Where did things go? He went looking for the book and ended up going through the boxes in the back room with a kind of horrible fascination at the weird remains. Why were they there? Who wanted these old birthday cards? No! Throw them! Didn’t know that was still there. Leeches, hanging on. You can’t pull them off and when you do and you’ve hurled them overboard, you remember them two days later and think, oh God, that old receipt, the spyglass! The ration card. Those cards, the Jack that looked like Mr Punch. At last he found the book half-way down about the sixth box he got to. I’m going to take this whole lot into town and dump them, he thought. The lot. Go by Tring and Lily-hoo. There you go, another thing remembered from his gran, she used to recite it in a mournful voice sometimes, that and ‘Barbara Allen’ and ‘The Spanish Lady’. What was that thing, Tring and Lily-hoo, something like fuck it all, just throw it up and go, take the country lanes, that kind of roving gypsy kind of thing, by Tring and Lily-hoo. Drawing of a tree, silhouette, perfect oak tree. Oh he remembered the page. Lily-hoo, for God’s sake. Did it exist? Who called a place Lily-hoo?
And that was another thing. He didn’t much read. Madeleine had always been trying to make him read things. He just didn’t want to. The real world was too much anyway. Why would you want more? It had been mad, him and her, so different. She was serious and intelligent, cleverer than him. Why did she pick him out? Because it was her doing, no two ways about it. There was nothing nice about him. No saving grace. He wasn’t nice. Not good-looking or clever or smart. Neither one of them had really been out with anyone till then. He’d been sitting in the foyer waiting for something, seeing one of his tutors or something, and she was sitting along from him on one of the blue chairs and she turned her head to look at him, not smiling, just looking at him in a serious, inquisitive kind of way. And there he was, him, young, poor stupid boy, a big tough body with a tremor inside and her looking at him like that. She was big and solid and sensible-looking, a very restrained kind of girl who didn’t mix freely, and she’d just been there for weeks in the general everyday heave of college. Unbelievable. They’d actually talked once about getting married. He always knew it would never happen, but she seemed to think it would at one point. So she can’t have been that clever, can she? And her always lording it with her smartness and reading and such and making him feel small.
He took the book into where the murder thing still burbled on from the telly. It was a big thick book and he couldn’t find the picture. There was no index and no contents. Tring and Lily-hoo. Perhaps that was in here too. It was the kind of poetry book that had lots of different departments, Old Tales, Lyrical, Humorous, Nature, Mortality etc. Nice pictures. That one. Ha! He clasps the crag. And all these funny half-remembered phrases clamoured from the side alleys of his memory and still he couldn’t find that old song. He found Tirra lirra by the river and Is it even so? And the fleas that tease in the high Pyrenees, but not what he was actually looking for. And he didn’t find Tring and Lily-hoo either. Maybe it was another book.
An old black matriarch with wild amber eyes, mother of many, graced him with her presence by the fire. Where was the orange one? He looked around, counted four. On a normal night he would’ve gone out and stood on the back step and called puss puss puss puss puss and usually the old ginger tom would come. Might get clawed but he’d come.
The woods had never bothered him, apart from round the old ruin sometimes. But you just stayed away from some places. It was creepy out there, no denying. Things should be the same, they shouldn’t change from day to day. Things shouldn’t be there that aren’t really there. To be out there, now, in the middle of the night, in that dark wood, you’d have to be mad. You’re not supposed to say mad any more, someone told him that in the pub. People are stupid. What else were you supposed to call it? He knew what he meant by it. Not the kind of everyday madness everyone had, no, this was something other, something beyond. To be out there on your own in the wood in the middle of the night, that’s real insanity, he thought, and it scared him in the same way that the idea of the supernatural did. Anyone could go mad. Fear could do it. It was quiet but always padding around him like a great invisible bear. Sometimes it ached in his throat and stung his eyes and made the very next second of life unbearable. The scary thing: what if the words come by themselves out of nowhere. What if the picture on the screen changes? The murder thing ended and something else came on. He flipped through a few more pages and there she was, Allison Gross who lives in yon tower. There was the sick young boy. My God, it’s still there. The TV screamed. What is this? Someone was getting chopped about, blood spewing.
