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

sat down on the back step and my forehead was cold and wet.

‘It’s not your wood,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t belong to you, does it?’

Nothing more to say. Later I’d decide what to do. The whole thing had always been madness. I could go back to that place, the betting shop and the carpet shop opposite, the sheer hopeless mundanity of it all. Grow old there, really old. It was one of those times when I envied sincerely people with faith. I had none, not really, no matter how hard I sometimes tried, and I did, many times. I know I don’t have it because of the fact that I’m always scared. That view from the window, the polite dove-grey sky over the street, the grinning leer of the cardboard buffoon mugging it in the betting shop window, all of that, to me, is more terrifying than the wood in the middle of the night.

The orange cat sat across from me, watching me with a grim, slightly concerned look.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ the man said, not nicely.

‘I’ve been ill.’

There was a big gouge in the back step, spoiling the pretty weed-sprouting symmetry of the semi-circle. ‘I wondered if you could get me something from the shop if you were going into the village.’

‘I’m not.’

One of the cats had caught a vole or a shrew, I couldn’t tell what. Oh God, I hate that. The poor little thing with its heart beating visibly and furiously, the darling thing. The sweet little black and white cat with his four white socks. Two steps below my feet, the Roman Games.

‘Oh fuck sake!’ said the man, stomping back down the steps and seizing the cat by the scruff of its neck. ‘Let go!’ he roared, but of course it didn’t, till he physically prised its jaws open and the vole or whatever it was fell out and tried to run but couldn’t. Instead, it just hobbled and crawled like a bad actor in an old western.

‘Gaargh!’ said Dan, throwing the cat away to land on its feet with wide eyes and prickling hackles in a patch of clover. At the same time he brought the wrench down with all his weight on the head of the poor vole or shrew or whatever it was, so suddenly that I flinched. It splurted. It was like a horror film.

‘Here, you half-wit,’ he said to the cat, slinging it the corpse.

‘What is it you want?’ he asked, stomping back up the steps past me.

‘Paracetamol,’ I said. ‘Milk.’

‘I can let you have some of that.’ He kicked the door open. ‘I’m not walking all the way down to the village.’

I stubbed out my cigarette and watched the cat eat the vole. It seemed very tense, pausing in its biting and chewing every few seconds to look around suspiciously, stopping once or twice to hurl the body in the air with a delicate toss of the head before pinning it once more with a front paw and returning to the feast. The man came back with a carton of milk and a strip of paracetamol. The carton was about half full, I guessed. I swigged some milk down with two of the pills, sitting there on his back step like some old tramp he didn’t want to let in the house. Which is, of course, what I was.

‘Thank you for this,’ I said.

I sensed him standing behind me. ‘Look at that,’ he said. ‘Cruel creatures.’

The cat’s tail gave the occasional slow flick.

‘Cats don’t know it’s evil,’ I said. ‘We do.’

‘You look terrible,’ he said.

The trees were waving their tops in that old slow way, the way they did when things were changing. A big lump in my throat pushed heat up the back of my eyes.

‘Is it the flu?’ he asked. ‘I don’t want you coming in with flu, I don’t want to catch it.’

‘I think it’s just a bad cold.’

‘Well, I still don’t want to catch it.’

I started getting up, stiff all over. I didn’t want to groan like I usually do, not in front of him. Funny, isn’t it, the way we cling on to dignity? ‘I don’t blame you,’ I said. ‘Actually I think I’m on the mend.’

He said, ‘Come in the kitchen,’ which made me laugh because it reminded me of Robert Johnson singing ‘Come On in My Kitchen’ in his gorgeous distant voice. Because of the peculiarity of my state this made me tearful, a feeling I knew I must vanquish. I sat down at the spartan wooden table that took up most of the room. Poor room, with nothing on the walls, and bare windows and the smell of controlled damp. He made Irish coffee, and put honey in it. ‘Honey’s good for it,’ he said, ‘whatever it is you’ve got.’

I laughed.

‘You sound like Barbara Cartland,’ I said, but he didn’t know what I was talking about.

There he sat, awkward in his own space, electric, constantly looking down.

‘Is this your honey?’ I said. ‘From your bees?’

‘Yeah.’

‘That’s nice,’ I said. ‘I mean, it’s a nice thing to do.’

‘What?’

‘Keep bees.’

He didn’t reply, just sat down and lit up a cigarette. ‘You shouldn’t be smoking,’ he said, ‘not with a cold.’

‘You’re right.’

He just sat there like a big lump after that, and I couldn’t think of anything to say. The Irish coffee came in a large mug with spots on. He’d done it really well so that the cream on top covered everything. Honestly, you couldn’t have got it better in a bar, and it was lovely, sipping the hot whiskied coffee through the cold cream.

After a while I said, ‘This is a nice old house.’

He looked surprised, as if I’d said something personal.

After another while I said, ‘How long have you lived here?’

He thought about this. ‘A long time,’ he said, gazing at the window, where the cat now sat licking its chops.

‘What, like since you were little?’

It began to rain softly on the windows.

‘On and off.’

‘Was it always like this? With the cats