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

her. Of course not. Could not. We turned into Wilf’s street, and there was his motorbike covered in tarpaulin and Lily on the steps all bundled up against the cold with her big white fluffy scarf, talking to a large thickset lad with ruddy cheeks. ‘Hello, old people,’ she said as I got out of the car, and ran back inside leaving the poor boy standing scratching his cropped brown hair awkwardly in the tiny patch of earth in front of the house. Avoiding my eyes as I passed, he swung one leg across the low fence, crossed over onto next door’s step and lurched into a dim hall. First time I ever saw Terry.

‘Who was that then?’ I asked in the car on the way home.

‘Who?’ Yawning in the back seat with Harriet leaning against her earnestly humming the Postman Pat theme tune.

‘That boy you were talking to.’

‘Oh, that was Terry.’

‘Who’s Terry?’

‘Dunno.’ She looked out of the window. ‘He’s doing the windows next door with his uncle.’

That night, after the girls had gone to bed, Johnny made a fist and hit himself hard in the middle of his chest. ‘From now on,’ he said, ‘I’m not going to feel.’

16

The storms abated, though they were set for a return next week. It was fine but breezy for Fair Day in the big field. All the pretty horses, corralled by the wood’s edge. They’d asked Dan to help with putting up tents and waving people’s cars to the right spot in the field. Through with the work, such as it was, he got his free crap pale ale in a flimsy plastic container and wandered vaguely about. Nothing much worth seeing apart from the races, such as they were, and they weren’t till five. The horses grazed and twitched their skin in the corral. He walked over and leaned on the gate. A fat little Thelwell pony ambled over to say hello.

‘Hello, Fatty,’ Dan said, and tickled her behind the right ear.

She blew hot nostril air at him, faintly snorting, and he remembered Pepper. A couple of boys were playing music on a raised platform, one had a banjo. I should have learned to play an instrument, he thought. The smell of frying onions drifted over from the food stalls.

‘Come on, come on there,’ he said to the horse.

‘Dan!’

It was Madeleine with her husband, a baldy bloke with glasses whose name he always forgot, and a load of kids, two rowdy boys and a sulky girl who stood looking away over her shoulder with her arms folded.

‘Hello,’ Dan said.

‘It’s a bit nippy, isn’t it?’ she said brightly.

‘Well if you want to buy it, buy it,’ her husband was saying to the girl, ‘but don’t make a big deal of it.’

The girl ignored him.

‘Dan,’ Madeleine said, ‘have you noticed anyone hanging round the woods?’

She had on one of those big long scarf things, knotted all fancy, draped this way and that, a mere touch of pale brown makeup under her pale blue eyes.

‘There’s always people hanging round the woods,’ he said.

The kids all had Madeleine’s hair, not that you’d know it to look at her now with its wild and faded glory smartly pulled back and bundled up into a frazzled bun on the nape of her neck. Back then, she’d been plainer in a way, the way she dressed anyway, subdued, not flaunting herself or ever trying to be sexy, even though she could have. She just wasn’t like that. Now look at these flamboyant scarves, the bright layers of ethnic beads.

‘No, not walkers,’ she said, her eyes straying to the two boys scrambling about on the fence trying to reach the horse’s nose. ‘Someone living rough.’

‘Not that I’ve noticed,’ said Dan. Oh well, he thought, she’s rumbled. Well, it’s not my fault, I never said a word.

The husband and the girl wrangled.

‘You’re just angling for more money,’ the husband said. ‘Not cool, Fliss, not cool at all.’

‘It’s my Hothemby family,’ said Madeleine, pushing back some frail stray hairs, ‘their kids play in the woods. Something got them all freaked out. You know what kids are. They’re on about ghosts and so on.’ She smiled. ‘But I think someone might be living rough and, I don’t know, they might need help or something. So I wondered if you’d—’

‘Not seen anything,’ he said.

It was sort of true, he hadn’t seen the woman in weeks.

‘Oh well,’ said Madeleine, ‘most probably just kids mucking about.’ All smiles and jolly crinkling eyes, and the warm throaty voice, must have been terribly reassuring to her clients or whatever you called them. ‘We shall see,’ she said.

His mother’s spiteful voice: like a horse; face of a big horse.

And he’d said nothing.

Don’t upset Mum.

Yes she was. She was spiteful.

The husband came up and skulked near her shoulder. Gary? Neil?

‘She’s after more money,’ he said, smiling broadly at Dan. ‘Hi, Dan.’

Dan nodded.

‘What a surprise,’ said Madeleine.

The girl walked away in the direction of the food stalls.

‘We’re on duty,’ the husband said, ‘for our sins. Got any change, love?’

‘Oh, not again,’ said Madeleine, putting her hand down into the deep straw bag she carried, ‘you’re not giving in to her, are you?’

‘Course not. I’m getting a bun.’

She gave him a fiver and he strolled away.

‘I can’t stand the queues,’ she said, gazing after him, ‘look at them, it’s always like that.’ He looked at her, somehow worried, not knowing why. ‘Did you know,’ she said, ‘I got let down by the Examiner?’

‘Did you?’

‘I did,’ she said. ‘They wanted me to write a piece about when I gave that man a lift because it was around the time when that body was found, so I worked really hard at it, you know – it was like a local reader’s story sort of thing – they said they wanted it by Wednesday morning so I worked really hard to get it to them on time, and then you know what? Can you believe? They went and pulled it at the