Edna O'Brien

by In the Forest (epub)

  ‘We can’t cuff him.’

  ‘Get him off me . . . he’s biting my ear,’ Brophy roars. ‘Jesus, as if one madman isn’t enough,’ Morgan says, hoists himself over the front seat, grips O’Kane by the hair, pulling it with a long practised traction until the mouth and teeth are loosed from the bloodied ear and O’Kane’s face getting whiter and whiter - ‘You’re breaking my fucking neck.’

  ‘No one cares if we break every bone in your body,’ Morgan tells him as Lahiffe pulls his arms behind his back and handcuffs him, still butting, still vowing that he will bring them down.

  The car rocks from side to side with Solon struggling to get a grip on the wheels as they slurp on the mossy bank and beyond the geese in a wild consternation because their young have been slaughtered, bits of yellow, lifeless, furry rag, slung there.

  O’Kane sits between them, a lethal presence, the only weapon left to him is his fingers, his thumb tearing the opposite thumb, dragging the flesh away and then each finger picking the flesh of its opposite finger, the shredded flesh, the drawn blood and the chafing of the cuffs as if they are about to spring open of their own accord.

  As they near the town the two detectives in the back look from one to the other, comparing their slashed jackets, their bruises, their cut lips.

  ‘Longest eighteen miles I’ve ever driven.’

  ‘How’s the ear?’

  ‘Deadly ... I can’t tell my wife he bit me.’

  ‘Cover him up lads . . . they’ll be looking for his horns here,’ Morgan says and they throw a blanket over him to hide him from the throng.

  They have gathered outside the station, milled, grave, appalled, but when he is bundled out, the voices break into an instantaneous wail of repugnance and revenge, the same words again and again - ‘Murderer . . . Child murderer . . . Butcher.’

  The likeness of the dead woman stares back at him from raised posters, stares from several points, her face with an unwonted calmness, the eyes soft as cloud, a long rope of hair under the upturned brim of a straw hat, gazing, at them, at him, at the summer day. He is not seeing it, not hearing their heckles, he has gone back into himself, into a hulking frozenness.

  A legion of guards converge around him and he is pushed forward, a bunched and damned silhouette passing into the gloom of the hallway. Then in some monstrous and antic aftermath he turns, head-butts the blanket off and begins to laugh, a mad, mocking laugh and they draw back, a shaft of terror passing through them, witnesses to some medieval grotesquerie, his grinning face, his loathsome eyes with dead yet murderous glare.

  They are afraid of him now, the Kinderschreck, one of their own sons, come out of their own soil, their own flesh and blood, gone amok.

  Bart Glynn

  It was like I dreamed it. It was like I’ll dream it all my life. I seemed to have known where I was going, my steps led me there in an orderly, unfussy motion. I didn’t salute any of the mob around the crossroads, they were as invisible to me as I to them. I was a phantom in search of a phantom and I would find it. To call it weird is to belittle it. I even think I envisaged how the woman would be. I’d seen her once playing pool in Boyce’s bar and sensing this glow around her, arnberish, possibly because of the red gold hair. She played like a pro and the men riled her. I had known it before I wakened. To my wife I said, ‘Leave the dinner till evening time’ and she didn’t question me. She never does which possibly accounts for our being together. I am described as a loner. My favourite place is a mobile home thirty miles away by the seaside. I walk and I walk and I need no one. I’ve never been one to believe in signs or portents or dreaming. I am a rationalist. Having passed the two barriers and little knots of guards stationed here and there it seemed to me that everyone was running in different directions, somewhat clueless. Strangers to the wood. It was a warm day and in the breeze there was the smell of spring itself, a tender smell. The wood was fairly dark and I had to crawl along under the low branches and under the trees that had fallen athwart. Strands of dead moss dipped from their branches. I sensed something in the instant before I saw it. Then that rapid contraction in the chest, that onrush of adrenaline. The exposed calf of one leg was the whitest white, the coat was black and she had thick purplish socks. She was in a furrow, face down, and the pine needles had fallen on her like decoration, fine, thin needles; rust colour. I knew she was dead, the smell alone told me that. She looked so remarkably lifelike that a person might be forgiven for thinking she could be brought back to life with a touch. There were flies on her hair, moving in and out of it and lodging on the crusts of dried blood. They were merciless. Nothing else moved. Not her. Not I. It was her repose that I found the most unbearable, the wisdom of it, as if in those last moments she saw what was coming and somehow she met death. The picture just kept going in and in, a gruesome canvas inside my head, forever.

  ‘Up here ... up here.’ I went out shouting it. I shouted like a madman but Cornelius said that when he came towards me, my face and my beard had the pallor of a ghost.

  Grief

  ‘Why didn’t he overpower the bastard? Why didn’t he take the gun off him? Why didn’t he run into the woods? Why did he die like a lamb to the slaughter?’ It is Jack, a second woodsman, asking the detective who has just been winched down. Asking it relentlessly as he has asked it from the moment at dusk when, after the searches were called off until the morrow, he came on him alone, Father John, with his head placed over a limestone slab, his hands folded for prayer, his priest’s collar unstained.

  ‘Why, just tell me why, he didn’t fight back?’

  ‘No use in whys . . . because the creatures are all gone,’ the detective replies and then genuflects for a moment in lieu of a prayer and then it is the cold grim task of identifying the body and noting every detail for his report.

  The same woods, that filtered green, the constant leafy murmur and yet not the same, no longer the harmless place it once was, marked now as a human can be marked by its violation, its wood memory, the habitation of their frightful pilgrimage, their hapless cries; three bodies soon to be wrapped in plastic and brought down to the waiting hearses.

  Bluebells

  The small country chapel has the smell and leafiness of field and woodland. Garlands of fern and ivy, bluebells in jugs, their bells a clouded violet blue, so close together as if they might just accidentally tinkle; carpets of flowers along the aisle and by the altar steps where the two coffins are placed on either side, the larger brown coffin for Eily and the smaller white one for Maddie. The chapel is filled to overflowing, the sermons, eulogies and songs drift out along with the smell of bluebells and woodbine, out to the grounds and the adjoining fields where hundreds of mourners stand, stunned and teary.

  Cassandra spoke for her entire family when she said that their spirits should now be allowed to go free and looked at the coffins as if she was talking to the bodies beneath, bodies that had been cut and sawn and scalped and weighed and swabbed and pieced together again, dressed now in garments of eternal glory.

  ‘Free them,’ she said and cupped her hands and as she raised them, people looked up to the rafters believing they were witnessing the transmigration of the two souls.

  An estranged father stood apart. That was his child inside the small white coffin, his feelings locked inside his own brusque and taciturn nature. Herself and the child were one, indivisible, and O’Kane, the outcast, had seen that and had wanted it and had had to destroy it in his hunger to belong. The ultimate loser. An estranged father who wanted to cry but did not cry, then. There were tears to be shed but they would be shed elsewhere, him imagining them forever in the woods, their true resting place. He thought What can I do to prove to myself that I am that bit bigger than I was, before this struck. I can’t bring them back. I can think of those last mad minutes until thinking is empty of thought, but I can’t bring them back, ever.

  What he did then was to search out O’Kane’s father and shake his hand and the man looked at him, perplexed, uncomprehending, h
is sunken eyes like holes in his face, two fathers, outside that boundary of mother and child, their hands briefly touching, touching on things that could never be said.

  Blood

  ‘Tell me that you didn’t rape her, Mich ... just tell me that.’ It is Aileen, teary and unslept and waiting since dawn to be allowed in, travelling almost a hundred miles since he has been moved to a prison half way between home and the city. She has brought him clean clothes, a bar of soap and bananas that he asked for. The guard outside has explained to her that he has refused to give blood and asked her to tell him, as they have told him, that it can be taken forcibly. He looks at her as if he might kill her.

  ‘Tell me,’ she says, beseeching.

  ‘They set you up ... they want to blacken me with every crime in the book.’

  ‘Then tell me that you did not rape the woman, simple, simple, Mich.’

  ‘Fucking voices . . . won’t shut the fuck up ... get me a radio . . . get me anything . . . get me a gun . . . get me out of here.’

  ‘Mich . . . Michen.’

  ‘She loved me . . . she was my girlfriend . . . she sucked my cock in the woods ... we had a tent up there . . . mad for me.’

  ‘She was not your girlfriend. It’s all in your mind and 238

  there’s only you and your mind for the rest of your fucked life . . . Jesus.’

  It is as they are arguing that a young prison officer with pale, almost albino colouring comes in; clean shaven, a crew cut, his eyes the washed blue of cornflowers, dangling a syringe and making imaginary stabs in the air as he dances around O’Kane.

  ‘We don’t need your blood, scumbag ... we have it. You cut your bollocks on the glass door when you broke into that house ... we have your DNA on our files . . . they flushed you out of her, above in the mortuary . . . she’s dead but she’s clean and you’re unclean and you stink.’

  ‘Is that the woman on the shore,’ he asks.

  ‘No, it’s not the woman on the shore, scumbag . . . it’s the woman you brought to the woods. How come you forget the most important data? You don’t forget to ask for bananas or a change of underpants but how come you forget that, you’re a monster, but you can’t hide behind the devil’s apron strings any longer ... do you want to know why. Because you are him, hooves and horns and all . . . it’s been a farce, a roadshow down the country . . . everyone willing to help you ... a bishop no less, priests, dignitaries, VIPs, wringing their hands . . . poor you . . . you never had a chance . . . the system failed you ... we failed you ... St Michael’s, St Joseph’s, St Bridget’s, St Patrick’s, St Finian’s, St Teresa’s, St Anne’s, Spike Island, Clonmel, Rugby, Featherstone, Wolverhampton all failed the little coward who so loved his mother that he had to take an innocent woman and fuck her and kill her and then kill her child to complete the tableau and kill the priest that was brought to give the last rites. It’s all a blur inside that football of a head . . . it slipped your memory somehow . . . well, I’ll tell you something, the bishops and priests and the VIPs will run like rats from you now, repulsed . . . your visitors from now on are Us ... state visitors . . . state plate . . . state blanket . . . state funeral . . . welcome to hell, O’Kane . . . it’s been waiting for you.’

  ‘He’s a fucking liar, a fucking liar,’ he says when they are alone.

  ‘I think you did rape her Mich ... I think you did.’ ‘Do you want them to lock me up?’

  ‘It’s the only thing . . . after what you done.’

  ‘Your own brother.’

  ‘You’re not the brother I knew . . . you’re an alien,’ she says, fearless, despairing.

  ‘Don’t leave me,’ he says running to her, grasping her. ‘I have to . . . I can’t stay here a minute more.’

  And he did not try to stop her, he just backed away in frozen immobility seeing the shame that welled up in her eyes.

  O'Kane

  It was after I had sex with her I came downstairs to the kitchen. She had the kettle on. I heard the voice of the devil saying kill her kill her. I said we have to go to the woods. She tried to defy me. The gun was hid outside behind a tree. She didn’t like it, she didn’t want a gun around the child. I said I’m only after getting it. I intend to raid a post office. I didn’t think of killing her before that. I had no reason to. She used to come up to my tent in the wood every other day and bring me food and we had loads of sex there. She sucked my cock. She wouldn’t let me go to Tullamore.

  I made her drive to Cloosh Wood and when we got there she said where’s your tent. I said I burnt it, I had no more use for it. I said then I’m going to have to kill you. She said don’t be raving. I brought her way in from the road at gunpoint. She was nervous, panicky. She was holding the child’s hand. I told her if she tried running away I’d shoot them both. She let go of the child’s hand and sent it to play. I brought her up into the horseshoe of trees and she said you’re frightening me, you’re scaring me, give me that gun. She took it off me. She unloaded it. We were struggling. She hit the bolt and that automatically unloaded it. I tripped her. She fell on the ground and I loaded the gun. She tried to get back up. I shot her in the face. It was messy. I had a problem with the child. What was I going to do with him. He was screaming. He had no mother. I couldn’t bear to look at him. I shot him in the side of the head or somewhere around there. I forget. My mind was gone.

  I came out of the wood and sat in her car. The keys were missing. I went back to the wood to get the keys from her pocket. She’d gone green. The colour frightened me. I covered her with pine needles and left the wood. I slept in the car a long time, maybe a day. I burned the car somewhere and went to my grandmother’s. I was sweating. I threw up. I was hearing the devil’s voice. He said burn your grandmother’s iron gate, burn her hay shed. I don’t remember going out from there but I did, I was walking along the road with the gun. I heard a voice say burn the lockkeeper’s house. He wasn’t there. I took a blanket. It got dark so I went on up towards the lights in the village and saw the church. The priest’s house was beside the church. There was no light in it and I waited. When he came I kidnapped him at gunpoint. He said oh my God. He asked me what I wanted. I said I was in a mood to kill. He said relax and don’t kill me, I’ll drive you anywhere you want. I brought him to a house in the wood where I lived as a kid. I’d hid in a closet there, pissed in it. My mother thought that very funny. Someone had sunk a well there since we lived in it. The priest said what are you going to do to me. I said I was waiting for orders. He said I was a sick man. He said that he knew my grandmother, that he went to see her sometimes, heard her confession. He had a wallet in his inside pocket. He went into the toilet and hid it in his trouser pocket. I ate cake with sugar on top. I went to sleep.

  It was six in the morning and the birds were singing. I said to him come on, time to get up. I took his wristwatch. I gave it to some fucker in Limerick for hash. I laughed at the blood coming out of his head like a water pump. I got a great buzz, a great kick out of that. I liked the jump. I’m possessed.

  Christmas

  He lay in his own shit. He lay in his own dark, cursing and conspiring. He hated the screws. The screws hated him. He made their lives hell, refused to use the bucket that they passed in and shat on the floor to spite them. Threw his arms out like they were oars or javelins and told the fuckers he’d be leaving very shortly, going through the roof. The ‘Jumping Jesus show’ they called it. They were afraid of him. He roared and harangued and they believed that even if his head came off from roaring his lopped head would go on persecuting them. He called them Ambrose. They called him Fattie. ‘No hamburgers for Mr Fattie.’ ‘No radio for Mr Fattie.’ ‘No walkies for Mr Fattie.’ He’d hold four fingers up in rotation, and they knew what it meant. He’d killed three people and there would be a fourth. Sometimes he sat like he was in a trance, sucking his thumb, staring. His laughing was a kind of roaring also. He could keep it up for hours.

  The staff shot the pheasant that kept him company because they were jealous of it
. He got his revenge. He had birds coming in the window whistling tunes and he whistled back. Then one day six or seven red hens from home came and he talked to them and asked them if they were laying well. He had great times with them. He learned the chookchookchookchookchookchook that they did after they laid. Then one day they didn’t come and he cried. Pigs came but they got stuck, they got wedged between the bars, their pink hairy rumps not able to get in and not able to get out. They taught him grunts and the screws listened outside the cell and looked through the spy hole, made bets whether he was or was not a pig. Instead of Fattie they called him Piggy and he called them Ambrose.

  He was brought for a walk each day, around a closed yard with a high wall and one tree with dead, papery leaves. There was a lavatory bowl in the corner with no chain and no handle and he shat in it even though he was not supposed to. He saved his shit for there so that they would come with bucket and broom cursing him and making him clean it up. One day there was a new nurse that gave him a funny look and he struck at him in a long lunge, got him to the ground and then started hitting his skull on the edge of the bowl, his face mired in the shit. It was the padded cell after that. He’d hurl himself against the leather walls and be thrown back and rehurl himself, because nothing would convince him that it was not going to give in to him.

  That’s when Dr Macready was called. Dr Macready had the distinction of being the only one that was not afraid of these nutters, afraid of no one. He agreed with the governor to see him but only on one condition, face to face. He did not want to be in one room and looking at O’Kane through glass in an adjoining room - ‘I want to get to the real person,’ he said and the governor smiled the smile of the disenchanted. It took five visits to break the ice. He was late for his visit and sat down, took out his handkerchief, began to clean his spectacles and said, ‘There was a drunk Scotsman on the bus and he kept saying “No sweat John no sweat John” and he walked up and down the aisle and looked into people’s faces and said “Peasants” and then he came and sat beside me and studied me and said “Peasant”.’