Cold Boy's Wood

by Carol Birch

  Cold Boy’s Wood

  Cold

  Boy’s

  Wood

  CAROL BIRCH

  AN APOLLO BOOK

  www.headofzeus.com

  First published in the UK in 2021 by Head of Zeus Ltd

  Copyright © Carol Birch, 2021

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

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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

  ISBN (HB): 9781838939410

  ISBN (XTPB): 9781838939427

  ISBN (E): 9781838939403

  Head of Zeus Ltd

  5–8 Hardwick Street

  London EC1R 4RG

  WWW.HEADOFZEUS.COM

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  About the Author

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Cold

  Boy’s

  Wood

  1

  We’d been driving across England, west to east, somewhere in the middle, hours it seemed in our old red and white Ford Anglia. Everything had gone on for so long and so boringly that it felt as if we’d been driving for a million miles, and I’d fallen asleep and woken up feeling sick over and over again in the back seat. I was fourteen with greasy hair and slouchy shoulders. It was a lip-chewing, knicker-wetting time of crying secretly in closed rooms, and it seemed, like the journey, to have been going on forever. There were vans along the sides of the road selling stewed tea and oily hotdogs and hamburgers.

  I woke: hedges, fields and such, the car tootling along, my dad saying, ‘This is no good, we’ll have to stop somewhere.’

  I can’t remember what it was for. Maybe they needed a chemist. It doesn’t matter. ‘Over there,’ my mum said.

  There was a spire a long way off, across fields. Woods running over hills. A turning and a signpost. Andwiston 2, Copcollar 4, Beggar’s Ercol 9.

  The lane was long and twisty. There were cornfields with rolls of corn in neat symmetry. The windows were wound down for air, but the car still smelt strongly of petrol and heat, and more faintly of cleaned-up sick from me and my brother. And in spite of the heat there was rain on the heavy air and the clouds were bruising, and in the village there was a haywain in an open shed and all the shops were closed. Not a soul was in sight.

  It was a strung-up Adlestrop kind of a moment. Andwiston.

  It was not like seeing it for the first time. Thunder murmured far away. My brother Tommy said he wanted a wee.

  ‘There in that grid over there,’ said my mum. ‘Go with him, Lor.’

  ‘So where is everyone?’ shouted my dad, at us, as if everything was all our fault.

  ‘Maybe it’s early closing,’ said my mum in a tight strained voice.

  ‘He can’t wee in a grid,’ I said. ‘What if someone comes?’

  ‘He’s only five!’ My mother pulled off her glasses and started polishing them furiously.

  ‘Let him go in the woods,’ I said.

  ‘What woods?’

  ‘What woods? The woods all around.’

  ‘I know what you mean, Lorna,’ my mum said. ‘But in case you haven’t noticed, we’re not in the woods, are we, we’re in the village.’

  ‘So drive out a bit. There’s nothing here.’

  ‘Bloody ridiculous,’ my dad rumbled, ‘village of the dead.’

  My mother started putting her glasses back on, but just at that moment my father yanked his jumper up over his sweating face and tossed it into the back. His hand knocked her glasses.

  She went ‘Uh!’ and grabbed at them as they fell. The jumper, warm nylon, sweat-smelling, landed on my knee and I flicked it away as if it was a snake. It started to rain. My mother caught the glasses and put them back on her face. Through the open window I saw across the rough triangle of the village green a small row of shops: a butcher’s, a co-op, a ladies’ hairdressers with a window full of faded blue-tinged images of smiling girls with meticulously regimented flick-ups and ruler-straight fringes. The rain sloped across it all, bright and clean and steely. I felt funny. Why don’t people like rain, I thought. And the feeling grew that I’d seen it all before.

  ‘You’ve just knocked my glasses off, Ray,’ my mum said in a martyred voice.

  He ignored her, turning his beet-red face to the back seat. ‘Well, are you getting out or what?’

  I felt as if I’d been much older a long time ago, not just old but ancient, and we’d just dropped out of somewhere else into here.

  ‘I said, are you—’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Go to the woods, I’ll take him there. We can keep dry under the trees.’

  So we did. Just outside Andwiston I took my little brother Tommy for a wee in the woods. If I looked one way I could see our car through the leaves, if I looked the other I saw the back of Tommy’s head, his fragile neck and jug ears, and I could hear him singing to himself, ‘a pig is an animal with dirt on its face,’ and all around us was the whisper of rain on leaves and the smell of wet forest. I sent him back to the car when he’d finished.

  ‘I’m going to have one now,’ I said, ‘won’t be a min,’ and sent him scooting off while I went in deeper, further and further from the track. I stood still in a tiny space among dark green holly and ivy. The trees stretched far away above my head, and I was almost completely shielded by wet leaves. If I could write music, it deserves music, it deserves music, I thought, something sharp and ripe and rich. But I couldn’t write music so I just stood there getting softly wet from the filtered rain, and thinking, if only I could not go back.

  Then things tilted again, and I went back to the car.

  That was my first time in these woods. A strange thing happened as we drove away. A sudden wind whipped itself up and the rain got heavier. I was rolling up the window and for – oh I don’t know – maybe three seconds, I saw a boy in one of those big fields that come after the woods. Two fields over. Naked in the pouring rain, thin and white, arms round himself. His face looked towards me but he was too far away to make out any features. The hedge hid him, and then I saw him again
for maybe another second or two, from a different angle. There he was, just standing still for no reason in the middle of a field in the middle of the day.

  ‘Stop the car!’ I said.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I can’t stop here,’ said my dad.

  ‘Stop the car!’

  ‘Why?’

  I was opening the door.

  My father shouted, ‘You bloody fool!’

  The car stopped and I jumped out and ran back.

  He was still there.

  Don’t misunderstand. I haven’t got a clue about anything but I’m not a fool. I’m not talking about fakes and frauds, videos on YouTube, screamers, all that. I’m talking about things that happen in a breath in the middle of an ordinary day. I know the explanations. A hallucination is something physical in your ridiculous clown of a brain, not uncommon, all quite normal, but when it comes, the creature is as real as anything ever was. Not the same real, a different real. Still, it can touch you and stop your breath and look you in the eye, shake your mind out of your head. A hallucination can sometimes swing upon the air as it comes into focus, a shimmering appearance. And sometimes, like the cold boy, it’s solid, sharp as a fox or a hare. Until it isn’t.

  Gone while you blinked.

  Which is what happened.

  My father was furious. My heart beat twice as fast all the way to Hothemby by the Long Wights where they’d booked a holiday cottage. I never said another word, but when we got home a week later my mum took me to the doctor’s because she thought I was depressed and he suggested I start reading the Guardian. ‘That’s a very lively paper!’ he said kindly. ‘It’ll give you a lot to think about. What newspaper do you get?’ He addressed this to my mother, who had insisted on accompanying me into the consulting room and had been sitting looking at me with a mild worried smile while I didn’t know what to say or do.

  ‘The Daily Express,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, well, that’s very good too,’ said the doctor.

  ‘She sometimes says she’s seen something,’ my mother said nervously.

  ‘Something?’

  And I had to tell him about the boy in the field.

  ‘Mm,’ he said, ‘has anything like this ever happened before, Lorna?’

  It had, but not so startlingly, and I’d learned to keep my mouth shut about such things. I shook my head. Then I told him I’d read in a book how there was a poor boy killed and thrown out naked in those woods, and the doctor asked where I’d heard about that.

  ‘It was in a book,’ I said, ‘in the cottage where we were staying.’

  ‘Ah!’ he said, looking relieved. ‘You know what’s happened.’

  He gave my mum a big smile. ‘You know what’s happened,’ he repeated, ‘her memory’s playing tricks.’ And explained that what had really happened was that I’d actually read the story in the book before I saw the boy, and that because I had such an impressionable mind and such a highly developed imagination I had manufactured a kind of – he paused, looking up and sideways to his left as if a small helper was holding a prompt board over his head – a kind of projected thought-picture. It was actually not all that unusual. He gave me some pills anyway. He was the first of all my doctors, and I’ve forgotten his name. I forget most of their names and some of their faces but a few stand out: old Dr Walse with the bottle-top glasses and elaborate jowls (he used to pull them out to a distance with his fingers and let them slap back, he didn’t know he was doing it) and the one called Muriel whose eyelids rippled. This one was a nice young man, enthusiastic and kind. He talked about the tricks the mind could play, the illusions, the reasons for déjà vu, crackling synapses, short circuits, nothing to worry about unless of course it becomes a problem. It’s just a dream, he said. Only it happens when you’re awake.

  ‘But we didn’t go back to Andwiston,’ I said.

  ‘You probably did but you don’t remember.’ He smiled, drawing his prescription pad across the blotter. ‘I’m always getting mixed up myself. I get the days wrong all the time.’

  ‘Oh, so do I!’ said my mum reassuringly. ‘It’s awful, isn’t it? I forget people’s names, it’s terrible.’

  I can’t remember what the pills were called. They worked. I didn’t see anything else for years and I no longer had those disturbing frissons, as if someone came and stood in my space, invisible.

  2

  Waking Monday morning in his stale bed, Dan thought first of the three ravens that had landed on the lean-to roof last night and jabbed the bathroom window with their sharp beaks. Later, a fallow doe, heavily pregnant, had walked out of the wood behind his walled garden and stood in the deepening dusk watching through the slats of the high gate while he pulled some mint and a few leaves of cabbage. He was a superstitious man and these things bothered him.

  He’d dreamed that the cats were all gone, but the rough orange tom with scruffy ears stood by his bare feet, addressing them with a monotonous, persistent harangue as if they were the seat of his intelligence. Another cat, skinny and black with an expression of fixed amazement, glared from the windowsill.

  Growling, he withdrew his feet under the duvet. None of them was his. They just lived here. His mouth was sour, his head thick. He kicked the cat off the bed and turned over, but it came back again and again, wouldn’t stop, and in the end, scratching his belly in its dirty vest, grunting and sighing, he got up, went downstairs in his underpants and rattled some biscuits into a couple of dishes on the steps outside the back door.

  The house, slightly grand a long time ago, was old and square and too big now. In the rains the water dripped downstairs through the night, gurgling peacefully like a mountain stream. After the terrible storms of last week the woods were still, though it had rained hard all night and soft mist blunted the outlines of things. It was his birthday. Sixty-eight, -nine, maybe more, he hadn’t kept track. Also – his mother’s deathday, the day he was supposed to take a bunch of flowers to her grave. He went in and made instant black coffee in his cowboy mug. The tremble in his hands was noticeable when he stirred the grains and it got on his nerves. A swig of Laphroaig quelled it a little. Kicking the back door open again he walked out into the middle of the yard and stood there yawning, looking at Pete Wheeler’s kid’s Venza that he should have had fixed by today. The morning brightened as the whisky warmth settled. A black cat washed itself on the roof, not the one that had sat on his windowsill, another, serene with the morning and the world.

  Someone had been at his garden. Something to do with the way the rope on the gate had been looped, too sloppy, not how he did it. Probably kids. Once last week, twice since Sunday. He walked round the side and checked the hives. OK. Mess with them, he muttered, see what you get, you fuckers, tightening the rope on the gate one-handed, coffee in the other. Draining it, he gagged and spat and decided not to go to work yet on the car. He went in and cleaned his teeth, swigging lukewarm water round his bleeding gums. In the mirror, big greasy pores. Sore red eyes. The veins, vermilion worms.

  Two paracetamol, two ibuprofen. Another coffee. Put Al Green on the Bose and turn it up really loud.

  Around twelve Pete Wheeler came by. Dan had got the bonnet up and was just getting started on the engine.

  ‘How’s it going?’ Pete asked.

  ‘Nearly there.’

  ‘Did you hear?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Big landslip over by Ercol. Last night. The road into Gully’s closed off.’

  Dan raised his eyebrows and went on working.

  Pete took a squashed roll-up out of his pocket and shoved it in his mouth. ‘They found a body,’ he said, bobbing around on his trainers as if he was a jumpy kid rather than a grandad.

  ‘Kidding,’ said Dan.

  ‘Got police tape.’ Pete flicked his lighter with a long double-jointed thumb. ‘All that stuff. They only do that for murder, don’t they?’ Pocketing the lighter, he sucked hard. ‘Murder! Fuck’s sake!’

  Dan said nothing.


  ‘It’s these rains,’ Pete said. ‘It’s all buggered up there. Terrible mess. You know what it’s like, it’s all holes. Doesn’t take much.’

  Then he laughed. His forehead turned into wavy ridges. ‘Racking my brains,’ he said, ‘thinking back. Did anyone go missing round here? Back when – when – it’s an old one. The body. Just bones, I suppose. Been there a long time.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Well – so they say.’

  ‘Old how?’ asked Dan, looking up from the Venza’s engine. ‘Old like medieval or old like ten years?’

  Pete bent down to stroke a cat but it scooted away. ‘Not medieval like historical medieval,’ he said, rising, fiddling with his stubbly chin. ‘They wouldn’t put up a tape for that, would they?’

  ‘Might do,’ said Dan, straightening and stretching. Upright he was at least six inches taller than Pete. ‘Keep people off.’

  ‘Well anyhow,’ said Pete, spitting tobacco off the end of his tongue, ‘it’s a right bloody mess. Bloody mud everywhere. Not surprised. Half them storm drains up there are useless.’

  He waited a while, making little blowing sounds through his lips.

  Dan didn’t respond.

  Like talking to a brick wall, thought Pete.

  ‘Big mess to clean up,’ he pushed on. ‘All across the road. Gone on the graveyard. Awful.’

  He waited a minute or two more, pulsing up and down on his toes, looking towards the edge of the woods that crowded up against the back wall, then he said, ‘Getting foggy.’

  When still no response came, he ruffled a hand through his short pale hair and said, ‘So what time shall I pick this up then?’

  ‘Five,’ said Dan. ‘Ish.’

  ‘Well then,’ Pete said. ‘Adios, amigo,’ and headed off.

  What a terrible thing. As if a faint bad smell was drifting from over there. Made you wonder what else was lying around under your feet. Mud on the graveyard. Well. He was going up there anyway.

  He felt like walking in this nice spooky mist, so he threw everything down just as it was and walked off. No dog no more to call, no dog at his heels. An absence. Long time since. Just the cats, and they were indifferent, watching him go. He couldn’t look after things. The cats hunted. He gave them water and cat biscuits from the market, and they came and went through a hole in the wall where a pipe used to be in the side of his house, God knows how many, it changed all the time. They hung about the yard and the field and the woods beyond, and they got in his garden and he chased them out with hoses and shouts, and filled clear plastic bottles half full of water and laid them about the place, and kept the doors closed and the walls protected by cat repellent, and still they got in.