Cold Boy's Wood

by Carol Birch

  ‘Here you are, love,’ I said.

  I rolled him into the side. Both of us were soaked. I stayed with him for a while, maybe ten minutes, maybe twenty. It was so hard to leave. For a while I just looked at his face in the torchlight and remembered how much I loved him even though I hated him too, how he was infused in every part of me. It had been quick. I don’t think he suffered long but he must have experienced the knowledge and terror of what was happening. He didn’t deserve it. And yet still, even now, I think he deserved it. He didn’t know that though. He was the wronged one always. Sometimes I think they both deserved it, he and Maurice, and I thought of them together forever in some seedy little side alley of hell. What sin? For turning people into symbols, Lily, Terry, Phoebe Twist, all the same. Because that’s what he did when it was all over, I believe, he changed her for his own peace of mind from a girl to a thing. Give it any name you want. It was not nice. If he could have avoided it he would. The tears in my eyes were boiling hot. His lower lip hung full and childlike.

  Why are we here? he asked me. Where have you brought me?

  It’s OK.

  So sorry, my love. So sorry we ever met because I couldn’t not have not loved you, even though it meant I had to hate you in the end.

  But not this. Lor, Lor, Lor, not this. Not this.

  Then again, who could kill the soul?

  Still bewildered, love?

  Still.

  When I crawled out, the sun was up. I got in the car and drove out of the field, closing the gate, went home like any other normal person, parked in the lane outside the cottage and went inside. No one would come. I’d clean up later. For now I must sleep. I looked at the clock, it said ten past seven. Is that all?

  I threw my filthy wet clothes on the bathroom floor, showered, closed the curtains and got into bed, and oh my bed was lovely and warm and cool and clean. But there was no sleep. I couldn’t stop shivering. The water was dark black, long streams and trails forming stickinesses of green algae. Below the ground I heard it, water sloshing, a voice in the ground. Silver as moonlight.

  40

  He built up the fire. Something to do. What time is it? Feels very late. But look! it’s only midnight. How is that? he thought. Time’s gone mad.

  Can’t trust a word she says, the daughter said.

  He picked up the bottle of pills from the table and set about reading the label.

  ‘How many of these are you supposed to have?’ he asked.

  ‘Can’t remember.’ She lay back and closed her eyes.

  He got up, got his reading glasses.

  ‘Hm,’ he said, ‘looks like no more till tomorrow,’ then something struck him.

  ‘Should you be drinking with these?’

  She laughed. ‘You make me laugh,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘drink might stop them working.’

  ‘Doesn’t work like that,’ she said. ‘Takes weeks anyway. Doesn’t just kick in overnight.’

  She jumped up and stood staring down into the fire.

  His head was all mussed up. Not long now, he thought, till morning. Her daughter’s coming. Or is she calling? Or was that Madeleine? Anyway, whatever, one or both will turn up soon and take her away. He wouldn’t say a word. It was all just stuff in her head. They could sort it out. A dead man came down when the hillside slipped. She heard it. She made a story. That’s what they do. People who confess to things they haven’t done. It’s all in the mind. Not her fault.

  ‘You go to sleep,’ he said, ‘drink that and go to sleep.’

  The big black and white cat, mother of many, was up there next to her, looking into her face intently as if with sympathy, but she hadn’t seen it.

  ‘Look at that,’ he said, ‘I never seen that cat take to anyone before.’

  She looked at it and it darted its face forward with a rough growl.

  ‘Hello,’ she said.

  The cat took a step or two and lay on its stomach with one paw on her leg.

  ‘Never before seen,’ he said.

  She smiled.

  ‘All that,’ he said, ‘what you said – I don’t think you know what’s true. We think things, we remember things differently.’

  ‘Yes. And some things are just so real but they’re not. I know, I know, I know.’

  ‘It’s just the past,’ he said. ‘It’s gone, caput, over.’

  ‘Just like that.’

  He shifted awkwardly, narrowing his eyes as he spoke. His clumsy hands splayed out on the air. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘I don’t know if anything you say is true. I know you have problems. You’ve got to go somewhere else, where people know what to do with you. I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘What to do with me?’ She laughed. ‘What to do. Indeed, indeed, the big question.’

  He shook his head. ‘There was a body,’ he said. ‘We know that.’

  ‘These cats,’ she said, ‘you really have got to stop pretending they don’t live here. Give up. This is a cat palace.’

  ‘That wasn’t him,’ he said, ‘the body.’

  ‘Too short.’

  He laughed though none of it was funny. His eyes creased. ‘How many more up there, you reckon?’

  ‘God knows. The earth teems.’

  ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘I’m not having this.’

  She blanked and looked down. ‘So that’s it anyway,’ she said, ‘it’s all up. Now I’ve told you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She said nothing but looked at him as if waiting for him to say something, but he couldn’t get his thoughts in order and the room was too hot, and he was beginning to think he’d pushed a bit too far with the booze, even for him.

  She said nothing.

  ‘You—’

  ‘I’ve told you,’ she said, ‘I’m not telling you again.’

  ‘The thing,’ he said, ‘the file.’

  ‘The diamond file.’

  He shook his head. ‘Never heard of a diamond file before.’

  ‘No reason to,’ she said. ‘You’d never need one.’

  ‘So,’ he said, pulling sense back around him like a blanket round his shoulders, ‘so’ – someone like that, he thought, you’d never know what was real and what wasn’t – ‘so let’s just say, let’s say’ – he flipped a cigarette out of the packet – ‘let’s just say…’

  She looked harmless. The witch in his garden. She’d been scary, but he hadn’t been afraid of her now for a long time. He pitied the mess of her. Made him feel like a normal person.

  ‘Let’s say,’ he said, ‘for the sake of argument—’

  ‘I’ve told you the truth,’ she said.

  They sat a while.

  ‘So what now?’ he said.

  She looked at him. ‘Can I have one of your cigarettes?’

  He opened the pack, took one out, tossed it. She caught it deftly and put it in her mouth, and when he tossed his lighter she caught that too. ‘Thanks.’ Her hands shook visibly.

  ‘Stop trembling,’ he said roughly.

  ‘Can’t.’

  ‘Try!’ Sternly. If she went to pieces, he hadn’t a clue how to deal with it. Slug from the bottle, meaningless, just another little smear of courage, another little trick on the mind, let it go, let it happen, nothing can be stopped anyway, not when it’s gone this far.

  ‘So what now?’ he said again.

  ‘I don’t want these to start working,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s like, looking at this cat now—’

  But she was muddling words – so she just looked at him because she didn’t know how to say, and he was looking back and she thought, it’s these I’ll miss when the meds kick in, these moments when you catch something from another person but you don’t know what it is but it’s more than real and too much to take, when you see yourself rippling away under someone’s eyelids, when a cat’s paw comes into focus, a complication you see in someone’s eye stops you in your tracks. These I’ll miss. But not to
feel! Oh God, let me not feel!

  ‘Stop this,’ he said, horrified.

  Because she’d started to cry and it was embarrassing. She stood up. ‘I did it,’ she said, ‘I really did.’

  ‘Stop this!’

  The fire blazed on her face.

  ‘Sit down,’ he said, standing and pulling her arm.

  She was all over the place, electrified. She drew in smoke as if it was life-giving air. ‘I know I’m evil. I want him down from there.’ She jerked away from him and started for the back door, trailing the old rug from her ridiculous hovel behind her. ‘Everyone will know,’ she said, ‘everyone will know. ’

  ‘Wait!’

  She turned.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘You gave me two pills,’ she said. ‘God knows what they were. I’m wide awake.’

  ‘It’s half past twelve.’

  She gathered the rug into a roll and put it under her arm. ‘It’s all right,’ she said, ‘everything’s under control.’

  ‘The fuck it is.’

  He followed her to the door. The moon was high and bright, nearly full.

  ‘Look at the stars,’ she said, then pushed him back lightly and walked out into the yard.

  ‘What you doing?’

  But she ignored him and walked away round the side of the house. He went to the corner and called after her, ‘You cause so much trouble for people. You think you can just do what you want.’

  He saw the dark shape of her for a few moments against the light coming out of the side door window, then she was swallowed up in the night. For a while he heard the sound of her footsteps, then not even that. He walked back to the house, slammed the door, went back to the fire and chucked on another log.

  ‘Idiot!’

  He sat down, grabbed the bottle, threw back his head. ‘I can’t stand all this,’ he muttered. ‘None of it’s even true.’ Let her. Do what she wants. He’d had all he could take. He sat for half an hour gazing into the fire. He thought about going out and getting in the car, drunk as he was, and driving down the lane to see if she was OK. Nah. Much too drunk to drive. Ridiculous. Fuck her and her madness. She’d be somewhere along the steep track leading up to the Wights. God, he was tired. None of it was his problem. Nothing of this would change, his house, his garden, the cats, his grandma’s old car, the back step with the gouge where his mother had hit it with an axe. That was a terrible thing. That old pickaxe, still around somewhere. No use for it. In the shed somewhere. The way she swung it, right up over her head and whack! He’d screamed. Four or five. It was like it was coming down out of the sky. Nothing more terrifying than when your mum turns into a demon and her eyes turn black. But they don’t really. Stop all this, just morbid imagination, things that pop into your head, and she lets them get the better of her. He could have fallen asleep then, but the booze in his head and gut was wide awake and swirling, and shivers were running up and down his chest. Wonder how a heart attack feels. He opened his eyes and raised his head and for a moment the world was blurred and his eyes were running, and his nose. He yawned mightily but it turned into a kind of sob, pointless and inexplicable. Why this terrible watery feeling, as if his chest was turning to mush? He was going to be sick, that’s what it was. He rushed to the back door, yanked it open and just got to the bottom of the steps before he spewed out a gallon or so of bilious alcohol that splashed dramatically across the yard. The cold air made his teeth chatter. He staggered a couple of steps, raised up his face and contemplated the night sky, the sprinkling of stars and the eerily glowing moon, and for a long moment gave up all expectation of ever reaching normality again.

  After a while he went back in, and watched the fire till it sank down into its cradle, then he put the guard up, locked the back door and went to bed.

  41

  I walked along beside the wall, to the gate, but the old gate was no longer there, just those rusted posts that somehow were still familiar. Hello, walls. I thought time was playing tricks. Down along the lane I stopped and listened. I wanted him to have followed me, my only friend, that clumsy silly man who was all wrong. Damn, still there! The sound of water running down under the road, under the house, down and away under the woods and meadows, its channels splitting and diverging all over the place and somewhere no doubt in that mythical mystical mine under the ground, where all the little streams combine into one great subterranean lake. Six hundred years I was a stone, six hundred a drop of water, six hundred, the sunlight that passed once a day on that one spot on a wall no longer in existence. Six hundred more I was the ditch in the lane a few hundred feet down that curly leafy lane from our holiday house, I was the black strings of slimy dirt hanging like thin teeth over a gap more than a foot wide, I suppose, don’t ask me, shaped indeed like a mouth. And gurgle gurgle shine shine went the water over long green strands of hair. That’s where I’m going.

  Clear as day, all that time. Walking down the lane with the limp roll of the rug gathered up and hugged close: this is why I came here. I should have done this years ago. I see my way, nothing’s changed. I like that. Nothing changes round here. If they ever touch my wood I’ll kill them. I remember the exact turning with the thorn tree, up above the Long Wights, the tracks never driven. I remember the car rocking and bouncing on the rutted track, creeping forward, the bushes on either side closing in and scraping the windows, and everything so dark that I couldn’t even see the place ahead where the midden darkness of an empty space where once there was a gate waited like a fall into unconsciousness.

  Not that it makes any sense or any difference. I know it’s not him any more, but I’m getting him out of that place. Over the years it has lain inside me, foul and wet, black and freezing, rank, green and stinky. I walk. It’s a climb, I breathe hard, never thinking how much further there is to go, one foot in front of the other, stars and moon above, on and on, up and up, till at last here it is, the approach, my feet slipping in the grass that’s covered it all. The gate-place, fully dark between the faint leafy tremblings on either side. Still advancing, my side hurting, I find myself laughing. Such fools. Life’s wasted on the living. In the gateway I stand still. When you reach the darkest place, if you stand long enough you begin to see things. The old lost field stretches before me. Don’t move. Listen. Water running underground. Big sky. Because this is impossible and not to be borne, I have emptied myself, there’s only my walking feet, my breath, the smudged and blurry picture my eyes see, moving as I move. Go on, slightly towards the left.

  It takes a while. I have to get down on hands and knees and feel my way beneath the hedge, pushing under, not here, not there, stopping, listening, as if you might give me a sign, as if a voice might call me, this way, this way!

  Not that I can see but I know that this is it, this void. Suddenly my hands feel nothing but space and damp air. Cold. I’ve been saving the torch for this. Now I switch it on, get down and turn myself into a mole. I’ve done this before. Head first I go, flattened, crawling. In here there’s no sky, no world, no life. The light jerks and swerves over low walls of ridged mud, curtains of mould that hang like cobwebs, dripping serenely. There’s no time. Whatever’s left of me is gone to ground, watching, wondering at the strange dream. Perhaps I can never come back. Perhaps this is my end.

  Oh.

  There you are.

  You’ve been washed many many times. You have no face. Oh my boy, you’re flat. And what are they? Secretions. You are nothing but secretions. You’re not even skin and bones, just empty rags. Your brown boots, rotted. Your ripped green t-shirt, filthy dirty, what’s left of it. Hello, face. No face, only skull, a little skin, dark and pinched on top, and a few wisps, non-colour, nothing, and in my mind your curly black hair, so rich and thick. Poor Yorick. Poor little bones. I don’t even know how to pick you up.

  There are ridges under the cloth.

  Here’s real. Cold trickling walls, your flat rags.

  He always loved touch. Hands. Lips. Hair. His face now is anybo
dy’s, all skulls are the same. Where’ve you gone? You great fool, the greatest fool that ever lived. How could you? Now, idiot, look, just look at you.

  I couldn’t bear it so I turned off the torch light.

  *

  I think I’ve been here a long time. In the dark there’s nothing. Time’s gone. Maybe I’m not even here. Floating off on nothing, dipping and falling and rising again. Not even thinking. Maybe I slept. Anyway, there I was sitting upright, and he was still there with me because he was breathing, sussussussuroo in the dark. The light. The button you push up. Click. There you are! We have to go. I won’t leave you here any more. It’s not fair. You’ll fall to pieces if I’m not careful. So, crawling like a worm I brought you out, slow inch by inch, rolling the rug along, the light before me showing that this is hell indeed, this wet slime of a place, crawling on my belly through the earth, and all the years fell away till I was there again, hauling and hauling, deep in the earth where I was no one and he, in death, was more alive than I ever knew him. I saw his face when it was lovely, his dark eyes and hair. God, he was gorgeous. I used to look at him and think, Lord have mercy, all my dreams came true. And what did he do? Turned it all to shit. Mud on the road. I remember I wrote at my lowest point, with a pen that broke the paper, stabbed it: Make my body mud on the road, let the wheels roll over it till I’m crushed in the ruts. My lowest point. All that sweetness came to that in the end. But I got you back. Didn’t see that coming, did you? That’s what I said to him. Do you know the nights I lay awake hour after hour in the long dark, and every instant was impossible, every second hurt. What happened, it served you right, oh God it served you right. You made that happen. Lily and that poor boy, thick as a plank, should have been the old bag, the cow, the evil cunt, ugly evil cunt, ugly evil withered vile old bag of a cunt. She’s dead now, you’ll be glad to know. Such a miserable existence the sour old creature had. In the end she took pills and ended it. Well, no wonder. What did she have? Money. But that’s all.