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

surely not, because he isn’t now. The jacket faded to grey. Two men on a ship, in uniform. Mountains. The sea. The sea. Snowy plains with far mountains. Him? Maybe. At the bottom of the sideboard, a great brown heavy thing with rounded sides that gave an elephantine impression, was a little door that opened onto a peculiar segmented storage area full of ancient records in scruffy old sleeves, LPs, Johnny Mathis, Jim Reeves, Bobby Darin, Roger Miller, The New Seekers, Rockin rollin ridin all along the bay, I said Hello Mary-Lou, goodbye heart, put your sweet lips a little closer to the foam.

That’s what I thought it was.

Put your sweet lips a little closer to the phone.

But for years I thought it was closer to the foam. I was quite young and it seemed quite logical really, she was drinking a foamy drink, a milkshake with a foamy top or something, creamola foam, and they were sitting in some mythical thing, a soda bar, in mythical America. I listened to it one night in town, in a little snack bar where I sat with my first boyfriend, the woody smell of his hair, lights outside the window and a wide street, a young girl with thin dirty bare legs sitting alone at one of the tables. Two men in suits came in and sat down with her. One of them was tall and plump and wore yellow socks. He bought her a coffee. The dirt encrusted round her ankles was speckled black.

Poor girl.

I was dying for a wee, but if I went up to the bathroom he might wake. I could go out in the yard but then the back door would make a noise. I sneaked upstairs and listened carefully behind the first closed door. Mustn’t get the wrong room. He was in there, I heard his deep breathing heading towards being a snore. I crept along the landing. There were three other doors, all closed. The first one I opened slowly and silently onto blackness, and felt for the light switch. Click. Not loud. A spacious room appeared, empty apart from a very old and worn green chaise longue peculiarly placed in the middle as if on display, a ruined chair collapsed in the middle by the curtainless window, and the curtains themselves piled in a heap next to it, a ripped and frayed bundle with the lining stained brown. The floorboards were bare and a lone bulb hung down in the middle of a high, ornate ceiling.

I wonder if there’s a psycho thing going on here, I thought. Perhaps he’ll come downstairs in the middle of the night dressed as his mother.

Suddenly I was very cold and ridiculously tired, and unaccountably close to tears.

I found the stark, unloved bathroom, peed quietly and worried about pulling the chain. But I had to, the water was all yellow. Afterwards I waited a couple of minutes but there was no sound from anywhere in the house, so I hurried back down to the fire, and the fire was so beautiful and the cats so asleep, and the night had entered into a stillness made out of chaos, but out there, all out there, not here with me. ‘Shove up, you,’ I said to the big cat, which spat and sprang to the floor. I pulled the blanket over myself, closed my eyes and listened to the fire burn and the storm rage.

I woke up and the fire had burned down a lot but was still good. The wind moaned, a low worrisome tone. The door into the hall was closed, though I was sure I’d left it open, and someone was standing hesitant on the other side of the door. He’s there. He knows I’m in here alone. He’s very drunk. But then there was silence for so long that I decided I’d imagined it and went back to sleep. When I woke up again the man was over there, sitting in the armchair, drinking whisky straight out of the bottle. I don’t know how long he’d been there.

‘So where’s your family?’ he asked, as if we were continuing a conversation. Perhaps we were.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t really think that’s any of your business. Where’s yours?’

It was unreal. The only light came from the dying fire.

‘What will you do in winter?’ he said, still angry.

I said nothing. I had no idea what I was doing there.

‘That’s no way to live,’ he said.

‘Really?’ I laughed.

‘Have you not got anywhere else to go?’

He put down the bottle, got down on his knees on the hearth and, shoving his hand with a great rattling into an old black coal scuttle, started building up the fire. His big dirty hands arranged the coals neatly and slowly in spite of the small flames that began whispering up around his fingers. I sat up.

‘What’s this rock?’ I asked him.

‘Lava,’ he said. ‘It’s from Iceland.’

I picked it up.

‘It’s very light,’ I said, becoming aware of odd purrings, muffled squeakings from a big green armchair to the right of the fireplace.

‘Feels like the middle of the night,’ I said. ‘What’s the time? What a strange night!’

‘Getting on for four.’ He sat back down, drank, swilled the liquor round his mouth.

‘I thought you’d gone to bed,’ I said.

‘I did.’

‘Can I have some of that?’ I indicated the bottle.

He went out without a word and returned with a glass. Poured.

‘Where’s your family?’ he asked, swiping the outer edge of his watery left eye with his paw. ‘Anyone?’

‘We’re not in touch.’

He handed me the glass. ‘Do they know you’re living rough?’

This was just nosy.

‘I was all right,’ I said. ‘You didn’t have to come looking for me but thank you for worrying about me.’

‘I wasn’t worrying,’ he said. The noises from the green chair increased. The purring became thunderous. A great slurping lick-lick-licking almost drowned out the mewing undertone.

‘Someone’s having kittens,’ I said, and he groaned.

‘Oh Christ,’ he said, ‘not another lot.’

I downed my whisky and fell asleep