Cold Boy's Wood by Carol Birch (if you liked this book TXT) 📗

and frizzy like an Afro, and I dyed it black and painted my nails green, and we lived in a wardrobe in Fiona’s brother’s room in a house in Notting Hill. We had to stay in there in case the landlady found out about us. Sitting in the wardrobe putting on our smudgy black eyes. It was a very conscious decision to run wild. It was the first thing I’d found that I really wanted to do. Oh Portobello Road and the Dilly. All those pretty people. How hard it was. No one could be beautiful enough. Inside I felt like the geek in ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’, lost in it all, no confidence at all, but coasting along like a colourful duck on thin ice. We smoked dope and took orange pills, oh those orange pills, Christ, I could do with one now – and one night in the middle of some music thing in a park I looked down and realised I was wearing a Tyrolean milkmaid’s outfit. My God, I thought, what the hell am I doing? And on summer days we’d go down to Holland Park and lie in the sun on Acid Tree Lawn. I was lying there one day on my back, eyes closed, when a shadow fell over me.

‘S’cuse me, love, is this your shoe?’ Prince Charming.

My blue espadrille. The other still sitting there. A dog had run off with it.

Wilf was a chef in a hotel near Euston and worked odd shifts. He had a classic cupid’s bow mouth, which he gave to Lily, and he rode an old Norton motorbike on which we took jaunts out into the countryside whenever we could, taking just any old turning to see where we ended up. He was the most laid-back man I’d ever known. For two years we lived together in a room in a basement in Notting Hill, and if ever there was a time in my life when the living was easy, that was it. I sold shoes on Ken High Street. He baked apple cake, ginger cake, perfect angel cake, read sci-fi and watched football. Sex pretty much stopped after the first year but it took us a while longer to realise that all we were was just good friends. In those days, though, you always had to shack up, that’s how it was. We were never going to stay together. We must always have known, but we just went on as we were because it was so easy and we got along so well, and every now and then we’d still have sex but it really wasn’t lighting up very much. So we decided to split and stay friends, and then I realised my thickening waistline was not only from the apple cake. It was Lily.

*

Silent lightning over the tree tops once a long time ago, and me sitting on the bench with my jewellery things. A silver leaf. Things have been a little mad these days. I started back through the trees and – woo! – listen! –

A kind of sweet singing sighing voice made out of tree tops.

Lor-na! Lor-na!

Hello?

6

He’d started sketching again. Tried to draw one of the cats but the stupid thing moved off. He drew a cat and a fiddle. Found some old drawing pencils and a rubber in the cats’ room. State of it. Wood. Old pine doors. Plywood boards and planks. He was always intending to build a chicken coop and put it at the end of the garden with a run, the bit where he didn’t grow anything. Might as well. Fresh eggs. But he never got round to it. Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle. The cat looked stupid. Gave him whiskers. A smile. Gave him lynx ears. That was better. And musical notes dancing around in the air about his head. Stupid, he wrote. El Stupido. Then he chucked it all in and went to the pub. Pete Wheeler was there. Eric Munsy, mates once, long time ago. God, what’s this all for? They used to go out together sometimes, him and Madeleine, Eric and Josie. What happened to her? Big tall girl. No idea. Still skinny as a rake, Eric. Long grey hair straggling over his shoulders, face like a wet weekend. And here we all are, some of us, still kicking about. Eric raised his glass in silent greeting from the other end of the bar. The music was loud but you could hardly hear it, something bouncy and techy, not his thing. Lots of young ones in tonight, someone was having a birthday or something and they were on their way somewhere. Lots of shouting.

Mary behind the bar knew what he wanted and reached automatically for a glass. ‘Wild in here tonight,’ she said, pulling the pint.

‘Aye.’

Mary was in her fifties with long dyed black hair and a trim figure. ‘There’y’go, my love,’ she said, smiling a crooked-jawed smile and putting the pint down on the mat.

‘Ta, Mary.’

He sat at the bar trying not to look like a dirty old man. He always sat at the end if he could, with his back against the wall next to the old dragon banner the schoolkids made out of rags. It had been there for years and was falling to pieces. He drank steadily and quietly, one pint after another. The bright young things talked very loudly. A hearty little roar went up now and then from the darts players way down the other end, and the grey parrot in its cage just sat there looking wise. Pete Wheeler came over. ‘Oy!’ he shouted over the roar. ‘Did you hear about your old ex?’

‘What?’

‘Your old ex, Madeleine.’

‘What about her?’

‘Been talking to the police about that body,’ Pete said. ‘Says she gave some guy a lift around the time it was, you know, when it happened. And he had blood on his face.’

‘I didn’t think they knew when it happened,’ Dan said.

‘Yeah, well, I