In the Forest (10 page)

In the end the grown ups had to have a secret ballot and the prize went to a little chap with black curly hair who never spoke. It turned out he was a mute. Then they stuffed themselves with sweets and chocolate cake, then they fought, rival gangs,
Bang bang, you’re dead, I’m not dead,
up and down the wobbly stairs, into the garden, up in the trees, peeing on one another, Kevin squirting the girls from his water pistol and mothers walking around the garden, admiring it, out of politeness.

It was evening when we got ready to leave, the grown ups drooping, the children more feisty than ever. Two daddies came to pick up their brood and it was amazing the welcome they got. Kids descending on them, kids hugging them, kids jumping onto the running board of a vintage car that one of them drove. It was like the largest toy they’d ever seen and the daddy basked in their admiration of it.

Eily didn’t want the day to end. ‘Let’s go to the pub,’ she said. Several of the ladies gave her that look as if she was a dipso.

‘We can’t take children to the pub,’ I told her.

‘Denny knows me ... he knows Maddie. We’re regulars ... we go for a pint at six.’

‘They’re tired . . . they’ll moan.’

‘A girls’ night out,’ she said with that soft pleading look in her eyes and the lashes fluttering a mile a minute and her saying
Please please
and me saying
Another time.

When I drove off I could see her in my mirror waving goodbye and in that wave I saw that she was facing isolation and I thought,
Why did I ever let her bury herself in that strange old house with its haunted vibes?

From behind a tall iron gate, patched with sheets of aluminium and looped with wire of every description, Lalla, the little girl is running as though she is shaped out of thin air, running between the snarling, yellow eyed Alsatians, in and out between the several caravans and among the men who are engaged in their sullen tasks, welding and hammering and soldering, men renowned for their cussed manners and their fights outside pubs on Saturday nights. Lalla is wearing a tartan skirt and dainty turquoise slippers with fluffy porn poms. She runs, indifferent to the men who are cursing her for making the dogs so excited, runs for the sake of running with a lightness of a bright steamer and when Eily and Maddie arrive outside the gate she calls out bossily, ‘You’re late, you’re late.’ The dogs converge on the gate and begin to leap up, their yellow eyes unblinking; hurling themselves against the wire, dropping back and hurling again, barking with a fierce and lusty malevolence and Lalla ordering one of the men to come and chain these savages up.

Inside the cramped and curtained space of the caravan, four mothers sit in a quiet inertia, smoking, staring at the television as brightly coloured balloons drift through the stale air with a randomness. Lalla’s mother, Dell, cleans in the school where Eily teaches and they have been invited to make it a special birthday party for Lalla who is four.

A small table has been laid with mugs and an iced cake and the room smells of cigarette smoke and a sickly sweet air spray.

‘I saw you a long time ago,’ Lally says touching Eily’s hair, the blue braid of her jacket and then her hand.

‘Where did you see me a long time ago?’

‘In heaven.’

‘She’s lying . . . she tells lies,’ her brother Shane says and ignoring him she holds up her best present, a plastic wristwatch the colour of raspberry cordial and she licks it to show how much she loves it. Maddie is tugging Eily’s hair at the other side, jealous, suspicious and whinging to go home.

‘We only just got here.’

‘Come,’ Lalla says and takes Eily’s hand and leads her to a smaller room crammed with bedding and boxes and two bunk beds where herself and her gran sleep. ‘Every morning we wake up at the same time and I say “Hello Gran” and she says “Hello Lalla” and it’s always eight o’clock on my watch and it’s eight o’clock at school and it’s eight o’clock for the cows out in the fields.’

‘She can’t count and she can’t read,’ Shane says.

‘I’ll spit at you,’ Lalla says and they have a spitting match and her mother calls in that they are to behave themselves and remember they are not alone now, there are visitors.

‘I like silver and gold and I like light blue,’ Lalla says, studying Eily’s mouth now in which there is one gold filling at the back.

‘Where do you see silver?’

‘Money.’

‘Where do you see gold?’

‘Teeth.’

‘Where do you see light blue, Lalla?’

‘In the sky. I like Mrs Quilligan because she has no kids.’

‘Who’s Mrs Quilligan?’

‘Teacher . . . she lets me play football.’

‘No, she doesn’t,’ Shane says. ‘She’s too scared to play football . . . she plays with Hilda’ and from a cradle under the bed he takes out Hilda, a china creature in a pink fur attire from head to toe. Lalla snatches it from him.

‘Watch this . . . she can smile . . . watch this . . . she can walk’ and Hilda takes a few stalled steps and flops back onto the mat.

‘Watch this . . . she’s hungry’ and as she presses on her Hilda’s mouth opens, her fawn tongue glides out and with a little dropper Hilda is given some milk.

‘Watch this . . . she needs to burp’ and Hilda burps and Hilda says a croaky ‘Ta’ and Hilda yawns so Hilda has to be put down because Hilda needs lots of rest and Hilda is put into her cradle and brought off to her dormitory. Lalla returns with pictures of her favourite toys and boasts of the many things they can do; play football, go to war, go to hospital, get married, have babies and sometimes have twins.

‘I gave her a scary spider book and she got goose pimples,’ Shane says.

‘What’s goose pimples?’ she asks haughtily.

‘Goose pimples are this,’ he says and starts pinching her and as she screams, ‘I hate you, I hate you’ a startled mother comes in, dazed, wondering how she could have begot such unruly children. It is while they are fighting and their mother failing to keep them apart that Maddie comes io from the other room, holding something as if it is a trophy. In the one hand he has Hilda’s fur outfit which he has peeled off and in the other the magic bakelite box which enabled Hilda to walk and talk and eat and burp and yawn as she went to sleep. Lalla and Shane round on him as he is the enemy now, the baddie that hacked Hilda.

‘Let’s chop his head off.’

‘Let’s lock him up in the shed with the dogs.’

‘Let’s put him down the well.’

‘Nah, let’s fry him’ and as they band together to pick him up, he retaliates with vicious thumps and seeing that they will not be reconciled, Eily picks him up and apologises to the mother who runs on ahead to get the dogs chained up once again and all the while the balloons are drifting idly and harmlessly through the air.

‘I want to go home ... I want to go home,’ Maddie says, thumping her now though in his temper he is still thumping them.

‘We’re going home.’

‘It wasn’t a party.’

‘It wasn’t a party because you mauled poor Hilda.’ ‘Were you flabbergasted?’

‘No. Annoyed.’

‘I’ll never do it again ... I swear.’

Once outside the gate she looked around in dismay. Her car was gone. She found it further up, driven off the road, hidden with over-hanging branches, a fall of yellow pollen on the roof. It looked shaken to her. There was a note on the seat and picking it up she saw a mawkish scrawl on a torn billhead from one of the shops. She read it twice - ‘Blow lady blow through the hole in your big fat duck egg.’

‘I’ve goose pimples,’ she said and looked around and Maddie rubbed her arms to do his magic, to rub the goose pimples away.

Jeremiah Keogh talks to his rifle, except that it is not there; O’Kane has just sped off with it in the night. He keeps going over its life, him and it together and the day he bought it from the firearms dealer in Limerick forty odd years ago when he could scarcely afford it. A single shot bolt action to it and the dealer bringing him into the back room where there was a sort of rifle range for beginners to practise. Giving him little tips on how to use it. He memorised the certificate number, in his head, the very same as a prayer, or a recitation, in case it should get lost. And now O’Kane has sped off with it in the night. His legs still hurt where O’Kane bound them with twine. He recalls dreaming of being in China or somewhere Far East and having his hands and feet bound by men, pickaninnies with ponytails and he wakened with the pain and found he was in his own room and there was Michen O’Kane, the returned native with a mask over his face, his eyes wild, shouting, ‘Where’s your fucking gun where’s your fucking gun’ and him defying him and telling him what a pup he was to break into a house like that. Yes he did defy him. He will tell that to his sister Geraldine when she starts to complain. When she sees the mud marks on the carpet and on the window sill that she cleaned, she will ask how he gained entry and weren’t windows supposed to be locked and why was he let get away with it, why was he let run off with a weapon to threaten others with.

He recalls the times with it, going out at dusk to shoot rabbits and hares, shooting weasels and stoats and time and time again the magpies in the cornfield. One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a wedding and four for a boy. Half his life stolen, with that rifle. He has only to show Geraldine the wardrobe with its front door smashed in for her to know the blackguarding that went on. He is lucky to be alive, his shins and his feet bound and the hooligan with an axe, holding it above his head, swinging it, then smashing the lovely walnut panel of the wardrobe and him saying, ‘You could at least have opened it, the key is in the door’ and the vile language of the pup, every other word feck and the lunatic, flinty eyes glinting in the knitted balaclava. Geraldine will say, ‘Go to the guards’ and he’ll say, ‘No’ because if he goes to the guards O’Kane will be back to finish him off. Between two stools, the law and the outlaw, O’Kane’s parting words, ‘You go to the guards and you’re a dead man.’

If he had a woman beside him now she would bring in a basin of hot water to bathe his feet, but he has no woman, his Helena gone ten years, his rifle gone too, and the ammunition, the live rounds of bullets, at least eighty, kept in the tin that used to have floor polish and that imparted to them such a clean, housewifely smell. O’Kane with enough ammunition to do his raids and his rounds and his housebreaking. He recalls the impudence of the pup as he lifted the weapon out of the wardrobe, wrapped in its bolster case, said, ‘It’s as old as yourself,’ then wiping the cobwebs off it and cocking it and sighting him and him trying to plead with the bugger, ‘I need that gun . . . it’s my only protection . . . what else have I against marauders like you’ and O’Kane digging him in the ribs like it was child’s play. His torch taken too, his blue torch that saw him home nights from the pub.

He has a good mind not to tell Geraldine at all, except for the fact that she will see the muddy footprints on the window sill and on the fawn bit of carpet and see the ravaged wardrobe, the lovely walnut panel in bits, splinters on the floor and the top lintel hanging off where O’Kane found his money, his last little bit of security for the rainy day. ‘Where’s your fucking money’ and him saying, ‘I’ve no money . . . I’m a pauper . . . I’ve only a pension’ and he’ll tell Geraldine that, how he stood up to the bugger and O’Kane repeating it and him saying, ‘I forget, I forget where I hide things’ and then the bolt pulled back and the bullets put into the magazine, the chill of it and O’Kane panting with excitement, the hunter in his blood coming out and him pointing to the top of the wardrobe, to the money in a leather purse that Helena had made and thonged herself when she went to night school in the technical college and studied leatherwork as a hobby.

He can just see Geraldine, one hand in her apron pocket, wagging a finger, fuming ‘Go to the guards’ and him saying, ‘The guards are no friend of mine and never were’ and not telling her, because it would scare her, of O’Kane’s parting shot, ‘Go to the guards and you’re a dead man.’ He can’t tell that to the guards, can’t tell it to Helena, can’t tell it, has to keep it to himself, alone in his room and his faithful weapon gone.

It is dark as the patrol car comes tearing down the lane and swings into Cooney’s back yard, stones hopping off the kitchen window and Kim, their little terrier, yapping. They storm into the kitchen shouting abuse at Cooney and his wife for harbouring a felon. Children who have been around the table back off and huddle on the stairs, nervous at the sight of two men in uniform.

‘Bring him down,’ Corbett the senior guard says.

‘The hell I will . . . you come in here like cowboys . . . scare the wits out of my kids . . .’

‘We know he was here ... we have proof.’

‘Look, Rambo ... I’d agreed with Guard Tulley that if O’Kane came in here again, I’d feed him, talk to him and Rita my wife would telephone the barracks and ye’d park the car up on the road and walk in the back door and I’d express surprise . .. instead of that ye burst in . . .’

‘So why didn’t you telephone the barracks when he got here?’

‘He stayed two minutes ... he wanted a sleeping bag that he left here before he went to England . . . and at this very moment he could be on the other side of that ditch resolving to kill me and my family for talking to scumbags like you.’