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

‘OK,’ I said.

So we walked down Ladbroke Grove.

‘I’m Johnny,’ he said.

‘I’m Lorna.’

A big old coat, a guitar on his back. Said he played at the Cellar Upstairs sometimes and would I like to come? And we went in that old co-op place that used to be there, plain board tables, good coffee and soup, freaks and junkies and ska. I’ve got to go for my little girl, I said, and he came with me. She came running out from school, her first year and she loved it, her smile, two big front teeth, the gap between. ‘What a lovely little girl,’ he said.

God, wasn’t he lovely then though! I’d watch him sleep and refuse to believe that the soul that made that face could be anything but beautiful.

*

I’ve nicked a few cabbage leaves from his garden, just the outer ones. I sing, to the tune of ‘Autumn Leaves’ and a silent Miles Davis accompaniment:

The outer leaves are in my stew pot

The outer leaves that I have stole

The words are a kind of blur until: But I miss you most of all, my darling, when the outer leaves start to boil.

Nothing fits, nothing rhymes.

I’ve forgotten things. Quite a lot, I’d say. It’s raining. It’s so cosy in here. I don’t know why I didn’t do this years ago. The rain runs down the rock face at my back, but it’s OK because I put a big tarpaulin between the tent and the rock, and there’s another overhead, and I have branches all over the top of that. I love the sound of heavy rain on woodland, a roaring. Silver. Kind. I fish out the big strong cabbage leaves, fill them up with rice and herbs and wild garlic from my pot. Then I eat them. After a while, I get up in a dreamy state and walk through the wood. The rain’s stopped. I live close to the ruins. I’m so hidden, there’s no chance that anyone visiting the ruins (that’s if they’re lucky enough to find them) would ever get to me. But no one ever comes, and so it should be. Me and the ruins, we go back a long way. There used to be a path and a clearing but they’re long gone, and there’s not much left now but three blackened walls higher than your head, and some old lichened grave stumps. The ruins straggle on, stumps and bumps and hidden things to scrape your shin on. Me and Lily came looking for them when we stayed in that cottage by the bridge where the water runs under the road and you hear it all night. The ruin was hard to find, all buried away under ivy, and we’d searched twice before and not found it, then suddenly, when we weren’t really thinking about it any more, there it was, walls, things to fall over, stumps. My God, she said, this is like the setting for a horror film. Now how’m I s’posed to sleep tonight? I was telling her the old story, about the stable boy murdered by his master, and about the boy I’d seen in Gallinger’s field all those years before. I used to sit up on the hillside looking over the fields but I never saw him. Poor boy, I’d think, still shivering and hurt after all these strange centuries, whoever he is, whatever he’s done. And she said, Bloody hell, Mum, don’t creep me out. She was fourteen, the same age I was when I read the story in the book I stole from the holiday cottage. A murder hiding here and there in folk tales, cross-bred with elf and boggart and fairy lore, a branched story. Poor boy courts the baron’s daughter. Or sleeps in too long, or skimps on his work, pulls one mocking face too many. The cruel baron beats him, puts him out naked in deepest winter. Cuts off his head, strikes a fell blow, feeds him poison, stabs him with a pitchfork. Tosses him from a high high crag, hurls him in a reedy pond or a midnight tarn, or down down down in a deep dark well full fifty fathoms deep.

The boy of Ercol woods hasn’t walked in years and no one remembers him now.

Still he sings, along with his fellows:

Wae’s me, wae’s me,

the acorn’s not yet fallen from the tree,

that’s to grow the wood

that’s to make the cradle

that’s to rock the bairn

that’s to grow to the man

that’s to lay me!

Fourteen, so a couple of years before everything went crazy, before horrible Phoebe Twist and poor thick Terry and all that stuff. Lily was a lovely kid. She thought she was fat. I used to point out pictures of Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell and say, they’d be thought fat these days you know, just goes to show how ridiculous it all is, but of course she never believed me. She, in jeans and a butterfly-patterned top, picking little pink flowers among the ruins; then she got nettle-stung and started whining, sat down on a stump to poke at a blister that was coming up nicely on the back of her heel.

There’s a bright moon rising tonight. I walk all the way up past the Long Wights till I’m rambling in small boggy fields not much used, and there’s a wide rusted-up farm gate hanging askew at the end of an overgrown track. If you stand still, you can hear the water running off these high fields through the maws of storm drains that hide under hedges. Through that broken-down gate, across the field, if I look to the left I can follow with my eyes the dim up-and-down line of the hedge against the sky and I think I know the exact spot where one old drain I used to walk by in the old days gapes like a mouth widened in a grimace. I walked up here with my little brother once and