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

alone. I ate chocolate, half the Whole Nut. Save the rest for tomorrow. I was glad I’d cleaned my rug, it made everything seem good. It was a nice one, I’ve brought it around with me wherever I’ve gone for years and years; I can’t remember where it came from, but I know I had it in Carmody Square. It’s brown and blue and red and green and looks as if it might be Turkish.

I just lay and lay and lay and tried to drift away. Lily came in my head, eating a pink shiny chewy thing, slowly peeling the paper off it, but some of it’s still sticking to the toffee. It makes my teeth ache to watch her.

‘Remember that poor man that died?’ she says. ‘Guess what?’

The screech owl woke me.

It was pitch black.

*

Lily was flopping about alternately sucking her thumb and smoking. ‘As soon as I turn seventeen,’ she said, ‘Terry’s going to teach me to drive.’

‘How many is that a day now, Lily?’ I asked her.

‘Only about five.’

‘And the rest.’ Johnny was playing Chinese Chequers at the table with Harriet. Harriet was winning.

‘Five too many,’ I said. ‘Can you please not blow it in this direction?’

‘Why?’

‘Because of Harriet.’

‘Harriet likes it. Don’t you, Harry?’

‘I don’t mind.’ Harriet skipped over another two of Johnny’s pieces.

‘He’s got a driving job now,’ Lily said. ‘He really likes it.’

‘Really? What kind of a driving job?’

‘Delivering to shops.’

‘What does he deliver?’ I asked.

‘Anything. He drives a van and he’s got his own car now too. It’s a really good one.’

‘Lily,’ said Johnny, ‘I have absolutely no objection whatsoever to you learning to drive. I think it’s a good idea. But wouldn’t you be better off getting proper driving lessons?’

‘Yeah, but I don’t have to pay Terry.’

Oh well. Johnny and I exchanged a look. She won’t be seventeen for another six months. Time enough to discourage her.

We were supposed to be going to Maurice’s but I didn’t want to go. I was sick of him swivelling in his chair like our professor, idly tossing the fruits of his knowledge at us in his munificence.

‘You’ve changed,’ Johnny said, ‘you’re no fun any more,’ when the girls had retired to their room to play with makeup.

We were always arguing these days, sotto voce.

‘No fun,’ I said, ‘where’s the fun in another boring night at Maurice’s? If anyone’s changed, it’s you.’

‘That is not true. You’re too easily influenced.’

‘Me? That’s a laugh.’

Not that we ever did have much of a laugh by then.

‘You used to be far more open to ideas.’

‘You mean I agreed with you more?’

‘That’s one thing,’ he said. ‘You don’t take my side.’

‘Your side? I don’t even know what you mean.’

‘Yes, you do, you and her, you gang up on me. That’s how it feels.’

‘We don’t.’

‘It’s always the two of you having a go at me, all the time, and I’m sick of it.’

‘What, you mean just because we don’t always agree with you?’

‘I don’t expect you to, you know that, you twist things, I can’t open my mouth but you twist everything I say.’

‘No, you twist things.’

On and on we went, stupid. I said he was a big baby. I hated it when he got like this.

‘I hate it when you get like this,’ he said, and went off to Maurice’s on his own.

*

When did I first look in his eyes and find him gone?

It was across the room, he was lying full length on the sofa watching something on the TV. I’d come in from somewhere, the shops or something, loaded down with stuff. He turned his head slightly towards me. There was a sneer above his mouth. He lifted the mug of tea to his lips and in that moment I realised how profound and irreversible was the coming change, and how complacently I’d ignored its approach. It wasn’t sudden. People often say ‘It came out of the blue.’ Ah no, the signs were there, they just never came into focus. That day when I came and he looked at me like that I knew that he’d started to hate me but hadn’t realised and was still calling it love. He never came back, the old Johnny, the one with soft brown eyes and humour. In all those years, even in the sulks, the snappishness, the irritating smugs, still they were his eyes, shielding hurt feelings, slicked over with pathetic bravado. Now they were hard. There hadn’t been evidence. In early pictures of him he smiles, his eyes twinkle. In his later photographs he aspires to remorseless severity. Oh serious man! I only have one from his early life. He’s sixteen and completely gorgeous. He carried nothing forward.

And when did I first feel afraid? Not afraid in the sense of terror but deeply and with anguish, the way I thought it must feel to be aware of prolonged coming heartache, as if someone dear had just been diagnosed with a terminal illness. That sort of fear. Bang went the shutters, down came the grille. The time came when I couldn’t say what I thought or do what I wanted, because if it wasn’t what he thought or wanted to do there’d be a row. He told me I had no moral compass. And soon there came a time when only the new Johnny looked back from his eyes, and they lost their beauty but gained a formidable depth, controlled, noble and steely. It was the cause, it was the cause, my soul. It was a kind of stern vandalism in him, a haughty disdain for the stupid, the fallible, the lazy. Life was serious, not for calm but striving, and what kicked in was a terrible hard master like some old god.

Anyway, he changed.

And, you know, you pretend. You carry on, because if not, it’s a tragedy, and even at its worst you’ll get a sudden memory like a punch in the gut, Johnny watching cartoons on the TV, such a kid. And I’d cry and lose myself in