In the Forest by Edna O’Brien Page A

He is still going through the motions of following the fucker, of catching him, but he is not following. Instead he yells at Minogue to come out and account for himself.
    ‘You are harbouring a criminal, you pup.’
    ‘He called for a cup of tea ... I was pouring it when you boys dropped by.’
    ‘We could arrest you, you know.’
    ‘You weren’t fuck able to arrest him.’
    ‘There was a serious danger to guard O’Heirlihy and myself ... his language, his movements, his stance . . . were all threatening.’
    ‘That wasn’t a gun, that was a broomstick,’ Minogue says and he picks it up and rides it and starts crooning -‘Gee up old gal, for we’ve got to get home . . . to . . . night.’
    In the car they do everything to reassure one another. ‘To have run after him would have been craziness.’ ‘Oh mad. The fight in him,’ O’Heirlihy says.
    ‘It looked like a gun, did it not?’
    ‘You’d need to be a genius in that light to say it wasn’t.’
    ‘We won’t find him tonight . . . he’s in some hole . . . but find him we will . . . the Rat.’
    As they get back towards the town they are quiet, constrained. Outside the station they stand to stretch their legs. The same stars, a few dogs, the quenched string of fairy lights around the pub, not a sound and yet an unease. He could be anywhere, behind the stack of porter barrels, beyond the high wall of the youth hostel, up in the ash tree, anywhere and fucking nowhere.
    ‘I feel kinda bad,’ O’Heirlihy says.
    Corbett does not answer. A sentence seems to grind repeatedly inside his head. We let him go ... we let the little fugitive go.

A Letter
    ‘Queasy in the head queasy in the tum turns too much diddly diddly dee . . . queasy in the head queasy in the tum turns too much diddly diddly dee.’
    Maddie goes around the kitchen, half singing it, then opens the door and shouts it out to the cows and the stocky red bull. Eily sits on the stairs drinking a mug of coffee summoning the strength to go to the village. There will be a letter from Sven. She is sure of it. Her hair is all knotted from the reckless midnight swim and she has not the will to draw a comb through it. Snatches of the previous evening make her laugh, make her groan. The singing, the barbecue by the lake with Otto as head bottlewasher and too much diddly diddly dee. Her head is splitting. She takes a scarf off the back of a chair and winds it around until she is slathered in it like a mummy.
    ‘Eily’s a mummy,’ she says wanly.
    ‘Eily’s a mummy,’ he says and opens the door again to announce it to the herd, then slams it shut. He is jocular because there are no lessons. Every morning there is a lesson. He puts dots on a word in his colouring book and writes a name in English and in French. The French is on account of Elmer the elephant being a French boy. Elmer is watching from the dresser, Elmer in his harlequin suit and his cloth eyes, who doesn’t miss a trick, making sure that they don’t go without him. Elmer is no fool. His droopy ears are all agog. He has a squeak box inside his belly. Eily loves bellies. Eily paints women with bellies. Bellies bellies bellies. He came out of Eily’s belly and he was a giant.
    Since she feels too queasy to carry him he takes one of the big sticks from behind the door and they set out across the mud field, him jabbering non stop. If only he would shut up. If only the birds would stop singing. If only a cold breeze would circulate through her head. Bits of the previous evening keep coming back, the excitement, the banter, the jokes the men made, the ice cold swim, the way it felt like getting born down there, then the warmth from the barbecue, their heated faces, a young boy singing a love song, keening it out to the lonely fields and the distant lilac mountain. Too much diddly diddly dee like there was no tomorrow. Tommy, the soberest of the group, landing the van in a ditch and their having to walk to the house of the young accountant