Cold Boy's Wood

by Carol Birch

  ‘So what happened with you?’ he asked. ‘She said. You lost a daughter. I’m very sorry for that.’

  She smiled.

  ‘She told you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She left some meds, didn’t she?’

  ‘She did.’

  ‘Got them here?’

  How stupid. They were sitting on the kitchen table.

  ‘No.’

  She laughed, and she looked funny, her eyes shining strangely, and he got that fear again, him out here in the dark wood with a mad woman. Oh Allison Gross who lives in yon tower, the ugliest witch in the north countr-ee…

  ‘Shall I tell you,’ she said, ‘shall I tell you about it? Do you really want to know?’

  35

  We couldn’t go on much longer, me and Johnny. Through everything we’d maintained a surface normality, though words had been pointless for a long time. We had this string tied around us both, we were everyday’s reality, always there together, him and me. And there was so much to do! So much to do! And these strangenesses in his eyes, and no doubt he saw that in me too – I don’t know how many times he looked searchingly at me and said, ‘You’ve changed.’ And me thinking it’s him. I didn’t want to touch him. Couldn’t. It was absolute.

  ‘Lorna,’ he said, ‘Lorna, what’s happening, what’s happening?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Harriet’s big red eyes had stopped weeping, she looked almost normal, though really all of us were running on empty. Finally, when she was in bed and asleep, he said, ‘Why was she there?’

  His face was dark and strange, all the blood in him rushing to the surface.

  ‘Why did you let her go?’ he said.

  There was no way we could have touched. An invisible field separated us. It had been forming for years.

  ‘I didn’t.’ My throat was sore.

  ‘You’re the parent, Lor, you’re supposed to be in charge.’

  She just went. Fast. A moment, and gone.

  ‘She’d be alive now if she hadn’t gone,’ he said.

  I looked at him. Stone.

  We got through it. Here’s the funny thing. Phoebe Twist turned up to the funerals. That hideous woman. Sat at the back looking like death. And Johnny, he couldn’t go. Just couldn’t. He said: Let the dead bury the dead and who is to be fed be fed. He was angry. Furious. He didn’t want Harriet to go, thought she was too young. Don’t upset her. She was all pale and quiet. ‘I’ll come if you want me to,’ she said. Of course you should come! Your sister! She came. The crematorium was full. Her school friends. Teachers. Wilf, who never worried, his face streaked with tears. If the bomb was dropping he wouldn’t worry till it hit him on the head. Oh Chicken Licken, the sky has really fallen. Mark was there. Hard for him, I suppose, he didn’t know anything about Terry till the crash.

  ‘I saw another side of Lily,’ he said to me after it was all over.

  And I thought, yes, who am I to think I was the only one who knew her? What if this weird pale boy, so strange to me, what if he was the one who got the real deal? Sweet boys really, Terry and Mark. She didn’t do too bad, my Lily, sweet sixteen and two of them so fixed on her. In love? Well, by the standards of sixteen, oh certainly, though so few years had rolled under the bridge that all of them were untested.

  *

  We lasted another few weeks. The atmosphere around us got sick.

  One day Johnny said to me, ‘You don’t love me any more.’

  And I didn’t and I did.

  ‘You are dead,’ he said, ‘I will mourn you.’

  The next day he was gone.

  I will never forgive him for what that did to Harriet.

  Someone can just vanish. It’s less rare than you think. I knew a young guy who went to India and got out of his head far too much on Goa Beach and ended up hospitalised, and all his friends had by this time moved on and he’d fallen out with his girlfriend, and hadn’t had any contact with his parents, if they were even alive, for years. He just never came back. Amazing how someone can just never come back. And every now and then one of his old friends might say, ‘I wonder whatever happened to poor old Simon? Did anybody ever hear anything?’ And nobody ever had.

  Sometimes I think I’ll never come back.

  I did drink a lot after Lily died. I really did try not to let any of this affect Harry. But she was so hard. So hard to me always, after he’d gone. We were alone together now, and she wouldn’t take a hug or anything from me. She didn’t have to be like that. She missed him fiercely and everything was my fault, she always thought there was something I wasn’t telling her about where he’d gone, but there was nothing at all. No one knew anything, certainly not the Hatchet lot, who, when the whole thing was over, just faded away. Never came near. Shallow people, shallow friendships. I must have been a fool. I’m having nothing more to do with these people, I said. I made up my mind. I’m not chasing after them if they can’t be bothered. I never went back to Hatchet, never saw any of them. Not that they’d done anything but I just couldn’t take any more of that place. It’s where the hate began. And though I hated the hate, I couldn’t stop my own hate growing inside, for what he’d done not just to Lily and Terry but to me, and to Harry, who had loved him completely. I couldn’t forgive him for any of it. A little while later, don’t ask me how long, time was funny around then, I walked past Hatchet, and it was all closed up with a mountain of mail on the mat.

  One day when he’d been gone about four or five weeks, I decided to clear up a bit. I’d get rid of some of his things. It was a terrible thing to have to do but I had to do something, cut something out, and I couldn’t afford to feel anything. It was brutal survival. I cleared his drawers of the socks that were left, the old ones with holes, a lone pair of holey underpants, a couple of t-shirts he’d never worn. It was like dying. For Harriet too, her beloved Dad, it didn’t bear thinking about, and I couldn’t stand that he’d done this to her. To me, yes, I could cope. But not to her. It killed us, you know. She just drifted further and further from me till she was sixteen and buggered off to live at a friend’s, and never wanted to keep in touch with me.

  So there I was, putting his things in bags, and I got to his books on that shelf and I hated them. I hated their smugness and their cleverness. I hated that they thought they knew so much and looked down on me, and I shoved them into a holdall from the back of the wardrobe, as many as I thought I could carry. He hardly ever read fiction. Most of it was battered old Marx and Anarchism and all this Gramsci, Bakunin, Bataille and Foyerback or whatever he was called, and a lot of postmodern stuff. And there was a manual for a Ford Cortina car. Terry’s car. It looked new. What was it doing on Johnny’s shelf with Johnny’s books?

  I kept thinking about it all the way down to the Oxfam shop where I handed the books in, and all the way back. Harriet came home from school and said nothing to me.

  ‘Come on, sweet,’ I said, ‘let’s be friends.’

  I made her tea while she watched kids’ TV.

  *

  A papercut under my wrist.

  This niggling thing, under every second of every moment, as I walk around town, cook dinner, take Harry to her piano lesson, hear her cry, think about Lily.

  I think about how Johnny never much cared about Terry till he heard about the Dorset job. How after that he was all friendly to the lad, and invited him in against all previous odds and told him to park his car in that little yard at the back of the co-op. I think about how he was out all night the night before she went away with Terry, about the spanner someone bought just around the corner from Hatchet, and the reason why there was a brand new manual for Terry’s car on Johnny’s shelf with Johnny’s books. I think that I don’t know why I’m thinking about these things so incessantly, why they will not, will not leave my mind. After all, I don’t know anything about these things. Johnny was no mechanic. I think about the car on that pretty country lane with no other traffic around, veering off the road and over the verge and into t
he deep pond, and as always the things beyond that that are unimaginable, though still they come. There’s no stopping them.

  And I think of how angry he was at Phoebe Twist for not going to Dorset that morning, at Lily for going instead for a country ride, and at me for letting her go.

  They grow deeper and deeper, the blood-red papercuts, sharper and sharper. He hurt me so bad. Cut me down. Might as well have taken a knife and stuck it straight in my chest.

  36

  This man is still in my den. Go. Go now.

  I kept saying it, go, go now, please go. Like the werewolf imploring a friend to leave before the moon is full. First he just sat there staring at me, as if he was trying to work something out.

  ‘I’m going to sleep now,’ I said. ‘Please go.’

  Very slowly, with a slight groan, he got himself up and hauled himself out through the flap. When all sounds of him blundering in the undergrowth had faded, I lifted up the rug from where it lay rolled up next to my backpack and took it with me. I would need it. An idea was forming in my mind. My throat felt very dry, I had to lick and lick my lips to get them working. I was out in the wood and I could see everything far more clearly than I should have been able to. I walked and wandered, stopping every now and then to listen to the sounds of the wood, the little creatures, the birds ruffling in sleep, falling into harmony around me. Everything moved. Far above through the trees was a deep starless blue sky. I gave a long low whistle, and the ghostly sound lingered. If anyone else was here in these woods it would put fear in them. My heart was a pounding mill and I’m lonely for them, Lily and Harry and Johnny and the times that wring your stupid heart in the early hours like a terrible old song. How many times has she appeared in the night? Where are you? I say. Are you here? Is it really you? Of course, she replies, smiling. Her teeth. Her eyes. I knew she was only in my mind. It’s different when the real thing happens. You just know. Lily never gets out of my head into the real world, to walk and talk and touch me. In a sense, neither does Harriet. I don’t know that woman. I know Harry in the garden with her tortoise, how we searched and searched for poor old Toby, how he still haunts these woods now, only he’s turned into a prehistoric monster. How many times did I wish and wish that if anyone would come to me out of the fog, it would be Lily, but it never was. Still, you could say, what’s the difference? The whole thing is just in your head, not just them old dreams, the lot.

  I had a weird taste in my mouth. It’s one of those signs. Yes and there goes the shake and thrill of it up and down me. Teeth like castanets. Poor trees, poor blasted trees. They’ve been murmuring for a while now, I can no longer deny it. Could be dragons, elementals, the cold boy, mad King Goll – they will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech leaves old – What a game. At first I pretended it was just the sounds the world made, saying my name. But it’s not, it’s the old thing, like they’ve never been gone, murmuring voices rippling softly, a constant stream, heard behind a distance, from a distance inside. They’re always there, they just lie dormant, sometimes for years, like a volcano. Whispering, chuckling, the odd one rising now and then, the odd phrase emerging:

  it was another time

  she was on the bus and never

  but if you did know

  what would you do about it?

  not you

  now you know

  They also laugh.

  I hear voices that have been inaudible for ages. Still distant. Sometimes I thought they were there as I was going off to sleep, only they could have been the heating, or something outside, or stuff moving through a pipe. Just the world. They’re coming in over the waves in the air, from high in the sky, still quite far away, so many all murmuring together like the civilised hum of a great room full of polite people making conversation. My heart thudding got in the way of the voices, irritating me. I walked until I came to the ruin. It had changed. At first I thought it was a dark castle, blocking out the trees over a long area, but when I turned to look around at the woods folding over the path behind me and then looked back, there were lights on inside, and colours, as bright as if a strong light source lay behind them, running down in the windows like pouring water. I wondered if I walked towards it, would it all vanish, because it was too perfect to be real, and I didn’t want it to stop. It soared up and up, a thing of mythical proportions, away and above the trees, with those pouring waters rushing down behind the windows.

  How lucky I am! There’s no approaching a sight like that, not if you don’t want to get burned. I sat with my back to the wood and my face towards where fog came from the heights, slipping down the long slopes like grey suds, thickening as it came. I haven’t got a home anywhere. I’d love to light a fire. I have matches in my pocket, and a tiny bottle of vodka. I drink my vodka. Anything goes. I can play and misremember because it’s all misremembered anyway, and the hours fly by. The stones and leaves dance, sweetly, sedately. Rivers run in the leaves’ black veins. The things out there, whispering, are real, that much is obvious. I know what they should be but I don’t think they are. They should be all those people I know who’ve gone, but they never are, or if they are, they’re still so far away that I can’t get them. They’re just people I don’t know, their endless meanderings wandering by. Still, every so often I feel as if they fill me with themselves, all of their weird and groping selves, sometimes I almost feel as if I am them. We are legion. Here in me they never stop their bickering. I remember one day laughing at it all, I said: What point? What point trying to unmix this ball of worms, let them writhe. Then was consumed with horror at what I was.

  I looked down and saw on the stones in some ancient path that ran from where I sat to where the great doors had stood, a worm, a thin long thing trying to get somewhere. I hate worms, can hardly look at them. I watched in fascination as it slumped itself feebly a little way along. These too, I thought. Me and thee, worm. You make every fibre of my being curdle. And I thought about the body that came down, and felt sorry for it. Are you here still? All the time you were up there in that terrible lonely place did your clay meet them, the worms? The horrors, the horrors. Death by worms, the boats. What have I done? Oh God, what have I done, what have I done? Did you walk? Oh but you’re long gone now. It’s all long gone in the end.

  *

  I forget the stages, if stages there were, by which the ineffable again corralled me, but I wasn’t even in the woods any more. It felt as if considerable time had passed, or as if I’d just come to in a dream. A wild sea spread out beneath me, small grey sea horses dashing themselves to delightful death against the cliffs. I was on a lip of rock very high above the sea. I put both my feet right on the edge and swayed forward, looking out across the deep black-blue ocean, the needle rocks below, and everything said, do it, do it, let go. One step. Now. Jump.

  But I stepped back, and when I sat up I was in the wood and the night had gone into some impossible place deep in my grinning skull. I’d been biting this nail for three hours now and still never never never getting to what I was biting for. My head was too full. They’d turned the noise up.

  Babbling fools. ‘Shut up,’ I tried to say, but I couldn’t get the words out. Hundreds and hundreds all splurging their stupid thoughts. Will they just shut up. Shut the fuck up. One of the walls crumbled greyly, off to the side. It made a sound like an iceberg breaking off. A few small stones shot out and rolled across in front of me in the moss and vetch. I picked one up but it was hot so I dropped it. I wanted to stop my head and all these voices so I walked out of the wood and it was like pushing through seaweed under the sea, drifting to the outer edge where the trees meet the big fields and the big slopes rising up towards the Long Wights. I walked up to a high ridge and lay down in the grass with my hands behind my head, watching meteorites streak across the sky. One high above, then another a few minutes later, lower down over Copcollar. All the people grew quiet. I waited ages, half an hour, I don’t know, willing another one, and at last it came, busting out of nowhere and dash
ing itself out in a long lonely streak across the west.

  They started whispering again, in a soft inviting way, making me know that something was coming. Not like the things in my head, Lily’s teeth, her eyes; this was something to be seen perhaps, something slowly bursting from the cocoon between there and here. I turned on some high ridge and looked back, scared in a way I’d never yet known.

  Someone was walking up the hill. I couldn’t tell who. My eyes closed. Handless Jenny. No. She doesn’t come around here.

  I opened my eyes. It was still walking up the hill. It seemed to carry with it some element of the fog that had now settled and lay low in the hollows. The darkness obscured its face. For a long time it seemed that it walked but never came any closer. After a while it walked on by below me and disappeared around a protruding shelf of land at the highest point of Gallinger’s field.

  I’ve ripped a great strip of skin off my thumb and it hurts. The rim where the end of the nail meets my cuticle is bloody.

  I was alone on a hillside somewhere under a picture-book sky with a gorgeous crescent of a moon, God’s sickle, and a refined scattering of perfect stars, and I was in a moment of pure naked terror. There was a watcher in the woods; I felt its eyes and I didn’t know that it might not be some evil thing. So I ran further up till I reached the Stones and got right in the middle, thinking this would either be safe as a ring of salt or very dangerous. There I sat down and waited for my breathing to steady and my heart to die down. It made my ears pound. Someone passed between two stones on the outside of the circle, right on the edge of my vision. The fear shock was like electricity, the dentist’s drill on the spasm of a raw nerve. This was not a safe place. My feet, as if directed by some other will, walked across the empty moonlit ring, but there was nothing there, nothing there.