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

shipshape and watertight. Let it crash and roar above my trees. I got my head down, tired, but I couldn’t sleep. When morning came, the woods were whistling. I had slept, I suppose, because there were traces of dreams and there was sleep grit in the inner corners of my eyes. I didn’t go out because the rain came thundering, and the howling of the world outside was like a sea. I got my old books out of their box. The Family of Man, MOMA 1955. Photographs. Cornell Capa. A traditional fifties Christmas. No, it’s not, it’s Thanksgiving. A lecture theatre in 1952. I always look at the people in the background. I look right into their faces. There they all are. Those people in the crowd, dead now for many years. All over the world, the eyes, the same, everywhere you look, there we all are. My cards lay scattered, the Queen of Cups, the Knight of Swords, the Devil. Later the rain stopped, though it was still very windy. I went out and my eyes narrowed with the bitter air. I went back to the ruin and leaned my back against a tree. I just watched everything, shoved my hands up my sleeves and watched, sharp as the eye of a stoat. I started feeling sorry for the baron. Poor fucker, I thought. Boiled alive. No, he got off. He was rich, money talks. Swears. He got off with it and lived to a ripe old age with a ghost and a daughter who hated him. Couldn’t they just have hanged him, I thought? I mean boiled! For God’s sake. Come on. If that’s the way it was, I’m glad he got off. Maybe the boy was a pain. Maybe she was a pig. Oh the baron’s fair daughter was walking one day, Oh but her love twas easy won… or maybe he was just a brute. No daughter, just a brute that killed a servant. The father to the daughter spake, hey my love and oh my joy…

Just a touch. A quick dab on the shoulder, the left one, nothing that might not have been a leaf drifting down, anything really. These things never do go away forever.

Ai-weee and ai-weeeeee.

Still weeping after all these years. The ghosts that stick are the sad ones.

15

Justice for Melvin Morgan!

Underneath, smaller: She must be charged.

The usual picture of Phoebe Twist, and under it the start of Maurice’s article, which continues on the inside page along with the photographs of her house and the wilting flowers in the doorway where Melvin Morgan had died. I was there when Maurice took those pictures. I ran into him near Holland Park tube station and we walked along together in the direction of Shepherd’s Bush Green. It was bitterly cold but he kept stopping to take photographs. He wasn’t a bad photographer, Maurice. Took some nice pictures of the streets round where we lived. I had one or two till not long ago. We had a framed one on the wall once. He was a very fast walker, always a couple of paces ahead, and I had to keep breaking into little trots to keep up. When he spoke he threw the words back at me over his left shoulder. Suddenly he veered off from the main road, a quick swerve, a jerk of the head for me to go with him, saying, ‘Let’s get a picture of this cunt’s house.’ He apologised for saying cunt. ‘But it really is the only word for her,’ he said. ‘Anything else I could say would be worse.’ We went and stood in front of Phoebe Twist’s house, in the white painted mews full of window boxes. It was on the end of the row with one side facing onto a small cobbled square.

She was so near. Not much of a detour.

Sophisticated cooking smells drifted round the immediate area from the backyard of a fancy pub restaurant, invisible behind a high green paling, and there was the cursed doorway, locked, a wintry trail of bare clematis running wild over the top of it, set deep into the wall at one side. In spring it would make a sweet shadowy nook, but now it was cold and dreary and the cellophane on a dozen or so shiny-crinkled withered bouquets, two neat rows of them tied up with thin silk ribbons, shook in the wind. I didn’t go over to read the notes. Too sad. Maurice acted like a professional, a quick clatter of fast shots, his fingers white and thick and squidged against one another in an ugly way as he held the camera.

‘Fucking murderer,’ he said, ‘she got away with it,’ then we went on our way.

One of Hatchet’s finest, that was, rushed out by the next day. The article begins with a number of bile-filled quotes from the woman’s letters, then gives a brief account of her privileged upbringing, Admiral father, debutante mother, private schools, horses, hunting, all that stuff. ‘Consider now the life of Melvin Morgan,’ Maurice wrote. ‘You will not find here the genteel airs of the country house, the comforts of a fully stocked wine cellar, the whispers of well-oiled doors opening at the nod of a well-connected head.’ Melvin Morgan had nothing, Melvin Morgan had never had anything. Now he didn’t even have life because a fellow human being had deemed him worthless. No doubt this woman had given ample pious lip service to the poor of the earth in many a sanctimonious hymn and prayer throughout her long and pampered life. Now this trash, this eyesore, this human being, Melvin Morgan, was dead.

People have to know this stuff.

Because Phoebe Twist had got off scot free. No charges. Money doesn’t talk, it swears. Somewhere in all this there was a song to be made, I thought, something along the lines of ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’.

‘That’s what it’s like,’ said Johnny. ‘Nothing ever changes.’

*

There they all are, the office