Cold Boy's Wood

by Carol Birch

  The boy of Ercol woods hasn’t walked in years and no one remembers him now.

  Still he sings, along with his fellows:

  Wae’s me, wae’s me,

  the acorn’s not yet fallen from the tree,

  that’s to grow the wood

  that’s to make the cradle

  that’s to rock the bairn

  that’s to grow to the man

  that’s to lay me!

  Fourteen, so a couple of years before everything went crazy, before horrible Phoebe Twist and poor thick Terry and all that stuff. Lily was a lovely kid. She thought she was fat. I used to point out pictures of Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell and say, they’d be thought fat these days you know, just goes to show how ridiculous it all is, but of course she never believed me. She, in jeans and a butterfly-patterned top, picking little pink flowers among the ruins; then she got nettle-stung and started whining, sat down on a stump to poke at a blister that was coming up nicely on the back of her heel.

  There’s a bright moon rising tonight. I walk all the way up past the Long Wights till I’m rambling in small boggy fields not much used, and there’s a wide rusted-up farm gate hanging askew at the end of an overgrown track. If you stand still, you can hear the water running off these high fields through the maws of storm drains that hide under hedges. Through that broken-down gate, across the field, if I look to the left I can follow with my eyes the dim up-and-down line of the hedge against the sky and I think I know the exact spot where one old drain I used to walk by in the old days gapes like a mouth widened in a grimace. I walked up here with my little brother once and he shouted down it. ‘Something’s crawling up!’ I said, and we ran away giggling.

  If someone saw me here now they’d probably think I was a ghost. Standing like this, so still in the muddy entrance to the field. In a way I do feel like a ghost, haunting this place where so much happened.

  It was early morning by the time I’d come down and drifted along through the wood till I found myself again at that place where the track comes out by a cottage with a small garden and a corrugated roof. Typical holiday cottage. Bigger than the one I stayed in with my mum and dad and my little brother. It had been full of dopey little signs and wooden plaques on the wall. A Dream Is A Wish Your Heart Makes. Don’t Fear The Storm, Learn To Dance In The Rain. The one in the toilet said Flush Your Cares Away. Anyway, it’s not a holiday cottage any more. The garden’s too much of a mess for that, full of tortured bicycles and scooters, a sand pit, a trampoline. They’ve had the roof done and put in white uPVC windows upstairs. Doesn’t look anywhere near as nice as it used to.

  The people are still in bed. I don’t go into the garden and up to the windows to peep inside. I stay near the trees. We came out of the wood and there they all were in the garden, Johnny talking political philosophy with Maurice Albin, Harriet, missing her two front teeth, running towards us with her worried forehead and a tortoise in her hands, held up as if an offering to the gods.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Lily, ‘what’s he doing here? This is our holiday.’

  There’s the old bench still. She’s sitting on the back of it licking her pink ice cream.

  ‘Look!’ croaked Harriet. She always croaked.

  Eternity in a second. The day of the tortoise and the bees. I see them. Oh God, the pair of them, Maurice in a denim jacket, wholesome and clean, Johnny a limp blue t-shirt, a handsome satyr with brown corkscrew curls hanging into his dark eyes. The noble warrior, the beautiful rebel, sun on his brow, deep in some high-level intellectual conversation in that garden. It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul. Johnny was a Knight of the Round Table. He loved humanity, justice, the downpressed, gave his time to the poor and needy, fed soup to the cardboard box people, the huddlers in doorways.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I said to Maurice. ‘Were you pining?’

  Couldn’t keep away. The two of them were so bloody boring. Yak yak yak all the time. The low wall, the small round table with garden chairs, the ropey deckchair. Johnny said he’d told me and I’d forgotten. Maurice had come down from Blackpool and was picking Johnny up, the two of them were off to London on some urgent Hatchet business. Should only be a couple of days though, Johnny said. Hatchet (Small Axe originally, after the Bob Marley song, but the name was already taken) was the small bookshop and press in Shepherd’s Bush run by Maurice (logo: a tree, an axe) and it was always demanding last-minute, drop-everything attention. They had a high-brow bi-monthly journal (reviews, agitprop) that did OK in students’ unions, alternative bookshops and little co-ops, but really the whole thing was only ever hanging on by its fingernails. Johnny never had anything that lasted till he met me, not even a father or mother; he’d dropped out and in and out and in and read everything he could get his hands on, sang and played his guitar for money not beer, did this and that of nothing much and really couldn’t stand any of it. He’d left jobs in the middle of afternoons, of shifts, of tea breaks and sentences, just walked out. ‘I thought I was going to burst,’ he’d say. And he never kept a job till he went to Hatchet and met Maurice and found his place in life, and the job that became more than a job. First he was just sorting out and shelving books: The Squatters’ Handbook, Marx, Mao, A Critique of Pure Tolerance, Marighella. Soon, though, he was up and about early with the others, dedicated, out restoring the plumbing in smashed-up two-years-empty council flats.

  I was glad he was going because I was sick to death of Lily and him always going at it hammer and tongs, driving me mad. Things were souring with me and Johnny by now. Lily grabbed the tortoise off Harriet and kissed the top of its head. ‘I wouldn’t kiss it,’ I said. I thought she might catch something from it. Its mouth was a placid drooping slit, its legs scrambled against open air. Maurice had rescued it from a house in Blackpool, some people he’d been seeing, sweet but dim beings, he said, think they’re being radical by living in shit, and I don’t mean that metaphorically. Some clown going on about the Lords of Misrule. This child, I kid you not, walking around like some kind of deformed beast with a horrible growth, this nappy that looked as if it carried a ton of bricks like a builder’s load, and the fragrance – and this poor thing underfoot with all the other mini-beasts, you name it, getting kicked around, tripping up over, just a toe-stubber really, pets, can’t see the attraction. So I thought of your little one here.

  That was nice. Maurice had no one else to give it to, no wife, no kids, no ties. He used to boast that he could vanish, just like that, and it was rumoured that his name was just one alias among many. Never believed it, myself. He’d brought ice cream too, a big tub of strawberry, there we are, all of us eating our pink ice cream out of plastic bowls, Lily perched on the wooden bench, long brown toes curled round the edge. Harriet, pushing her way backwards onto Johnny’s lap with her spoon dripping onto his jeans. Maurice supine in the deckchair, one arm behind his head of close-cropped colourless hair, holding forth vertically in his sing-song Cockney voice about Americanisation and advertising and media collusion, how there was nothing to choose between the two main parties now, Tory and Tory. We told them about the ruins and Maurice said he wouldn’t mind seeing the Long Wights some day. Johnny and Lily had a big row, stupid and pointless as ever, just before he left. She threw his books on the floor. The Society of the Spectacle, its pages bent. Adorno, Deleuze. Weird afternoon: it can’t have happened this way but it’s how I remember it. I was standing near the back door. Johnny set down the spoon, bent down and tickled the back of the tortoise’s neck and its head started to rise. He chuckled. ‘Look at this!’ he said. It was standing perfectly still, its claws splayed out on the grass. The more he tickled, the higher the head rose and the longer grew the neck, longer and thinner, up and up, one inch, two, three, still going up. The creature’s face was outraged. Still Johnny chuckled and tickled. Longer and thinner, longer and thinner, and the face hideous, agonised.

  It made me feel sick.

  ‘Stop! Stop!’ I said. ‘It’s horrible! Stop it!’

>   But it went on rising till it was level with the lower edge of the table top. Then – and I remember this in slow motion – its mouth opened very wide but no sound came out.

  Johnny stopped tickling. Slowly the head went down.

  ‘Yes,’ said Maurice, ‘amazing creatures, aren’t they?’ His blue eyes, guarded and steady, looking out on the world with vague distaste, crooked-teeth smile. His teeth were disgusting. You could always see the whitish-yellow crud building up between them. It toddled away towards the hedge, slowly, pointlessly, pushing its way through the grass, the pink-tipped daisies and the clover.

  ‘Are you all right, Mum?’ asked Lily. ‘You look funny.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said. I felt hot and had to sit down.

  And then the bees came; Maurice yelling, ‘Woah! Woah! Fuck me!’ and ran in shouting, ‘Close the windows! Quick! Close everything! A big swarm of bees!’ And we ran about wildly, closing windows and doors, and stood in the kitchen and watched as the swarm came down, magnificent, coming down over what remained of our strawberry ice cream and our coffee, and over the tortoise still crawling somewhere in the overgrown lawn. I never saw a tornado or a waterspout but I’m sure the swarm had something of that quality. It was wild and dark and deafening and overcame the walls and fixtures of the small garden.

  ‘Toby!’ screamed Harriet.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said, ‘he’ll go in under his shell.’

  A thick black cloud whirling madly on the other side of the glass.

  ‘Can they get in?’ Lily, soft-voiced, materialising at my shoulder.

  ‘No!’

  But none of us were sure.

  Johnny stood behind me with his arms round me. You could cuddle for England, I used to say. You should be one of those people that charges money for hugs. We’d be rich. When the swarm cloud lifted and whirled away, the farm where we went for our eggs and milk was once more visible, its red roof above the hedges where bats would soon be flitting, and the tortoise was gone. It was as if the bees had carried it away with them, though none of us could recall seeing it go. Toby the tortoise was never seen again. We looked everywhere for him. Lily and Harriet cried. I had a little cry too. It had been such a nice day, and then it hadn’t.

  After a while we gave up and came back in, and Lily flung herself down on the sofa and turned on the TV, and sat there with swollen eyes. A crier from the day she was born. Anger, joy, sadness, whatever, she cried. She produced a bar of chocolate from somewhere and took a big bite.

  ‘You’ll get fat,’ Maurice said. Johnny picked up her red-yellow-I-am-crap-screaming shiny magazine from the ugly retro coffee table and showed it to Maurice. ‘The girl that taste forgot,’ he said.

  ‘Fuck off,’ she said, baring her big teeth.

  I saw them off.

  ‘The Wights,’ I said. ‘They’re worth seeing.’

  After they’d gone I smoked a joint all to myself as the bats began to swoop and the girls went searching for poor Toby once more, calling his name as if he’d recognise it and think: Oh! Must go home! But soon the dark came down for real and the search had to be abandoned.

  I was awake most of the night worrying about that poor tortoise. Those things are supposed to be slow, but he must have shifted. I fell asleep and had a dream that the tree tops outside were moving in a strange slow deliberate way that made me scared, and when I woke up I lay staring at the dark and listening to the small stream that ran by the side of the house, on across the field and off under the road to dissipate who knows where.

  *

  Fuckers are in my head, arguing –

  You’re nothing if not consistent, love.

  She hated the way he called her love in just that tone.

  And you, in her best bored voice, are such a patronising shit.

  I’d never have said a thing like that to my dad in a million years. He’d have walloped the shit out of me.

  … these magazines she gets, seven million adverts to every fatuous article.

  So?

  I’m not being horrible, Lily, I would just love to see you read something decent, for your own sake, not mine.

  Maurice butting his big nose in: What are you reading, Lily?

  None of your business. I’m not reading all that boring crap if that’s what you mean.

  Pet Sematary, Johnny says.

  What’s wrong with that?

  Read what you want. I’m only trying to help you.

  Fuck off.

  And Maurice, who’d read everything of literary, philosophical and intellectual importance and probably nothing at all of pulp or anything approaching it, just sniggered.

  ‘I’m going to make soup,’ I said. ‘You come and help me.’

  So fucking up themselves! Peeling carrots.

  And then one day while I was rambling around down here in the woods (after the bees this would have been) I turned into a mole and tunnelled. I was just thinking, what if you just go deeper and deeper in, under the bushes, under where the swathes of ivy and curtains of moss fall, if you cross the forest in its least accessible places, burrowing – as a mountaineer fathoms height or a spelunker depth. And I just went off the path to a track, off the track to a smaller one and then one smaller still; till I was off into the deepest parts of the wood where no one else goes. I lay down and tunnelled, and I was fourteen again, standing in the rain in the woods that first time. Exactly the same. Deeper and deeper I moved into the beautiful depths, darker and more pure, and the depths said, well, my little dear, come in and play with us. We’re all here and we know all about you. I sat in the green darkness and thought, I can always come here. It stayed with me like a comfort blanket.

  4

  On the way home Dan detoured into the village to get a paper. Madeleine was in Ollerenshaw’s, and by the time he saw her she’d noticed him and it was too late to get out.

  ‘Hello, Dan.’ She smiled fondly.

  ‘Hi.’

  Must have been about five years, he thought. She wore a green floaty thing and a pink cardigan and her chest was freckled. She’d caught the sun. The lines on her forehead were deep and amiable, and her hair, long and loose round her shoulders, was no longer red but light brown and fuzzy at the ends. Human Remains Found In Mudslide Chaos, said the headline on the front of the Examiner. Outside, a truck started reversing. ‘Danger!’ it said in a loud irritating voice, then a load of jumbly stuff meaning get out of the way. Something had gone wrong with the sound system so it sounded like Donald Duck.

  ‘And how are you?’

  Years of running around sorting out other people’s problems had given her the capable, approachable air of a popular teacher. When she bundled up against him to let someone get to the door, a mutual shrinking of the flesh occurred.

  ‘Fine,’ he said, turning away to read the paper. Male, cause of death unknown. Identity unknown.

  ‘Now that is really quite creepy,’ she said, putting a packet of cherry flapjacks and a carton of eggs down on the counter. He should ask how she was but the words didn’t make it as far as his mouth.

  ‘It’ll be some idiot potholer,’ said the small grey man behind the counter.

  ‘Could well be,’ said the woman in the purple coat.

  ‘I was over seeing someone at Hothemby,’ said Madeleine, getting her purse out of a shoulder bag with a bright tropical forest pattern. ‘And I saw all these cars.’ Her face was large and sensible and big-nosed with high wide rosy cheekbones and a Slavic cast. The creases at the outer corners of her eyes were symmetrical and intricate like tiger markings. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘the word on the street says it’s foul play.’

  The word on the street. Something about that really irritated him, as if she thinks she’s a fucking Brooklyn gumshoe or something.

  ‘Danger!’ quacked the truck.

  ‘God knows how they know these things.’ Madeleine paid for her stuff. ‘I mean, there can’t be much left.’

  He wished she’d go, but she hung about while he
bought his paper and then walked out with him. ‘It’s a terrible thing to say,’ she said as they walked towards the green, ‘but there’s a kind of horrible excitement about it. This body. You know, like something’s actually happening round here for once.’