Cold Boy's Wood

by Carol Birch

  Where did things go? He went looking for the book and ended up going through the boxes in the back room with a kind of horrible fascination at the weird remains. Why were they there? Who wanted these old birthday cards? No! Throw them! Didn’t know that was still there. Leeches, hanging on. You can’t pull them off and when you do and you’ve hurled them overboard, you remember them two days later and think, oh God, that old receipt, the spyglass! The ration card. Those cards, the Jack that looked like Mr Punch. At last he found the book half-way down about the sixth box he got to. I’m going to take this whole lot into town and dump them, he thought. The lot. Go by Tring and Lily-hoo. There you go, another thing remembered from his gran, she used to recite it in a mournful voice sometimes, that and ‘Barbara Allen’ and ‘The Spanish Lady’. What was that thing, Tring and Lily-hoo, something like fuck it all, just throw it up and go, take the country lanes, that kind of roving gypsy kind of thing, by Tring and Lily-hoo. Drawing of a tree, silhouette, perfect oak tree. Oh he remembered the page. Lily-hoo, for God’s sake. Did it exist? Who called a place Lily-hoo?

  And that was another thing. He didn’t much read. Madeleine had always been trying to make him read things. He just didn’t want to. The real world was too much anyway. Why would you want more? It had been mad, him and her, so different. She was serious and intelligent, cleverer than him. Why did she pick him out? Because it was her doing, no two ways about it. There was nothing nice about him. No saving grace. He wasn’t nice. Not good-looking or clever or smart. Neither one of them had really been out with anyone till then. He’d been sitting in the foyer waiting for something, seeing one of his tutors or something, and she was sitting along from him on one of the blue chairs and she turned her head to look at him, not smiling, just looking at him in a serious, inquisitive kind of way. And there he was, him, young, poor stupid boy, a big tough body with a tremor inside and her looking at him like that. She was big and solid and sensible-looking, a very restrained kind of girl who didn’t mix freely, and she’d just been there for weeks in the general everyday heave of college. Unbelievable. They’d actually talked once about getting married. He always knew it would never happen, but she seemed to think it would at one point. So she can’t have been that clever, can she? And her always lording it with her smartness and reading and such and making him feel small.

  He took the book into where the murder thing still burbled on from the telly. It was a big thick book and he couldn’t find the picture. There was no index and no contents. Tring and Lily-hoo. Perhaps that was in here too. It was the kind of poetry book that had lots of different departments, Old Tales, Lyrical, Humorous, Nature, Mortality etc. Nice pictures. That one. Ha! He clasps the crag. And all these funny half-remembered phrases clamoured from the side alleys of his memory and still he couldn’t find that old song. He found Tirra lirra by the river and Is it even so? And the fleas that tease in the high Pyrenees, but not what he was actually looking for. And he didn’t find Tring and Lily-hoo either. Maybe it was another book.

  An old black matriarch with wild amber eyes, mother of many, graced him with her presence by the fire. Where was the orange one? He looked around, counted four. On a normal night he would’ve gone out and stood on the back step and called puss puss puss puss puss and usually the old ginger tom would come. Might get clawed but he’d come.

  The woods had never bothered him, apart from round the old ruin sometimes. But you just stayed away from some places. It was creepy out there, no denying. Things should be the same, they shouldn’t change from day to day. Things shouldn’t be there that aren’t really there. To be out there, now, in the middle of the night, in that dark wood, you’d have to be mad. You’re not supposed to say mad any more, someone told him that in the pub. People are stupid. What else were you supposed to call it? He knew what he meant by it. Not the kind of everyday madness everyone had, no, this was something other, something beyond. To be out there on your own in the wood in the middle of the night, that’s real insanity, he thought, and it scared him in the same way that the idea of the supernatural did. Anyone could go mad. Fear could do it. It was quiet but always padding around him like a great invisible bear. Sometimes it ached in his throat and stung his eyes and made the very next second of life unbearable. The scary thing: what if the words come by themselves out of nowhere. What if the picture on the screen changes? The murder thing ended and something else came on. He flipped through a few more pages and there she was, Allison Gross who lives in yon tower. There was the sick young boy. My God, it’s still there. The TV screamed. What is this? Someone was getting chopped about, blood spewing. Horrible demon face, how do they do that? No! Zap zap. Couldn’t watch anything like that.

  There he is. Prrr.

  ‘There you are, you bastard,’ Dan said.

  The cat narrowed his eyes.

  ‘Stealing my produce,’ said Dan.

  Produce? the cat said. What are you talking about, produce? A few old cabbage leaves.

  11

  Once a week I smarten up, walk to the car park on the Gully road with my bag on wheels, get the bus into town and stock up. Hit the cash machine. My pension goes in, about the third week of every month. I’ve got a bar of chocolate I’m saving for later. My treat. I eat two a week. I try and spread them out but sometimes when I’ve been drinking I go all stupid and scoff the lot in half an hour. I’ve got a bottle of Cava. The cork popped when I opened it and flew up into the leaves. I poured carefully into the smaller of my cups and drank the Cava down very quickly – that made the cooking go better – I was chopping garlic on my board, I’d got the pan hot. It reminds me, teaching Lily how to peel garlic properly, how you bang it with the handle of the knife. Her in her turn, teaching it to Harriet in the kitchen of our old place. I fried mushrooms and tomatoes and chucked in a can of tuna. I wish I could say the mushrooms were wild woodland ones, foraged knowingly, but they were from Aldi. I tried not to think of the man and his garden and not being able to go there any more, kept pushing away the fear that I was discovered; but it went on in my stomach and throat and chest, and it was horrible. God’s sake, I thought, didn’t I come in here to get away from all this? Worry, for God’s sake, the worry you get from people. Thought I was done with all that.

  Now that I live here in the wood, I wonder why I was so scared back then in those old days about never having anywhere to live. All of us, everyone we knew, young, with lives back somewhere else, somewhere out of London, living in crappy little rooms, getting out in the early hours for the first papers of the day, combing through the ads, ringing a million numbers that were engaged or said it had just gone or it was too expensive or way off the tube lines, and once or twice getting as far as a viewing and finding yourself standing in a line of awkward couples not really wanting to look at each other. Leaving Lily at Wilf’s and sitting for hours in the housing department trying to get on the end of a futile list, and all around us everywhere, empty places, empty and empty and empty every time you walked past, weeks, months, years on end. And my mother saying it’s impossible to be homeless if you have family, not realising the impossibility sometimes of going back. Being without a home is worse in the city than in the woods. Comes back to me a scene under an arched bridge, very first cold light of a winter day, wet white frost on the railings dividing the end of the ginnel from a small ornamental garden. A line of long heaped darkness. Sleepers. The sound of engines as the police vans approach. Funny. I never saw it but I feel as if I did. Johnny told me about it. He cried. Such a heart he had for the mistreated. Soft.

  When the food was done, I didn’t even feel like it. I ate some because I thought I should and let the rest go cold. I don’t eat too bad, you know. So far, no real big problems. Not on the material level anyway. What has me attentive is the thing out there, the thing on the edges, the thing not too many really notice or care about but which will make itself felt at the strangest, most unexpected of times. I used to envy the ones who never heard it or saw it or felt it. I don’t any more.
I just don’t want it to take me too far away again. Then again, sometimes I do, just to see what it’s like.

  *

  Five a.m., the woods all still: still couldn’t sleep. Someone knows I’m here. I can’t stand that. Got up and walked.

  This countryside is lovely and serene yet there’s blood and fear and betrayal. Up there by the Long Wights, where they took the old baron to his hideous death. The stones are bloody. Blood draws blood. The stones draw thunder and lightning.

  One fine day in the middle of the night

  Two dead men got up to fight.

  *

  That night there was no thunder, just silent lightning, so fast it was like the onset of a migraine, maybe even imagined.

  Flash –

  Flash –

  Flash –

  Two mad little cut-out men in a flick-book, neither of them good at it, mitts up like amateurs. Don’t hit me, please!

  How these two fought!

  *

  I went back to the cat man’s place. He hadn’t locked the gate, and he’d had plenty of time. But this time I didn’t go into his garden, I went straight into his yard. At first I thought he wasn’t in, then I saw a face looking at me from the back window. It had large soulful baggy eyes, very startled and naked, and its hair jumbled out on either side of its round, rather magnificently ridiculous face. I smiled at the face and lifted one hand like a chieftain in an old Cowboys and Indians film. How! The face disappeared, and before I could get to the door, it opened and he stood there. He didn’t say anything, just glowered. He was big. We were alone. For all I really know, he’s a maniac.

  ‘What do you want?’ he said nastily.

  I stood at the bottom of the steps looking up. ‘Just wanted to apologise,’ I said, looking into his crinkled sad old eyes. There he stood with an outraged air about him and stains down his jumper, thick neck sloping into a barrel chest. Something was wrong with one of his eyes, it watered all the time.

  ‘That’s all,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have gone in your garden.’

  ‘No, you shouldn’t,’ he said fiercely.

  ‘Yes… I know… anyway, sorry…’

  I could have left a note instead. This is stupid.

  ‘The thing is,’ I pressed on, ‘I was wondering if. I mean, I’d appreciate it very much if you didn’t say anything to anyone. About me.’

  Still nothing. Stupid to ask, of course.

  ‘All your cats,’ I said, looking round, trying to make light of things.

  ‘They’re not mine,’ he said bitterly.

  ‘Oh! Well. I’d better…’

  I can revert to normal, just like that. I smiled at his scowl. ‘So, is that OK then?’ I said. ‘You know. Like, that you don’t mention anything? About me.’

  His face turned harder. Nothing, nothing. He wasn’t going to say anything else, so I just turned and walked round the side of the house, towards the lane, thinking, now he’ll go and tell everyone in the village about this mad woman who… and my neck got a creeping feeling. He was behind me. I looked back. He was standing at the corner of the house. When I got to the gate he came lumbering down the path so I got out quick and put the gate between us, but it was OK. He just leaned his meaty arms along the top of the gate, didn’t meet my eyes, and said, ‘Take what you want,’ as if he was telling me to fuck off.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Doesn’t make any difference. I’ll turn a blind eye,’ he said, and walked away.

  12

  There used to be a horse in the field but it’s not there any more. First there were three, Little Sid, Pepper and Lady. Then Little Sid’s people took him away. Then Lady – what happened to Lady? Then there was just big Pepper, who was a very old horse by the time he’d left for sea, and gone by the time he got back. Now that was a beautiful animal. Got to ride him when he was fifteen. Pepper belonged to Gallinger who had the farm, but he was past his prime and living out long peaceful days, and when Dan had gone up and asked if it was OK, they just said, yeah, sure, here, take his tack, it’s hanging up in there. He’d never caught a horse before, never saddled up, but he’d seen it done many a time; never ridden but there was no doubt in his mind he could do it. What a horse. Turned that great head as Dan approached. Sprayed a greeting from loose wet nostrils. Knew him of course, the kid who hangs on the fence, strokes his face if he gets near enough. Stood quiet and willing as the harness slipped over his head, didn’t puff out his belly when the girth went round, swung his head round now and then to see how things were getting along. And when finally the big clumsy boy put his foot in the stirrup and hauled himself up and over, being careful not to land too heavily, Pepper shifted his feet expectantly, raised his head and shook his long ginger mane. Dan knew what to do, dug with the heels, gentle, and away they went walking, just ambling along the edge of the long sloping field. After a while they veered towards the centre, and he pulled on the reins. Pepper stopped. He remembered that feeling still sometimes, there’d never been another like it – like when you read in a book or something – his heart soared. That’s what it was like: the high blue sky, the musky horse smell, the distant droning of insects.

  Sitting out back, pushing midnight, the big drunk sky. Weary. What was it with him? The way these times kept happening, times when a thought of an old horse could get him maudlin. Fuck, that’s pathetic. Time to stop. Funny thing, all that. You just have to forget it. All stupid anyway, all that madness and crying and stuff for nothing. We’re all still here. It doesn’t matter.

  The things he hadn’t had gathered round him. Too late now. All that. It was awful, sometimes everything that came into his head seemed set on giving him a pang. Things in the paper. Things underfoot. That horse, Pepper, when he rode that horse round and round that field, at one time rising to a glorious canter, there was no fear and nothing gauche, he was strong and graceful, he and the horse together. Of course Pepper, for all his size, was just a soft old thing a baby could have ridden, but still. And he remembered how, when he got home, his mother had already heard from someone about what he’d done and he’d had to pay for it for days.

  Couple of days later he ran into Eric in the village.

  ‘Hello there, Dan. Howya doin’? So how’s it going?’

  What a fucking stupid question.

  ‘OK,’ Dan said.

  You want the full story? I’ve got this pain – here – and my fucking knees creak, and this shooting pain that’s really scary, sort of simultaneously front and back, but then it goes away again and you feel a fool going all the way down town to see the doc.

  ‘So-so,’ he said.

  ‘Aren’t we all?’ Eric’s frizzy grey hair was tied in a ponytail, his small eyes squinted past Dan’s shoulder into the low evening sun. ‘Have you noticed anything funny around here lately?’

  ‘Funny how?’

  ‘Seen anyone hanging around?’ Eric chewed the inside of his cheek and his mouth twisted to one side and made him look like a flounder.

  Don’t tell anyone about me, she said. Why would he bother?

  ‘Don’t think so.’

  ‘No? No one hanging around?’

  ‘Hanging round?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Why? Should there be?’

  ‘Just Murph saw smoke in the woods. Like a campfire. OK now when it’s damp, but it’s supposed to be getting hot next week.’

  ‘Campers,’ Dan said.

  ‘So long as they’re careful.’

  ‘I’ll keep an eye out,’ said Dan.

  *

  He could have laid in wait, got the police, whatever, but when he’d thought about actually doing anything, a great torpor had come over him, and now a kind of routine had set in. He didn’t see her, but he knew she came and went, once, twice a week, maybe more, who knows, she was stealthy. And once he saw her stalking in the field, acting crazy, gesturing with her arms as if she was talking to someone. When she turned towards him, he hid behind a tree.

  That was it
.

  Poor bugger, he thought.

  She always came when he was out, but one day in the very early morning while he was lying on the settee with a headache crowding his eyes, drinking cold tea from his cowboy mug, having not been to bed, he heard the click of the gate and knew she was coming in from the woods. Still creepy, he thought. Creep creep creep when everything’s quiet.

  She wasn’t there long, couple of minutes. Then he heard the click again when she left. It was only just light. He got up, went to the back door and opened it, looked out. She was walking just this side of the trees on the other side of the stone wall. She froze. He didn’t know why he’d opened the door. They looked at each other nervously.

  ‘You’re up early,’ she said.

  He didn’t say anything for a moment then, ‘Thought you might like to know, someone saw your fire. Smoke.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, and her heart sank. She’d been worrying about that.

  ‘What’s it like out there?’ he said.

  ‘I like it,’ she said, and he went back inside, and she walked on, thinking, funny how it all turned out. He’s OK. First I thought I fooled him, didn’t want him knowing I came from the woods. But of course he knows.

  She went back in the evening to listen to the music. Poor man with his old music. Pathetic, aren’t we? All living in the past. What’s he playing now? Bob Marley and the Wailers. Not his usual. Oh God, doesn’t this take me back! Oh but doesn’t it? Twenty-four years old, hearing it for the first time.