It was cold for April. He walked along the lane, skirting the lower edge of the woods and cutting across the fields, thinking about the body, someone lying dead and unknown near here all those years. Man or woman? Did he say? Poor sod anyway, laying in the ground all alone and no one knowing you’re there. Except for the murderer, of course, if it was a murder. Poor sod.
Ravens. The wet nose of the pregnant doe. A body returned to light. Things falling in sequence. All these things seemed significant.
It wasn’t as bad as Pete said. The mess was mostly down at the far end, low by the trees; the really old stuff where time had rubbed out all the names and all the dates, all the things recorded in memory of; smoothed down into ripples on stone.
Three men in yellow coats were cleaning up with shovels. A lorry was backed in at the gate.
His mum’s grave was well out of the danger zone. Yes, there she was, poor old Mum. Audrey Jane Broom, safe and sound. OK for now, not too much overgrown, but the jam jar was empty and he’d forgotten to bring flowers. Should have picked her some bluebells on the way. Oh well. Next time. And there was his gran, Ocella Mary Morse. He remembered her well, lying on her old green chaise longue when he took her a cup of tea in her upstairs room that smelt faintly of pee. The two of them, his mum and his gran, going like hell at one another, Grandma’s tone lower and scarier, his mum’s shrieky. And he under the bedclothes with his ear to the radio listening to the music.
He left the graveyard and climbed to the top of the Edge, walked a little way and sat down on a hillock looking towards the woods. There was activity on the road below, figures moving about, cars. Towards the heights, the Long Wights hid behind an outcrop of rock. The land up there, beyond the old stones, was potholed and full of shafts from the long-disused mines.
Not too long ago they were open. Maybe someone fell in.
He’d gone to school in Ercol. His mum made him walk over there because she said it was a better school than the one in Andwiston.
And don’t you ever, ever, ever go anywhere near those shafts, never ever ever.
So of course he hung around them all the time like all the other kids. Peering into them. Utter blackness. That swift shudder, and the recoil. Now they were all fenced off for health and safety.
The climb had set his back off. The sun shone silky through a milky sky. He lit up. Smoke on the air, into the fog. The wood’s edge was fuzzy. Or was it his eyes? His sight was getting pretty fucked these days. He remembered him and Eric Munsy and a big daft boy called Frankie, daring each other to jump across the smaller shafts, idiots, going to the edge of the big one, lying down. Your head hanging over, someone holding your feet. Then running down through the woods to play in the ruins.
When we were thirteen.
‘See, what I think,’ said Frankie, ‘is it’s like we’re all just ghosts. Only we don’t know it.’
Frankie’s theory was that we’re all actually dead. All this is the afterlife, only we can’t tell. Dan imagined all the dead people crawling about in the earth like worms. ‘That’s shite,’ he said, because he thought it sounded tough.
They ran whooping through the trees, and he went home past the field with the horses, Little Sid and Lady and the big bay called Pepper. He stood for a while with his arms hooked over the gate. His mother wouldn’t let him ride. She wouldn’t let him do anything. Every time he stepped out of the door she foresaw terrible disasters, cars smashing into him, cows trampling him, slates flying off roofs in breezy weather and decapitating him. There she’d be at the gate when he got home, peering mournfully down the lane with her long white face.
The fog was clearing, just a little. He went down, walking heavily, keeping his back consciously straight against the niggling pain. Along the edge of the wood he imagined how he’d look to someone on the far side of the field: like a ghost coming out of the fog, emerging like a developing photograph.
3
The forest is ancient, beech and ash and oak. There are wild strawberries, and tiny purple-pink flowers found shining at the side of the track like stars in the crisp dark green. People don’t come in this far, only the deer, the creatures, and the strangeness comes and goes, like weather. I write by the light of my Tilley lamp at night. In the daytime, the constant shimmering leaf light is enough. I’m drawn, of necessity, to the theory that half-light’s good for the eyes. I’ve stocked up on reading glasses from the Pound Shop. I have a den against a rock face, a perch on the side of the hill looking out on the glade. I’ve loved these old woods ever since that first time, when I saw the cold boy. They’ve kept bringing me back. I’ve loved them in memory, seen from afar, dancing merrily over three hills, and I’ve loved the rocky ups and downs of them, the silence in the centre, and the birds’ far-away murmur, full and soft. When I am an old woman I shall wear purple, says the poem, but purple’s not my colour so I came to the woods instead. First there was childhood, then here then Carmody Square then here then Childhallows then Crawley then here. Always back to here.
I had a job for the past few years, but it came to an end. I was working in a place that closed down. It was called Childhallows Farm, but
