In the Forest Read Online Free PDF Page B

milk. It’s a little muslin cap with coloured beads dangling from the edges. Billy knew all the history of the house, told us how a shopkeeper in a market town owned it and thought he would retire here but found it too isolated, too run down. At times he believed that people had broken into it on account of finding ashes in the grate and a mattress and an old torch. We sat outside on a broken wicker seat, Maddie hugging his new friend Smokey and us drinking and the light of the sky changing from one deep blue to another, like paint on a palette. Billy made me promise that I would get a ’phone, said a woman alone would need it, shouted me down when I said I had an army of spirits protecting me. He won.
    ‘Jaysus,’ Billy said when he spotted an old coal scuttle with jewellery in it. It was a silverish bracelet showing through the black dust, and he took it out and wiped it in the grass.
    ‘Jaysus . . . it’s the crock of gold,’ he said, spitting on it.
    ‘Jaysus’ Maddie said, and we laughed and laughed and it was the beginning of everything, the buds on the trees, the birds scudding about in some sort of spring daftness, in the occasional gusts of wind, falling blossom, the very same as if someone had emptied confetti from a packet.
    Twice I went indoors just to look at the letter again, to look at the words, to drink them in - Thinking of you across two seas. Should one be upside down because of a beautiful crazy red haired girlfriend. I guess yes. Your Sven.

Homecoming
    Sergeant Wiley is fixing up his hedge to keep McCarthy’s bloody bullocks out. It is a straggledy hedge, hawthorn, privet, and different kinds of greenery tangled in together and sprouting with a will of its own. McCarthy’s bloody cattle have made big holes in it and keep coming in, time and time again, and trampling on his wife’s lawn and his wife’s flowerbeds. With a slash hook he loops down the high branched bits, and with his hands knits them together and packs them into where the gaps are.
    Coming across from the graveyard he sees a youth in a bomber jacket carrying a rucksack, but he pays no attention, thinking him a hitchhiker on his way to the hostel. He has knelt to drive a peg into the ground when suddenly there is a face peering at him from the other side of the gap, the tongue forking in and out in obscene and apish mockery. The two faces are level, the one laughing, the other rigid with surprise, realising it is O’Kane, who should be in England, doing time for mugging an old lady.
    ‘On maternity leave are you?’ O’Kane says chuckling.
    ‘Sure now, I retired from the force over eighteen months ago ... I potter . . . I’m fixing my hedge because it’s necessary to keep stock in or keep stock out.’
    ‘How far is the town?’
    ‘You’re looking across at it ... you can see the smoke from the factory chimney.’
    ‘Didn’t expect to see me, did you?’
    ‘So you’re home for a bit.’
    ‘For keeps. They were shit scared of me . . . my negativism. Define negativism,’ he asks, then answers in a gallop, ‘an act of striving against all attempts at contact, ergo, when a hand is offered I withdraw . . . give me your hand.’
    The sergeant puts his hand through the gap and the grasp is deadly, rage emanating and pulsing from it. Their faces are so close he can smell onions off O’Kane’s breath, and him raving - ‘The inmate’s behaviour is not likely to attract much publicity because of relatively minor offences, although it should be noted he is Irish. Reasons for refusing food, wants to die. Has no one to double up with. Sister, father, stepmother, staff all cunts. Fifteen minutes surveillance on wings C and D necessary. Shat in cell. Refused mass visit. In padded cell for management purposes. Blood potassium fell. Laughs abnormally. Resents changing milieu. Changing milieu . . . you’re the bastard that had me put away . . . that started it all.’
    ‘It was for your own good. You were wild.’
    ‘Jail