In the Forest (16 page)

‘Will you leave the child outside the shop.’ Each word said slowly, over-calmly, with quiet, grinding emphasis. He appears to be heeding it.

In that suspended second, her thinking races ahead and looking through the trees she says, ‘I hear someone corning’ and as he runs to ensure, she steps on the gun, bounces on it, as on a trampoline, her strength prodigal, her determination supreme. He lunges, appalled that she should have tricked him and now the ultimate flood of rage that has been waiting is loosed from the wrenched and bloodied sockets of his fucked life as he tears at her clothing in an ecstasy of hate, as though tearing limb from limb all womankind.

When he flings her down she feels the harmlessness of damp earth, his craziness shutting out all of life, all of light, a tiny pearl button of her blouse skiving off, his mouth, his mucus over her, still begging him, her words being swallowed ‘Promisemeyouwillleavethechildout sidetheshoppromisemeyouwill leavethechild outsidethe-shoppromisemeyouwillleavethechildoutsidetheshop.’

All earth, all air, all forest is filled with Maddie’s cries calling her, running, kneeling by her, child and warrior in one, throwing fists of clay at her attacker, clay that falls in splotched medallions; a warring triptych, flailing and furious, her yoked body, Maddie clinging to her, their desperate cries as one, going up to the trees and down to the wisps of dew that have outlived the morning, rising and expiring, dying and perpetuated in that catacomb of green, up there at the edge of the world, on the point of sacrifice.

Pre-dawn, the grey woozy world, a horn of a moon going back in and rain dripping off the branches.

O’Kane wakens in the back of the car, pulls the blanket down and sits up crumpled, he looks around, feels for the rifle and listens; then he gets out.

His piss against the green lichen of the tree rises in a prolonged and steaming arc and he breathes deep and slow into the neutral greyness, allowing not even a chink of a thought, saying time to move on.

The car bounces over the narrow slash of tarred road, swaying on the bends, uphill and downhill, past the odd bungalow, a gateway, a red letter box, a caravan, cows. Another mile or so and he is on the dirt road and after that on a mountain pass, lurching and bouncing among the ruts. No guards, no lorries, no scumbags, bandit country. He is in his element, whistling, cheering, like he has won a race, a tremendous high, his energy gathered and transferred into the driving, the last drive in that rackety little yoke, soon to pass into another county, a deserted outback, the end of the little yoke, its last hooray in a whoosh of flame. He is untouchable.

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 striped, 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 and then stands on the rickety bridge of iron and cement-blocks and looks down at the water that is the colour of porter and frothy like porter too. He is about to pitch it in when a whelp has come up behind him and grabbed 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 like 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 down river 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 said, 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 stands 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 with 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 foul 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 had 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 bog-land, 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. Then 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 clothes that 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 chickens’ feathers being burnt. He’d covered his tracks, son.

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 the after smell of burned rubber. Then there is 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 maybe that Eily has had to bring him to the doctor and considers ringing 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 and 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 river bank 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 to this and that. At the fork where 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 was bunched inside it. She draws back from it, too fearful to touch it or pick it up.

It is getting dusk, big sulky clouds threatening to rain and the new born 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 new born 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 her 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 had 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 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 shirt sleeves, 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.