Free In the Forest by Edna O’Brien

doors since you hit town.’
    ‘Why aren’t you shit scared of me?’
    "Cause I’m a hobo like you ... I can hot-wire a car ... I haven’t done hold ups yet but I’m planning . . . Did you know that Jesus is also called Emmanuel?’
    ‘Who says?’
    ‘It’s written on the poster - Dear Jesus alone in every tabernacle . . . poor Jesus’
    ‘Could you get me chips or a bun.’
    ‘I’m skint . . . but tell you what, there’s a cure for hunger . . . the priest read it out on Sunday’ and picking up a leaflet he hopscotches to the altar and reads in a manly voice - ‘Elijah went into the wilderness, a day’s journey and sitting under a fir’s bush wished he were dead. Lord, he said, I have had enough, I am no better than my ancestors, take my life. Then he lay down and went to sleep. But an angel touched him and said, “Get up and eat.” He looked around and there at his head were scones baked on hot stones and a jar of water. He ate and drank and then lay down again. But the angel of the Lord came back a second time and touched him and said, "Get up and eat or the journey will be too long for you. ” So he got up and ate and drank and strengthened by that food he walked for forty days and forty nights until he reached Horeb, the mountain of God.’
    ‘Would you come to the woods with me,’ O’Kane asks.
    ‘Which woods?’
    ‘Any woods. We can track game and shoot and have barbecues . . . I’ll get a guitar.’
    ‘Ah now . . . me mammy would die if I wasn't home for me tea’ and at that he has run into the sacristy whistling and out the door, then off under the yew trees, over a stile towards home.
    O’Kane went out wet, sullen and lonesome. He crossed fields and back yards shouting and kicking dogs that accosted him.
    It was a shop called The Wren owned by the newcomers, the blow ins as they were called. In the doorway there were sacks of potatoes and vegetables caked in thick brown muck. He stood outside and looked in at the plates of scones and small pots of jam and honey. There were women in there, talking and laughing, with their backs to him. One of them went behind the counter as soon as he came in and looked at him, suspicious. He was holding the single coin in his hand.
    ‘How much is a scone?’
    ‘Thirty pence,’ she said, then shook her head because he had only five. Her eyes were mean looking and her hair was scraped back in a bun.
    ‘Go on Maggie . . . give him the scone,’ a second woman said and rooted in her shoulder bag for the money. She was tall, hair all the way down her back, red hair, the ribs of it standing out, like there was electricity in it and when she turned her eyes were gold spots, like the beam of his torch in the wood at night.
    As he is given the bun he bows to her and blurts it out - ‘Elijah fasted for forty days and forty nights until he reached the mountain of God.’
    Maggie comes from behind the counter and holds the door open for him, then pulling the bolt angrily turns to Eily, ‘He’s off his trolley . . . you shouldn’t encourage freaks like that.’
    ‘Mother Margaret,’ Eily says, allowing a wisp of cigarette smoke to float in her direction.

Playtime
    She was in a cream, rackety little motor car with a child in the back seat. O’Kane thought it was someone else’s child that she was dropping off because she looked too young to be a mother. Her hair was all hidden under a black beret and she was smoking and laughing. He tailed her in a stolen car, but kept a sensible distance.
    She turned around a lot to talk to the child and on a bend nearly crashed into a haulage lorry. Suddenly she shot up a side road to where there was the new school. He put on his sunglasses and a knitted cap and he followed on foot. The school was a huddle of single storey wooden houses, some old and shook looking, some very new. There were trees and flowerbeds and ornamental rocks. There was a sandpit with buckets and spades for the kids. In the windows there were