The Bird Woman

A raised eyebrow and that look again.

“It’s true,” I said. (Why was I sounding defensive?)

“There’s more.”

“No, there isn’t.”

“Yes, there is.”

“I see things that don’t happen. Sometimes they happen, but not always. And not till a good while after.”

Then I told about walking down the street and seeing the bomb going sailing over the security fence and onto the roof of the bar. How I was somehow inside the bar at the same time as being outside, watching. And then about seeing Jacko Brennan being blown to smithereens.

“And I’m screaming and screaming,” I said. “And people are coming running and they’re taking me to the hospital and I’m losing Barbara Allen, which is what I call the baby.” I could hear my voice, and it was going high and shaky. He held out his cigarettes, and I took one and he lit it and I saw that my hand was shaking as well as my voice.

“Only it didn’t happen,” I said. “I mean, Jacko dying didn’t happen. Losing Barbara Allen happened alright. But six months later Jacko died, and it was all the way I saw.” He waited. I took a long drag at the cigarette and went on. “It was evening. I was ironing, and the window was open and I heard the blast and I knew exactly where it came from and I knew that Jacko was dead. But this time I didn’t see a thing. I went on ironing. But the shaking started in my hands, and it went up my arms and wouldn’t stop. I sat down and waited for Robbie. Robbie came in, and he said it was true; there’d been a bomb and Jacko was dead, but that was all hours and hours ago. Funny, wasn’t it? Jacko, dead like that? And why hadn’t I turned the light on, why was I shaking?

“That’s all he said. He never once mentioned me seeing it all six months before it ever happened. Maybe he didn’t want to think about that or maybe he saw the state I was in and he didn’t want to make things worse…But he took me over to the hospital, and they gave me sedatives. They said it was shock. The next day I started this crying-thing, and it wouldn’t stop.”

“Who’s this Jacko Brennan?”

“No one special. I only knew him to nod to, say hello—”

“That’s not mad, it’s clairvoyant.”

“There’s no such thing, stupid. People who see things are mad.”

“You’re mad if you think that. You should be in Purdysburn.”

“I am in Purdysburn, and so are you.” I glared at him. “Anyway, what’s so great about what you did? What’s so great about trying to drown yourself?”

He looked back at me, unblinking. For a moment I wanted to kill him; then I started to laugh and I couldn’t stop. I laughed, and I laughed and when I came up for air, he was looking at me still, his expression completely unchanged.

“That’s more like it,” he said.

After that I had company. Michael and me, a twosome. It was June, and the trees in the grounds were green and thick in the summer night. The dayrooms were all on the ground floor, and it wasn’t a heavy-duty part of the hospital, most of the windows weren’t locked. After dark people flitted about like moths. The staff must have known, but nothing was said. Perhaps they were sorry for us; or perhaps it kept us quiet, and they didn’t care. I’d climb with Michael through a window of the empty dining hall, and we’d walk about under the trees and lie on our backs spotting stars through the darker darkness of leaves. We told each other stories, sometimes from books, sometimes incidents that had happened in the past. It was lovely, so it was. Words spoken into the night. Small, soft words, far off and glimmery like the summer stars. Sometimes we climbed into the trees and sat in the forks of their branches, swinging our heels. I was better at climbing than he was, more agile, more sure-footed; I’d join my hands into a stirrup to give him a start then I’d scramble up behind him.

After the first week I asked Michael if he fancied having sex with me, but he turned me down.

“Sorry,” he said. “Nothing doing.”

“Why not? Are you gay?”

He gave me his sniffy look. “I don’t fancy you,” he said. “Besides, I’m married.”

“What’s that got to do with it? Anyway, I don’t believe you.”

“That I’m married? Or that I don’t fancy you?”

“Both,” I said. “I don’t think you’re married. I think you fancy me but you can’t get it up.” (It was wonderful, that hospital. All your inhibitions went sailing off down the river.)

“Correct,” he said. “On both counts. It’s the drugs. Why don’t you try Catriona?”

“Do I look like a dyke?”

“Silly girl—ugly word. Catriona’s so beautiful. Those red lipstick circles she draws on her cheeks. I’d try for her myself if I was able.”

“Is she a dyke?”

“Who knows? She might feel like giving it a go if you asked her nicely. Lots of people have a bit of both.”

“Speak for yourself,” I said. “I certainly don’t.” I was shocked. Besides, I was afraid of Catriona, though I didn’t say that to Michael. She saw blood coming out of the taps, which was worse than seeing people being blown to bits.

Michael stared at me, a long, slow, speculative look from those hooded eyes. “You’re very narrow-minded for a redhead,” he said.

I wanted to ask him what he meant, but I didn’t. I was afraid of my hair, even then.

Michael never touched me, never as much as took my hand walking back through the dark. And I was glad enough, for it kept things light and simple. My forwardness was really only bravado.

Robbie came and when he did Michael vanished from sight.

“Hubby alright?” he’d ask me afterwards. “Not pining?”

“Robbie,” I’d say. “His name’s Robbie.”

But he went on stubbornly calling him Hubby. I wouldn’t answer him when he did. I sulked, but he wouldn’t shift; it was Hubby this and Hubby that till I lost my temper.

“Lay off, would you? You’ve never even set eyes on him.”

But he had. He’d seen Robbie from a window.

“I wouldn’t want to meet him on a dark night down a back entry,” he said. “He’s the sort kicks the shite out of people like me—”

He had a point, though I didn’t say so.

Robbie hated coming to the hospital. Shame made him narrow his shoulders and kick out sparks with his steel-shod boots. His wife in that place, labelled forever, was more than he could handle. And no Barbara Allen. He’d wanted Barbara Allen as I never had, and now she was flushed down some hospital sluice, gone when she’d hardly started.

My mother came on the bus from Derry. I told her the doctor had said I could ask for a transfer to the hospital there. That way she could visit more often.

She gave me a long, straight look and told me I had a husband. Then she said Londonderry was just a wee village for talk, and folk said these things ran in families, and what about my two wee nieces? Had I no thought for Brian and Anne at all?

“Oh, folk know alright,” she added. “I don’t try to hide what can’t be hid, that’s not my way. But some things are best not advertised.”

Hard words, but there was a tenderness in that hospital, a looking-out-for-one-another that nearly made me not mind them. We were all raw with our own failure, and as well as that our minds were turned down low with drugs so we weren’t so keen on judging. That was a kind of liberation, for what could you do at the bottom but laugh—the laughter of gentleness, not of derision? Derision was for out there. Derision and fear-of-derision had landed us in here. We had broken ourselves on our own wheels, trying to be what we thought was required of us, trying to be “normal.” Failing. In here we moved slowly, taking care, as wounded things take care. Oh, there were dislikes and resentments alright, but only because we were human. Mostly we were as careful of each other’s sore places as of our own, or nearly so. And in a funny way there was no one out there as real for us as the ones inside that we lived with every day. Perhaps what bound us together was pity more than love. I don’t know, I don’t know where the one stops and the other starts.

I was discharged before Michael was. I wrote out my address and I said good-bye, and it never once crossed my mind that I might not see him again. I’d accepted the gifts he’d given me—gifts that were given freely, as you give when you are young. I took them without thought or gratitude; took them in the fullness of youth, when life is opening and everything seems natural and yours by right.

I sent him a postcard. Later on I scribbled half a letter, but I lost it on a bus. I never rewrote it. I was living my life, I forgot about Michael. When at last I remembered, my letter came back with “unknown at this address” scrawled over the envelope. Perhaps he’s alright, perhaps he’s alive, but I get no sense that he’s out there still. The depression was very bad with him; it never let him alone.

I am thirty-six and already so much left undone and regretted. What will I do when I’m old?

Chapter 4

Where was I? The day after the night I first met Liam. Saturday. I met him again in the street late that morning. He was walking towards me, his head down, his eyes on the pavement, no sign of Noreen. I was dying with the hangover and the lack of sleep, but I wanted to be out of the flat and away from Robbie, away from Robbie’s foul words, away from the misery in his eyes when he came out with them.

I’d told him I’d messages to do. I was out the door almost before he knew I was going.

When I saw Liam my first thought was to turn on my heel and run, but I didn’t. I’d be past him in a flash, I told myself, there was no call to be drawing attention to myself, running off like an eejit. So I went on ahead, my eyes on the ground, the same as his were. Then the next thing I felt a hand gripping my arm and a voice saying my name out as if it was news to me.

“You can leave go of my arm,” I said. “I’m not about to run off with your wallet.”

He let go. He said he hadn’t seen me till I was nearly past, he hadn’t meant to hurt me.

“How about a cup of coffee?” he added. “Wouldn’t you let me buy you a coffee or a drink or something? Would you fancy a bite of lunch?”

No, I said, I didn’t want a drink, or not yet, and where was Noreen, wouldn’t she be wanting her lunch any minute now?

“That should keep you busy and out of trouble,” I added nastily.

“Noreen got the early train to Dublin. Said she couldn’t be doing with Northerners. Always arguing and complaining and telling the rest of us what to do. Said she knows when she isn’t welcome, even if I don’t.”

“And don’t you?”

“Oh, I do. It’s coming through loud and clear, I just don’t want to admit it’s what I’m hearing—”

My head hurt, and I wanted to get away from him. By now I was well on my way to forgetting all about the business with him the night before. It seemed like a dream, a stupid dream, and I was sick of myself and the way I let my imagination lead me up garden paths. Then he put out his hand and took mine. Straightaway I was back there, ready to drop with the knowing of what I had known last night. And with the fear of it.

He didn’t let go of my hand. Instead he put his other one under my elbow and drew me round to face him. I kept my head down, my eyes well away from his. But I let him move his hands to my upper arms and hold them there to steady me. After a while his hands dropped.

“Right,” he said. “Lunch,” he said, and steered me into the Sceptre and sat me down in a snug. Then off he went to the bar and came back with sandwiches and pints of Guinness.

“I don’t like Guinness,” I said.

“You could do with building up.”

I don’t remember any more than that, I don’t remember what I said next or what he said next or whether I drank the Guinness or left it sitting or poured it over his head. But I remember how I pressed back into the chair, how I tried to get small and still inside my clothes to get away from him. He never touched me, and I never touched him, but when I got back to the flat two hours later, I had a story ready for Robbie and I wasn’t slow running it past him. I told him I’d rung my mother from a pay phone while I was out. Brian and Anne and the babies had been there with her.

“They’re away off to the West for a week’s holiday,” I said. “They’ve rented a house—a place off the coast of Mayo called Achill Island. Brian came on to ask did we want to come with them?”

Robbie was looking at me, but I was busy taking the dishes off the drainer and stacking them into tidy piles by the sink.

“We?” Robbie said, so I knew he’d bought the rest of the lie.

“Well, not exactly,” I said, still not looking at him. “He asked were you working, and I said you were. Then he said did I want to come?”

A new cottage had been built hard behind the old one, its front door facing across to the other one’s back door. For the old couple or maybe the young couple—family, anyway—a natural proximity. Sometime later someone had added a joining arm so the two had become the one, with a bit of a yard in the space between. Hardly even a yard. Just a rough place for hens to pick over and washing to hang, sheltered from wind and weather.

Achill. We’d been there four days. I had carried a kitchen chair out and was sitting doing nothing at all, the gnats rising, the shirts I’d washed in the kitchen sink just stirring in the quiet air. Liam had gone off after groceries and a mechanic to look at his car. There was a noise he didn’t much care for in the engine, he said, and maybe he wanted some time off from me as well, maybe he’d bitten off more than he could easily chew. For myself, I was glad to be on my own. My thoughts went wandering about in the whitish sea light that you get off that western coast.

The yard was three sides cottage, with the fourth side closed off by a big thick dark fuchsia hedge, red now with hanging blooms that were starting to drop. It was early September, a bare two months since they’d let me out of the hospital, a bare four since the bomb had gone off that killed Jacko and left me not able to stop crying. The yard had been covered over with a scrape of rough concrete, breaking up now so the weeds and the moss had taken hold, the whole place littered with things that were most likely never going to be used again but just might come in handy one day: broken boards and odd stones and shells carried up from the beach, floats for a fishing net in a tangled heap, a black plastic bucket half filled up with rainwater over by the wall. A shallow brick drain was clogged up with silt and leaves and drained nothing.

If I lived here I might learn to do less, I thought. To wash less, to go on wearing things that were soiled. Even in the few days we had been here the urge to clean it all up had died in me. I no longer itched to chuck out the junk, to unblock the drain, to sweep it all down; I no longer wanted to do anything much except sit on the straight-backed chair in the soft bloom of light and stretch out a hand to check the shirts on the line.

On the first day I’d washed all the windows in the kitchen. I’d intended doing the whole house, there wasn’t a clean window anywhere; they were splattered with rain marks and mud and had deep layers of ancient cobwebs veiling the corners. Liam laughed when he saw what I was at. I asked him why, and he went red and shook his head, but I pressed him and finally he said he thought it strange to be starting in on cleaning on your holidays.

But that wasn’t why he’d laughed, and I knew it. I kept on at him, and he went redder, but still he wouldn’t say. In the end he gave in and told me about being on the sites in London and working alongside an old Cockney who thought Liam was way too innocent and needed wising up. He had a dirty old tongue in his head, Liam said, but he meant well—he was forever passing on bits of tips and information. It seems he’d told Liam to look out for women who were workers because women who were workers were always on for sex.

I rinsed out the cloth in the water, then turned and washed down the last pane. But I didn’t give them a shine with newspaper as I’d intended, and I didn’t wash any more. I was angry. I didn’t laugh and brush it aside; my mind closed like a trap round his words. I remembered Robbie—what he’d said about knowing as soon as he saw me that I was repressed, a volcano ready to blow.

I’d made a mistake with Robbie, I thought, and I was surprised at myself, for this was the first time I’d let myself think such a thing.

Now it looked like I might well be on the way to making another one with Liam. I took my coat from the peg without a word.

“Where are you off to?” Liam wanted to know.

I didn’t reply. I shrugged on my coat and was gone through the door without looking back.

Out on the road I went steaming along, the wind on my face, my hair ripping out, the bog stretching red-brown to either side. The sky was flying above me; the wind keened in the telephone wires; my ears sang with the lovely fresh running noise of water going pelting down the ditches. With every step I took I was freer, the anger draining away.

“What ails ye?” Liam was asking me, coming up from behind.

“You know rightly,” I said, without slowing down. He started to say he was sorry, but I wasn’t having it, I turned around to his face.

“Why shouldn’t women like sex?” I demanded. “And why do men have to sneer and joke if we do? Wouldn’t you think men would be pleased that we like it? Wouldn’t you think it would make life easier all round?”

He stared. He started to try to say something, but I only laughed in his face. I threw my arms round his neck and pulled him to me; then I undid my arms and pushed him away and went striding off over the bog, all the anger gone from me.

It’s a wonderful place, Achill; there never were such skies. I was used to skies from Derry, but still it wasn’t like Achill. Achill had the best skies that ever I saw in all Ireland. It could be ink black up ahead, but away to the left you’d see light breaking through in a shaft like a floodlight, while off to the right there’d be rain, a grey curtain, and behind that again you’d see where the rain had passed over and the land was shouldering its way back up through the gloom.

So we went striding along together, all thought of regret vanished clean away and Robbie only a flicker of guilt at the back of my mind.

Night came, and we sat by the smoking fire with a bottle of whiskey that I was throwing into me but Liam had hardly touched. It was awkward as hell, but I didn’t care. We’d ease up in bed and no need for talk—our bodies would say it all. Or that’s what I thought, but I’d reckoned without Liam: when I put my hand on his leg, you’d think he’d been stung by a wasp.

He hadn’t brought me here, he said, for that.

“Why not?” I asked him. “What’s wrong with that?”

It seemed Liam thought we should learn to talk first.

“If we can’t talk,” he said, “there isn’t a future—”

I gaped at him. No future was fine by me. A bit on the surface of me was playing with the notion of leaving Robbie, but deeper down that wasn’t what I meant to do at all. Deeper down I wasn’t leaving Robbie, I was having a bit of a fling with Liam and while I was at it destroying whatever shared future I’d glimpsed that night in the bar. I was trying to avoid my fate, you see; I thought I could go with him to Achill and then sneak back home again to Robbie. Outwit my fate, give it the slip.

So I sat there, not believing what I was hearing, thinking it all some game on his part that would resolve itself in an hour or so’s time in the bed. Only it didn’t. He’d taken himself off to a different bed the first night, and the next and the next. And for all I knew he would do the same tonight.

In the day we’d walked long, long walks, together but alone. And now we were both so miserable we were relieved to be apart.

I sat on, thinking these thoughts, glad of his absence, wondering should I cut my losses, find a bus, and head back to Belfast, but knowing I wasn’t yet able for Robbie or the city. Beside me on the windowsill were two oval stones, very white, and the skull of some long-dead ewe. Or some long-dead ram—how would I know? What did I know about sexing live sheep, much less something like this, stripped of its flesh and blood?

It was ugly, the bone grey and pitted, the horns broken off at the tips. A row of hefty grey teeth stuck out from the upper jaw, but the lower one had long since vanished away, and round holes, empty and dark, stared out where the eyes should have been. Once it was its own sheep, I thought, with some sort of life of its own and some sort of consciousness. Idly, I looked down at my hand in my lap, imagining the bones lurking under the flesh, wondering would they stay linked in the grave or fall away, like the sheep skull’s lower jaw.

I should have kept a tighter hold on my thoughts, for I got more than I’d bargained for. I watched, and my skin turned yellowy-blue, as though it was badly bruised, then puffed and swelled, and the yellowy-blueness darkened into black. A foul stench hung on the air, and I saw my flesh breaking open, heaving with maggots and pus. I screamed and jumped up. I tried to throw my hand off from me, but it stayed joined onto my arm. It was like trying to throw your own child away; you can’t do it even if you want to, you can’t rid yourself of a part of yourself just because you don’t like what it does or says or because it’s manky with maggots.

I don’t know how long it lasted: it might have been half an hour or only seconds. But I watched, and it all changed back. My hand was my hand, the flesh clean and regrown, and not a maggot in sight. I reached for my cigarettes, but the same hand shook so hard I couldn’t get one out of the packet.

Sweet Jesus, I thought. Not that again, don’t let it be that again. How am I going to live if I can’t even think a thought without seeing it act itself out before my eyes?

But it was—I knew well that it was. I was seeing things again. Barbara Allen and Jacko Brennan came flooding back, and my little bit of quiet and kind idleness in the broken yard was gone.

I sometimes wonder now, could I have left Robbie if Barbara Allen had lived? There are times when I think I could, but more often I think I couldn’t. He wouldn’t have let me take her, that’s certain sure, and I don’t think I could have defied the whole world and myself and gone off without her, but I don’t know. It’s no good thinking and saying to yourself “I’d do this” or “I’d do that.” You don’t know till it happens; you don’t know what you will find in yourself till it’s found.

What I do know is that I couldn’t have gone to Liam half as easily as I did if something of what had been between Robbie and me hadn’t died along with Barbara Allen.

But all that was ahead, and nothing to do with my standing there, shaking from head to foot, my eyes on the sheep’s skull, full up with fear. It wasn’t that I thought it foretold anything. It was it happening at all that scared me stupid. The bruising, the maggots, the pus—they had come and gone in a flash—but the speed of it all somehow only made the thing worse. It was as though my life were a bicycle I’d been riding happily down the road: one minute I was up there, the wind on my face, and the next I was sprawled on the tarmac, broken-boned and with all the wind knocked from me.

I didn’t hear the car; I didn’t hear Liam getting out or shutting the door or walking around the house. The first thing I knew he was standing in front of me, and I moved forward without knowing what I was doing and threw myself against him. His arms went around me and held me, and I never wanted him to let go. He held me without words, but small, soothing noises were coming from low in his throat, the same sounds you make to comfort a hurt dog.

I don’t know how long we stood like that, and I don’t know how we moved from being like that to sitting together there in the yard, his hand holding mine, me telling him in a big jumbled rush about what had just happened, about Barbara Allen and Jacko’s death, about the hospital and its drugs which had stopped me seeing things.