In the Forest Page 7

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  The following Sunday there was a session in the pub and she was there. Her hair was in small plaits, all over her head, like snakes tapping her. Surrounded by blokes. Blokes with earrings and leather jackets and guitars. She lapped it up. The blokes made much of themselves, getting out their instruments, setting them up, testing them, big pints placed down in front of them and in front of her, too. She was wearing the scarlet trousers that she had worn the night he saw her hanging the clothes. She had a matching jacket with some of the buttons open down the front. She had a necklace. A pouffe was set down for her to sit on. He stood outside the pub window, his eyes burning into her, burning into her smile and the open buttons and the necklace. She swayed in time with the music. The blokes reached over, whispering things to her. When she had drunk most of the pint, one of them picked up the bodhran and laid it into her lap. After a lot of coaxing she began to beat on the goatskin, bringing every dead hair, every fibre alive. She beat it like a mad woman, like an African woman that he had seen in a picture. He banged on the window, making the same sound, believing that she would look up and see him and bring him in and say, “This is my friend.” He would bring her up to the woods, to his hideaway, and he would ride her there and she would ride him back, because she had already made eyes at him in the school and in the post office, had given him scones to eat, like Elijah got. He drew nearer and nearer, his nose puttied to the window, until a woman saw him and whispered to Gussie the owner.

  “You bastard … you pup you, get out of here. Don’t ever let me catch you here again.” It was Gussie the cripple, with a beer mug in his hand and a posse of men behind him.

  “Fuck you all,” he said, and he turned, but he did not run. They were afraid of him. No one of them man enough to come out alone, but in a herd. He would have to act fast, because one of the earring bastards fancied her, his thigh smack up against hers for the session, his skin-tight leather thigh against her pleated, satiny folds.

  Easter

  IT IS a warm night, the sounds and the smells coming through the open door, the smell of grass, pigeons cooing in the trees and a donkey that has been moved to a nearby field whining to be let back home. Her friend Brigit’s voice on the tape sounds so near, so intimate, as if she is there in the kitchen with them. On the table, the dozen eggs, the two needles, a big white bowl, and a whisk, all in preparation. Maddie is on her lap, and they lean in like schoolchildren to hear it.

  More and more people here in Holland make an Easter branch. It is a custom that has been revived. First we empty the eggs, and then paint and varnish them and display them on a branch. It can be pussy willow or forsythia or any branch. To empty the egg I take a needle to the top and to the bottom, pierce a hole, and then place one of the holes to my lips. Then I blow with all my strength until the white and the yellow comes out completely through the bottom hole. It’s nicer to keep the hole really small, but it makes blowing the eggs harder. Ever tried to blow a big balloon? This is the same. I use water paints, marker or glue glitter, cotton for hair and beards, and sometimes paper hats to make a funny impression. I looked up in my symbol book and found this:

  “Eggs have been a symbol of spring since ancient times. Rabbits, too, are associated with the fertility of spring because of their ability to produce so many young. The lamb is an important Easter symbol. It represents Jesus and relates his death to that of the lamb sacrificed on the first Passover.” Blow blow blow, dearest friends.

  “Come on now, we’ve got to blow.”

  At first Maddie loved it, puffed his cheeks out and giggled at the splutter of the yucky egg coming out of the little hole and the puddle in the bottom of the white bowl. Yucky. Yucky. Yucky. He dipped his finger in the yucky and tasted it and ran into the yard to spit it out.

  “I’m having a rest.”

  “I won’t let you paint unless you blow.”

  “Eily can blow.”

  “Mr. Yucky can blow … he has lungs.”

  “Mr. Yucky’s gone on strike … Mr. Yucky’s on his bike …”

  By the time he has come back, all the eggs are empty and she has got out the paint, the markers, the glitter, the cotton to decorate them with.

  “Guess what. I think there’s a robber out there.”

  “Really.”

  “I heard him … I chased him.”

  “How did you hear him?”

  “I heard him running over sticks — the demon.”

  “Good thing I have you as a guard dog … Smokey is dozy.”

  “Is Sven coming?” he said overquickly.

  “You are a nosey one … I don’t know. Why?”

  “I like Sven … me and him have good chats. But I like Eily the most, then Cass, then Smokey, then Declan …”

  “Then bed,” she said, and had to chase him before she got hold of him.

  The painted eggs hanging from the swaying branches are like jewels, red and yellow globes wreathed in glitter, and even as she steps across the kitchen floor, they begin to tinkle, their shells so light, so airy, as if they might shatter into smithereens.

  Cassandra

  I WAS MASTER of ceremonies for the Easter Egg Hunt on account of my years in puppeteering, knowing how to play a crowd, how to work them into a dither, terrify them and bring them back down.

  Eily had bought the prizes in the pound shop — balloons, cheap little dolls, cars, and colouring books. When the guests arrived she had already set up a bowl of hard-boiled eggs and jam jars of water and paintbrushes. Every child was invited to decorate an egg. They did squiggles and dots, and we hawed on them to dry them fast. Eily went to hide them in the orchard, and when she hollered and they were let out, they charged like barbarians, roughing each other, everyone wanting to be first. Screams which meant an egg had been found, and another and another. Then a big lamentation from Maddie because he’d stood on his egg and broke it. He went in for one of his fits, turned blue in the gills, and had to be laid down on the grass for his mammy to stroke his tummy and tell him he was the best boy. Two other children couldn’t find eggs at all, so two extra eggs had to be scrawled with a red marker and hid in a prominent place so that we could get on with the big attraction, the prize-giving. They formed a line outside the kitchen door, and each child in turn got a marzipan chicken, a chocolate egg, and a little prize. None were satisfied. Everyone coveted the top prize, which was a Transformer Robot and which Eily stupidly had put up on the mantelpiece. I knew it would lead to ructions. Me me me. Two boys tried to knock it over with a walking stick.

  In the end the grown-ups had to have a secret ballot, and the prize went to a little chap with black curly hair who never spoke. It turned out he was a mute. Then they stuffed themselves with sweets and chocolate cake, then they fought, rival gangs, Bang, bang, you’re dead, I’m not dead, up and down the wobbly stairs, into the garden, up in the trees, peeing on one another, one boy squirting the girls from his water pistol, and mothers walking around the garden, admiring it, out of politeness.

  It was evening when we got ready to leave, the grownups drooping, the children more feisty than ever. Two daddies came to pick up their brood, and it was amazing the welcome they got. Kids descending on them, kids hugging them, kids jumping onto the running board of a vintage car that one of them drove. It was like the largest toy they’d ever seen, and the daddy basked in their admiration of it.

  Eily didn’t want the day to end. “Let’s go to the pub,” she said. Several of the ladies gave her that look, as if she was a dipso.

  “We can’t take children to the pub,” I told her.

  “Denny knows me … he knows Maddie. We’re regulars … we go for a pint at six.”

  “They’re tired, they’ll moan.”

  “A girl’s night out,” she said with that soft pleading look in her eyes and the lashes fluttering a mile a minute and her saying, Please please, and me saying, Another time.

  When I drove off, I could see her in my mirror waving goodbye, and in that wave I saw that
she was facing isolation, and I thought, Why did I ever let her bury herself in that strange old house with its haunted vibes?

  Blow, Lady, Blow …

  FROM BEHIND a tall iron gate, patched with sheets of aluminium and looped with wire of every description, Lalla, the little girl, is running as though she is shaped out of thin air, running between the snarling, yellow-eyed Alsatians, in and out between the several caravans and among the men who are engaged in their sullen tasks, welding and hammering and soldering, men renowned for their cussed manners and their fights outside pubs on Saturday nights. Lalla is wearing a tartan skirt and dainty turquoise slippers with fluffy pompoms. She runs, indifferent to the men who are cursing her for making the dogs so excited, runs for the sake of running, with the lightness of a bright streamer, and when Eily and Maddie arrive outside the gate, she calls out bossily, “You’re late, you’re late.” The dogs converge on the gate and begin to leap up, their yellow eyes unblinking; they hurl themselves against the wire, drop back, and hurl again, barking with a fierce and lusty malevolence, and Lalla ordering one of the men to come and chain these savages up.

  Inside the cramped and curtained space of the caravan, four mothers sit in a quiet inertia, smoking, staring at the television as brightly coloured balloons drift through the stale air with a randomness. Lalla’s mother, Dell, cleans in the school where Eily teaches, and they have been invited to make it a special birthday party for Lalla, who is four.

  A small table has been laid with mugs and an iced cake, and the room smells of cigarette smoke and a sickly sweet air spray.

  “I saw you a long time ago,” Lalla says, touching Eily’s hair, the blue braid of her jacket, and then her hand.

  “Where did you see me a long time ago?”

  “In heaven.”

  “She’s lying … she tells lies,” her brother Shane says, and ignoring him, Lalla holds up her best present, a plastic wristwatch, the colour of raspberry cordial, and she licks it to show how much she loves it. Maddie is tugging Eily’s hair at the other side, jealous, suspicious, and whinging to go home.

  “We only just got here.”

  “Come,” Lalla says, and takes Eily’s hand and leads her to a smaller room crammed with bedding and boxes and two bunk beds where she and her gran sleep.

  “Every morning we wake up at the same time and I say, ‘Hello, Gran,’ and she says, ‘Hello, Lalla,’ and it’s always eight o’clock on my watch and it’s eight o’clock at school and it’s eight o’clock for the cows out in the fields.”

  “She can’t count and she can’t read,” Shane says.

  “I’ll spit at you,” Lalla says, and they have a spitting match, and her mother calls in that they are to behave themselves and remember they are not alone now, there are visitors.

  “I like silver and gold and I like light blue,” Lalla says, studying Eily’s mouth now, in which there is one gold filling at the back.

  “Where do you see silver?”

  “Money.”

  “Where do you see gold?”

  “Teeth.”

  “Where do you see light blue, Lalla?”

  “In the sky. I like Mrs. Quilligan because she has no kids … she lets me play football.”

  “No, she doesn’t,” Shane says. “She’s too scared to play football … she plays with Hilda,” and from a cradle under the bed he takes out Hilda, a china creature in a pink fur attire from head to toe. Lalla snatches it from him.

  “Watch this … she can smile … watch this … she can walk,” and Hilda takes a few stalled steps and flops back onto the mat.

  “Watch this … she’s hungry,” and as she presses on her, Hilda’s mouth opens, her fawn tongue glides out, and with a little dropper Hilda is given some milk.

  “Watch this … she needs to burp,” and Hilda burps and Hilda says a croaky “Ta” and Hilda yawns, so Hilda has to be put down because Hilda needs lots of rest, and Hilda is put into her cradle and brought off to her dormitory. Lalla returns with pictures of her favourite toys and boasts of the many things they can do: play football, go to war, go to hospital, get married, have babies, and sometimes have twins.

  “I gave her a scary spider book and she got goose pimples,” Shane says.

  “What’s goose pimples?” she asks haughtily.

  “Goose pimples are this,” he says, and starts pinching her, and as she screams, “I hate you, I hate you,” a startled mother comes in, dazed, wondering how she could have begot such unruly children. It is while they are fighting and their mother failing to keep them apart that Maddie comes in from the other room, holding something as if it is a trophy. In the one hand he has Hilda’s fur outfit, which he has peeled off, and in the other the magic Bakelite box that enabled Hilda to walk and talk and eat and burp and yawn as she went to sleep. Lalla and Shane round on him, as he is the enemy now, the baddie that hacked Hilda.

  “Let’s chop his head off.”

  “Let’s lock him up in the shed with the dogs.”

  “Let’s put him down the well.”

  “Nah, let’s fry him,” and as they band together to pick him up, he retaliates with vicious thumps, and seeing that they will not be reconciled, Eily picks him up and apologises to the mother, who runs on ahead to get the dogs chained up once again, and all the while the balloons are drifting idly and harmlessly through the air.

  “I want to go home, I want to go home,” Maddie says, thumping her now, though in his temper he is still thumping them.

  “We’re going home.”

  “It wasn’t a party.”

  “It wasn’t a party because you mauled poor Hilda.”

  “Were you flabbergasted?”

  “No. Annoyed.”

  “I’ll never do it again … I swear.”

  Once outside the gate she looked around in dismay. Her car was gone. She found it farther up, driven off the road, hidden with overhanging branches, a fall of yellow pollen on the roof. It looked shaken to her. There was a note on the seat, and picking it up, she saw a mawkish scrawl on a torn bill from one of the shops. She read it twice: “Blow, lady, blow through the hole in your big fat duck egg.”

  “I’ve goose pimples,” she said, and looked around, and Maddie rubbed her arms to do his magic, to rub the goose pimples away.

  A Weapon

  JEREMIAH KEOGH talks to his rifle, except that it is not there; O’Kane has just sped off with it in the night. He keeps going over its life, him and it together, and the day he bought it from the firearms dealer in Limerick forty-odd years ago, when he could scarcely afford it. A single-shot bolt action to it, and the dealer bringing him into the back room, where there was a sort of rifle range for beginners to practise. Giving him little tips on how to use it. He memorised the certificate number, in his head, the very same as a prayer, or a recitation, in case it should get lost. And now O’Kane has sped off with it in the night. His legs still hurt where O’Kane bound them with twine. He recalls dreaming of being in China or somewhere in the Far East, and having his hands and feet bound by men, pickaninnies with ponytails, and he wakened with the pain and found he was in his own room, and there was Michen O’Kane, the returned native with a mask over his face, his eyes wild, shouting, “Where’s your fucking gun, where’s your fucking gun,” and him defying him and telling him what a pup he was to break into a house like that. Yes, he did defy him. He will tell that to his sister Geraldine when she starts to complain. When she sees the mud marks on the carpet and on the windowsill that she cleaned, she will ask how he gained entry and weren’t windows supposed to be locked and why was he let get away with it, why was he let run off with a weapon to threaten others with.

  He recalls the times with it, going out at dusk to shoot rabbits and hares, shooting weasels and stoats, and time and time again the magpies in the cornfield. One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a wedding, and four for a boy. Half his life stolen, with that rifle. He has only to show Geraldine the wardrobe with its front door smashed in for her to know the blackguar
ding that went on. He is lucky to be alive, his shins and his feet bound, and the hooligan with an axe, holding it above his head, swinging it, then smashing the lovely walnut panel of the wardrobe, and him saying, “You could at least have opened it, the key is in the door,” and the vile language of the pup, every other word “feck,” and the lunatic, flinty eyes in the knitted balaclava. Geraldine will say, “Go to the guards,” and he’ll say, “No,” because if he goes to the guards O’Kane will be back to finish him off. Between two stools, the law and the outlaw, O’Kane’s parting words, “You go to the guards and you’re a dead man.”

  If he had a woman beside him now, she would bring in a basin of hot water to bathe his feet, but he has no woman, his Helena gone ten years, his rifle gone, too, and the ammunition, the live rounds of bullets, at least eighty, kept in the tin that used to have floor polish and that imparted to them such a clean, housewifely smell. O’Kane with enough ammunition to do his raids and his rounds and his housebreaking. He recalls the impudence of the pup as he lifted the weapon out of the wardrobe, wrapped in its bolster case, and said, “It’s as old as yourself,” then wiping the cobwebs off it and cocking it and sighting him and him trying to plead with the bugger, “I need that gun … it’s my only protection. What else have I against marauders like you,” and O’Kane digging him in the ribs like it was child’s play. His torch taken, too, his blue torch that saw him home nights from the pub.

  He has a good mind not to tell Geraldine at all, except for the fact that she will see the muddy footprints on the windowsill and on the fawn bit of carpet and see the ravaged wardrobe, the lovely walnut panel in bits, splinters on the floor and the top lintel hanging off where O’Kane found his money, his last little bit of security for a rainy day. “Where’s your fucking money” and him saying, “I’ve no money … I’m a pauper … I’ve only a pension,” and he’ll tell Geraldine that, how he stood up to the bugger, and O’Kane repeating it and him saying, “I forget, I forget where I hide things,” and then the bolt pulled back and the bullets put into the magazine, the chill of it, and O’Kane panting with excitement, the hunter in his blood coming out, and him pointing to the top of the wardrobe, to the money in a leather purse that Helena had made and thonged herself when she went to night school in the technical college and studied leatherwork as a hobby.