In the Forest Read online

  Set in the countryside of western Ireland,

  In the Forest centres on unwitting victims for sacrifice: a radiant young woman, her young son and a trusting priest, all despatched to the wilderness of a young man’s unbridled, deranged fantasies.

  Edna O’Brien’s riveting, frightening and brilliantly told new novel reminds us that anything can happen when protection isn't afforded to either perpetrator or victim ...

  A modern masterpiece’

  Sunday Independent

  ‘A magnificent book, haunting, instinctive and shocking . . . When art is this good, it cannot be afraid to speak out’

  Scotland on Sunday

  ‘O’Brien is a superb storyteller .,. breathtakingly told in O'Brien’s typically graceful, emotionally gripping style’

  Los Angeles Times

  ‘Her best book, and a modern masterpiece . . . In the Forest redeems and restores the memory of those who died in Cregg Wood and, apart from its art, is a fitting memorial to Imelda Riney whose story inspired the loving portrait of the book’s principal character, Eily Ryan’ Eoghan Harris, Independent on Sunday

  ‘In the Forest is a sort of fictionalised inner exploration of an outer horror, beautifully written but, yes, dark’ Mary Kenny, Spectator

  ‘This novel, splintered in its form but coherent in its potency, is a persuasive representation of a desperado, of one who has despaired’

  Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Sunday Times

  ‘In the Forest is one of [O’Brien’s] most powerful and effective novels, a model of its kind . . . The skill with which O'Brien recreates Eily’s world, in a few deft strokes, is one of the best things in the book . . .In retelling a sensational story, O’Brien has avoided sensationalism, preferring to present the quieter drama of a community of law-abiding citizens terrorised by violence but strong enough, ultimately, to defeat it’

  David Robson, Sunday Telegraph

  ‘This is an ambitious, important book, dealing with difficult subjects directly and courageously’

  Jonathan Heawood, Observer

  ‘Where O’Brien’s novel shows its intelligence is in its objective quality and avoidance of sensationalism or glib judgements’ Sharon Barnes, Irish Tatler ‘A spare, compelling and compassionate novel . . . the writing of In the Forest was not just a worthwhile enterprise, but a necessary and successful one’

  Ronan Bennett, Guardian

  ‘There is something compulsive about In the Forest . . . All characters are drawn compassionately, and the descriptions of the author’s beloved Ireland are picturesque and melodic. For O’Brien this is a Greek tragedy that “needed to be written” . . . her writing is poetic enough for you to feel that, yes, however painful, it also needs to be read’ Viv Groksop, Daily Express

  ‘Masterly, intuitive, poetic’ Atlantic Monthly

  ‘In the Forest is a rather extraordinary transformation of cold fact into lyrical fiction’ Melanie Rehak, Vogue

  ‘This literary thriller reads like a dark enchantment, an unholy myth, a terrifyingly true fairy tale’

  Lisa Shea, Elle

  Edna O’Brien’s most recent fiction, Wild Decembers, followed House of Splendid Isolation and Down by the River, as a novel of modern Ireland. Her life of James Joyce was published in 1999. She grew up in Ireland and now lives in London.

  By Edna O’Brien

  The Country Girls The Lonely Girl Girls in their Married Bliss August is a Wicked Month Casualties of Peace The Love Object and other stories A Pagan Place Zee & Co Night

  A Scandalous Woman and other stories Mother Ireland Johnny I Hardly Knew You Mrs Reinhardt and other stories Some Irish Loving - An Anthology Returning: a collection of tales A Fanatic Heart The High Road Lantern Slides: short stories Time and Tide House of Splendid Isolation Down by the River Wild Decembers In the Forest

  In the Forest

  EDNA O’BRIEN

  PHOENIX

  First published in Great Britain in 2002 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson This paperback edition published in 2002 by Phoenix,

  an imprint of Orion Books Ltd,

  Orion House, 5 Upper St Martin’s Lane,

  London WC2H 9EA

  Copyright © 2002 Edna O’Brien

  The right of Edna O’Brien to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 0 75284 892 5

  Typeset by Deltatype Ltd, Birkenhead, Merseyside Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives pic

  For Imelda Riney,

  Liam Riney,

  Father Joe Walshe In memoriam

  Turn back, turn back, thou Bonnie Bride,

  Nor in this house of death abide

  (Folk Song)

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Contents

  Cloosh Wood

  Kinderschreck

  Eily Ryan

  Homecoming

  Druidess

  Dusk

  Stones

  Father

  Aileen

  Froideur

  Parting

  The Tavern

  Joy Ride

  Hoodlums

  Playtime

  Watching

  Easter

  Cassandra

  Blow Lady Blow . . .

  A Weapon

  Chase

  A Letter

  A Will

  Fiesta

  In the Forest

  Wild Ponies

  Vigil

  Suspicion

  Father John

  Shadows

  Searching

  Donnagh

  Houlihan's Pier

  Capture

  Reckoning

  Interrogation

  Absolution

  A Plea

  Old Times

  Evil

  Bart Glynn

  Grief

  Bluebells

  Blood

  O'Kane

  Christmas

  Court

  Visiting Hour

  Heaven

  Aileen

  Grotto

  Scallywag

  Author’s Note

  Cloosh Wood

  Woodland straddling two counties and several town-lands, a drowsy corpus of green, broken only where the odd pine has struck up on its own, spindly, freakish, the stray twigs on either side branched, cruciform wise. In the interior the trapped wind gives off the rustle of a distant sea and the tall slender trunks of the spruces are so close together that the barks are a sable-brown, the light becoming darker and darker into the chamber of non-light. At the farthest entrance under the sweep of a brooding mountain there is a wooden hut choked with briars and brambles where a dead goat decomposed and stank during those frantic, suspended and sorrowing days. It was then the wood lost its old name and its old innocence in the hearts of the people.

  Ellen, the widow woman, did not join in the search when the men and women set out with their dogs and their sticks, clinging to the last vestiges of hope. Yet she dreams of it, dreams she is in Cloosh Wood, running back and forth, calling, calling to those search parties whom she cannot reach, the tall trees no longer static but moving like giants, giants on their grotesque and shaggy roots, their green needly paws reaching out to scratch her, and she wakens in a sweat, unable to scream the scream that has been growing in her. Then she gets up and goes into her kitchen to boil milk
. She looks at the sheen of dark beyond her picture window, the plants, geraniums and cacti limp in their sleepiness, looks at her big new brass lock, bright as a casket, and then she comes fully awake, and as she tells it again and again, Eily, the dead woman with her long hair walks towards her and says, ‘Why, why didn’t you help me?’ ‘The Kinderschreck,’ she answers back. ‘The Kinder-schreck,’ and with her raised arm tries to blot out the woman’s gaze, the light of the eyes a broken gold, like candles puttering out.

  Kinderschreck

  The Kinderschreck. That’s what the German man called him when he stole the gun. Before that he was Michen, after a saint, and then Mich, his mother’s pet, and then Boy, when he went to the place, and then Child, when Father Damien had him helping with the flowers and the cruets in the sacristy, and then K, short for O’Kane, when his hoodlum times began.

  He had been a child of ten and eleven and twelve years, and then he was not a child because he had learnt the cruel things that they taught him in the places named after the saints.

  He was ten when he took the gun. He took it so as not to feel afraid. They put him away for it. It was his first feel of a gun, his first whiff of power. It felt heavy. When he stood it up it was taller than himself. He did not know if he would have the guts to fire it. His hands shook when he loaded it, yet he loaded it out of a knowledge he did not know he had. Then he cuddled it to himself and gave it a name, he called it Rod. I didn’t mean to kill, only to frighten one man. He wanted to say that, but he was not able to say it because they were beating him and shouting at him and dragging him off. There was the guard, the sergeant, his father and Joe Mangan, the bad man that threw the shovel at him and blamed him for cycling over his wet concrete and destroying it. It was not him that cycled over it, it was Joe Mangan’s own son Paud, but they blamed him. No matter what was done wrong they blamed him, and there was no one to stand up for him because his mother was dead. They said she was dead but she wasn’t, they buried her alive, suffocated her. They brought him up flights of stone stairs and into a cold room to show her lying on a slab with no colour in her cheeks and no breath. It was snowing outside. It was the snow that made her white and made the world white. She was not dead. They only told him that so as to trick him because he was her pet. They were jealous, they were. They put her in a coffin and buried her. He stole out at night and went and talked to her, and she talked back. He crept out through the window and ran across the fields to the grave at the edge of the lake. He was a cross country runner and had won a medal for it. He scraped the earth back and made a hole where he could talk down to his mother and where she could hear. She promised to come back and save him when she was less tired. His plan was that he would run away until then, live in the forest and eat nuts and berries and in the winter go from house to house to beg for food. He would give himself a secret name, Caoilte, the name of the forests.

  The first time he spent nearly a night there he was dead scared and dead excited. There were spots before his eyes and shimmers, different colours. He got on his hands and knees and broke sticks, building a sentence around the totem words - ‘God hates me, Father hates me, I am hated.’ In the wood that night he saw things no one else saw, not Joe Mangan’s sons, not anybody’s sons, only him. He climbed into a tree and hid. A fox, a she fox, let out a sound that scared him. It was like a woman having her throat slit, only worse. The vixen was calling for her mate, her husband. She was in a bad way and so were the pheasants that were letting out cluck-cluck sounds to warn each other of the danger. He heard a badger barking and he ducked well into the branches because he knew a man that a badger bit and the man said it was worse than any dog bite. He swore then to live in the wood, to make a log cabin up in the trees, with a floor and chairs and a rope ladder leading up to it. He and his mother would live there away from his father and everyone else. While he was thinking it, a princess floated by, flying. She was wearing a long white coat and had very long hair down to her ankles. She was carrying slippers. His mother was still in the house, his father attacking her with a poker. She shouted at him to run out, to run off to the woods, and she stayed behind to take the blows. He’d got one blow. There was blood at the side of his mouth that had run down from his ear and he put a fob of a pine branch on it to stop it. The thing was to keep awake, no matter what. There were noises and there was silence. The louder the silence, the scarier the noise to come. A cock pheasant was warning all other pheasants of an imminent attack. He was waiting for his mother to come but he was afraid she might be dead.

  There was a full moon and it was walking across the sky and in places the light spilt onto the ground, where there were no trees. That was called a glade. He knew that from school.

  When his mother came he was fast asleep. Mich Mich Mich. He wouldn’t let on he heard her and wouldn’t let on when he came awake. She lifted him down and tweaked his nose and said, ‘Sleepy head sleepy head.’

  One of her front teeth was gone and she didn’t look nearly as nice. He put his finger into the hole and felt the damp of the blood and tasted it and it was warm. His mother and he were not two people, only one.

  ‘I saw a beautiful lady.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘She was on her way to her wedding.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘She had silver slippers.’

  His mother carried him back to Glebe House, through the scrub and the moon was a lamp to show the way. She said he was a brave boy to stay all alone in the forest and not scream like that silly vixen. She said he was a true son of the forest. Next day he wrote that in the front of his copy book at school - I am a true son of the forest. They jeered at him, called him a liar, a bluffer, said that he’d run scared from his own shadow, he that had to have his mammy walking him to school and waiting for him out in the cloakroom and sometimes having to sit in the back of the classroom because of him bawling. A mammy’s boy, a patsy, a pandy, a sissy and a ninny.

  Soon after that, they had to leave Glebe House and went to live in a cottage, far from the woods.

  His father and the guard and the sergeant and his sister Aileen and Joe Mangan and Mrs Joe Mangan are all in the court, and the judge is sitting at a big brown desk, higher up. The sergeant is telling the judge the terrible thing he’d done. The German man is on the other side, nodding about the terrible thing he’d done. His sister Aileen is beside him, holding his hand. His nose is streaming and his eyes and he has no hanky. The sergeant is describing how he stole a bicycle from the doctor’s shed then rode it over the wet cement that Joe Mangan had just put down and did it on purpose and then rode and got the groceries for his sister and left them on the window sill and ran off in search of an empty house where he could find a gun. The sergeant got very wound up when he came to the bit about breaking into the German man’s house and finding the shotgun and the belt of cartridges, and then painted the picture of him creeping back towards his own house, hiding in a ditch at the end of the garden and waiting for the opportunity to shoot. The sergeant told how he himself and the boy’s father were behind that very door that had been shot at and were lucky to be still alive. There was more and more about his aggressive behaviour from a very young age, from the innocence of stealing apples to the non-innocence, the evil, the knowing evil of stealing a gun. He was listening to it all but he was not allowed to speak. He had not cycled over wet cement, another boy did that, Joe Mangan’s son Paud did that, but he got the blame and they called him dirty names at the time and told him what they would do to him. They would carry him off to the Shannon and drown him and he’d never be found. He ran to his own house to tell his sister that, but she wouldn’t let him in because she had a friend of hers there and she was ashamed of him. When he asked for a glass of orange, she poured it and put it out on the window sill and told him to drink it there. That was when he ran away because no one wanted him and no one believed him and he had no friend.

  When the judge gave the sentence he didn’t understand it. A detention centre. What
did that mean? The judge’s voice was very low but his face was very red. The sergeant thanked the judge and they trooped out.

  His sister told him outside the court that he was going to be going away to St Malachi’s and it was lucky that there was a vacancy as it was a very nice place. He cried and screamed and ran down the street, but they caught him in a car park and lugged him back.

  ‘If ever you try to escape, I’ll hunt you down like a dog until I find you,’ Sergeant Wiley said to him, and there was hate in his eyes and in his spit.

  His sister said that it was only for a little while and that it was a nice place and had a swimming pool, just like a holiday camp. He would be let home at Christmas and he could write letters, so he mustn’t cry. ‘I didn’t mean to kill, only to frighten one man. She told him to shush it or they’d murder him for thinking such a thing and anyhow they had to hurry home to start washing and ironing and packing his things. She borrowed a suitcase from Mrs Joe Mangan.

  When they arrived there he wouldn’t get out of the motor car but clung to his granny’s knee. She was the one nicest to him, along with his mother and his sister. The car drove past iron gates into a yard with big high walls. The sergeant sat in front and he in the back, refusing to get out because the place was not a holiday camp but a big dark creepy castle. His granny kept telling him to be a good boy and do as he was told and walk in there like a man. The sergeant lugged him out by the ear and led him past a whole lot of boys, boys his own age and boys younger and boys older, gawking and jeering. The sergeant passed him over to Brother Finbar and Brother Finbar took him in and shut the door and bolted it. Brother Finbar had a long brown robe on him and a pair of rosary beads that swung in and out. They walked fast, with Brother Finbar telling him they would put manners into him. He was brought to a cloakroom to be fitted with clothes. He and Brother Finbar fought over his jumper, the one his mother had knit for him when she was sick in the hospital. It was purple and red, with navy cuffs and a multicoloured tassel at the end of a zip. It smelt of his mother and when he wore it he could feel her soft hands and her kiss. He would not part with it. He would not raise his arms to have it pulled off. Brother Finbar dragged and dragged, then found a loose thread in the waistband and started ripping it. He could see the colours breaking up, navy blue and purple and red; it was like his mother was being ripped up, and the threads were in wormy coils on the flagged floor. He was fitted with short pants, a jacket three times too big for him, and nailed boots. ‘You will wear our clothing whilst here,’ Brother Finbar kept shouting. Whilst here. Whilst here. Whilst here.