In the Forest (21 page)

Charlie’s house was suddenly like a canteen. Neighbours had gathered because of hearing the cars and the fire engine and Charlie’s wife, her hair loose and flying as if she belonged in some ancient drama, kept plying them with warm scones, repeating the miracle that had happened while the men were gone, that a sick sheep that they were sure was going to die, had given birth to twins. She marvelled that it was twins and that the sheep, poor creature, had had a dropped womb and wasn’t it a good omen. It was only when the guard came back in from the hallway where he had been ringing the station that she seemed to take in the gravity of what was really happening.

‘It’s the priest’s car,’ the guard said.

‘Father John’s car . . . Father John’s car.’ The evocation of his name sent shivers through them and one who knew him spoke of his kindness, his down to earthness, the way he mixed with the people and played hurley like any ordinary bloke. She was pressed for more information and all she could think to say was that he had a good dress sense and wore a beautiful gold watch.

‘It doesn’t look good,’ Charlie said.

‘We’ve dragged our feet too long over them missing people,’ the men said, eager now to go on a reckless search in the dead of night.

Around the cold jetty in the sad dawn, twenty or so people converged to see it and what they saw was a crinkled plastic sheet covering a shell of a car like a shroud. They knew it was the priest’s car, just as they knew of the rosary beads that had not been burned out and the shot that had been fired a few feet away after midnight. With a terrible constraint they kept looking towards the lake, believing that Father John was down there among the ghosts of others who had drowned, fishermen caught in a squall, drunk youths coming home from a disco and Fidelma that had left her husband after the first night of marriage. No one said so but each felt he was down there, and standing in the cold they looked up at the first sight of the helicopter, rackety, invasive, a big threatening bird, bringing unease to fields and meadows, to lanes with gorse bushes all in bloom, to the soft-seeming haze of the sheltering mountain.

‘The
fox is invisible
.’ He keeps shouting it from the depths of a ditch where he has hidden all night, shouting it and emptying the rainwater out of his boots.

The heat is on. They are searching boats, harbour front, fields and sheds, shitting themselves because they can’t find him. He has seen his picture in the newspaper next to the woman, like they are a bridal couple. She has both her eyes, gazing. There is a picture of the fecking dog with the number plate in its mouth. A picture of the priest, a lock of hair down over his forehead, holding a hurley stick.

In that ditch before the dawn, he has his first fill of the chopper coming in to get him. He can feel their desperation in the way they tear over the fields, zoom up and down, in and out, skimming the tree tops, trying to sniff him.

‘You could get me but you’re afraid of me . . . scumbags,’ he shouts up to it as it skims off over to the lake and the island where the butcher grazes his cattle. He gets out of his hole and walks across to a gateway, leans on it, waiting for someone to pass. A creamery lorry drives by and the driver gapes at him with fear and semi-recognition and drives on. He leaves an old bucket upside down in a field, another trick to confound them.

‘The
fox is flying it,’
he says to the bushes, to the hawthorn and across to the house that he has already targeted. He is merely waiting for the man or the woman to come out, to walk up the road, to open a gate and let the cows make their own way on down to the milking parlour. He has watched them do it each morning, either one of them going up to open the gate and the other going down to the milking parlour to get the machines ready, and Kitty the daughter asleep. She is a redhead too but not golden like the woman, raw, foxy. He bursts out laughing at the thought of her scream.

At the sound of something breaking Kitty sits up startled and thinks
Jesus, the dishes, I didn’t stack them right in the press, my mother will eat me.
Her younger sister Deirdre and her grandmother in the far wing of the house and her parents gone milking, same as always, then not the same.

The door is kicked in and she screams, she screams at a face masked with black nylon tights, shouting at her to get up, fast. Behind the gauze of the nylon she recognises O’Kane, his eyes like coal, spittle along his lips and every other word fuck, fuck. To save her grandmother a heart attack she gets out of bed and says pluckily, ‘There’s nothing for you in this house, O’Kane.’

There are splinters of glass all over the kitchen floor where he has broken a panel and she has to pick her steps to get the car keys that he has asked for out of the drawer.

‘Take them,’ she says and flings them across a worktop.

‘You’re coming too, Ginger,’ he says.

‘I’ve an exam today . . . it’s a very important day for me,’ she says, that little bit less insolent.

‘It’ll happen without you.’

‘At least let me get some clothes on,’ she says, pulling the lapels of her pyjamas across her front.

‘Get the fuck out the door and stop messing.’

He sits beside her, the gun across his sprawled legs and a couple of minutes beyond the^ gateway she sees her own mother seeing her and flinging her hands up aghast. He has already mapped a route in his mind.

‘Go left.

‘Go right.

‘Go along the pier.

‘Go up to the ash tree.

‘Go to Dick’s Cross.’

‘You think my mother didn’t know you . . . you think that mask disguises you . . . well, it doesn’t,’ she tells him.

‘You’re a fecking useless driver . . .’

‘You were only a class ahead of me at school . . . such a shy little lad . . . you wouldn’t come in the playground . . . waiting for your mother . . . and look at you now . . . having the country at gunpoint.’

‘Stop the fecking car,’ he orders her and as he gets out she thinks she will have a few seconds to bolt, but he has already anticipated that and levelling the muzzle on her forehead, he backs out, opens the back door and lobs the gun above her head as he settles into the back seat and pulls the tights off. He allows the legs to dangle on his shoulder and gives them a little mocking toss from time to time. He nuzzles them and she thinks
I know who they belong to.
He looks less of an ogre without the tights and she tries talking to him, as if she is not afraid.

‘You’ve made a bit of an impression, haven’t you?’ ‘Is that what they’re saying?’

‘You’re wanted . . . your picture in the papers . . . where did you sleep last night?’

‘In a hole.’

‘And why did you come to us?’

‘That fecking chopper.’

‘Everyone is asking about the missing people.’ ‘What missing people?’

‘A woman and a child and a priest.’

‘I know nothing about a priest.’

‘So you do know about the woman and the child.’ ‘She gave me a lift a week back ... I got out at a shop . . . that’s all I know.’

‘That’s not what people are saying.’

Suddenly he is shouting at her to go left, go left and she is on a dust road, pouches of it splashing the windscreen as if it had not been trodden in centuries.

‘People must have lived here once,’ she says, pointing to gable walls of fallen cottages, mere attempts at normality.

‘It’s my area now.’

‘And that’s why we’re here?’

‘I want to get to France.’

‘What the hell happened to you to turn you into such a raving lunatic?’

‘They put acid into my brain. They doped me first with sleeping pills and poured melted plastic over my feet so as I couldn’t move.’

‘You better have that head of yours seen to.’

‘I don’t want to. I’m in with the top man now.’ ‘Who’s he when he’s at home!’

‘Man with the horns. He’d suck your titties any night . . . or that sister of yours or your old dopey granny.’

‘You’ve seen too many horror movies, O’Kane.’

‘My arse is bleeding. I cut it going into your place.’ ‘That’s because you hadn’t the manners to knock.’ ‘You’re funny. How are you feeling anyhow?’ and he nudges her in the back.

‘Freezing. Could I have my jacket?’ she says and as he passes it to her, her hand comes off the wheel and in that instant the car swerves to one side and slides into loamy ground, the wheels slurping, then sinking down into a swamp.

‘You done it on purpose, you bitch.’

‘If I done it on purpose ... I would have done it on the main road.’

‘Reverse.’

‘I can’t reverse. It’s stuck’ and they get out to push it and he tries raising it onto a ridge of stones, all to no avail and finally he gets newspaper out of the boot, rolls it furiously into twists and as he opens the nozzle to dip them in the petrol she lets out a cry. ‘Don’t. My father loves his little car ... his little Minny.’

‘He’ll get another little Minny,’ he says and as they walk away from it she can see by the haltingness of the flames, the way they hesitate, that Minny will not catch fire. She will stay put and be a clue when her parents and the guards come on their trail.

Nothing, only emptiness, no cattle, a round rusted empty cattle feeder in the middle of nowhere and they walking over boggy ground, the stones and the thorns cutting her bare feet. There are telegraph poles to one side of the bog, the wires sagging down, wires onto which birds fly and perch for a few moments and her whispering to them, ‘Tell them, tell them where I am.’ ‘My fucking feet,’ he said.

‘My fucking feet,’ she said back. She tried to stop but he pushes her on and way way down below they come to a view of lake water rippling and glinting.

‘You can see the Shannon,’ he said.

‘I don’t need to see the Shannon ... I live beside it ... how long more do you intend to keep me?’

‘For as long as I want.’

‘If you’re thinking of killing me, you better know that I’m not ready to die.’

‘Are you afraid?’

‘Everyone’s afraid of death, sonny boy . . . even you . . . acting the big fella with Jeremiah Keogh’s gun.’ ‘Who told you about Jeremiah Keogh’s gun?’

‘His sister did. He’s too chicken to go to the guards.’ ‘What else are they saying about me?’

‘They’re saying you’d be as well off to give yourself up.’

‘Never . . . I’ll never do time again.’

‘The priest’s car was found burnt out on the pier . . . people saw it for miles . . . they knew it was your work . . .’

‘They’ll never get my dabs on it,’ he says with triumph. She stops and grips his arm to hold up one of her feet to show him how it is bleeding. He goes berserk, telling her to wash it wash it or the fecking dogs will smell them out.

‘I can’t wash it ... there’s no water . . . anywhere . . . we might as well be on the moon,’ she says.

‘You’re a cheeky bitch.’

‘You’re not going to kill me, Michen, are you?’ she says almost comradely.

‘If I have to I will . . . it’ll be a fast end . . . you won’t feel any pain.’

‘Jesus. Them that love me will feel pain . . . anyhow if you kill me you’ll have no cover . . . I’m your cover.’

‘Bitch.’

They walk and walk. Bronze bracken, tough tawny grasses and furze bushes cutting her feet. Bouts of talk and bouts of silence. All of a sudden he stops, thinks, a storm going on inside his head and decides that they will turn back, they will take a different route. She realises that he is starting to panic.

‘Look . . . we’re going around in circles.’

‘Shut up.’

‘You won’t get away with it, you won’t.’

‘Shut the fuck up.’

He starts to shake his head then, shakes it violently, cursing at some sudden apparition, and then he staggers, like he is drunk or blind as he blunders towards her.

‘I can’t see you ... I can’t see you,’ he is shouting.

‘What’s wrong with you.’

‘I’ve gone blind.’

‘I’m here.’

‘Lead the way,’ he says gripping her arm and she thinks as she leads him along in that wasteland, what a deceptive picture, what a tableau, pilgrims, tired, footsore, making their way to the Inn.

‘There’s a rain barrel here ... I want to drink,’ she says, stroppy.

‘Where . . . where.’

‘Put your hand out’ and she guides him towards it and he plunges his head into it and drinks at the same time, like a caveman, then tells her to wash her fucking feet and keep them sniffer dogs away. She cups the dirty water in her hands and drinks it. It tastes of iron. Then she pours some over her feet. His sight restored, he watches her, grinning.

The sound of the helicopter, abrupt and thundery, comes from beyond, scoring the sky, a giant bird, the engine roaring, the rotor scissoring the air and her eyes drinking it in, following it as it comes up from the rim of the horizon, coasts over Cloosh Wood and veers across the range of bracken ground towards them. Unable to suppress her joy she waves a white sleeved arm and hollers, ‘Here, here.’