The Bird Woman

Bird sounds, wind sounds, the lapping of water. It was all so quiet and far away it felt as though there was no one left on the face of the earth but me. But for all the absence of people, I wasn’t alone. The cracks in the rocks beside me were crammed with whelks and winkles; further down they were spiky with blueblack mussels and clogged with drying seaweed that shifted before my eyes. The more I looked, the more I couldn’t stop looking. There were limpets everywhere, and between the limpets, barnacles, and crawling over them glistening flies as big as the nail on my thumb. Huge blue-grey sea slaters scuttled the rocks, sand fleas hopped on my feet, and the seaweed laid down by the tide in heaps was heaving with questing birds. Everywhere you looked everything was jam-packed with life, doing nothing at all with itself except living.

And the more I saw how alive it all was, the more I got this creepy feeling that it was way too alive, it was all too busy and strong for me, and if I went on looking another minute it might do like the skull had done and turn into something else.

So I stopped looking. I scuttled across the rocks like one of the slaters, and when I found Liam, I flung myself at him, demanding a bus.

“A bus?” he said, his hands on my shoulders, pushing me off and holding me there. “Where to?”

“Belfast,” I said.

“Back to Robbie?” he asked, the anger showing in his eyes and tightening his mouth.

“None of your business.”

“What if I think it is?”

It’s nearly three in the morning, very dark, for the cloud has thickened and crowded out stars and moon. I’ve been a long time remembering Achill; it’s been strange to see it so close up in my mind when I haven’t really thought of it for years. I suppose I was already deep in love with Liam, but I didn’t know it, I thought it was only my body responding to his. And I thought I could live rationally, could make that body give up what it wanted and do whatever I told it to do.

But I didn’t go back to Robbie. Liam was angry enough to say what he thought of him, and somehow after that I couldn’t make him big enough in my mind to submit again to that life.

Instead I went running home to my mother in Derry. Did I say that? Here am I, sleepless with dread at the thought of the morning and what it will bring, when back then Derry was home and my mother and refuge of sorts.

A delusion that even then was short-lived. After a week of her I was so beside myself I walked into the town and had all my mass of flame-red hair cut short in some sort of crazed, inarticulate protest. I came home near bald and wild with dread that I’d driven Liam off from me for good. Which was what I wanted and what I couldn’t bear.

I looked in the mirror. This poky white face like a rat’s with tufts of red all around it looked straight back out at me. I got out the antidepressants and sedatives they’d given me in the hospital and shook a whole load of tablets into my hand. That felt good; it felt painful and dramatic. Then I caught myself on. There were neighbours of ours, RUC men, who’d been shot at their own front doors. I knew what death looked like—I didn’t want to be dead.

I picked up the nail scissors and eased the sharp points in under the flesh of my palm till the blood began to come. It hurt, but at first I liked that because it made me forget how I was hurting over Liam. Then I stopped liking it; I looked at myself and what I was doing and filled up with self-disgust. I set down the scissors and sat at the window reading the graffiti on the walls of the houses across the way. Ira Scum and Death to all Taigs. I felt sorry for myself and martyrish—Romeo-and-Julietish—as though by falling in love with a Catholic I’d gained some sort of special status. I wept till my eyes were swollen and red, and I felt much better. I knew I wanted to go on living, I just couldn’t work out how.

My mother gave out when she saw my hair, which got up my nose because she was never done telling me to tie it back and stop it from flying away out like a flag. I said there was no pleasing her. She said to keep a civil tongue or I wasn’t welcome in her home.

“It’s my home too,” I said.

“It is not,” she said. “You’ve a home of your own in Belfast, in case you’d forgotten. A husband as well, and it’s time you were thinking of going back to him.”

So there it was, out on the table. She wasn’t blind—no phone calls, no sign of Robbie, no talk of me going away.

I saw the stiff line of her shoulders, and my heart sank inside me, for I’d backed myself into a corner and I knew that I’d have to tell her the truth or go.

Not right away though. Instead I got the bus to the Waterside, tramped up the hill to Brian and Anne’s, and stood ringing their bell in the pouring rain, desperate for someone to talk to.

“Merciful God, Ellen,” Anne said when she opened the door, “whatever have you done to yourself? You look like a scalded fox with a dose of the flu.”

That was better than a rat, but only marginally. I decided there was no way I was going to tell her anything, not even the amended version I’d worked out on the way over. In this version I’d thought I might say I was maybe thinking of leaving Robbie, and Liam wasn’t going to appear at all. Anne was no fool though—I knew she might spot that there was someone else lurking—so I had a contingency plan prepared with Liam’s name changed to Fred. That way I’d only have to deal with the leaving-Robbie issue; I could leave the Southern Catholic bit till later or not at all.

But Anne knew more than I thought. She took me in to the fire and brought me a glass of wine and a towel to dry what was left of my hair.

“Brian’s away out at a meeting, and the weans are in their beds,” she said. “We’ll have a nice wee talk, so we will, you can tell me all about it.”

She was friendly and sister-in-lawish and fishing for information, but the harder she tried the more I shut tight as a clam. In the end she told me out straight that my mother had phoned while I was on my way over. It seemed Robbie had rung up looking for me. He’d asked her if we were back from Achill.

“I needed to get away from Robbie,” I said, “so I told him I’d gone with you and Brian and the weans to Achill. He knows you can’t stand him. I knew if I said I was going with you he wouldn’t want to come.”

That stopped her in her tracks. In Anne’s world the more you disliked someone related to you the more they weren’t supposed to know that was the way you felt.

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that in a city the size of Derry there’d have been somebody I could have talked to, but there wasn’t. I was always too awkward and shy, could never join in the way I saw other girls do, couldn’t whisper and confide. So I’d kept myself to myself and spent my time waiting for when I might leave.

It was the same now. I sat there, saying less and less, getting lower as each minute passed. And the longer I sat on Anne’s good settee in her clean and tidy living room with her clean and tidy life all around me, the surer I was that I had to find the courage in me to walk through the door and out into the storm. And the surer I was that I had to, the surer I was that I couldn’t. Suddenly I understood that the life I had with Robbie was all about getting away from this. Then I knew that I hadn’t gone far enough, that I had to leave the life I was living and travel further and make another one over again. I saw the seal heading down into black water, and I knew I had to learn how to drown.

And fear of it stopped my throat, so I choked on the glass of wine Anne had poured for me, sending it flying all over her sofa, and me flying out of the door.

When I got home I apologised to my mother for giving her lip. She nodded her head without looking at me, but I saw her mouth tighten with satisfaction and I had to clamp my own shut or I’d have been out on my ear.

I lasted another three days with her then I took the deepest breath of my life, phoned the number Liam had given me, left a message for him, then got on a bus that was headed down South.

Chapter 7

It was dark when the bus pulled into Kilkenny city. There were people waiting on the pavement, but I kept my eyes in front. I’d been worrying myself sick all the way down. Would Liam meet me when I got there? Would I still want to see him if he did? Could I even remember what he looked like? I closed my eyes tight and pictured as hard as I could, but all I got was Robbie. I stared out at the lights and the darkness because it was better than staring in at Robbie’s face, which wouldn’t go away. I tried again for Liam, but the harder I tried the more completely I’d forgotten. Kilkenny was coming up on every signpost, so I knew we were near. By the time we’d swung off the ring road, I was wound up tight as a scream.

The bus drove into the station yard and stopped. I reached up and took my things from the rack, then walked slowly, slowly down the centre aisle. I climbed down the steps, my eyes on my feet. I lifted my head and there he was, and I knew him right away.

He took my bag and pulled me to the side so the girl behind me could get past. Then he stood there, looking down at me, smiling like an idiot.

“You’ve no hair.”

“Not much. Anne says I look like a scalded fox with a dose of the flu.”

“Who’s Anne?”

“Brian’s wife.”

“Ah. The sister-in-law. Is this all the luggage you have?”

“There’s another one in the hold.”

We went round to the side of the bus where the driver was unloading. I pointed to a small blue suitcase.

Liam lifted it out, set it down on the pavement, folded me into his arms and that was that. Or it was till we reached the house and we had a row over nothing at all on account of the state of our nerves. Then we went to bed and that was that again.

Liam is a stonemason and a sculptor. He went to art college in Dublin, spent a couple of years in a stonemason’s yard in Cork, then moved himself here because he’d had about enough of cities. Liam comes from Tipperary—that’s the next county—a place called Graigmoyla, forty-odd miles to the west of here.

“Kilkenny seemed a good compromise,” he’d told me on Achill. “Close enough to home but not too close. People I knew around the place to give me a start.”

By that he meant near enough to see his family when he wanted to, but not so near that they’re forever dropping in. Liam is one of five, and he’s slap in the middle. Connor’s the oldest; he lives in the home-place with Kathleen, his wife, and they work the family farm. His father still lives there, and he keeps his hand in, though these days he does less and less. Then there’s Eileen and Liam, and after him, Carmel and Tom. Liam thinks a lot of his family, especially Connor and Kathleen, but he has to have a bit of a distance from them or he feels like he needs to come up for air.

Which suits me as well. I like the Kielys now that I’m used to them, I do my bit in the family-thing, but I wouldn’t want to live in the midst of the nest. Liam comes and goes, and they’re tactful enough to keep their distance and give us a bit of space. We have his mother to thank for that. She laid down the rules in the early days—without her, it might not have entered their heads to hold back.

We’re not one of these couples you never see apart. Not now, anyway, though we were to begin with, when I was new and everything was strange. I was glad enough of it back then, but it’s different now and I wouldn’t want to be always tagging along in Liam’s wake. It passes, the twined-fingers stage. You don’t see it going till it’s gone.

I’m getting ahead of myself again. When first he came to Kilkenny, Liam stayed with Dermot Power and his wife, Marie, the same two who’d lent him the house on Achill. Dermot was a painter, his oldest friend, so Liam wasn’t shy about cluttering up their living-room floor while he looked around for a house he liked at a rent he could scrape together. He was in no hurry, so he stretched his welcome. It’s a good story now—they laugh in the telling—but by all accounts he wore their patience thin.

Liam knew what he wanted, you see, and he wasn’t about to compromise just to have somewhere to live. He wasn’t like Robbie, saying yes to the first place we saw that wasn’t a total dump. Liam watched and waited, taking his time. At last he found a stone-built farmhouse with outbuildings and an owner willing to rent at a price he could afford. There was even talk of a lease, but it was only talk, the documents never appeared. Liam said quietly that he might be interested should Mr. Fitzgerald ever be thinking of selling. Mr. Fitzgerald let on not to have heard, but Liam knew well that he had. They understood each other. He would live there, and if it worked out to their mutual satisfaction it might come to a sale.

Back then that was part of buying a house—goodwill and compatibility were valid currency, to be taken into account. Not now. These days no one cares who you are so long as there’s a bank to come up with the mortgage. And neighbours don’t matter the way they used to now that everyone has a car.

For two years Liam had rented, but by the time I stepped off the bus he was already mired in the long, slow business of buying. It all took forever. Mortgages were hard to come by, and he’d no fixed income to show. His family helped: his father stood guarantor with the bank, and Connor and Kathleen lent him money for the deposit. The worst part was getting permission from Pat Fitzgerald’s five siblings. Pat (he’d long ceased being “Mr. Fitzgerald”) was the oldest son, so he had the farm, but the house had passed to them all when the old people died and emigration had scattered the rest to England or America. Two of them were hard to find but easy enough to persuade. The other three had done well for themselves, they’d no urgent need, so they couldn’t quite make up their minds to the sale.

“It’s only natural,” Pat said. “It’s where they were reared, so they’ll take their time. Push, and they’ll dig in their heels; we have only to leave them be and they’ll come round.”

So they were let be, and they came round. I wasn’t surprised, I’d been watching Liam, and I knew well he’d have his way. Robbie could want something and there’d be hell on if he didn’t get it. Then he’d spot something else and away he’d go, the first thing entirely forgotten and left behind. Not Liam. Liam knew when to push, and he knew when to wait, it was nearly sinister, this relentless patience. It shocked me a bit. I had thought him all ease and good nature, but it seemed there was a whole lot more to him than I’d let myself notice.

It’s a narrow house, two storeys high, tucked sideways into a steep treed hillside with a muddy half-cobbled yard at the back and a mesh of fields at the front. A lovely place, secret and domestic, the small, ambling meadows like thrown-down cloths scattered over with horses and sheep.

There’s a few other houses around the place, but nothing too close. I can hear Haydn’s dogs at night, and a voice if it’s raised to a shout. In winter there’s the shine of Fitzgeralds’ lights through the empty trees when I’m bringing in fuel from the yard. Quiet. That’s how it was when I came here, that’s how it is still in spite of the cars drawing up to bring folk for my hands. A quiet green place of spring wells and stone walls studded with white thorn and ash. About as far from Derry as the moon.

Around the yard there are outbuildings in different stages of dilapidation. There’s a gate at the side that leads to a bit of an orchard with old, twisty trees climbing the slope, and behind them the land rising steeply up to the ridge. Below the house the land slopes gently down, and off in the distance the Blackstairs Mountains walk the horizon. The main gate from the yard opens into our boreen, which gives onto a single-track road, which gives onto another road where two cars can pass if you’re careful.

There are more houses now. Coady’s empty dwelling-house by the spring well has been renovated, and there are new bungalows here and there on the road that leads up to the ridge. I don’t mind it, though at first I did. I’d got used to solitude; I didn’t want neighbours.

When first I came here the place was more like a barn than a house. The roof leaked, the plaster walls blossomed with damp, the windows rattled at every breeze. Liam saw none of its defects. He showed me around like a man showing off a mansion; I might have been looking at antique rugs stretched on polished wood floors, at traceried ceilings, at mahogany sideboards laden with fine bone china. He had all sorts of plans for the house—its potential had long since changed in his mind into fact.

The front door opened directly into what had once been a traditional farm kitchen, with a flight of stairs climbing up the back wall, and two small rooms opening off it at either end. But time passed, Pat married, his new wife had set about making changes as new wives do. When she’d finished, the old range had gone and the big room had been divided. In the poky, wee kitchen an electric stove stood on rickety legs, and a miserable one-bar heater burned pound notes if you turned it on, which we rarely did, for we’d no pound notes to burn. Somewhere along the line Pat and his wife had built themselves a new bungalow three fields away and put the house up for rent. The bungalow was double glazed with fitted everything. Liam was planning to undo most of the changes and bring the house back to what it had been.

Upstairs there were three bedrooms and a makeshift bathroom that took up part of the landing. It had a sink, a toilet, a rust-stained bath, and a paraffin stove that took the edge from the cold. The bedrooms were small and low-ceilinged, their rectangular windows set low down near the floor so you had to kneel on the boards to look out. In the biggest bedroom was a double iron bedstead with an old feather mattress, the sort with a hollow in the middle that you both fall into no matter how far apart you’ve started out. Not that I minded until I was pregnant. I liked sleeping sprawled over Liam.

So it was no palace, but that didn’t bother me. The flat in Belfast hadn’t exactly been Ideal Home country either, and there I’d opened my eyes every morning on Robbie’s bony shoulders, which never quite lost their tension, even in sleep. Here I would open my eyes and there would be Liam, flat on his back and snoring his head off, his brown curls rising and falling with every breath. I’d wriggle and squirm myself closer into his arms, then lie there smiling like an idiot until I grew bored with contentment and kicked him awake.

There was an ash tree outside the window and on windy nights in summer it swished and tapped on the glass, and on windy nights in winter it rattled and banged, and there was nothing I loved more than its lonely, companionable sound. Liam loved it too, he would never have cut it down, but when Andrew was four he was plagued with dark dreams and he’d wake in fear at the sound and the shadows moving across the wall. So the ash tree went, and I had to content myself with the one further round to the side of the house, which kept a civil distance and was never intimate with us. I’m sorry now that I let Liam cut it down, I should have taken time with Andrew and brought him back to loving the tree, for from that day he wanted everything that frightened him removed from him and there’s no peace in living like that.

But all that was a long way off. It was autumn when I came here, and I was stunned by this bosomy, treed land with the blue hills rising up from its plains and the march of bluer mountains away to the east. I had never been to “the South” that was south, I thought it would all look like Achill or Donegal—acid land, wild and empty, all wind and sky and that haunted light. Nothing had prepared me for the ease of this place, its soft skies and luxuriant growth, its wide meadows and its loose brown rivers.

Settled weather. There never was an autumn like it. Day followed day, week followed week, we would wake to mist like a wraith at the window, breath-thin, a wash of moisture drifting about the house, the sheds, the trees. The fields were heavy with dew; the horses and sheep stood up to their hoofs in vapour, grey as the sea. Even as I watched, the meadows brightened. By eleven the mist had burned clear.

Then sunlight, silence. Each day, the air higher and thinner. Leaves dropping down in the stillness, knocking against the layered branches, a hollow, papery sound. And the cheep of birds, small flurries of song, the chestnuts fiery, the ash going lemon yellow in the soft, clear light. At evening the sky all around the horizon laid out with layered white cloud, like fresh, folded linen. Above this, a pure, thin blue, with combings of fine cirrus, the wisps of an old woman’s hair.

I’d no idea what I was doing there, only kept from panicking by squashing down all thought. Derry, Belfast—they seemed like stories I’d invented, black-and-white photos, a long way away and in another time. I would wake in the early morning and lie in the breathing stillness, so happy I dared not move.

I should do this remembering more; it might bring me contentment. What’s happiness? Nothing at all. Wind in the trees. You only notice when it dies away.

We hid ourselves from Liam’s family, but with his friends it was different.

“This is Ellen,” he’d say. No explanation, no word of where he’d got me from. It must have seemed strange to them—one day I hadn’t existed, the next I was part of his life. A few of them asked about Noreen, but he only shook his head and smiled. Maybe they saw the way we were together and that stilled their tongues.

They seemed an odd lot, scruffy and garrulous, into music but indifferent to fashion. That was strange to me. There was more money in the North in spite of the unemployment, and if you were young you were mad for style. Here it was the opposite. Most of Liam’s friends seemed to live in jeans, and the girls my age hardly bothered with makeup at all. Everything was borrowed, thrown together, improvised. They thumbed lifts or rode around the place on antique bicycles; the few cars they had access to were clapped-out wrecks that no one ever serviced, much less washed.

But it didn’t stop them enjoying themselves. Any excuse was a good excuse and what money they had disappeared right away on a good night out with plenty of drink. Just the same, the talk was all of America and emigration and getting your hands on a green card.

That was then; it’s all completely different now. The banks are lending, the emigrants are coming back home, and everyone’s learned about possessions with the speed of light. But then was when I came, and it was so unlike what I was used to, it fairly made my hair stand up on end.

But Liam looked out for me, he knew I was frightened still, alert for any hint of the things I saw that weren’t there. We’d be in company, and something would shift on the edge of my vision; I’d tense, but before I’d had time to panic, there he’d be, at my side. And it wasn’t like it had been with Robbie, I didn’t feel hunted down by his eyes, just less always the stranger in the crowd. Which was odd, when you think about it, because for the first time in my life I truly was.

I knew I ought to write to Robbie, but I couldn’t put pen to paper and I couldn’t bear to ring him up and hear his voice. You think with a new love you’ll leave off loving the old one, but it doesn’t always work like that, or it didn’t for me. I knew I’d never go back to Robbie no matter what happened with Liam, but I cared for him still and I knew I’d hurt him sore. And I was his lawful wife, and Robbie set store by such things; if I wasn’t going back I should tell him so he could get himself a divorce. Robbie needed a wife—and children, too—that way lay his only chance. But I didn’t write or phone, I sent no word.

I signed on in the nearest town. There were no jobs anyway—half the country was signing on, they asked about qualifications, and when I said a degree in Russian they shoved the forms across at me, the same as in the North.

Liam was standing beside me, one hand on the counter, the other one dropped to my leg, which he planned to squeeze if I needed help.