In the Forest Page 6

  When the fire had died down completely, he sat trying to figure out where he would go next.

  * * *

  Cissy’s friends have foregathered to sympathise and to wait with her for the guard to come. They sit around the kitchen table lamenting that beautiful car that she had saved for, her chocolate ornament, her child, her joy.

  “I even called it Cadbury,” she says, and again she weeps, wondering aloud where it is and when it will be returned to her and in what state it will be.

  “It’ll be found … they always find them,” one says.

  “He’s evil, I know he’s evil,” Agnes says, Agnes, whose mother asked her to pop in on her way home to see if Cissy was all right.

  At the mention of that word they shudder.

  “I’ll tell you something I didn’t even tell my own mother,” Agnes says, and in a hushed voice describes how she and a group of girls were practising Camougie one evening in the sports field and O’Kane stood there watching them and his eyes met hers and the queer look from him sent shivers down her spine.

  “Shivers,” Oona said darkly, because they were all women and they knew what Agnes meant.

  “Weren’t you lucky you weren’t in the car … or where would you be now, Cissy?”

  “Tied up somewhere.”

  “Your throat cut …”

  “I heard that he can make himself invisible … You can go up into your bedroom and find him there and not even know how he got in.”

  “Oh, Immaculate Heart of Mary.”

  “If the guards did their job we’d be safe and Cadbury would be outside the door.”

  “It’s not the guards’ fault … it’s the government’s … cuts cuts cuts everywhere.”

  “Tell you what,” Oona says, “why don’t we get down on our knees and pray … pray for two things, that Cadbury will be brought back safe and that Michen O’Kane will be sent back to one of them institutions.”

  Hoodlums

  O’KANE IS ALONE in an empty chapel, white walls, the red flame of the lamp, a bare altar, by the holy-water font a poster of Jesus in white with a gold halo around him.

  He had gone in hoping to find some Holy Mary on her knees, to get a bit of money. He hasn’t eaten for two days, and his feet and his socks are soaking wet. Empty. Fucking empty. Nothing for it but to raid the box where the money for the candles is put. He finds a screwdriver round the back, in a shed where they kept tools and a lawn-mower, and begins to prise the metal mouth open, bit by bit, tongues of twisted brass curling out like an opened cunt. He keeps hacking at it until the hole is big enough to put his hand in. He rummages. The metal teeth snarl at him and he snarls back. Fucking nothing. Two coins, one of them foreign. He goes pitch and toss with them on the tiles of the floor when in walks a kid, a kid not unlike himself, younger and with rosy cheeks.

  “Howdie, Gunner,” the kid says.

  “Who’re you?”

  “Not telling.”

  “Little gick … Got a fag?”

  “They’re all shit scared of you … They’re locking their doors since you hit town.”

  “Why aren’t you shit scared of me?”

  “’Cause I’m a hobo like you … I can hot-wire a car … I haven’t done holdups yet, but I’m planning. Did you know that Jesus is also called Emmanuel?”

  “Who says?”

  “It’s written on the poster: Dear Jesus alone in every tabernacle … poor Jesus.”

  “Could you get me chips or a bun?”

  “I’m skint … but tell you what, there’s a cure for hunger … the priest read it out on Sunday,” and picking up a leaflet he hopscotches to the altar and reads in a manly voice:

  Elijah went into the wilderness, a day’s journey and sitting under a fir bush wished he were dead. Lord, he said, I have had enough, I am no better than my ancestors, take my life. Then he lay down and went to sleep. But an angel touched him and said, “Get up and eat.” He looked around and there at his head were scones baked on hot stones and a jar of water. He ate and drank and then lay down again. But the Angel of the Lord came back a second time and touched him and said, “Get up and eat or the journey will be too long for you.” So he got up and ate and drank, and strengthened by that food, he walked for forty days and forty nights until he reached Horeb, the mountain of God.

  “Would you come to the woods with me?” O’Kane asks.

  “Which woods?”

  “Any woods. We can track game and shoot and have barbecues … I’ll get a guitar.”

  “Ah now … me mammy would die if I wasn’t home for me tea,” and at that he runs into the sacristy whistling, and out the door, then off under the yew trees, over a stile towards home.

  O’Kane went out wet, sullen, and lonesome. He crossed fields and back yards shouting and kicking dogs that accosted him.

  It was a shop called The Wren owned by the newcomers, the blow-ins. In the doorway there were sacks of potatoes and vegetables caked in thick brown muck. He stood outside and looked in at the plates of scones and small pots of jam and honey. There were women in there, talking and laughing, with their backs to him. One of them went behind the counter as soon as he came in and looked at him, suspicious. He was holding a single coin in his hand.

  “How much is a scone?”

  “Thirty pence,” she said, then shook her head because he had only five. Her eyes were mean-looking and her hair was scraped back in a bun.

  “Go on, Maggie … give him the scone,” a second woman said, and rooted in her shoulder bag for the money. She was tall, hair all the way down her back, red hair, the ribs of it standing out, as if there was electricity in it, and when she turned, her eyes were gold spots, like the beam of his torch in the wood at night.

  As he is given the bun he bows to her and blurts it out: “Elijah fasted for forty days and forty nights until he reached the mountain of God.”

  Maggie comes from behind the counter and holds the door open for him, then, pulling the bolt angrily, turns to Eily: “He’s off his trolley … you shouldn’t encourage freaks like that.”

  “Mother Margaret,” Eily says, allowing a wisp of cigarette smoke to float in her direction.

  Playtime

  SHE WAS IN a cream, rackety little motorcar with a child in the back seat. O’Kane thought it was someone else’s child that she was dropping off, because she looked too young to be a mother. Her hair was all hidden under a black beret and she was smoking and laughing. He tailed her in a stolen car, but kept a sensible distance.

  She turned around a lot to talk to the child and on a bend nearly crashed into a haulage lorry. Suddenly she shot up a side road to where there was the new school. He put on his sunglasses and a knitted cap, and he followed on foot. The school was a huddle of single-storey wooden houses, some old and shook-looking, some very new. There were trees and flower beds and ornamental rocks. There was a sandpit with buckets and spades for the kids. In the windows there were paintings and mobiles: stars, dinosaurs, and fishes. He could hear singing.

  Just by the vegetable garden a young fellow was emptying horse manure from a trailer and dumping it onto a pile.

  “Howya,” he said as he passed him.

  “Shovelling shit,” the fella said, and laughed.

  He followed her to the very end building and then went around to the back to have a view through a side window. They were infants and they were all in little wooden armchairs around a table, as if they were grown-ups eating their breakfast. When she went in they jumped up and ran to her. The child she was carrying thumped her at being put down and then lay on the floor kicking.

  From a cupboard she took out things that were not school things at all: mats and bits of coloured rope and sun umbrellas. Then she took off her shoes and started clowning, and they clowned with her. She walked a tightrope holding the umbrella, and when she fell they cheered and started clambering over her. Then they took turns walking the tightrope, and they fell.

  Eamonn, the fellow shovelling shit, was standing b
eside him laughing as well. “It’s a new kind of school … no curriculum, no beatings, no punishment.”

  “You want a hand shovelling that shit?” he asked, and picked up a spare shovel, and the two of them worked and whistled.

  “Don’t put the fork through it when you lift it … it stirs up the gas … gives out a rotten aul smell,” Eamonn says.

  “I’ll split your skull,” he says, aiming the shovel at him.

  “Sorry sorry.”

  “Are you local?”

  “I’m not … I work with a man that owns the equestrian centre … I muck out.”

  “Spend your life shovelling shit.”

  “Nearly. He’s going to bring me to the horse show in Dublin in August … Jesus, don’t put the fork through it … sorry sorry.”

  “What do they do with this shit?”

  “It’s great for rhubarb … they make a rhubarb bed.”

  A tall grey-haired woman came as they were talking, carrying a tiny mug of coffee. She was surprised to find that there were two workmen, but at once said she was glad of the extra help, as many hands make light work. She went on to praise the manure and the generosity of the man who gave it to them for free. She said that it did wonders for the rhubarb bed, the fruit trees, and the little birches that were growing apace. She liked all trees, but the rowan tree was her favourite, because of the bright red berries. Suddenly she became very girlish and put a strand of hair behind her ear and told them, “When I was a little girl in the forest, my mother told me that the rowanberries were poison, but they are not … they are bitter, but they are not poison … You will get a wonderful dinner here with rönnbärsgele, perhaps you have had it sometimes with game or venison … no?”

  “Game or venison,” O’Kane said when she left, and they sniggered and shared the mug of coffee. The rim of it was white, with white dribbles leaking onto the earth brown glaze. They had a few slugs each.

  When he looked again the dazzling young woman was wearing an apron over her jeans and carrying a skillet on which there were little loaves of bread.

  “Hi, Eamonn,” she said as she passed them. The children followed in a drove, behind her, their faces painted every colour and streaks of paint in their hair.

  “They love you, missus,” Eamonn says.

  “They love anyone that lets them play and make bread.”

  She carried the tray of loaves to a clay oven that was built on bricks and shaped like an igloo. She used a toasting fork to open the slide door and a big blaze of fire leapt out and lit her face, and it was all ruddy, as if she were blushing.

  “What’s her name?” O’Kane asked.

  “Catherine, I think.”

  “You think.”

  “Maybe I’m mixing her up … bewitching, isn’t she?”

  “What the fuck would you know about bewitching.”

  Soon the smell of warm dough drifted across to them, and the children flopped around and the woman talked to them in a husky singing voice. She knew all their names.

  * * *

  It was a week before he followed her, and when he saw where she lived, he went wild. It was his house, his lair that summer before he went to England. He had slept upstairs in the attic room; he knew the foxes that came around there in the mornings, mothers and fathers and cubs, foxes that drank from the trough where he washed himself. He’d put the wind up the man that owned it. Left death threats. He loved sleeping there. Left an old mattress and things: an axe; souvenirs of his mother, her hairbrush and a pink bed jacket. His hidey-hole. The owner, a shopkeeper from Limerick, got afraid to come, complained to a neighbour about being burgled, his tinned foods eaten and his stock of paraffin oil used up. Now she was in it, her and the child. A sadness came over him, then rage, and he thought of hurling stones through the windows, but a voice said, “All you’ve got to do is make friends with her, son.” It was a good voice and his heart leapt to it, and he felt something like hope, he felt he was coming home for her.

  Watching

  FROM THEN ON he watched her. He watched her eat her breakfast, watched her bathe, watched her bring out a mug of coffee to Declan Tierney, up on the roof, and whistle him down. She had a powerful whistle for a woman and a powerful laugh. She flirted. She carried furniture and bags of groceries, and she carried the child back and forth to the car, the two of them always gassing: “Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to work we go.” In his daydream there was no child, there was only him and her.

  He got to know her exact movements, the days when she taught in the school, the places she shopped in, the pubs she drank in, and the day she queued at the post office to get her child’s allowance. He was about ten behind her in the queue, and the people on either side of him kept nudging one another and edging away from him.

  “Hello, Michen … you’re back,” a bitch said.

  “Piss off,” he told her.

  Eily turned and laughed, and then on her way out admired his jumper. It was a green jumper with berries on it that he’d stolen from a caravan. With his dole money he would buy her a present. When his turn came, a cow behind the counter told him he wasn’t eligible for twenty-eight days, being as he was only recently returned.

  “Eligible, what the fuck is eligible,” he roared as he went out.

  In a window across the street there were knitted things, shawls the colour of heather and belts with tassels on them. He went in, looked around, and picked up a flat grey stone with a sickle carved on it.

  “Excuse me,” a girl called out.

  “Excuse me,” he called back.

  Later that evening he left the stone outside her door and hid in the field on the far side of the wall. The door was closed on account of it raining. He hid for hours and watched the turf smoke going up and breaking into shreds. There weren’t many stars. There were clothes steeped in a big aluminium pot on the stove. The child was writing at the kitchen table. She sat next to him and from time to time went across and pounded the clothes with a wooden mallet and then took a drag out of a cigarette and inhaled it.

  When she came out to hang the clothes, she was so close to him that he thought she would smell him the way he smelt her. She had a clean smell, like the smell of the clothes and the white flakes she had washed them in. He could have reached out and grabbed her, but he didn’t. She had trained the tilly lamp towards the line, and the beams ran down one side of her face and neck and down the leg of the trousers that she wore. They were scarlet trousers, not the denim ones that she wore over in the school.

  “Eily, where are you?” the kid called from the house. So she was not a Catherine, she was Eily, and he was within a few feet of her, imagining the scream she would let out if he sprung her.

  Nothing was the same from then on. It was as if with some subtle, unspoken signal she had let him in.

  The next night, she was standing up in the aluminium bath, blood running down her thighs, blood the bright red of fuchsia, blood like he had seen on his mother once and cried thinking she was going to die. It gushed. She poured the water from a jug, and the blood and the water got mixed in together and streamed down her legs, less ruddy, the rest of her body white as milk.

  She went up to bed early that night, the child in her arms, already asleep. In his mind he went up the stairs behind them. He knew that stairs well, knew the missing step at the bottom and the steps that creaked. He knew the rafters where the thrushes nested in the spring. He saw a mother thrush sit there day after day and night after night, her eyes like glass beads. Once, when she went off to get food, he took the eggs and mashed them in his hands. The shells were a light blue.

  In the mornings she washed outdoors in a big white bath, one that the Declan fellow carried across the field with three of his mates. It filled up with rainwater and sometimes the kid played with boats in it. The kid got on his nerves, the way she pandered to it, the way she kissed it for no reason, made chips for it and tumbled them in a wire basket like a lady in a chip shop. When they got into the bath together, she had a long br
ush to scrub her back and scrub the child’s. She had a nailbrush with a frog handle. Before she washed the child’s hair she undid the knots in it, picked them out one by one and then combed it and poured a jug of water on it, and Maddie rebelled when she poured on the shampoo and scrunched his eyes and kicked her.

  One night she did something odd. She came back downstairs in the dark and lit a candle, then crossed to a wooden cupboard and turned the long, thin key and opened the flap doors. There was a golden figure inside, cross-legged. She sat in front of it, the same way as the figure sat, and began to pray. She folded her hands and bowed her head. She was praying for something very important, he could tell. It made him cry. When he cried he could not stop, it was like when he laughed he could not stop, except that it was crying and it went on and on. She was a sad woman that night, not laughing and not smoking a cigarette. She had a book that she read from, like a prayer book, and she kissed the page when she had finished.

  He crossed the fields, climbed gates and walls, and then went along by the shore and past the empty summer houses to where his mother’s grave was. He had not been to it for over a year, since he went to England, and he lay down on the mound crying and explaining. His mother heard him, but she did not talk back to him, probably on account of his having gone away and got put in jail for wrong things. Flowers and wreaths on a new grave caught his eye. He picked them all up in his arms and heaped them onto his mother’s grave. He slept a bit. When he wakened it was light, and he decided to go back and visit the woman and bring some of the flowers and ask for a cup of tea and say he was lonely.

  When he got there he ranted because she had gone out. He tore up the flowers, tore the petals, tore the stalks, and flung them everywhere. He knew where she kept the key under a flower pot, and let himself in. Even before he pushed it, he knew the creak of that door. Breakfast things were on the table. He ate cereal from a packet, held the packet above his mouth and funnelled it in. On the wall there was a calendar with a picture of a woman and a child, a golden child inside her chest. Underneath there was writing. He made out the odd word — ocean, deity, water, fire. The woman was all them things. Her folded tights were on a chair, and he picked them up and examined them and took them for company.