by Carol Birch
She didn’t know but he could see her from the upstairs window, had been uneasily watching her listening for several minutes. She was wearing a woolly hat, leaning back against the outside wall of the garden, smoking a roll-up with her eyes closed. It was threatening rain. After a while he went down and approached, making sure she heard him as he crossed the yard.
‘What the hell are you fucking doing sitting there?’ he said. ‘Are you mad?’
‘I love this,’ she said, not opening her eyes. ‘This track.’
Stir It Up.
‘For Christ’s sake!’ he muttered, and she opened her eyes and looked up at him. He was a very angry-looking man. She is completely stark staring mad, he thought. ‘What are you doing living out there anyway?’ he said.
She thought, then said, ‘I don’t know. Same as anyone else, I suppose.’
‘How long you been out there?’ he asked, as if she was at the South Pole.
A shrug.
‘You drunk or something?’ he said, and she gave a short laugh.
Inside, the music changed.
He felt stupid standing there. ‘Do you get scared?’ he said for something to say.
She thought again. ‘Sometimes.’
The first bat jerked across the sky.
‘Fancy a drink?’ He looked away.
She thought again, and this time it irritated him that she didn’t answer immediately after he’d made the effort to speak.
‘Yeah,’ she said finally, ‘wouldn’t mind.’
He jerked his head at the back door and she followed him to the back steps. ‘Stay here,’ he said, and went in for the bottle. Fuck, bad move, he thought, getting down a couple of shot glasses. When he went out she was sitting on the top step, holding out one hand to see if it was raining. ‘It’s that funny kind of moist weather,’ she said, ‘when it’s so fine you don’t know if it’s there or not.’
He sat on the other end of the step, and put the bottle of Jameson’s and the two glasses between them. Leaning on the door frame, he poured. The more sociable among the cats came round.
She knocked it back pretty quickly.
‘Smoke?’ He offered a pack of cigarettes, though she’d just put out her roll-up.
‘Thanks,’ she said, taking one, and they lit up.
‘How many cats have you got?’ she asked, smoke flowing from her nostrils.
‘They’re not mine.’
‘Of course they are.’
‘They’re wild,’ he said. ‘Not mine.’
‘Well, you feed them,’ she said, ‘and they come in and out of your house whenever they want, so they’re your cats.’
A few spots of rain appeared on the steps. Ginger Tom came stalking from the woods, mouthing a silent snarl as he passed en route to the old cars out front.
‘Cats aren’t like that,’ he said.
They sat smoking and drinking in silence for five minutes.
‘Better go,’ she said.
She stood, brushing herself down as if she was wearing fine clothes.
He stood too. ‘You want some runner beans?’ he asked.
She pulled the hat more firmly down over her ears. ‘Can you spare them?’
‘I wouldn’t ask if I couldn’t.’
‘OK,’ she said.
He went in and she followed, just inside the entryway, and stood in the hall while he pushed through a door on the right. She could hear him in there opening cupboards and poking around. The hall was wide, a staircase running up into darkness. A coat stand was buried under old coats and macs, and there were a few pictures on the dirty white walls, flowers, dogs, birds, old things that looked as if they’d lived there for years. If you lifted one, you’d see clean white underneath. Where the stairs began, the hall turned a corner. A black cat appeared, saw her and turned back.
‘Puss,’ she said, tiptoeing after. Round the corner was the original front door of the house with a never-opened look, and another door, open, through which the cat skittered. She peered in. Light through an uncurtained window. Boxes, old furniture, dust, cats. An old-fashioned sideboard by her elbow, its surface covered in forgotten envelopes and newspapers, spent matches. Old pine doors, wood. Doors – old barn doors. One with a wooden knob all eaten away by something, one with a rusted metal latch. One four-panel, almost decent.
‘What are you doing?’ he growled.
Standing there with a load of runner beans wrapped in newspaper like a bunch of flowers, the pointy ends sticking out.
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Looking at your cats.’
‘Not my cats,’ he said again, shoving the clumsy bundle at her. And he walked behind her to the door, like a dog with rising hackles seeing her off the premises.
13
It was dark when I got back. I lit the lamp and made coffee, put the beans into my vegetable box, spread out my coat to dry. Not my cats indeed. Silly man. The rain was soft and constant like people whispering. I was reaching the stage where I could distinguish the small differences between the sound it made running down the rock, the pitter-patter on leaves, the sucking of the earth. I’ll fry the runner beans with spring onions and wild garlic. All night the dripping of leaves. They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech leaves old. I loved that poem. I sat on cushioned otter-skin. Mad in the woods. Slowly, as I shouting slew and slaughtered – in my most secret spirit
Most secret.
grew a whirling and a wandering fire –
*
I fell asleep and dreamed about a green boy who came and stood at the edge of the clearing and smiled at me. He looked terribly ill. He was ragged and his face, gaunt and plague-spotted, had a sickly drowsy leer of a smile, so pretty.
‘How could you not remember me?’ he said.
Only I wasn’t fully asleep. Somewhere between. I’ve gone off the rails, I thought. And then I was a little bit more awake, and I knew that things were starting to go funny with me again, it was exciting and I started breathing much faster. It was going repeatedly through my mind, I remember, I remember, of course I remember you, how could I ever forget? And a very old dream came back, more than just vivid or bright, a dream of a whole new order more memorable than many a real thing, coming out of the nether and piercing through the little core that I am or was: a boy dying on a bed with a ray of light streaming out of one eye, piercing through the darkness up to infinity. And I realised it was not the first time that I had dreamed this dream, though I wasn’t conscious yesterday that I had dreamed this same dream countless times before.
When I woke up in the morning finally, just as the light came creeping in, I felt ancient. Not that I was stiff or tired or anything, at least not more than usual. In fact I was wide awake and alert. It was my soul that felt ancient. My soul, whatever that is. But the grief of the boy’s dying was older still, stuck on a moment in time, eternal. I kept thinking about the green boy and the boy with the light in his eye, thinking how funny that they were real before I was born, because they were always there, even before I knew about them. They just were. And how it could be that way back then, when I was – what? – younger than fourteen because it was definitely before I first came to Andwiston that I first dreamed him, that I had woken up one day with this boy inside me. One sleep that had changed everything, and on his behalf a dreadful grief that crashed the world. Could it be so true and real even though nothing had actually happened? It was just me waking up on another ordinary day.
‘It’s just one of those nightmare things,’ my mum had said when I tried to tell her about it.
But it had seemed more than that. It left a sore in my chest, and Johnny made it better.
I got up and lit the lamp. There was the newspaper that the runner beans had come wrapped in, lying open and wrinkled on the ground, and I saw the headline: Human Remains Found In Mudslide Chaos. I read in the paper about a body coming down in a slurry of mud, how all the road was blocked. And all the while I never knew a thing about it. When I read on, I saw that the de
ad man’s age did not match my particular dead man, and that made me wonder. Who is this, come clawing back up through the sad grey mud? My teeth chattered like mad things, and in the back of my mind a little voice said: You really did it, you made yourself into a witch. Witch, what witch? Which old witch, the wicked witch, ding dong she’s dead, green face and pointy hat, skinny like a snake, massive-girthed in black, long dangling jugs and toothless mouth, vile filthy hag sitting on your chest, wise woman gathering simples, a basket of herbs, la belle dame sans merci, wild-eyed, crowned with the moon, well my pretty, a bite of this apple redder than blood, the chin that meets the nosetip, bentbacked, stick, warts and all, claw-nails, cloven foot.
That’s me. A poor sinner if ever I saw one, said I, standing outside myself. I met the bad kind once, eye to cold eye, Phoebe Twist reaching into the freezer for a packet of fish fingers. Ah, Phoebe Twist! A shock of the unseemly at the back of the shop on Holland Park Avenue, her face lavishly coated with whitish powder that had accumulated in the networks of wrinkles running into the hollows of her cheeks, like silt in a delta. A weird little woman, withered and dry, with an anxious pinched face and bright bulging eyes, eyebrows two thin brown lines painted so high up that she looked permanently shocked. Over them a crescent of sore-looking red skin was dotted with scurf; a few wisps of sparse grey hair tried to escape over it from the brim of a dark green beret with a stalk sticking up in the middle. It’s her, it’s her, I thought, wait till I tell, but then no, why would I tell, why stir all that up again?
This was a rare sighting. The woman was almost a recluse and scarcely ever ventured forth from her white mews house. Everyone hated her. If they didn’t hate her they ridiculed her. She was an old has-been now but way back in the thirties she’d been one of those bland actresses with the look of a strait-laced but handsome teacher, the sort no one remembered the name of but who turned up occasionally in one of those rainy Sunday afternoon black and white B movies. Then she’d married a massively rich businessman and gone on to write a whole boatload of thin romantic thrillers, books full of clever clipped prose in which everyone was wealthy apart from a few working-class idiot comic relief walk-ons. No one read them any more. But she was old now, older than old, stinking rich still but long widowed, a bitter nasty creature who lived alone and spent all her time writing peevish letters to the local paper. Three times she ran foul of us. The first time was when she tried to get Hatchet closed down because she thought the cover of a comic book in the window, a cartoon of two men snogging in bed, was obscene. It wasn’t just one letter, but three or four, and the stupid paper printed them all. Pretty much amounted to a campaign. Maurice stuck a photo of her on the back of the office door at Hatchet, a black and white one from the jacket of one of her terrible old books. Someone, I think Pedro, whose real name was Peter, with his monotone and mountain man demeanour, had taken the trouble to go out and buy some darts specially to throw at it.
The second time was when someone took a hose and doused the cardboard box sleepers near Shepherd’s Bush Market with freezing water very early one morning. Johnny had been on a late night at Hatchet and was walking back to where he’d parked the car and he saw it and when he came back from there he was in a terrible state, You should have seen it, Lor! Horrible. Men in black, well co-ordinated, fucking fascist vigilantes or something, five of them, six maybe, knew what they were doing all right. You could die on a night like this. And it’s getting colder.
‘I didn’t know what to do,’ he said, quivering like a wire. ‘I went to a phone box but it was fucked. What could I have done? Just me. They’d have kicked the shit out of me. What could I do? They’d have kicked the shit out of me.’
‘There wasn’t anything you could do,’ I said, and he dropped into a chair and sat with his head in his hands. Sometimes he was just a great big hole of self-hatred, a pit of relished failure. It was hard work having to comfort him all the time. Those were the times when I wanted to walk out until he’d got over it, but I had to stay and go over the same ground with him again and again and again, like walking around with a crying baby dribbling on your shoulder, patting him on the back.
The Standard covered it. Homeless charities called for an end to harassment and the police denied involvement. Six men and two women were treated in hospital for the effects of hypothermia. One night the paper featured one of the women and one of the men telling their stories of that night and how they came to be sleeping in a cardboard box anyway, and people sent them job offers and encouragement. Phoebe Twist wrote a letter saying most people became homeless because of the choices they’d made. It’s not in dispute, she said, that most of them are drug addicts or alcoholics. They’ve colonised the area in question and the mess they create is appalling – needles, condoms, rotting food. It attracts rats. Many of the homeless beg and use foul language, spit and urinate and worse. People are afraid. There are places they can go to where they could get food and drink and receive assistance, but they don’t use them because they don’t want to abide by the rules. I hear no such outpourings of sympathy for those they intimidate, she wrote, and I am left to wonder why people seem more concerned about these vagrants than about their own neighbours and in fact all the residents of this area.
Stupid old cow, we said, that’s just what she would say. Talk about privilege, her with the silver spoon sticking out of her gob. Anyway, what’s it to her? Hardly ever goes out. ‘Christ, what a fucking hateful pile of steaming shit she is,’ Johnny said, throwing the paper on the floor. ‘Can just see her in an SS uniform.’
The third time came about six months later.
That whole area in those days was posh and poor all mixed. I think it’s just posh now. There were rich places with security guards on, old estates full of graffiti, big houses full of druggies, hundreds of bedsits, clean white mews and sweeping crescents and lovely grand houses. We used to go shopping in Notting Hill and walk down Holland Park Avenue to Shepherd’s Bush when Johnny worked at Hatchet. Quite a few famous people lived round there. Tony Benn. Freddie Mercury. Frankie Howerd. Peter Finch. I saw John Cleese once queuing up at the checkout in the same shop where I saw Phoebe Twist getting her fish fingers. So you could bump into a millionaire one minute and a loser like Melvin Morgan the next. Melvin Morgan asked Johnny for spare change on Shepherd’s Bush Green one day and Johnny gave him a couple of quid and they talked for a while. Melvin Morgan was looking for someone he thought he knew, only he couldn’t remember the address or even the guy’s second name or anything at all really apart from the fact that he was pretty certain he lived round here somewhere. And next day or maybe the one after, there it was – Melvin Morgan’s pathetic face in the paper, surly and staring with a slight squint, narrow-lipped. Stringy throat sticking up turkey-like from a dirty collar.
‘Fuck me, man,’ Johnny said, ‘I gave him a quid.’
After wandering around for hours, off his head on booze and God know’s what, Melvin Morgan had passed out after being sick in the recess of a gateway leading into a pub yard at the side of Phoebe Twist’s mews house. Phoebe Twist was on CCTV going out at one o’clock in the morning with a beret on her head, slippers on her feet and a fur coat over her nightie, hauling the watering can she kept for her pot plants. It was a big watering can and she upended its ice-cold contents all over him. In the morning, covered in a thin film of ice and sick, he was dead. It was on the radio, the evening news. Twist said she thought he was a threat, he was mumbling and making peculiar noises. You would, wouldn’t you, lost, off your head, drenched in sick in a doorway? She said she’d asked him to leave twice and rung the police, but no one came. The water was meant to wake him up and move him on. Of course she regretted his death. Of course she hadn’t waited around to check on him, she was scared of him. Last she’d seen he’d been sitting up. She’d gone straight back to bed and taken a sleeping pill.
I’ve sometimes wondered: if Melvin Morgan hadn’t looked Johnny in the eyes the day before he died, how different would all our
lives have been? Of the great archive of social injustice all around us, stretching back in the endless mirrors of infinity and unfolding still into the future, I’ve wondered why it was that this particular lonely miserable death shook him so to the core. The effect could not have been more harrowing if the man had been his sworn blood brother. We were all appalled, but Johnny grieved. I’ve searched what little I knew of his life before me to explain it, and all I keep coming back to is the cold at that school in Oxfordshire, the nine-year-old boy getting up in the winter dark and washing in freezing cold water.
‘Cold water,’ he said, ‘cold water. Cold water, my God!’ Over and over again. ‘Cold water, cold water, Lor, can you imagine, freezing to death?’
February for God’s sake, wind blasting in from Siberia.
‘She killed him, Lor. Murdered him sure as if she’d stuck a knife in his gut.’
The story on the page was depressingly familiar. Twenty-five years old, slow, dim, foster homes, young offenders’, prison. Booze, speed, H. He’d been staying on his sister’s couch in Leeds, she’d kicked him out, he’d come down to London looking for someone he’d been in prison with.
‘And that story of hers, full of holes as a colander. And they would back her up, wouldn’t they, the police? Where’s the report of her phone call then? Liars. All of them.’
14
One of my favourite walks is the track along the side of Gallinger’s field, takes longer to get home but it’s nice. A hedge runs all the way along on the left, full of the most wonderful wild flowers. The trees spread out their long arms, beseeching the arms of the trees on the other side, but they never get near enough to touch. They put livestock in Gallinger’s field, sometimes horses, sometimes cattle. It’s about two hundred yards across. At the other side there’s a narrow track leading away between the back of the farm and the meadows beyond, and there’s a wooden bench you can sit on at the start of this track but I never see anyone sitting there, although, very occasionally, I sit there myself. So I was walking along looking across towards the empty bench and watching the sky darken as the wind came up, when I saw the cold boy again. A whole field away, but that’s close enough for whatever he is. He was in with the cattle. It’s a very high field, and the shapes of the cattle and the boy were clear against the skyline like black cut-outs. The boy faced the back of the farm. I could make hardly anything out about him because he was so dark against the lowering evening sky. I stood very still and watched him for ten minutes or so, then my ears began to ache from the cold and I walked on. For a while I lost sight of him behind the hedge and some trees, but it was no more than half a minute, and by the time I could see the field again he was gone.