There he is. Prrr.
‘There you are, you bastard,’ Dan said.
The cat narrowed his eyes.
‘Stealing my produce,’ said Dan.
Produce? the cat said. What are you talking about, produce? A few old cabbage leaves.
11
Once a week I smarten up, walk to the car park on the Gully road with my bag on wheels, get the bus into town and stock up. Hit the cash machine. My pension goes in, about the third week of every month. I’ve got a bar of chocolate I’m saving for later. My treat. I eat two a week. I try and spread them out but sometimes when I’ve been drinking I go all stupid and scoff the lot in half an hour. I’ve got a bottle of Cava. The cork popped when I opened it and flew up into the leaves. I poured carefully into the smaller of my cups and drank the Cava down very quickly – that made the cooking go better – I was chopping garlic on my board, I’d got the pan hot. It reminds me, teaching Lily how to peel garlic properly, how you bang it with the handle of the knife. Her in her turn, teaching it to Harriet in the kitchen of our old place. I fried mushrooms and tomatoes and chucked in a can of tuna. I wish I could say the mushrooms were wild woodland ones, foraged knowingly, but they were from Aldi. I tried not to think of the man and his garden and not being able to go there any more, kept pushing away the fear that I was discovered; but it went on in my stomach and throat and chest, and it was horrible. God’s sake, I thought, didn’t I come in here to get away from all this? Worry, for God’s sake, the worry you get from people. Thought I was done with all that.
Now that I live here in the wood, I wonder why I was so scared back then in those old days about never having anywhere to live. All of us, everyone we knew, young, with lives back somewhere else, somewhere out of London, living in crappy little rooms, getting out in the early hours for the first papers of the day, combing through the ads, ringing a million numbers that were engaged or said it had just gone or it was too expensive or way off the tube lines, and once or twice getting as far as a viewing and finding yourself standing in a line of awkward couples not really wanting to look at each other. Leaving Lily at Wilf’s and sitting for hours in the housing department trying to get on the end of a futile list, and all around us everywhere, empty places, empty and empty and empty every time you walked past, weeks, months, years on end. And my mother saying it’s impossible to be homeless if you have family, not realising the impossibility sometimes of going back. Being without a home is worse in the city than in the woods. Comes back to me a scene under an arched bridge, very first cold light of a winter day, wet white frost on the railings dividing the end of the ginnel from a small ornamental garden. A line of long heaped darkness. Sleepers. The sound of engines as the police vans approach. Funny. I never saw it but I feel as if I did. Johnny told me about it. He cried. Such a heart he had for the mistreated. Soft.
When the food was done, I didn’t even feel like it. I ate some because I thought I should and let the rest go cold. I don’t eat too bad, you know. So far, no real big problems. Not on the material level anyway. What has me attentive is the thing out there, the thing on the edges, the thing not too many really notice or care about but which will make itself felt at the strangest, most unexpected of times. I used to envy the ones who never heard it or saw it or felt it. I don’t any more. I just don’t want it to take me too far away again. Then again, sometimes I do, just to see what it’s like.
*
Five a.m., the woods all still: still couldn’t sleep. Someone knows I’m here. I can’t stand that. Got up and walked.
This countryside is lovely and serene yet there’s blood and fear and betrayal. Up there by the Long Wights, where they took the old baron to his hideous death. The stones are bloody. Blood draws blood. The stones draw thunder and lightning.
One fine day in the middle of the night
Two dead men got up to fight.
*
That night there was no thunder, just silent lightning, so fast it was like the onset of a migraine, maybe even imagined.
Flash –
Flash –
Flash –
Two mad little cut-out men in a flick-book, neither of them good at it, mitts up like amateurs. Don’t hit me, please!
How these two fought!
*
I went back to the cat man’s place. He hadn’t locked the gate, and he’d had plenty of time. But this time I didn’t go into his garden, I went straight into his yard. At first I thought he wasn’t in, then I saw a face looking at me from the back window. It had large soulful baggy eyes, very startled and naked, and its hair jumbled out on either side of its round, rather magnificently ridiculous face. I smiled at the face and lifted one hand like a chieftain in an old Cowboys and Indians film. How! The face disappeared, and before I could get to the door, it opened and he stood there. He didn’t say anything, just glowered. He was big. We were alone. For all I really know, he’s a maniac.
‘What do you want?’ he said nastily.
I stood at the bottom of the steps looking up. ‘Just
