In the Forest Read online

  “I can see men enslaved here … Homer with the sirens,” she had said, walking around, scrutinising the various treasures, little perfume bottles, tortoiseshell combs, donning a feather boa, and green with envy, as she put it.

  In the month of the bluebells Madge asked if she could do a portrait of Eily and sat her on a kitchen chair in the middle of Allendara Wood. The bluebells everywhere, along the ground and between the rocks and up the tree trunks and even wreathed around the skulls of two dead horses that lay there perfectly preserved in a greenish mould. There was a harmony to it, the rich myriad life of the wood all about, the deft strokes of the brush along the canvas, little shadows that danced skew-wise across her face, under the brim of a lilac straw hat. It was Madge’s hat and it was made of a silken straw. They jumped when a pack of lurchers ran through, chasing their leader, who had a hunk of raw dripping meat hanging from his mouth.

  “You’re to keep the hat,” Madge said as they walked back in that filtered sunlight, stopping and starting, picking the odd flower, and concocting big dreams about buying land and selling it for a packet. That was the day they pledged to be always there for one another, but then Sven arrived and came between them somewhat. Farmers referred to him as the Scholar because he was so knowledgeable, knew so much about different types of land, diversified farming, lecturing them at length and sometimes a little boringly about environment, the pollution in their rivers and streams. The need for cosmic consciousness.

  Madge had first sighted him in the hall dancing with an elderly woman, looking into her face and dancing the slow sedate steps that she knew, oblivious of the tempo around them. “I bet that boy loves his mum,” Madge had said, and remarked on his arms that were a little too long for his body. It was Madge who spotted him and it was Madge who eventually threw them together. How inevitable it seemed once it happened, yet before that Eily had scarcely noticed him, had given him a lift the odd time, had once seen him in the landlord’s grounds, the pair of them walking up and down the avenue debating heatedly. And then that spell, that flounder, an instant of capitulation and not a word uttered. It was his birthday, and while everybody was celebrating, Madge had sent them into the kitchen to make a pot of tea. Suddenly they were kissing and he was kicking closed a nearby door to avoid the inevitable guffaws from the other room. Accidentally they bumped into and overturned a heater, and as he told her afterwards in his confiding way, he left it overturned to prolong the sweetness of the moment.

  Kilcash became their haunt, the oldest of all the woods, a timelessness in its rustle, in its vastness, in twig and leaf and bole, moss a thick bouclé of velvet on tree trunks, herds of wild goats fleeing at the first sight of an intruder. Their wood. Sven had fixed up a hammock inside a fort of trees and covered it with a canopy of green tarpaulin. Nearby was a well which he insisted was a magic well and where someone, other lovers perhaps, had left a little pewter egg cup for passersby to drink from. On their third or fourth visit she brought a holy medal and threw it into the well, and they wished, jointly wished, then watched the silver sparkle down there, the medal settling itself on a bed of fawn silt. …

  * * *

  “Hi, stranger,” Madge said, fixing the last peg to the sheet with a snapping sound.

  “I haven’t been because I’m working on the place day and night.”

  “When is the housewarming?”

  “Soon … I want to borrow that dream book from you. I had the oddest dream last night.”

  “What?”

  “Monkeys. They were swinging inside my skull, frantic to get out.”

  “Sven borrowed it.”

  “Oh, he’s back,” Eily said, trying to sound casual.

  “Yes, he got back last night. He called here … He crashed out, but before you erupt, let me explain: he was tired, we talked, smoked a joint, I made a bit of supper and presto, it’s midnight.”

  “I see,” Eily said, but what she saw was a sheet hung up, water dripping from it in little piddles, a sheet she believed that they had slept on.

  “Get a grip … you sulked when he left for Dublin, you sulk when he comes back. He’s just a kid … he’ll go off you.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Well, his family think it’s all wrong … an older woman, solo with a child. They have bigger things in mind for him.”

  “He told you that?”

  “He trusts me, he confides in me, he runs to me, then you run to me … tea and sympathy … You’re like children, the pair of you … Sometimes I wish I’d never flung you together.”

  Eily had been sitting sideways, half in and half out of the car, bantams, like little ballerinas pecking at the canvas of her shoe, when suddenly she swings her feet back in, trembling but adamant.

  “Why are you doing this? Why are you so suspicious?”

  “I love him, Madge.”

  “Oh Jesus. Love! All I meant was, don’t be such a princess,” and with that she reached in and tried to snatch the keys, and they bickered, Madge insisting, “I only want to be his friend. I want to do a painting of him, I don’t want to make babies with him.”

  Eily reversed the car, startled some hens in the dust baths, and trampled over a new flower bed to get onto the rutted avenue, Madge hitting at the bonnet and pleading with her not to go: “I’m a blatherer … I know I’m a blatherer, but I love you.”

  The car shot away, Madge waving a teacloth and then shaking the garments on the line, imploring her to turn round.

  When Eily saw Sven outside Jacko’s Pub, sitting on the pavement, she almost melted. He seemed so young, so vulnerable, eating a choc ice, a punishing haircut, his tongue licking the drips of cream, beside him a bundle that held his few belongings.

  She did not want to, yet she crossed towards him and handed him the tape that contained the storybook words they exchanged when they were alone.

  “What’s this?” he asked as he stood up. He had just read her eyes.

  “I’ve decided that it’s best you go home now … not in a month or two, as we said.”

  “I can’t. I’ve told my parents … I’ve written to my professor … I’ve told them I’m staying on here.”

  “We always knew that you were going to go home … We knew it from that very first day in the Kilcash Wood, but we blocked it, because we’re … simpletons.”

  He broke into his own tongue then, believing that the depth and truth of what he felt would be evident, and she, for her part, kept lolling her head idly as if she was about to yield to him. A little girl who was skipping stationed herself in front of him, wildly curious.

  “Trying to find the right words,” he said.

  “For what?” the little girl asked, and he described seeing a beautiful princess on a dance floor, wearing a sailor suit, and then suddenly she was gone and he had to bribe one of the locals to drive him over fields and bogs, eventually arriving underneath her window and serenading her with bits of grass and loose pebbles.

  “Don’t, Sven,” she said.

  “Is it our age difference, then?”

  “That … and … everything. There will always be people who will try to split us up.”

  “Let’s go to a new place … let’s drive farther and farther west until we find maybe an island with a few cows … me and my Gypsy girl.”

  “Your Gypsy girl’s mind is made up,” she said.

  They are facing each other now, both shaking, each with a hand raised either to mediate or to remonstrate. The black hairs on his knuckles are like jet.

  “This is some kind of false proudness,” he says.

  “It isn’t … I’ve put down roots here and I’ve put them down alone,” she says.

  “To be honest, I don’t know you now. I am looking at a woman I thought I knew … who has turned into a stranger.”

  “I don’t trust you, Sven.”

  “I didn’t fuck anybody in Dublin, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “You got back last evening.”

  �
�I hitched … it was raining. I walked the last bloody umpteen miles and I called to Madge … you’re just jealous.”

  “Yes, just jealous.”

  “Explain to me, please, why you’re making me go.”

  “I’ll write it to you.”

  “So you really mean that you want me to pull out.”

  “Yes, I really mean that I want you to pull out.”

  “What do I do with all my feelings?” he asks boyishly.

  “When we’re sixty or seventy, we’ll understand all about our feelings.”

  “I guess you’re right … everybody moves on.” He shrugged, then said, “Hey … let’s make it bittersweet … let’s kiss here on the street in front of all the busybodies,” and his full lips, the wine red of loganberries, sought hers.

  She did something other. She took off the chain and blue amulet that she was wearing and put it round his neck and tied it with infinite care.

  “I’m in a rocket,” he said, her hands so stealthy, so caressing.

  “I’m gone,” she whispered.

  “Stay just one minute,” but she was lifting the latch of the pub door, tall and tawny, disappearing with the abruptness of a sunset.

  The Tavern

  SHE SAT SILENTLY and drank slowly but deliberately. She thought, I am seeing this place through different eyes. She had been in Jacko’s dozens of times, yet never before had taken it all in so acutely. She thought, I’ve drunk with him here, I’ve danced with him here, I’ve flirted with him here, and now I am staring into the almost empty bar wondering why I sent him away.

  What she stared at were the high stools with their red plastic covers held down by regimented rows of brass studding, the one wall with a strip of embossed velveteen from Jacko’s mother’s time, the other walls white, the globes of light with segments of imitation fruits and a dented St. Anthony’s box. Two men are farther over by the fire, arguing, grasping each other’s coat collar, in an altercation. She knows them: Denny, a bachelor, small, with a grizzled goatee beard, and Huw, the swank, in a green corduroy jacket, with leather elbow patching.

  “I’m not telling you and that’s that,” Denny says.

  “All I’m asking is, have you a site to sell?”

  “I wouldn’t let you within miles of my place … with your women and your greyhounds.”

  “At least hear me out.”

  “I know what you want … you want to buy it cheap and then sell it off to another fecking foreigner.”

  “How many acres have you, a hundred, two hundred?” Huw says, baiting him now.

  “More.”

  “Water frontage?”

  “Water frontage, water view, water works … you’re wasting your throttle, boy.”

  “I’ll pay the asking price.”

  “I’m not selling … I told you last week and the week before and the week before that.”

  “What do you want with all that land and you an old bachelor?”

  “How many illegitimate kids have you now … is it five or six? … the state paying for them … our poor little country bled from the likes of ye.”

  “You haven’t done too badly with your water frontage.”

  “It was my father’s before me.”

  “Look, half an acre is all I ask … I’m living with a Norse woman and she’s mad to be by water. She misses the sea.”

  “Asleep on the job, are you?” Denny says, and winks to where Eily is sitting.

  “And how is the princess?” Huw calls across to her. She had thought him attractive for a few minutes one night in another pub and she always regretted that she had let him see it, because he took sneering advantage of it.

  “Fine, fine,” she says distantly.

  “Didn’t poor Mrs. Burke go quick,” Denny calls across to her in a friendly voice.

  “And how are you, Denny?” she calls back.

  “I’m getting old and foolish,” he says, laughing.

  “He’s sitting on a fortune,” Huw says, and suddenly Denny goes towards the door cursing, “Feck off, you and your foreign woman and them naked children, running wild.”

  “Oh … a major alcoholic,” Huw shouts to him as he goes through the door.

  Standing above Eily, he begins to read aloud what she has just written:

  Go up to the village and turn left at the village hall.

  Go on not too far and take the first left turning and you come to a little road that goes over a tract of bog, you pass a derelict house on the left and farther on down there’s ponies, piebald ponies in a field, after that there’s an old red caravan with a curtain in the window and you go on down until you come to a view of the lake way beneath you and you will come to a forked track where there is a rusted cattle feeder and you’ll take the centre fork and see the house in among the trees. By the way, you’ll have to walk the last bit of your journey.

  He looked at her, looked to the copy book again, and whistled and said, “Jesus, you’re a number-one Gypsy, plonking yourself like that in the middle of wilds. No one will go to a party down there.”

  “Look, Huw, cut it out,” and she snatches the notebook back, and nettled by the rejection, he takes off his green scarf, dosses it with a spurious and condescending sarcasm, and says, “You’re all candidates for Valium here.”

  She is unnerved when he has gone and orders another pint. Jacko says nothing. That is his way. He stands in the yellow artificial light, like a figure in a frieze, stands as he has done for years, drawing pints, never once remarking on his customers or entering into any conversation with them. The wall clock seems both loud and slurpish.

  “It’s not like you to have a third pint,” he says, and she knows that that is his way of being friendly.

  She thinks she will sit a while longer, then drive out to the lake road and Sven will be under a tree sheltering from the summer rain and she will stop and he will get in. At first he will be quite formal, talking with a kind of evangelism of some new theory of his, and in time taking her hand, holding it, and then they will park the car and go in their little lost road, the trees all in bud, catkins like feathered tapers, the blossom in mazed and snowy whiteness, thralling in the moonlight, bridal trees in the brief ravishment of springtime.

  But he was not there and she wept at her rashness, her false pride, and her grandiloquent speech about being alone. Alone alone alone, the word galled her like the hungry cry of some cormorant, far out at sea.

  Joy Ride

  CISSY’S NEW CAR is outside her front door, a chocolate-coloured ornament, the sheer metal a mirror in which passersby can glance at themselves. Cissy doubles as sacristan and hackney driver, is run off her feet, and has gone in to grab a cup of coffee before taking a Frenchman to the airport. From the windscreen an ivory Virgin dangles down, a relic to protect her, and her rosary beads are in the glove box along with a bag of peppermints and a map.

  O’Kane, sporting a new growth of moustache, jaunts down the towpath and stops to admire it, reaches in, and as he turns the key, the engine comes to life and he thrills to it. Within seconds he is tearing down the street and sees her in the rearview mirror, a grey-haired harridan, flapping like a turkey. Dogs and children scatter before him, and two older men on a street bench stand up and gape after him. He drives towards the next town, but bypasses it and goes on up towards the mountain, over the bumpy roads, where he can give her a good ride. Ursula he named her, after that cow in the jail. She is full of juice. She bounces and rocks and sways and swags as if there is no ground, as if he is flying it. Wild horses and wild ponies appear in speckled splashes, leaping and whirling into the air, the needle jigging, the engine racing, and a high that he hasn’t had in over two years. Yelling with excitement he talks to himself, “Ride her cowboy … yonder yonder.”

  It is evening before he makes his way over the rim of the mountain and down a rough ravine to the edge of the wood that is his favourite, the wood where he hid as a kid, before the scumbags got him, and with a squealing and sprawling suddenness
the car comes to a stop and he knows why it is that he has come there. He gets out.

  “Welcome home, son … you did us proud … didn’t let the bastards get to you.” It is the wood talking to him, the trees thicker now, the trees where he hid and where his mother came and found him, the spot where he kept old cushions, the mass of cover dark even in daylight. He searches in his pocket for a rag, and finding none, he tears a strip from the tail of his shirt, unscrews the nozzle, and dunks the cloth in it, then lays it on the front seat, about to witness his first glorious spectacular. No sooner had he struck the match than the seat caught, as if it had been waiting for it, the flames breaking free and spreading, sheets of flame, flags of flame, orange, crimson, roaring and crackling. The tyres starting to burst, their bursts like priests farting, the windows beginning to crack, beads of glass falling onto the ground, flame flitting across his face and he sucking big scoops of air, flouting his importance, Davey and Lazlo and the other fuckers all cheering him on.

  He decides to make a party of it, ask people up. He puts his arm out to catch a burning lady, an Ursula, a cunt. He’s high, he’s the devil’s favourite son and they will never lock him up again or beat the shit out of him and into him. He’s a man. He has grown to manhood in spite of the bastards and bastardesses. Better than eating, better than drinking, better than dope or screwing or anything. He hasn’t screwed a woman yet. All he knows of women is from the juicy pictures in the magazines, passed from cell to cell, girls with their backs in suspender belts, one leg hoisted to show the pleat of their arses, or frontwise slung back over a table to show the pleat of their cunts, their throats waiting to be slit.

  Soon he is smoochy and he wants to kiss a woman and get kissed. He debates about a name. He’ll call her Veronica, no he won’t, he’ll call her Trish. He wants to hear a woman say, “I like your moustache.” He feels her feeling the hard blunt hairs, up there in the dark, in the painted flame, and him feeling her back, up there on the edge of the empty forgotten woods.