Bitterhall

by Helen McClory

  ‘There,’ he said, ‘he’s quite clearly there. Hello, friend of my houseguest.’

  I turned – yes I did – to see – yes – nothing. But not completely nothing. The universe had been opened to the idea that there was something, and through that fissure something hissed completely silently and completely unreal, but only for now. At the time I’d snorted. I’d had enough and bustled my plate to the sink and went through to my room and Órla sleeping there, my landing spot, and the cat came up and arranged herself on my feet and in the dark I fell towards safety, for perhaps the last time.

  Occupation

  The ocean is full of plastic. I’ve touched plastic things dozens of times today. Small nubs of it, smooth flanks of it, crinkling skins of it. Touched it with my hands, my lips. I feel the gyre multicoloured flop and spin. Plastic is in the gullets of guillemots and stamped into valleys of landfills. It’s a weird, upsetting occupation of the earth, if you think about it – our production, natural since it comes from us. I think at some point in the distant future what’s left of humanity will look on plastic with appalled nostalgia – like it’s amber from another era where our secretions could not be stopped – but that day I sat under a dodgy light on a plastic and petroleum-product chair attempting to open an acreage of boxes set on the floor to meet some new-birthed plastic and petroleum products and pretend I was happy doing so. I struggled with layers of tape, finally snapped them with my teeth. The latest plastic simulation of a thing, thingness being adspace, in my work. I plunged in up to my forearms and packing peanuts swelled around me like smooth blood cells and my eyes closed over and the sounds of the office receded. I wanted to just sit with my hand in there, rustling. I wanted to sink into the slurry of dry tiny pieces. I had not slept. Out by the neck I slowly raised from the box one of fifty toy mer-unicorns. Mallory in her tall heels primped over and eyed it, and me.

  ‘The vodka people, right?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, turning the thing. It had a switch that set it on and it began to sing an unpleasant upbeat tune. We listened in silence. I liked Mallory for that.

  ‘Well,’ she said with a sigh, ‘it started off weak and it struggled in the middle there, but by the end, it really managed to finish and be done.’

  ‘How much did they pay for this?’

  ‘Too much. It’s got to be in violation of some of rule about flogging booze to kids. They should have just stuck with the cartoons. But there was muttering about them too.’

  ‘Who would want this?’ I said. We looked at each other.

  ‘No one. It’s going in a hole in the ground, to sit there for a thousand years.’

  ‘Such great triumphs mark out our days from the lineage of humanity,’ I said.

  ‘Funny. Who said that?’ Mallory asked in a tone without any sense of enjoyment. That was also part of the game, and I liked her all right for saying it, and I desperately wanted to walk out of the building and start running and run to the sea again, or up the cliff. Instead of answering I imagined a corner of a dark woollen picnic blanket, and the way cheese and butter sandwiches gleam and bulge when tightly bound in cling film, melting slightly from the heat of a summer’s day, and how they feel as they come loose and my childish fingers poke flute holes in the soft white bread.

  We would make a copy, Daniel and I, spending some hours in that long oppressive basement room – I can still feel the air conditioning blowing my lips blue. Do you know what precious means? I thought it was a slimy word used in jewellery copy and by Gollum. But though it has an ugly sound in the mouth it means more than important; tiny and rare and not self-replicating, and so mortal though longer-lived than either of us will be. I thought precious afterwards as I lay hard in my bed, almost crying. I thought of Daniel’s hands on the neck of the new thing he had made. It was worth a thousand years of occupation of the dirt for that, I think.

  Recycle

  I touched the smoothed edges of the rock where I came to the end and thought of plastic inhabiting everything. Microbe-sized multiplying and seething in its shiny ever-new pill bodies. I’d been able to avoid thinking of all this, when I was fine, before. So now I thought of the ionic surfactants that wash down the drain. I thought of the rare metals in phones dragged out of the rocks in unknown poor regions of the world, names I don’t even know – the county or the metals. I thought of the phones I’d tossed away when they began to run slowly or just look a little tired. I thought of factories making plastic goods and realised I didn’t know what they’d be like, though I have watched videos before of production lines. There’s a lot I can’t see clearly – all I have is the conveyor belt and no other details of the warehouses or people working there. What the work does to their eyes or their fingernails, I don’t know and can’t bear to know. I thought of the volume of plastic shit being made at these unknowable factories spewing out, like the doors of factories were mouths or anuses, factories like bodies. I thought about the sticky backing glue on labels I had peeled off at work. Boxes of new textures and shapes immediately discarded. I thought about guilt, which I didn’t really feel for any of it. It’s my fault and it’s not, since I am going to die, I thought. I thought of myself, standing here, how easy it would be to take a step forward and stand nowhere ever again. I thought of seabirds’ guts. I thought, isn’t it stupid. Some children when they learn about dying are horrified by the idea. Then there are others who think, well, that’s one way out, and that stays with them all their life, that sense of horrific possibility. There are others who don’t think either of these things but I’m too tired to think of them.

  I tried to think of every good thing I had done and all I could manage was standing under a tree in somebody else’s garden, with a man I – I wanted. I’d fucked everything else up, even just by existing I was just a walking carbon footprint. I had never loved anything as I should have, I had lacked capacity to see between wanting what I was told to want, and my real desires. And even when I finally dimly got the hint there had been a kiss that almost but didn’t happen, and the name for that’s a ghost kiss. A kiss that does happen can be a mistake but a ghost kiss never is, aching just beyond the borders of myself. A kind of human texture. I hear hail falling in the grass and on my clothes and his. I shuddered. Later we’d go a lot further but it won’t count. I’m lost again – timing. Here, at the end. Small stones fall when I move. The grass is damp and the winter sky is nothing worth recording so I do, staring at it with my phone until my eyes hurt. But I’m inside, I forget. You’re here and I’m down on the ground and I fell? But I did not die. There’s a fire going. I’m in the grate sending up sparks, and my skin is blurring. I need someone to lean against me so I can be in one place. Stay with me.

  Doubling

  We walked into the building of the university late at night with the infernal bright shit that so characterised the work that I was spending my life on. Down past some security doors and into the padded room, and I felt the fear immediately – that the door would close shut behind us forever and we would die and desiccate in there. It was not my only fear.

  Stopped dead. Daniel looked back at me and smiled. He hadn’t said anything other than, ‘Here’s the machine,’ with a wave of his hand like introducing a work colleague.

  ‘It doesn’t make the copies out of plastic?’ I asked. My voice cracked under the strain and I winced at myself. My heart so fucking loud, like a much younger less used heart. Go back to being the way you were before, I was thinking. Órla never did this to me. This was dire. I have never loved airless rooms. Too many memories. Rooms press in and crush you like grinding stone gears and no one overly cares where you are, ever really, you could be missing for hours and no one would think to go looking.

  ‘No, the machine uses different resins,’ he was saying. ‘It’s not in its mandate to copy post-twentieth century objects.’ He was placing the thing in the copy tray with finicky care. I saw the veins on his hands, the raised bones. He had a small red scuff on his left hand, near the middle knuckle. I fol
lowed its progression as he moved the toy about, splaying its legs, straightening out its shiny green fishtail as much as it would go, brushing out the cheap shitty silver mane with his fingers. Will you listen and not tell – I was worried with a rising alarm in my heart that I would – at a slipped moment – be somehow tricked into kissing him; that was how I thought of it, like we’d stand too close and I’d lose my sense of decorum, bend down, my lips on your lips. I didn’t have thoughts, my thoughts wanted to yell, it’s the room itself! Don’t get confused! And yelled drowning me out white cold as I watched him pull back and go about his business. I wanted, with a kind of shocked heat, to reach out and hold his hand up to my lips. I could imagine the skin cold against my own cold hand. It would smell of citrus; before we left the flat he had been peeling a mandarin. ‘I am getting confused,’ I thought, and tried to puzzle out all the reasons why I might be mistakenly feeling like this – I hadn’t been sleeping. I was not gay, nobody had said that about me: nobody at school had yelled it at me or shoved me into a wall for it. Nobody had implied or inferred it. Not that it mattered if I was, I told myself afterwards, if I was. Just, right, no man looked to me for anything other than work – and sometimes to double check their form at the gym – that was all I had to give, the rules were set. There below everything in that horrible cold dry room, the tops of my ears burned. Nothing about this made sense, so perhaps it was my body telling me in its twisted way I had a virus brewing, a shivering, high temperature boiling up and my subconscious made a mistake with the input. You could blame reading over and over the sensual sinuous diary entries of James Lennoxlove, colouring my understanding of the world so much I could get fearful pleasure out of this. Because that’s what it was, I see it now. But then I was thinking, wanting isn’t like this, doesn’t have the feel flavour shape certification or panic of this, so this isn’t wanting. I was overtired. I hadn’t been sleeping. Nothing had to happen, I wouldn’t make any kind of mistake like that.

  Passage

  I went to get coffee and I held that instead. It’s this century’s substitute for rest or closeness, unity that requires no other hand but your own to utilise. One of the many, and more reliable and available in public now that vaping has left cigarettes as historical. Fucking vaping, the flavoured condom method of substance dependency. Coffee is customisable comfort that doesn’t need other people except for workers in the chain of supply, I suppose. Can’t ignore the world economy, especially if it’s how we get interpersonal only with ourselves. I had made a career on the fringes of this sort of self-securing by the object, the image, the smell or the burn of a drink. I was like the high priest of it. No – ha – really another worker too, just one of many soldering meaning onto the endlessly passing things with a series of little taps and clicks.

  Anyway, I went out through the doors. The hall smelled of fresh paint and nineties carpeting. There’s lots to register in an empty building when you are trying to buy coffee so you can avoid the man whose presence is causing you actual mania. You walk carefully to avoid making noise, then get self-conscious about what that means about you and switch to good strides. The hall extends away from you as you walk down it. Something crackles, shifts. Wall surfaces; ghosts. I went into the nook for coffee, stood for a moment staring into space, then pressed the options I wanted. A hearty old stream shot out of the machine, invigorating the air with fragrance. Behind me a long way

  back down the corridor I could hear a slow, steady creaking. Sometimes your mood is a Dutch angle through which you can see the world and it’s only going to look bad, that tilted. I kept my head down, didn’t I? I didn’t invite it in. At no stage could anyone say I had let myself go completely. No, I got taken by the crazy. Or the weird reality, I don’t know. I don’t know! The creaking came nearer, I kept busy. Hand around the cup, so warm, the colours on the cup a solid choice, the logo resembling a major chain but not actionably close. I selected the options for Daniel, thinking he probably liked a standard cappuccino with a twist. For some reason, ‘smoky woods’ was a syrup flavour. My finger hovered over the button. A sound came from a few metres away, shuffling. Snuffling, like a horse tickering, the sounds of a bridle in a horse’s mouth. It kept coming closer. The machine beeped up closer still and the second coffee was ready. I sipped, I swallowed a hot mouthful. I turned around two cups in hand, face calm. Daniel had followed me – or, some other person with a job to do crawling in this empty hive.

  Nothing. No one.

  And then, walking in from my left side, a figure. There was a sick feeling all through me like death, like the system going into shutdown, greyish beats, no air.

  The figure turned his head to me as he passed, then kept walking down the hall. My own head was facing forwards – I held myself upright, on duty, believe me, against any of this – so I saw little of it, only registering a horror and dirty coils of snail-brown hair, and only when he had gone by me, about twenty seconds afterwards I turned in the direction he’d left in. Nothing, no one. I stared. Still nothing re-materialised. I started breathing again in a gasp. A sick feeling – fuck me. I knew he had not gone into any of the other doors. The keypad noises would have alerted me to that. No. What had I seen, then?

  I stood for a while composing a self against a world that had rotated its agreed-on boundaries. Come on I told myself, it’s just tiredness – here, breathe in the coffee – it’s just a moment you will find yourself thinking back on in pubs – disassociating with a group of mates talking about spooky things, but you – you won’t say, give them your moment – so weird you have to unhinge a part of your worldview like a snake unhinges its jaws just to accommodate the animal it’s eating. But I was used to getting through; I had good core strength, I could run a mile in four minutes. I could live through the childhood I had. Later I’d be able to – digest. And so I shook my head and pretended to scoff and became an approximation of fine and went back into the copy room to face other kinds of dangers, now seemingly less obscure and wreaking.

  Still

  Still the night had plans for me. Daniel wasn’t at the end of the room by his device. I found him in a kind of cupboard off to one side – the air here smelled like blackcurrant cordial, less sweet, more sawdust, the wine I’d drunk at the MacAshfalls’. It was from the inks. Daniel pulled out a container of liquid leather to show me – the stink of it – mammalian, dangerous. I took a deep breath in to show him I was not afraid. I pulled back spluttering.

  ‘Smells like an uncooked hamburger dropped down the back of a radiator.’

  ‘Yes, sordid isn’t it? There’s a bottle of gilding liquid up there. And dirt.’

  ‘A bottle of dirt?’ Daniel wanted to make the objects as close to real as possible, and real things stink, and are coated in their filth from being here – from existence. I admired it and I hated it, just how deep he was trying to go with authenticising things, but that was good – to be operating in a higher layer, above my weird, base confusion. ‘You’ll be able to convince everyone it’s real when it’s not.’

  ‘That’s not it at all’ Daniel said. ‘Well, now you’ve said it. Maybe. But it’s more – verisimilitude. And excessive pushing at the limit of what we can do, how far we can go.’

  ‘Dirt would really lend it credence. Get the right patina on it, and it’s like, why even have the real thing?’

  ‘You’re testing me, Tom.’

  I picked up a bottle of ink from a nearby shelf, ‘Kells blue 0004. That Kells?’

  ‘That Kells,’ Daniel said. ‘You don’t really think this is all some kind of master forgery—’

  ‘No no. I think it’s pretty cool. Just, has to be in the right hands. Otherwise the world would be overrun with fakes, instead of your choice few.’

  ‘It’s still a pricey and difficult thing to do, and there’s a lot of paperwork around to prevent forging.’

  ‘Unlicensed forging.’ I looked at him, tilting my head. This was good. Pick at him, I thought, until he bleeds. But on thinking that – repulsed m
yself. It implied, if I thought about it, a skin stretched between us – skin stretched out on the air – or the skin of our bodies, interacting, pressing up against us, hairs raising in the scented squalid warmth –

  ‘I just want to keep the old things safe, Tom,’ he was saying, ‘that’s all I want to do. To keep the originals in perfect condition. And I get to do that here.’

  ‘I don’t think it can possibly do what you want it to do, Daniel,’ I said. I really thought it all was a miracle; a disgusting and dangerous miracle, if you looked at its constitutional parts.

  He looked away, turned back smiling, cheerful, ‘I’m here to change your mind. And I think you want it changing.’

  Patter

  I remember, I pulled the collar up on my coat and ploughed into the frigid air. Daniel going fast at my side to keep up, a bit of the look of a narrow-faced dog. The late stub-end of the night – first there were the city’s elegant stone tenements, their staircase railings glowing black with condensation under the orange lights, then shopfronts and desolate empty buildings, then the hedges of the gardens of bigger houses set back on lawns a distance from the street and from the network of back lanes we were going along, like servants rushing so as not to be seen. A stray growth – tendril or bulge – in one of those hedges or a binbag, guts got at by a seagull is as needed and helpless as a small scream of passion or despair I thought, ‘We are lashed down, we cannot spare ourselves.’ Bloody tired I was from so many emotions – really, an excess of them – or the fever of them – which had in the long hours worked itself through, I thought, with that little scene or hallucination over the coffee marking the worst of it. I did not on the whole journey need to think myself into old, happier times to get by. I was beyond that. My trusty body was just intent on getting me home.