Cold Boy's Wood

by Carol Birch

  It was cold for April. He walked along the lane, skirting the lower edge of the woods and cutting across the fields, thinking about the body, someone lying dead and unknown near here all those years. Man or woman? Did he say? Poor sod anyway, laying in the ground all alone and no one knowing you’re there. Except for the murderer, of course, if it was a murder. Poor sod.

  Ravens. The wet nose of the pregnant doe. A body returned to light. Things falling in sequence. All these things seemed significant.

  It wasn’t as bad as Pete said. The mess was mostly down at the far end, low by the trees; the really old stuff where time had rubbed out all the names and all the dates, all the things recorded in memory of; smoothed down into ripples on stone.

  Three men in yellow coats were cleaning up with shovels. A lorry was backed in at the gate.

  His mum’s grave was well out of the danger zone. Yes, there she was, poor old Mum. Audrey Jane Broom, safe and sound. OK for now, not too much overgrown, but the jam jar was empty and he’d forgotten to bring flowers. Should have picked her some bluebells on the way. Oh well. Next time. And there was his gran, Ocella Mary Morse. He remembered her well, lying on her old green chaise longue when he took her a cup of tea in her upstairs room that smelt faintly of pee. The two of them, his mum and his gran, going like hell at one another, Grandma’s tone lower and scarier, his mum’s shrieky. And he under the bedclothes with his ear to the radio listening to the music.

  He left the graveyard and climbed to the top of the Edge, walked a little way and sat down on a hillock looking towards the woods. There was activity on the road below, figures moving about, cars. Towards the heights, the Long Wights hid behind an outcrop of rock. The land up there, beyond the old stones, was potholed and full of shafts from the long-disused mines.

  Not too long ago they were open. Maybe someone fell in.

  He’d gone to school in Ercol. His mum made him walk over there because she said it was a better school than the one in Andwiston.

  And don’t you ever, ever, ever go anywhere near those shafts, never ever ever.

  So of course he hung around them all the time like all the other kids. Peering into them. Utter blackness. That swift shudder, and the recoil. Now they were all fenced off for health and safety.

  The climb had set his back off. The sun shone silky through a milky sky. He lit up. Smoke on the air, into the fog. The wood’s edge was fuzzy. Or was it his eyes? His sight was getting pretty fucked these days. He remembered him and Eric Munsy and a big daft boy called Frankie, daring each other to jump across the smaller shafts, idiots, going to the edge of the big one, lying down. Your head hanging over, someone holding your feet. Then running down through the woods to play in the ruins.

  When we were thirteen.

  ‘See, what I think,’ said Frankie, ‘is it’s like we’re all just ghosts. Only we don’t know it.’

  Frankie’s theory was that we’re all actually dead. All this is the afterlife, only we can’t tell. Dan imagined all the dead people crawling about in the earth like worms. ‘That’s shite,’ he said, because he thought it sounded tough.

  They ran whooping through the trees, and he went home past the field with the horses, Little Sid and Lady and the big bay called Pepper. He stood for a while with his arms hooked over the gate. His mother wouldn’t let him ride. She wouldn’t let him do anything. Every time he stepped out of the door she foresaw terrible disasters, cars smashing into him, cows trampling him, slates flying off roofs in breezy weather and decapitating him. There she’d be at the gate when he got home, peering mournfully down the lane with her long white face.

  The fog was clearing, just a little. He went down, walking heavily, keeping his back consciously straight against the niggling pain. Along the edge of the wood he imagined how he’d look to someone on the far side of the field: like a ghost coming out of the fog, emerging like a developing photograph.

  3

  The forest is ancient, beech and ash and oak. There are wild strawberries, and tiny purple-pink flowers found shining at the side of the track like stars in the crisp dark green. People don’t come in this far, only the deer, the creatures, and the strangeness comes and goes, like weather. I write by the light of my Tilley lamp at night. In the daytime, the constant shimmering leaf light is enough. I’m drawn, of necessity, to the theory that half-light’s good for the eyes. I’ve stocked up on reading glasses from the Pound Shop. I have a den against a rock face, a perch on the side of the hill looking out on the glade. I’ve loved these old woods ever since that first time, when I saw the cold boy. They’ve kept bringing me back. I’ve loved them in memory, seen from afar, dancing merrily over three hills, and I’ve loved the rocky ups and downs of them, the silence in the centre, and the birds’ far-away murmur, full and soft. When I am an old woman I shall wear purple, says the poem, but purple’s not my colour so I came to the woods instead. First there was childhood, then here then Carmody Square then here then Childhallows then Crawley then here. Always back to here.

  I had a job for the past few years, but it came to an end. I was working in a place that closed down. It was called Childhallows Farm, but it wasn’t really a farm, it was in the middle of town and attached to a big building that had once been a school but was now what they called a Welcome Centre, because it was for inadequate people like me.

  An odd little family we made. When it was gone, I saw them about: Henry whose head was too full, Jane who loved dogs, Hilary who looked like the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland and scared people in the street by roaring Hallelujah.

  When Childhallows closed they gave me a place in Crawley. That was weird, I mean really weird. My room smelt like the elephant house at the zoo, circa 1956. One morning there I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth, face in the mirror, then suddenly the horror, the horror. Those deep hollowed bird’s eyes, bare and strange, looking back at me, but it wasn’t me, I had eczema round my eyes, the horror, the horror.

  It’s a damn thing to be old and not know what any of it was for.

  One night I nearly smoked my contact lens and put my dope to soak in saline for the night. And in the mirror there was me – behold the crone, the ancient of days. I was pretty once. A man stopped in the street and looked at me and sighed as if I was a sunset. But it happened, that thing that was always so far away, the place you were never going to get to. Others aged, your father and mother, their faces changed and then they died. You were never going to change. Then you did. Your face looked back at you from mirrors and dark windows, different, and you saw that only Death awaited, sweet and savage. And I got that deep humming noise in my head, the way it came before. Here we go again, just like before. I knew it was coming. I sluiced out my mouth, rinsed my face, went into the kitchen, poured out last night’s heated-up coffee and stood at the window. I looked at my fingers wrapped round the nice warm mug and they were peculiar to me. Then I looked out of the window and I was dizzy and there were people walking up and down, and they were remarkable. Truly do they not know fear? These people walking about and talking on buses and sitting in pubs as if nothing’s wrong. I have fear. It never goes away. It underlies my existence. Things block it out. I’ve taken meds. They slow me down. Fog the mind. Dry mouth. Dizzy. Speed I gave up. Dope I like, and booze. Just those really. Without them life’s just so dull, so boring. Oh, and anti-depressants; I had to take those because if I didn’t I lay in a coma forever. It’s a matter of survival.

  There was a knock on the door, and I froze.

  Who? My head ran through the possibilities. Oh I don’t know. Quickly – pull yourself together.

  I opened the door and it was this woman called Sue who lives downstairs.

  ‘Hi, Lorna,’ she said. She has a nice face, her eyes are soft and kind. She’s round and red and so eager to be good.

  ‘Hello.’

  Click. I’m on. Pretend to be OK.

  ‘I’ve brought you the paper,’ she said. ‘I’ve finished with it.’ She has a high little-girl voice. />
  ‘Oh, that’s great. Thanks.’

  Monday morning, of course. Yesterday’s Sunday Mirror with all its bits.

  ‘You know that funny woman,’ Sue said, timid and earnest, ‘that walks up and down with a cat in her pocket?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Have you seen her about recently?’

  I thought. Poor old mad thing. Poor old cat.

  ‘Er – I’m not sure. I haven’t really been looking out for her.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m just feeling a bit worried. I haven’t seen her in a while.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Well. Do you think something’s wrong?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She looked away, folding her arms in her big fluffy jumper. Her skirt was long and huge. ‘I don’t want to seem nosy,’ she said, looking back at me with small dark eyes full of hurt, as if at some stage, someone had badly upset her feelings, ‘but you know, you never know…’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Where does she live?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. But she’s usually on the benches near Sainsbury’s. I think I should take a walk down there.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘That’s probably a good idea. She is a bit – I don’t know.’

  ‘She is, isn’t she?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  There was an awkward silence. I didn’t want to get involved in any way.

  ‘It’s just that she goes right past my window,’ she said, ‘just about every day. Two or three times usually. And that little cat’s face peeping out of her pocket, poor little thing.’

  ‘I know.’ The little cat’s face came accusingly into my head. ‘Have you ever tried to talk to her?’

  ‘I used to,’ she said. ‘There’s not much point really, is there?’

  ‘No,’ I said, pushing the cat away, ‘not really.’

  ‘Oh well.’ She smiled and set her shoulders. ‘I’ll take a dander down there. I’ve got to get some bits and bobs anyway.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Let me know, will you?’

  ‘I will, yes.’

  ‘It’s probably nothing,’ I said and closed the door.

  ‘Oh, I’m sure!’

  When she’d gone, I sat down on the blue wicker chair. The room was not yet mine. It had nothing much of me, and I thought, I have become like those boys when I was young, those boys with their sad little pads they couldn’t make nice. You’d go round and they’d try and get you to stay and sleep with them. The humming was loud in both my ears. I looked at the newspaper. There was a picture of a gorgeous little boy crying his heart out. The headline said: Thousands flee fighting. But it was blurry and I had to keep blinking, and my heart started: Boom! Boom! Boom!

  Breathe, dear. Go on.

  The coffee wouldn’t go down, it just wouldn’t. I couldn’t make it to the bathroom so I pushed up the window and spat it out onto the sill. It left a foul taste in my mouth. I thought I might be sick so I left the window open and lay down on the floor, and stayed there till the sick feeling passed and my heart slowed. I had no idea how long I’d lain on the floor. The little boy was still crying and I cried along with him. I thought how useless I was, when all I did was lie here on the floor; and how even poor Sue who many a time had got on my nerves, her with her mimsy little voice and do-goodish verve, was better than me because she actually helped people, while I didn’t even notice they needed it. Then I thought about Johnny and how affronted he was by life. Couldn’t watch a sad film without tearing up, couldn’t cope with the daily horrors, the murdered babes and cruelly dispossessed, the staring starving toddlers, the suffering, like Prince Siddhartha, only Johnny didn’t become the Buddha, he became a morass, a porridge of love and fury. I’ve seen him smash his fist through a wall after watching the news.

  My chest ached. The world’s cruel. Not a thing you can do to make things not have happened. I got up and looked out of the window. There was a carpet shop across the road, a taxi place, a sad Christian bookshop and a BetFred, and a little further along, a triple-layered concrete car park where pale youths drove cars too fast round and round and round in the evening. I didn’t want to grow older looking at that. I closed the window.

  That’s why I came here: tent, sleeping bag, Tilley lamp, camping stove, stewpot, frying pan. Knives. Spoons, forks. A bowl. Plates, of course. Mug. Long life milk. Soap – toothpaste, matches… I’ve always lived by lists. The practicalities. Who cares? It can be done. And as nothing matters, why should I worry? I was never any good at living with people anyway. There was a quiet babble in my head and I didn’t know what to do with it. If I go to the woods I’ll be better able to pay it attention, I thought, I’ll go there, I’ll find out. I got a bus. It took three or four trips with my stuff, and after the last I threw my mobile over the bridge into the little stream that runs through Andwiston. I was alive again, on an adventure one more time. Hallelujah! I got out of it. I’d never really thought about what I’d do with my time. Just live and listen from day to day and think about things, something like that. Of course it would be strange in the depths, but it seemed very necessary for me to do this, and it was so much better to be homeless in the country than in the town. Much more dangerous in town. Here, all you’ve got to worry about is being scared of the dark, and that’s just the same as being scared of yourself. If I stayed in town, I’d end up like old Norm and those people under the bridge, and that old woman who scared me shouting in the street near the tube station once when I was walking home very late. Johnny came back one night with old Norm, in the early days before Carmody Square and Harriet: this is Norm, he’s staying the night, it’s freezing out there. Looked a hundred years old and smelt like a hundred jars of pickles. Oh! Hello. Swaying about with his red eyes and red face, saying nothing. Well. What do you do? We only had one room. Me and him and Lily and a sink and draining board, the cooker behind a partition. Lily woke up and was scowling out at us from her bed in the corner. I made a cup of tea and Norm nodded off on our sofa. It was hard sleeping with him in the room. He snored and grumbled in his sleep and his smell pervaded the air. In the morning his bare knobbly feet, all brown and dried up, hung over the end of the sofa. Me and Lily went over to Talgarth Road and stayed at Wilf’s for a couple of days. ‘Dad!’ she said, running in. ‘There’s an old man moved into our house!’ We had a good laugh about it, me and Wilf and Jananda. When I first met Wilf I thought he said his name was Wolf and I thought, Wow, what a cool name. But it wasn’t, it was Wilf. I mean. Wilfred. What were they thinking of? The only Wilfreds I could think of were Wilfred Pickles, Wilfred Owen and Wilfred Hyde-White. That was it. Wilfred never made a comeback like some of those other old names. It was never cool. That night we put her to bed with the cousins and Jananda’s Jeannie, so it was a huge treat for her. They didn’t quieten down till after eleven. When we got back Norm was still there and he’d been joined by a couple of his mates. Johnny was making chips. It took him three more days to get them out.

  He was like that in those days. Soft.

  There’s this nice old bloke lives on the edge of the wood. Well, he’s not nice really, in fact he’s a bit scary, but he plays good music.

  Trouble in mind, oh, I’m blue, oh but I won’t be blue always.

  Those old days, in the Music Exchange, sifting through albums. I’d been for coffee with Fiona. The shine on the cover of Blonde on Blonde, the music playing. This man, immediately striking and attractive, there on the other side of the sloping boxes of records. Your eyes skim off each other’s glance. I didn’t look at him so much, he was just a huge presence, very dark, eyes, hair, eyebrows, the rough hair around his sweet mouth. He followed me outside. Asked me where I was going. Said, ‘Want to come for a coffee with me?’ He was well spoken.

  ‘OK,’ I said.

  So we walked down Ladbroke Grove.

  ‘I’m Johnny,’ he said.

  ‘I’m Lorna.’

  A big old coat, a guitar on his back. Said he played at the Cellar Upstairs sometimes and would I like to come? And we went in t
hat old co-op place that used to be there, plain board tables, good coffee and soup, freaks and junkies and ska. I’ve got to go for my little girl, I said, and he came with me. She came running out from school, her first year and she loved it, her smile, two big front teeth, the gap between. ‘What a lovely little girl,’ he said.

  God, wasn’t he lovely then though! I’d watch him sleep and refuse to believe that the soul that made that face could be anything but beautiful.

  *

  I’ve nicked a few cabbage leaves from his garden, just the outer ones. I sing, to the tune of ‘Autumn Leaves’ and a silent Miles Davis accompaniment:

  The outer leaves are in my stew pot

  The outer leaves that I have stole

  The words are a kind of blur until: But I miss you most of all, my darling, when the outer leaves start to boil.

  Nothing fits, nothing rhymes.

  I’ve forgotten things. Quite a lot, I’d say. It’s raining. It’s so cosy in here. I don’t know why I didn’t do this years ago. The rain runs down the rock face at my back, but it’s OK because I put a big tarpaulin between the tent and the rock, and there’s another overhead, and I have branches all over the top of that. I love the sound of heavy rain on woodland, a roaring. Silver. Kind. I fish out the big strong cabbage leaves, fill them up with rice and herbs and wild garlic from my pot. Then I eat them. After a while, I get up in a dreamy state and walk through the wood. The rain’s stopped. I live close to the ruins. I’m so hidden, there’s no chance that anyone visiting the ruins (that’s if they’re lucky enough to find them) would ever get to me. But no one ever comes, and so it should be. Me and the ruins, we go back a long way. There used to be a path and a clearing but they’re long gone, and there’s not much left now but three blackened walls higher than your head, and some old lichened grave stumps. The ruins straggle on, stumps and bumps and hidden things to scrape your shin on. Me and Lily came looking for them when we stayed in that cottage by the bridge where the water runs under the road and you hear it all night. The ruin was hard to find, all buried away under ivy, and we’d searched twice before and not found it, then suddenly, when we weren’t really thinking about it any more, there it was, walls, things to fall over, stumps. My God, she said, this is like the setting for a horror film. Now how’m I s’posed to sleep tonight? I was telling her the old story, about the stable boy murdered by his master, and about the boy I’d seen in Gallinger’s field all those years before. I used to sit up on the hillside looking over the fields but I never saw him. Poor boy, I’d think, still shivering and hurt after all these strange centuries, whoever he is, whatever he’s done. And she said, Bloody hell, Mum, don’t creep me out. She was fourteen, the same age I was when I read the story in the book I stole from the holiday cottage. A murder hiding here and there in folk tales, cross-bred with elf and boggart and fairy lore, a branched story. Poor boy courts the baron’s daughter. Or sleeps in too long, or skimps on his work, pulls one mocking face too many. The cruel baron beats him, puts him out naked in deepest winter. Cuts off his head, strikes a fell blow, feeds him poison, stabs him with a pitchfork. Tosses him from a high high crag, hurls him in a reedy pond or a midnight tarn, or down down down in a deep dark well full fifty fathoms deep.