Cold Boy's Wood

hummed and ticked in the grass and the sky was deep cloudless blue. The land around here is full of holes, even now, but I know my way around. Somewhere above me is the old storm drain, its sticky black mouth opening to the underground. I went down into the woods. People mostly stick to the paths but I go anywhere, I know all the signs, the curve of a certain trunk, the particular pattern of shading on the bark of one special fallen tree. I went back to my bower. My bower is hung all over with long strands of beads, inside and out, and brooches pinned here and there, and inside I have small round raffia boxes filled with beads and clasps and chains, and an old musical box that no longer plays music. It’s full of gauzy flowers and brushed felt and pretty buttons.

After tea and bread and cheese and some wine from my box, I sat for ages imagining the tortoise now, still in the woods but grown to a giant, a prehistoric beast. Beware the Jabberwock, my son. The teeth that snap, the jaws that drool. Time stopped all over again as I sat there – it does, it does –

When it had been dark for some time I thought I’d go see if the cat man was playing music, the poor scruffy man who wears those horrible old baggy trousers that sag at the knees. So I took some wine in a bottle and went to the place near the back of his house where I could sit among the trees and listen. I like that. He plays corny old stuff, things I haven’t heard in a long long time, like ‘Misty Blue’, and ‘When the Deep Purple Falls’, and ‘What Becomes of the Broken-Hearted’. Sometimes, in the dark after a drink or two this heartsick music is unbelievably beautiful. You sit there going, oh remember this one, oh –

He’s a sad old thing, his face all frazzled and a look of puzzlement as if someone’s just told him off and he doesn’t know why or what to say. Poor idiot. Poor drunk. Yes, I can hear it in the distance, so off I go and find a nook, and there are lights on in the house. Weirdo.

Once I heard, played on a fiddly jazz sax, ‘Lily of Laguna’. Remember that? Ah no, of course you don’t.

She is my Lily of Laguna,

She is my Lily and my rose.

I used to sing it to her when she was a baby.

*

So there I am lying on my back on Acid Tree Lawn, Holland Park, 1969, the sun hot orange through my closed eyes. A shadow falls upon me and I open my eyes and there’s this young black guy with a hooked nose and a long chin saying, ‘S’cuse me, love, is this your shoe?’

Me and my friend Fiona had dropped out of university and gone to London. I didn’t realise I wasn’t clever till I went to university because up till then everyone told me I was (I could seem to be clever sometimes, I think) and boy could I pass an exam. The trouble was, I wasn’t clever, really I wasn’t clever, but everyone thought I was. And I wasn’t tough. Everyone else was. Tougher, harder. No one else seemed scared like me. I wished I could be hard, but I don’t suppose it’s all it’s cracked up to be. And those intellectuals made me feel stupid. It’s a closed shop and I can’t be doing with it. I couldn’t stand the way they talked, and they were all posh, and if they weren’t posh, they were hard, and everybody putting everybody else down as the song says, and I hated it. I’d sit in a seminar feeling dumb while everyone else talked like Malcolm Muggeridge and snortled superciliously. And everyone banging on loudly about oppression and the domination of the few, when it was still all the same, the ones who banged on the loudest were themselves always the ones rising to the top, the strong, the loud, the confident, and no one else mattered. It got harder and harder to hide my dumbness and lack of tough. But Fiona was OK. She was on my Biology team, and when they brought us in the trays of maggots for scientific purposes – we each had our own personal tray – she joined me at the back of the room. Can’t, I said, just can’t. Me neither, she said. No point in going home, my parents had moved to Halifax and I didn’t know a soul there. Anyway I couldn’t have lived with them any more. I’d spent years wanting to get away and it would have been a massive capitulation to go back. Mainly it was because of my dad, who’d always treated me with embarrassed contempt and made me feel afraid for no reason I could articulate. I don’t suppose it was personal, he was like that with everyone. And my poor old mother, she just put up with it. What a way to live – no choice, always in the shadows, always just enduring. My brother though, twelve now, still at school, stuck there with all that, though to be honest whenever I did go home, he seemed fairly happy with his friends and his football and his scouts. So we went to London, Fiona and I. Fiona had big grey eyes and tumbling red curls that flowed everywhere and she could dance like Isadora Duncan. She ended up a model. Used to see her sometimes in catalogues. And me! I’m laughing now. Look at me! What a state. Oh, but it was such fun! To be young and free and stupid and land in London in 1969. It was a dressing-up festival. Clothes were like fancy dress. Fiona was a medieval princess. I had a floppy yellow bow-tie. I just let my hair go and it went all wild