In the Forest (13 page)

‘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.

Suddenly the visitor is hitting the table, pounding with his fists, no time for coffee, no time for a leak, time to go.

‘We’re ready we’re ready,’ she says as she grabs her shoulder bag and their coats.

‘He’s a robber he’s a robber,’ Maddie whispers and she pinches him to be quiet.

Crossing the field O’Kane talked back to the birds, shouted at them to belt up. As they arrive at the grassy fork where her car is parked he runs to where he has stashed it and she sees the brown gauntleted handle of dark wood and the barrel covered in different coloured plastic paper.

‘I never let my child near guns,’ she says.

‘Uncle Rodney . . . the boys in the north, the balaclava crowd want to recruit me . . . I’m a crack shot but I’m no one’s poodle ... a loner ... a lone cowboy, that’s me.’

‘If that thing is loaded, I’d like you to unload it.’
117

‘Drama queen are you . . . get in the fucking car . . . we have business, missus.’

Maddie begins to shout and kick, refusing to let the robber into the back seat.

‘That’s my seat . . . that’s my seat . . . it’s not his seat.’ ‘Now now, darling . . . it’s only a short journey.’ ‘Darling,’ the stranger says, then grabs the long plait of her hair, runs it over his mouth and nibbles it.

The car starts, stalls, backfires as with loud swift bangs they are off.

‘You’ve got a small gun yourself in your exhaust,’ he says jokingly.

His arm is across the back of her seat and he tweaks her hair from time to time.

‘I wish you wouldn’t do that,’ she says.

‘Angry are you . . . you should take a course in anger management . . . noisy car you’ve got.’

‘Yes ... they’ll hear us coming.’

‘But they won’t hear us going baby. Baby. Into the sunset . . . had breakfast had you?’

As they approach the town he huddles down in the back seat and pulls his jacket over his head and Maddie is howling, trying to undo the straps of his carry cot, yelling to get out because the robber has turned into a monster. She slows down outside the pub only to find it closed, the green blind drawn, nobody about except a woman in the distance, going down the hill walking her dog. Outside the post office, Birdie’s van is parked under the palm trees and Birdie is in the passenger seat sorting a bundle of mail. With her whole being she wills the woman to look in her direction. Birdie does look and merely shakes her head to indicate that there are no letters for her.

‘This is where we part company,’ she says, turning to him.

‘Put your foot down . . . put your dainty foot down,’ he shouts from the shelter of his jacket and she feels the cold graze of the gun slide down the side of her neck.

Once out of the village he begins to laugh, loud, gutsy peals of laughter, the laughter of somebody locked inside a barrel and frantic to be let out. They pass the town hall, the hurling field, the funeral parlour with a lit cross, ponies in a field, and clumps of yellow gorse just coming into bloom. A man at a gateway looks in her direction, then looks away as if he has not wanted to see her.

At the crossroads she swerves onto the tarred road toward the next big town, believing that their ordeal will end there. He is shouting at her to reverse, reverse, fucking bitch, fucking cunt. She reverses back to where there are two signs bearing the name of the wood -Cloosh Wood. One is high up and written in black on a white signpost and the other a fish shaped oblong of oak with fancy lettering. At the first entrance to a dirt road there is a red and white barrier and he shouts at her to go on, go the fuck on. At the third entrance there is no barrier and he leans forward and grasps the wheel, steering them towards a dirt road and a grid over which a carpet of young green branches have been laid.

‘Where are we?’ she asks.

‘God’s country,’ he says boastfully.

To one side is woodland, a sombre-green gloom stretching as far as the eye can see, the village, the showery apple orchards of home far behind them, an emptiness that is ghastly. She listens in vain for the thud of a hammer or the revving of a chainsaw, but there is none, only him starting up a yodel as he runs around coiling and uncoiling an imaginary lasso rope.

‘Wayyupwayyupwayyupwayyupwayyupwayyup,’ he keeps saying and it takes her seconds to interpret it as ‘Way Up’.

‘That’s how gamesmen lift the birds,’ he tells her, except that there are no birds, no birdsong, no evidence of life except a tub shaped black barrel with Poison scrawled on its surface and a wooden tool-shed, the very new wood syrup coloured in the sunlight. Perhaps it meant that workmen came and went and presently she expects to see a forester materialise out of that wilderness of green. On a nearby tree at the entrance to a shaded path is a round mirror with a rubber rim, his spy glass and that along with the strewn branches over the grid tells her that he has planned this escapade. She jumps as a forked twig drops onto her jacket and he flicks it off.

‘Is that Kelly green?’ he asks fingering the collar.

‘It’s royal blue actually,’ she says tersely.

‘OK OK . . . wrong script . . . erase . . . erase . . . wipeout.’

‘People saw us you know,’ she says, the calm of her voice in contrast with the pelting of her heart.

‘There’s no one out there for you ... or me sunshine,’ he says.

‘I have friends ... I do community work. I teach . . . they’ll be on our trail,’ she says.

‘Lonesome trail,’ he says. He is staring at her, his eyes both penetrating and dead looking like worn leather.

‘Why don’t we have a smoke,’ she says.

‘Your shout,’ he says and they sit on a log, their backs to the wood facing a wasteland of tree stumps and ash heaped earth. He watches her take the brown cigarette
paper from its folder, make a trough, then flake some tobacco into it and roll it.

‘Lick it ... lick it,’ he says and watches her moisten it, then tells her to light up.

‘Top o’ the world rna,’ he says grinning then throwing off his jacket and he leans back along a log, smoke wreathing across his young face and his mad chuckling eyes. He is not yet twenty she reckons, his Adam’s apple supple, like a yo-yo, his arm muscles thick and corded. The short hairs of his moustache reddish brown in that light, have the bristle of a cornered hedgehog. Maddie has not said a word, his face buried in her lap, peering out at moments through the lattice of his outspread fingers.

‘Ever see
White Heat
?’ O’Kane asks.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Top film . . . Cody’s mother thought he was the little lamb of God.’

‘Every mother thinks that.’

‘Bollocks. Town bicycle every mother.’

‘You’d want to watch your language,’ she says and as she gets up and crosses to the car he grabs hold of her ankle and squeezes it.

‘Yonder,’ he says pointing to the wood.

‘I don’t want to go in there . . . it’s dark . . . it’s dismal,’ she says, in a voice a little quiet, a little placatory.

‘That’s where you’re going Goatgirl . . . that’s the deal.’

He waits until they have crossed to the narrow entrance between a line of trees and then he follows, calling ‘So long’ to the ash heaped wasteland behind them.

How engulfing the darkness, how useless their tracks in the rust brown carnage of old dead leaves. Pines and spruces close together, their tall solid trunks like an army going on and on, in unending sequence, furrows of muddy brown water and no birds and no sound other than that of a wind, unceasing, like the sound of a distant sea. But it is not sea, it is Cloosh Wood and they are being marched through it. The ground is soggy under foot, with here and there shelving rock sheathed in slippery moss. Not even an empty cigarette carton or a trodden plastic bottle, nothing: emptiness, him, them, insects like motes of dust suspended in the air, yet crawling onto her and onto Maddie, who is scratching and whimpering to go home. She is carrying him and hums to simulate some normality. She thinks before she turns then asks, ‘What is this for?’

‘They’re after me.’

‘Who’s after you?’

‘Dublin gang . . . knackers.’

‘They’ll find you here anyhow.’

‘No way . . . they’re afraid of the banshees.’

‘Look, I’ll drive you wherever you want . . . I’ll drive you to the boat . . . I’ll give you money.’

‘You’ve no money.’

‘I’m getting a loan from the bank on my house . . . we can go there and draw some.’

‘To the branch?’ he says puzzled, then a flying smile. ‘To the branch,’ she says matter of factly.

‘By the way, that’s my house you’re in ... I dossed there ... I left that bracelet in the coal bucket.’

‘You can have it back . . . you can have it all back . . . the house, the bracelet, the land, the lot.’

‘Trying to bamboozle me?’

‘I’m not bamboozling you . . . this child is delicate . . .

he has to have medicines every four hours ... he suffers with palpitations ... we were to drop you in the village, that was the deal. Now we come to this . . . forest.’ ‘Your man stayed all night . . . under the sheets . . . did you walk up his leg or down his leg ... make any babies?’

‘He was a friend ... a platonic friend . . . he’s helping me to sort the house out.’

‘Fucking prostitute.’

Mick Rafferty is on the phone to his wife, in the shop where she does part-time work. He talks in a hushed urgent voice and she talks back in the same way, not wanting to be heard.

‘I think I saw the Kinderschreck.’

‘Oh Jesus, was he in our barn again?’

‘No ... in the back of a car . . . with the newcomer, the redhead . . . laughing like mad.’

‘Michael are you sure.’

‘I’m sixty per cent sure.’

‘Oh God protect us.’

‘You’re going to your mother’s tonight . . . you and the children . . . you’re to come now and pack the bags.’ ‘And what about you?’

‘I can tackle him ... I have a gun . . . but if everyone is here yelling I’m powerless.’

‘Why would he be laughing Michael?’

‘I don’t know . . . maybe he was telling her a horror story.’