In the Forest by Edna O’Brien Read Free Book Online Page A

out than he’d be caught again for some fresh crime, burglary or aggravated burglary, whatever that means. A wild young man. They couldn’t tie him down, he’d escape through windows or police vans and one day he ran away when he was out for a walk with a prison officer. He’d show up around home and ask to be hidden. It even got that I was afraid of him, I that reared him. You could be talking to him and all of a sudden he’d be looking through you like you were glass and he was going to smash his way into you.
    He walked in here one day and demanded a sandwich. I was changing my little boy’s nappies, my little Ben, only a few months old, on a table. My brother jumping up and down wielding the bread knife and I said to him, ‘Will you put that thing down Mich, what kind of fooling are you up to?’ He wanted a sandwich but wanted it there and then and I changing nappies and Mich yelling and roaring at me and saying, ‘Give it to me now’ and I am saying, ‘Pipe down or people will hear’ and I wrap up the child in a duvet and walk off towards the bedroom and doesn’t he follow me down with the knife aimed at me and says, ‘I’m going to cut your throat’ and I say, ‘You’re absolutely crazy but I’ll make the sandwich if you put the knife down’ and he says, ‘I don’t want your fecking food, it’s poisoned and I’m going to leave a permanent mark on your face, so’s every time you look in the mirror you’ll think of me’ and I try fighting him and he lunges the knife into my knee and blood starts gushing out. Next thing he produces a flick knife and digs it down into the duvet with Ben under it. The luck of God he didn’t harm him. My leg is going from under me and I let on to him that I hear the landlady and that he better get out before he’s sent back to one of them detention centres. I get him out the front door and he starts kicking it and calling me every name under the sun. Then everything goes silent, even the child is stunned and there’s blood pumping out of my knee and I shout out the window, ‘Somebody come and help me.’ I shout it oodles of times and the landlady calls up from below and I says to her, ‘Would you come up and help me, my brother is after throwing a fit and I’m bleeding.’ She comes up and she says we have to report it to the guards and I say I don’t want to, that I want to go to the doctor and we leave Ben with a neighbour and we go out together. Up he hops from behind an oil tank with a hatchet and I tell him to go away, that I’m only going to the doctor and he says, ‘You’re going to the pigs.’ That’s what he called the guards. We try ignoring him, us going down the road and he on the opposite side with the hatchet cursing and blinding us. He sees that I’ve gone into the doctor’s and the woman with me and he scarpers. They bandage me up and then the woman insists that we have to go to the guards and I say, ‘That’s betrayal’ and she says, ‘Betrayal or not, he assaulted you’ and I say that they’ll send him back to one of them places and she says that if I don’t she will and we go out the lane and she heads towards home and I go on up to the barracks and I report it. Because it’s gone dark I ask can they drive me back home because I’m afraid to walk and they say there isn’t a car available and I walk up home lame and scared out of my wits. When I get in home I call to the landlady and she comes up with a poker in her hand and says there’s no sign of him and that he’s probably gone to stab someone else. We’re having a cup of tea when there’s a knock on my door and it’s him nice as pie asking would I have a drop of washing up liquid, so I lift up my knee and show him the big bandage and I say, ‘Look what you did’ and he says he didn’t mean to do it, it was them that told him to do it. I said who was them and he said the voices, the commands. That was the first I ever heard about them voices and I was puzzled and