Cold Boy's Wood by Carol Birch (best books to read for students txt) 📕

slow and steady. They never troubled him. The two hives were up against the garden wall, the land in front of them, covered with white and purple clover and thyme and spotted with dandelions, sloping gently down to another arm of the wood. Cautiously he lifted the cover and began chivvying out the first frame, removed it and let it rest against the side of the hive. Now the next one. The bees crowded, crawling. There she is, the queen. Everything looked fine. Put the new super in tomorrow. He still glanced sideways and up before he left, to the far end of the wall – always would, even though it was, Christ, nearly twenty-six years since his mother hanged herself there. There’d been spikes all along the top then, put there by the fabled Grandad Jack to keep kids from climbing over, and she’d tied the belt of her dressing gown to one. The spikes had been removed after that. He’d been somewhere between Shetland and Faroe when the word came, and by the time he got home it was all over, someone had cleaned the house and she was in the chapel of rest in Gulliford. He didn’t go to see her. No point, poor silly soul. It was a terrible thing. Terrible.

Time for a drink. Three or four straight whiskies fast, then toast. He fried a few eggs, shoved them down while watching the news. Bloody depressing crap. The body was on the local. A man, they said. Blow to the head with a heavy object. Dan walked out the back with his bottle and stood swigging. His yard was a tip. A heap of broken bricks was piled up against the hedge, and tyres lay about near a half-dismantled wreck. The fog had gone completely. Wild kittens skittered by the gate leading into the wood. He went round the front for no reason, just walking aimlessly with his bottle. The swish of the tail of something whisked itself away between the ancient wreck of the old car his gran used to occasionally drive in a very slow and dignified way along the narrow country lanes to the huge irritation of other motorists. It and another rust heap were sinking together into the surrounding greenery, becoming part of the landscape. Some of the cats had made a home in the two old wrecks. Three big elders sat there now, one on a roof, the others on the bonnet of his gran’s Wolseley, watching him indifferently. And again, for no good reason, because there really never was any particular good reason for anything but what he and his bottle felt like doing, he lay on his back in the long grass and closed his eyes, and tried to think of some other thing apart from what was left of a body after thirty years in the ground, washed down in the swill like a bit of rubbish. He’d have been at sea then. Didn’t anybody miss the poor fucker? Well, no one would miss me either, he thought. It’s not that bad. It’s not unusual. Then he got ferociously, stupidly drunk. It was getting dusky, bats appeared, first just one or two then a constant skittering. When he got up, his head swirled in a pleasant familiar way. He went out and looked down the lane at the bats swooping drunkenly all along the tops of the hedges in both directions. There was no one about. He walked a little way for no reason. The corncrake grated. Walking back, he got that good feeling, the loose softening perception, and there was his house – hello! – glimpsed from the road through the wild hedge.

You’d think it was derelict. The scent of jasmine came to him. He felt sorry for his house. At heart he was a sentimental man.

The high wall of his garden was covered in toadflax. He ambled over, swinging the bottle, kicked the door open and looked at the garden in the fading light. Two paths crossed in the middle and there was a flaking white bench in the corner where he sometimes sat and smoked. That’s where the jasmine ran wild. It had always been there. He imagined the bees in their hives, a hum of sleep. The bees and the bats would outlast him. Are all the bees dying? His aren’t. His are just the same old bees, living on like pioneers. The last bees on earth. Nothing much was growing but parsley and spring cabbage and a bit of mint. Down at the far end was the open place where he thought he might build his hen coop and a good run whenever he finally got round to it. Sometimes he worked at his garden in the middle of the night if the fancy took him. It was nice out digging under the moon, the bottle propped in the earth. If only he didn’t feel so shattered sometimes. But what could you do about it? It was life. He loved it here. If you stood still sometimes your ears caught things. The trees hissing. Something that croaked and keened under its breath. His ears still listened for a sound from the far wall where the hives stood but it was slightly less than conscious now and fairly tolerable. A couple of times lately he thought he’d heard a new rustling in the woods at night, and he didn’t like that. He liked to know what was what. But he often doubted his senses. They’d let him down too many times.

At the back of the house were three circular overgrown red-brick steps, on which he’d scraped his shins when he was three. Foxgloves and Herb Robert ran wild. He sat down and cried, again for no reason. That big orange tom that talked to his feet was snoozing on the bottom step, the one that was scarred with a long gouge on the right-hand side.

‘You stupid old fucker,’ he told it.

He went back inside,