Cold Boy's Wood

by Carol Birch

  I didn’t want to see him, I swear. I never want these things to happen. But some things you can’t stop no matter how much you want to.

  Someone whispered. The rising wind. Some witch must have loosed a knot.

  Things are talking to me once more. I’m getting that feeling again.

  Again I stood still, the wind in the thin upper branches soft but shrill. Don’t talk to me in that stupid voice, I said. Don’t just talk crap like the dishwasher at Childhallows. It used to go: shoe me mama, shoe me mama shoe me mama…

  I got in before dark, made all well, shipshape and watertight. Let it crash and roar above my trees. I got my head down, tired, but I couldn’t sleep. When morning came, the woods were whistling. I had slept, I suppose, because there were traces of dreams and there was sleep grit in the inner corners of my eyes. I didn’t go out because the rain came thundering, and the howling of the world outside was like a sea. I got my old books out of their box. The Family of Man, MOMA 1955. Photographs. Cornell Capa. A traditional fifties Christmas. No, it’s not, it’s Thanksgiving. A lecture theatre in 1952. I always look at the people in the background. I look right into their faces. There they all are. Those people in the crowd, dead now for many years. All over the world, the eyes, the same, everywhere you look, there we all are. My cards lay scattered, the Queen of Cups, the Knight of Swords, the Devil. Later the rain stopped, though it was still very windy. I went out and my eyes narrowed with the bitter air. I went back to the ruin and leaned my back against a tree. I just watched everything, shoved my hands up my sleeves and watched, sharp as the eye of a stoat. I started feeling sorry for the baron. Poor fucker, I thought. Boiled alive. No, he got off. He was rich, money talks. Swears. He got off with it and lived to a ripe old age with a ghost and a daughter who hated him. Couldn’t they just have hanged him, I thought? I mean boiled! For God’s sake. Come on. If that’s the way it was, I’m glad he got off. Maybe the boy was a pain. Maybe she was a pig. Oh the baron’s fair daughter was walking one day, Oh but her love twas easy won… or maybe he was just a brute. No daughter, just a brute that killed a servant. The father to the daughter spake, hey my love and oh my joy…

  Just a touch. A quick dab on the shoulder, the left one, nothing that might not have been a leaf drifting down, anything really. These things never do go away forever.

  Ai-weee and ai-weeeeee.

  Still weeping after all these years. The ghosts that stick are the sad ones.

  15

  Justice for Melvin Morgan!

  Underneath, smaller: She must be charged.

  The usual picture of Phoebe Twist, and under it the start of Maurice’s article, which continues on the inside page along with the photographs of her house and the wilting flowers in the doorway where Melvin Morgan had died. I was there when Maurice took those pictures. I ran into him near Holland Park tube station and we walked along together in the direction of Shepherd’s Bush Green. It was bitterly cold but he kept stopping to take photographs. He wasn’t a bad photographer, Maurice. Took some nice pictures of the streets round where we lived. I had one or two till not long ago. We had a framed one on the wall once. He was a very fast walker, always a couple of paces ahead, and I had to keep breaking into little trots to keep up. When he spoke he threw the words back at me over his left shoulder. Suddenly he veered off from the main road, a quick swerve, a jerk of the head for me to go with him, saying, ‘Let’s get a picture of this cunt’s house.’ He apologised for saying cunt. ‘But it really is the only word for her,’ he said. ‘Anything else I could say would be worse.’ We went and stood in front of Phoebe Twist’s house, in the white painted mews full of window boxes. It was on the end of the row with one side facing onto a small cobbled square.

  She was so near. Not much of a detour.

  Sophisticated cooking smells drifted round the immediate area from the backyard of a fancy pub restaurant, invisible behind a high green paling, and there was the cursed doorway, locked, a wintry trail of bare clematis running wild over the top of it, set deep into the wall at one side. In spring it would make a sweet shadowy nook, but now it was cold and dreary and the cellophane on a dozen or so shiny-crinkled withered bouquets, two neat rows of them tied up with thin silk ribbons, shook in the wind. I didn’t go over to read the notes. Too sad. Maurice acted like a professional, a quick clatter of fast shots, his fingers white and thick and squidged against one another in an ugly way as he held the camera.

  ‘Fucking murderer,’ he said, ‘she got away with it,’ then we went on our way.

  One of Hatchet’s finest, that was, rushed out by the next day. The article begins with a number of bile-filled quotes from the woman’s letters, then gives a brief account of her privileged upbringing, Admiral father, debutante mother, private schools, horses, hunting, all that stuff. ‘Consider now the life of Melvin Morgan,’ Maurice wrote. ‘You will not find here the genteel airs of the country house, the comforts of a fully stocked wine cellar, the whispers of well-oiled doors opening at the nod of a well-connected head.’ Melvin Morgan had nothing, Melvin Morgan had never had anything. Now he didn’t even have life because a fellow human being had deemed him worthless. No doubt this woman had given ample pious lip service to the poor of the earth in many a sanctimonious hymn and prayer throughout her long and pampered life. Now this trash, this eyesore, this human being, Melvin Morgan, was dead.

  People have to know this stuff.

  Because Phoebe Twist had got off scot free. No charges. Money doesn’t talk, it swears. Somewhere in all this there was a song to be made, I thought, something along the lines of ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’.

  ‘That’s what it’s like,’ said Johnny. ‘Nothing ever changes.’

  *

  There they all are, the office at the back of Hatchet, Burning Spear on the sound system and the printer running in the room next door. On the wall: We must devastate the avenues where the wealthy live.

  One of the local rags has interviewed her. She is deeply concerned about local policing. This whole episode has been a dreadful ordeal for her. She’d never intended harm to anyone, had never done so in her entire life, but she no longer felt safe in her own home where she had lived for more than forty years. And there was her smug face staring out from the page, a large photograph, those insulting eyes all bloated with certainty.

  Pedro and Barry. Keyvan. Shiv. Els. What was her name, Polly. Others.

  ‘Why do people keep on publishing her? If they just all stopped printing her letters she’d stop writing them.’

  ‘It’s not about the letters. Talk about violence, what’s that if it’s not violence? It’s assault, straight up. I mean if that was anybody else.’ Disgusted, Barry the ferret, tossing the paper over to someone else.

  The pamphlet had just gone out and Shiv was a bit worried. ‘You know,’ she said, rolling tobacco in the saggy red sofa, ‘you shouldn’t really print a picture of her house. What if someone throws a fucking bomb through her window or something?’

  ‘We had to put this out,’ Maurice proudly held up his pamphlet as if he was being photographed for an award. ‘Letters are one thing, but this here what she’s done is bodily harm leading to death. I mean, that is extreme. Anyway, we didn’t identify the house—’

  ‘Oh come on,’ said Shiv, ‘people will know.’

  ‘—and I mean, even if we had, it’s not exactly a secret, is it? Everyone knows she lives there. For fuck sake, she even puts the name of the street on some of her letters, I’m sure she does – oh no no, not at all, put out the word, she wants attention, she can have it.’

  ‘Can’t say I’d cry an awful lot.’ Els. Arched eyebrows, standing up and soaring over everyone else. Always felt like a Munchkin next to her.

  ‘Won’t make a difference anyway.’ Johnny appeared to be in pain. ‘It’ll all be forgotten next week.’

  Phoebe Twist was becoming Johnny’s obsession.

  ‘Serve the old cow right,’ said Barry.

  ‘Not a bomb.
’ Keyvan, striding about like he did, jumping on and off the furniture as if he had worms. ‘Dogshit yeah. Through the letterbox. Dogshit I’m OK with. Not a bomb though.’

  ‘You know what?’ said Johnny coolly. ‘I wouldn’t give a fuck.’

  ‘Yes, you would.’ That was me.

  ‘It wouldn’t be murder, it would be assassination.’

  ‘Cut it out.’ Maurice swung his legs up onto the desk, crossing them at the ankle and lying back in his swivel chair. The soles of his Doc Martens were splodged with wads of grey chewing gum. ‘You want to go and join Barry’s lot if that’s how you feel. It’s not for here.’

  Barry the ferret laughed. He was only moonlighting here.

  ‘You see that?’ said Keyvan. ‘A parasitical underbelly.’

  ‘And what does that sound like?’ Pedro got up to change the music.

  ‘That’s horrible.’

  ‘It’s all horrible. There is so much horribleness out there. This whole world is fucked up.’

  ‘Vermin,’ said what’s her name Polly. I can’t even remember what she looked like. Her head bowed as she buttoned herself up to the chin. ‘That’s all they are to them.’

  ‘See anyone else getting away with it.’

  Shiv agreed, thumbing her lighter. ‘Say it was anyone like us,’ she said. ‘I still say ignore her. Even this,’ waving another copy of the pamphlet, ‘you’re just giving her more publicity. Ignore. Treat with contempt.’

  In truth, the people of Hatchet were more into good works and rhetoric than throwing the little streets upon the great. Mostly.

  Maurice sat forward and put a hand on Johnny’s arm – strangely, I thought, an awkward moment, and Johnny flinched away.

  ‘Yes, I’m angry,’ he said, ‘I’m fucking furious. So should everyone be.’

  ‘You’re emotional,’ Maurice said, ‘that’s not the same. I’m actually probably much more angry than you are, but I’m not as emotional.’

  The way Johnny simmered, taking it as a rebuke. God forbid the master should disapprove. I could kick him. Yes, Maurice. No, Maurice. Do you think so, Maurice? You know, I said once, you’re allowed to disagree with him. I know! he said angrily, and his anger was so cold. But the smallest thing, he gets mortified. Maurice has a 2:1 from Exeter and Johnny dropped out of Somewhere-or-other. Who cares? He did, for all that he said school was a load of crap and we should have home-schooled Lily, we should be home-schooling Harriet. Fine, but he wouldn’t do it. Churning out units, he said. Where was the aspiration? The pursuit of greatness unbeholden to the leaden hammering in of Gradgrind facts? Teacher, leave them kids alone, hey teacher – leave them kids alone! They’re brainwashing you in the womb, he said, by the time you’re born you’re already fucked. Born into slavery. No choice.

  Off they go then about regressive tolerance, a sedate duel.

  ‘We should go,’ I said. We were picking up Lily and Harry from Wilf’s.

  The traffic was awful, the sky like lumpy potatoes.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I said.

  Of course he wasn’t.

  ‘You know,’ he stared moodily into the traffic ahead, ‘nothing’s going to happen. Not a thing. All this deadline stuff, all this talk, all this must publish stuff, it all means nothing. Futile. All of it. Nothing’s going to happen. Nothing ever does.’

  ‘What do you want to happen?’ I said.

  Our voices were carefully expressionless, and the moment was peculiar and loaded for no discernible reason. He was quiet for so long I thought he wasn’t going to answer, then he said, ‘I want her treated like everyone else, that’s all. I want her arrested and tried in a court of law.’

  I looked away into the traffic and remembered that moment in the shop when I’d seen Phoebe Twist by the frozen foods and looked into her nasty cold eyes, and I wondered if I could shoot her. Of course not. Could not. We turned into Wilf’s street, and there was his motorbike covered in tarpaulin and Lily on the steps all bundled up against the cold with her big white fluffy scarf, talking to a large thickset lad with ruddy cheeks. ‘Hello, old people,’ she said as I got out of the car, and ran back inside leaving the poor boy standing scratching his cropped brown hair awkwardly in the tiny patch of earth in front of the house. Avoiding my eyes as I passed, he swung one leg across the low fence, crossed over onto next door’s step and lurched into a dim hall. First time I ever saw Terry.

  ‘Who was that then?’ I asked in the car on the way home.

  ‘Who?’ Yawning in the back seat with Harriet leaning against her earnestly humming the Postman Pat theme tune.

  ‘That boy you were talking to.’

  ‘Oh, that was Terry.’

  ‘Who’s Terry?’

  ‘Dunno.’ She looked out of the window. ‘He’s doing the windows next door with his uncle.’

  That night, after the girls had gone to bed, Johnny made a fist and hit himself hard in the middle of his chest. ‘From now on,’ he said, ‘I’m not going to feel.’

  16

  The storms abated, though they were set for a return next week. It was fine but breezy for Fair Day in the big field. All the pretty horses, corralled by the wood’s edge. They’d asked Dan to help with putting up tents and waving people’s cars to the right spot in the field. Through with the work, such as it was, he got his free crap pale ale in a flimsy plastic container and wandered vaguely about. Nothing much worth seeing apart from the races, such as they were, and they weren’t till five. The horses grazed and twitched their skin in the corral. He walked over and leaned on the gate. A fat little Thelwell pony ambled over to say hello.

  ‘Hello, Fatty,’ Dan said, and tickled her behind the right ear.

  She blew hot nostril air at him, faintly snorting, and he remembered Pepper. A couple of boys were playing music on a raised platform, one had a banjo. I should have learned to play an instrument, he thought. The smell of frying onions drifted over from the food stalls.

  ‘Come on, come on there,’ he said to the horse.

  ‘Dan!’

  It was Madeleine with her husband, a baldy bloke with glasses whose name he always forgot, and a load of kids, two rowdy boys and a sulky girl who stood looking away over her shoulder with her arms folded.

  ‘Hello,’ Dan said.

  ‘It’s a bit nippy, isn’t it?’ she said brightly.

  ‘Well if you want to buy it, buy it,’ her husband was saying to the girl, ‘but don’t make a big deal of it.’

  The girl ignored him.

  ‘Dan,’ Madeleine said, ‘have you noticed anyone hanging round the woods?’

  She had on one of those big long scarf things, knotted all fancy, draped this way and that, a mere touch of pale brown makeup under her pale blue eyes.

  ‘There’s always people hanging round the woods,’ he said.

  The kids all had Madeleine’s hair, not that you’d know it to look at her now with its wild and faded glory smartly pulled back and bundled up into a frazzled bun on the nape of her neck. Back then, she’d been plainer in a way, the way she dressed anyway, subdued, not flaunting herself or ever trying to be sexy, even though she could have. She just wasn’t like that. Now look at these flamboyant scarves, the bright layers of ethnic beads.

  ‘No, not walkers,’ she said, her eyes straying to the two boys scrambling about on the fence trying to reach the horse’s nose. ‘Someone living rough.’

  ‘Not that I’ve noticed,’ said Dan. Oh well, he thought, she’s rumbled. Well, it’s not my fault, I never said a word.

  The husband and the girl wrangled.

  ‘You’re just angling for more money,’ the husband said. ‘Not cool, Fliss, not cool at all.’

  ‘It’s my Hothemby family,’ said Madeleine, pushing back some frail stray hairs, ‘their kids play in the woods. Something got them all freaked out. You know what kids are. They’re on about ghosts and so on.’ She smiled. ‘But I think someone might be living rough and, I don’t know, they might need help or something. So I wondered if you’
d—’

  ‘Not seen anything,’ he said.

  It was sort of true, he hadn’t seen the woman in weeks.

  ‘Oh well,’ said Madeleine, ‘most probably just kids mucking about.’ All smiles and jolly crinkling eyes, and the warm throaty voice, must have been terribly reassuring to her clients or whatever you called them. ‘We shall see,’ she said.

  His mother’s spiteful voice: like a horse; face of a big horse.

  And he’d said nothing.

  Don’t upset Mum.

  Yes she was. She was spiteful.

  The husband came up and skulked near her shoulder. Gary? Neil?

  ‘She’s after more money,’ he said, smiling broadly at Dan. ‘Hi, Dan.’

  Dan nodded.

  ‘What a surprise,’ said Madeleine.

  The girl walked away in the direction of the food stalls.

  ‘We’re on duty,’ the husband said, ‘for our sins. Got any change, love?’

  ‘Oh, not again,’ said Madeleine, putting her hand down into the deep straw bag she carried, ‘you’re not giving in to her, are you?’