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

Once there was a ghost on the stairs.

Nah! It was nothing! Nothing else happened after that, did it?

He wouldn’t think of it.

‘Where are you, you fuckers?’

They came after a while, slowly, one by one, the big orange one, the matron, the black and white dandy. Who could ever keep track?

43

Winter passed.

The old orange cat died. Usually they went away to die, but this one died in the armchair by the fireplace in its sleep, and he found it dead there one morning. He buried it out back, by the bees, put a stone on top of the spot and found himself looking at it now and then when he was out there seeing to the hives.

Two or three weeks later a new cat turned up, also orange. It just walked in the back door one morning as he was drinking his tea, came into the living room and sat on the end of the sofa staring at him. Its eyes were orange like its fur, and it reminded him of the old cat except that this one was half grown and thin and skittish.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘you’re a one, aren’t you?’

After a few days it seemed to be following him around. Once it sniffed his feet as he sat on the back step, but if ever he tried to touch it, it flinched and ran. He began to think perhaps it was an offspring of the old one’s, and started calling it Ginger 2 (though the old one had never actually had a name) then Gin 2, which ended up as Jintoo. He’d come home stupid and drunk and lie on his back on the sofa and shout, ‘Hey Jintoo! Jintoo! Come on, you fucking cat!’

Sometimes the cat came, sometimes it didn’t.

When work was slow, sometimes he slept the day away. But always at night he was wide awake and the dark crowded his windows. He found himself listening to nothing, a sudden realisation that he’d been doing it for much too long. He broke eggs into a pan and thought about chickens but then the idea of chickens and cats together, no, couldn’t be, unless, such a lot of hassle. His hair grew longer. He drank from the same old chipped cowboy mug every day. One day, down by the hedge at the bottom of the slope where the bees were, he saw something, a difference, he thought, a re-arrangement of something, and when he went down he saw a stick cross tied up with knotty brown twine, six inches high like something a child would make. A few heads of Michaelmas daisies and dog rose scattered the disturbed earth in which it stood. Peculiar.

He didn’t want to touch it. Could have been anything. Kids. Still, he didn’t want to touch it. But who’d been mucking around down here? Kids. Leave it. Instead he sat down under the hedge and prodded at the earth, then went and got a trowel and dug and piled and delved until at a depth of about two feet something was revealed, a corner of a rug, red and brown, so rotten and dirty it was impossible to tell if this really was the rug he’d last seen being lugged about by that woman, and when he knew by the way it stuck and snagged when he tried to pull it out that something was wrapped inside, he gave up. Small like a baby gathered into the last swaddling, there with the bees hovering above in the white and purple clover, whatever it was could stay there.

The cats were taking over the house. That room, the cats’ room, was a disaster. He’d gone in and just grabbed a load of stuff and shoved it all in some big plastic bin bags and taken them to the dump without even looking through anything. Could’ve been anything, but what was all that, anyway, just the past. Now was this only – what existed. He’d put down litter in ridiculous things like old drawers, anything he had, and they were using it, and now he had to go round emptying it all the time or it stank out into the hall and he wasn’t having that. So he cut a hole in the bottom of the door and just kept that door closed all the time so as not to have to think about it all the time. So fucking stiff he was, he groaned when he stood up.

*

April showers.

The April showers, he sang to whichever cat happened to be in the vicinity, may come your way –

The windows streamed, thick ropes of water. It was like a hissing in his head.

They bring the flowers that bloom in May –

They scampered down the hall.

Oh, fuck off, you miserable sods, no taste.

So when it starts to thunder don’t run under a tree –

No, that’s a different song.

He stood at the open back door and watched the rain. The sound of it was all-obliterating, it ran away in all directions like water flowing underneath the ground. There was a funny light in the sky. Maybe a storm brewing. Electricity. It was lovely. He waited for the first rumble of thunder in the distance. The stones, they say. They draw electricity, thunder and lightning. He felt like a walk, down the lane with his mac on and his hood up, all fresh and nice. All glistening, and the long puddle down the centre of the lane shining silver. He didn’t go too far. The outline of a barn on the skyline was rimmed with black. Smelt the cowshit, and the herbs in the hedges. Oh come on, let’s have a big big storm. He jumped the stile into Gallinger’s field. Round the gate was all trampled mud from the cows, though the field was empty, they were all in the upper field. Squelching through the mud he looked to the skyline and thought of