In the Forest Read online

  “I’ll get out here, it’s the cow walk,” he says suddenly, and pounds her shoulder. The car comes to a screech and she places her hand across the child’s chest to protect it. As he goes to get out, he drops the orange into the child’s lap.

  “No, you keep it yourself, you’ll need it …”

  “He’ll need it … he’s teething,” he says.

  As she stands to let him out he gives her an unbearable look of reproach. “You were afraid of me … that hurt me … I wanted so little … I asked so little.”

  “What’s in the cow walk?” she says, as a kind of apology.

  “The true answer,” he says, and looks up into the rainy distance with something like longing.

  As she drives away, he is standing under a cover of young trees, motionless, half hidden, as if he is planning something spiteful.

  Stones

  O’KANE SITS on a tree stump behind a high ornamental wall with crenellations along the top. Three men are filling potholes on a stretch of road at the outskirts of the town. His father is one of them. His father sweeps the dirt out of the hole with a yardstick, rooting and poking until every bit of dirt is nosed out, lifts it and scatters the debris into the kerb. Then he scoops the stone chips into the potholes, packs them down with a shovel while a second man sprays tar over them from a hose affixed to a tanker on the lorry. When his father has flattened the stones with the paddle of the shovel, patted them in, he adds a second heap, which in turn is tarred, and so on, in silent, sweating, unbroken tedium.

  I’m nearer than he thinks … I’m within striking distance of him, O’Kane thinks as he watches through a chink in the wall, sees his father, the black sleeve, the braced arm, the thick hand holding the shovel, the face determined and gruff like it always was. The lorry trundles on as the next hole is filled and the next, and the patches of tar are like black flowers splashed on a blue road.

  O’Kane decides to give his father a bit of a turn and lets out a hoot, half man, half donkey, his prison hoot, and his father looks around, sharp, baffled, and then runs his hand down his neck as if flies have landed on it. He’s got fatter. The devil’s work. The devil done that.

  At lunchtime the lorry is driven onto a by-road and the three men go up the street to Nellie’s Café for their grub. O’Kane leaps the wall and begins to take shovel loads of chips and throw them willy-nilly onto the road and onto passing cars, shouting, “Fucking provos … fucking provos.”

  Walking her dog, Mrs. Vaughan sees this and runs back into her house to hide. She draws her blind, drags a gas cylinder and puts it against the hall door, and goes upstairs to peer through a window, to wait for him to move on.

  His task done, he decides to call on the parish priest. Going up the short drive towards the pink two-storey house with its green shutters he recalls things he had nicked there — altar wine, a nail scissors, money, and hair gel. He recalls His Holiness, like a big white owl in his fleece long johns, gagging for it.

  “Oh, Enda … nice to see you,” Father Malachi says in as level a voice as he can muster.

  “Not Enda …”

  “Of course. Michen. I heard you were home … Still on the road, day and night … always on the road. It will be time for you to settle down … nothing in those woods for anyone … there aren’t even birds up there. I was talking to Cian Logan the other day, he’s retiring, he’s done his threescore and ten, and I said to him, ‘Cian, tell me what was wonderful about being a forester,’ and I had to laugh at his reply: ‘Damn all … midges eating you alive in the summer and rainwater drenching you in the winter every time you sawed off a branch.’”

  “You had me there,” O’Kane says, standing by a low bed with a red cover and a white linen antimacassar over the pillow.

  “Yes, everyone thinks his or her own calling the most taxing,” the priest says, pretending not to be unnerved.

  “I want money.”

  “Now, why would I give you money?”

  “Because I could have you disgraced … I could go to the bishops.”

  “It’s you yourself that might be disgraced … Nevertheless, I will give you money if it means a hot meal or a decent pullover,” the priest says, and looks towards the hall, reluctant to leave him alone in the kitchen and disguising his fears by muttering to himself, wondering where his overcoat could be.

  “Shitting your pants?” O’Kane says with a grin.

  “England has done you no good.”

  “Plenty of fist-fucking in the English lavs.”

  “No good whatsoever.”

  The priest returns, separating the new clean notes with his dampened thumb: “Today was my day for visiting the poor.” He counts them studiously, then hands them over.

  “Dirty money,” O’Kane says, and pockets it.

  “You should go on down home and make peace with your father.”

  “I’m not wanted there.”

  “Where are you wanted?”

  “Nowhere,” he says, and sits down at the end of the table as if he is about to be given food, staring out, his eyes like holes filled with vistas of nowhere. “I might go to the Low Countries … they have lots of woods there and caves,” he says with a sudden spurt of excitement.

  “Well, please God you’ll find your niche,” the priest says, and holds the door open for him to go out, then lifts his hand in some baleful mimicry of a farewell blessing. He stands dismayed for a long while.

  A curse on the man who puts his trust in man,

  Who relies on things of the flesh,

  Whose heart turns from the Lord,

  He is like dry scrub in the wastelands:

  If good comes he has no eyes for it,

  He settles in the parched places of the wilderness,

  A salt land, uninhabited.

  Father

  ON FRIDAY, 15 April, at approximately four o’clock, I was working on the road down from the hotel. I was accompanied by Michael Burke. We saw a car, a fairly big family car, maroon-coloured, driving very fast. It was driven by my son. He was wearing dark glasses and had on a fisherman’s hat. It swung around in a hand brake turn and backed up the same way as it had come. The driver did this a few times, and then he drew towards the digger where we were working at high speed and got through us. I am convinced that he was trying to drive through me and knock me down. I would have been thrown to the ground but for Michael Burke pulling me back towards the wall. He drove so close by me that a button came off my jacket. There is no doubt but that he was trying to get me. Two days later he drove the same car up and down the harbour front yelling, “Fucking provos, fucking provos.” There was damage on the left rear wing of the car. Also, he was growing a moustache. The next time I saw him was when I was in my own car and stopped at the bottom of the hill outside the bank. While I was there, a silver-coloured car approached from the opposite direction. When he saw me, he picked up speed and tore off, shouting some “f” words through the window.

  Aileen

  THERE’S WORD going around that my brother is back from England, that he was spotted in the north drinking champagne, and then in Dundalk arguing in a car park, and then nearer home, thumbing a lift. He’s beginning to be a bit of a legend, but I hope he isn’t around, and if he is, I’m glad I’ve moved away from Cloosh and made my own life here. This world is not his world, and frankly I don’t know what his world is and he doesn’t know either, shuttled from one place to another down the years. No sooner would he be let out than he’d be caught again for some fresh crime, burglary or aggravated burglary, whatever that means. A wild young man. They couldn’t tie him down, he’d escape through windows or police vans and one day he even ran away when he was out for a walk with a prison officer. He’d show up around home and ask to be hidden. It got so that even I was afraid of him, I that reared him. You could be talking to him and all of a sudden he’d be looking through you like you were glass and he was going to smash his way into you.

  He walked in here one day and demanded a sandwich. I was
changing my little boy’s nappies, my little Ben, only a few months old, on a table. My brother jumping up and down wielding the bread knife, and I said to him, “Will you put that thing down, Mich, what kind of fooling are you up to?” He wanted a sandwich but wanted it there and then and I changing nappies and Mich yelling and roaring at me and saying, “Give it to me now,” and I am saying, “Pipe down or people will hear,” and I wrap up the child in a duvet and walk off towards the bedroom, and doesn’t he follow me down with the knife aimed at me and says, “I’m going to cut your throat,” and I say, “You’re absolutely crazy, but I’ll make the sandwich if you put the knife down,” and he says, “I don’t want your fecking food, it’s poisoned, and I’m going to leave a permanent mark on your face, so’s every time you look in the mirror you’ll think of me,” and I try fighting him, and he lunges the knife into my knee and blood starts gushing out. Next thing he produces a flick knife and digs it down into the duvet with Ben under it. The luck of God he didn’t harm him. My leg is going from under me and I let on to him that I hear the landlady and that he better get out before he’s sent back to one of them detention centres. I get him out the front door, and he starts kicking it and calling me every name under the sun. Then everything goes silent, even the child is stunned, and there’s blood pumping out of my knee and I shout out the window, “Somebody come and help me.” I shout it oodles of times, and the landlady calls up from below and I says to her, “Would you come up and help me, my brother is after throwing a fit and I’m bleeding.” She comes up and she says we have to report it to the guards, and I say I don’t want to, that I want to go to the doctor, and we leave Ben with a neighbour and we go out together. Up he hops from behind an oil tank with a hatchet, and I tell him to go away, that I’m only going to the doctor, and he says, “You’re going to the pigs.” That’s what he called the guards. We try ignoring him, us going down the road and he on the opposite side with the hatchet, cursing us. He sees that I’ve gone into the doctor’s and the woman with me and he scarpers. They bandage me up and then the woman insists that we have to go to the guards, and I say, “That’s betrayal,” and she says, “Betrayal or not, he assaulted you,” and I say that they’ll send him back to one of them places, and she says that if I don’t she will, and we go out the lane and she heads towards home, and I go on up to the barracks and I report it. Because it’s gone dark, I ask can they drive me back home because I’m afraid to walk, and they say there isn’t a car available, and I walk up home lame and scared out of my wits. When I get in the house I call to the landlady and she comes up with a poker in her hand and says there’s no sign of him and that he’s probably gone to stab someone else. We’re having a cup of tea when there’s a knock on my door and it’s him nice as pie asking would I have a drop of washing-up liquid, so I lift my knee to show him the big bandage and I say, “Look what you did,” and he says he didn’t mean to do it, it was them that told him to do it. I said who was them and he said the voices, the commands. That was the first I ever heard about them voices and I was puzzled, and I felt a bit sorry for him because he looked so lonely, a loner in life. I took his hand then and I said I did something awful, “I went to the pigs,” and he got up then and went out.

  I heard he was over in a caravan site by the lake for a few months, and next thing he stole a priest’s clothes and a priest’s collar and made his way to England. He wasn’t long there before he struck again. There was a picture of him in the paper, with the priest’s outfit, mugging an old woman at a bus stop. After that, the odd letter was from places with Her Majesty’s name on the top of the stationery. That was the first time I heard mention of voices, voices telling him to be a desperado, to earn for himself the name and state of outlaw.

  Froideur

  THEY ARE in Otto’s studio, a loft full of clutter, old floor lamps, picture frames, cane chairs waiting to be restrung, sofas to be upholstered, and a motorcycle from his tear-away days. A collection of china dolls on a high ledge look out at them with beady, unblinking, compassionless eyes, and from the rafters old pots and pans, ceramic jugs, and the pink baby chair with its abacus of beads from Otto’s babyhood. Witnesses to his wayward and wandering life.

  Otto is carpenter, stonemason, weaver, ladies’ man, and bohemian all in one.

  Each week Eily comes to paint with him, and over time she has heard fragments of his peripatetic life, born in a bunker in Berlin as the city was about to fall, an adoring mother who worked in a nightclub to rear him, weaned on whiskey, gaudy cellars, the bittersweet songs of love and disillusion, a world of women, bonbons, prostitutes, and, later on, actresses to whom he gave fans or shawls, waking up next to a ravaged face each morning, and always inside his head and in his urgent hands the powerful painting that was waiting to get painted. But he had deferred it and put it into life instead. Many a morning he has paced and with a childlike simplicity spoken to her of his torment, but on this morning he is in a sulk and has not yet saluted her.

  “Say it.”

  “I do not wish my little woman to go away.”

  “It’s only a few miles down the road.”

  “You shouldn’t have left here. This is our valley … our Montmartre.”

  “I had to … my lease was up.”

  “Your house is not happy … it’s gloomy.”

  “Don’t say that. It’s costing me all I have and haven’t.”

  “For your whippersnapper … Master Sven … Prince Hamlet of the byways.”

  “The local people like him, they respect him, they call him the Scholar.”

  “You are a free soul.”

  “So is he.”

  “Not like you. You give off an aura … Even the dogs in the street know that.”

  “We’ll still be friends, Otto, always.”

  “Always. What is always. Go … go to your shack with its no bath and no lavatory and no Otto to come across the fields to of an evening and smoke and have a drink and conjure Chagall’s floating angels circling above our valley.”

  “I’m happy … don’t you want me to be happy?”

  “No, nein, nyet.”

  “What can I do?”

  “Let me paint you.”

  “Okay.”

  “Nude.”

  “Okay.”

  “A triptych — first nude, the young Eily, vibrant, hungry, her burning hair. Next, she is older … a little belly on her … mother of three in a chemise, and last a pilgrim woman going up a winding road.”

  “Why are you so against him?”

  “Question … how come Otto has not been allowed to make love to the little Madonna?”

  “Because it wasn’t the right chemistry.”

  “I see. You will tell me next that you have discovered love. You will tell me there is no other love like it … never was, never will be … The stroke of his hand and you are electrified … you think a thought and he finishes it. You will tell me you have just discovered love and I will tell you you have just discovered disappointment. It is all illusion, fantasy, chimera.”

  “Why are you so against him?”

  “Because he is young and nothing else matters in this crooked, lousy, beautiful world.”

  He kicked a few things out of the way and went down the ladder stairs and she followed, a bit crestfallen.

  Parting

  MADGE IS hanging out a double sheet, mustard-coloured. There is something amiss about her wave to Eily, something tentative, embarrassed. In that moment Eily thinks she should reverse up the lane, but then she thinks that would be hasty, unfriendly.

  Madge and Eily have been friends since they met that warm day the previous spring when Eily had gone into the craft shop where Madge works, to see if she might display some of the postcard drawings she had done. They were all of nudes, and many were pregnant, with proud, voluptuous bellies.

  “How about putting some clothes on them,” Madge said, and they laughed, both knowing how the local people viewed them, their long skirts and their wellingtons, sloppy k
nitwear and ethnic jewellery. “Blow-ins” they were called, a name that had originated from the flotsam of wrecked vessels that had blown in from the sea. Blow-ins.

  They went outside and sat on the window ledge watching the dilatory life of the street — a dog chewing a flat ball, young girls teetering in absurdly high platform shoes, walking up and down, expecting a group of boys to appear.

  “I hate men,” Madge said, but without conviction. She had separated from her third partner, had two kids, no money, lived in a leaky caravan, and had just set her cap on another heartthrob. They discovered that they both had a penchant for the Jesus types, men with long, straggly, unwashed hair, woodsmen appearing at dusk like shadow men. Madge had noticed her latest on the upper road delivering oil, and many a morning since was to be seen wandering up there, drooling.

  “What hooked you?” Eily had asked.

  “A silent bugger … I have this dappy notion that if they’re silent they’re deep. What about you? Are you solo?”

  “I am now. I lived in England, worked in an arts centre, fell for someone, got pregnant … the old story. But I have a bonny boy.”

  “The old story,” Madge said wistfully.

  It transpired that they lived within a few miles of each other, Madge in her buckled caravan and Eily in a rented apartment surrounded by rolling hills and the landlord’s thoroughbred horses.

  When Madge visited for the first time, she marvelled at this harem, this Aladdin’s cave: bright walls, Oriental rugs, shawls and throws flung around like props on a stage.