In the Woods

It’s the smell, that damp, cold, musty smell of woods in winter. As our breaths hung in small clouds fading and the cold assaulted our faces. Ruddy and warm, we trudged and slithered on wet leaf rot, tramping our way through the trees that stood in barren silence as though in shame of their summer glory. I can feel the cold in my lungs, the damp in the air, the heat of my body in the bundled clothes. Boots over thick socks, corduroy trousers (denim would soak), vest, t-shirt, thick, woolly jumper, heavy coat, gloves and wool hat. Wrapped against the world, my mother’s insurance.

We moved in that random, Brownian way of children, motivations fading and new adventures discovered, inspirations fermenting from the random, the innocuous, the mundane, the slightest hint blooming new worlds in our fertile imaginations. Although, in the politics of this I always deferred to my older brother, he was the director of our play and I trailed in his wake the minor power in our government of fantasy. So it was that afternoon as we wandered the woods.

It was Paul who found the body. I looked up and saw him standing still, staring at the ground so I went over. We both stared at her, lying blue and sprawled. A slug was moving slowing, deliberately across her face.

‘Is she dead?’ I said. Paul’s response was to pick up a lichen-covered mouldy stick and gingerly, tensely move it toward her and poke at her as though expecting some great surprise. The folds of her coat moved slightly, nothing more.

We stared for some time then, our minds blank and absorbing the newness. The beads of damp stood on her coat and her plaid pleated skirt. Her long straw hair lay lank and matted with leaves. The swell of her new breasts budding beneath the ribs of her jumper, the body lying abandoned like a rag doll. One sock up, one sock down, one shoe missing. And her face, her pale face lying slack and pushed to one side as it pressed into the earth beneath the empty trees and the cold uncaring cries of the black birds that circled in silhouette in the gun-metal skies, undertakers of winter.

'Let’s look at her knickers’ Paul said as he moved the stick, waving slightly towards the bottom of her skirt.

‘No!!!’ I cried horrified and shoved Paul hard, ‘leave her alone!’. Paul turned, a queer look on his face. ‘Baby!’ he retorted and shoved me hard so I sat down heavily into the damp brown leaves. The instant sorrow of infants filled my chest and I blurted ‘I’m telling mommy', my bottom lip curling and protruding, shiny with saliva. Paul, well versed enough in our relation to know bluff from serious intent instantly changed tack.

‘OK, OK, I was only joking, I didn’t mean it. No need to be such a baby.’
I looked at him and then at her and started to cry.

‘I want mommy, we should go get mommy.’

‘yeah, we should go get help’ his mind, I see now, latching onto the dialog of his age, imbued from bumper Christmas annuals and Saturday morning black and white television shows. We needed the sheriff.

‘Come on’ he said and struck off invigorated with new purpose. I watched the back of him recede through the trees and did not move. A new feeling had entered the base of my soul. A sort of sorrow, a sort of emptiness crept into my limbs and I turned my head back towards her.

‘It’s ok’, I whispered.

‘Come on!’, Paul shouted, in his usual exasperation at my tardy, hindering awkwardness.

‘I’m not going.’ I called after him.

‘What?’ he cried as he tramped back to me.

‘I’m staying here.’

‘Don’t be daft, come on, we have to go get help.’

‘You go, I’m staying.’

‘Oh, come on. Or I’ll hit you.’

‘NO!! I’M NOT GOING. LEAVE ME ALONE.’

Paul backed away a quizzical look on his face. Now I think on it, that might have been the first time he ever looked at me like that, that look that fills our relationship now, that signs the gaps between my head and his.

‘Right then,’ he said, immediately bending the world into his schema, ‘you stand guard and I’ll get help’ and he trudged off, ‘I’ll go quicker on my own anyway.’

I heard his movements – the rustles of evergreen undergrowth, the snap of rotted sticks and his heavy footfalls diminish and I was alone.

I turned to her again and said in a quiet voice ‘It’s ok. It’ll be alright soon, you’ll see.’ I became aware of the cold again seeping into my clothing, soaking from the ground into my buttocks and I looked at her again, at her emptiness, her lack of her. The odd empty feeling began to return too, seeping in pace with the cold. A dim alarm began to creep into my heart. Was I dying too? Somehow her ‘missingness’, her lack, the essential part of her that was gone had left a hole, a hole that was sucking me in too, slowly drawing me away. I shivered.

‘No’ I cried in small voice, tears beginning to stream down my cheeks. I sighed and shuddered and a lump of emotion wracked from my body. I felt oddly better although beads of sweat stood on my forehead simultaneously burning like fire and freezing like ice.
Then, for no reason I can fully understand, I began to sing; a strange song to a strange tune that I cannot recall. I’m not even sure if it had real words, I can only remember the feeling of that song now, a memory of that strange ache that had entered me. I sang it to that and I sang it to her, to comfort her, to ward her, lying empty and alone, forgotten rubbish in a remote wood.

Time must have passed because the next I remember it’s getting dark, the light fading from the woods and I am cold to the bone and shivering. I hear voices in the distance. Men. Serious and alert tones, indistinct from meaning come floating through the semi-gloom and trees.

‘Told you’ I whisper to her and rise wobbling to my cramped and aching feet. Somehow I don’t want to spoil our quiet so I stand and wait silently until they find us.

‘See? Over here, I told you.’ I hear Paul’s voice and see torches flashing and then I am surrounded by big burly men breaths steaming and fogging the gloom.

They pause for a moment and then one says ‘Ah god, it’s her alright.’
‘Jesus’ another mutters. They start talking at once, organizing themselves, words building between them swirling into actions. One notices me and Paul and says ‘we’d best get these lads home.’ And we’re lead away, one of the men wrapping me in his big quilted coat. I remember the smell of tobacco and sweat, tangy in the back of my throat, smelling like real man, that foreign world that my cells ached to become. As he carried me away, I looked back over his shoulder and stared at her lying still, torch light flicking too and fro across her in the gathering gloom, mist rising from the ground.

Later, I’m in the kitchen all the lights are on and the room is full of strangers, everyone is serious, solemn speaking in subdued voices and looking bashful. It feels wrong, I want them all to leave. I’ve never had so much attention. People keep muttering and saying how brave I am. I can feel a pressure building in me, welling up. I want it all back, my safe normal, minimal life. I want to sink again beneath the radar of adult attention, to become the un-noticed, the anonymous. I start to cry, a hole opens in me and from it sounds my loss. My mother gathers me to her.

‘There, there’, she says, ‘my brave boy. It’s OK, she’s in heaven now’

But I’m not crying for her, for little Louise Anderson, strangled and left for dead at the tender age of thirteen. I’m crying for me, for my world that has fallen apart and will never be the same.