Cold Boy's Wood

by Carol Birch

  ‘Shut up, Mum. Don’t say anything stupid, he’s here. Tes! Here!’ She leaned out and threw down the keys. Soon we heard the familiar tread on the stairs.

  ‘Did you bring it, did you bring it?’ she cried as soon as he came in.

  He had been summoned. A CD he had that she wanted and must have now. Fool of a boy. ‘Great,’ she said, grabbing it, not looking at him.

  ‘Sit down, boy,’ Johnny said, ‘have a cup of coffee. And while you’re at it, Lily, make a whole pot.’

  ‘Ha!’ said Lily but did as he said.

  These days you could almost have believed he liked Terry but actually the main attraction was Phoebe Twist. Johnny was still fascinated by her. ‘Seen anything of Irma Grese?’ he asked.

  Terry didn’t know who Irma Grese was but knew it meant Phoebe Twist, along with Cruella de Vil. He had mentioned that she watched TV in the afternoon. ‘So, go on,’ Johnny would say, ‘what does she watch?’

  ‘Quiz shows and things. You know. Those talk things.’

  ‘And she smells?’

  ‘Well, she’s got a sore on her leg. That’s what smells.’

  ‘Ugh!’

  ‘A big ulcer.’

  ‘Doesn’t she get it seen to?’ I asked.

  ‘She’s got this nurse or someone who comes round sometimes and changes the dressing.’

  ‘Must be awful to be old,’ I said.

  ‘The fridge is the worst,’ said Terry, ‘and the utility room. She’s got all sorts round the back of her washing machine.’

  ‘See what I mean?’ said Johnny. ‘These posh fuckers. Filthy.’

  ‘When you open the fridge,’ Terry said, ‘you have to hold your nose. Smells like someone farted.’

  ‘Please God she’ll get food poisoning one of these days,’ Johnny said.

  ‘And she drinks sherry all day,’ Lily said, ‘all day.’

  ‘You’d think someone like her would have a cleaner,’ I said. ‘Money she’s got.’

  ‘Ah but she’s not right in the head,’ Terry said with a faint grin. ‘She does have a cleaner but she won’t let her in. Says she wants to rob her.’

  ‘Ha!’ said Johnny. ‘And you don’t?’

  ‘No,’ Terry said. ‘I don’t.’

  ‘So why does she let you in? What’s so special about you?’

  ‘Well, it’s only when she needs something doing. She blocks everything up all the time, see. Toilet. Sink in the utility room. Honest, she’s bonkers. Anyway, she’s used to me. She likes me.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Yeah, me. And I sort her telly out for her.’

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘Nothing. She just fucks it up all the time by pressing all the wrong buttons. Honest, she’s mad.’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Lily, ‘enough. I’ve got to get ready. You’d better go now, Tes.’ Without a further glance at him she headed off into her room to start the long process of dolling herself up for tonight. She was going out with Mark. Poor old Terry. No idea what he was up against. I felt sorry for him sitting there with his flushed cheeks and slow blue eyes. He stayed a bit longer looking superfluous, then got up heavily.

  ‘See ya,’ he said.

  ‘Bye, Terry.’

  ‘Bye bye, Terry,’ said Harriet.

  Johnny ignored him. ‘No self-respect, that kid,’ he said when he’d gone. ‘Christ, she can pick ’em.’

  24

  When I was down to a crust I got up. I looked in the mirror. God, is that me? Those hollow cheeks. Those vacant eyes. The skin all softening and the hairs all grey. The dirt.

  Strange me.

  Something told me I had to go and talk to that man. So I went. It was about eleven in the morning, nice weather. I waited in the woods for a while first, making sure no one else was there, watched him lumbering about in the yard, big shoulders, graceless. He wore a cap and what was left of his hair had grown shaggy under it. The cats were sitting about like mandarins. After a while he went to work on a grey car that was parked by the shed, hanging over the engine in his baggy old overalls. He didn’t see me till I was right there, and ‘Hello,’ I said. He jerked up as if he’d been shot.

  ‘There’s a woman walking round in the woods,’ I said.

  And the fear or whatever I thought I saw was gone and he was just the grumpy old sod he always was.

  ‘I’m sure there’s lots,’ he said, sticking his head back into the engine.

  ‘She was just standing in the same place for ages calling out. She knew. I’m sure she was looking for me. Did you tell someone?’

  ‘Of course I didn’t.’ He sounded indignant.

  ‘How else could she know?’

  ‘Are you thick?’ he said. ‘You leave signs. There’s smoke. You’re not in the wilderness, you’re in a wood. There’s people all around. What do you expect?’

  I hated that. I could have killed him. Till then I’d been living in my faery realm. It vanished with a horrible sound like a deflating balloon and the terrifying world rushed in, flicking from grey to technicolour in a fraction of a second.

  ‘I know her,’ he said then.

  ‘Who is she?’

  ‘She’s a social worker. She’d already heard about you.’

  Why was he angry? Some people just were. He was like a big bull, breathing heavily down his nostrils.

  ‘You told her about me.’

  ‘I did not.’

  ‘You must have done. How else would she know? That part of the wood? That particular direction she was looking in.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, chucking something, some tool or other, maybe a wrench, up onto the roof of the car, ‘she doesn’t mean you any harm.’

  It was a horrible moment. Everything changed like a light turning on or off, I couldn’t say whether it brought darkness or light. Like a sound starting up in your inner ear.

  ‘So you did tell her,’ I said, betrayed. ‘You said you wouldn’t.’

  It was horrible and bizarre because from the corner of my left eye I saw things starting up, scarcely even aware of themselves, things from the other place.

  This other place, Lorna, this other place. Can you tell me some more about that? Can you tell me where, for example, it exists?

  Oh Dr Walse here you are after so many years. One of the many. Dr Semple, Miss Farrell, and you, Dr Walse, you used to pluck at your wattles, pull them out like bubble gum and twang them back into place. Again and again. I suppose it was like biting your nails. And you wore bottle-top glasses and everyone made fun of you behind your back, did you know, I wonder? I smiled.

  ‘Oh, not at all,’ said Dan, though by this time I’d forgotten what he was referring to.

  He gave me a funny look.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he said.

  Of course.

  ‘Have you got a cigarette?’ I asked, knowing I shouldn’t but craving one. I hadn’t had one for nearly four days. Just goes to show I could do it.

  ‘I didn’t tell her where you were.’ He scooped out three cigarettes and handed them to me. I have to give him that: he wasn’t a mean man. ‘What makes you think she couldn’t work it out for herself?’ he said. ‘She’s not stupid.’

  Sounded like he really knew her well.

  ‘Can I have a light?’

  He got out a lighter and handed it to me, seeming annoyed.

  ‘So you know her,’ I said, lighting up, ‘and you said something to her.’

  He sighed. ‘If you insist.’

  ‘What did you tell her?’

  He slammed the hood down and snatched back his lighter. ‘Oh, for God’s sake! No more than she already knew. She said is there someone living in there and all I said was I don’t know, there might be.’ He grabbed the wrench from the roof of the car and started walking back to the house and I followed. Like a dog, the big orange cat came too. That beast needed a good grooming. Full of fleas, the lot of them.

  ‘So I have to go,’ I said.

  He turned and gave me a sour look. ‘List
en,’ he said, ‘she only wants to help. What are you worried about?’

  ‘I told you.’

  He was at the door by now. The cigarette tasted good and pure and fresh and rushed into my lungs.

  ‘I don’t want anyone hanging round,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to be moved on. I’m not doing any harm.’ I was all shaky. I couldn’t help it, I sat down on the back step and my forehead was cold and wet.

  ‘It’s not your wood,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t belong to you, does it?’

  Nothing more to say. Later I’d decide what to do. The whole thing had always been madness. I could go back to that place, the betting shop and the carpet shop opposite, the sheer hopeless mundanity of it all. Grow old there, really old. It was one of those times when I envied sincerely people with faith. I had none, not really, no matter how hard I sometimes tried, and I did, many times. I know I don’t have it because of the fact that I’m always scared. That view from the window, the polite dove-grey sky over the street, the grinning leer of the cardboard buffoon mugging it in the betting shop window, all of that, to me, is more terrifying than the wood in the middle of the night.

  The orange cat sat across from me, watching me with a grim, slightly concerned look.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ the man said, not nicely.

  ‘I’ve been ill.’

  There was a big gouge in the back step, spoiling the pretty weed-sprouting symmetry of the semi-circle. ‘I wondered if you could get me something from the shop if you were going into the village.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  One of the cats had caught a vole or a shrew, I couldn’t tell what. Oh God, I hate that. The poor little thing with its heart beating visibly and furiously, the darling thing. The sweet little black and white cat with his four white socks. Two steps below my feet, the Roman Games.

  ‘Oh fuck sake!’ said the man, stomping back down the steps and seizing the cat by the scruff of its neck. ‘Let go!’ he roared, but of course it didn’t, till he physically prised its jaws open and the vole or whatever it was fell out and tried to run but couldn’t. Instead, it just hobbled and crawled like a bad actor in an old western.

  ‘Gaargh!’ said Dan, throwing the cat away to land on its feet with wide eyes and prickling hackles in a patch of clover. At the same time he brought the wrench down with all his weight on the head of the poor vole or shrew or whatever it was, so suddenly that I flinched. It splurted. It was like a horror film.

  ‘Here, you half-wit,’ he said to the cat, slinging it the corpse.

  ‘What is it you want?’ he asked, stomping back up the steps past me.

  ‘Paracetamol,’ I said. ‘Milk.’

  ‘I can let you have some of that.’ He kicked the door open. ‘I’m not walking all the way down to the village.’

  I stubbed out my cigarette and watched the cat eat the vole. It seemed very tense, pausing in its biting and chewing every few seconds to look around suspiciously, stopping once or twice to hurl the body in the air with a delicate toss of the head before pinning it once more with a front paw and returning to the feast. The man came back with a carton of milk and a strip of paracetamol. The carton was about half full, I guessed. I swigged some milk down with two of the pills, sitting there on his back step like some old tramp he didn’t want to let in the house. Which is, of course, what I was.

  ‘Thank you for this,’ I said.

  I sensed him standing behind me. ‘Look at that,’ he said. ‘Cruel creatures.’

  The cat’s tail gave the occasional slow flick.

  ‘Cats don’t know it’s evil,’ I said. ‘We do.’

  ‘You look terrible,’ he said.

  The trees were waving their tops in that old slow way, the way they did when things were changing. A big lump in my throat pushed heat up the back of my eyes.

  ‘Is it the flu?’ he asked. ‘I don’t want you coming in with flu, I don’t want to catch it.’

  ‘I think it’s just a bad cold.’

  ‘Well, I still don’t want to catch it.’

  I started getting up, stiff all over. I didn’t want to groan like I usually do, not in front of him. Funny, isn’t it, the way we cling on to dignity? ‘I don’t blame you,’ I said. ‘Actually I think I’m on the mend.’

  He said, ‘Come in the kitchen,’ which made me laugh because it reminded me of Robert Johnson singing ‘Come On in My Kitchen’ in his gorgeous distant voice. Because of the peculiarity of my state this made me tearful, a feeling I knew I must vanquish. I sat down at the spartan wooden table that took up most of the room. Poor room, with nothing on the walls, and bare windows and the smell of controlled damp. He made Irish coffee, and put honey in it. ‘Honey’s good for it,’ he said, ‘whatever it is you’ve got.’

  I laughed.

  ‘You sound like Barbara Cartland,’ I said, but he didn’t know what I was talking about.

  There he sat, awkward in his own space, electric, constantly looking down.

  ‘Is this your honey?’ I said. ‘From your bees?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ I said. ‘I mean, it’s a nice thing to do.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Keep bees.’

  He didn’t reply, just sat down and lit up a cigarette. ‘You shouldn’t be smoking,’ he said, ‘not with a cold.’

  ‘You’re right.’

  He just sat there like a big lump after that, and I couldn’t think of anything to say. The Irish coffee came in a large mug with spots on. He’d done it really well so that the cream on top covered everything. Honestly, you couldn’t have got it better in a bar, and it was lovely, sipping the hot whiskied coffee through the cold cream.

  After a while I said, ‘This is a nice old house.’

  He looked surprised, as if I’d said something personal.

  After another while I said, ‘How long have you lived here?’

  He thought about this. ‘A long time,’ he said, gazing at the window, where the cat now sat licking its chops.

  ‘What, like since you were little?’

  It began to rain softly on the windows.

  ‘On and off.’

  ‘Was it always like this? With the cats and all?’

  ‘Oh no no,’ he said. ‘Not then.’

  We sat in silence for a while and I wondered about who’d lived here, and why he was on his own.

  ‘Must be nice,’ I said.

  He looked at me but said nothing.

  ‘The honey. Your own honey. Must be nice.’

  He stumped out his cigarette and lit another. His eyes narrowed.

  ‘So when did all the cats come?’

  A long pause, then, ‘It was empty for a time,’ he said.

  ‘The house,’ he said.

  ‘They colonised.’

  After that he said nothing and smoked meditatively.

  ‘This woman,’ I said, ‘who is she?’

  He raised his eyes and sighed as if I was a real nuisance. ‘She’s just this woman, you know – just this woman who likes to help with things – you know – just like you know – like if she thinks someone needs help—’

  ‘I don’t need help,’ I said.

  He shrugged and said, ‘You say what you want.’

  ‘What does she know?’ I said. ‘I don’t want someone coming telling me I can’t live there. I’m not doing any harm, it’s ridiculous.’

  I might as well not have been there. Reasonably enough, he wanted me gone.

  ‘Fucking busybodies!’ I drained the mug. ‘Can’t leave anyone alone.’ Next thing I know there’s stupid tears running out of my eyes.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ he whispered, got the whisky bottle from the shelf and plonked it down in front of me. I grabbed it and poured some into the coffee dregs.

  ‘Bloody ridiculous!’ I wiped my face with my hands, downed the whisky and poured some more. ‘You know,’ I said, ‘I just don’t care any more.’

  He filled up the kettle, his back to me. ‘Is it so terrible to y
ou,’ he said, ‘that somebody might actually be wanting to help?’

  ‘I just don’t want it. I just don’t want her coming round.’ And for good measure, like a child: ‘I hate her.’

  ‘Good for you,’ he said unpleasantly, plugging in the kettle before sitting down, pouring himself a big drink and knocking it back fast. ‘You don’t know the woman,’ he said. ‘How can you hate her?’

  So I felt ashamed and hated him instead.

  ‘Can I have some more?’ I said.

  ‘No.’ I heard people in the woods, very far away, high voices. So vague they could have been birds, or a distant machine. I got lost for a while in following them in their eerie fluctuations till it seemed they were threads mingling and dispersing, an auditory manifestation of flocking starlings. He was talking all the time but I wasn’t taking anything in.

  He was saying something:

  ‘So what’s your story?’

  ‘I haven’t got one.’

  ‘Everyone’s got one.’

  ‘OK then, what’s yours?’

  He hesitated then said, ‘None of your business,’ with an embarrassed sneer.

  ‘Did you always live on your own like this? Or was there, you know, like were you ever married or anything? Have you got children?’

  ‘No!’ As if the idea was ridiculous, and he turned his face away and looked at the far wall. The kettle boiled and turned itself off but he ignored it.

  ‘So did you grow up here?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I did.’

  ‘With your mum and dad?’

  ‘No. Just my mother. And my grandmother.’

  ‘I have two daughters,’ I said, and he nodded as if he already knew.

  Something hit the floor in the room above. He jumped like a nervous dog. There was one peculiar silent moment as we both looked at the ceiling.

  ‘Cats,’ he said.

  We sat listening. There was something tight and strained about the air, that subtle change I well knew. I knew because of that dreadful tingle and the urge to run outside that something was upstairs, but I faced it down and stayed put, and there we both were, frozen.

  There was a bang on the landing, one loud dark thud.

  ‘Christ’s sake!’ he said, leapt up and dashed upstairs with a look of outrage on his face. I ran outside and stood in the yard looking at the house. No way was I going back in there. I’d get back in the woods quick. I expected a face in one of the windows above but there was nothing. Then he appeared at the back door. He stood for a minute then came out and walked towards me. ‘Nothing there,’ he said.