Bitterhall

by Helen McClory

  I decided I’d put that night down to antic happenings, not self-villainy. I’d been drunk, and so had Órla, and this was something else, and it was wrong of me to claim it as my doing, that was the thing; wrong to take credit for something, even if it’s negative. I stared at his closed eyes, the wet spatters on his cheek. An inch of water would drown him, water gurgling down into his lungs. Things are not always your fault; that constant I must tell myself. I crouched further and touched Tom’s neck, taking his pulse, because I felt I should.

  ‘Tom,’ I said. ‘Tom, you’re all right.’ Though who ever is? He woke shortly afterwards and I helped him back up the steep steps to the cliff top, I put him to rest on the bothy boards. Órla had texted, insisting we stay until she arrived, and I was thinking of all the food I should have brought with me. Then the image of spoonfeeding a pathetically weakened Tom stove-warmed soup floated into my mind, and I dwelled in torment and arousal for a while. Sometimes we spoke, Tom and I, sometimes he seemed to listen to voices and respond. I found myself listening to it, and thinking, perhaps. Perhaps some people need to stop living, if they are suffering. And that thought made me cold, and I shuddered, and fussed.

  ‘There, Tom,’ I said, ‘we’ll get help soon.’

  Órla McLeod

  Hind

  I was excited, I’ll admit it, to get to be on that ride. I had contacted my supervisor to let her know I was off on personal business and moved shifts at my work so I wouldn’t lose any money this month. It meant a delay going up, but that was fine. Daniel was first response, I would be the one with the full kit. So I packed a bag for the rescue as if I’d practiced my whole life for this day. Warm clothes and towels and the like for the runaway, first aid, a camera, driving licence. I picked up the car and drove back to the house to see Badr one last time. In the end, it was him who was to play the worried wife.

  ‘Take care on the roads at night, hey?’ he said, and handed me a small fold of paper. Mark MacAshfall had dropped off a note or something of Tom’s, thought it might help.

  ‘Goodbye!’ Badr said, and lifted Mrs Boobs and waved her white arm. She gave me a baleful glare.

  I went through the city. A light went green, I indicated left. The streets were unfamiliar. Under surface thoughts of work – a conference was upcoming, my supervisor had not responded to my last two emails – a burn of worry in my guts, over Tom, and Daniel. I wondered if the two of them hadn’t had some kind of repression-led showdown, and one or the other hadn’t been killed. As much as the image struck me as interesting – a twist on a murder ballad, a good story for me to tell many years from now in beautiful knitwear, grey hair at my temples, sat at the head of table at a faculty dinner – I was fighting a frantic sense of doom.

  It flared and sunk. There, a bus pulled out, and I saw a grave with Tom’s name on it, and Daniel’s, intertwined with ivy. A small child carrying a shopping bag waiting beside a bin: I’d been left. School – please drive slowly. And I’d miss it, the drama, I’d not be in time to stop whatever it was. Partly-demolished shopping centre. Another right, another right, doubling back. And Tom, I’d missed a sign, whatever had gone on between us three in the bedroom at the party, the rattling windows. The intense and beautiful activities in that huge bed. I went red. I swore, I took another right and got stuck behind a bus.

  After at least an hour of steering and braking and breathing hard I veered off and sat parked awkwardly up by a supermarket and rubbed my head. I wasn’t even heading the right direction for the motorway. A police car slowed to look in at me and I smiled and nodded, and it went on. I prodded the GPS. I brushed my hair which was in some state, and saw the bodies of Daniel and Tom sinking off black-shaded cliffs. Scrolling waves covering them, and the north wind as a cloud with an angel’s face, blowing above it. I thought of old-woman-me, at a dinner table, several glasses into the wind, declaiming on the beautiful boys who had died because of me, because of love and trouble between them. I was a Tennessee Williams play, describing a tableau. I was playing up, no doubt. No more of that.

  Hours later. Stopped in a turn-off to eat a sandwich in a roadside parking place, I hoped to push the panic down my throat. After I’d eaten I unfolded Tom’s paper, or papers, rather – getting it buttery at the edge like some kind of heathen. I looked. Flipped the little sheets back and forth. Blank, creamy-coloured but raggedy with age. It occurred to me it must have come from the diary, but I could see no clue on it. Mark must have thought it had some meaning for Tom, so I wondered if there was lemon juice on it, or a hint of a message to be decoded, perhaps via creases, or faint scratches. The only comfort it seemed to offer was the kind I got from all old things long carried through the world in the protective casement of their books. I shook off a crumb and put the paper back in my bag.

  It was November; I was somewhere parked by moorland, watching rain blowing in grey down the sweep of a hill, and I felt numb. Daniel had let me know Tom was alive but in some kind of state. I had no experience with madness, and so I thought then only two things: firstly how frightening and baffling it was to have grazed it a little with the tips of my fingers, the world of madness in which a completely unwritten-on piece of paper could sing just for you, that running off north out of your life was an acceptable thing to do; and secondly I felt resentment at the fact Daniel was there with him already. I remember rolling my shoulders, and the look of cars thundering past on both sides of the road, on home to loved ones, to lives. No one crossing this moor was going to work, unless they were postmen or van drivers. And there was me in a hired car with no one really wanting to see me at the other end of the interminable journey. I should have left it to Daniel and Tom to sort out. After all, I was the third wheel. I felt like I was nothing to them. Despite my involvement I felt I was almost a nothing, and felt in myself nothing but a little miserable. And how petty it was that I was this way, with all that was actually happening to Tom. I cracked my fingers and turned out back onto the road. It’s true, Whitman, we contain multitudes; it’s just that much of it is dross.

  Later again, dusk. I still had a fair way to go yet. I had been startled out of my fog by a stag standing on a rock by the side of the motorway. Noble, as they always look. I left it behind and took it with me, imagining a monk drawing it in the margins of a book of hours, red and gold, a beast with eyes and lips like a man. I imagined it shot through with arrows, or like the famous tapestry of the captured unicorn, surrounded by deliberate plants, contained within its boundaries as if it was choosing to never step through them. As though to be trapped was to be thought of, to be beloved. It was already too late to do anything different but chase north, and to feel self-conscious in the chasing.

  Daniel Lightfoot

  Grip

  I don’t know at what time Órla drove in, but the distant lights of her car turning off the road triggered a panic in him. I looked over and saw his eyes open and his mouth, and heard him murmuring again a lot of senseless words. As I stared, he mouthed the sounds of the sea, and in my head I heard the door bang open, though when I looked up it was shut tight. Such a simple thing, precognition. I should have stroked his hair then, no matter how dirty. I should have been tender to him. At no point could I have really been said to be tender to anyone other than myself. I only sat aloof and talked back with Tom quietly, until, right as the car could be heard rolling over the gravel path to the bothy, Tom made a sudden run for the door, and out into the wind.

  I swore and I stumbled, picked myself up and tried to guess at where he might be. Órla’s lights blinded me, and I knocked on the driver’s window as she was pulling on the brake.

  ‘He’s out there,’ I babbled. ‘Quick, come, have to get him – we have to go, quickly before he does something.’

  At the cliffs I was overwhelmed by the smell of the air again in the dark, and the sense of infinite, not even uninterested stars above us. I was afraid, of course I was, then. Give me mortality, don’t give me the inhuman gigantic nothing that is all around us. I shone my
phone light over and picked out Tom, running, a slip, glowing in his white jacket. His shoes were off, we’d never find them. I held out an arm, only just stopping Órla from tumbling into one of the sea-cuts in the ground. I had moved to stop us falling without even thinking. So it often is that without thought I was all the safer. Tom was on the other side of a fissure, dark like everything else, but I could hear him ranting.

  ‘Tom,’ Órla said in a tight, positive voice, ‘hey, it’s me. Are you – you coming back in?’

  And this was something I hadn’t known, that the scene of an attempted suicide can feel so awkward and mundane. Tom paced about, waved, let his arm drop. The whites of this, unevenly moving, hurt to look at in the darkness, and also suggested a startling of some white bird that was trying to fly but could not, had forgotten how to rise.

  ‘I’m fine,’ he said, sounding hoarse. ‘Umm, how are you, Órla?’

  He paced. He shouted sometimes, though I could barely make out what he was saying. I thought: a poor, bare, forked animal, then of the constellation of the great bear, and the wind’s bite and the yawning gap in front of us all, as metaphor, as hunger. I asked myself if I too wanted to fall in, and found no answer. And just like that, a calm feeling came. I counted myself safe, and that Tom was safe, because I was here to save him, I held Órla back from rushing round, in case, in the shock, he might have fallen. I heard her cry out nonsense. I felt, in that place, as I never had, burnished with purpose and the cold. I felt myself swell up with the sense that this was all awful, and we were all very much alive.

  How? Above us the night sky spun, as did we, my fingers and toes lost all feeling, and I stamped from one foot to the other, and the sea breathed in and out, older than any living thing, smashing itself into fragments of sense. I sat on the ground – and I could have laughed at how little I was, and how uncertain, except on the matter that I was alive, and Órla, and Tom, here in the dark, as we had been in another dark, warm and gentle with each other. A tenderness could be brought on again, I thought, if I thought very carefully on how to enact it. I don’t know how long we waited there, stuck in our places, filled with that sound of the sea making itself and making the shape of the rocks change. A heartbreaking scale of events. And I pulled up little handfuls of grass, and asked myself what friendship was and what desire was, and had no answers because I was small and stupid, and that was fine, thinking away and watching until there was a break in tensions, a moment when Tom decided he had had enough of confronting death, and sat down, and Órla, quicker to move than me as always, picked her way over and took him by the arm. It’s as simple and mundane as that, in the end – the reason he didn’t kill himself that night, was not even that we were there, nor that we did anything at all. It was him, or timing perhaps. A hesitation, or a clearing. That’s it, that is sometimes enough, and is all that we have.

  Órla McLeod

  Meet

  At the bothy by the cliffs we met again. Daniel and I ran about in the morning after our beautiful Tom, who ran in turn away from us through the whipwind and the dark in all different directions, nearly slipping, clambering over some rocks, nearly lost off the edges. Just like in a dream he was never any closer, or we were never any closer to him. There was too much land out here, and nothing of it. It had no shape in the dark, only little things to trip me. My own clumsy physicality got underfoot. I was tired, my body ached, I was tired of being the hunter, the active one. I was afraid too much so it made me sick and bored and sick again and nothing, nothing, nothing. We suddenly stopped, Daniel holding his arm out.

  ‘What the fuck does Tom want,’ I said, through the panic, thinking, where is he going, and why can’t I catch up to him? We’ve lost him, I thought. I shuddered. Then Daniel picked him out with the light from his phone only a few metres away from us, across a gap. His eyes had a backshine to them. I turned to Daniel: ‘Did you see that?’ I said, ‘humans don’t reflect like that,’ but he must not have heard me.

  We stood at the break and I called out ‘Are you all right?’ and the part of Tom I could see in the light – a sliver of his face, showed a smile: recognition.

  If we approached too close there was a risk he would take flight again, perhaps over one of the cliff edges that lay in every direction. After a time Daniel sat on the ground, while I kept yelling into the weather. Pleasantries, suggestions, as Tom stalked about and turned on himself answering for a while, then apparently talking to himself. I tried to engage with full sentences, until it seemed pointless. Half my words thrown back at me by the wind. Then I just tried, ‘Hey Tom. Hey.’ He turned his back and faced away.

  I listened to only the wind. Tears started going down my cheeks. I wiped my face and then my hand on my clothes. My throat burned. So I stopped calling, so I stood, looking on, as Daniel had. I let my phone drop, its light finding out my shoes and jeans – I have a body, I thought, how strange I am not just a voice in the dark. The sky above us had come down hard, so it really seemed like existence was unlikely at all. I began plucking at a clump of salt-cropped spiky grass by my knees. It’s oddly dull, I thought. And I’m cold now, as well as tired. But the chill at least was keeping the unwilling flesh of me alert.

  Tom was also sitting down. He was only about five metres away, but the sea cut between us, down those cliffs. I thought, who is keeping him over there? And I blinked; it seemed to me that I saw in faint outline the impression of another person sitting down beside him, facing him. It moved oddly, as if parts of it were slipping away as it moved into non-existence.

  As much as I wanted to believe in what I saw I’m no fool. I’d been driving for about eight hours, fractious and on little sleep, and it was so dark that I could barely make out much beyond the light I held up. Tom’s head was low as if he was listening.

  ‘Daniel?’ I said, uncertain. ‘Can you see something there?’

  Daniel didn’t answer. I turned the light at him and all he did was raise a hand against it. He was lying down, looking at nothing, scarf up to his nose and the hood of his jacket pulled up. He was exhausted too. ‘Tom,’ I called, and found myself asking: ‘Who – who’s your friend?’

  ‘It’s James,’ Tom said, ‘James.’

  ‘James, Tom, why are you so far away?’ I said, ‘We’re over here, if you want to come round?’

  ‘I’m waiting – he wants – ’ Tom said, almost inaudible.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘I don’t like this,’ he said, his voice with a crack in it.

  ‘I’m coming over,’ I told him. ‘Wait for me. Just so I can hear you better, all right?’

  Daniel and I looked at each other a moment and he nodded.

  I hesitated. I was stuck between the sharpness of my thinking and the tactile mutability of what was going on. We should call someone; but who was there to call in all this world, who could help any of us? I thought, wiping my cold hand on my face again: I have no future. The terrible thoughts rushed over me. There’s no one beside him. He’s talking to no one. How awful – awful to go so mad. My cheeks burn from the wind and Tom’s gone mad. So he has no future, no stability, even if we get him back. Anyway there is no future. It was like a flood of sadness, then. For all my careful study, I thought, all my enthusiasm for my subject, I’ll die in poverty on this fucking coffin archipelago, there will never be a job in codicology waiting like a prize for someone like me. There will never be a secure old age from which I might tell stories of this time. In spite of this I was getting up, pushing myself, heavy in body and heart, sore arms and legs and frozen fingers – and so it was, otherwise how would I have written this? If we’d all just stayed. Or tipped one after another off the ledge for a lack of other options on how to live.

  I went skirting round the gap, holding out my arms for balance. There was nothing below, no water visible, only the sound of it crashing and withdrawing and crashing. I got down next to Tom, and felt primeval there, hunched against the rages off the sea, like any ageless nameless number of people might have held down aga
inst the weather, waiting for the sea to give them an answer to some terrible equation.

  ‘Are you going to come inside with us or what?’ I asked. He twitched his hand, turned away still, and muttering, murmuring, though for the wind I could not make out one word. On the other side of him I glanced for the thing I had seen. And I sickened. There was something; a shape that moved when he did, that felt almost like a shadow he was casting, but on the dark air where it could not possibly be. But then again, now I write this, it could have been my eyes attempting to understand the gloom. We find patterns always where there are none. We make them, because we need there not to be nothing. I resolved to ignore the shape. If there was something, it wasn’t mine. I took out the blank piece of paper and put it in Tom’s hands. And he looked at it, and held it close. I talked softly to Tom, having him like a child to me, like a lost child who belongs to someone who is not there. It occurred to me I knew nothing about his childhood, not one thing.

  ‘You’re tired,’ I said, ‘come on up now, let’s go in.’ He looked at me and smiled. You can imagine in what way. Emboldened or desperate I took him by the wrist and stood up. That was enough. The wind shook out my hair and this man looked up at me. At some point as I was half-dragging him back he must have let the piece of paper go as I did not see it again.

  I held Tom’s wrist all the way back across the heath, never turning my head, trusting Daniel to follow. That journey, a few minutes only, was one of the longest of my life. I understood hardly any of the sounds I heard. I hesitate to write even approximations of them. But I had my Eurydice, my Tam Lin, my child, my burden, and I did not let him go, and I looked nowhere but the way to the light. Inside the bothy we would listen to the wind rage itself hoarse, until morning came.