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

stop my scraping. Oh how naked, the petrified leer, the whimpering laugh that came out of his mouth. His eyes were bright and mad and scared, never leaving me, stuck on me, open wide and never blinking. I was sure then. He couldn’t deny the fact of it.

‘I know I can’t explain it in any way you’d understand,’ he said. ‘Don’t even try, Lorna, this is just you and me now.’

Nothing to say then, another long nothing time in which that thing I term my soul curled inward and I felt as if something inside me was rocking itself.

‘There was always much more to it than just you, or me, or anyone else,’ he said. ‘It happened so it had to happen.’

He wanted to come near but I kept him away with my eyes. He looked at me hungrily, as if amazed, kept shaking his head, saying, ‘Wow. Too much. Too much,’ and laughing that well-remembered laugh. ‘Talk about strange days.’

Lightning flashed.

Whenever, wherever, whatever, he’d always been fundamentally, profoundly incapable of admitting fault or guilt. Neither was permitted. ‘You need to see the whole picture,’ he said.

And when I still didn’t speak he said, ‘You were supposed to be with me, Lorna.’

Reproach even.

‘You stopped being with me.’

Tears ran down his cheeks. ‘I didn’t do what you think I did. I did do something but it was never intended to turn out that way. You know that. But what if I did? I didn’t, but what if I did?’

It wasn’t real, the garden, the moon, the ghost of Johnny.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’ve had a horrible day. I had a fight with Maurice.’

‘I know.’ I was very frightened. I stood up. ‘You said.’

Then he told me. Something terrible had happened. No, don’t get upset, it’s not that bad. They’d walked all around the stones, in and out of them, Maurice had taken pictures and now they were above, looking down.

‘How soon are you leaving for Paris?’ asked Johnny.

‘Probably Wednesday.’ Maurice was fiddling with the camera, and Johnny said he wouldn’t mind having a go with it. ‘Aren’t you coming? I said. Aren’t you coming to see Lorna? But it was all Paris and secrets and something big and he was acting like he was too important, you know, and I’m thinking well you’re a right cunt now, aren’t you, you twat, and I said I might go as far as Paris with him, I know some folks in Avignon, but he wasn’t having any of it, you know, trying to put me off, like, who the hell does he think he is? I said, oh fuck, you think I want to trail after you? Just we’re both going in the same direction. He’s quite bald at the back now you know.’

‘Does he know?’

‘What?’

‘Does he know what you did?’

‘Yes, he does. I wish I’d never told him.’

‘Why?’

He wiped his face and rubbed the back of his hand under his nose. ‘Said he didn’t want to know. Said he wished I’d shut up and kept it to myself, said he thought the others suspected, it was pure madness, it sits like a lump inside, he said, that horrible knowledge. He just went on and on as if none of it was anything to do with him, and he asked me why I’d gone off like that and I said my head was all messed up and I just had to get right away, and then he said…’

His throat seized up.

‘Harriet,’ I said.

He looked at me as if I’d hurt his feelings.

‘You think I didn’t think about her? You think I didn’t think about both of you every single day?’

‘What good was that?’

‘I didn’t want to make things worse. I had to sort my head out.’

‘Fuck off, Johnny.’

‘I don’t believe this,’ said Johnny, ‘how could I have known what would happen? You’re like him. I wouldn’t have done it if it wasn’t for him. I was the only one who actually did anything. Like you said, the rest of them, they were all just wanking off. So now I have to take the blame, well no, no, I won’t take it all, and if you think it hasn’t killed me every day, and he said, you know what he said, he said don’t blame your misjudgement on me, I won’t accept that responsibility. Fake. All fakes. Just mouths spouting words. I told him. And there was me like an idiot taking it seriously, and he says, serious? Serious? You think knocking off some silly old bag was serious? And you couldn’t even do that right. Oh well, I’ve seen through him now. Talking like he’s throwing pearls at swine, the woman was meaningless, he says, even if you’d put her at the bottom of the sea with a bullet in her head, who’d have cared? Who’d even have noticed? Like treading on a bug, that’s all. And you, thinking you’ve done some splendid thing! No you didn’t. You killed two irrelevant people and no one cared, no one noticed. How did that change the world? And he went on and on and on, she was everything we’re up against, everything, she’s nothing, he said, and he starts walking on and I was having a go with his camera, I was taking a picture of the stones from above, and he was going the wrong way but he wouldn’t listen, like when did he ever listen to anyone? I told him, if you go that way, you’ll end up at the edge and have to backtrack about a million times and climb down rocks and things and go round boggy bits and holes in the ground, the map’s deceptive, and he started going on and on, trying to make everything normal, on and on about this Paris thing, like it’s some big thing, all top secret, and he said he couldn’t tell me about it because other people were involved and it’s all like yeah yeah, who the fuck do you think you are? Going on