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

Thought I heard a sound upstairs, so I shoved everything under the sofa and went to the door and to look upstairs but it was nothing. Cats. Always cats. The house breathed out age. I like old houses. When I was fourteen we moved from our old house to a stucco semi-detached with a bow window. It had small square rooms and I had grey and yellow striped wallpaper in my bedroom. I had the room at the back and my brother Tommy was at the front. He used to come in in the middle of the night and say he was scared. ‘It’s all right,’ I’d say, but I was scared too. We were never scared in the old house, dark and creaky as it was, but this new one was a strict, nasty house, humourless and mean. I went back to the fire and looked at the pictures some more. Look at him, look at him look at him, a poor boy too, just look. I kept hearing things, nondescript ticks and clicks, rustlings, some as close as the kitchen, as if someone was moving carefully so as not to be heard. It can’t be him, I’d have heard him on the stairs with his heavy feet. The door to the hallway was open and the darkness stood beyond it like a curtain. If I’m going to put these back so he doesn’t find out, I’d better do it now, I thought, now or never. It took all my resolution to get up and steal along to the cats’ room in the dark and return the photographs to the top of the sideboard, foolishly trying to arrange them just as they were before, so he’d never know. Then I skittered back down the hall and got down on the settee under the blanket and stared at the fire that was clucking itself gently into peace for the night.

I thought about Harriet. Can’t do it. Have to. Just no way of working it all out. Where can I go? The snow, would it be so bad? The woods in winter, the snow thick and heavy on the branches, falling and sifting down, and me there watching, warm with all my blankets wrapped round me, looking out. How could that harm me more than BetFred and a boarded-up hairdresser and dull yellow food containers made out of that peculiar thick brittle plasticky stuff, blown by the perishing wind along the street below? And who am I? Other people live with it, why can’t I? What if that view from the window, BetFred, the grim, the dreary mediocrity – what if you looked at that and saw it like the wild wood, saw the beings there, those awful stupid boring people, as if they were wildlife in a wood? Try to make something of that. Where was the joy in BetFred and ketchup-smeared plastic?

So I went in the kitchen and got his whisky down off the shelf, and drank two or three and still couldn’t put my mind away and get to sleep, so in the end I got up and went back to my den and saw my old Tarot cards hiding down there, and picked them up and gave them a good shuffle. Nice old things, a lovely Italian deck, very worn down, with gold on the Major Arcana cards. The people all look like Botticelli angels and maidens at the well. The lion is handsome, the moon sadly and serenely wise. It’s embarrassing, says Johnny’s voice, you and all this crap. It’s pointless. It’s really quite pernicious all that kind of thing. I just find it baffling how anyone can find things like that interesting. He was far far above all that shit. ‘I just like the pictures,’ I said, ‘it’s not as if I run my day on them, you know.’ I never drew a spread and said aha the Devil and the ten of swords, I must not go out today. If he thought that was weird, God knows how he’d have coped with me now. Nothing strange happened to me in all the years I was with him.

*

When it was light I went up to the heights, I didn’t know what else to do.

32

‘She’s gone,’ Dan said. ‘She was supposed to be here.’

It was raining again.

Harriet heaved a great exasperated sigh. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you’ll have to show us where she lives.’ She laughed without humour, rolled her eyes and repeated, ‘Lives!’ in a wry tone.

‘Harriet’s concerned,’ said Madeleine.

Harriet looked away, bland-faced.

He went out to get his boots and Madeleine followed. ‘I mentioned about that body,’ she said. ‘You know, it’s worrying me, Dan. I mentioned about that body and I’m not kidding, she went white.’ She leaned forward and whispered. ‘“My dad,” she said. You should have seen her, “My dad.” Cos he went off about then. It was awful! All sorts of things she was saying. She just kept saying, “What if it was her? What if she did him in? My dad. He just was there and then he wasn’t.” And she was a liar, she said, her mum was a liar. Told her he’d left them. But he wouldn’t do that. He would never do that. That’s what she said. Why would he? But then I thought –’

She was following him around irritatingly while he got his boots on, went into the kitchen, shooed out a cat.

‘– I thought, come on now, let’s get forensic here! And I said, Harriet, how tall was your dad? And she said he was tall. She wasn’t sure but she thought at least five eleven, possibly more.’

‘I see,’ he said.

‘Thank God. Because the man they found wasn’t that big. Five foot six, they said. So I could confidently say, that was not your father, Harriet, that man was definitely no more than five foot six. Thank God for that. But do you know what she said after that? I think this