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

A weird little woman, withered and dry, with an anxious pinched face and bright bulging eyes, eyebrows two thin brown lines painted so high up that she looked permanently shocked. Over them a crescent of sore-looking red skin was dotted with scurf; a few wisps of sparse grey hair tried to escape over it from the brim of a dark green beret with a stalk sticking up in the middle. It’s her, it’s her, I thought, wait till I tell, but then no, why would I tell, why stir all that up again?

This was a rare sighting. The woman was almost a recluse and scarcely ever ventured forth from her white mews house. Everyone hated her. If they didn’t hate her they ridiculed her. She was an old has-been now but way back in the thirties she’d been one of those bland actresses with the look of a strait-laced but handsome teacher, the sort no one remembered the name of but who turned up occasionally in one of those rainy Sunday afternoon black and white B movies. Then she’d married a massively rich businessman and gone on to write a whole boatload of thin romantic thrillers, books full of clever clipped prose in which everyone was wealthy apart from a few working-class idiot comic relief walk-ons. No one read them any more. But she was old now, older than old, stinking rich still but long widowed, a bitter nasty creature who lived alone and spent all her time writing peevish letters to the local paper. Three times she ran foul of us. The first time was when she tried to get Hatchet closed down because she thought the cover of a comic book in the window, a cartoon of two men snogging in bed, was obscene. It wasn’t just one letter, but three or four, and the stupid paper printed them all. Pretty much amounted to a campaign. Maurice stuck a photo of her on the back of the office door at Hatchet, a black and white one from the jacket of one of her terrible old books. Someone, I think Pedro, whose real name was Peter, with his monotone and mountain man demeanour, had taken the trouble to go out and buy some darts specially to throw at it.

The second time was when someone took a hose and doused the cardboard box sleepers near Shepherd’s Bush Market with freezing water very early one morning. Johnny had been on a late night at Hatchet and was walking back to where he’d parked the car and he saw it and when he came back from there he was in a terrible state, You should have seen it, Lor! Horrible. Men in black, well co-ordinated, fucking fascist vigilantes or something, five of them, six maybe, knew what they were doing all right. You could die on a night like this. And it’s getting colder.

‘I didn’t know what to do,’ he said, quivering like a wire. ‘I went to a phone box but it was fucked. What could I have done? Just me. They’d have kicked the shit out of me. What could I do? They’d have kicked the shit out of me.’

‘There wasn’t anything you could do,’ I said, and he dropped into a chair and sat with his head in his hands. Sometimes he was just a great big hole of self-hatred, a pit of relished failure. It was hard work having to comfort him all the time. Those were the times when I wanted to walk out until he’d got over it, but I had to stay and go over the same ground with him again and again and again, like walking around with a crying baby dribbling on your shoulder, patting him on the back.

The Standard covered it. Homeless charities called for an end to harassment and the police denied involvement. Six men and two women were treated in hospital for the effects of hypothermia. One night the paper featured one of the women and one of the men telling their stories of that night and how they came to be sleeping in a cardboard box anyway, and people sent them job offers and encouragement. Phoebe Twist wrote a letter saying most people became homeless because of the choices they’d made. It’s not in dispute, she said, that most of them are drug addicts or alcoholics. They’ve colonised the area in question and the mess they create is appalling – needles, condoms, rotting food. It attracts rats. Many of the homeless beg and use foul language, spit and urinate and worse. People are afraid. There are places they can go to where they could get food and drink and receive assistance, but they don’t use them because they don’t want to abide by the rules. I hear no such outpourings of sympathy for those they intimidate, she wrote, and I am left to wonder why people seem more concerned about these vagrants than about their own neighbours and in fact all the residents of this area.

Stupid old cow, we said, that’s just what she would say. Talk about privilege, her with the silver spoon sticking out of her gob. Anyway, what’s it to her? Hardly ever goes out. ‘Christ, what a fucking hateful pile of steaming shit she is,’ Johnny said, throwing the paper on the floor. ‘Can just see her in an SS uniform.’

The third time came about six months later.

That whole area in those days was posh and poor all mixed. I think it’s just posh now. There were rich places with security guards on, old estates full of graffiti, big houses full of druggies, hundreds of bedsits, clean white mews and sweeping crescents and lovely grand houses. We used to go shopping in Notting Hill and walk down Holland Park Avenue to Shepherd’s Bush when Johnny worked at Hatchet. Quite a few famous people lived round there. Tony Benn. Freddie Mercury. Frankie Howerd. Peter Finch. I saw John Cleese once queuing up at the checkout in