Free In the Forest by Edna O’Brien Page B

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.

Watching
    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