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

and cry quietly to show how horribly he’d upset her. So he’d stay out again and then she’d go mad.

Googly eyes filling up with tears.

Oh, poor Mother!

She was too weak and scared to live out in the world. Couldn’t cope. Hunched up in the bathroom, crying next to the bath. Clutching her knees, peering soulfully at the wall with massive pining eyes.

He put his hand down to pull her up.

Fuck you, Mum. I shouldn’t have had to put up with that.

OK.

Musico! Get sensible. Make a list. Go into town Friday. Need a few things. He’d never got round to locking that gate. Seemed pointless. Things to do. Things to do, things to do. Make a start on the chicken coop. But instead of doing sensible things he found himself getting sentimental with the cats. Chasing a small tortoiseshell, scooping it up and singing: Oh what a beautiful pussy you are. You are! You are! The cat, which had no name, purred and narrowed its eyes at him, wisely. The line down the centre of its face looked as if someone had done it with a precision tool. It wriggled, squirmed out of his arms and fled.

He stopped, struck like a statue under the full moon.

This is no way to carry on.

It’s a shame, people said. He wasn’t so bad before the drink got to him. It was after he came back from sea. There just didn’t seem to be anything else to do. He remembered his bunk. His face in that little mirror. He must have been younger then but it always seems to have been the same face in the mirror, the same one all these years, till now it didn’t look like him any more, it didn’t look like anyone he knew. It was much fuller and harder and older. He talked to himself and the cats, forced himself on the tortoiseshell again, danced with it. Ridiculous. Sometimes he did ridiculous things like suddenly shout yeeeh-haaah! to the starry sky for no reason.

The cat scratched his hand, jumped down and ran.

‘Sorry! Sorry!’ he said.

Cold.

Getting cold.

Turning to go in, he stubbed his toe on the wrench that had materialised from nowhere in his path. ‘Fuck!’ he yelled as it went spinning, tripped over a straying wheel brace and fell hard across the steps, cracking himself bang in the centre of the forehead against the edge of the top step.

7

Oh God, poor fool’s knocked himself out.

Well, what can you do? Got to do something. Terrible thing to find the poor fucker’s dead and you could have done something. I only came for the music. Had some wine earlier and was feeling nice. Then he comes out and starts making a racket behind his house, shouting and yelling and groaning, then clonk and that awful silence. The music went softly on in the house, I don’t know what it was, but honestly, it was sinister, the way one minute he’s shouting and singing and the next – nothing.

So of course I had to go and look. I came out of the woods and went into his yard for the first time, and there was plastic tacked over a couple of the back windows, and hundreds of cats all looking at me with wide suspicious eyes. The man was lying face down and half on his side right across the steps, and there was blood on the step and on his forehead; it had run down his face between the eyes, and his eyes were moving about a lot under the lids so he was alive anyway. He was OK. Breathing and everything. Just pissed out of his head. But he looked really uncomfortable, the way the step pressed into his neck and shoved his face sideways, so I thought I should get him a cushion, and went inside. To be honest, I was curious. I felt sorry for the poor old bugger. So I had a little poke around, and it was creepy and depressing. There was a wide staircase with darkness at the top, and on the right as you went in, a massive kitchen that smelt cold and a bit off, with a big wooden table in the middle, deep old white sinks and wooden draining boards. Not much used, I’d say. To the left, from which the music came, the living room, messy and surprisingly cosy with a long sofa and comfy chairs and a TV, and pictures on the walls, the kind of things you saw in junk shops, hunters with dogs, landscapes, boats, nature studies, and a fireplace all laid and ready to light. There were two more rooms, one on either side of the stairs. One was a workshop with tools and wood shavings and cluttered shelves, the other a cat-stinky place filled with old furniture and boxes and a few old doors stacked up against the wall. When I turned on the light there was a scuttling and something dark ran behind a beat-up brown armchair with no seat and scratched arms. ‘Hello,’ I said, ‘I hope you’re a cat and not a rat.’ Why keep all this stuff? Not many books. Not a reader then. I opened the top drawer of an ugly sideboard. Jumble. A Present From Whitby, a little quaint fisherman’s cottage. A lump of rock. A boat with blue-trimmed sails. A pair of cream-coloured kid gloves, perfect and tiny. A brooch consisting of fine filigree intertwined letters, an O and an A and a C. Letters in a bundle. An old telescope. That was nice. I picked it up but the glass was obscured with filth and the mechanism refused to budge. Photographs half out of an envelope. Old black and white of a young woman standing by a swing, grinning happily. An old man and a woman sitting formally, stiff. A lane. Garden. Beehives. The ones out back, must have been there a long time.

Enough. The poor man’ll be dead.

I picked up a cushion from the sofa