In the Forest

by Edna O'Brien

  When he has to slow down he thinks, Fuck shit and reaches for the rifle. Crazed ponies everywhere, bucking and leaping, and he thinks of finishing them off, pictures their heaped bodies all over the road, then thinks the fucking car will be stuck and the scumbags able to trace it. They are Shortie’s ponies, brown and fawn and grey and spotted, bouncing in the air, butting the car in ones and in pairs, neighing, wild-eyed. He thinks, nothing for it but to drive them off the road, and he ploughs through them with a hectic speed, and they scatter towards the mountain. He stops the car on the broken bridge near where Shortie lives. His van is gone. The yard a scrap heap of junk and Shortie’s jaunting cars for gigs in the summer, hens, and two foals at the front door leaving their cards and swishing their chestnut tails.

  From the booth he takes some clothes and the yanked-off number plate, smells the clothes, flings them in the back seat, and then stands on the rickety bridge of iron and cement blocks and looks down at the water, which is the colour of porter and frothy like porter too. He is about to pitch the plate in when a whelp comes up behind him and grabs the calf of his leg through his trousers. He roars. It is the dog from her place, looking at him with a wolf’s venom, one brown eye and one blue, not growling, not barking, just staring at him.

  “You devil,” he says, and strikes it on the snout with the metal plate, but it crawls away, yelping, and each time he tries to catch it, it slips from his grasp as if it is covered in oil or car grease. Then he tries another tactic, which is to coax it, to bring it closer. From his pocket he takes a few biscuit crumbs, holds them in his paw, calling, “Smokey Smokey.” It doesn’t come. It is on its belly now, crouching, the lips lifted over the blackish teeth. He kicks it, and it takes the kicking, and when he has kicked it unconscious, he jumps the bridge, slides down the slope, and hurls the number plate into the river. He watches it go, bobbing between the stones, in and out of the froth, swept in the current, turning a corner where there are willows, when the fecking dog reappears and jumps in and goes on downriver along with it.

  Back in the car he is huffed and he is hungry.

  * * *

  To Fiona, the young assistant, he looked crazed, spinning into the shop, his arms flying it and laughing at nothing. She had come in early to unpack stuff and shouts, “We’re not open, we’re not open.” There was muck on his boots, pine needles in his thick crop of brownish curly hair, and one sleeve of his anorak rolled up, like he had just been in a fight. A maniac.

  “We’re not open.”

  “You’re open now, pussy,” he says, racing around helping himself to cartons of cigarettes, biscuits, cream cakes, toilet rolls, and she keeps staring at the gap in the shelves and imagining how Mrs. Morrissey will fume and scold her when she finds that they have been robbed. As he stood by the chilled drinks cabinet he jerked his head for her to come over.

  “Fanta,” he said, and when she hesitated he shouted, “Santa Fanta, you stupid cunt.”

  She hauled out as many bottles and cartons as she could hold and slung them into a wire basket for him. Lifting a big haunch of ham in its muslin cap, he plumped it onto the slicer and chuckled as she almost cut herself from nerves slicing it. He lifted off the slices as fast as they came and gobbled them down.

  “What’s your name, pudding face?”

  “Fiona,” she said. It was the first sound of her voice since he had come in, and it was squawky, like a chicken’s.

  “Open the till, Fiona.”

  “There’s nothing in it,” she said, and drew out the steel drawer with steel clips empty of notes and the several cavities empty.

  “You’re not getting my drift, Fiona.”

  “I’ve nothing for you,” she said shrilly.

  “You’ve plenty for me … Open your purse, cunt.” As she tumbled the contents of her handbag onto the counter, a tiny blue medal rolled onto the floor and ridiculously she shouted, “Don’t take that … it’s for a novena.”

  His right hand slid along her throat, that and a splutter of obscenities into her ear, yet she did not move and she did not scream but began to feel her legs go, under her long tweed skirt.

  She was unable to tell Mrs. Morrissey the exact time the lunatic left, as by then she had blacked out, and they found her slumped on the tiles just underneath the open till.

  * * *

  He drove out of that county and into the next. Stone walls instead of woods and trees, no cover. He drove for hours and passed through bogland, in teeming rain, and while it was still lashing, he drove across roadside streams and much later on into a field, empty of everything except emptiness. A rotting wooden grid led to another field and another, and he was sitting inside the car, waiting for the fucking rain to let up.

  It was a slow, sulky burn, the flames wouldn’t suck, wouldn’t hiss, wouldn’t boil. They kept stopping and starting in the drizzle. He had to douse it again and again. The wadding didn’t want to burn, there was spite in it. The high was not so high now and he was freezing cold.

  He sat by the ugly black burnt-out shell of the car saying her name as if she might answer to it. When he tried to leave he was stopped. Fog walked into the field and all around the field, and he was trapped in it. He tried going through a gap, but it was foggy in the next field too, and then the voice came: “Cover your tracks, son, cover your tracks, son.” He was a big tall man in a hard hat and he was leering: “Cover your tracks, son.”

  He ran to gather her clothes, which he had flung up into trees and into ditches, and he brought them back to the embers and made another fire and crouched there and watched them burn. They smelt of chicken feathers being burnt. He’d covered his tracks, son.

  Vigil

  CASSANDRA IS in Eily’s kitchen pacing, the front door open, the better to call out when they get back. There is something about the kitchen that is not right. A kettle has been left on the gas ring, a new kettle at that, and there is an aftersmell of burned rubber. Then there are Eily’s purse, the medicine that Maddie has to take every four hours, and Elmer propped on the dresser, all evidence of their leaving in a hurry. In a corner his purple Rolls-Royce, his “Vintage,” as he calls it and a stack of wooden bricks. She thinks that maybe Eily has had to bring him to the doctor and considers going out to ring the surgery, but stops herself.

  To be in Eily’s kitchen without Eily is quite unsettling. She misses the laughs, the smokes, the bit of bickering. In the basket are the several stones that Eily collected on her journeys, stones sometimes chosen in the vertigo of love. She picks one up — round, squat, grey, inscrutable, its stony life locked within it, so that it tells nothing of its former whereabouts. She is jittery, stroppy at moments, and in the tiny mirror her eyes are stricken, as if someone had tried to scratch them. Then she jumps with relief at the sound of their arriving by the side of the house. It is Smokey, black and slimy, as if he’d been dipped in a barrel of oil, letting out short weird whelps.

  “Smokey … Smokey, where were ye?” she says, and listens for the footsteps coming across the fields, the pair of them humming and chatting, and rehearses her own scolding voice saying, “You stood me up yesterday, you bloody stood me up.” Eily and herself had arranged to meet in the town that morning, to go to an auction room and buy a few pieces of furniture.

  During those next hours while she waits, she invents reasons for Eily’s absence, says how wilful she is, often taking off on the spur of the moment, maybe gone to the city, or maybe gone to meet Sven, who might be reinstated. She climbs the stairs to see if Eily’s Turkish travel bag is in its usual place under the bed and flinches at the sight of it. She telephones three friends, finds only Hildegard at home, and voicing her anxiety she feels ridiculous. She has to listen to a homily on Eily being a free spirit, a changeling, probably at that moment walking along some riverbank with Maddie and a new admirer paying her court.

  She cannot stay indoors a moment longer. Hours have gone by, smoking, scouring the kettle, making cups of tea, some mindless cleaning of this and that. At the fork wh
ere the grassy paths join, she notices a man’s glove, thick and black, like a boxing glove, a menacing purposeful feel to it, as if a fist were bunched inside. She draws back, too fearful to touch it or pick it up.

  It is getting dusk, big sulky clouds threatening to rain and the newborn lambs in Dessie’s field bleating. It feels like a maternity ward, mothers bleating too, running around after their idiotic young, who can barely stand on their buckled newborn legs.

  “Shut up, shut up,” she shouts, but it is to Eily she is really shouting. She remembers when they were young and how they used to play hide and seek in an old fort, and Eily was always the one to find the most covert place.

  “I can’t play this game for a second longer … Come back, come back from wherever it is you have absconded to,” and saying it she puts her palms up in a gesture of prayer, and as the clouds break and she feels the first big spatters, she believes they are in answer to those wretched hours, her mind askew, imagining the worst.

  In a tender reversal now of her spleen and impatience, she thinks how grateful she will be to see them, how deep that river runs with Eily and herself.

  * * *

  When they had not returned by morning Cassandra drove to the barracks, only to find that it was shut. She had to turn an iron handle and speak into a machine, then communicate her desperation to a faceless guard six or seven miles away. He is dismissive, reminding her that a grown lady, ergo her sister, has probably gone off for the long weekend and who wouldn’t, what with the gorgeous weather that was forecast. She formed a picture of this young man, callow, restless, and irritable because of not being out in that promised gorgeous weather.

  “She’s missing,” she says emphatically.

  “A missing person is not a missing person until seven days have elapsed.”

  “She’s very responsible … she would not disappear without letting me, her sister, know.”

  “Oh yeah … I stopped her for speeding a few times … Arty, isn’t she?”

  “What’s wrong with arty?”

  “Next thing you’ll be asking me to give her Housewife of the Year award.”

  “Oh please … please this is serious,” she says, trying to reach him now, trying to smother her anger, and suddenly and pitifully she is kneeling on the gravel, her mouth to the face of the machine, begging him to at least drive out and go with her to Eily’s cottage to see if there is anything suspicious there.

  “I don’t have a patrol car … and I can’t leave the station. You see, we’re short-staffed on account of the bank holiday.”

  “What do I do?”

  “Go out searching if you want,” he says, and then the connection is cut off and the machine has that terrible deadness of machinery. From behind the barracks she can hear a lawnmower start up and knows that a guard or a sergeant must be there so she calls out, her voice shrill and warbling above the solid whirr of the blade in its near and less near precision, someone beyond that fence who hears her cry but is ignoring it. She climbs onto the fence and sees him in his shirtsleeves, impassive as a plank, and when he turns he shows no recognition, his eyes empty of seeing as he stoops and empties a scuttleload of young grass, the lime green specked with bits of chopped daisies.

  * * *

  That night a strange thing happens. Cassandra lay waiting for sleep, knowing that she would not sleep, her mind in splinters thinking of the machine she spoke into and of the guard who met her in another station who also seemed indifferent to her plight. She is thinking of the moment when she will have to break it to her distraught mother and father, picturing their faces, their disbelief, their shock.

  When she hears footsteps in the garden she’s not surprised; it is as if she has been waiting for this nameless person to come and take her, too. Naked, she pulls the quilt up to her chin, with only her eyes listening, hearing the knocking on the door that is quite timid. The caller has not struck the knocker, merely tapped tentatively on the wooden panel. She waits for a voice, a command.

  She is in the kitchen now, the light from the hall shedding only a faint beam, so that to the person outside, the kitchen is a sphere of dark. The telephone is over by the fireplace, the green light of the answer machine like a little bead. She believes that she will be shot as she crosses to it. The knocking grows more persistent, but is still gentle, as if the person on the other side is pleading with her to have trust in it. She kneels by the side of the door and in a strangled voice asks, “Who is it?”

  “Can you open the door?”

  “Who is it?”

  “Declan.”

  “Declan who?”

  “I’m a friend of Eily’s … I was doing the roof for her … you met me.” As she opens the door she sees a young man, his gaunt face terrified and a cigarette about to drop off from the corner of his lips. “We think that the Kinderschreck might have taken them.”

  “The who?”

  “A local … a wild man … He’s only out of jail a few weeks. Since he got back home, he’s created mayhem, stole cars, beat up a pensioner … took a gun …”

  “Why do you think he would have taken Eily and Maddie?”

  “If I tell you, will you promise that you won’t say it was me? A man saw them around noon last Friday … the day they went missing … his wife let it out in the shop. The man is demented ever since, he’s too afraid to go to the guards in case the Kinderschreck came back to kill them.”

  “Who is the man that saw them?”

  “His name is Rafferty … They live a mile outside the village … on the right-hand side … a lovely flower garden.”

  “And he saw Eily driving with this wild man?”

  “Don’t say I told you.”

  “Why not? Why not, Declan … we must all band together.”

  “It’s my mother … I’m out all day working and she’s afraid he will come and take revenge. You see, he’s sworn to paint the town red …”

  She feels cold, forewarned, knowing that the suspendedness of the last three days is a mere prelude to something terrible. She knows. Yet she still thinks of them as alive; Eily’s spirit would have spoken to her, sent her a sign of some sort, some premonition as she lay in the coiled darkness anticipating footsteps on the gravel under her window.

  “We’ll have to get the guards to track down this wild man,” she says.

  “We’ll have to storm heaven and earth,” he says sheepishly.

  He did not leave, he vanished, like a fish darting down into the depths of a river, and she stood and watched the sky, a tapestry of stars, and she could hear seagulls crying, the lonely, icy, almost human shrieks of seagulls who had come sixty or seventy miles in from the sea. And why.

  * * *

  They stand as one in Mrs. Rafferty’s cement path, appealing to her in her doorway — Cassandra, Delia, Hildegard, and Kim. It is evening, as they have had to wait until Delia finished teaching school, Delia round and strong and complacent, a link between the local people and the outsiders. The garden is a shower of colour, tiny blue flowers faint as drizzle, big white daisies, and devil’s pokers a flame red, with red-bonneted gnomes in the flower beds, like bucolic guardians. The pebbledash of the house a mosaic of ornamental shells and wedges of deep blue glass holding lakelets of blue light. Mrs. Rafferty is vague, uncomprehending, her eyes averted, insisting that she does not know a thing, cannot understand why they have come. All of a sudden she seems animated, says by far the best places for their enquiries are shops, post offices, bars, and restaurants. She even recalls the name Celine, the proprietor of a new international bar who would be familiar with the comings and goings of travelling folk.

  “Eily Ryan is not a traveller … she moved here,” Kim says.

  “Is that so?” Mrs. Rafferty says vaguely.

  “Your husband saw someone in her car,” Cassandra says.

  “I’m not my husband.”

  “I’m her sister … I’m desperate … my mother and father are desperate … put yourself in our position … help us.”
>
  “I can’t,” Mrs. Rafferty says, retreating backwards into the house and almost colliding with her husband, who has obviously been listening. He salutes them with a stricken look, as if their arrival bespeaks doom for him. He speaks rapidly, as if in a witness box giving a prepared statement: “I saw her drive past here at approximately twelve noon last Friday. There was a man in the back aged about twenty with dark brown hair and he had on a green jacket,” and pointing to the wellingtons Hildegard is wearing, he deems them the same green as the man’s jacket, an army green, yes, army green.

  “Can you name him?” Delia asks, sympathetic.

  “No … all I can tell ye is the registration of the car … it’s the same as my pickup truck. TZY.”

  “Was it O’Kane?” Cassandra asks.

  “I couldn’t answer that.”

  “But you know him, Mick,” Delia says.

  “Many people know him … you know him yourself, he’s a pest.”

  “I taught him for a short while,” she says. She has taught Mick’s children also, and somehow she feels that he is better disposed towards her.

  “I’ve told you all I know,” he says, and puts his hand out to shake hers in conciliation.

  “It was my idea to come to you,” she says, her big brown saucer eyes gazing into his, begging him.

  “Unease quickly spreads,” he says in a droning voice, like a man talking in his sleep.

  “Which direction did the car go, Mick?” she asks.

  “Maybe Portumna … or maybe up there,” pointing to the swath of evergreens.

  They drove to the forest then, a place of unyielding solitude, vast, quiet, and they got out of the car and stared into a hinterland of green, trees stacked close together, the trapped wind like the sob of a sea, stared at it and then at the charred tree stumps on the other side, and throwing up her hands Cassandra asks, “Where do we begin … where do we begin to search?”