Another Part of the Wood Read online

  ‘To my friend Kidney, for whom everything may be possible.’

  ‘What may be possible?’ asked Roland.

  Kidney didn’t answer.

  ‘What’s it mean?’

  After a moment Kidney paused and reclaimed his book, fingering the open page like a blind man reading braille. ‘It means,’ he said, ‘that he’s my friend.’

  ‘What are the poems about?’

  ‘I don’t know. I haven’t read them.’ Kidney put the book back in his pocket and continued the descent into the valley.

  Roland looked back the way they had come and already the plateau was shrunk by distance. He could see its surface lit by sunlight, a concave rim of brightness merging into the sky. Below him, quite near, the plantation of firs lay ruptured by shadow.

  They had no need to go near the trees. The path wound in a semicircle to the furthermost side of the valley, so that the reservoir in its neat cement sink and the arrow of firs lay to their right and the mountain loomed directly above them. Roland could make out the tower quite specifically now. He was disappointed to see that it was almost a ruin, three walls standing and the fourth gone half way. Pieces of stone jutted like broken teeth out of the ruined mouth of the tower.

  It wasn’t a difficult climb, hardly a mountain at all now that they were there. The path wound upwards, leading gently to the top. There were even sheep quite near the summit.

  ‘Where are we?’ cried Roland, turning round to look out across the valley and the distant fields. ‘Where’s our hut?’

  Frowning, Kidney poised his hands on his plump hips and regarded the view. He could see water a long way off and factory chimneys sticking like upturned glasses from the rim of the sea.

  ‘There’s the Estuary of the Dee,’ shouted Roland. ‘All that bright piece in the sun is the Wirral and Cheshire.’

  The tower was quite roomy inside, enough to sit down in. There was a mound of refuse in one corner and some beer bottles. ‘What’s it for anyway?’ said Roland, feeling cheated, kicking the bottles with his foot.

  ‘It’s not for anything,’ said Kidney, sitting down on a pile of yellow stone, shifting his feet about to balance himself. ‘It’s a tower for people to see.’

  Roland remembered a film he had been to with his grandmother. It had been about a king with a humped back who had drowned his friend in a malmsey butt. ‘They put the princes in a tower,’ he said, ‘but it had beds and things. My dad wouldn’t think much of this.’ He sat on his haunches and rolled a brown bottle backwards and forwards in the dust.

  ‘King Lear had a beard,’ said Kidney.

  ‘Who’s Lear?’

  ‘Lear was a king by Shakespeare,’ said Kidney.

  ‘How old?’ asked Roland.

  ‘– who had some children he wanted to live with. They didn’t want him.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Roland.

  ‘He went out for a walk and his beard went white. His good girl came for him and took him home.’

  ‘Is that all?’ said Roland. He watched Kidney take a bottle of pills out of his pocket.

  ‘Yes,’ said Kidney.

  ‘Joseph said you weren’t to have those,’ shouted Roland. ‘You’ve got to do more exercise.’ He reached out his hand and snatched the bottle away from Kidney. He ran to the entrance of the tower, ready to flee down the mountain. He looked back at Kidney, crouched on his seat of stones, dark in the shadows of the interior. ‘It’s windy up here,’ he called, the breeze whipping his hair back from his forehead. ‘Why is it windy, Kidney?’

  ‘We’re up a mountain.’

  ‘There’s towers in the Bible too,’ said Roland, leaning his head back and looking up at the square structure. ‘There’s Babel and Pisa, the leaning one, and there must have been one at Jericho that fell down when the trumpet blew.’ He came back into the tower and sat down on the floor, resting his shoulders against the wall. ‘Mountains too … Mount Sinai and the Mount of Olives and the one Moses went up … things like that. Do you know any mountains in the Bible?’ He didn’t think Kidney would know any. It had been a rotten story about Lear and his beard.

  ‘Abraham in the Bible took his only son up a mountain,’ Kidney said.

  ‘Oh, I know that one.’ Roland looked at Kidney who had stood up and turned away from him. ‘He only used a ram – only a ram in the end.’

  Water was running in a rivulet between Kidney’s legs. The stone dust thickened the stream and made it run sluggishly.

  ‘My dad would never sacrifice me,’ shouted Roland. ‘He doesn’t believe in God.’

  Kidney was gazing at a sunspot on the stone wall above his head, flickering before his eyes. He felt dazed by the play of light on the crumbling wall. A fly, alighting, clung to a crumb of stonework and crawled into a niche, folding its wings. Kidney turned round, still with his trousers unbuttoned and said pettishly, ‘Give me my pills. You have no right.’ He tried to tuck himself away, but his hands were ineffectual, inaccurate; he waggled the flaccid member at the staring boy.

  ‘That’s rude,’ said Roland, looking in another direction and returning fascinated to Kidney and the front of his trousers.

  ‘I want my pills.’

  ‘It’s very big. It’s bigger than Joseph’s.’

  ‘Give me the bottle.’

  ‘I ought to keep the pills. Joseph wouldn’t like you to have a pill. You’re much too fat.’

  Kidney rebuttoned his trousers and stood with arms dangling in the shadow cast by the wall. The fly left its cranny and spun upwards into the light. Kidney raised his hands high, palms cupped together, as if he sought to imprison the fly, the spot of sunlight, something.

  ‘Is it the pills that make you so big?’ said Roland. ‘Is it the pills?’

  Kidney wouldn’t reply.

  ‘What’s your other name?’ asked the child. ‘What’s your real name?’

  ‘A boy like you,’ said Kidney, ‘oughtn’t to be like you are.’

  Roland fidgeted in the doorway, not knowing what way he was. He put his face to the wind and blinked his eyes with embarrassment. Still, he wouldn’t give up the bottle of pills.

  Going down the mountain, he tore from the bracken a piece of heather for Joseph. It was dried up, like the lavender his mother kept in the linen drawer. He held the bottle in one hand and the odourless heather in the other, following Kidney down into the valley.

  ‘What’s the pills called?’ he asked Kidney.

  Sullenly Kidney told him they were Phenobarbitone. ‘They sedate me,’ he told Roland, turning his face to the boy higher up the path. The child didn’t know what he meant. He held the bottle tightly in one clenched hand.

  ‘Pheno barbitone,’ sang Roland. ‘Pheeeno barbeeee tone.’

  It was from the Italian, like vista, and only half sad, the other half funny. He sang the strange words over and over, shaking his head from side to side, the breeze carrying the name away … ‘Pheno, pheeeeeno, pheno-bar-be-tone.’

  Half way down the mountain he unscrewed the bottle cap and with difficulty swallowed one of the oblong capsules. He could feel it lying against his throat, cold, obstructive. He sucked in his cheeks and collected saliva under his tongue, using it to wash down the pill.

  At the far side of the valley, before the ascent to the plateau, he took two more. He took a fourth when he turned to look back at the mountain blackening now and the tower a smudge against the whitening sky. He swallowed ten capsules in all, the last before they went through the gate. Ten, he reckoned, would be enough to put a lot of weight on him and make him tall and strong. Perhaps not all at once, but in a matter of days. He was only a little worried by what he had done. His mother had repeatedly warned him about aspirin and the tablets she took when she couldn’t sleep. They were a different kind of pill, he thought, pills to make you better when you were ill, not like Kidney’s pills, which were just to make him grow.

  He was glad Joseph had stayed at home. The mountain had been a bit of a let-down. Only an old ruined tower,
no battlements, no peep-holes, nothing, just a lot of old beer bottles. Joseph would have yawned.

  Balfour woke at teatime and was sick in the grass.

  He raised his white face and saw the sunbathers at the end of the field. Joseph and Dotty and May. He went inside the hut to swill out his mouth and Dotty ran over the grass after him.

  She looked at him with interest and wanted to know how he felt.

  ‘Fine,’ he told her. He spat into the sink and did feel better. His face was a mess. The stings and constellations of pimples were merged. His eyes were large with fatigue. ‘Where’s George?’ he asked her.

  ‘Painting the house. Ma and Pa MacFarley’s windowsills. Gone off with Willie.’

  ‘I’ve been sick in the grass. Threw up, like. I wouldn’t w-want him to see.’

  She offered to clean it up. ‘Honestly, I don’t mind,’ she said, looking about for a bucket. She still felt a doctor should have been called. It frightened her, someone being sick and stung about the head by wasps. Finding a pail under the sink she went out purposefully, ignoring Balfour’s protests, thinking of the nuptial flight of the queen of the hive and the fertilizing male plummeting to the earth. Serve him bloody well right, she told herself giggling, looking about for Balfour’s vomit in the grass.

  When she returned she had to tell him about the bees, the little she knew, while she made him some tea. ‘At the very end, at the very end, the toughest bee, the one that flies high enough to mate the queen – why, he leaves most of himself inside her and drops dying to the ground.’

  ‘Is that so,’ said Balfour, depressed by the cruelty of it.

  Gaily she poured him out a cup of tea. She wouldn’t call the others in – why should she? ‘It’s silly, isn’t it?’ she said, handing him the sugar. ‘What a way to go.’ She laughed quite loudly and he laughed with her. She felt at ease with him, elated. She kept smiling. He felt there was a definite relationship being established between them, something special. It was a shock when she told him she was leaving early in the morning.

  ‘Leaving … where?’

  ‘I’m going to London … or home.’ She stared self-consciously at the cups and saucers. ‘I’m not sure where I shall go. Obviously I can’t stay here.’

  ‘No, of course not,’ he agreed, not finding it at all obvious, disappointed that she wouldn’t be staying longer, that they weren’t going to know each other better. It annoyed him that he should feel distressed, before there was anything to feel distressed about.

  ‘I just can’t hang about here … now.’ She leaned back in her chair, playing with the limp strands of her hair. ‘I mean, I can’t hang about now.’

  For one moment, he thought, she might mean because of him kissing her in the field. He half believed it, but he knew it wasn’t that.

  ‘I mean, it’s obvious he doesn’t want me. It is … isn’t it?’ She looked at him for a denial. They were both tentative, both disappointed, though she was the more cheerful.

  ‘I suppose so,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know why I’ve stuck it so long,’ she admitted. ‘Honest, I don’t know why. I don’t really want to go, but I must.’ She jumped to her feet. ‘I’ll give you my address, my home address, and I’ll write to you and we’ll keep in touch.’

  ‘Yes, we could do that all right,’ said Balfour, without hope.

  ‘You won’t mention to anyone that I’m going to do a flit, will you?’ Dotty turned to him earnestly. ‘You won’t, will you?’

  ‘N-not a word. I’ll carry your suitcase if you like.’

  ‘Would you? Would you really?’ She hadn’t really thought she would go. Still, if Balfour expected her to leave and wanted to carry her suitcase she supposed she would have to go.

  ‘I hope we meet again,’ he said dejectedly.

  ‘Oh, we’ll meet,’ she said carelessly enough. ‘If not on earth, then somewhere else.’

  When George came back with Willie he spoke sternly to Balfour. ‘You ought to be resting,’ he said. Balfour, anxious not to appear ungrateful for care given, lay down obediently on the sofa.

  Willie smacked his lips and made sympathetic noises. ‘And you not too well,’ he said, his eyes moist with satisfaction. ‘I hear you took bad last evening, had one of those attacks. Very sorry to hear it … that and the wasps.’

  Joseph came indoors, skin glowing. He showed his burnt chest to Dotty. ‘Look at that, Dot-Dot. How’s that, eh?’

  ‘Smashing,’ she agreed, turning her head away from his fiery breast and the two nipples embedded like black pips. ‘Why hasn’t Roland come back?’ she said.

  He buttoned his shirt neatly and shook his head. ‘Don’t ask me. He’s down at the stream, isn’t he?’

  ‘Is he?’ She wouldn’t tell him. She put more water in the kettle and averted her eyes from his sunburnt skin.

  He went slowly out into the field, glancing at Lionel, who was still reading his newspaper.

  ‘Roland,’ he called, ‘Roland.’

  ‘He’s gone for a walk with that Kidney,’ May told him.

  ‘A walk – are you sure?’

  ‘He asked you if he could go. Several times in fact.’

  Joseph studied the trees and sniffed the air. ‘Extraordinary,’ he said. ‘Well, they can’t have gone far.’

  ‘They’ve been gone hours,’ May said cruelly. She followed him into the hut and sat down at the table, watching Dotty put out more cups.

  ‘Balfour’s better,’ Dotty said, nodding in the direction of the sofa.

  ‘Is he? What’s been wrong with him?’ asked Joseph, standing at the window looking out at the field and the sprawled and lonely Lionel.

  Balfour kept his eyes closed.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s a little foolish letting Roland go off with Kidney?’ May said.

  ‘Foolish? What’s that supposed to mean exactly?’ Joseph faced her, knowing exactly what she meant, angry, fearful that he might be put in the wrong.

  ‘Well, Kidney’s not exactly a suitable companion for a little boy. He’s very odd.’

  ‘Odd?’

  ‘Yes, odd.’ May turned to Dotty for support. ‘Do you think Kidney’s fit to look after Roland?’

  Dotty looked at Joseph and was forced unwillingly to defend him. ‘I don’t think there’s much harm in him … He’s a bit simple, but he’s all right.’

  ‘Kidney isn’t simple,’ Joseph said sternly. ‘I’ve told you that often enough.’ He was sorry at once that he had spoken so loudly. She had meant to be loyal. He added more gently, ‘He’s not simple at all. He’s just mentally blocked. He’s perfectly intelligent and normal, but he can’t communicate.’

  ‘That’s not what you said before,’ said Dotty.

  ‘Perfectly normal!’ May lifted her eyebrows and eyed him incredulously. ‘He’s almost an imbecile. There’s nothing normal about him.’ She was growing irritated, malicious. Savagely she dug her nails into the table top. She couldn’t bear Joseph and his supercilious ways, and Dotty rattling the cups, and the ridiculous wooden hut set in the middle of nowhere. ‘I think it’s terrible,’ she cried. ‘A little boy like Roland, sleeping in the same room as that big fat man and going off for walks with him for hours … Anything could happen. He looks as if he’s abnormal.’

  Joseph thought she was absurd. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he told her sharply. ‘I’ll just walk over to the road and look for them.’ He glanced at Dotty, but she wouldn’t look at him. She blamed him too.

  ‘I’ll just s-stretch my legs a bit,’ said Balfour, rising from the sofa and coming to the door. ‘I’ll just come over the field for a walk.’

  They passed Lionel in the grass, the newspaper lying flat, his head propped on his arm. He was snoring.

  ‘I shouldn’t worry,’ said Balfour. ‘They won’t have gone far.’

  ‘I’m not in the least bit worried,’ Joseph told him. ‘That woman’s a cow.’ He shook his head with disgust. ‘It doesn’t do to coddle them too much, you
know. They’ve got to have a feeling of independence. Strike out on their own, dear boy.’

  Balfour agreed, keeping pace with difficulty, thinking of Roland being independent, striking out with his mentally disturbed companion. ‘We’ve got quite a few lads l-like Kidney at the club,’ he said. ‘Same types, same difficulties, only a bit more predictable.’ He looked quickly at Joseph but failed to read his expression.

  Joseph said abruptly, ‘How so?’

  ‘Well, you get to know the signs. It’s a kind of pattern. They’ve got the same troubles at home, lack of interest, lack of – ’

  ‘– security?’ suggested Joseph.

  ‘That and other things …’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘B-bad housing. Three or four to a bed. Bad diet. Bad schools. They usually have mentally defective parents and a long history of – ’

  ‘Kidney’s parents are perfectly intelligent,’ said Joseph. ‘Particularly about Kidney.’

  ‘Yes – well, there are differences,’ Balfour conceded. ‘Different environment, like. As a general rule there’s only one parent anyway. The dads have usually b-buggered off somewhere.’

  His head was aching once more. The poison was working through his bloodstream. But he would gladly have been stung all over again if it would have erased that last remark. ‘I only meant about the lads at the club. I mean the parents are different … You and Roland, that’s different. I can see that … You understand him.’

  ‘I love him,’ said Joseph simply, coming to the gate at the end of the field. He climbed it agilely and walked quickly away along the path between hedge and haystack.

  Roland, turning the bend of the road, saw his father at the entrance of the farm and began to run towards him with arms held out. Swaggering, Joseph went leisurely to meet his son. The boy ran swiftly, clutching the sprig of heather.

  ‘Where the devil have you been?’ Joseph shouted. He swung the child up in his arms, shaking him fiercely. ‘Where have you been, beauty boy? Just where have you been?’

  Roland was trying to tell him. He was choked with the violence of the embrace and the excitement of his return. ‘We’ve been up the mountain,’ he got out at last, looking up slyly at Joseph’s face, waiting for the surprise to show.