In the Forest (6 page)

Whose heart turns from the Lord,

He is like dry scrub in the wastelands:

If good comes he has no eyes for it,

He settles in the parched places of the wilderness,

A salt land, uninhabited.

On Friday, 15 April at approximately four o’clock, I was working on the road down from the hotel. I was accompanied by Michael Burke. We saw a car, a fairly big family car, maroon coloured, driving very fast. It was driven by my son. He was wearing dark glasses and had on a fisherman’s hat. It swung around in a hand brake turn and backed up the same way as it had come. The driver did this a few times and then he drew towards the digger where we were working at high speed and got through us. I am convinced that he was trying to drive through me and knock me down. I would have been thrown to the ground only for Michael Burke pulling me back towards the wall. He drove so close by me that a button came off my jacket. There is no doubt but that he was trying to get me. Two days later he drove the same car up and down the harbour front yelling, ‘Fucking provos, fucking provos.’ There was damage on the left rear wing of the car. Also he was growing a moustache. The next time I saw him was when I was in my own car and stopped at the bottom of the hill outside the bank. While I was there, a silver coloured car approached from the opposite direction. When he saw me he picked up speed and tore off, shouting some ‘f’ words through the window.

There’s word going around that my brother is back from England, that he was spotted in the north drinking champagne and then in Dundalk arguing in a car park, and then nearer home, thumbing a lift. He’s beginning to be a bit of a legend but I hope he isn’t around and if he is I’m glad I’ve moved away from Cloosh and made my own life here. This world is not his world and frankly I don’t know what his world is and he doesn’t know either, shuttled from one place to another down the years. No sooner would he be let out than he’d be caught again for some fresh crime, burglary or aggravated burglary, whatever that means. A wild young man. They couldn’t tie him down, he’d escape through windows or police vans and one day he ran away when he was out for a walk with a prison officer. He’d show up around home and ask to be hidden. It even got that I was afraid of him, I that reared him. You could be talking to him and all of a sudden he’d be looking through you like you were glass and he was going to smash his way into you.

He walked in here one day and demanded a sandwich. I was changing my little boy’s nappies, my little Ben, only a few months old, on a table. My brother jumping up and down wielding the bread knife and I said to him, ‘Will you put that thing down Mich, what kind of fooling are you up to?’ He wanted a sandwich but wanted it there and then and I changing nappies and Mich yelling and roaring at me and saying, ‘Give it to me now’ and I am saying, ‘Pipe down or people will hear’ and I wrap up the child in a duvet and walk off towards the bedroom and doesn’t he follow me down with the knife aimed at me and says, ‘I’m going to cut your throat’ and I say, ‘You’re absolutely crazy but I’ll make the sandwich if you put the knife down’ and he says, ‘I don’t want your fecking food, it’s poisoned and I’m going to leave a permanent mark on your face, so’s every time you look in the mirror you’ll think of me’ and I try fighting him and he lunges the knife into my knee and blood starts gushing out. Next thing he produces a flick knife and digs it down into the duvet with Ben under it. The luck of God he didn’t harm him. My leg is going from under me and I let on to him that I hear the landlady and that he better get out before he’s sent back to one of them detention centres. I get him out the front door and he starts kicking it and calling me every name under the sun. Then everything goes silent, even the child is stunned and there’s blood pumping out of my knee and I shout out the window, ‘Somebody come and help me.’ I shout it oodles of times and the landlady calls up from below and I says to her, ‘Would you come up and help me, my brother is after throwing a fit and I’m bleeding.’ She comes up and she says we have to report it to the guards and I say I don’t want to, that I want to go to the doctor and we leave Ben with a neighbour and we go out together. Up he hops from behind an oil tank with a hatchet and I tell him to go away, that I’m only going to the doctor and he says, ‘You’re going to the pigs.’ That’s what he called the guards. We try ignoring him, us going down the road and he on the opposite side with the hatchet cursing and blinding us. He sees that I’ve gone into the doctor’s and the woman with me and he scarpers. They bandage me up and then the woman insists that we have to go to the guards and I say, ‘That’s betrayal’ and she says, ‘Betrayal or not, he assaulted you’ and I say that they’ll send him back to one of them places and she says that if I don’t she will and we go out the lane and she heads towards home and I go on up to the barracks and I report it. Because it’s gone dark I ask can they drive me back home because I’m afraid to walk and they say there isn’t a car available and I walk up home lame and scared out of my wits. When I get in home I call to the landlady and she comes up with a poker in her hand and says there’s no sign of him and that he’s probably gone to stab someone else. We’re having a cup of tea when there’s a knock on my door and it’s him nice as pie asking would I have a drop of washing up liquid, so I lift up my knee and show him the big bandage and I say, ‘Look what you did’ and he says he didn’t mean to do it, it was them that told him to do it. I said who was them and he said the voices, the commands. That was the first I ever heard about them voices and I was puzzled and I felt a bit sorry for him because he looked so lonely, a loner in life. I took his hand then and I said I did something awful, ‘I went to the pigs’ and he got up then and went out.

I heard he was over in a caravan site by the lake for a few months and next thing he stole a priest’s clothes and a priest’s collar and made his way to England. He wasn’t long there before he struck again. There was a picture of him in the paper, with the priest’s outfit, mugging an old woman at a bus stop. After that, the odd letter was from places with Her Majesty’s name on the top of the stationery. That was the first time I heard mention of voices, voices telling him to be a desperado, to earn for himself the name and state of outlaw.

They are in Otto’s studio, a loft full of clutter, old floor lamps, picture frames, cane chairs waiting to be restrung, sofas to be upholstered and a motor cycle from his tearaway days. A collection of china dolls on a high ledge look out at them with beady, unblinking, compassionless eyes and from the rafters old pots and pans, ceramic jugs and the pink baby chair with its abacus of beads from Otto’s babyhood. Witnesses to his wayward and wandering life.

Otto is carpenter, stonemason, weaver, ladies’ man and bohemian all in one.

Each week Eily comes to paint with him and over time she has heard fragments of his peripatetic life, born in a bunker in Berlin as the city was about to fall, an adoring mother who worked in a night club to rear him, weaned on whiskey, gaudy cellars, the bittersweet songs of love and disillusion, a world of women, bon-bons, prostitutes and later on, actresses to whom he gave fans or shawls, waking up next to a ravaged face each morning and always inside his head and in his urgent hands the powerful painting that was waiting to get painted. But he had deferred it and put it into life instead. Many a morning, he has paced and with a
childlike simplicity spoken to her of his torment, but on this morning he is in a sulk and has not yet saluted her. ‘Say it.’

‘I do not wish my little woman to go away.’

‘It’s only a few miles down the road.’

‘You shouldn’t have left here . . . this is our valley . . . our Montmartre.’

‘I had to ... my lease was up . ..’

‘Your house is not happy . . . it’s gloomy.’

‘Don’t say that . . . it’s costing me all I have and haven’t.’

‘For your whippersnapper, Sven . . . Prince Hamlet of the byways.’

‘The local people like him, they respect him, they call him the Scholar.’

‘You are a free soul.’

‘So is he.’

‘Not like you . . . you give off an aura . . . even the dogs in the street know that.’

‘We’ll still be friends Otto . . . always.’

‘Always. What is always ... go ... go to your shack with its no bath and no lavatory and no Otto to come across the fields to of an evening and smoke and have a drink and conjure Chagall’s floating angels circling above our valley . . .’

‘I’m happy . . . don’t you want me to be happy?’ ‘No, nein, niet.’

‘What can I do?’

‘Let me paint you.’

‘OK.’

‘Nude.’

‘OK.’

‘A triptych . . . first nude, the young Eily, vibrant, hungry, her burning hair . . . next she is older ... a little belly on her . . . mother of three in a chemise and last a pilgrim woman going up a winding road.’

‘Why are you so against him?’

‘Question . . . how come Otto has not been allowed to make love to the little Madonna?’

‘Because ... it ... wasn’t . . . the right chemistry.’

‘I see. You will tell me next that you have discovered love . . . you will tell me there is no other love like it ... never was, never will be ... the stroke of his hand and you are electrified . . . you think a thought and he finishes it ... you will tell me you have just discovered love and I will tell you you have just discovered disappointment. It is all illusion, fantasy, chimera.’ ‘Why are you so against him?’

‘Because he is young and nothing else matters in this crooked, lousy, beautiful world.’

He kicked a few things out of the way and went down the ladder stairs and she followed, a bit crestfallen.

Madge is hanging out a double sheet, mustard coloured. There is something amiss about her wave to Eily, something tentative, embarrassed. In that moment Eily thinks she should reverse up the lane, but then she thinks that would be hasty, unfriendly.

Madge and Eily have been friends since they met that warm day the previous spring when Eily had gone into the craft shop where Madge worked, to see if she might display some of the postcard drawings she had done. They were all of nudes and many were pregnant with proud voluptuous bellies.

‘How about putting some clothes on them,’ Madge said and they laughed, both knowing how the local people viewed them, with their long skirts and their wellingtons, their sloppy knitwear and their ethnic jewellery. ‘Blow ins’ they were called, a name that had originated from the flotsam of wrecked vessels that had blown in from the sea. Blow ins.

They went outside and sat on the window ledge watching the dilatory life of the street - a dog chewing a flat ball, young girls teetering in absurdly high platform shoes walking up and down, expecting a group of boys to appear.

‘I hate men,’ Madge said but without conviction. She had separated from her third partner, had two kids, no money, lived in a leaky caravan and had just set her cap at another heartthrob. They discovered that they both had a penchant for the Jesus types, men with long, straggly, unwashed hair, woodsmen appearing at dusk like shadow men. Madge had noticed her latest on the upper road delivering oil, and many a morning since, was to be seen wandering up there, drooling.

‘What hooked you?’ Eily had asked.

‘A silent bugger ... I have this dappy notion that if they’re silent they’re deep. What about you? Are you solo?’

‘I am now. I lived in England ... I worked in an arts centre, fell for someone, got pregnant . . . the old story. But I have a bonny boy.’

‘The old story,’ Madge said wistfully.

It transpired that they lived within a couple of miles of each other, Madge in her buckled caravan and Eily in a rented apartment surrounded by rolling hills and the landlord’s thoroughbred horses.

When Madge visited for the first time she marvelled at this harem, this Aladdin’s cave, bright walls, oriental rugs, shawls and throws, flung around like props on a stage.

‘I can see men enslaved here . . . Homer with the sirens,’ she had said walking around, scrutinising the various treasures, little perfume bottles, tortoiseshell combs, donning a feather boa and green with envy, as she put it.

In the month of the bluebells Madge asked if she could do a portrait of Eily and sat her on a kitchen chair in the middle of Allendara Wood. The bluebells everywhere, along the ground and between the rocks and up the tree trunks and even wreathed around the skulls of two dead horses that lay there perfectly preserved in a greenish mould. There was a harmony to it, the rich myriad life of the wood all about, the deft strokes of the brush along the canvas, little shadows that danced skew-wise across her face, under the brim of a lilac straw hat. It was Madge’s hat and it was made of a silken straw. They jumped when a pack of lurchers ran through chasing their leader who had a hunk of raw dripping meat hanging from his mouth.

‘You’re to keep the hat,’ Madge said as they walked back in that filtered sunlight, stopping and starting, picking the odd flower, and concocting big dreams about buying land and selling it for a packet. That was the day they pledged to be always there for one another, but then Sven came and came between them somewhat. Farmers referred to him as the Scholar because he was so knowledgeable, knew so much about different types of land, diversified farming, lecturing them at length and sometimes a little boringly about environment, the pollution in their rivers and streams. The need for cosmic consciousness.