Edna O'Brien

by In the Forest (epub)

  They stand as one on Mrs Rafferty’s cement path, appealing to her in her doorway. There is Cassandra, Delia, Hildegard and Kim. It is evening as they have had to wait until Delia finished school, Delia round and strong and complacent, a link between the local people and the outsiders. The garden is a shower of colour, tiny blue flowers faint as drizzle, big white daisies and devil’s pokers a flame red, with red bonneted gnomes in the flowerbeds, like bucolic guardians. The pebbledash of the house a mosaic of ornamental shells and wedges of deep blue glass holding lakelets of blue light. Mrs Rafferty is vague, uncomprehending, her eyes averted, insisting that she does not know a thing, cannot understand why they have come. All of a sudden she seems animated, says by far the best place for their enquiries are shops, post offices, bars and restaurants. She even recalls the name Celine, the proprietor of a new international bar who would be familiar with the comings and goings of travelling folk.

  ‘Eily Ryan is not a traveller . . . she moved here,’ Kim says.

  ‘Is that so?’ Mrs Rafferty says vaguely.

  ‘Your husband saw someone in her car,’ Cassandra says.

  ‘I’m not my husband.’

  ‘I’m her sister . . . I’m desperate . . . my mother and father are desperate . . . put yourself in our position . . . help us.’

  ‘I can’t,’ Mrs Rafferty says, retreating backwards into the house and almost colliding with her husband who has obviously been listening. He salutes them with a stricken look as if their arrival bespeaks doom for him. He speaks rapidly as if in a witness box, speaking a prepared statement: ‘I saw her drive past here at approximately twelve noon last Friday. There was a man in the back aged about twenty with dark brown hair and he had on a green jacket’ and pointing to the wellingtons Hildegard is wearing he deems them the same green as the man’s jacket, an army green, yes, army green.

  ‘Can you name him,’ Delia asks, sympathetic.

  ‘No ... all I can tell ye is the registration of the car . . . it’s the same as my pick up truck. TZY.’

  ‘Was it O’Kane?’ Cassandra asks.

  ‘I couldn’t answer that.’

  ‘But you know him, Mick,’ Delia says.

  ‘Many people know him . . . you know him yourself . . . he’s a pest.’

  ‘I taught him for a short while,’ she says. She has taught his own children also and somehow she feels that he is better disposed towards her.

  ‘I’ve told you all I know,’ he says and puts his hand out to shake hers in conciliation.

  ‘It was my idea to come to you,’ she says, her big brown saucer eyes gazing into his, begging him.

  ‘Unease quickly spreads,’ he says in a droning voice like a man talking in his sleep.

  ‘Which direction did the car go, Mick?’ she asks.

  ‘Maybe Portumna ... or maybe up there,’ he says pointing to the swathe of evergreens.

  They drove to the forest then, a place of unyielding solitude, vast, quiet and they got out of the car and stared into a hinterland of green, trees stacked close together, the trapped wind like the sob of a sea, stared at it and then at the charred tree stumps on the other side, and throwing up her hands Cassandra asks, ‘Where do we begin . . . where do we begin to search?’

  ‘We begin by getting the goodwill of the guards . . .

  the local people, the foresters, people who know these woods, know them backwards,’ Delia says.

  They stood in silence, reluctant to leave, each thinking it some kind of dishonour to go.

  As they drive back down the road they see Mrs Rafferty away from her own gate with a cardboard box over her head. She gestures for them to slow down and in a galloping voice says, ‘My husband is seventy per cent sure it was the man you named.’

  ‘Seventy per cent,’ Delia says.

  ‘That’s how he worded it to me . . . it’s on his conscience,’ she says, her sloe eyes darting in every direction.

  ‘Will he go to the guards?’

  ‘I’m trying to get him to go but he’s afraid . . . we’re all in fear of our lives,’ she says and from deep inside her comes a strange racking cough like a death rattle.

  Kim debates aloud to herself whether she should or should not tell them something that only she knows.

  ‘For God’s sake, Kim.’

  ‘A year ago last September I was off down near Eily’s place, picking blackberries and O’Kane came on me in that sneaky way of his and he made me go across to the house ... he said it was his headquarters and that it would be up for sale soon, but if anyone else bid for it he would shoot them.’

  ‘There we have it,’ Hildegard says and blesses herself.

  ‘Can we speak to you in confidence?’ Delia says to the tall guard on the other side of the counter.

  He knows that they have come concerning the missing people and he is already resistant.

  ‘Go ahead,’ he says but he makes no attempt to bring them into the back room marked Private. That he is impatient is evidenced by his clicking the barrel of a biro, rearranging sheets of paper while pretending to listen.

  ‘We want a search in Cloosh Wood,’ Cassandra says.

  ‘Cloosh Wood . . . you’re talking of over a thousand acres ... it takes forty minutes alone to drive there and drive back . . . we’ve only four officers in our entire unit.’

  ‘It’s got to be done,’ she says.

  ‘Why there?’

  ‘It’s O’Kane’s area,’ Kim says.

  ‘O’Kane fever . . . why has everyone got that scoundrel on the brain. We’re not treating this case as an abduction . . . they are simply a mother and a son who have taken off somewhere.’

  ‘He was seen in her car last Friday,’ Delia says very quietly.

  ‘That doesn’t mean anything . . . he’s always thumbing lifts.’

  ‘But he’s dangerous.’

  ‘He only does Mickey Mouse crimes.’

  ‘Burning Mrs Slattery’s car isn’t a Mickey Mouse crime . . . kicking a pensioner unconscious isn’t a Mickey Mouse crime.’

  ‘Who saw him in her car . . . some visionary?’ he asks testily.

  ‘No, a farmer outside the village . . . Mick Rafferty . . . but he’s being cautious about it ... his wife broke it to us.’

  ‘Well that might be a link,’ he says, pausing, reaching now for a pad to jot down the farmer’s name and address and cursing locals twice O’Kane’s size for giving him bed and breakfast instead of turning him in.

  ‘Would he be armed?’ Kim asks.

  ‘Not a firearm . . . maybe an axe or a knife.’

  ‘If he has her, what might he do to her?’

  ‘Not that much . . . he’s a loner, he’d use her to get him from A to B and then he’d vanish . . . women are not his thing,’ he says, a little abashed at the necessity to broach such a thing.

  ‘That’s not true,’ Kim says abruptly.

  ‘Why so?’

  ‘I was in a caravan site two years back and he spent some time there ... we used to all sit outside at a picnic table in the summer evenings and one evening he said a thing I would rather not have heard.’

  ‘About women?’

  ‘About women and what he would like to do to them,’ she says and lowers her head with shame.

  ‘Would you come out with us and talk to this Rafferty man . . . it’s serious,’ Delia says.

  ‘I’ll go out later on ... I’ll have to refer to someone higher up to get the OK and then I’ll go out and take a statement from him.’

  ‘That’s my sister,’ Cassandra says holding up a photograph of Eily, thinking it will melt him, enlist him, those huge trusting eyes, the face pale and moulded under the brim of a straw hat.

  ‘Good-looking woman,’ he says.

  ‘We’d like it in the local newspaper.’

  ‘You’ll pay dear for that unless you have an in with an editor or a sub-editor.’

  ‘What about television?’

  ‘She’d have to be missing for at least a week for that crowd to cotton on.�
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  ‘Guard Tighe,’ Delia says putting her hands flat on the counter, her ample body softly feminine, her pleading eyes, staring directly into his, not letting him slip from her - ‘You see, Eily moved into a house that O’Kane thought was his.’

  ‘His lair,’ he says soberly.

  ‘His fox’s lair,’ she counters.

  ‘And finds Mrs Fox at home.’

  ‘And Baby Fox,’ Delia says, her voice tapering out. His voice ceased, but his thinking quickened and his thin, sallow face was a map of tiny creases.

  Suspicion

  At first glance Aileen could tell there was something wrong with him, she sensed it the minute he came in, soaking wet, his hair plastered down, his eyes caved in and black as soot. It was back and forth, back and forth, from the kitchen window to the side window, from the back door to the hall door, on edge, listening for the slightest sound, kicking the cupboards open in case there was someone inside them. He wanted clean underpants and wanted them fast. They sparred over that. She said he was not in an English hotel now, meaning an English jail and that his granny was not a laundry girl.

  ‘Where is my granny . . . this is her house not yours.’ ‘I come every Tuesday to give her a hand.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘She’s down the fields dosing a sick calf ... a woman of her age doing things men should be doing. Where have you been?’

  ‘In the woods.’

  ‘What were you doing in the woods?’

  ‘You’d love to know, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘I can see you’re in one of your hate moods.’

  ‘Hand me the fecking underpants,’ he shouts as she roots in a clothes basket and hauls out different garments, socks, pillow slips, rags. He takes off his jeans and wrings the wet out of them onto the floor, jumping at the sound of a passing car and rushing into the back hall shouting at her to lock the fecking doors and keep the pigs out. When he draws the striped underpants on over his dirty white ones she asks him if he is stone mad and tries to pull them, saying that if anything happened to him, like he had an accident, people would think he was kinky. He laughed at that and drew them up above his waist and for a split second she saw the prankster of his youth in him. When she lifted his anorak to dry it before the fire she nearly dropped it on account of its being so heavy.

  ‘Jesus how can you carry it ... it’s a ton weight,’ she said and he grabbed it from her and told her to leave his stuff alone, to mind her own fucking business. ‘What in the name of God is at you?’

  ‘They’re coming they’re coming for me . . . they’re taking me away.’

  ‘There’s no one coming for you . . . there’s no one out there . . . it’s only rain dropping out of a gutter.’

  He made her open the door and go out and walk around to the gable to see if someone was lurking. It was then she noticed it propped against a pipe, bagged up with different colours of plastic and tied with different twines. She stood looking at it and called to him - ‘What is this yoke?’

  ‘A fishing rod.’

  ‘A fishing rod . . . you’re not a fisherman.’

  ‘It’s the season . . . the Mayfly . . . French and German and Dutch people in the hotel . . . they’ll pay me to be a gilly.’

  ‘It’s not a fishing rod,’ she said studying it.

  ‘It’s a curtain rail.’

  ‘What in feck’s name would you want with a curtain rail and you sleeping rough in the woods.’

  ‘I got a nice place . . . I’m doing it up ... me and someone.’

  ‘I hope she’ll straighten you out . . . Father rang here and said you nearly ran him over working on the road, him and three others . . . you tore past them in a car . . . still whipping cars are you . . . one of these days you’ll be in trouble again.’

  ‘Never . . . I’m a big player now.’

  She pleaded with him not to bring it in the house because she well knew what it was. He laid it on the table with a braggishness and untied the knots slowly, unwrapping it more slowly still, as if it was Christmas and he was opening a toy. His eyes lit, watching her watching it. She screamed when she saw the grey muzzle of a gun. Once he had unwrapped it completely, he put his hand on the trigger and held it, playful, tantalising, and for that interminable minute she stood watching, not daring to speak, merely looking at it, waiting for it to go off. When he was satisfied that he had frightened her, he let go of the trigger and unbreached it and it lay there like a broken ornament, the brownish wood handle with writing on it, stained in black, a silvery pin and the metal barrel like the eye of a telescope taking in her and the contents of the kitchen.

  ‘Gather it up and get it out of here,’ she said.

  ‘You want me caught, don’t you?’

  ‘I don’t want you caught but I want you to talk to me ... I want you to tell me if you’re getting yourself in deeper into something you won’t be able to get out of.’ ‘I’ll never do time again . . . me or Uncle Rodney,’ he said and bent his cheek to it and caressed it and she

  knew then there was something very wrong, very weird about that.

  ‘Why didn’t you bring this girl along?’

  ‘She sleeps all day.’

  ‘Oh, a Sleeping Beauty.’

  ‘A Sleeping Beauty,’ he said to the mirror and asked it if it thought he was good-looking, or if he was too fat.

  Hearing her grandmother and the dog she told him for feck’s sake to get that thing out of sight, to cover it up. The moment his grandmother arrived in the kitchen she ran to hug him, asked why he hadn’t been sooner, why hadn’t Aileen given him his tea and why a new moustache and a little fledgling beard. She kept looking at him, regretting that he looked older and please God wasn’t he out of trouble now and starting a whole new life.

  ‘They fucked my head up bad in England,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t use bad language, son.’

  ‘But not my heart,’ he said, letting her touch the outline of his moustache.

  ‘Your soft heart,’ his granny said and recounted that day in the morgue when his poor mother died and it was snowing outside and him sliding down the banister and out into the grounds to bring back a snowball to run over his mother’s face, to give her the kiss of life.

  ‘The kiss of life!’ Aileen said, watching him watching the doors and the windows.

  As a car swung into the yard he shouted at them to lock the door.

  ‘It’s only Tom . . . it’s only cousin Tom . . . he’s coming to fetch a lawnmower,’ his granny told him and ordered him to sit down.

  ‘What’s that thing outside the door with plastic over it?’ Tom asks as he comes into the kitchen and sees O’Kane with a mug of tea and apple pie placed before him.

  ‘It’s a long gun,’ Aileen says tartly.

  ‘A long gun!’ his granny exclaims.

  ‘I wouldn’t use it to hurt anyone . . . never.’

  ‘Well you’d better get it out of here ... I passed a patrol car a couple of miles up,’ Tom says.

  ‘Where were they going?’

  ‘Looking for you perhaps,’ Tom answers and opens and closes the oven door to show his disquiet, then goes to the dresser and takes the news cutting out of a tureen and places it on the table.

  ‘Nice work,’ he says holding up the picture of O’Kane, that was caught on video, attacking an old lady.

  ‘A poor woman . . . the same age as myself,’ his granny says, tears in her eyes.

  ‘I didn’t do it ... I was framed . . .’

  ‘You’ve no business coming here,’ Tom tells him.

  ‘I came to see my granny.’

  ‘I’m glad you did, love ... we went through a very hard period . . . you gave us a fright when you stabbed your sister that time . . . scared us all ... and you’re always running away.’

  ‘Will I be able to stay until it gets very dark?’

  ‘I don’t know . . . things are different since you went to England.’

  ‘No one wrote to me . . . not even you.’
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br />   ‘I didn’t know what to say to you, son ... I realise now I should have written.’

  ‘I’ll be gone before daylight.’ He looks at his grandmother tenderly, the look that promises to do no wrong and she looks back torn, then reaches into a drawer and takes out money and puts it in his pocket.

  ‘I burnt a car up in a wood a while back.’

  ‘Whose car?’ Aileen asks.

  ‘An old banger . . . the gears weren’t working . . . there was a hole in the exhaust.’

  ‘Come outside,’ Torn says, taking the heavy jacket from the back of the chair.

  He is in the back of Torn’s car, the gun on the floor with a sack over it, Tom speeding and the radio on full blast.

  ‘What’s that gun for anyhow?’

  ‘Shooting rabbits.’

  ‘How did you come by it?’

  ‘I bought it off a man called Gleeson ... I paid twenty quid for it.’

  ‘You mean you stole it.’

  ‘Is this a set up . . . are you driving me to the barracks?’

  ‘Christ Almighty . . . I’m giving you a lift to the roundabout.’

  ‘Stop the car . . . I’m going to do a legger.’

  ‘You’re welcome to do a legger’ and as Tom slows, the music is stopped abruptly for a news flash. They hear how a woman and a child have gone missing in a district ten miles away. The announcer gives the woman’s name, her height, her age, her occupation and the type of car she was last seen driving, along with the age and colouring of the child.

  ‘That’s a sacred bond, a mother and a child,’ O’Kane says.

  ‘What would you know about a sacred bond,’ Torn says and keeps the engine running as he thrusts him out of the car, cursing him for the trouble he brings on them.

  O’Kane walks, concealing the gun, jumping as cars whizz by, uncertain as to whether or not he will risk the town, the voices saying, ‘Sort this out . . . sort this out.’ When he sees the street lights, he stops and thinks. He remembers a chip shop and the priest’s house where he mowed grass.

  The priest’s house is at the approach to the town with a short avenue leading up to it. The lights are out and the car is not there. He thinks of breaking through the back window but then decides it might get messy so he goes behind a low wall to wait. He kneels there, the rain driving into him, a rush of rain down out of the trees, clean rain, washing him out and he lifts his face and his body to it, allows it to soak into him and through him, making of him an innocent son.