Edna O'Brien

by In the Forest (epub)

  ‘Is he alive ... is he alive?’ the women shout and Eily drops to her knees, her hand reaching in to him.

  As the Jeep is pushed back she sees Maddie like a trapped animal, curled up, his knees to his chest, his face a stark white and then as he opens his eyes and blinks and reblinks a litany of thanksgiving goes up -‘It’s a miracle . . . it’s a miracle . . . he’s alive.’

  As she-reaches in, he begins to shake, his whole body convulsing and lifting him out he feels broken, like a vessel that has been smashed. The onlookers say that he must be left there, that she must not pick him up, that she could injure him even more.

  ‘Leave me alone . . . leave me alone,’ she says, gathering him up in her arms, feeling his bones through his clothes, holding him tight, tighter, the onlookers urging her to bring him to the doctor and she refusing and just staring down at him, incredulous, her little mite, her parcel of infinity.

  ‘It’s all Elmer’s fault ... he ran out,’ Maddie says, basking in the sympathy all around him and there in the middle of the road is Elmer, unscathed, strangely comic and plucky in his harlequin outfit.

  A Will

  In the outer office of the solicitor, Eily can hear him having an argument over the phone, saying intemperate things, then laughing at his own gall. His secretary who is typing at the nearby desk seems to ignore it and a couple seated on a stool are so shy and so fearful they do not even look up, the young woman just staring down at the tattered magazines on the glass-top table.

  Edward the solicitor comes out laughing, rubbing his hands as if all the invective has cheered him up.

  ‘I want you to act for Colm as well as me,’ the shy woman says, half standing.

  ‘How the feck can I act for Colm if I’m defending you, Cora.’

  ‘He says he won’t do it again ... he won’t harm me.’

  ‘I want to hear it from his own lips,’ Edward says, turning to Colm who is wringing the sleeve of his jacket, mortified, unable to speak.

  ‘All right then . . . whisper it ... imagine you’re in the confessional and making an act of perfect contrition . . . if that’s not too hard for you to imagine . . . and you’re saying, “ I will not go with that painted Dublin woman in her Mercedes again . . . I will not be her odd job man . . . and I will not come home four nights a week dead drunk and I will not beat up Cora. ” ’

  ‘He means it ... he bought me this ring,’ and she holds up a silver ring with lovers entwined. Edward glances at it, then at her, then shakes his head. ‘There’s a stone seat under the bridge where the pair of you can sit and watch the ducks going quack quack quack and stop wasting my fucking time.’

  The first thing Eily notices is a vast unfinished jigsaw, occupying most of the table and his papers and documents on the floor.

  ‘For the ulcer,’ he says ruefully.

  ‘I’d like to make a will,’ she says, a litle constrained.

  ‘Are you single?’

  ‘Sort of ... I have a child. There is a daddy, but I’m by myself now.’

  ‘Fancy free,’ he says and then less jocularly, ‘Are you worried about something?’

  ‘I’m probably imagining things . . .’

  ‘Well whatever . . . you’re doing the sensible thing. I’m always recommending it to people . .. the trouble I’ve had about wills . . . fisticuffs. You see that door there? Well, they broke it down one night . . . the sons or daughters of a certain farmer ... I know it was them but I could never prove it. They got the door down, ransacked the files . . . they didn’t touch the kitty money . . . all they wanted was to get their hands on that document.’

  ‘I wonder what made her make a will . . . usually it’s when people have the wind up,’ Edward says to Maeve who is still typing.

  ‘She left this,’ she says holding up a diary with a cloth cover patterned with dainty rosebuds.

  ‘Oh we can’t read her diary.’

  ‘I have,’ she says and unprompted begins to read aloud: ‘When they are all here, Declan and Cassandra and Ming and Otto and we are smoking and drinking and propounding our tinpot ideas I am full of fun and even showing off a bit, and then after a few hours a shutter comes down inside me and I want them to be gone. I want my life back, my aloneness. It is the same when I fall in love. I fall in love and I become the creature that the man requires. I allow myself to be overruled but already the love has cracks in it like cracks in a mirror. The hard experience of married life has made me afraid. Yet I tell myself that it will be different with Sven, free love, free thinkers, free everything'

  Flinging it down, Maeve is suddenly petulant, as if something in it irks her - ‘These artists, these would-be artists . .. they’re all haywire, full of complexes ... if you ask me they need to do a proper job and respectable work . . .’

  ‘A beautiful lady . . . but her feet are not on the ground,’ Edward says roguishly to himself.

  Fiesta

  It was a Pagan feast on the mountain, old recitation, old lusts, debauchery and division between men and women amplified to the brazen beat of fiddle and penny whistle.

  Since noon they had been blaring, cordant and discordant. Calling the country people, saying, ‘Come, come and hear the old story, the hedge-master’s recital of the Women of Munster upbraiding their pusillanimous menfolk.’ The barren field with its coarse grasses and weepy reeds had been transformed into a Mecca, the marquee like a pale temple set down there, torch flame, candle flame and red and yellow fairy lights plump as tulips in the trees and along the hedges, revellers sloshing their drinks, a jig in their old bones at the novelty of it all.

  They came, to marvel at the audacity of the girls, the imperiousness of the Ruling Queen - Queen Euvul of the Grey Rock, draped with dead squirrels, leaves and the accoutrements of the forest - and the benighted husbands in their hob-nailed boots with hoary beards and torn waistcoats, side by side on a long stool having to endure the taunts of these gaudy girls. There was Winnie in harlequin suit, Cindy in black corset and fishnet stockings, May in nun’s habit, Agatha a dairy maid, Peg a scrubber with her battered bucket and Eily the Princess poured into a lame dress with a white fur stole and a silver handbag dangling from her wrist.

  Harry, the Master of Ceremonies, told the audience how a poet who was also a hedge-schoolmaster fell asleep one day by the lake that was within spitting distance and had the most outlandish dream concerning the arguments between the sexes.

  O’Kane was there too, at one with the dark, squatting outside, quiet as a cat, the canvas flap uplifted on this sight of her in a purple dress and purple gloves up to her elbows, tears streaming down her face and that Harry spiv skimming them onto his finger like they were pearls and asking the audience to behold ‘her tearful eyes red and hot, her passions burning as in a pot’.

  The fiddlers outdid one another accompanying her verse:

  Heart sick, bitter, dour and wan

  Unable to sleep for want of a man

  But how can I lie in a luke warm bed

  With all the thoughts that come into my head.

  The disgruntled husbands, loath to listen to these tirades, had to be held back from attacking her.

  There you have it. It has me melted

  And makes me feel that the world’s demented

  A boy in the blush of his youthful vigour

  With a gracious flush and a passable figure

  Finds a fortune the best attraction

  And sires himself off on some bitter extraction

  Some fretful old maid with her heels in the dung Pious airs and venomous tongue.

  Dissenting old maids, hoisted on wires poked her with broomsticks, but she mocked them.

  Couldn’t some man love me as well

  Aren’t I plump and sound as a bell

  Lips for kissing and teeth for smiling

  Blossomy skin and forehead shining

  Look at my waist. My legs are long

  Limber as willows and light and strong

  There’s bottom and belly that claim atten
tion

  And the best concealed that I needn’t mention.

  Then one of the husbands rose, tottered and staggered onto the rostrum to have his say. He decried the baseness of womankind, asked what were they but scratching posts outside public houses, tramps naked to the skies in empty bogs, turf cutters astride them. Pointing to the painted jezebels he said he could guess at the layers of dirt under their petticoats, singled out Winnie, his wife, with her brazen hips and her bullock’s hide, who tricked him into marriage and who made him realise on that very first night when he saw her stripped that he was a father before he had even started.

  The Queen pooh poohed his gripes, egged on the mutiny, as with shouts and hisses he was sent back to his stool, to sulk.

  The girls became more daring, did headstands and somersaults, flirted with the fiddlers, lampooned the husbands and cheered at the secrets Eily admitted to.

  Every night when I went to bed

  I’d a stocking of apples beneath my head;

  I fasted three canonical hours

  To try and come round the heavenly powers;

  I washed my shift where the stream was deep

  To hear a lover’s voice in sleep;

  Often I swept the woodstack bare,

  Burned bits of my frock, my nails, my hair,

  Up the chimney stuck the flail,

  Slept with a spade without avail;

  Hid my wool in the lime-kiln late

  And my distaff behind the churchyard gate;

  I had flax on the road to halt coach or carriage

  And haycocks stuffed with heads of cabbage,

  And night and day on the proper occasions

  Invoked Old Nick and all his legions.

  O’Kane on his belly, midges eating him, bats in eerie whirl, seemed to lose contact with the earth as the compere cross-examined her, on her vices.

  ‘Are you a witch, Eileen Ryan?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Do you dabble in the black arts?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Are you friends with Old Nick?’

  She drew her stole down and Harry gasped in mock terror and marched her around for everyone to see and be horrified by the devil’s hoof marks on her breast bone, skewered in a vivid indigo colour. To the crowd it was all fun, make-believe, but to O’Kane it was real, she had stepped out of her own world into his, into his transmogrified dream of her, all-mothering, all-sinning. She-devil.

  Then it was the duty of the Queen to give judgement as to which side was the most deserving and she sided with the woman, decreed that the mettlesome young Whelps of Munster be brought into the Chapel Yard and tied with chains until they distinguished themselves in the bedchamber - ‘Mix and mash in nature’s can, the tinker and the gentleman.’

  The crowd applauded, stood on chairs, whistled, clapped, finding in the beat of their hands a waiting wildness, their pagan impulses brought to life in this heady carnival.

  By the Queen’s divination, the hoary old husbands tore off their beards, flung down their waistcoats and became the mettlesome whelps, partnering the women in a violent instantaneous dance, to avenge the slurs and insults that had been hurled. The nun came on stage, riding a donkey, whacking it with her rosary beads and when it lifted its tail, misbehaved and brayed, the crowd laughed until they cried, tears and laughter all one. Outside O’Kane rolled around on the grass in a frenzy for it to end. By the time the crowd spilt out, the moon had risen and he stood, a raving shadow, to one side of the exit, knowing that she would come out and she did, spivs congratulating her and jockeying to light her cigarette. She and them went on down to the lake, smoking and laughing and he waited until people had scattered and the lights of the cars crawled along the road on the far side of the lake.

  ‘Chase me chase me,’ she taunted them and suddenly she was running, running out of her clothes towards the water, the men chasing her and lifting her up, her half naked body blanched under moonlight, a laughing queen being escorted on her litter.

  ‘Isn’t she plump and sound as a bell.’

  ‘There’s bottom and belly that claim attention.’ ‘And the best concealed that we needn’t mention.’ ‘Shame on her.’

  ‘Shame on you.’

  ‘She’s a water baby.’

  ‘Let’s throw her in.’ A shanty song started up as they swung her back and forth and then O’Kane could hear the big splash of water and her scream, half terror, half delight as she was thrown in, her voice gasping, ‘It’s freezing, it’s freezing, lads.’ The men were stripping and leaping in after her, snorting, currents of water being churned up. He ran with wild eyes and wild teeth, pulling his shirt off, ran to the water’s edge and put his face down into it, peering to catch a sight of her, her white body, her trailing hair. They had stopped laughing and there was a silence down there. Six men and her. He couldn’t swim so he put his face to the water and drank it and spat it out, and the shore line sucked the water too and burped it back and he called urgently but none answered.

  All was quiet, their bodies gliding together down there, through the orgies of the deep.

  In the Forest

  O’Kane canters across the several fields. O’Kane’s reflection in the sheets of standing water, scummed in weed and dock seed. O’Kane’s shadow, dark and furtive scaling the lime capped walls, in a jacket he has fecked from a shop. Flying it. The lull hour. Kids packed off to school, mammies and daddies gone their separate ways. Empty world except for her and the youngster and the smoke from her chimney. He knows the days she teaches and the days she doesn’t. Fields and roads drying off after a night of rain. In a pool of brown rainwater he dunks his face and in another pool studies his smart new moustache. Suits him. Then he hears a car hoot and leaps jumping Jesus, onto a gateway to catch a glimpse of her going off, except that it is not her, not her creamy jalopy. It is a sports car with a fall of rain on the canvas roof and a fucker skimming it off with a bit of a branch. Feck shit. An all night visitor while he dossed in a hay shed because of the fucking rain. Clean shaven, not the bearded bastard he’d seen her with in a pub having a bit of a to do. Her window pane with a sheet pinned to it. Private. Keep out. Fuck shit. He is waving his arms in wild rotary fury.

  ‘Top o’ the morning to you.’ He is in the kitchen as Eily comes down the stairs half dressed, her top through her white slip, busty.

  When she realises that she has a visitor she reaches back to the loft room, takes a sweater and pulls it on over her head. Seeing the stranger, his movements manic, his eyes agog, she looks down, then looks back to think if they could escape through the skylight. Her hair is plaited and she is barefoot.

  ‘Want to watch that last step . . . the bastard should have fixed it,’ he says and dances across to confront her, wags his tongue because she doesn’t remember him -‘What’s this? Don’t tell me you don’t remember me . . . we’re old friends. Maybe it’s the moustache . . . d’you like it? Goes with my mustard trim ... so you forgot me, tough shit.’ The words come in a welter as if his thinking is going too fast for him, pell mell, bubbles of foam on his lip and his eyes rolling.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asks with as much composure as she can manage. She hears Maddie getting out of bed and coming to the top step of the landing to peer down.

  ‘Put the kettle on ... that’s what a woman of the house does,’ he says, then turning to Maddie - ‘What’s his name . . . Ben . . . Caimin?’

  ‘No . . . his name is Matthew but he’s called Maddie.’ ‘Maddie Baddie Daddie and you’re Eily.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Never ask a man in my profession what’s his name. As a special favour you can call me Iggy, short for Ignatius . . . you got the fireplace fixed I see.’

  ‘So you’ve been here in the past.’

  ‘In the past!’ He is walking here, there, everywhere, looking at things, his talk fast, furious, he picks a pair of stones from her collection in a basket and rubbing them, chuckles at the sparks which fly out. The sparks are of
his own imagining. While he is doing this Maddie runs out and comes back with a handsaw, to attack him.

  ‘We’re not cutting wood now, darling . . . that’s for later,’ she says, snatching the saw and putting it to one side.

  Her visitor stands then in front of the wall calendar that has a picture of a goddess, a flame infant, like a golden crocus inside her torso.

  ‘That you?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Read me what it says.’

  ‘Read it yourself.’

  ‘Haven’t brought my bifocals.’

  He stands dreadfully close behind her as she reads -‘Thetis was one of fifty sisters and an ocean deity. Reluctant to marry a mortal Peleus she changed her form to a wave, then a fish, then a burning flame. Chiron, a centaur, advised Peleus how to win her heart. She gave birth to Achilles and in attempting to avert his fate tempered his body with magical fire and water.’ ‘Won her heart,’ he says and laughs a laugh that is bizarre.

  ‘I’ll make you a cup of coffee and then I’ll drop you off in the town. We have an appointment there,’ she says.

  Without once looking in his direction she can feel his eyes following her, his mad curious eyes watching as she reaches for a mug and a sugar bowl. Then he gives a little tug to her plait as she crosses.

  ‘Now now now,’ she says chastisingly.

  ‘I was fucked up and lonesome and who walked in but long red hair.’

  ‘Look, there’s a child here,’ she says.

  ‘OK . . . OK . . . point taken. You won’t see me losing the plot. Poor Jesus, poor fucker he lost the plot. Number one bloke. Him and me we did the odd gig. Like my trim?’ and he brings his moustache close to her, then parts his lips to show his teeth which are a fungused green.

  ‘In case you think that’s dirty, it’s moss . . . not a rotten tooth in me head.’

  ‘He’s a yucky,’ Maddie says beside her now, pulling on her sleeve, asking to be lifted up and as she lifts him she goes to the open door calling Smokey, calling Declan, then goes outside to pull on socks and wellington boots.