The Bird Woman

The empty eyes of the sheep’s skull stared from the sill.

“Is this the first time you’re after seeing anything since the hospital?”

I shook my head. “The night I met you—there was something then.”

He just nodded; he didn’t ask what. I put my hands over my face, and I started to weep. I felt the tears running through my fingers and down my wrists. He stroked my head, then he shifted a bit and put his arms round me again, and I wept into the warm place under his chin. After a while I stopped. I drew away from him. I patted my pockets, looking for something to blow my nose in, and I found a scrumpled bit of tissue and blew. I felt better. The weeping was a release, it had got me past the fear to a place where what was happening to me was simply what was happening, it wasn’t any longer something I was desperate to shut out.

“D’you think have I a screw loose?” I said when I’d finished blowing.

He shook his head. “I do not. You see things. Sometimes just things. Sometimes things that are going to happen but haven’t happened yet. That’s not the same thing as having a screw loose.”

I looked at him then. He was so serious and so innocent, his grey eyes very round and wide open, his brown curls lifting in the strengthening breeze. I started to laugh. He looked surprised, then a bit offended.

“What’re you laughing at?” he asked.

“You,” I said. “Is there nowhere you’d draw the line?”

“What d’you mean by that?”

“If I told you there was a wee man dancing a hornpipe on your left shoulder I think maybe you’d believe me.”

He smiled. “Why not?” he asked. “Because I don’t see something doesn’t mean it isn’t there. It just means I don’t see it.”

Fear hit me in the belly with the force of a man’s fist.

“You don’t see it because it isn’t there,” I shouted at him. “It’s a chemical in my brain, making me think I see things, that’s all. But they’re not there, they’re not there, they’re not there—”

Everything crumpled, and I started to sob again. “Easy now, easy,” he was saying, holding me tight in his arms and stroking my hair. “Easy, girl, easy.”

The wind had risen in the night. Storm waves rolled in, and the damp sands blew with flocks of shiny bubbles like tiny hermit crabs scurrying off sideways as fast as they could go. Further down there were big curvy swathes of pale foam, and I took off my shoes and walked in them, kicking the empty white fizz with my bare, bony feet, making it fly. The wind blew, and the clouds raced over the big, clean sky and the air snapped and rushed about my head like a flag. Where the beach curved out of the wind there were stranded castles of dark-cream foam like the tipped-out froth from hundreds of pints of Guinness.

A lone dog was trotting about, some sort of a collie cross, black and white with splashes of tan. When he came to a castle he’d crouch down and bark, his tail would lash back and forth, then he’d pounce. Nothing. The castle had disappeared, leaving only splatters of foam and claw marks deep in the sand. He couldn’t work it out. He’d stand there with such a puzzled, affronted expression on his face that I laughed aloud.

I was happy as a lark. We both were. Happy with the happiness of two people who have just found each other’s bodies and are amazed by them. Liam hadn’t moved away off from me after the time in the yard. It showed in a touch to my hair, a hand on my arm. Later, when I’d sat in beside him on the sofa, his arm had gone around my shoulders and stayed there. After that it was only a short step to bed and the pleasures of bed.

And pleasures they were. We had bodies that matched on a deeper, surer level than anything I’d known with Robbie, though Robbie was more athletic and knew better what he was doing. But Liam made me laugh, which Robbie never had. He talked to me, where Robbie was all silent concentration. And Liam got hungry—he was forever jumping out of bed and bringing back half the fridge and spreading it out on the coverlet. Then he’d feed me from his hand till I felt like a bird or a horse. Soon the sheets were greasy with buttery prints, and I slept with tiny islands of discomfort on my bare skin, never giving it a thought.

I should have known from that. I’m too fastidious by nature not to mind, and I didn’t. I thought I was only in ankle deep, when I’d waded in up to my neck.

But that day we were only beginning, and it seemed all the weight of the last hard months had fallen away and nothing but ease remained. We went strolling along the strand, the dog trotting behind us, the tide pulling out and out till you felt you might walk to America. Liam asked me why I feared it so—this habit I had of seeing things. Was it on account of not knowing if it would stop?

I didn’t answer him. I picked up a length of stick that the sea had laid down, and at once the dog was lepping and yapping for me to throw it. I didn’t. Instead I wrote my name in big broad strokes on the sand. Then I looked at Liam out of the corner of my eye and I wrote his name under mine. Then I wrote “Dandy the dog” under his. I took another peek at him to be sure he was watching me, and I lifted the stick and drew a big wide circle around the three names, linking us all together. He was disappointed, and I knew he would be. When I went to circle the names he had thought it would be with a heart. And it almost was, for it seemed a small thing to do for him when he’d made me so happy. But I held back, I wanted to stay in the happiness; I didn’t want to move on into hearts and love and all the trouble they’d bring. I dropped the stick and fell into step beside him.

“Sometimes, after Barbara Allen, when it started to happen,” I said, not answering his question, “I could make it not happen if I tried hard enough, but I had to shut myself down so tight it sometimes felt like I’d die. My head ached from keeping from thinking things, and my jaws ached from keeping my mouth clamped shut. That was the best thing about that place. The hospital, I mean. Having the drugs to stop it from happening, not having to do it myself.”

“What makes you so sure it was the drugs?”

I turned round to face him.

“You saw what happened in the yard.” I made my voice hard and cold so he’d know not to push. “It’s only started again because I’m off them.”

“Have you got those pills with you now?”

I shook my head. If you ask my mother she’ll tell you I’m a bad liar. I wondered would he see through me as easily.

“You wouldn’t go back on them, would you?” he asked.

“Just watch me. I’ve a prescription. I will if it’s going to start again.”

“How long between stopping the drugs and it starting again?”

I thought for a minute. I didn’t want to tell him the truth, but my mouth seemed to open and speak of its own accord. “The night I met you. But I was out of my head, things happen when you’re drunk. Yesterday was different—I was stone-cold sober.”

“The first time was when you were pregnant? It never happened before?”

“No.” I stopped and poked at a beached jellyfish with my toe. It was one of those clear ones with pale mauve marks in its centre. They don’t sting, or not from the outside anyway. It’s like putting your foot on a jelly cube warmed in the sun. Liam was watching me, waiting. “W-e-ll,” I said.

“Well?”

“I had kind of flashes before. Once or twice. Nothing much.”

He didn’t ask, he just looked at me with the question in his round grey eyes. He was good at that—just looking, not asking. I almost always fell for it at the start. This time I hadn’t meant to tell any more, but I did.

“We were over seeing my granny one Sunday,” I said slowly. “She lived outside Derry, a place called Dunnamanagh. It’s where my mother was born, there’s a farm. We’d had our dinner, we were only waiting for them to send us out so they could talk. Little pitchers have long ears, that’s what they’d say.” I wobbled the jellyfish with my toe. “It was spring, a beautiful day. I thought I’d go mad, stuck inside, behaving.” I sneaked a glance at him, but he wasn’t watching my face, he was watching my toe on the jellyfish. “Being thrown out was the best thing about those visits. The hay barn; looking for stray eggs; dandering about in the fields. There were four of us—me and Brian and my cousins, Heather and John. Heather was only nine, she was messing about, showing off, turning cartwheels over and over in the sun. It was lovely, so it was, the meadow all yellow with dandelions—”

I picked up a stone and threw it into the sea. The dog rushed after it and stuck his nose in where the stone had gone under. He brought his face up, and it streamed water. He looked at me reproachfully.

“I was watching Heather. One minute she was hands down in yellow flowers and the next there weren’t any flowers, just wee silver balls in the sun as far as the eye could see.”

“Silver balls?”

“Dandelion clocks. The flowers had all died and turned into clocks. I opened my mouth to call out, but the next thing they’d turned themselves back into yellow flowers. And it wasn’t like it is in a film when you go backwards or forwards, there wasn’t that wee blurry bit that comes up and says to you ‘watch out now, here comes fast-forward.’”

I threw another stone. The dog did his thing.

“And no one else saw what I saw,” I said. “I looked at them, and I knew for certain sure they hadn’t seen.”

“Did you tell Brian?”

“You’re joking me. Brian would have said I was mental.”

“What age were you?”

“Fourteen, maybe fifteen.”

“That was the first time?”

I shrugged. “The first time I remember.” I paused. “But I didn’t remember. I forgot on purpose; I never wanted to think about it again…I was only young, I thought I was going mad, it was really scary.”

He must have heard in my voice that that was it, I’d gone as far as I’d go, for he didn’t press me. Looking back, I can’t believe I talked to him the way I did. I could have lived with Robbie a thousand years and I never could have said to him half of what I said to Liam right from the start.

Chapter 5

“It’s in you and that’s fine; I don’t think there’s anything to be frightened of. I think you should learn to handle it, not go back on the drugs.”

We were looking down on the heave of a big dark sea, the waves coming in short and strong to smack up hard on the great bank of stones where we sat. They were sea stones, heavy and round, knotted and veined like wood, rattled and rolled by the crash of each breaking wave.

The beach curved off to the right, where it ran into dunes and sheep-grazed sea turf. The low dunes were sunlit, the grass brilliant green, the sand a rich gold, but above, the sky was slate black and the gulls rose into it, shining like chips of quartz in the stormy light. There were cormorants coming in off the sea in small, straggly bands, and half a mile back a big grey seal had stuck its head up out of the water and stared its fill.

Liam was telling me what to do but pretending not to. He’d held off a good while, but he was comfortable with me now so he let himself. Men seem to think that’s what women want of them, and maybe we do, or maybe a part of us does. I did with Robbie; I didn’t know what I was doing in Robbie’s world, so I thought it was great to have someone to ask who’d know the answers. Then slowly it dawned on me that Robbie didn’t know either. I wasn’t supposed to notice, but I couldn’t help myself, so after a while I stopped asking. He went on telling me anyway, and I’d stand there looking at him, the rage rising up in me, spilling over into my face in judgment. He must have seen it, but it didn’t stop him; it only made him worse.

“There’s no way you’re mad, Ellen, only clairvoyant,” Liam said. “This thing is a gift; you shouldn’t be trying to blank it out with drugs.”

At first I couldn’t believe what he was saying. In my book hearing and seeing things that aren’t there is schizophrenia. Go back a hundred years or so and it’s possession. No part of me could accept, as Liam did, a world full of beings and things that were real as day but we couldn’t see. Even thinking a thing like that outside in the wind and the air with Liam beside me scared the living daylights out of me. Letting it creep in when I woke at night gave me the screaming abdabs. I’d grab hold of him and scurry into his body looking for refuge, only I didn’t go telling him that, I let on it was all appetite. The way I was reared, you didn’t say if something scared you—that was weakness. You didn’t let others see weakness, even your nearest relations. Weakness was a secret between you and God, who knew anyway, who wrote it all down in a big black book and judged you and found you wanting.

There was another thing about the way I was reared that kept smacking me in the face with Liam, and the more I tried to wriggle my way around it, the more it stood in front of me blocking my path. My mother was a woman with very strong views on what you did or did not do, and one of them was that it was just plain ignorant to remind a Catholic that he or she was a Catholic. Especially if you had time for them. It was something you left unmentioned, out of good manners.

And now here was Liam, as Southern and as Catholic as they come, and for the life of me I couldn’t turn round and say that believing there were things in the world you couldn’t see was Catholic, and seeing things that weren’t there was even more Catholic, which he was, but I wasn’t. More to the point, letting go and seeing what might happen would have been like deliberately stepping off from a narrow ledge to fall into bottomless darkness.

Suddenly all the comfort I’d had from Liam flew out the window. He was ignorant and superstitious, and that was the reason he’d listened so patiently to all my talk. I was better off with Robbie—Robbie didn’t live in a whole moither of strange half-notions; Robbie had his two feet on the ground.

But thinking of Robbie was as dangerous as walking into the heaving sea. I hadn’t phoned or sent a postcard, and today was the very last day of the time I’d said I’d be here with Brian and Anne. If I didn’t come home now he’d ring up my mother. No, he’d leave it a day or so longer because he wouldn’t want to admit that he didn’t know where I was. You’d think I’d have lifted a phone even then just to cover my back, but I didn’t. I’d got into a strange mood of fatalism and I didn’t seem able to act or make up my mind—all I could do was let things drift.

So I sat there on that wall of stones with my face turned into the wind and my hair flying back behind me, caught between the devil and the deep and not sure which was which. I kept my eyes fixed on the sea. The dog stuck his head under my arm and butted at it. He wanted sticks thrown, but it was way too rough, and anyway I wasn’t in the mood.

After a bit the dog left off nudging and threw himself down on the stones in disgust. Still I didn’t speak, though I knew that Liam was waiting. I didn’t speak because I couldn’t; it was as if my whole body was caught between these two men and what they were trying to make me be, and all it could do was freeze and refuse. Then the seal we had seen before came back and stuck its head up out of the water and stared at us. I looked straight into its eyes, and it looked straight back into mine. They were huge and soft, like liquid filling a glass right up to the brim and ready to spill over. The dog sat up beside me and started to mew; then he let a yap out of him, and the seal gave us this sorrowful pitying look and slid slowly down under the water. It must have gone motoring about under there because after a while it broke the surface again, only this time it was further over and closer in.

It’s the strangest thing, a big grey seal in a strong running sea, for it isn’t like anything that should be in the sea at all, it isn’t fishy or birdlike or scuttling, but a warm-blooded mammal with eyes more human than a dog’s. More human than most humans, if by human you mean full of speech and feeling. Yet it lives in the endlessness of the unbounded seas, and you can see that it can handle all that, even the loneliness. It can live down there where the pull and slide of deep water changes all colours and rubs out all edges; it can handle the fish world of swayings and scuttlings, then poke up its head and look with over-water eyes at our oxygen world, which is fixed and flashing with daylight.

And when it comes in close and swims around, staring, you can’t help feeling that it is like searching for like, searching for warm, milky creatures that know the beat of hot blood and suckle their young. If you speak or sing it draws nearer, and its kingdom looks out through its eyes and enters us through ours.

When I saw that seal I wanted to weep for myself, for I knew with a strange, strong knowledge that if I did as Liam said I might learn to be easy out there, I might even come to love the slide and suck of great moving masses of water far out in frontierless seas. But I knew as well that for any ease and joy I might have in that other kingdom, I’d always fear it, and I’d never stop wanting to be one thing only and undivided—I would never, ever get over the awful loneliness of being other. I didn’t want to see things or hear things or live under the sea; I didn’t want to be different or special like that, only to be special to some man who wasn’t broken and hard like Robbie and maybe have another Barbara Allen to hold in my arms.

But at that time I couldn’t seem to stay out of the other world nor find the courage to fully enter it either. I still can’t, I still live caught between the two, though at least when the underworld claims me now I know to hold my breath so I don’t come up near drowned. But back then, I sat on the stones with Liam knowing nothing beyond what I was reared to. I was the child who has only ever seen what is revealed by day, who hasn’t known that in darkness you lose what is near but you see beyond into galaxies.

I remember looking up at Liam from a long way off, and he got to his feet and stretched down and pulled me onto mine and we tramped off over the short, springy grass, which he said was called machair, with Dandy dancing alongside and the sheep getting up and moving off at sight of him, sheep with curling horns like my skull on the windowsill, and arses dyed indigo blue.

Boredom and fear belong to the mind, and pain and exhaustion belong to the body, but the spirit knows none of these things—the spirit knows only light. So we moved off, and the movement must have jogged me out of the mind and its fear and into the body—home of pleasure as well as pain—which still glowed with its discovery of Liam’s.

And maybe into the spirit as well, for it is amazing, looking back, how easily I sloughed off the seal and its dark warnings, and went skipping and dancing like Dandy into Achill’s shifting light.

Chapter 6

“Marie and Dermot will be here on Thursday,” Liam said. “We’re welcome—for as long as we like—but I’d need to be thinking of getting back.”

Dermot was Liam’s friend, the one who’d lent him the cottage, which belonged to Dermot’s family on account of his mother being from Achill. He’d told me that much, but nothing at all about anyone coming.

“What day’s today?” I asked, blank as I could manage.

“Tuesday.”

I got up from the table and made a fresh pot of tea. I took my time, heating the pot and then sliding the lid in carefully under the rim, making sure there was no rattle from the tremor in my hand.

I carried the teapot to the table.

“There’s an architect looking for me for some work,” Liam said, “and I’ve put him off twice already. It’s a good job, and there’s others will jump at the chance if I don’t turn up and show willing.”

Liam went on talking about this architect, enthusiasm in his voice. I poured the tea, schooling my face to say nothing.

“A new house, no expense spared,” Liam said. “The client’s rich—seriously rich—wants the fireplaces hand-carved in Kilkenny marble, plus balustrades and fountains and garden ornaments as well. God only knows what it’ll look like, but I’m not about to argue. With luck it’ll pay for my own work for at least a year.”

I hardly listened. I’d thought there was no time limit, no end, that it was only me that had anything to decide or go back to. And I wanted him to ask would I come home with him to Kilkenny. Ask—so I could turn him down.

I buttered more toast and slathered it in marmalade and ate it without speaking or looking at him. He said later he was watching for the slightest sign, but I didn’t let on.

Why would I? His body told me I was the world to him, yet here he was, chatting away, fireplaces and features and to hell with me.

When we’d finished breakfast we left the dishes in the sink and went out. Dandy wasn’t at the door, but we weren’t five minutes down the road and there he was, trotting along, business as usual. He’d adopted us, waited outside the door most mornings, but when we came back he’d go off home up the hill. I wanted to feed him, but Liam said no, somebody owned the dog. He only came with us for company and a walk.

It was a perfect day, the first we’d had, the sun shining down on the blue sea and everything looking subtly wrong in the calm, clear light. The sounds were different too, fine-weather sounds—the cack, cack of a leisurely gull, the fizzle and pop of seaweed drying, the drone of a bee in the lazy air. Strangest of all was Slievemore, no longer a black looming mountain half lost in the shifting cloud, but a big bony hill against sky that was far too blue.

I took my shoes off and made for the water. The tide was out; little low waves ran over my feet, and off to the left three cormorants sat on a rock and held their wings out to dry in the sunny air. A big curlew was strolling about at the sea’s edge, but Dandy bounced and danced along beside me, ignoring the curlew, the curlew ignoring him, both of them too much at ease for the effort of chase and flight.

Ease. And I in my turmoil.

I glanced back. Liam was squatting down, staring at something—a crab or a bit of old wood, I couldn’t see. Liam was always stopping and looking; he’d get excited at things no one else would bother their heads with—a heap of old stones or a rope of brown seaweed laid out on the sand. It was all new to me, this standing and looking. The devil and idle hands, that would have been the way I was reared. My family went to Portrush for a week every summer when I was young, but then Daddy died and she said that was that, there was no more money for holidays and going away. She took us on day trips to Donegal instead, but they were all action: pulling and squirming, strictly no dawdling, the freezing plunge, the scrape of the towel, wet sand in your knickers and socks. I didn’t know grown-ups ever just stood around and gawped at things; I didn’t know they were allowed. Not that I thought myself grown up, but Liam was four years older than me, and that made him nearly ancient beside my twenty-three.

But now I’d discovered I liked doing this looking; sometimes I’d find myself getting near as excited as Liam did himself. Sometimes. Not that day. Liam called out to me, but I didn’t stop or let on that I’d heard him; I was too busy putting space between us. I glanced back once, but by then I was round the headland and Liam had dropped out of sight and sound.

It was different round there, rougher and stonier, with long piers of rock that marched out into the sea. The sun still beat down steadily, but it was much more exposed and the water was ruffled with hundreds of tiny blue ripples all running in fast from the west. Oyster catchers picked around among the weed, ringed plovers scuttled in the stones, winds pulled at the pools so they shivered and shone, and there wasn’t a sinner in sight. My feet were soft from city shoes, so I hopped from rock to rock, watching my step and thinking of yesterday and the seal.

And today it was Liam and leaving here that were twisting me over and under like string in a cat’s cradle. The confusion of it all. One minute I couldn’t stand the sight of him, and the next I wanted to be here with him forever, standing about and looking at things, never far from his side. This new confusion was nearly worse than the seal confusion, and the two falling so close together was a whole lot worse than either on its own. Try as I might, I couldn’t seem to get anything sorted or straight.