Bitterhall Read online

  Bitterhall

  Helen McClory is the author of two story collections: On the Edges of Vision (Queen’s Ferry Press), a winner of the Saltire First Book of the Year award, and Mayhem & Death (404 Ink), as well as a novel, Flesh of the Peach (Freight, 2017). The Goldblum Variations – a collection of experimental micro-fictions – was published by 404 Ink (2018), and Penguin (2019). Her short stories have been listed for distinction in The Best of British Fantasy (2018), The Best of British and Irish Flash Fictions (2018/19), and nominated for the Pushcart prize. Helen is a part-time lecturer at the University of Glasgow and co-founder of writing retreat Write Toscana.

  BITTERHALL

  A Novel

  by

  Helen McClory

  First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Polygon,

  an imprint of Birlinn Ltd

  West Newington House

  10 Newington Road

  Edinburgh

  EH9 1QS

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  www.polygonbooks.co.uk

  Copyright © Helen McClory, 2021

  The moral right of Helen McClory to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  The excerpt on page v is taken from Stigmata (1998) by Hélène Cixous.

  Printed with permission.

  ISBN 978 1 84697 549 3

  eBook ISBN 978 1 78885 375 0

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges investment from Creative Scotland towards the publication of this book.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library.

  Typeset by 3btype.com

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

  And to think that there will be readers of our book. They will open it. And they’ll make fun of the murkiness of our night. Says the author – We, for so many years, see them, trying to find themselves, get lost, a hundred times on the point of finding themselves, seeing themselves, looking at themselves, recognizing themselves; finally tearing away the lovely, thin veil that blurs their vision, the guardian of truth, and thus living for years, on the edge, quivering with desire, that is, fear, that is, desire.

  Hélène Cixous, Stigmata

  Daniel Lightfoot

  Autumn Soft

  I am on the swing in the garden, under the oak bough, late August night, a couple of beers tipped over beside me in the short mossy grass and my heart is a neat bundle of sticks in love with the dead and the unreachable. Up in the house a single light shines; first floor, the bedroom, my bedroom, so it looks like there’s somebody up there. And I, hazy, imagine them looking down on me, and at the same time down on the whole of this city, with some dispassionate warmth, like a God.

  My head lies against the swing chain, the fabric of my scarf at my throat grey in this light, blue indoors, I’d grabbed it on leaving the new housemate and his girlfriend at a strange moment all together in the kitchen. I think how he, Tom, is legendarily good looking. Only later will I see Tom unravel and almost fall, and I will catch him.

  Work is just beginning to launch itself to its full purpose, and I think of the objects I will handle, which I have seen in the catalogue or taken out of packaging and put into the safe, so frail in my careful hands; I think of the monumental paperwork, the email chains to and from absent bosses mostly floors above my soundproofed basement room.

  I feel for the metal chain of the swing and kick off again, a gentle sway, a little more, wind in the face, cold, and the ground makes a good sound when I kick it. I don’t think about the thing I am trying not to think about. Shhhh. I think for a while about this ground, leafy, dirt in footprints, old scuff-mark furrows from swing-riders, and of the tensile strength of the chains, and of the cold of the seat. All I can think, just for a moment, is: Just be calm. Bed soon. Back up to the diary I am reading and I do not yet know of everything wild that waits above us to kick off, with my housemate, his girlfriend and me.

  I want you to love me, if I’m being honest. That’s why I start so gently, in the garden, in the present tense. A good story begins tipsily in a garden, and carries on through well-proportioned rooms in the past tense in which blood is being spilled and was spilled, is measured out already, and the possessors of that blood were embarrassed at its spilling, and hold their hands over the wounds, pretending everything was fine. When exactly is this happening, and to whom is it happening, and who is making it happen? We begin to become tricky, don’t we, when I write in the first person. What tense do my intrusive thoughts manifest in? Somewhere between the first and second, like a harsh note in a piano recital, a piece so often played it should be clean of errors, yet here and here again the wrong note spikes in the same predictable, always jarring way, repeating itself, a bad inorganic refrain.

  Intent is the issue, too. It’s a holiday to take up a different tense, a different perspective. But I’ll let you decide who is who, who is not who, who is real (real enough, then?). For a clue (as much as I’ve got), there is a centre to this whole thing. It’s up to you to mark it.

  Aside – everything is an aside. Except the centre. That is the centre. Find it. Come along and around me. Us. Fill the edges of this thing.

  The Self

  In the garden at night, opening my eyes after closing them over, and keeping the drunkenness and feeling all in, and trying not to let it out I take a swig from one of the beers. It’s flat and stale and tastes of my own mouth. I click tongue against teeth and think good, the taste of it, think of that. A small body flashes on the old stone wall, moonlight white. The new housemate’s cat prowling. I let it go without trying to get it to come to me. That morning it had looked orange saucers at me from the housemate’s – Tom’s – briefly open door as the housemate – Tom – made a cup of tea and yawned good morning at me in his boxers in the kitchen, while I held my robe – Christmas present ten years ago from a long-gone boyfriend – tight around me, not knowing where to look. Knowing exactly where to look, I had thought, that bulge, the trail of hairs blond but still there. And people think I’m a prude. I shake my head. Cat’s going over the old stone wall. A little bell sound. A bell on its collar. Then she’s crouching to leap down the other side, her white tail there a moment and gone. Silent snow, I think. Without the bell she would catch everything and sink her teeth in. But she can’t. So she will go through all the gardens of this part of town causing no harm at all. The cat is called Mrs Boobs, Tom told me.

  ‘Was fucked when I named her,’ he had said, in his English voice – sounding to me like a crisp, low round of applause in a half-empty theatre – as he smiled into his tea, and raised his eyes to mine, ‘and somehow it stuck.’

  ‘It’s pretty memorable,’ I had said, politely, lost in his wide, shimmering blues. It mattered not a bit what he had said, but everything around it: cool, brilliant, probably brutish, seen across some distant ground from my own poor territory, my peripheral beinghood – Midlothian, adenoidal, not, as I am constantly made aware, aesthetically gifted in the face or body. Tom is aesthetically gifted. I could almost hate him, I think, but I know it would merely make me an idiot if I don’t wait to see what he is; all his sticky, tender layers, underneath, outwith and beyond me.

  Tonight is okay; tonight it’s early autumn and a few stars, and no one about, everyone passed out – or busy – in their own beds. You are loved, Daniel, I tell myself, with a s
light, drunken kind of sincerity that is also unstable. You are stable. Neither of these are true things, I know, I know, but it is something I am now saying to myself, a different kind of repetition. From today onwards. Only when I’m not likely to blurt it out and have other people hear, and look at me with confusion and pity. New housemate, new housemate’s new girlfriend – Órla – neither of whom love me, no one has ever wanted to stay with me for long. They know, I think each time a loved one, a friend, a lover, dumps me, they know the kind of terrible person I am.

  ‘You are loved, Daniel,’ I say out loud, but softly. No one, not even the cat, hears me, thank God. I am trying to make it happen, cringing at trying, and though powerless not to try, at least, through the small degrees I am capable of believing it. It’s all been done so many times before. Swing, I think instead, and feel the wind lift my hair. All the stakes, for this moment, are small. My life, my body moving in the dark against all the other darkness, moving, swells of small life, cats creeping over many walls, their teeth unable to clamp down on throats, because a little bell declares their sublimated intentions. I am loved. The world loves all in it. A man long dead is the current target of my affections.

  Pathetic Fallacy

  I found the diary in a friend’s house three days before Tom moved in and I stole it and ran away. It was the handwriting that made me do it; I would say, if asked, I’m a sucker for gorgeous handwriting. That is, not handwriting that is perfect, but which seems to exude a quality of welcome dalliance across the page, an open pleasure in the act of writing down just exactly what you wish and at your own pace, directed at no one and in private. James Lennoxlove of Bitterhall has just this kind of quality in his writing, which is all that is left of him, the man himself being dust. I even liked how our names might look together, that juvenile of me: Lennoxlove and Lightfoot. The great tall L of Lennoxlove with the loop through the top, full of air, finding its twin in my L, if he, Lennoxlove, wrote it out by its side.

  It wasn’t clear how Mark came to be in possession of the diary, an accident of boxes from his mother’s and uncle’s merging households. How I decided to take it is simple impulsiveness. Mark, the kind of rich boy who found me amusing and so, in a moment of spurred viciousness, I stole this diary. Vicious to me, I knew Mark wouldn’t care. Would laugh. Would say, Oh Daniel, in a way that would madden and wind me for days. Because I was all reactions, as I often told myself. Easily wound up. I put the brown-red clothbound book down the front of my trousers and let my bulky jumper and nervous smile conceal it. I gave a hurried excuse about being home for breakfast with my mum.

  But I didn’t go home to mum. I went to the place I live, the eternal non-home of my generation, the rental house where I and my two housemates have our various lives, decently set out so that they do not overlap or hurt one another too much. All strangers, yes, because I have never been able to find anyone who would request to live with me.

  I went up the stairs to the room in the place in which I live and set the stolen diary square on my table and read it from start to one quarter or so through in two sittings (break for tea, taken in a dwam, a cup of tea and some bread, chewed slowly and carefully while eyeing but not reading the diary, so the crumbs didn’t get near). It was easy enough to read it, that flowing handwriting, welcoming me in. It felt like being plunged into a warm bath after a long time standing naked. What a beautiful pink there was in the sky when I came to and the great garden trees blue-black against it, my face mushed and hot where the heels of my hands had been pressed against the temples. I was crying. Relief I thought. Not a whole life, this one being gifted to me, or that I had more rightly stolen, not even that. I wondered if I could ever be loved like Lennoxlove loved the world.

  I decided not to read any more for a little while.

  Fixes

  A good day looked like this – nothing. A good and bad day looked like – I went into work early and down into the basement of the university, stopping in on my boss, Dr Glaister, who understood budgets and all warm palms needing shaken and the requirement too for staff morale and so for her to be at a kindly remove, providing a good email promptly, cakes on staff birthdays, plants in every space that could take a plant. Stopping in to say things were going well – they must always be going well, the personal is professional, and there to the staff room – kitchen, low calm lighting – to deposit my noodle box by the kettle and swipe for coffee and consume this, consume moments of amiability any passing colleagues might have to offer and proffer my own, and after that to disappear into my project; the blessed calm of it in a room padded and soft with no sound but me and my machine, everything smooth if it was to be running that day, and to my small side office, easily answered courteous emails, emerging for lunch and if no one about, then, then, the slip into thinking, gulping down a bottle of water while the kettle steamed up the glass cabinets, and pouring hot water into my desiccated meal, staring in wait at the staff kitchen table at my noodles swelling and pieces of carrot thinking of anything else I could; someone might come in and make small talk and I’d smile easily and make it back. I’d eat and they’d eat, and always the smile, it faltered as their fork approached their lips and I’d keep steadily thinking to myself, talking politely, meanwhile imagining certain images I find soothing, such as picking several daisies, say, or imagining myself on a calm fogbound lake with everything cool and my raft perfectly sanded and smooth, standing in soft clothes. Back to work. Finish work. Walk home, sometimes the pace of my thoughts keeping up with me, over even the blast of classical music in my headphones, until home, and sometimes too much breath too little chest and fragile bones and I might just shake myself apart and so I would go, if it was really bad, up to my room and curl up in a ball hugging a pillow and gasping until I relaxed, slept, woke up a little better or rather more resolved to be better. There were no really bad days then, only my hands got so tired of holding myself up. It was natural. I forgave myself that. And began each day knowing I would survive it, and hoping for normal if at all possible, and never expectant, like a disciple awaiting the descent of the most holy all the days of their life, in some desert cave, getting to know it well, stones are peaceful, the heavy, reassuring grace that any day can be broken down into measurable portions, toil preferable to the works of the devil that swings and slithers up to them at night, whispering their doubt that any such an end will come.

  Men of the House

  It was the day before Tom moved in. My heart throbbed in my wrists as I went downstairs after that first reading session, as I tried to recover my decorum, such as it was. I tapped my fingers on descent. I wasn’t sure yet if I had experienced a change in my life, as happened at times, from one Daniel to another, before-Daniel being somehow brimmed up and spilt over by Lennoxlove’s writing to be mingled with it, to become something else – I hoped not more tender, Christ, possibly not more tender than I was already, I might actually die from that, or disappear up my own fundament to nevermore emerge.

  The kitchen empty as it usually was around that time and pleasantly dirty in its pre-Badr state. Badr came in from work around seven. Minto was about, surely, in his room, sometimes his little white face and beard and twittering eyes as he slipped out to his toilet. Owner of the house Minto, the recluse, the hermit. One time only I was in there and saw the faded armchair, striped wallpaper-like pyjamas, damp spot and the bed. And. All. Those. Books. Minto fumbling but charismatic too, a deposed king of somewhere whose borders were now shrunk to this. The smell of the place, not awful but certainly lodged in the back of my head, so that when the door opened, as it infrequently did, I remembered the foost of it rather before I smelled it. One time only I’d been in there was the day I’d moved in, and handing Minto – tremulous red hands stuffy with arthritis – an antique cheque; after that, envelopes in the postal nook at the hallway. One waved hand, kindly enough to bid me leave his presence.

  Badr, the final and most normal flatmate: friendliest man ever, made good dishes that filled the kitchen with
rolling saffron waves of scent. Insisted on mostly eating these meals on the sofa – blackbeetle-coloured, pvc – and playing videos of this singing contest show from Russia he was obsessed with. Cat-singing, huge roof of mouth singing, that was what he liked to accompany eating. Badr was careful and obnoxiously, to my tastes, clean, liked spritzes of bleach after every use of the sink or shower. I had yet to learn much about him beyond these facts in the nine months we had been living together.

  I had heard from a colleague in archives that Dr Minto was more than a widower, cast out from the university under a cloud – of rumour, but more, of toothy suspicion – but I, not wishing to know, had waved my hand, kindly enough, and got on with the prep for the intricate digital transfer process for which I had been employed. Half a year ago? More.

  The Annunciation

  Badr wasn’t home quite, no bleach or high cheer, so I made myself tomato soup from a can with a twist – the twist being lemon rind, grated a little, and a splash of vodka, and yes I hated myself even for the idea of this being a twist or any kind of innovation, but it really was quite tasty. I checked my emails as I sat listening to the microwave. Nothing important. The door rattled, and Badr was now coming through.

  ‘Are you there, Danny boy?’

  ‘Yes, Badr,’ I said, smiling. Badr came in the room like a jolly sun in a cartoon with his shopping and rolled about putting things correctly away. I took the soup out of the microwave and sat back down, braced for a moment. I felt like screaming oh for fucks sake in the middle of the room, which was a kind of posturing idea, since I could quite well manage screaming anguished obscenities from my seat while I ate the soup. And I’d have to live with Badr after that.