but the hands in the reflection did nothing. The pane of the glass began to rattle. I felt something in my back molars as if a low sound was building.

  The not-Tom opened its mouth still further.

  ‘Fuck you think you’re doing,’ I said, and I threw a pillow at the glass. It bounced off and fell to the floor. The figure got up and picked up the same pillow, in reflection. Behind and through it I could see the muddy suburban night sky and beside it myself. It held the pillow to hide its face. Tom was standing now in the same place
as the figure. He held nothing.

  ‘Stop, Tom,’ I said, but he was raising his hands as the figure raised its hands, synced. And then I felt a pillow hit me and I momentarily stumbled and when I looked up I realised it had not hit me from the back – as if Tom had thrown it – but from the front. As if the figure in the glass had. And startled, I laughed loudly.

  ‘What a funny kind of game,’ I said. It smiled, sickly, back at me. But it was nothing. If you can hear me in my head, you’re nothing, I thought.

  The figure moved nearer the frame of the window and Tom was nearer, though not as close. The figure reached up and put its hand against the glass, fingernails first and dragged them down it making a slow scraping sound, though there were no fingers touching the glass, no real fingers.

  I put my hands up to my head. I shouted, I think, holding nothing but wishing for a blunt object to use to smash that glass and disperse the thing, and Tom was at my shoulders and pulling me away from the window. And the noise—

  A Violence

  Jamming up my ears in screeching, din-like-a-fire-alarm-cheeping-til-it-bursts, high, make-it-stop noise, everyone-flood-upstairs-tosee-what-it-is noise, but when I left the room, it stopped. And I could not hear it at all until I stepped back across the threshold and immediately had to hold my ears. Tom stood bent in the centre of the red room, clamping his hands to his head. I ran to the window like some genius and pulled down the blinds.

  And the noise.

  Just.

  Stopped.

  ‘Are you all right,’ I said, grabbing at him. He leaned into me, curling himself up like a child. Sobbing. I threw off my suit jacket, slid out of my shoes and drew him over until we were in the bed together.

  ‘There, shh,’ I said. What else could I do? I stroked his hair and his breaths slowly became even. Never had I seen a grown man like this. He kept his devastating eyes mostly closed and his mouth slack. I took a notion that the apparition had moved. How would I know? You know these things the way you can tell a scent shifting in a room. I closed my eyes too on this sudden feeling: there, behind my eyes and Tom behind his, we lay, listeners.