Cold Boy's Wood

by Carol Birch

  ‘Cats,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, cats.’

  Like me, he turned to face the house and we stood looking for a while at the blank windows and the open door.

  ‘I heard someone on the stairs,’ he said.

  ‘Just now?’

  ‘Couple of weeks ago.’

  ‘Someone,’ I said.

  He shrugged and walked back inside, and after a moment I followed. The feeling was still there in the house but far less so. He was in the kitchen. ‘I’m going now,’ I said from the doorway. He was rinsing a mug at the sink, looking out of the window.

  ‘Yesterday, upon the stair,’ I said, ‘I met a man who wasn’t there.’

  ‘Shut up,’ he said.

  ‘He wasn’t there again today, I really wish he’d go away. It’s a poem,’ I said.

  ‘Is it now.’

  ‘Who do you think it was?’ I asked.

  ‘Probably my mother,’ he said, casually tossing a grimy dishcloth onto the draining board. A chill went through me. Other people’s ghosts are so much scarier than mine. I went out into the hall and looked around, at the dirty yellow walls and the open doors, up the wide stairs with the dusty handsome bannister. When I looked back he was leaning in the kitchen doorway watching me.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘she’s here too, is she?’

  He scowled and turned away, as if he’d wanted me not to believe him and resented me for making it seem more real.

  ‘You’re a grumpy old sod, aren’t you?’ I said.

  He ignored this and went back into the kitchen.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I said, following.

  ‘Dan,’ he replied. ‘I know yours.’

  That got me. ‘How?’

  His back was to me.

  ‘How?’

  ‘Never mind.’

  That was childish.

  ‘I didn’t tell you, did I?’

  ‘You must have done.’

  He sounded guilty.

  ‘You’ve been in my purse,’ I said.

  ‘You come in my house,’ he said, ‘I’ve got a right to know who you are.’

  ‘I come in your house! You made me come in your house!’

  The monolithic stupidity of the back of his head, his round shoulders, his stolid silence.

  ‘Tell you one thing,’ I said, ‘I won’t be coming in again.’

  ‘Good,’ he said, turned and walked past me into the living room and stood looking down at the fire.

  25

  Can’t have this. Pull yourself together, woman. Up! What are you, fool, special?

  I will try, just for one day, to behave like everybody else. I shall get up, have a wash, comb my hair, sweep my rug, walk into the village. I won’t buy a newspaper, they’re what drove me mad in the first place. Don’t even want to see the headlines. I did all these things, and then I set off, and my heart was scared and thumping by the time I reached the wood’s edge. Because soon, maybe today, people were coming, and then things would be wrong again. I walked along, until I reached the part where there’s a row of new houses on the outskirts of the village. These weren’t here when I first came. Interlopers. The windows winked at me. In the village I stood for a while at the very spot where we parked our car that day, and I could smell the back seat with its fumes and smell of sick and I could see the backs of my father and mother’s heads, my father’s neck red and angry, hers covered with thick brown hair that curved into the hollow then out again. Then I saw the back of my little brother Tommy’s head in the wood, and his little boy voice sang to me: a pig is an animal with dirt on its face… as he pissed on a tree.

  There were plenty of people around in the village, and horses grazing on the green. It’s a pretty place. No one took any notice of me. Outside the pub there was a bench. Two young girls were sitting on it, waiting, I think, for the bus. I know that bus. Through the village and out the other side it goes round a big bend and on past where Dan lives and past the farm and the old cottages, and stops the other side of the narrow bridge going over the stream that runs down from where I get my water. That’s where I get on when I go into town for my cash, my bag of stuff, toilet paper, salt, blue soap in a bottle, eggs, whisky. And I get off there too, coming back. It’s worked out fine.

  I could scream at that woman.

  I wondered if I looked like some old tramp. Too open, too raw, the cold air in my throat. I didn’t know where to go, straight across the green where everyone could see me, or just walk on up the road and out the other side. Go round the edge. Stop. Go in the shop. Go on.

  Ollerenshaw’s. Ting!

  A woman was being served at the tiny counter, across the papers and the little box with strange bright toffee lollies sticking up in spikes, and the Tic-Tacs and chewing gum and lighters. It was all ineffably strange, all the colours jumping about next to one another, and a million different forms of lettering all over the walls and the shelves, even the doors of the glass cabinet. And there was a man, a little farmer with a wonky eye, and a thick-necked girl with narrow eyes and a mouth that chewed, though I don’t think there was anything in it. The people were all strange and looked at me as I entered. Cold eyes they have. I don’t think they like me. I’m a terrible, bad person, I know, but am I evil? I am maybe. How can they tell? It’s written on me.

  The old man behind the counter was thin and stooped and grey all over. His eyes flicked at me and away. My head felt hot inside. It may explode, just burst and splatter them all with my brain. The woman went out. I concentrated on the chocolate and my mouth watered. I felt like gorging on thick sweetness. A tube of Rolos, Wispa, Ripple, Cadbury’s Whole Nut. The farmer bought his paper, and the girl looked at me with the steady indifference of a cow looking over a hedge. I smiled at her to see what would happen but it made no difference to her face. Nothing would have. I was just something to look at. The man left and she said in a raspy voice, ‘Any bread later, Bob?’

  ‘Come in after one,’ the old man said, so she bought one of those awful magazines, the sort Lily used to get, and went out, pushing rudely past me as if I wasn’t there.

  ‘Yes, dear?’ the old man said, not looking at me.

  From the corners of both eyes I saw the rippling of things speeding up. Smiling idiotically, I picked out Rolos, Wispa, Ripple, Cadbury’s Whole Nut, and laid them on top of the pile of newspapers.

  He said something, probably the price but I didn’t catch it, so I just laid a fiver down. This will never do. If it’s this bad here, however will I handle town? It’s that woman’s fault.

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘No.’

  I dropped some of the money on the counter as he gave me my change.

  ‘Whoopsadaisy!’ he said.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, shoved everything in my pockets and left.

  I did all right.

  It started raining lightly, and oh it was good to be in the wood, but my journey back through the fringes and depths was washed with sadness. More change. All the time. God knows where to now. But look at all those people living every day – if they can do it why can’t I? That man standing there every day. Ting! He manages, doesn’t he? I haven’t grown up, have I? That’s what my parents said. I felt like that when I was thirteen and I still do. What is wrong with me? I came home and lay in my nest listening to the gentle patter on the leaves and wondered why they couldn’t all just leave me alone. I ate chocolate, half the Whole Nut. Save the rest for tomorrow. I was glad I’d cleaned my rug, it made everything seem good. It was a nice one, I’ve brought it around with me wherever I’ve gone for years and years; I can’t remember where it came from, but I know I had it in Carmody Square. It’s brown and blue and red and green and looks as if it might be Turkish.

  I just lay and lay and lay and tried to drift away. Lily came in my head, eating a pink shiny chewy thing, slowly peeling the paper off it, but some of it’s still sticking to the toffee. It makes my teeth ache to watch her.

  ‘Remember that poor man that died?’
she says. ‘Guess what?’

  The screech owl woke me.

  It was pitch black.

  *

  Lily was flopping about alternately sucking her thumb and smoking. ‘As soon as I turn seventeen,’ she said, ‘Terry’s going to teach me to drive.’

  ‘How many is that a day now, Lily?’ I asked her.

  ‘Only about five.’

  ‘And the rest.’ Johnny was playing Chinese Chequers at the table with Harriet. Harriet was winning.

  ‘Five too many,’ I said. ‘Can you please not blow it in this direction?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because of Harriet.’

  ‘Harriet likes it. Don’t you, Harry?’

  ‘I don’t mind.’ Harriet skipped over another two of Johnny’s pieces.

  ‘He’s got a driving job now,’ Lily said. ‘He really likes it.’

  ‘Really? What kind of a driving job?’

  ‘Delivering to shops.’

  ‘What does he deliver?’ I asked.

  ‘Anything. He drives a van and he’s got his own car now too. It’s a really good one.’

  ‘Lily,’ said Johnny, ‘I have absolutely no objection whatsoever to you learning to drive. I think it’s a good idea. But wouldn’t you be better off getting proper driving lessons?’

  ‘Yeah, but I don’t have to pay Terry.’

  Oh well. Johnny and I exchanged a look. She won’t be seventeen for another six months. Time enough to discourage her.

  We were supposed to be going to Maurice’s but I didn’t want to go. I was sick of him swivelling in his chair like our professor, idly tossing the fruits of his knowledge at us in his munificence.

  ‘You’ve changed,’ Johnny said, ‘you’re no fun any more,’ when the girls had retired to their room to play with makeup.

  We were always arguing these days, sotto voce.

  ‘No fun,’ I said, ‘where’s the fun in another boring night at Maurice’s? If anyone’s changed, it’s you.’

  ‘That is not true. You’re too easily influenced.’

  ‘Me? That’s a laugh.’

  Not that we ever did have much of a laugh by then.

  ‘You used to be far more open to ideas.’

  ‘You mean I agreed with you more?’

  ‘That’s one thing,’ he said. ‘You don’t take my side.’

  ‘Your side? I don’t even know what you mean.’

  ‘Yes, you do, you and her, you gang up on me. That’s how it feels.’

  ‘We don’t.’

  ‘It’s always the two of you having a go at me, all the time, and I’m sick of it.’

  ‘What, you mean just because we don’t always agree with you?’

  ‘I don’t expect you to, you know that, you twist things, I can’t open my mouth but you twist everything I say.’

  ‘No, you twist things.’

  On and on we went, stupid. I said he was a big baby. I hated it when he got like this.

  ‘I hate it when you get like this,’ he said, and went off to Maurice’s on his own.

  *

  When did I first look in his eyes and find him gone?

  It was across the room, he was lying full length on the sofa watching something on the TV. I’d come in from somewhere, the shops or something, loaded down with stuff. He turned his head slightly towards me. There was a sneer above his mouth. He lifted the mug of tea to his lips and in that moment I realised how profound and irreversible was the coming change, and how complacently I’d ignored its approach. It wasn’t sudden. People often say ‘It came out of the blue.’ Ah no, the signs were there, they just never came into focus. That day when I came and he looked at me like that I knew that he’d started to hate me but hadn’t realised and was still calling it love. He never came back, the old Johnny, the one with soft brown eyes and humour. In all those years, even in the sulks, the snappishness, the irritating smugs, still they were his eyes, shielding hurt feelings, slicked over with pathetic bravado. Now they were hard. There hadn’t been evidence. In early pictures of him he smiles, his eyes twinkle. In his later photographs he aspires to remorseless severity. Oh serious man! I only have one from his early life. He’s sixteen and completely gorgeous. He carried nothing forward.

  And when did I first feel afraid? Not afraid in the sense of terror but deeply and with anguish, the way I thought it must feel to be aware of prolonged coming heartache, as if someone dear had just been diagnosed with a terminal illness. That sort of fear. Bang went the shutters, down came the grille. The time came when I couldn’t say what I thought or do what I wanted, because if it wasn’t what he thought or wanted to do there’d be a row. He told me I had no moral compass. And soon there came a time when only the new Johnny looked back from his eyes, and they lost their beauty but gained a formidable depth, controlled, noble and steely. It was the cause, it was the cause, my soul. It was a kind of stern vandalism in him, a haughty disdain for the stupid, the fallible, the lazy. Life was serious, not for calm but striving, and what kicked in was a terrible hard master like some old god.

  Anyway, he changed.

  And, you know, you pretend. You carry on, because if not, it’s a tragedy, and even at its worst you’ll get a sudden memory like a punch in the gut, Johnny watching cartoons on the TV, such a kid. And I’d cry and lose myself in books.

  *

  I did go back to Maurice’s once or twice more. Both times I noticed something that must have been happening for a while now but that I’d never been aware of. Maurice sidelined Johnny. All his great thoughts were addressed to the others, and when Johnny spoke, Maurice just went on talking over the top of him. Poor Johnny. Too emotional, loose cannon, a drain on energy. And after all, what had he done wrong? Nothing. He’d just become a different person and it was noticed. This is it, I thought, this is why he seethes and sulks, why we are falling to pieces. ‘What a bunch of silly little jumped-up revolutionaries,’ I said when we got home. ‘Who are they? No one. Words words words. They are not your real life, Johnny.’ You should have seen the way he looked at me. Traitor. Apostate.

  ‘Lor… I really want to understand… is it me?… I just want to understand.’ Pained eyes, but the hardness gleamed through. ‘What is it I’m not getting? Don’t you accept that there are terrible injustices in the world?’

  ‘Of course I do. Why are you saying this?’

  ‘I’d die for this cause.’

  I looked at him and wanted to laugh.

  ‘Saint Sebastian,’ I said.

  ‘I’d kill for it.’ His eyes were very serious. ‘There are some totally hateful people. I mean, really bad people. People who’ve really hurt people and done dreadful things.’

  ‘You’re not Saint Sebastian,’ I said, ‘you’re the good Samaritan. That’s what you were when I met you.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Lor,’ he said, smiling. ‘I wouldn’t kill you. Anyway, what are you on about? Why are you bringing the Bible into it? What have those old fairy stories got to do with anything?’

  ‘Have you read the fairy stories?’ I said. ‘The real ones? Horror shows.’

  ‘Exactly!’ he said. ‘And what happens to the wicked? They dance in red-hot shoes forever.’

  ‘Just think of those people at the wedding feast,’ I said, ‘eating their dinner while this woman dances herself to death in red-hot shoes.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘but she was a nasty piece of work, that old queen. Think about it. She had to be stopped.’

  26

  She was there again. ‘I’ve got some chocolate,’ she said, ‘would you like some?’

  She didn’t look right. She was keeping her eyes on the ground.

  ‘I can get my own chocolate if I want any.’ He stood at the top of the steps looking down at her standing in the yard with a carrier bag in which it looked as if there was a bottle. ‘I’ve got things to do.’

  She looked off to the side with her mouth open.

  ‘Did you hear me?’

  ‘Oh sorry,’ she said dreamil
y, ‘bad time, is it?’

  ‘Look,’ he said, raising a hand as if to ward her off, ‘you can’t just keep turning up here.’

  ‘I know. I just wanted to find out if you’d seen that woman again.’

  ‘Madeleine.’

  ‘Is that her name?’

  ‘Yes. No, I haven’t seen her. So now you know. So now you can go. Why are you looking down all the time?’

  She looked up. ‘Am I?’

  ‘Yes, you are, you’re looking really weird.’

  ‘I’m feeling a bit scared,’ she said. ‘I just wanted to get out of the wood for a bit.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said derisively, ‘back to nature’s wearing a bit thin, is it?’

  ‘Just need to let the feeling pass,’ she said, turning to go, ‘that’s all.’

  ‘What’s in the bag?’

  She turned back. ‘Just wine,’ she said.

  Pathetic, she was. Worse than me, he thought. It was a funny feeling being stronger than someone. ‘OK then,’ he said and motioned her in with his head. The fire was all laid and ready to be lit. He grabbed the matches from the mantelpiece for something to do but it was too early to light the fire so he put them back. When he turned she was sitting on the settee. Won’t be able to get rid of her, he thought. The woman’s completely mad. He didn’t know what to do so he got his own bottle of whisky from the kitchen and set it down on the low table. Each recognising in the other a fellow piss-artist, they sat in grudging tranquillity till she’d polished off the best part of the wine, then she started rambling like a maniac. She said there was a ghost boy in the fields. As if he wanted to hear that, what with all the shit he was already putting up with. Then she held out her arm and said, ‘Look. See how it moves under the skin?’

  He couldn’t see anything.

  She said she’d seen this boy all her life and before that even.

  ‘You’re not making sense,’ he said.