In the Forest (18 page)

‘Jesus how can you carry it ... it’s a ton weight,’ she said and he grabbed it from her and told her to leave his stuff alone, to mind her own fucking business. ‘What in the name of God is at you?’

‘They’re coming they’re coming for me . . . they’re taking me away.’

‘There’s no one coming for you . . . there’s no one out there . . . it’s only rain dropping out of a gutter.’

He made her open the door and go out and walk around to the gable to see if someone was lurking. It was then she noticed it propped against a pipe, bagged up with different colours of plastic and tied with different twines. She stood looking at it and called to him - ‘What is this yoke?’

‘A fishing rod.’

‘A fishing rod . . . you’re not a fisherman.’

‘It’s the season . . . the Mayfly . . . French and German and Dutch people in the hotel . . . they’ll pay me to be a gilly.’

‘It’s not a fishing rod,’ she said studying it.

‘It’s a curtain rail.’

‘What in feck’s name would you want with a curtain rail and you sleeping rough in the woods.’

‘I got a nice place . . . I’m doing it up ... me and someone.’

‘I hope she’ll straighten you out . . . Father rang here and said you nearly ran him over working on the road, him and three others . . . you tore past them in a car . . . still whipping cars are you . . . one of these days you’ll be in trouble again.’

‘Never . . . I’m a big player now.’

She pleaded with him not to bring it in the house because she well knew what it was. He laid it on the table with a braggishness and untied the knots slowly, unwrapping it more slowly still, as if it was Christmas and he was opening a toy. His eyes lit, watching her watching it. She screamed when she saw the grey muzzle of a gun. Once he had unwrapped it completely, he put his hand on the trigger and held it, playful, tantalising, and for that interminable minute she stood watching, not daring to speak, merely looking at it, waiting for it to go off. When he was satisfied that he had frightened her, he let go of the trigger and unbreached it and it lay there like a broken ornament, the brownish wood handle with writing on it, stained in black, a silvery pin and the metal barrel like the eye of a telescope taking in her and the contents of the kitchen.

‘Gather it up and get it out of here,’ she said.

‘You want me caught, don’t you?’

‘I don’t want you caught but I want you to talk to me ... I want you to tell me if you’re getting yourself in deeper into something you won’t be able to get out of.’ ‘I’ll never do time again . . . me or Uncle Rodney,’ he said and bent his cheek to it and caressed it and she

knew then there was something very wrong, very weird about that.

‘Why didn’t you bring this girl along?’

‘She sleeps all day.’

‘Oh, a Sleeping Beauty.’

‘A Sleeping Beauty,’ he said to the mirror and asked it if it thought he was good-looking, or if he was too fat.

Hearing her grandmother and the dog she told him for feck’s sake to get that thing out of sight, to cover it up. The moment his grandmother arrived in the kitchen she ran to hug him, asked why he hadn’t been sooner, why hadn’t Aileen given him his tea and why a new moustache and a little fledgling beard. She kept looking at him, regretting that he looked older and please God wasn’t he out of trouble now and starting a whole new life.

‘They fucked my head up bad in England,’ he said.

‘Don’t use bad language, son.’

‘But not my heart,’ he said, letting her touch the outline of his moustache.

‘Your soft heart,’ his granny said and recounted that day in the morgue when his poor mother died and it was snowing outside and him sliding down the banister and out into the grounds to bring back a snowball to run over his mother’s face, to give her the kiss of life.

‘The kiss of life!’ Aileen said, watching him watching the doors and the windows.

As a car swung into the yard he shouted at them to lock the door.

‘It’s only Tom . . . it’s only cousin Tom . . . he’s coming to fetch a lawnmower,’ his granny told him and ordered him to sit down.

‘What’s that thing outside the door with plastic over it?’ Tom asks as he comes into the kitchen and sees O’Kane with a mug of tea and apple pie placed before him.

‘It’s a long gun,’ Aileen says tartly.

‘A long gun!’ his granny exclaims.

‘I wouldn’t use it to hurt anyone . . . never.’

‘Well you’d better get it out of here ... I passed a patrol car a couple of miles up,’ Tom says.

‘Where were they going?’

‘Looking for you perhaps,’ Tom answers and opens and closes the oven door to show his disquiet, then goes to the dresser and takes the news cutting out of a tureen and places it on the table.

‘Nice work,’ he says holding up the picture of O’Kane, that was caught on video, attacking an old lady.

‘A poor woman . . . the same age as myself,’ his granny says, tears in her eyes.

‘I didn’t do it ... I was framed . . .’

‘You’ve no business coming here,’ Tom tells him.

‘I came to see my granny.’

‘I’m glad you did, love ... we went through a very hard period . . . you gave us a fright when you stabbed your sister that time . . . scared us all ... and you’re always running away.’

‘Will I be able to stay until it gets very dark?’

‘I don’t know . . . things are different since you went to England.’

‘No one wrote to me . . . not even you.’

‘I didn’t know what to say to you, son ... I realise now I should have written.’

‘I’ll be gone before daylight.’ He looks at his grandmother tenderly, the look that promises to do no wrong and she looks back torn, then reaches into a drawer and takes out money and puts it in his pocket.

‘I burnt a car up in a wood a while back.’

‘Whose car?’ Aileen asks.

‘An old banger . . . the gears weren’t working . . . there was a hole in the exhaust.’

‘Come outside,’ Torn says, taking the heavy jacket from the back of the chair.

He is in the back of Torn’s car, the gun on the floor with a sack over it, Tom speeding and the radio on full blast.

‘What’s that gun for anyhow?’

‘Shooting rabbits.’

‘How did you come by it?’

‘I bought it off a man called Gleeson ... I paid twenty quid for it.’

‘You mean you stole it.’

‘Is this a set up . . . are you driving me to the barracks?’

‘Christ Almighty . . . I’m giving you a lift to the roundabout.’

‘Stop the car . . . I’m going to do a legger.’

‘You’re welcome to do a legger’ and as Tom slows, the music is stopped abruptly for a news flash. They hear how a woman and a child have gone missing in a district ten miles away. The announcer gives the woman’s name, her height, her age, her occupation and the type of car she was last seen driving, along with the age and colouring of the child.

‘That’s a sacred bond, a mother and a child,’ O’Kane says.

‘What would you know about a sacred bond,’ Torn says and keeps the engine running as he thrusts him out of the car, cursing him for the trouble he brings on them.

O’Kane walks, concealing the gun, jumping as cars whizz by, uncertain as to whether or not he will risk the town, the voices saying, ‘Sort this out . . . sort this out.’ When he sees the street lights, he stops and thinks. He remembers a chip shop and the priest’s house where he mowed grass.

The priest’s house is at the approach to the town with a short avenue leading up to it. The lights are out and the car is not there. He thinks of breaking through the back window but then decides it might get messy so he goes behind a low wall to wait. He kneels there, the rain driving into him, a rush of rain down out of the trees, clean rain, washing him out and he lifts his face and his body to it, allows it to soak into him and through him, making of him an innocent son.

It was a different priest, young, dark haired, wearing a gold watch and a natty suede jacket.

‘Will you help me?’ he asked.

‘Who are you?’ the priest asked, a bit tetchy.

‘I knew Father Hayes ... I did jobs here ... I mowed the grass.’

‘Father Hayes passed on. What can I do for you?’ ‘There’s someone in a bad way in a wood . . . you have to bring me there.’

‘How do you mean a bad way?’

‘He fell and broke his neck.’

‘But why come to me, especially at this hour of night?’

‘You’re a priest . . . God’s brother.’

‘But I don’t even know you.’

‘If we don’t go ... it will be a black night.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘He needs the last rites.’

‘Well if it’s that bad . . . then I expect we have to go,’ the priest said and opened the door cautiously to let him in.

I am writing this in an empty house while the young man sleeps beside me. Beyond the shutterless window a lonely quiet and the vast wood, the scene of some awful secret that he won’t tell me. At one point he threatened to kill me. I don’t believe he will. To ask him why he wants to kill me is quite useless, might as well ask him why his eyes are a dark colour or mine are grey. However he claims to like me, to have got to like me after our little contretemps because I did not show fear. I feel sure that he has broken out of an asylum and is being searched for in some county or another.

He looks so young sleeping there on the floor with the cake crumbs at the side of his lips. It was a sponge cake that Baba Melody gave me when I was leaving her house earlier tonight. A sponge cake and eleven duck eggs. He was waiting for me in the rain when I drove over the grid into my own gateway. I could scarcely believe it. He said he was home from England and that there was someone in trouble over in his own area and needed the last rites. Driving along, I asked him why he was out on such a wet night, he said, ‘It was all to do with the devil’s work’ and suddenly he ordered me to turn the car around. At first I thought he was joking, then he lifted the muzzle of the gun out from under his anorak and I don’t know which gave me the worst fright, it or his disjointed talk or the so-called jokes he made. Passing the grounds of a hotel with its tall cedars, he threw the duck eggs out of the window and laughed boisterously. He asked if the sponge cake was a gift from a lady friend. I said I don’t have a lady friend, I’m a priest who has taken the vows of chastity. He mocked that and said we were all the same under our habits. Then he asked who won the match and I said there was no match, that it was a weekday and not a Sunday. He said he’d lost a few days, scrunched up in a hole somewhere and that one morning he wakened and there was a young foal licking his face. He said he needed to be in a forest, they were the only safe places.

The first forest we tried had a locked barrier and he said they’d regret that, the keeper would regret that and he would be back to get him. He was talking, talking, talking. The odd thing is I discovered later on I had a connection with him through his sister. I had baptised her child, his nephew and he appeared in one of the photographs in a clean suit, holding the child. He asked me did I consider him good looking. I said very. He said he’d been in a lot of jails since then and picked up a lot of hooliganism. Kept telling me to speed up.

When we came to the track that led into Cloosh Wood he got very agitated and asked if I would help him. He made me promise to help him no matter how terrible the shock. I gave him my word. We walked, or fairer to say we stumbled, through a very dark, very soggy wood, treacherous under foot and seemingly vast. Then he ran to one side and came back with a torch which I presumed he had hidden there. The light from it was sputtery and soon expired. All of a sudden I felt myself go stone-cold. I cannot say what it was because he would not let me any closer. I just had the sensation that I was approaching a scene of calamity and instinctively I began to say some prayers for whoever might be lying there in that loneliest of spots. He went berserk, said that I wanted to frame him like all the other f* * * * * s. I somehow managed to calm him and we found our way through the undergrowth and through the dark to this empty ghost of a house where he claims to have lived as a child. He said it was the happiest time of his life because it bordered on the woods. I believe that he brought me to give the last rites to someone and then bewilderingly changed his mind. He kept saying ‘I’m an animal . . . I’m an animal.’ The moment I proposed hearing his confession, he went ballistic, told me to mind my own effing business, said I was part of a ring out to get him. I reminded him of the secrecy of the confessional and said I would not break his trust to anyone. He said then that he had misled me. The person that was in danger was in another wood altogether, held captive by a gang. I felt that he was lying. I told him that the best thing we should do was sit down and talk things over until daylight. I said everything was worse at night, fears were worse and suspicions were worse. I asked him was he hungry and he said yes he was starving. I sent him out to the car for the remainder of the sponge cake and he was eating it as he came in. It was unnatural the way he pawed at the cake and as he ate it he was also sucking it as if it were both food and drink.