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

If someone saw me here now they’d probably think I was a ghost. Standing like this, so still in the muddy entrance to the field. In a way I do feel like a ghost, haunting this place where so much happened.

It was early morning by the time I’d come down and drifted along through the wood till I found myself again at that place where the track comes out by a cottage with a small garden and a corrugated roof. Typical holiday cottage. Bigger than the one I stayed in with my mum and dad and my little brother. It had been full of dopey little signs and wooden plaques on the wall. A Dream Is A Wish Your Heart Makes. Don’t Fear The Storm, Learn To Dance In The Rain. The one in the toilet said Flush Your Cares Away. Anyway, it’s not a holiday cottage any more. The garden’s too much of a mess for that, full of tortured bicycles and scooters, a sand pit, a trampoline. They’ve had the roof done and put in white uPVC windows upstairs. Doesn’t look anywhere near as nice as it used to.

The people are still in bed. I don’t go into the garden and up to the windows to peep inside. I stay near the trees. We came out of the wood and there they all were in the garden, Johnny talking political philosophy with Maurice Albin, Harriet, missing her two front teeth, running towards us with her worried forehead and a tortoise in her hands, held up as if an offering to the gods.

‘Oh no,’ said Lily, ‘what’s he doing here? This is our holiday.’

There’s the old bench still. She’s sitting on the back of it licking her pink ice cream.

‘Look!’ croaked Harriet. She always croaked.

Eternity in a second. The day of the tortoise and the bees. I see them. Oh God, the pair of them, Maurice in a denim jacket, wholesome and clean, Johnny a limp blue t-shirt, a handsome satyr with brown corkscrew curls hanging into his dark eyes. The noble warrior, the beautiful rebel, sun on his brow, deep in some high-level intellectual conversation in that garden. It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul. Johnny was a Knight of the Round Table. He loved humanity, justice, the downpressed, gave his time to the poor and needy, fed soup to the cardboard box people, the huddlers in doorways.

‘What are you doing here?’ I said to Maurice. ‘Were you pining?’

Couldn’t keep away. The two of them were so bloody boring. Yak yak yak all the time. The low wall, the small round table with garden chairs, the ropey deckchair. Johnny said he’d told me and I’d forgotten. Maurice had come down from Blackpool and was picking Johnny up, the two of them were off to London on some urgent Hatchet business. Should only be a couple of days though, Johnny said. Hatchet (Small Axe originally, after the Bob Marley song, but the name was already taken) was the small bookshop and press in Shepherd’s Bush run by Maurice (logo: a tree, an axe) and it was always demanding last-minute, drop-everything attention. They had a high-brow bi-monthly journal (reviews, agitprop) that did OK in students’ unions, alternative bookshops and little co-ops, but really the whole thing was only ever hanging on by its fingernails. Johnny never had anything that lasted till he met me, not even a father or mother; he’d dropped out and in and out and in and read everything he could get his hands on, sang and played his guitar for money not beer, did this and that of nothing much and really couldn’t stand any of it. He’d left jobs in the middle of afternoons, of shifts, of tea breaks and sentences, just walked out. ‘I thought I was going to burst,’ he’d say. And he never kept a job till he went to Hatchet and met Maurice and found his place in life, and the job that became more than a job. First he was just sorting out and shelving books: The Squatters’ Handbook, Marx, Mao, A Critique of Pure Tolerance, Marighella. Soon, though, he was up and about early with the others, dedicated, out restoring the plumbing in smashed-up two-years-empty council flats.

I was glad he was going because I was sick to death of Lily and him always going at it hammer and tongs, driving me mad. Things were souring with me and Johnny by now. Lily grabbed the tortoise off Harriet and kissed the top of its head. ‘I wouldn’t kiss it,’ I said. I thought she might catch something from it. Its mouth was a placid drooping slit, its legs scrambled against open air. Maurice had rescued it from a house in Blackpool, some people he’d been seeing, sweet but dim beings, he said, think they’re being radical by living in shit, and I don’t mean that metaphorically. Some clown going on about the Lords of Misrule. This child, I kid you not, walking around like some kind of deformed beast with a horrible growth, this nappy that looked as if it carried a ton of bricks like a builder’s load, and the fragrance – and this poor thing underfoot with all the other mini-beasts, you name it, getting kicked around, tripping up over, just a toe-stubber really, pets, can’t see the attraction. So I thought of your little one here.

That was nice. Maurice had no one else to give it to, no wife, no kids, no ties. He used to boast that he could vanish, just like that, and it was rumoured that his name was just one alias among many. Never believed it, myself. He’d brought ice cream too, a big tub of strawberry, there we are, all of us eating our pink ice cream out of plastic bowls, Lily perched on the wooden bench, long brown toes curled round the edge. Harriet, pushing