Birchwood

with refugees, forlorn bands coming from nowhere and going to the same place, jettisoning in their wake a spoor of broken belongings. Their charity kept me alive. God knows what they thought I was, this crazed filthy creature perched on a starved nag. Perhaps they saw in me a celestial messenger of hope, anything is possible. I was not grateful for their kindness. I despised and loathed their misery, their helplessness. My accent impressed them. Some even called me sir. Sir! What a people!

I travelled, but I did not travel far. My journey described a wide circle the centre of which was, unknown to me, the circus, carrying me with it toward its goal by some mysterious intangible magnetism. The first faltering days of spring arrived. I remember gaping in bafflement at the green buds on a tree which had been bare when I lay down under it the night before. I could not cope with the season of resurrections. One day the horse died, buckled under me and flopped on its side on the road, coughed up unspeakable stuff, kicked, and was gone. There is a point at which one decides to surrender. Under one's dancing feet a black chasm waits always, always inviting. I had felt that darkness beneath me for so long that it had come to seem like a last refuge into which I could fly, and now as I left the dead brute there on the road and plunged into the woods I was content to think that I would never again see the light of day. But life, whatever it may be, is not simple.

In a clearing deep in the wood there was a ruined cottage, rubble and weeds and a rusty bedstead, and one upright wall with a cracked mirror suspended half way up it and a shaky lean-to made of branches and bits of sacking clinging to it like a faltering parasite. Amidst the weeds a fire burned under a blackened battered can slung on a forked stick, and it was over this steaming can and its intoxicating, barely familiar smell that I was bending when a pair of fierce eyes sprang at me from the dark den under the sacking.

‘Get your snout out of that!’

He sat on a stone in there with his hands clamped on his knees and glared at me, a huge fellow in a tattered overcoat and a lidless high hat. Two filthy toes stuck out of his boots, and a fearful set of yellow teeth were clenched in a hole in his beard. He spat into the fire and snarled. I thought of running away, but I knew that my legs would not work.

‘Who the fuck are you?’ he asked.

‘Johann Livelb, sir.’

‘That's a queer class of a name. Joe what?’

‘Johann, sir. Livelb.’

Suddenly he cackled.

‘Begod that's a mouthful all right. Sit down.’

I crept into the hovel and squatted on the ground beside him. He looked at me silently for a moment, grinding his teeth, and then turned his eyes to the fire.

‘I think I'm dying, sir,’ I said.

He nodded absently, and picked out a piece of stick from the bundle between his feet and threw it on the fire. Flames leaped up, and the stuff in the can bubbled fiercely. My stomach heaved.

‘Bit of grub, there,’ he observed, and looked down at me and winked. ‘Meat. Can't remember when I had it last. The country's in an awful fucking state. They're dropping like flies. Never seen the likes.’ He poured stew from the can into a biscuit-tin lid and set it down on the ground between us. I felt that I was meant to eat, yet I hesitated. I distrust such kindness, it shakes my lack of faith in human nature. He stopped chewing and glared at me. ‘Eat, will you! It's right stuff.’

I ate. After the first mouthful I scuttled away and was sick into the weeds. My fierce friend laughed. I crawled back on all fours and tried another lump of meat. It stayed down. We finished what was on the plate, and he poured out a second helping, and that too we had soon tucked away. It left in my mouth a taste of boiled fur.

‘Do you know what that was now?’ he asked, wiping his beard on his sleeve. He cackled. ‘Monkey stew! Aye, that's right. Up there on the hill by the road I found it, sitting in a tree as cocky as you like eating leaves. A bloody monkey! I nearly broke my neck trying to catch it.’ He paused then and frowned. ‘Do you know, I'm travelling the roads these twenty year, but I never knew there was monkeys in this country. First I thought it was a bird or something, or a squirrel, but no, it was a monkey all right, I seen them before with them fellows with the hurdy- gurdies, dancing on a string. A tasty lad, though, what?’

He dozed off after a while, sitting bolt upright with his hands on his knees, and I lay back against the wall and nursed my belly as it did its best to digest the remains of Albert, for Albert it must have been, the region could not boast of more than one monkey. How much else of the circus had survived? I had a vision of Mario perched in a tree, munching leaves and gibbering, or of Angel served up piping hot in a can. My friend started up abruptly and grabbed me by the throat.

What?’ he roared, ‘what?’ I croaked at him and flapped my tongue, and he released me and passed a hand over his forehead. ‘Jesus, that was a close one,’ he muttered cryptically, and then burst into song.

O there's hair on this
And there's hair on that
There's hair on my dog Tiny
But I know where
There's plenty of hair-
He yawned, shook himself vigorously, and rubbed his hands.
– On the girl I left behind me

!

His gaiety departed as quickly as it had come, and he began to grind his teeth again, and stared out gloomily at the frozen wood.

This used to be my place,’ he said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder at the wall behind us. ‘Cottage I had, grand little spot. Everything I needed, bit of game in the woods there, spuds in the back, a few head of cabbage. There was-’ Something occurred to him, and he turned to me and stuck out his hand. ‘Cotter's the name. Cotter's cottage, ha!’ Before I could shake his paw he clenched it and punched himself on the knee. ‘Them fuckers! Listen, tell me this, what harm was I doing? Christ, didn't they own half the county already, what did they want with my bit of a spot, eh? I had rights, squatter's rights! But O no, O no, the Big House wouldn't have me living in their woods, O no! You'll get shot some day, he said. By accident, he said. Accident my arse. That was the old whore himself, old Simon. Then they come and stove in the roof-and me in the bloody bed there! The fuckers.’

He ruminated for a while in a furious silence, pounding himself with his fist, and then a small light dawned in his eyes and he bared his fangs and grinned.

‘But they got their comeuppance too,’ he growled, ‘aye they did. I heard about it when I was up north, her kicking off in the madhouse, and then your man getting shagged out when her crowd took over. Good enough for them, the mangy bastards. And now I'm back to claim what's mine, my rights, I am.’

I waited for him to calm himself, and then I asked very carefully.

‘And what happened to…your man?’

‘What? Who?’

‘Godkin.’

‘Mister Joseph? Fucked if I know. I hear they let him stay on, living in some class of an outhouse.’ He glanced at me suspiciously. ‘Why?’

‘I just wondered.’

‘Oo you jast wahndered, did you now? I see, I see.’ His teeth were out again, and his eyes gleamed. He clawed at his beard in a paroxysm of suspicion. ‘Bejesus, do you know what it is, you talk like one of them yourself. You wouldn't be coming down here to spy on old Cotter, would you, eh? That wouldn't be it, now, would it?’

I backed out of the shelter slowly and stood by the fire watching him. He whipped off his hat and began to beat himself on the thigh with it, and muttered ruefully,

‘Dying, says he-like fuck!’