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

in the pub apart from the occasional squawk from the old grey parrot. The TV over the bar was on but it was just people talking on a couch and you couldn’t hear a thing they said. You could still hear the sound of the wind. This weather, thought Dan. Not right.

‘Apparently they buried that body,’ Mary said, ‘or what was left of it.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Yeah. ’Bout time too.’

‘Well,’ said Marlon, idling on a high stool reading the Examiner, ‘I suppose they’ve got to give it a chance to get claimed or whatever.’

‘I think it’s really sad,’ she said. ‘Think, being dead and no one even knows who you are.’

‘I should think he’s past caring,’ Dan said dryly.

Mary leaned on the bar. ‘Quite a few trees down,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t get to sleep last night.’ The makeup under her eyes was smudged. A tasteful blue tattoo of leaves and vines crept up the side of her neck and vanished behind one ear.

‘Wild near my house,’ said Dan.

‘I’ll bet.’

‘Yes,’ said Eric, ‘the weather’s sure gone funny.’

‘I wish everyone’d stop saying that!’ Pete stuffed crisps into his mouth.

‘Because it is,’ said Eric. ‘Can’t change facts.’

‘All this doom and gloom,’ said Pete, chewing. ‘Gets on my wick, it really does.’

‘People shouldn’t talk and eat crisps at the same time,’ said Eric piously, his face all soft and sunken. Dan looked away. Sometimes the music in here was crap, sometimes it was OK. Tonight it was crap. He didn’t know what it was, a load of gurgling technotwaddle.

‘I’d love a kitten, really I would,’ said Mary, moving down the bar to serve someone who’d just come in, ‘but I just can’t have one.’

Pete gave him a lift back. Neither of them spoke and the headlights, acid white, burned the darkness ahead. Everything in the beam was ghastly and unreal, everything outside it nothing. The tops of the branches in the spindly hedges either side of the road sparkled and crackled.

‘There y’go, mate,’ said Pete, dropping him off.

‘Seeya, Pete.’

The night was black.

The house was dark and cold. The fire had gone out. He lit a fire and lay in front of it, stretched out on the settee. Hell of a racket coming from that room. Never sleep with that going on.

They all want in. Oh miaow! Miaow! Tragic. Trying out for the opera. Sod it. He opened the door and let them in. And of course because they were cats and awkward bastards by nature, they didn’t want in any more.

‘Fuck you,’ he said, went back to the fire and fell asleep. When he woke up, he thought someone had just spoken. The weather was calm and there was only the sound of water dripping, and he had no idea what the time was.

There’d been something, a noise.

He sat up.

But no. Nothing but water, a gentle musical accompaniment. He should get up and go to bed, but instead he fell asleep again.

Time passed.

When he woke – a minute, an hour – who knows? – he thought once more, someone spoke, just now, and strained his ears to catch the ghost of the sound; but there was only a merging of several random small sounds, which came together by degrees and were suddenly clear, undeniable, identifiable: the sliding of a hand on the bannister, a discreet cough, bare footsteps on the stairs.

20

Through the green rank-smelling forest after last night’s wild night, to the stream. I have to wash my socks and knickers with a bar of soap. I remember Johnny washing his clothes in a bowl at midnight in Carmody Square. He would have loved this life in some ways. Ideally he’d have been a hobo riding the rails into the sunset but he’d never have been able to take the dirt, God knows what a boxcar would have done to him. Took at least two showers a day, even when we had no hot water. Standing on an outdoor landing pouring cold water over his head, his naked body brown and skinny and shiny in the early morning light. He could have been simpler, it would have suited him. He could have been a mendicant monk somewhere in the East, a sage on a rock in contemplation, with his begging bowl and his long black moustaches dripping down into the purling stream that meanders beside him through the rocks. Too fastidious though. So careful in some ways, so hopeless and careless in others. He’d lose a twenty pound note just like that. You might as well give it to the dog. Oh well, he’d say with his gentle infuriating eyes, I suppose we’ll just have to get some more.

And here I am, bashing my clothes on a rock in the stream. Johnny had no patience for drudgery. Life’s too short, he’d say. They live like insects, people, mindless, crawling the surface of the earth, scarcely conscious. Not me. Not me. I’m not afraid to plumb the depths. What else is life for? Life, Lorna! Your life! And you, you, you try to tell me what to do. Well, I don’t care about all that. I don’t care about cleaning the floor and getting nice towels and hanging them up, all that bourgeois shit. I care about what’s really important. Don’t you ever try and bring me down to that level. I mean it. I’ll never join the herd. Never. You think that’s real? That – shit. I’d rather be dead.

Oh, the end times with Johnny were terrible.

Lily was the reef on which we foundered. For a long time I had denied the obvious. How could it ever end? We were, I believed, old souls somehow joined through the dimensions. Don’t even start to ask me what that means, I haven’t a clue. Just that for so many years things had remained effortlessly right in spite of our differences, which were never few. They just didn’t matter.

Until they did.

I became irritated by the silly piercing look of his eyes. I never used to see