In the Forest (26 page)

‘She was not your girlfriend. It’s all in your mind and
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there’s only you and your mind for the rest of your fucked life . . . Jesus.’

It is as they are arguing that a young prison officer with pale, almost albino colouring comes in; clean shaven, a crew cut, his eyes the washed blue of cornflowers, dangling a syringe and making imaginary stabs in the air as he dances around O’Kane.

‘We don’t need your blood, scumbag ... we have it. You cut your bollocks on the glass door when you broke into that house ... we have your DNA on our files . . . they flushed you out of her, above in the mortuary . . . she’s dead but she’s clean and you’re unclean and you stink.’

‘Is that the woman on the shore,’ he asks.

‘No, it’s not the woman on the shore, scumbag . . . it’s the woman you brought to the woods. How come you forget the most important data? You don’t forget to ask for bananas or a change of underpants but how come you forget that, you’re a monster, but you can’t hide behind the devil’s apron strings any longer ... do you want to know why. Because you are him, hooves and horns and all . . . it’s been a farce, a roadshow down the country . . . everyone willing to help you ... a bishop no less, priests, dignitaries, VIPs, wringing their hands . . . poor you . . . you never had a chance . . . the system failed you ... we failed you ... St Michael’s, St Joseph’s, St Bridget’s, St Patrick’s, St Finian’s, St Teresa’s, St Anne’s, Spike Island, Clonmel, Rugby, Featherstone, Wolverhampton all failed the little coward who so loved his mother that he had to take an innocent woman and fuck her and kill her and then kill her child to complete the tableau and kill the priest that was brought to give the last rites. It’s all a blur inside that football of a head . . . it slipped your memory
somehow . . . well, I’ll tell you something, the bishops and priests and the VIPs will run like rats from you now, repulsed . . . your visitors from now on are Us ... state visitors . . . state plate . . . state blanket . . . state funeral . . . welcome to hell, O’Kane . . . it’s been waiting for you.’

‘He’s a fucking liar, a fucking liar,’ he says when they are alone.

‘I think you did rape her Mich ... I think you did.’ ‘Do you want them to lock me up?’

‘It’s the only thing . . . after what you done.’

‘Your own brother.’

‘You’re not the brother I knew . . . you’re an alien,’ she says, fearless, despairing.

‘Don’t leave me,’ he says running to her, grasping her. ‘I have to . . . I can’t stay here a minute more.’

And he did not try to stop her, he just backed away in frozen immobility seeing the shame that welled up in her eyes.

It was after I had sex with her I came downstairs to the kitchen. She had the kettle on. I heard the voice of the devil saying
kill her kill her.
I said we have to go to the woods. She tried to defy me. The gun was hid outside behind a tree. She didn’t like it, she didn’t want a gun around the child. I said I’m only after getting it. I intend to raid a post office. I didn’t think of killing her before that. I had no reason to. She used to come up to my tent in the wood every other day and bring me food and we had loads of sex there. She sucked my cock. She wouldn’t let me go to Tullamore.

I made her drive to Cloosh Wood and when we got there she said where’s your tent. I said I burnt it, I had no more use for it. I said then I’m going to have to kill you. She said don’t be raving. I brought her way in from the road at gunpoint. She was nervous, panicky. She was holding the child’s hand. I told her if she tried running away I’d shoot them both. She let go of the child’s hand and sent it to play. I brought her up into the horseshoe of trees and she said you’re frightening me, you’re scaring me, give me that gun. She took it off me. She unloaded it. We were struggling. She hit the bolt and that automatically unloaded it. I tripped her. She fell on the ground and I loaded the gun. She tried to get back up. I shot her in the face. It was messy. I had a problem with the child. What was I going to do with him. He was screaming. He had no mother. I couldn’t bear to look at him. I shot him in the side of the head or somewhere around there. I forget. My mind was gone.

I came out of the wood and sat in her car. The keys were missing. I went back to the wood to get the keys from her pocket. She’d gone green. The colour frightened me. I covered her with pine needles and left the wood. I slept in the car a long time, maybe a day. I burned the car somewhere and went to my grandmother’s. I was sweating. I threw up. I was hearing the devil’s voice. He said burn your grandmother’s iron gate, burn her hay shed. I don’t remember going out from there but I did, I was walking along the road with the gun. I heard a voice say burn the lockkeeper’s house. He wasn’t there. I took a blanket. It got dark so I went on up towards the lights in the village and saw the church. The priest’s house was beside the church. There was no light in it and I waited. When he came I kidnapped him at gunpoint. He said oh my God. He asked me what I wanted. I said I was in a mood to kill. He said relax and don’t kill me, I’ll drive you anywhere you want. I brought him to a house in the wood where I lived as a kid. I’d hid in a closet there, pissed in it. My mother thought that very funny. Someone had sunk a well there since we lived in it. The priest said what are you going to do to me. I said I was waiting for orders. He said I was a sick man. He said that he knew my grandmother, that he went to see her sometimes, heard her confession. He had a wallet in his inside pocket. He went into the toilet and hid it in his trouser pocket. I ate cake with sugar on top. I went to sleep.

It was six in the morning and the birds were singing. I said to him come on, time to get up. I took his wristwatch. I gave it to some fucker in Limerick for hash. I laughed at the blood coming out of his head like a water pump. I got a great buzz, a great kick out of that. I liked the jump. I’m possessed.

He lay in his own shit. He lay in his own dark, cursing and conspiring. He hated the screws. The screws hated him. He made their lives hell, refused to use the bucket that they passed in and shat on the floor to spite them. Threw his arms out like they were oars or javelins and told the fuckers he’d be leaving very shortly, going through the roof. The ‘Jumping Jesus show’ they called it. They were afraid of him. He roared and harangued and they believed that even if his head came off from roaring his lopped head would go on persecuting them. He called them Ambrose. They called him Fattie. ‘No hamburgers for Mr Fattie.’ ‘No radio for Mr Fattie.’ ‘No walkies for Mr Fattie.’ He’d hold four fingers up in rotation, and they knew what it meant. He’d killed three people and there would be a fourth. Sometimes he sat like he was in a trance, sucking his thumb, staring. His laughing was a kind of roaring also. He could keep it up for hours.

The staff shot the pheasant that kept him company because they were jealous of it. He got his revenge. He had birds coming in the window whistling tunes and he whistled back. Then one day six or seven red hens from home came and he talked to them and asked them if they were laying well. He had great times with them. He learned the chookchookchookchookchookchook that they did after they laid. Then one day they didn’t come and he cried. Pigs came but they got stuck, they got wedged between the bars, their pink hairy rumps not able to get in and not able to get out. They taught him grunts and the screws listened outside the cell and looked through the spy hole, made bets whether he was or was not a pig. Instead of Fattie they called him Piggy and he called them Ambrose.

He was brought for a walk each day, around a closed yard with a high wall and one tree with dead, papery leaves. There was a lavatory bowl in the corner with no chain and no handle and he shat in it even though he was not supposed to. He saved his shit for there so that they would come with bucket and broom cursing him and making him clean it up. One day there was a new nurse that gave him a funny look and he struck at him in a long lunge, got him to the ground and then started hitting his skull on the edge of the bowl, his face mired in the shit. It was the padded cell after that. He’d hurl himself against the leather walls and be thrown back and rehurl himself, because nothing would convince him that it was not going to give in to him.

That’s when Dr Macready was called. Dr Macready had the distinction of being the only one that was not afraid of these nutters, afraid of no one. He agreed with the governor to see him but only on one condition, face to face. He did not want to be in one room and looking at O’Kane through glass in an adjoining room - ‘I want to get to the real person,’ he said and the governor smiled the smile of the disenchanted. It took five visits to break the ice. He was late for his visit and sat down, took out his handkerchief, began to clean his spectacles and said, ‘There was a drunk Scotsman on the bus and he kept saying “No sweat John no sweat John” and he walked up and down the aisle and looked into people’s faces and said “Peasants” and then he came and sat beside me and studied me and said “Peasant”.’

‘Are you in America a lot?’

‘No . . . why?’

‘I don’t want a trial here. They’ll be laughing at me . . . they’ll make fun of me and fun of my mother. Could you get me out of here? Could you get me out a back door? I’ll harm no one ... I won’t get a gun . . .’

‘Not a chance in hell, Michen. The only way I can help you is to come in here and see you.’

‘Bullshit.’

‘Yes and let you bullshit me.’

‘I throw food on the floor ... I go to the toilet on the floor.’

‘I know . . . I’ve seen it.’

‘I’m a sick man, aren’t I?’

‘Yes, you’re a sick man.’

‘And what will you do for me?’

‘Not much . . . but, something . . . we’ll try . . . together.’

Dr Macready is with him in the hospital; he has been sitting for well over an hour, listening to him as he dozed and rambled - ‘There’s a little gun in your exhaust, I was a colicky baby, I smiled at three months . . .I twitched at six’ - his sighs getting fainter and fainter, a film over the eyes and sudden jerking as his brain seems to fuse out, then another little garbled sentence, then a smile.

The light from the corridor is mellow and in contrast with the harsher light in the hospital ward, O’Kane’s face gaunt, his skin yellow, his head lifted back against the iron rungs, his wrists no longer chafing, slack inside the handcuffs, the guard cuffed to him dozing with tedium. Two other guards stand at the end of the bed and one at the door, their squat revolvers slightly obscene looking, their hips waddling as they walk around, to kill time.

Dr Macready is holding in his hand the gift he has brought him because it is Christmas. O’Kane has been on a hunger strike for over twenty days, no longer warring, quiet, shivery, talking of being lifted up into the sky, and at other times seeing orange men dancing on his bed. He is saying that he wants his sins on his tombstone, wants the world to know he is sorry. He insists that it was when the box of Holy Communion wafers were found in Father John’s car that his luck changed, and that it was a good thing because it meant he got captured. He said she was a beautiful woman, his dream woman in his dream world and that was why he fell in love with her. He asked the doctor to say goodbye to home for him because home was the most important place in a boy’s life, a boy carried the woods into the world. He said his father should have come and forgiven him and he should have forgiven his father because a son had to be a father too. But always back to the woman, still alive in some part of him, still alive in Cloosh Wood, animals attacking her and him trying to save her and turning her over and picking her up. And picking her up.

‘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, dreamlike, as if someone lulled by a potion that has not come from outside, not been administered, but from inside himself, his own metabolism altered making him remote, serene, 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 women?’ 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.’