In the Forest

by Edna O'Brien

  “Aren’t you going to open your present?” the doctor says.

  “I can’t,” he says, and holds up the cuffed hand and smiles. Quiet, dreamy, like someone lulled by a potion that has come not from outside, not been administered, but from inside himself, his own metabolism altered, making him serene, remote, his demons gone. Dr. Macready unwraps the crepe paper and holds up the cigar box with the beige-coloured picture of a South American potentate.

  “Who’s the man and who’s the woman?” O’Kane says, staring at it.

  “There’s only a man there … can you not see?”

  “Is it chocolate?”

  “No, it’s cigars … I thought it was time for a cigar.”

  “I won’t come off the fast … so don’t try asking me,” he says very gently.

  “I won’t let you die … What do you think happens when you die?”

  “You go to the other place.”

  “What if you don’t like it in the other place?”

  “I’ll ask the way back.”

  “Michen, listen to me.”

  “You listen to me … I’m not mad now and I’ve no temper, and isn’t that a good way to die?”

  As the door is pushed in, Matron calls in a falsetto voice, “A visitor, a VIP,” and Dr. Macready gets up and says to wait for a moment until he clears it, then leans in over O’Kane. “I think I told you … I asked my friend Bishop Cormac to come by. He’s a lovely man, a sympathetic man.”

  “Is he an Orangeman?”

  The bishop stands by the bed and puts his hands alternately on O’Kane’s shivering forehead.

  “Can we take off the handcuffs, Matron … so as he can talk in private to Bishop Cormac?” Dr. Macready asks.

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “I can’t take responsibility for that. If he attacks and kills, I will get the blame.”

  “He can’t hurt a fly … he’s a dying man.”

  “I’ll have to phone the governor of the jail … he may not even be there. It is Christmas, after all,” and she points glaringly to a strip of tinsel looped above O’Kane’s bed.

  “Oh Jesus, where are the courageous people,” Dr. Macready says, looking from her to the guards and back again.

  “You’ve no idea, Doctor, how obstreperous, how dangerous this man can be.”

  “I have.”

  “Then you’re lucky you’re not in a morgue.”

  “I’ll answer to the governor, and so will Bishop Cormac. This boy must be persuaded to take a sip of something … or he’ll be in the morgue.”

  She nods reluctantly and the handcuff is undone, then the guards file out, somewhat sheepish at the presence of a bishop.

  * * *

  Dr. Macready and Miriam, a young auxiliary nurse, are in the pantry waiting. A plate of sandwiches covered with a cloth is on a tray, along with tea things.

  “It’s an awful thing to say, but I’m starving,” the doctor says.

  “Me too … it’s the thought of people stuffing themselves at this very minute with turkey and roast potatoes and little sprouts … and then the plum pudding and the brandy butter and a dollop of whipped cream …”

  “Don’t,” he says, and lifts the corner of the cloth to see what kind of sandwiches they have been brought.

  From time to time, Miriam goes to the door, which is still closed, and comes back with her index finger to her lip.

  The bishop takes them by surprise because of his crepe sole shoes and comes in smiling, his cupped hands raised in a little triumph: “He’ll take a sip … he’ll take a sip of sugar and water.”

  “Fantastic. What did you do?” Dr. Macready asks.

  “I didn’t have to do much … He’s a broken man, a broken boy, I should say. We talked of what happened. You see, it’s always coming back to him … the place, the woman screaming, the child screaming … all jumbled … so we made a kind of pact. I said that I’d take his thoughts for one hour every day … I’d pray and meditate and he could have a rest from them … that’s how I reached him.”

  “So we’re to feed him?” Miriam says petulantly.

  “Only sips, you understand … little by little … That will revive him.”

  “My father says he’d shoot the bastard, and we’re about to save him. It doesn’t make sense,” she says.

  “It does, Miriam … it makes sense of some kind … You wouldn’t have volunteered to be a nurse if you didn’t have sympathy,” Dr. Macready says quietly.

  “Okay … I’ll give him the sips, but I won’t tell anyone outside … and I won’t tell it at home either, because his crime is the worst ever committed and it’ll never be forgotten.”

  “Why is that, do you think?” the bishop asks.

  “We’ll never know the ordeal these people went through … and that’s why we keep reliving it.”

  “And he’ll never know either.”

  “He knows,” she says tartly.

  “You’re wrong there, Miriam … He makes no distinction between life and death … between you and me … between inside and outside. It’s all the same … it’s all dreamtime.

  “Dreamtime,” the bishop says, and looks at the evening sky, a marvel of pale violet, God’s creation, just as the young man in the bed about to take a sip of something is God’s creation as well.

  Court

  A YEAR has gone by and O’Kane has been moved from prison cell to hospital bed, back to prison again, sometimes in isolation, sometimes not, by turns abusive or opaque, while down at home his spectre haunts the place, and those who are obliged to give statements to the guards live in fear of his return, of his coming back to take revenge on them.

  Then it is the time for the hearing, and a crowd stand outside as they will day after day to look and to harangue him as he is brought, handcuffed, from the back of the van, sometimes cursing, other times shouting out that he is being persecuted in the prison, that he is being made senile.

  On the opening day his counsel asked the judge to go back with him to those early years, O’Kane the child, withdrawn, timid, flung in with city delinquents, institutionalised for most of his life, assessed but never helped, because no one, no one in the entire world wanted to help him. He described the abyss O’Kane lived in, was still living in, the tortured mind, worms crawling in and out of his skull, voices dogging him, a sense not just of alienation but of living hell. He was at pains to remind the judge and the crowded gallery of the Blitzkrieg that surrounded this very emotional case and, turning to the jury, tells them that theirs is a sacred task. He said the young man did not deserve to stand there alone, because the country itself was on trial, it had failed him, the system had failed him, as from the age of ten he was shuttled from one institution to another, motherless, fatherless, never with them and never without them. There were stares and looks of indignation. O’Kane sat handcuffed, bloated, with a blank expression, sleeping the hours away as if he were already dead.

  Counsel on the opposite side painted a different picture, that of a lying, untruthful, cunning, self-interested liar with a bloodlust, a man who took pleasure in killing, a man fully aware of what he had done, who now feigned madness to have his sentence mitigated. He said they would hear of voices that plagued the defendant, but to make no mistake, these were gimmicks, Alice in Wonderland ploys, tall stories of devils spiking his food or voodoo priests governing his actions or so-called maggots crawling out of his brain. And so endlessly his mental state was batted back and forth between quick jousting surgical minds, and mostly O’Kane seemed to register nothing, except for the times when he laughed uncontrollably and some in the crowd tittered with nerves.

  Day after day a re-enactment of the scene, the woods, the track, the twigs, the small branches, the brush, the partially covered bodies, the blowflies, the eggs of blowflies, the left foot, the right foot, the flexed knees, the black anorak, the blue anorak, the mother splayed over the child, listeners at once riveted and appalled.

  There were tears when exhib
its were held up, the priest’s elasticized gold watch, a wooden pendant that the woman had worn and the child’s sweatshirt with a motorbike pattern on the front. A neighbour of Father John spoke of his last tête-à-tête in her house, the half measure of brandy she had given him and diluted with twice as much water, the slice of sponge cake filled with cream which he ate and the sacred box of communion wafers he was carrying for children’s first Holy Communion three days hence. A cry of pathos was let out at hearing how he had removed his wallet from his jacket pocket and tucked it into the back pocket of his trousers, as if he feared being robbed by his captor.

  When the time came for O’Kane to be cross-examined, he seemed to emerge from a long coma, burning to tell how he got great with Eily, their first kiss on a couch in her house, the hashish they smoked, the times in his tent in the wood, and of those last minutes when she defied him. He said how she grabbed the gun off him and he grabbed it back and pulled the trigger and shot her in the eye and blood started squirting out and the child ran shouting, “Mammy, Mammy.” On being cross-examined, he denied that shooting the child was a vicious deed. He said no. He said that he did not want the child to grow up without its mother, the way he had done. He described and enacted how he had hidden the child under the mother and put the pine needles over them to keep off the rain.

  Cassandra did not know that she was about to do it, did not even remember herself standing up and walking towards the witness stand to where he stood.

  “The last picture my sister was painting was called Grief. It was a woman and a child … with a man at the edge of the canvas looking in.”

  O’Kane stared at her, baffled, vacuous, and then asked if the typist would read out to him what had been said. He heard it and shook his head repeatedly, as if to recapture something that had gone astray in him; then:

  “I watched only one woman.”

  “Why did you watch her?”

  “I was in love with her — that’s the truth.”

  There were gasps and hisses of outrage.

  “You don’t believe me, do you?” he asked.

  She paused, the pain, the horror, the sorrow, the anger, the loss, all compressed into this definitive moment.

  “God help us all, you included,” she said, her voice cold and unemotional, and she stood frail and unfrail, outside time and place, outside the shocked staring faces, not knowing if he had heard her.

  Visiting Hour

  HE IS HOLDING two soup spoons that are his friends. They have names. He is beating them hard. That steady hollow clang of metal upon metal, getting louder and louder and queerly hysterical in the austerity of the small dining room. Aileen is sitting opposite him. He has not said a word to her, he is in one of his blankety-blank moods, as she remarks. Others have got up as soon as they came in, shunned by all, even a black retriever which comes over to sniff them and goes off again. He has put on weight, and only his eyes bear resemblance to the youth that he was, just a year before.

  “So how are you?”

  “I’m in hell,” he says.

  “You’re not in hell. You’re in a mental hospital, and you prefer it to the jail … You prefer the food, the walks, the exercise.”

  “The chef is poisoning me … they’re all out to get me, tormenting me.”

  “Do you want me to talk to the doctor?”

  “You’re thick … a thick head.”

  “Look, it’s a three-hour journey … the trains are woeful … I had to get a babysitter for Ben … You don’t even ask how he’s doing. Well, he’s first in his class, and his best subject is English … so there.”

  “I want a …”

  “A what?”

  “A medal.”

  “Oh, are you religious now, is that what they done to you?”

  “St. Christopher. I want it in gold. It’s for a journey.”

  “Where are you thinking of going?”

  “Tullamore … I’ll build a small bungalow … get the balance back.”

  “I never know whether you’re mad or acting mad.”

  “Does your heart break?”

  “Sometimes.”

  He is crying then, his teeth eating his tears; pitiful sounds coming from deep within, a child’s despair imprisoned in the bloated being he has become. She leans over and takes the spoons from him, then very gently: “What is it, Mich? If you don’t tell me, I can’t know and I can’t help you.”

  “No one will double up with me … they’re all afraid of me.”

  “You attacked nurses … twice.”

  “Why did I kill them people?” he asks vacantly.

  “That’s between you and God.”

  “She’s there,” he says, and jumps back terrified.

  “She’s not there … there’s only me here.”

  “God isn’t talking to me. He says I’m an animal … Am I an animal?”

  “I brought something to cheer you up … a poem you wrote to me … You wrote it in the first place that you went to. It was in a jug all these years … Ben found it:

  Each night before I go to sleep

  I hope that you my heart will keep

  “Bullshit,” he says, and snatches it and tears it up.

  “It wasn’t bullshit … it was before bad got into you …”

  “I want to die.”

  “You can’t die until you die … no one can.”

  “Would you help me if I asked?”

  “You know I would … I love you no matter what. I’m your sister and nothing can change that.”

  “Get me back out into the woods … I’ll bother no one … I’ll live on berries.”

  “That’s daft talk.”

  “Who hunts there now?”

  “I don’t know … I’ve never been in them woods and I never intend to and don’t think that I don’t blame myself for that night at Granny’s … you unwrapping and wrapping that gun … Up in Mars you were and I did nothing.”

  “She was dead then and so was the child.”

  “You can’t keep going over it.”

  “Will you do it for me … ask the knackers?”

  “Look … there isn’t a hope in hell … there’s gates, there’s locks, there’s a sentry tower, there’s dogs, there’s guards …”

  “You want me locked up for life, you’re one of them … you gave evidence to the scumbags.”

  “I only told them that you sometimes flipped … They had me plagued, coming to the house.”

  It happened quicker than thought, the mug flying and the tea and the teabag running down the white wall, a sugar bowl smashed and two nurses coming in quietly and cautiously so that they can see him: “Come on now, Michen … cool it … let’s go for a walk,” and each one takes an arm and she gets up to follow.

  “Keep back now, miss … keep a distance … this could be dangerous,” and that was the loneliest moment of all, to see him gone into himself, dead to the world around him.

  Heaven

  THEY HAD put him down for the night. He had had his quota of pills, the blue, the yellow, the purple, and the white. The nurse wished him sweet dreams.

  It came down like hail and he sat up excited, thinking the gang had come to rescue him. He’d prayed to them and now at last they’d come. But it wasn’t them. It was a big television, so big that it filled the cell. He sat up and the picture came on; first there was a snowstorm and then there were trees and low bushes. It was the school and the Eamonn fellow shovelling shit and the woman carrying a tray with the little loaves of bread on it. People came from behind the trees and the prefab houses, people that he knew, and he wanted to shake hands with them, but his fingers had turned to dough, his fingers were all glued together. Nobody recognised him.

  Then the picture changed to heaven. It was heaven. He knew it was heaven because of gold walls and lamps. Jesus was there, and his pet fox was there, too. There were angels flying around with trays of biscuits and oranges. There was music. It was playtime in heaven, and they were all there, the woman and t
he child and the priest and his mother. The child picked up a bucket and spade and began to play on a bit of sand by the edge of a lake. He wanted them to talk to him, but they wouldn’t. The priest was in shorts and he had a tan. His mother was on a deck chair knitting, keeping an eye on the child. He tried to break into the screen, but it wasn’t glass, it wouldn’t break, it was gooey like putty. Then the woman came out of a doorway and looked straight ahead and then turned her back on him. Her hair was loose and it had grown, it was down to her ankles. There were animals and there were birds, thrushes and a load of blackbirds. His fox trotted across to where the child was playing and he called to it, “Ruben, Ruben,” and it spat at him.

  When it got to be dusk in heaven, the sky became navy blue, people started yawning and white garments floated out for his mother, the child, and the woman and pyjamas for the priest. Beds were wheeled in, wooden beds with acorns on the headboards. The child got into a little bed, and the woman leant over it and kissed it and then rubbed its tummy the way she used to down at home. He knew that she’d talk to him once his mother and the priest had gone down to sleep. He moved closer and closer so that she could hear.

  “Will I go to heaven?” he asked. He asked three times. She turned and looked at him. He thought she was going to say something nice. Her eyes were a fruity green like the lights in a slot machine. She screamed suddenly and one eye slid back into her head and an angel that must have been a surgeon squeezed the two lids together and began stitching them with fawn thread. Tears began to run down her face, and then they were not tears, they were drops of blood, and she wiped them with her hair. She got into bed next to the child and the music finished and there was nobody in the room, only him, and he was wide awake now.

  He began to bite bits of the mattress, tore minute strips and began to plait them together, his eye on the peephole, and he was happy because he was moving on, away from there.

  * * *

  The court was told of it first thing the following morning. Dr. Macready stood before the judge and said he had unpleasant news to relate: the defendant had made a serious suicide attempt the night before, had tried to strangle himself with bedcovering in the hospital after Eily Ryan had appeared to him crying. He said he had examined the neck and that the marks of the strangulation could be seen very clearly, as they extended three-quarters of the way round his neck and were blistering. He said it was why the defendant was not wearing a collar and tie as he usually did and asked permission to have the defendant excused from the court because of finding the trial so stressful, hearing people talking about him, and about his mother and her attempted suicide. As he was saying all this, O’Kane began to laugh, and now he was in a full spate of laughter at the people looking at him, curious, appalled, while Dr. Macready tried to point out that it was not laughing laughter, that it did not mean that the young man was feeling good, far from it, that instead of being repulsed by it, they should look on it as the laughter of the damned.