Cold Boy's Wood

the whole thing was over, just faded away. Never came near. Shallow people, shallow friendships. I must have been a fool. I’m having nothing more to do with these people, I said. I made up my mind. I’m not chasing after them if they can’t be bothered. I never went back to Hatchet, never saw any of them. Not that they’d done anything but I just couldn’t take any more of that place. It’s where the hate began. And though I hated the hate, I couldn’t stop my own hate growing inside, for what he’d done not just to Lily and Terry but to me, and to Harry, who had loved him completely. I couldn’t forgive him for any of it. A little while later, don’t ask me how long, time was funny around then, I walked past Hatchet, and it was all closed up with a mountain of mail on the mat.

One day when he’d been gone about four or five weeks, I decided to clear up a bit. I’d get rid of some of his things. It was a terrible thing to have to do but I had to do something, cut something out, and I couldn’t afford to feel anything. It was brutal survival. I cleared his drawers of the socks that were left, the old ones with holes, a lone pair of holey underpants, a couple of t-shirts he’d never worn. It was like dying. For Harriet too, her beloved Dad, it didn’t bear thinking about, and I couldn’t stand that he’d done this to her. To me, yes, I could cope. But not to her. It killed us, you know. She just drifted further and further from me till she was sixteen and buggered off to live at a friend’s, and never wanted to keep in touch with me.

So there I was, putting his things in bags, and I got to his books on that shelf and I hated them. I hated their smugness and their cleverness. I hated that they thought they knew so much and looked down on me, and I shoved them into a holdall from the back of the wardrobe, as many as I thought I could carry. He hardly ever read fiction. Most of it was battered old Marx and Anarchism and all this Gramsci, Bakunin, Bataille and Foyerback or whatever he was called, and a lot of postmodern stuff. And there was a manual for a Ford Cortina car. Terry’s car. It looked new. What was it doing on Johnny’s shelf with Johnny’s books?

I kept thinking about it all the way down to the Oxfam shop where I handed the books in, and all the way back. Harriet came home from school and said nothing to me.

‘Come on, sweet,’ I said, ‘let’s be friends.’

I made her tea while she watched kids’ TV.

*

A papercut under my wrist.

This niggling thing, under every second of every moment, as I walk around town, cook dinner, take Harry to her piano lesson, hear her cry, think about Lily.

I think about how Johnny never much cared about Terry till he heard about the Dorset job. How after that he was all friendly to the lad, and invited him in against all previous odds and told him to park his car in that little yard at the back of the co-op. I think about how he was out all night the night before she went away with Terry, about the spanner someone bought just around the corner from Hatchet, and the reason why there was a brand new manual for Terry’s car on Johnny’s shelf with Johnny’s books. I think that I don’t know why I’m thinking about these things so incessantly, why they will not, will not leave my mind. After all, I don’t know anything about these things. Johnny was no mechanic. I think about the car on that pretty country lane with no other traffic around, veering off the road and over the verge and into the deep pond, and as always the things beyond that that are unimaginable, though still they come. There’s no stopping them.

And I think of how angry he was at Phoebe Twist for not going to Dorset that morning, at Lily for going instead for a country ride, and at me for letting her go.

They grow deeper and deeper, the blood-red papercuts, sharper and sharper. He hurt me so bad. Cut me down. Might as well have taken a knife and stuck it straight in my chest.

36

This man is still in my den. Go. Go now.

I kept saying it, go, go now, please go. Like the werewolf imploring a friend to leave before the moon is full. First he just sat there staring at me, as if he was trying to work something out.

‘I’m going to sleep now,’ I said. ‘Please go.’

Very slowly, with a slight groan, he got himself up and hauled himself out through the flap. When all sounds of him blundering in the undergrowth had faded, I lifted up the rug from where it lay rolled up next to my backpack and took it with me. I would need it. An idea was forming in my mind. My throat felt very dry, I had to lick and lick my lips to get them working. I was out in the wood and I could see everything far more clearly than I should have been able to. I walked and wandered, stopping every now and then to listen to the sounds of the wood, the little creatures, the birds ruffling in sleep, falling into harmony around me. Everything moved. Far above through the trees was a deep starless blue sky. I gave a long low whistle, and the ghostly sound lingered. If anyone else was here in these woods it would put fear in them. My heart was a pounding mill and I’m lonely for them, Lily and Harry and Johnny and the times that wring your stupid heart in the early hours like