Somehow I was still in this other present.
‘I didn’t say you should be feeling jealous,’ Órla said, ‘I’m trying to work out what you were feeling. Fuck me, I think you were jealous because you don’t like the friendship I have with him,’
‘You know he’s gay, right?’ I said. My head was in a dark barn with lamplights, burnished metal. I was going to be free of this, somehow, telling Mark. I didn’t want to. It was soft there, softly lit. Órla opened and closed her mouth. I saw silver time in the water, running in crisscrossing lines like the fishes for Daniel’s net.
‘But you were feeling lonely, weren’t you?’ she was saying. ‘You aren’t – you seem – a bit out of it. What’s been up with you, Tom? What’s been going on?’
I didn’t speak. The fish in the river multiplied, branched out into channels, black and silver streams of fish, and the man was waiting for them to reach him, and everything was glinting. Faster than the current. A temporary overload. I blinked, seeing fish trails in cutting water. Feeling wet pages under it, held in my hand. And then behind me, just out of my line of sight, was the man. He wasn’t in the river now, he was walking with us, towards the house, and we had stopped – making him late. He had an appointment there.
‘I’m worried about you,’ Órla said, in a brittle voice.
‘I can’t tell you,’ I said, pushing myself back from the wall. My light mood was gone altogether. My rushing thoughts gone cold for the time. I heard a faint buzzing – so many days and what had I really done with them? Sucked back thoughts. He wanted. I heard him want like a faint breath in my breath. Órla gently took my arm.
‘What’s the big secret drama, eh? You had a few nightmares? You’ve been really into some book?’
‘What?’ I rubbed my face again, my nose stung, my eyes. I couldn’t focus. Tempting to say to you, I saw the sea and it was so welcoming. I saw a circle in the sea, going round and round, saying, fall into me and don’t have worries any more.
‘Did you notice, with that diary you’ve been into lately, there’s something wrong with it?’
I shook my head. It was better to feign ignorance, to keep the threads separate.
MacAshfalls’
Do I decay, right now? Have I fallen already? Do you see the stars are out, there, through the gap, there’s one. No, probably space junk. I want a coffee. Do you want one? The stove doesn’t burn like it should. Wait. I’ll keep feeding it though. Sparks come over me. Sparks enter me. I won’t. I’m still here, for now.
Órla had sensed I was tired – I was tired, wasn’t I? She’d stopped speaking at me – like birds singing in the end what she had told me, making no more sense – and dragged me off towards the party. I saw the long women in silver white dancing and the men their slaves dancing too. Never mind we’ll talk about it later. For tonight we’ll just have a good time. Words in that vein. From me, from her. We walked up and down some suburban hill streets towards what was going to happen talking little, consulting the map on my phone – I couldn’t quite understand how to get there on foot without it, not knowing I’d already been set on this way a long time before I’d even realised. Maps in my mind were overlapping – empty countryside sprung up for a moment and faded like a camera light going off – then dimness. Are you still with me? I can’t see you. Blinded myself from staring. At flames. At the night dark up here. We had arrived at the MacAshfalls’ house. I patted the book in my pocket. I pat the book in my pocket.
The house seemed even more like a magazine spread: giant beautiful green leaves, the wooden panelling and the slant of the roof – I think even feeling so bad I made a note – at the next meeting, talk about the narrative this house would add to their business. People love this sort of space. A couple of online pieces accompanied by pictures of this would work like a charm. A warm light suffused it at that time of day. Beyond the tiredness. The people were the only corruption – out of time themselves, the interwar look, short chinned, rosy, white satin, only the cigarettes in long holders were missing, because it would be inauthentic to us, now, to be that authentic. I eyeballed a couple of Cloudberry clients as we passed by, but they didn’t recognise me in my white suit and purposefulness. I was suddenly struck with the thought that we had passed from the outside into a place where a mock-up of the nineteen-thirties was ongoing in a strange kind of experimental set-up, itself taking place in the time before I was born, the nineteen-seventies – overseers in heavy-framed glasses gripping clipboards just out of sight, some head-ups in their carpeted conference room were the ones smoking constantly as they watched us through black and white monitors. I was in step with my own mission, but the overall aim was something higher than I could grasp. A question of how we behave in circumstances where our mortality hovers above us – can we feel its white wings gently brush the top of our heads? Can we feel our circuitous pointlessness?
Almost with a cry as the music of this strange set washed us further in I grabbed Órla by the hand and took her in to the dance. Blindly ongoing the dance. And white and black, and a kind of emptiness around us – we were in fact the only couple dancing. I steadied myself in dancing, and holding her warm hands. The music swirled us two specks tossed us about. But the song ended and all at once I all but dropped. I’m not good at this, I thought. I can’t do this. Órla guided me to the side, and Mark – Mark was there, holding up glasses for each of us. I slopped the liquid across my lips as I drank. Fear in the depths dragged me, a weight. But I was smiling. I should have found it fine to hold that fear. I am strong.
I – with wiser options available – split myself in two. In one version, I took Mark by the shoulder and led him to a quiet spot to discuss the book, and what I might know. In another I walked off on my own and found myself drinking meeting nobody’s gaze bent under the sense that all my life I had been a mistake and that I would always slam into a crossroads, knowing I was lost, because where other people have strong internal compasses I had none at all. I might have navigated by the stars but I had no stars. Daniel you could have printed stars for me, I think, out of nowhere. Then I’d know. I’d be steady. But I’m not allowed. I tried so hard not to put my head into my hands and cry.
Circling
Then he came, flickering, the notion of him, and places began not just to overlap but, like, stitch together. Someone dropped their hand to their chest and their necklace sparkled. A candelabra overhead almost guttered in a breeze I couldn’t feel. Someone passed me a tray of hors d’oeuvres and I pretended not to know what to pick. The waiter said, ‘Oh this one, definitely the best,’ and I saw him briefly and he smiled, and he was not the waiter but he was himself the man who had insinuated his way into my life.
‘Get away,’ I said quietly. I don’t know if he heard. I stood upright, I furtively knocked back drinks – tasting only the salt part of them or else the fumy, fragrant part, like drinking hothouse flowers and clammy stagnant air. At one point I was talking to a Cloudberry client about 3D technology turning us all into objects to be scanned and read and our originalities must be discarded in the after effect or we would perform clunkily or worse, become redundant. I must have done well, because the small crowd pressed around me was laughing. I had Órla’s hand again; I led her outside – how many hours had passed. We spoke and I was nearly crying though holding back. He’s here, I nearly said. Red crackle in my voice as I talked so I flitted from group to group so no one would find me out. Nothing else was under control, not even my sight was to be trusted. I saw Órla dancing with my tormenter. I saw her sit down beside him on the steps. I drank, there were always glasses rising to hand and salty, humid booze slipping past my lips.
Wander
It grew so late and no hours passed. All the while music came winding from the vinyl records, sounds so relentlessly ambiguous, upbeat and sad at once. I danced and I ate something hard with a slippery savoury paste in it. Another source of dissonance led me upstairs. I saw Mr MacAshfall bashing on a piano in a high room of the house that was not v
isible from any place in the street. His guests were immortal his pose seemed to say, or they’d died in their finery in garden bunkers in the first fall of the Blitz. I wondered if there was an experiment going on. I knew there wasn’t, but if I pretended it made it easier than the fact that none of it seemed stable or to make sense. Still he played away, waving at me. I raised a glass back and hesitated. Then with no more greeting forthcoming I left. Why had I tolerated him or even looked for him? The real thing I was looking for was – some help, some notice – not even a guide to all this but someone to hold my hand and stop my sobs coming up like stopping a sneeze. To be understood is all I ever want. I know I don’t seem the most —but if you see me and I’m there. I see you and you’re real. If we don’t notice each other we are both at risk of dissolving. Blipping out. It terrorises me, being seen, and existing when there are so many other better things people could be looking at.
I was in the kitchen and my palms had nail marks pressed in them from me making fists all night. I saw a window and blackness beyond. Then wooziness. My nose stung. Wasn’t this an— Perfume filled the air: of woodsmoke, cut across with sex heat semen – I walked quickly dispersing it – with the smell of party sweat Chanel and spilled white wine and cold tiny pastries cluttering back to fill the void. The sound of a river flowed around me, a hand grabbed my arm, I could not feel my feet. I shook off the hand and walked away, trying not to stumble. I went upstairs two at a time, gripping the rail. Had to get away. A river in my lungs and in the woods black at night. An owl cried. Straw and horse shit stamped by hoofs into the white carpet. I passed by everything and into another century, up and down the floors. I see it, it was there, these blasting pictures that did not belong to me. You understand. I could have managed if not for them insisting on me because I wanted them to.
Sliver
I wiped my face at a sink, someone was using the bathroom and they yelped but I was out. White stumbling steps. I wiped my nose which had blood on it – my fingers had blood on them. And shocked laughter burst behind me like a flower in a hedge. I scrambled through the nearest door – white, close fitted to the wall – and closed it behind me. It was a kind of walk-in wardrobe, close and delicately fragrant with a Jo Malone type scent – my grandmother and her friends’ houses – a sensor light turning on as I came in. Coats made shadows in fingers on the floor. The book – that would help – I pulled it out and in my fingers it fell open to an entry after the midway point:
J and the hunters returned to Bitterhall about two, and went into the house for refreshments, leaving the horses to the grooms. I stayed a little while. I have always loved J’s horse almost as much as my own. It is a great black stallion with a white star a white saddle. No one might normally ride him unless they were very much the master of themselves. I decided I would brush him myself and led him into the stables. They were full with hay; the hayloft overhead was flowing over, sending golden arrows of straw down upon my shoulders. I brushed them off with the horse-brush, laughing. The men removed the leather saddle, reins and snaffle, and joked about the hunger of hunters who have only caught a fox. I said we had not caught any beastie at all. All that had happened was a dog had caught a thorn in its muzzle.
I blinked and looked up at the room and there – I could see Bitterhall clearly before me. I couldn’t have dreamed something in such high resolution. It stood grey-stone austere in the frail wintery Scottish fields with double wings and stables and a long winding drive through a ride of naked winter trees. There was the smoke: something burning in the courtyard where the stable hands were huddled. The room’s walls were still faintly there. The room itself was both tiny and massively vast. I felt my breathing speed up, and I pressed my back to the door. But out there was only more chaos, and in here, at least, was what needed to be seen: One of the stable-hands hailed me. He was walking towards me and I was walking towards him. He had Daniel’s face. And the clothes I had recovered. And he was standing right in front of me.
‘James,’ he said.
‘I’m – I’m not James,’ I said, voice high and stupid. I wasn’t James. I had a small, pinched feeling I was not James to him.
‘No. But I call you that if I want to,’ said the man, ‘Here and now. And why not, if it’s James’ diary you carry about with you. Who else could you be?’
I was in the stable. The man was standing beside me, holding a horse’s saddle in his arms. He hauled it up and hung it across a half-door. Inside the stall a sturdy black horse stood, large as a house itself almost, facing the wall, tail flicking. Stink of hot horses and cold sweat. Further back from the horses a table stood with a lantern on it. Bedding in one corner, where there was a lantern, a rolled pack. I did not belong here. He belonged here. In fact, he had invited me in to his particular home – the size of a sleeping roll, the warm bodies of horses. I went over and touched the top post of the stall. It felt real: I got a splinter. All the while he watched me, even as he rubbed his hand on the leather of the saddle, smoothing it down like it was the horse itself.
‘I’ve a splinter,’ I said, holding up my hand. It throbbed – suddenly deep in and unexpectedly raw pain. I thought, what if it gets infected, what if I fall ill, here, in this stable, and I have to go to my bed and lose a week or more, or die from it.
‘Let me look at it,’ he said, moving with terrible deliberation to me. He wasn’t – I thought for the name – Daniel. Not Daniel. He was his own man, and not mine either. But he was, in a way. Mine. Like an extension of myself. I shook my head. He had my hand in his. It was rough and had dirt in the cracks and it was held roughly and made my hand dirty.
‘Aye,’ he said, ‘well . . .’ he bent his head over my finger. I felt him gently nibble at the place the splinter had gone in. He pulled his head back; a little piece of the wood stuck out from the teeth. He spat it out cleanly.
‘You could have used your nails,’ I said.
‘Suppose I could’ve, sir,’ he said, looking away. We were both ashamed. I knew his nails were trimmed too short to have been any use and that my own would have worked. He’d done it the best way he could. He held my hand still. My ears were hot. The horse stamped. I could hear muffled music, silken, playing through the wooden walls.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘then – don’t do it again,’ he gently let my hand go. He turned to his work. I walked over to another stable where a mottled white and grey horse was facing outwards. I put my hand carefully on the top of its head.
‘Wait,’ I said, ‘one moment. You were talking about the diary? This one?’
I held it out to him. He reached out but drew his hand back.
‘No, you’re to keep it,’ he said.
‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Why is it mine?’
‘James,’ he said.
‘I’m not James.’
And then I was only in a wardrobe, lost in a rack of old coats.
Finally
The book was on the floor – I had panicked, caught in a confined space, drunk and too tired, and I’d dropped it. Again. At least not into water this time. I rushed and picked it up, cradling it in my hands. Some part of the back had come loose – stupid, I thought, stupid, stupid. I licked my thumb and tried to smooth it down. The corner came unstuck completely and I began peeling it from the leather, swearing at myself.
In the gap between the back sheet and the binding was a folded piece of paper. I gingerly tugged it part of the way out and saw handwriting. I knew I must look at it, knowing there was a clue in there – there must be, or I wouldn’t have found it. But I couldn’t – I couldn’t, my heart was beating like something was going to burst. I put the book back in my pocket and burst out of the wardrobe instead, expecting to walk into the dazzling white length of the corridor. But I was in another place – a room. And in the room Órla, looking up at me with concern. There was a window ahead of me and I had a horrible sensation – raised hairs on my neck – that the window had just been vibrating as if struck. As if I’d banged it with my fist.
I
folded myself up and backed onto the bed. After a while I said, ‘Órla, something’s happening to me.’
‘I know,’ she said, ‘I know it is. I’m sorry.’
‘I went into the place in the diary and he was there,’ I said, putting head in hands not knowing if I wanted to tell her – just letting the story come out. My throat was burning like I had shouted. My words rasped; I hadn’t taken a breath in too long. If I had done anything to harm her, it would be unforgiveable.
‘Did I hurt you?’ I asked.
‘You’ve been hurting yourself,’ Órla said. She came over to the bed and sat at the opposite end from me. I wanted her arms around me; anything. I wanted not to feel myself like a pulled tooth, flimsy and rotten. Someone came to the door, and Órla barked an order for water. I pushed my head down into the pillow.
‘I want to know,’ I said, ‘but I’m so tired.’
I think I must have seemed drunker than I was. Órla had taken off my shoes, jacket, tie, shirt, at some point. I was warmer without them, under the covers, but looked around for the book until I had it near me, held to my chest. Órla spoke calmly.
‘Yes, I think we all have questions about what’s going on, with you. I hesitate to say with “us” since that’s not—That’s not—’
I am alone, I thought. I’ve never been scared of that; who isn’t alone? But then, just then, I was. It hit me in my guts, it tore at me. I am alone.
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