Edna O'Brien

by In the Forest (epub)

  It was only after he killed the kittens that there was trouble. One of the sons saw him, was peeping from behind the hay shed, a peeping tom. There were six kittens in all, cleaved together in their sleep so it was easy; it was just like killing a mat except for the squeal that came out of them and the blood. The son ran into the house yelling and the mother came out and blessed herself and asked him why in the name of God had he done such a wicked thing. She stood above the kittens and asked him what harm had they ever done to him. He said it wasn’t him that did it, it was someone else, a boy that came on a motorbike and then scooted.

  The father broke the news to him in the dining room. There was the father and him and a big jug of artificial flowers. The father held up papers, the documents about the adoption, and said it would have to wait. He would have to go back to the Castle for a while because his head was all scrambled up. He got on the floor and clung to the man’s trousers, but the man said it was out of his hands now, it was in the hands of the state and the social workers and the people experienced in these matters.

  They drove to another place, to where the local doctor had made arrangements for him to go. They’d made a special case of him. He was not going back to the Castle. A secretary took down the particulars and signed him in. The man told him to shake hands with her and say thank you and he did.

  ‘We’ve been trying to get him to eat for days but he wouldn’t . . . he’s very weak,’ the man said.

  ‘We can’t have that,’ she said, and went off to see what she could raid from the kitchen.

  When she was gone a head doctor with a red puffy face came and looked at them and the man handed him a sealed letter.

  ‘Hang on, hang on ... we might have a problem here,’ the doctor said, and went off to make a phone call. He came back and said they couldn’t keep the boy, but that there was a place for young offenders about twenty miles away and he would be placed there.

  ‘Can you make an exception?’ the man asked him.

  ‘I can’t . . . he’s under age . . . someone got their knickers in a twist,’ he kept saying that and a Latin phrase - ‘inter alia, inter alia

  ‘So what do we do?’ the man’s wife pleaded.

  ‘St Sebastian’s . . . that’s the place for young offenders and it’s not far. The only snag is his father will have to meet you there to sign the admission forms.’

  ‘His father won’t,’ the man said.

  ‘I’ll go and phone him and make sure that he does.

  He’ll be there to meet ye ... I’ll tell him exactly where it is. ’ He went off to telephone his father and came back telling them to drive nice and slow but to keep their eyes out for a big white noticeboard that said St Sebastian’s, two miles this side of the town.

  They drove, the man, his wife, and himself, without saying much, and when the town lights winked the man started asking the way. One person said, ‘Straight on’ and the next person said, ‘You’ve passed it.’ The man had to get out and make a phone call. The woman asked him was he cold and he said no. Then she asked was he sorry for the things he’d done wrong and he said yes. Yes.

  Two nurses saw him. One took his pulse and another put a stethoscope on his heart because he was shaking and twitching. Then one of them asked him why he killed the kittens. He said, ‘I forget.’ The other asked him why he ran away from the Castle. He said he hated it. The nurse said hate was not a good emotion, especially in a growing boy.

  His father had not arrived so they sat in the outer hall and waited and waited, but he never came. Two more phone calls were made, and then a nurse and a doctor came out and had a piece of paper that was a dossier on him. The man and the woman stood with them and he was standing nearby, next to a big green plant, and he could hear what they were saying. The doctor was telling the woman that it was not advisable to have him around other children.

  ‘Why not . . . why not?’ she kept asking. He held up the dossier again and showed it to the husband and the husband said ‘Jesus’ and said he would rather not show it to his wife. The doctor insisted. He held up the piece of paper for the woman to see, and when she saw it she screamed and said it out loud for everyone to hear -This boy could kill.

  The man and his wife shook their heads at one another and then the man came across to him and said that there was no room at the inn and that they would be taking him back to the Castle.

  ‘Don’t send me back, don’t send me back.’ He got down on his knees and shouted it to strangers sitting in armchairs. It was visiting Sunday. A woman came forward with a biscuit and he refused it and shouted louder, louder, ‘Don’t send me back there . .. I’ll do away with myself.’

  He said it to himself when they drove through the night in the rain. He thought if he said it often enough that his prayer would be answered, but it was not. They drove along dark country roads, where there were hardly any cars, and now and then came on a dead fox or a dead cat, outstretched, its fur and its guts strewn there, a pitifulness to it, as if there was something that cat or that fox badly needed to say.

  Eily Ryan

  I would come here for the mornings alone. Everything fresh, sparkling, the fields washed after rain, the whole world washed. Daisies and clover and blue borage springing up, and the young cattle on the other side of the fence, frisking, kicking their hind legs and their tails, as if they have taken leave of their senses. The apple and crab-apple trees are coming into flower, apparitions of white, cloaked in green.

  I went up the lane very early to give an eye to the ewes in Dessie’s field, like I promised him I would. They are due to lamb. There was a fox padding over the far field, out for its breakfast, and I wondered what I would do if it attacked the ewes. First it drank out of the stream and then crossed over, lifting its leg every other minute, and came at a trot to where I was. Its pupils are vertical like a cat’s. It’s the nearest I have ever been to a fox. A big heavy ewe was cropping the grass and it stole up to her like it was invisible. It was sniffing, sniffing, when our Smokey came and charged it and chased it back over the stream and up the opposite hill, the pair of them ferocious, a chestnut coat and a grey coat savaging one another, then the fox vanishing into a burrow, and Smokey coming back frothing.

  The nights can be long. My sister, Cassandra, says we won’t stick it in the winter, Maddie and me. We’ll have coughs and colds. We will stick it. We’ll wear loads of jumpers and thick socks, and anyhow we have the summer to acclimatise. I leave the door open for the clean, fresh smells to come in. The house has had no one in it for years, so it smells mouldy, a reek of lime and damp mortar. Apple Tree House it was named.

  Up in Denny’s pub they said that a cobbler lived here once and most likely I will come upon odd shoes. I did find a bracelet in an old coal scuttle where someone must have hidden it. It polished up nicely. And I have Maddie gabbling away nonstop. He says the daftest things. He says this house is ‘yucky’ and that we should go back to the ‘apportments’. That is his new big word. I say, ‘Wait until we have a bathroom and a tiled stove and a birdcage and a barbecue,’ just as in the garden of the ‘apportment’. People think I spoil him, carrying him everywhere, little hulk that he is, but the field to the road is a swamp. I bought a lorry load of chips to make a path and just stood there and watched them being swallowed into the mud as fast as they rolled out. The driver kept telling me I should have put big stones, rocks in there first - ‘Ah don’t let it get to you missus.’

  Denny’s pub is two miles away. He keeps a roaring fire no matter what the season. He did all the smithy work himself, the fire grate, the fire irons and the ornamental eagles on his piers. He has two wash basins that are a feature for tourists. The pedestal of one is a lady’s white porcelain legs moulded into black porcelain court shoes, and the other, in the gents, features a lady’s plastered protruding buttocks. He escorted me in to have a look at both. I wonder what they make of me. Anyhow they’re all smiles. Once he got a bit fresh and said that if I came at night I was to bring a change of underwear.
Then to make amends he said he’d save me the sawn-off language some of them used.

  The townland is named after goats, except that there are only a few around. There is a herd of cattle and a reigning red bull. In the evening they all come to the fence and bawl and bawl and Maddie bawls back. He pretends to be thwacking them with his stick and shouts some important new word. He’s the cop and they are the robbers. The ‘apportment’ is a place we rented before getting in here. More scenic than here, a lake, reeds, water birds, and cruisers that docked in the evening. Two city slickers invited Cassandra and me over for cocktails. The one with designs on her wore a ridiculous T-shirt and mine took me on a tour of the inside, pointing to the amenities, the bunk beds, en suite, the cocktail cabinet and the Scandinavian shower. He suggested that he and I motor over to Dromineer for a bite. Cassandra was miffed at being left outside and came in and said how naff that he served Martinis from a plastic glass, then stormed off in her very high heels. She says it’s the Mars in her.

  Apple Tree House was waiting for me, or so Billy said. He had it on his books for nearly a year but kept it for someone special and that someone turned out to be me. He had to bring a slash hook to fight his way through the briars and the brambles across the field, the house itself and the chimneys smothered in ivy and different trees. He put a crowbar to the door and pushed it in, and as it heaved and creaked back, a startled bird flew out at us, a blackbird, a she. We’d scared it. It was then Billy said he would help me to find a loan and he did. Cassandra always says that I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth.

  The day we moved in Billy helped us, brought things in his van, and Maddie and me drove on ahead in my little daffodil-coloured Beetle, hooting to let the world know. We had to park the car where the three grassy roads meet and walk across, lugging stuff. Billy brought an old sofa, pink velvet, with the nap worn down. I had cups and saucers and cutlery in a bucket. Maddie carried a lump of bog oak that Cassandra found for us. As we came around the house, there was our visitor, a dog on its haunches, a grey coat, the grey of steel wool, and the most pitiful expression in its eyes. It as good as spoke to us. Its coat had been burnt in places. It isn’t a frisky dog, it’s a thinking dog, and its hind leg is buckled so that it hops like a kangaroo. It took to us, jumped on us, yelped to make us welcome and followed us up and down the lane while we got our bric-a-brac. Billy said it had been through fire so we called it Smokey. It goes off nights and isn’t often back until noon, but back it comes because it wants to be here, guarding us.

  We broke a bottle of red wine to launch our arrival. Billy only conked its neck and then strained it through a bit of muslin Brigit had left me to put over the milk. It’s a little muslin cap with coloured beads dangling from the edges. Billy knew all the history of the house, told us how a shopkeeper in a market town owned it and thought he would retire here but found it too isolated, too run down. At times he believed that people had broken into it on account of finding ashes in the grate and a mattress and an old torch. We sat outside on a broken wicker seat, Maddie hugging his new friend Smokey and us drinking and the light of the sky changing from one deep blue to another, like paint on a palette. Billy made me promise that I would get a ’phone, said a woman alone would need it, shouted me down when I said I had an army of spirits protecting me. He won.

  ‘Jaysus,’ Billy said when he spotted an old coal scuttle with jewellery in it. It was a silverish bracelet showing through the black dust, and he took it out and wiped it in the grass.

  ‘Jaysus . . . it’s the crock of gold,’ he said, spitting on it.

  ‘Jaysus’ Maddie said, and we laughed and laughed and it was the beginning of everything, the buds on the trees, the birds scudding about in some sort of spring daftness, in the occasional gusts of wind, falling blossom, the very same as if someone had emptied confetti from a packet.

  Twice I went indoors just to look at the letter again, to look at the words, to drink them in - Thinking of you across two seas. Should one be upside down because of a beautiful crazy red haired girlfriend. I guess yes. Your Sven.

  Homecoming

  Sergeant Wiley is fixing up his hedge to keep McCarthy’s bloody bullocks out. It is a straggledy hedge, hawthorn, privet, and different kinds of greenery tangled in together and sprouting with a will of its own. McCarthy’s bloody cattle have made big holes in it and keep coming in, time and time again, and trampling on his wife’s lawn and his wife’s flowerbeds. With a slash hook he loops down the high branched bits, and with his hands knits them together and packs them into where the gaps are.

  Coming across from the graveyard he sees a youth in a bomber jacket carrying a rucksack, but he pays no attention, thinking him a hitchhiker on his way to the hostel. He has knelt to drive a peg into the ground when suddenly there is a face peering at him from the other side of the gap, the tongue forking in and out in obscene and apish mockery. The two faces are level, the one laughing, the other rigid with surprise, realising it is O’Kane, who should be in England, doing time for mugging an old lady.

  ‘On maternity leave are you?’ O’Kane says chuckling.

  ‘Sure now, I retired from the force over eighteen months ago ... I potter . . . I’m fixing my hedge because it’s necessary to keep stock in or keep stock out.’

  ‘How far is the town?’

  ‘You’re looking across at it ... you can see the smoke from the factory chimney.’

  ‘Didn’t expect to see me, did you?’

  ‘So you’re home for a bit.’

  ‘For keeps. They were shit scared of me . . . my negativism. Define negativism,’ he asks, then answers in a gallop, ‘an act of striving against all attempts at contact, ergo, when a hand is offered I withdraw . . . give me your hand.’

  The sergeant puts his hand through the gap and the grasp is deadly, rage emanating and pulsing from it. Their faces are so close he can smell onions off O’Kane’s breath, and him raving - ‘The inmate’s behaviour is not likely to attract much publicity because of relatively minor offences, although it should be noted he is Irish. Reasons for refusing food, wants to die. Has no one to double up with. Sister, father, stepmother, staff all cunts. Fifteen minutes surveillance on wings C and D necessary. Shat in cell. Refused mass visit. In padded cell for management purposes. Blood potassium fell. Laughs abnormally. Resents changing milieu. Changing milieu . . . you’re the bastard that had me put away . . . that started it all.’

  ‘It was for your own good. You were wild.’

  ‘Jail made me a man.’

  ‘I expect it did.’

  ‘And a monster. It’s a mismatch between us now and it’ll all end here,’ he says with a fiendish laughter, then vanished sprite-like.

  The sergeant still kneeling on the ground, feels not the damp grass but the sweat pouring through his vest and the corkscrew vein on his temple throbbing.

  ‘It’ll all end here.’ He keeps repeating it as he gets up and goes into the house to phone the barracks, to warn them that the Kinderschreck is back, to gall them.

  Druidess

  Declan has come to do the roof for Eily. Eager, rake thin, a cigarette at the side of his mouth, he is carrying something precious in a piece of cloth which he lays on the table with a certain ceremony. His sculptures. They are polished figures in black wood, embracing couples, a goddess with pendulous breasts and a warring goddess holding a sceptre.

  ‘Someone said you’d be interested . .. hope it’s not cheeky. Bog oak . . . very ancient, over five thousand years old, petrified I think they call it. It’s how coal is made . . . what d’you think missus?’

  ‘They’re lovely.’

  ‘Say hello to them. This is Druid at Dawn, this is Morrigan the Bloodthirsty, and that’s Diarmuid and Grainne, lovers that died together.’

  ‘And who is this?’ Eily asks, picking out a figure whose hands are folded chastely across her chest.

  ‘Ah now . . . she’s my favourite . . . little Lena. She must be the loneliest child that ever lived. Came from
a bog five thousand years old. You don’t mind that I brought them to meet you.’

  ‘Not in the least. What’s your name?’

  ‘Declan . . . but I changed it to Shiva after I went to

  India,’ and he winks and fiddles with an assortment of silver earrings in his left ear.

  ‘What was India like?’

  ‘Most intense experience of my whole life . . . great soul . . . great dignity . . . and the dancers, Jesus, their whole personality dances.’

  ‘Well, we’ll have to do a bit of dancing up on the roof, Declan.’

  ‘Jaysus the roof, the roof. I’ll tell you what missus, miss, I went up there yesterday evening. I got the loan of a ladder, and I tell you there are piles of slates missing. That’s not the worst bit, it’s the joists . . . they’re like pulp, sawdust. You could puff them away in your hand.’

  ‘Oh no.’

  ‘It’s an old house, you’ve got to remember that. Empty for years . . . rotting.’

  ‘I can’t have a whole new roof, not this year anyhow.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do. We’ll patch it up, we’ll put tarpaulin inside and we’ll paint it with pitch and we’ll get some new slates and tuck them in under the old slates, seal them with a bit of lead for the time being.’

  ‘Will that keep the rain out?’

  ‘Well there’s always buckets, I’ll bring a good supply of buckets. One question . . . what made you settle here?’

  ‘Back to nature,’ she says with a hoot of laughter.

  ‘Mystical . . . gorgeous.’ He grips her hand, apologises for the dirt but says it’s on account of being a carpenter, a stonemason, a barman, a sculptor, and a small time farmer.

  ‘A barman!’

  ‘I do weddings . . . me and my friend. We bring the barrels and we draw pints all night. I love weddings . . .

  I’m mad for them. Great craic, great singing ... so if you’re thinking of tying the knot, give us a shout.’ ‘Have you a girlfriend, Declan?’