Bitterhall

by Helen McClory

  Now I get that this is all past tense. Because of you and other things. I’m going to stop calling you you now. There are so many yous. It’s too confusing. It’s like there’s a box full of matches that are you and each one of them can go up and burn the rest. Woosh, that flare of heat. I was fine. I’m going to sort this out. I am here. And you are. And the sea, this day, overcast and the whole of the present and the past is crashing in you see and I can’t – be anything. Cope. Forgive me, I’m talking bollocks again. I’m in some stupid pain, if I’m being honest. Let me just say it, explain it – before you decide if I’m worth pursuing. I’d totally get if you didn’t want to go down that route. Well, now I’ve said this so far, I feel calmer, right, so let me just get my breath back. Listen to that sea. I’ll get myself sorted, won’t I? Don’t worry. I don’t think you do worry. About me. Why would you. I’m not sure if you’re here at all.

  The Structure

  My life was circles I understood. The daily routine cycle is the same cycle for anybody. Wake up, get up, go to work, I won’t go on, it would just be tedious. The start of the sex cycle is meeting the girl. This one I met in the club. Don’t remember much about how we got together. The usual sex cycle is as you’d expect it: so, meet the girl, sex with the girl, maybe hang out with the girl or leave the girl or fuck a few more times then gone, then go looking and meet the girl. The calming circle was the bluebells, as I mentioned, just whenever I needed, think of bluebells for a nonspecific length of time until whatever is bothering you has been defeated. The fantasy life cycle interlocks with the others and is a new – no, a returning circle I didn’t expect at my age. When I was little the fantasy life cycle was that my parents were not dead. It went: parents not dead, parents come for me, we go to a new big clean house full of toys, the reason they went away comes out. The reason was different every time. Sometimes it was a good reason like my father was on a special mission with the government and had to fake his own death and my mother’s mission is to save me. One I returned to a lot was the bad one, where my parents had deliberately crashed because they knew I would be a bad son and had come back (from the dead) because my grandmother was that tired of me she made a kind of sacrifice, and so the big dream house becomes a kind of prison for us all full of terrible words gone over again and again until I had to murder them both usually with an axe or a heavy table or an antique blunderbuss I’d seen on TV. I was given anxiety medication after some outcry when I was little and that cycle slowly trundled to a stop. It couldn’t really work that one anyway after my grandmother died when I was nineteen. I was free to think what I wanted.

  The fantasy life cycle I only now – right now I mean, standing here saying it – get for what it was because it came to me in a different form, not the fantasy of reunion with my parents but union with another – now I get it. I know I should save myself. Fucking shameful. I’ve been kissing a fogged up mirror, right? I have drilled down in circles but now I know at least there’s mud at the bottom, seawater, rocks around me and there are arms around to catch me up. Whether I deserve it or not.

  Gym

  In the middle of the typical daily cycle was how it began. I was standing smoothly lifting yellow dumbbells in front of the mirror wall with all the other people in the gym behind me and my body getting stronger, at that moment in the biceps. The tension of the muscle under the skin with no give at all, that was really satisfying. There’s nothing like that feeling of hardness in your body, like nothing can hurt you, nothing can press in. I had on my favourite teeshirt which was blue and made me look even hotter. I like simple pleasures including the way I look. Simple. At the apex of my curl as I was prodding the bicep and smiling, Badr passed behind me, saw me and wandered over.

  ‘How you been, Joe?’

  He called me Joe because I looked like a Joe, a simple strong adult Joe. He knew my name was Tom – it was one of our things. Badr looked warm and expansive with a little smile himself. He had been going to the gym about as long as I had with no visible difference to his physique. We’d talked about that and him getting a trainer, but after some questions back and forth he decided against putting the work in to either building muscle mass or trimming down. Trimming down, that was what I liked; not getting musclebound but being my taut living maximum self-reliant self. Half-arsed gym was just a part of Badr’s daily circle. Today in addition to his uniform of black sweatshirt and tracksuit he had a dark grey baseball cap on that said ‘chill’ on it.

  ‘Alright, Badr. Nice cap.’

  ‘Still the trouble, eh?’

  ‘Yup.’

  I had told him about the last girl and trying to be her flatmate and her putting the rent up on me when I started bringing other girls back.

  ‘I have that room you know. Remember I said?’

  ‘Oh yes. Still free?’

  ‘Still free pal. Come on round and see it. Give it a shot.’

  ‘I might just do that, Badr.’

  I texted him in the changing rooms. I thought, what a muppet, what if he’s still here all ready to go and he wants you to come over right away before you get showered. Something about the idea of him being close up beside me while I was texting him felt alarmingly intimate. Then I thought, I have no attachments and he probably likes the way I stink – he’ll have to if we live in the same house. He was there in fact, but leaving when he got the text and replied right away, telling me to come round and giving me his address. I showered with simple pleasure and longer than usual.

  Daniel

  What shall I say about getting the tour of the house? It was a shabby crumbling kind of place. Boxes of cereal open on the fridge and the bathroom, that rough Lynx smell, but I didn’t care – situation in my current abode was unbearable – it was time to step into a new place or die like a shark when it stops swimming. Badr was enthusiastic and welcoming – I guessed early on he must have been bullied as a child and did everything he could now – desperately – to make day-to-day life smooth for himself and everyone else. Seeing him at home clarified it all. He had a houseplant for every dropped friendship. He was one of the good guys that doesn’t get anywhere. I slapped him on the back, I listened to him talking. I could be around him a bit and move on at the next opportunity.

  I could see the mysterious door where the hermit owner of the house stayed. Badr introduced me to Daniel. I saw Daniel out of the corner of my eyes that first time. So I can’t tell you anything. Not yet.

  I went through the downstairs and saw the room I was going to take. I crawled all around that place testing it out with my sensory organs. It was a done deal. I would move in, into the new sex cycle that had just begun – if I’m honest – with an overlapping of the last one. I got myself set up to be a better man in a little while and Badr would hold me to it meanwhile and my cat would hold me to it, both kind soft beings.

  And Daniel?

  I don’t remember the days without Daniel. This is important: the time between meeting him and knowing him has compressed under the weight of everything after. I can just about remember the early days of knowing him, making myself talk louder and more confident than I felt. I told myself it was the beginning of a new cycle so I was going to feel rocky. If I believed in astrology, I’d say something was in retrograde – that messes you up, right? I don’t really know anything but I’m sure astrology has to do with cycles too. I respect that, I just don’t believe it. Funny now there’s no moon or sky and only the end of the land and the sea has all the answers I’d ever been asking for. I remember the night of the party – let me keep this. I remember the night of moving in. I got it into my head to think Daniel was a soft thing too, shook his hand – pleased with its dry firm grip – and went on my way, trying so hard to carelessly slot him as a detail only for the new rotation. But even that early I felt the first shocks of coming disruption as he sat with Órla and I saw them together and myself pretending to be outside of it all. I took to the room where Daniel was not to try and find my footing there. I slumped into swearwords an
d laughing like roaring, trying to hold up my picnic bluebells – you’ll have already worked out that I had other distractions which were all variants on the bluebells – like he was just some ungracious scrolling on the singular surface moment of a day and not. Already. Fuck. I sat myself solid as a side of beef in the living room with my friends and the desperate warmth of Badr and we talked about somebody’s girlfriend and my job in advertising and media. Which I’d explain was a lot of meetings and strategising war for things that don’t matter. Yeah, right in front of my colleagues, I didn’t care then. As if they didn’t know. And I drank a beer and another beer and each sip made me think it was my lips that were foaming not the drink, I was wrenched inside because I was moving into the place and I knew, as much as I resisted: he is something. Daniel. This is not a circle this is an end, a gap, a plummeting point.

  Daniel, when I let myself see him clearly at last in the basement of the university, looked like this: a quiet man, watchful eyes, a tripped step look. I mean the kind of person you look at and think nothing, then look again and get startled – what am I trying to say? Some horror that is not horror, the rollercoaster loop-de-loop of someone who sees you but who is also a lot of other things at once. Emblematic embedded eyes. Step it back: they were brown eyes, I think. I mostly saw him in low light always.

  He was four inches shorter than my six one and looked like he didn’t care about food or sunshine but would be rosier and darker if he did eat and go out and didn’t work so much but might not know how. He looked like the wind from a mountain was blowing on him and he was barely standing against it but in a fierce determined way, even when he was at rest he was holding himself against that wind. He liked to wear lots of layers. He loved jumpers and touching things with his fingers as if checking their quality. I’ve never thought about anyone more than I’ve thought about him and it shows, like I’ve exhausted all my thoughts on him and then pumped myself round the track again twelve more times.

  Let me tell you, sexuality didn’t come into it. It was just a door creaking open to let the fucking ghosts in. Daniel was a harbinger. Everyone is drenched in ghosts – there are so many more dead people than alive – so it takes a cut to let them get in. My cut was Daniel. My means of infection was the diary. This I am just now setting out from myself, from my fallen position. Now, inside, I’m glad of the windbreak, this stove, aren’t you? I can taste smoke in the back of my mouth and it reminds me I’m still alive. I had to stand on the edge where the breakers come in before I even would admit it: I wanted Daniel to be near me always because I wasn’t cycling, I was falling and the darkness was already rushing past me.

  Daniel, Daniel

  Fear was a new feeling in my adult life; I thought I’d put that fucking brick down on my road from childhood and walked away from it forever. What could I fear when everyone I’d ever loved had died already? Before the day I moved into that house, I breezed through life, I was healthy. I was blowing by fast and sleek and no impediments; work was shit – Cloudberry Corporation, ad campaign planning for fuck’s sake – but life in Scotland was an improvement on life in London, where I had been before, in that at my new work no one cared after five o’clock, and drinking was mandatory but not skewed with upmanship. I was too young to complain about the cost of pints and rent – necessities had been a gouge for longer than I could remember, and my grandmother’s money softened that a little anyway. Life was all right, before. I had Órla on board, a girl who seemed like she wasn’t easily hurt and would be a good friend once it was all inevitably over between us – I saw she was smarter than me, but did not worry, since I guessed she was smart enough to be kind to an, let’s face it, idiot, like me once the fucking was done.

  I saw Daniel on the side of the room and put him away for the moment but as soon as I was leaving the flat, that first time after I agreed to move in I was afraid of an unknown pressure of wanting. This unknown shape. This Daniel whoever it was. Wanting things is the worst possible thing. You should never want. You should just fucking be, right? That’s what better men than me had told me. And especially not to want to the degree I did. So when I moved in I threw myself into work, so when I was living there I was out a good amount of the time, out with Órla, in with Órla, who seemed to like Daniel a decent amount, and gave me an excuse not to talk to him and an excuse to look between them and get coffee and sip it and go off to work and hear her talk about her funny odd little new friend.

  Thread

  Fear though, it had sneaked into my life and I couldn’t shake it. Things change, all right, but I’d always been in charge of that change, or could see the shape of it. I was good like that, adaptable. So. Like I said, this wasn’t about sex. I wouldn’t care, would I? I could fuck a man. No worries there, though I haven’t. Hadn’t. This was like metal filings finding out about magnets. Only the magnet is so unassuming they think, why this magnet. Why now. I am being honest now – as honest as I can be, and sharp with myself, because I am so lost and truth is a small iron thread coming out of my arteries through my chest wall and you’ll tell me I have to follow it up hand over fist somehow out, somehow into light again, out from under the shadow I’m in. It might lead to you, it might not. It might kill me. I am repetitive, you’ll think. Shallow, a whole load of other judgements. Fuck you, I know, don’t look at me. So are all people who are in a crisis or in love or full of ghosts. So are all people. It’s a lot. It’s a lot.

  A Partial List of Objects I Unboxed at Cloudberry

  The ones I remember:

  – On my first day, a box of a thousand shoelaces with the name of a celebrity stamped along each in Arial Black font, to be handed out at a national football match.

  – A box of fake maps to ‘stars’ homes’ in a small Scottish town where none of the actors actually live; I don’t remember what this was for.

  – A box of white tee-shirts, torn up and with fake blood on them, advertising a new crime drama for an online network we represent.

  – A box of samples of gin-flavoured dick-shaped gummies for some club.

  – A box of holographic jumpers to be given to local ‘influencers’ who were fans of gymnastics.

  – A box of seventy obsidian black shell-shaped objects with screens (that were not phones) whose use and associated company no one in the office could work out.

  – A box of anatomically correct dolls without hair (an ill-advised campaign to do with alopecia awareness).

  – A box with nothing in it but packing peanuts.

  – A box of plush polar bears with their eyes crossed out, to signal their extinction; a promotion for a computer game.

  – A box with leaflets of infographics that detailed not just our company but individual people working there (all women) including their estimated clothing size; a promotion for a new clothing app.

  – A box of American flags and guns in the colours of human skin, complete with nails and some with freckles and warts; a promotion for a Chinese gambling firm.

  – A box with 3D printed food snacks that had gone mouldy; a promotion for a new 3D snack company which went immediately bust before we could give them feedback.

  – A box with mocked-up old scrapbooks and photo albums; a promotion for a genealogy service.

  – A box with toddler clothes advertising a breast milk enhanced beer (we told them no).

  – A box with several mer-unicorns stuffed with recording devices.

  An Introduction to Him

  To understand myself I’d realised early on in life I had to understand one or two people at least very well and mould my thoughts to their shape to keep myself tough and on course. I’d done it in the past with friends and work colleagues though suffering from the move north and the small cultural barriers there were between me and people at the new workplace. There are always bits that get lost in translation, jokes that won’t work, etcetera. But I had the form down. A couple of my early friends and girlfriends were the biggest role models, but none of the later ones had more than a bit to
add to my repertoire. Usually, after I was into my twenties – whether partner or person of interest – their influence faded when I left their company. And I became different again, with only a little of the residue in the ways I dressed or a motion of my hands retained. Different again: another circle of being, but with these little bits of continuity, new wheel but still a wheel. So I keep – kept – myself together.

  After I moved into the Minto house I read and understood the story of James Lennoxlove and sucked it wholesale into me sort of accidentally. Nobody else knew it really, not even Daniel, who had the diary – who had stolen it, and like most any thief had missed its real value. Mark MacAshfall, whose diary it was, also never knew the whole story. He knew the facts but not the story. I was the only one who got that. It gave me a wilder wonkier shape because of that. You should never get an original insight, they are the road to madness, because they might be wrong, and that reflects on you, or they might be right, and then people might be disturbed. That’s what I’d thought all my life, based on empirical evidence. Yet here I fucking am. At the end of everything.

  James Lennoxlove’s diary came to Daniel from Mark who I knew previously by chance – his stepfather was a client of Cloudberry and once I had to go to Mr MacAshfall senior’s house to explain a device his company was using to collect and monitor the notes of the most profitable songs in real time. He hadn’t invented it; he played the piano to me in a room upstairs and made me taste a wine he had laid down from the year of my birth – sweet charred cork and purple musk with an entrancing death lily edge, he said. Mark came up and extracted me. We sat in the kitchen and the sun cast long golden rays between the stairs. I told him about my grandmother’s villa on the edge of a town in the Cotswolds. The electrical substation where I’d hang out with friends and drink cider and smoke roll ups had barrels of pink and white flowers planted around it to make it look prettier. It was the kind of place, I said, that looks like either everyone is about to be scenically murdered and or endlessly and in booming self-satisfaction votes Tory which amounts to the same thing – I was pretty drunk at that point. Mark laughed; a pug sneezing. Less scenic to be murdered by Tories, he said.