In the Forest (9 page)

‘They love you Missus,’ Eamonn says.

‘They love anyone that lets them play and make bread.’

She carried the tray of loaves to a clay oven that was built on bricks and shaped like an igloo. She used a toasting fork to open the slide door and a big blaze of fire leapt out and lit her face and it was all ruddy like she was blushing.

‘What’s her name,’ O’Kane asked.

‘Catherine I think.’

‘You think.’

‘Maybe I’m mixing her up ... bewitching isn’t she?’ ‘What the fuck would you know about bewitching.’ Soon the smell of warm dough drifted across to them and the children flopped around and the woman talked to them in a husky singing voice. She knew all their names.

It was a week before he followed her and when he saw where she lived he went wild. It was his house, his lair that summer before he went to England. He had slept upstairs in the attic room, he knew the foxes that came around there in the mornings, mothers and fathers and cubs, foxes that drank from the trough where he washed himself. He’d put the wind up the man that owned it. Left death threats. He loved sleeping there. Left an old mattress and things, an axe; souvenirs of his mother, her hairbrush and a pink bed jacket. His hidey hole. The owner, a shopkeeper from Limerick, got afraid to come, complained to a neighbour about being burgled, his tinned food eaten and his stocks of paraffin oil used up. Now she was in it, her and the child. A sadness came over him, then rage, and he thought of hurling stones through the windows but a voice said, ‘All you’ve got to do is make friends with her, son.’ It was a good voice and his heart leapt to it and he felt something like hope, he felt he was coming home for her.

From then on he watched her. He watched her eat her breakfast, watched her bathe, watched her bring out a mug of coffee to Declan Tierney, up on the roof, and whistle him down. She had a powerful whistle for a woman and a powerful laugh. She flirted. She carried furniture and bags of groceries and she carried the child back and forth to the car, the two of them always gassing - ‘Hi Ho, Hi Ho, it’s off to work we go.’ In his daydream there was no child, there was only him and her.

He got to know her exact movements, the days when she taught in the school, the places she shopped in, the pubs she drank in, and the day at the Post Office she queued to get her child’s allowance. He was about ten behind her in the queue and the people on either side of him kept nudging and edging away from him.

‘Hello Michen . . . you’re back,’ a bitch said.

‘Piss off,’ he told her.

Eily turned and laughed and then on her way out admired his jumper. It was a green jumper with berries on it that he’d stolen from a caravan. With his dole money he would buy her a present. When his turn came a cow behind the counter told him he wasn’t eligible for twenty-eight days, being as he was only recently returned.

‘Eligible, what the fuck is eligible,’ he roared it as he went out.

In a window across the street, there were knitted things, shawls the colour of heather and belts with tassels on them. He went in, looked around and picked up a flat grey stone with a sickle carved in it.

‘Excuse me,’ a girl called out.

‘Excuse me,’ he called back.

Later that evening he left the stone outside her door and hid in the field on the far side of the wall. The door was closed on account of it raining. He hid for hours and watched the turf smoke going up and breaking into shreds. There weren’t many stars. There were clothes stooped in a big aluminium pan on the stove. The child was writing at the kitchen table. She sat next to him and from time to time went across and pounded the clothes with a wooden mallet and then took a drag out of a cigarette and inhaled it.

When she came out to hang the clothes she was so close to him that he thought she would smell him the way he smelt her. She had a clean smell like the smell of the clothes and the white flakes she had washed them in. He could have reached out and grabbed her but he didn’t. She had trained the tilly lamp towards the line and the beams ran down one side of her face and neck and down the leg of the trousers that she wore. They were scarlet trousers, not the denim ones that she wore over in the school.

‘Eily, where are you?’ the kid called from the house. So she was not a Catherine, she was Eily and he was within a few feet of her, imagining the scream she would let out if he sprung her. Nothing was the same from then on. It was as if by some subtle unspoken signal she had let him in.

The next night, she was standing up in the aluminium bath, blood running down her thighs, blood the bright red of fuchsia, blood like he had seen on his mother once and cried thinking she was going to die. It gushed. She poured the water from a jug and the blood and the water got mixed in together and streamed down her legs, less ruddy, the rest of her body white as milk. She went up to bed early that night, the child in her arms, already asleep. In his mind he went up the stairs behind them. He knew that stairs well, knew the missing step at the bottom and the steps that creaked. He knew the rafters where the thrushes nested in the spring. He saw a mother thrush sit there day after day and night after night, her eyes like glass beads. Once when she went off to get food he took the eggs and mashed them in his hands. The shells were a light blue.

In the mornings, she washed outdoors in a big white bath, one that the Declan fellow carried across the field with three of his mates. It filled up with rain water and sometimes the kid played boats in it. The kid got on his nerves, the way she pandered to it, the way she kissed it for no reason, made chips for it and tumbled them in a wire basket like a lady in a chip shop. When they got into the bath together she had a long brush to scrub her back and scrub the child’s. She had a nail brush with a frog handle. Before she washed the child’s hair she undid the knots in it, picked them out one by one and then combed it and poured a jug of water on it and Maddie rebelled when she poured on the shampoo and scrunched his eyes and kicked her.

One night she did something odd. She came back downstairs in the dark and lit a candle, then crossed to a wooden press and turned the long thin key and opened the flap doors. There was a golden figure inside it, cross legged. She sat in front of it, the same way as the figure sat and began to pray. She folded her hands and bowed her head. She was praying for something very important, he could tell. It made him cry. When he cried he could not stop, it was like when he laughed he could not stop, except that it was crying and it went on and on. She was a sad woman that night, not laughing and not smoking a cigarette. She had a book that she read from, like a prayer book and she kissed the page when she had finished.

He crossed the fields, climbed gates and walls and then went along by the shore and past the empty summer houses to where his mother’s grave was. He had not been to it for over a year, since he went to England, and he lay down on the mound crying and explaining. His mother heard him but she did not talk back to him, probably on account of his having gone away and got put in jail for wrong things. Flowers and wreaths on a new grave caught his eye. He picked them all up in his arms and heaped them onto his mother’s grave. He slept a bit. When he wakened it was light and he decided to go back and visit the woman and bring some of the flowers and ask for a cup of tea and say he was lonely.

When he got there he ranted because she had gone out. He tore up the flowers, tore the petals, tore the stalks and flung them everywhere. He knew where she kept the key under a flower pot and let himself in. Even before he pushed it he knew the creak of that door. Breakfast things were on the table. He ate cereal from a packet, held the packet above his mouth and funnelled it in. On the wall there was a calendar with a picture of a woman and a child, a golden child inside her chest. Underneath there was writing. He made out the odd word - ocean, deity, water, fire. The woman was all them things. Her folded tights were on a chair and he picked them up and examined them and took them for company.

The following Sunday there was a session in the pub and she was there. Her hair was in small plaits, all over her head, like snakes tapping her. Surrounded by blokes. Blokes with earrings and leather jackets and guitars. She lapped it up. The blokes made much of themselves, getting out their instruments, setting them up, testing them, big pints placed down in front of them and in front of her too. She was wearing the scarlet trousers that she wore the night he saw her hanging the clothes. She had a matching jacket with some of the buttons open down the front. She had a necklace. A pouffe was set down for her to sit on. He stood outside the pub window, his eyes burning into her, burning into her smile and the open buttons and the necklace. She swayed in time with the music. The blokes reached over, whispering things to her. When she had drunk most of the pint one of them picked up the bodhran and laid it into her lap. After a lot of coaxing she began to beat on the goatskin, bringing every dead hair, every fibre alive. She beat it like a mad woman, like an African woman that he had seen in a picture. He banged on the window, making the same sound, believing that she would look up and see him and bring him in and say, ‘This is my friend.’ He would bring her up to the woods, to his hideaway and he would ride her there and she would ride him back because she had already made eyes at him in the school and in the post office, had given him scones to eat, like Elijah got. He drew nearer and nearer, his nose puttied to the window until a woman saw him and whispered to Gussie the owner.

‘You bastard . . . you pup you, get out of here . . . don’t ever let me catch you here again.’ It was Gussie the cripple with a beer mug in his hand and a posse of men behind him.

‘Fuck you all,’ he said and he turned but he did not run. They were afraid of him. No one of them man enough to come out alone but in a herd. He would have to act fast because one of the earring bastards fancied her, his thigh smack up against hers for the session, his skin-tight leather thigh against her pleated satiny folds.

It is a warm night, the sounds and smells coming through the open door, the smell of grass, pigeons cooing in the trees and a donkey that has been moved to a nearby field whining to be let back home. Her friend, Brigit’s voice on the tape sounds so near, so intimate, as if she is there in the kitchen with them. On the table, the dozen eggs, the two needles, a big white bowl and a whisk, all in preparation. Maddie is on her lap and they lean in like school children to hear it.

More and more people here in Holland make an Easter branch. It is a custom that has been revived. First we empty the eggs and then paint and varnish them and display them on a branch. It can be Pussy Willow or Forsythia or any branch. To empty the egg I take a needle to the top and to the bottom, pierce a hole and then place one of the holes to my lips. Then I blow with all my strength until the white and the yellow comes out completely through the bottom hole. It’s nicer to keep the hole really small but it makes blowing the eggs harder. Ever tried to blow a big balloon? This is the same. I use water paints, marker or glue glitter, cotton for hair and beards and sometimes paper hats to make a funny impression. I looked up in my symbol book and found this: ‘Eggs have been a symbol of spring since ancient times. Rabbits too are associated with the fertility of spring because of their ability to produce so many young. The lamb is an important Easter symbol. It represents Jesus and relates his death to that of the lamb sacrificed on the first Passover.’ Blow blow blow, dearest friends.

‘Come on now, we’ve got to blow.’

At first Maddie loved it, puffed his cheeks out and giggled at the splutter of the yukky egg coming out of the little hole and the puddle in the bottom of the white bowl. Yukky. Yukky. Yukky. He dipped his finger in the yukky and tasted it and ran into the yard to spit it out.

‘I’m having a rest.’

‘I won’t let you paint unless you blow.’

‘Eily can blow.’

‘Mr Yukky can blow ... he has lungs.’

‘Mr Yukky’s gone on strike . . . Mr Yukky’s on his bike . . .’

By the time he has come back all the eggs are empty and she has got out the paint, the markers, the glitter, the cotton to decorate them with.

‘Guess what ... I think there’s a robber out there.’ ‘Really.’

‘I heard him ... I chased him.’

‘How did you hear him . . .’

‘I heard him running over sticks . . . the demon.’ ‘Good thing I have you as a guard dog . . . Smokey is dozy.’

‘Is Sven coming?’ he said over-quickly.

‘You are a nosey one ... I don’t know. Why?’

‘I like Sven . . . me and him have good chats . . . but I like Eily the most, then Cass, then Smokey, then Declan . . .’

‘Then bed,’ she said and had to chase him before she got hold of him.

The painted eggs hanging from the swaying branches are like jewels, scarlet and turquoise, wreathed in glitter and even as she steps across the kitchen floor, they begin to tinkle, their shells so light, so airy, as if they might shatter into smithereens.

I was Master of Ceremonies for the Easter Egg Hunt on account of my years in puppeteering, knowing how to play a crowd, how to work them into a dither, terrify them and bring them back down.

Eily had bought the prizes in the pound shop -balloons, cheap little dolls, cars and colouring books. When the guests arrived she had already set up a bowl of hard boiled eggs and jam jars of water and paint brushes. Every child was invited to decorate an egg. They did squiggles and dots and we hawed on them to dry them fast. Eily went to hide them in the orchard and when she hollered and they were let out, they charged like barbarians, roughing each other, everyone wanting to be first. Screams which meant an egg had been found and another and another. Then a big lamentation from Maddie because he’d stood on his egg and broke it. He went in for one of his fits, turned blue in the gills and had to be laid down on the grass for his mammy to stroke his tummy and tell him he was the best boy. Two other children couldn’t find eggs at all, so two extra eggs had to be scrawled with a red marker and hid in a prominent place so that we could get on with the big attraction, the prize giving. They formed a line outside the kitchen door and each child in turn got a marzipan chicken, a chocolate egg and a little prize. None were satisfied. Everyone coveted the top prize which was a Transformer Robot and which Eily stupidly had put up on the mantelpiece. I knew it would lead to ructions. Me me me. Two boys tried to knock it over with a walking stick.