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

haunches in this little space. ‘Christ’s sake,’ he said, ‘you know you’ll get arthritis and rheumatism and sciatica and everything else too living like this.’

‘I know,’ she said.

She pumped the Tilley lamp and it glowed a bit brighter. The drink slid down and down, warm and freeing. And the night grew dark outside, and the ghost of a possibility failed to manifest. It wasn’t on. No no no. Come off it, I couldn’t let anyone see my stomach now. Sod all that pride in what you are crap, no one’s ever getting a look at my stomach from now on, not unless it’s a doctor and absolutely necessary. Not for me. Not for you. Not even in the dark. Men don’t care as much. Maybe in the dark. And the well is dry. I’ve reached some place, she thought, where I can see things whole, the young boy in the gross old man, the baby in the waste-of-space, the bullied in the brute. This man in his awful bathos, this morphed clay thing blooped out of soft-eyed youth. My flabby belly, his paunch. Never going to happen.

‘So what happened with you?’ he asked. ‘She said. You lost a daughter. I’m very sorry for that.’

She smiled.

‘She told you.’

‘Yes.’

‘She left some meds, didn’t she?’

‘She did.’

‘Got them here?’

How stupid. They were sitting on the kitchen table.

‘No.’

She laughed, and she looked funny, her eyes shining strangely, and he got that fear again, him out here in the dark wood with a mad woman. Oh Allison Gross who lives in yon tower, the ugliest witch in the north countr-ee…

‘Shall I tell you,’ she said, ‘shall I tell you about it? Do you really want to know?’

35

We couldn’t go on much longer, me and Johnny. Through everything we’d maintained a surface normality, though words had been pointless for a long time. We had this string tied around us both, we were everyday’s reality, always there together, him and me. And there was so much to do! So much to do! And these strangenesses in his eyes, and no doubt he saw that in me too – I don’t know how many times he looked searchingly at me and said, ‘You’ve changed.’ And me thinking it’s him. I didn’t want to touch him. Couldn’t. It was absolute.

‘Lorna,’ he said, ‘Lorna, what’s happening, what’s happening?’

‘I don’t know.’

Harriet’s big red eyes had stopped weeping, she looked almost normal, though really all of us were running on empty. Finally, when she was in bed and asleep, he said, ‘Why was she there?’

His face was dark and strange, all the blood in him rushing to the surface.

‘Why did you let her go?’ he said.

There was no way we could have touched. An invisible field separated us. It had been forming for years.

‘I didn’t.’ My throat was sore.

‘You’re the parent, Lor, you’re supposed to be in charge.’

She just went. Fast. A moment, and gone.

‘She’d be alive now if she hadn’t gone,’ he said.

I looked at him. Stone.

We got through it. Here’s the funny thing. Phoebe Twist turned up to the funerals. That hideous woman. Sat at the back looking like death. And Johnny, he couldn’t go. Just couldn’t. He said: Let the dead bury the dead and who is to be fed be fed. He was angry. Furious. He didn’t want Harriet to go, thought she was too young. Don’t upset her. She was all pale and quiet. ‘I’ll come if you want me to,’ she said. Of course you should come! Your sister! She came. The crematorium was full. Her school friends. Teachers. Wilf, who never worried, his face streaked with tears. If the bomb was dropping he wouldn’t worry till it hit him on the head. Oh Chicken Licken, the sky has really fallen. Mark was there. Hard for him, I suppose, he didn’t know anything about Terry till the crash.

‘I saw another side of Lily,’ he said to me after it was all over.

And I thought, yes, who am I to think I was the only one who knew her? What if this weird pale boy, so strange to me, what if he was the one who got the real deal? Sweet boys really, Terry and Mark. She didn’t do too bad, my Lily, sweet sixteen and two of them so fixed on her. In love? Well, by the standards of sixteen, oh certainly, though so few years had rolled under the bridge that all of them were untested.

*

We lasted another few weeks. The atmosphere around us got sick.

One day Johnny said to me, ‘You don’t love me any more.’

And I didn’t and I did.

‘You are dead,’ he said, ‘I will mourn you.’

The next day he was gone.

I will never forgive him for what that did to Harriet.

Someone can just vanish. It’s less rare than you think. I knew a young guy who went to India and got out of his head far too much on Goa Beach and ended up hospitalised, and all his friends had by this time moved on and he’d fallen out with his girlfriend, and hadn’t had any contact with his parents, if they were even alive, for years. He just never came back. Amazing how someone can just never come back. And every now and then one of his old friends might say, ‘I wonder whatever happened to poor old Simon? Did anybody ever hear anything?’ And nobody ever had.

Sometimes I think I’ll never come back.

I did drink a lot after Lily died. I really did try not to let any of this affect Harry. But she was so hard. So hard to me always, after he’d gone. We were alone together now, and she wouldn’t take a hug or anything from me. She didn’t have to be like that. She missed him fiercely and everything was my fault, she always thought there was something I wasn’t telling her about where he’d gone, but there was nothing at all. No one knew anything, certainly not the Hatchet lot, who, when