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

‘U-u-urh!’ she said, but she didn’t look too bothered.

‘Hadn’t you better call him?’

‘I’ll sort it out,’ she said.

By the time she’d got up and had a bowl of Fruit ’n Fibre, Terry was bobbing about restlessly between the window and the table. I went into our bedroom and pulled open the drawer where I kept all my jewellery stuff. I’ll just stay in here, I thought. This should be my day off. The door was open. Terry said, ‘I’d have been well on the way by now.’

‘I know,’ she said, ‘it’s a shame.’

‘I’ve got this money,’ he said.

‘Have you? What money?’

‘Well, I haven’t got it yet, but if I go round she’ll give it me. She’s paying me anyway, she said.’

‘Great!’

‘I was all looking forward to a drive out in the country,’ he said.

‘Aw!’

‘We could go somewhere anyway,’ he said.

‘Yeah? Where?’

‘Dunno. Get out the map and just go.’

And she, the little bugger, the horrible thoughtless infuriating little bugger, called out casually, not hiding anything from anyone, ‘Mum! Will you tell Mark I’ve had to go somewhere? Tell him I’ll give him a call midweek.’

‘You can’t do that,’ I said, rushing out of the bedroom. ‘That’s not fair, Lily, you tell him.’

They were half out the door. She looked back once and giggled then she just went, hair all a mess, sleep still in her eyes, in old jeans and a purple sweatshirt. I looked at the phone and thought about calling Mark. Terry had left it all slimy with butter. I didn’t have Mark’s number to call and let him know, make some excuse, save his feelings. Sorry, Mark, she’s not feeling well. I threw everything in the bowl, all the mess they’d left from breakfast, cursing them all for the inconsiderate bastards they were, all of them, all of them. Harriet went downstairs to play with Eve and Steve’s little boy, who was two now, and at last I had the place to myself. Oh blessed, blessed solitude. I was so tired, I went in and drew the curtains across, lay down on my bed and fell asleep very quickly.

*

The car went off the road in a very pretty part of Surrey, by a pond that swallowed up Lily and Terry and his wonderful car. There was no other traffic, no one else around, just one of those senseless things.

And after that, with breath-taking speed, everything else fell apart too.

When the news came, Mark was in our house, drinking a cup of tea, smiling at Harriet’s hamster as it scurried round and round the table, big black beady eyes like berries. He didn’t know where to look, what to say. The policewoman said, ‘Shall I call your husband?’ I looked over and saw this pale stranger boy looking at me with a face full of fear, as if instead of the deaths of two small people the great day of wrath had been announced, the chasm gaped, the veil of the heavens rent. I don’t remember what was said, how he left. I remember going into the girls’ room and seeing Lily’s unmade bed, with a scrunched-up tissue sticking out from under the pillow and her James Herbert book, a quarter read, lying face down on the floor with its spine bent down the middle. I remember the policewoman. She was lovely. She held my hand. Then Johnny was there, and Harriet was on his knee, her arms around his neck, him with his eyes aflame, and I finally cried, in a weird way, politely, apologetically, a sad slow drip, because it was that or scream. Eve came in and made us all some tea. Steve looked in. Scared blank faces. The police had gone to tell Wilf. It was unbearable, it was endless. How time played, how it stretched and spun and contracted.

30

Dan went upstairs, into the bathroom. He felt awful. Can’t believe this. You dig a hole, it just keeps getting bigger. In the mirror the skin round his neck was all scraggy. He should have felt relieved getting this thing off his hands at last, or at least starting to, but somehow he didn’t.

And what exactly, he thought, was the point of it? What would they do? The great they. They can’t put her away. Not a crime now to be sleeping rough, millions of them. Just get her out of the elements before winter. Some kind of hostel maybe? And if she won’t, she won’t. Least I tried. Least I know I tried, then if they find her one day frozen solid it’s not my fault.

He felt terrible. She’ll go mad. Thinks I’m a cunt already. Still, get her daughter in. She can sort it out. Fuck it. He went down and sat on the back step. It was some time after ten, he thought. A big starry frosty sky. The occasional swish of a tail, a cough, soft movement from the cows over by the hedge. He talking to the owls, a thing he did sometimes. They’d go: Woo-woo! And he’d reply, cupping his big knotty hands in front of his mouth and blowing. Whoo whoo! He’d been doing that for some time when he suddenly got scared so he went out into the middle of Gallinger’s wide meadow and sat down and waited there to feel normal again. It was midnight by the time he felt like returning to the house, which lately had taken on what he could only describe as a crowded feeling. He felt it as he crossed the threshold, as if the rooms he could not see were occupied, as if the faces on the old photographs in the cats’ room were moving, talking to one another. I’ll get rid of them, he thought, once and for all. The room stank of cat pee. He yanked open the two top drawers on the sideboard and pulled stuff out, piled it up on top. Photographs, ancient yellowing documents that hadn’t been important for decades. Just