The Bird Woman (11 page)

So it was for me. I lost shape, inwards and outwards. My feet pulled through mud and forgot to resist it.

T
here was a young one working in the supermarket in the town, a girl of maybe nineteen or twenty years of age. The first time
I saw her I couldn’t get over her; I had to force myself not to stand and gawp, for she was the living, breathing spit of
Robbie poured into a female form. After a while I got more used to seeing her, didn’t get the same shock. All the same, I
could never entirely just shrug and pass her by.

One morning I was over at the fruit and veg picking out onions, and there she was, up ahead of me, lifting bunches of bananas
from a box on a trolley and setting them out on the shelf. She turned and glanced in my direction. Her face was a Pierrot’s—a
dead-white, painted-on, chalky mask. I looked around, but no one else was staring. Maybe there was something going on that
I hadn’t heard about, some children’s thing in the town to do with face painting or mime. She was a bit old for face painting,
but it could be she was the face painter and she’d used some on herself as well….

I went back to the onions, keeping my eyes to myself, concentrating, for I knew there was something up and I was growing afraid.
When I’d finished with the onions I moved on to the carrots, then the mushrooms, then I started in on the fruit. The hairs
on the back of my neck had risen, so I let myself sneak another
wee look to find out what she was at. The thick white paint had entirely gone; her face was back to being pink and normal

I knew right away that it was Robbie, but I tried to pretend to myself that it wasn’t, for I didn’t want what I knew. All
day I was jumpy and tense with waiting, but nothing happened. When I found I was sticking close to the phone, I took myself
out to the garden and made myself dig and rake.

Liam came home and found me out there, and he was delighted with all the work I’d done.

“You must have a few farm genes in you after all,” he said. “From that crowd up in Dunnamanagh, your mother’s people.”

The phone rang at nine. I picked it up, and it was my mother, telling me Robbie was dead. It seems he was driving someone
else’s car—too fast and too full of drink most likely—and he’d smacked it into a wall and killed himself and the girl who
was sitting beside him. My mother said that his sister Rita had phoned her; she’d said to be sure to let me know the funeral
was in two days’ time.

“Why would she want you to let me know?” I asked her. “I’d left him, hadn’t I? They surely don’t want me there at the grave?”

“You’re not thinking of going?” Her question came sudden and fierce down the line.

“Why are you telling me if you don’t want me to go?”

She didn’t answer, and I didn’t expect her to. She was phoning because I was Robbie’s wife still. Phoning me so I’d know she’d
been right all along.

But she needn’t have worried, I didn’t want to see them bury Robbie, I didn’t want to go back to the North. But I sent flowers,
yellow freesias, which have the sweetest scent I know and a shape like a promise if promises had shapes. I wept for him then,
and I wept for Barbara Allen, and if I’d known how I’d grieve for him in
the weeks to come I’d have gone to the funeral as well. I didn’t regret him, you see, and I thought that because there was
no regret I wouldn’t have to remember.

I was wrong. The minute his coffin was safe in the ground some wall came crashing down inside me and my body was filled with
a longing so physical and intense that it felt like pain. I thought of Robbie, his brown eyes and his brown hair and his strong,
whippy body so different from Liam’s, and my heart fairly broke. I wanted to see him one more time, to be in his company one
more time; I wanted things to be as they’d been back then, when he was my song and I was his, and the song that we sang together
was who we were when we sang it.

It had taken me a year to do it, but I’d written at last to Robbie. I’d told him where I was and that I would sign any papers
he cared to send my way. I never had an answer—I didn’t expect one—I knew that my letter would make him angry and remind him
when he wanted to forget. But when I heard of his death, I was glad that I’d sent it. Sometimes silence can be every bit as
bad as the worst of words.

When the grieving came on me I had to endure it. I couldn’t stop it or change it by act of will. No more could Liam. At the
start he had moved to comfort me, but I’d turned away from him, for I couldn’t bear his touch.

Then when it had passed I tried to reach him, but he wouldn’t let me back. At first I thought that his distance would go once
I’d drawn him into sex, but it didn’t. I couldn’t understand that: how could he make love with his body while his mind stayed
cold and apart? Making love for me was all of myself. We went together into the Garden, we lost ourselves and remade ourselves,
and afterwards everything started afresh.

When he stayed so closed off from me I was deeply unhappy. I knew that my grieving for Robbie had hurt him, but I knew it
had
nothing to do with the way I was with him. As well as that, I was starting at shadows—afraid of these deaths that sent signs
my way before they rightly happened. Liam went about his life steadily. If you hadn’t known what had been between us, you
mightn’t have thought there was much wrong now. But I was edgy and lonely inside myself. I walked about in the night, and
often I didn’t go back up to bed but fell asleep at last in a chair in the kitchen. I’d begun to consider going back to the
North, but I couldn’t think of anywhere to go. I’d lost touch with my friends when I moved down here. Besides, they’d been
Robbie’s friends more than mine. I sat in the kitchen and thought of the past.

I hadn’t lied to Liam when I’d told him the seeing began with the dandelion clocks in Dunnamanagh. It had. So I hadn’t lied,
but there were a couple more things from around that time that I’d just sort of passed over. Fiona Clarke was one of them.

The Clarkes lived a few streets away from us. There were three children: Trevor, who was Brian’s friend; Susan, just a few
years older; then Fiona, who’d gone off to London before ever we’d moved to the Glen.

It happened like this. There was a great-uncle of mine, a single man all his life, who took a heart attack and died there
suddenly in Dunnamanagh. I think my mother liked funerals—the baking and talking and sandwich cutting, all the women in the
kitchen together. Whatever the way of it was, she had us out there the minute she heard the news.

I was in the kitchen with the women. She said I was old enough now, so there was no getting out of it, that was me stuck.
But I was keeping my head down, buttering soda bread like there was no tomorrow, staying out of things if I could. The women
behind me were pawing over another death, a suicide by the sound of it, and only a few weeks past. I was all ears, for suicide
has a strange, strong glamour about it when you are young and
you’ve little enough idea of the suffering it causes. I heard the name Clarke, and then someone said something else and mentioned
“the brother, Trevor.” In a flash I realised the suicide must be Susan Clarke. And I knew Susan Clarke on account of Brian
and Trevor; she’d gone off to Belfast to nurse just the summer before.

I was fifteen at the time, old enough to know what they were saying but not old enough to be told things straight out in my
own right. And suicide was a scandal with us. Not as bad as it was for Catholics, but still bad enough for lowered voices
and phrases that slid across truth. So I bided my time till after the great-uncle’s funeral, then I got Brian off by himself
and I asked him what way Trevor’s sister had died and how had they managed to keep it so quiet?

Brian looked at me strangely, then he said I was off my head. “Susan Clarke’s not dead, she’s alive and kicking. You don’t
have to believe me; she’s home next week—you’ll see her with your own two eyes.”

Then he asked who’d told me. I said I’d heard it in the kitchen.

“Who from?”

I thought hard. I heard the voices behind me again, but I couldn’t work out exactly which voice had said what.

By now Brian had had enough. “You’re off your head,” he said again, “or you dreamt it.” And that was the end of that.

A week later word came that one of the Clarke girls had overdosed on alcohol and antidepressants alone in a bedsit in London.
But it wasn’t Susan at all, it was the older girl, Fiona. By law there had to be an autopsy, so the Clarkes could do nothing
but sit by the phone and wait for the authorities to finish their business and sign the release form for the body. It was
terrible, so it was. The strain of waiting, not knowing when they could bury
her. Brian spent a lot of time with Trevor, and I was that busy avoiding being left alone with Brian that it took me a while
to notice that he was doing the exact same thing with me.

At first I thought those women had named the wrong sister, but when I went over it carefully in my mind I couldn’t precisely
remember hearing a name. I decided I must have thought it was Susan because I’d forgotten Fiona existed. And I realised in
a way I didn’t care to think about that I’d “heard” the news of Fiona’s death a full ten days before she’d died. I never spoke
of it to Brian. He was already courting Anne—maybe he talked it over with her, but I doubt it. Brian was always secretive
and private, the same as I am. And he didn’t like things he didn’t understand.

As for me, I couldn’t work it out, and I still can’t. All I can clearly say is I ended up knowing something ahead of when
it happened. And it wasn’t like Jacko Brennan, for I’d never met Fiona Clarke. I’d barely even known her name when she died.

But it started me into thinking back, and I hit on one or two things that might have been premonitions or might have been
just a slanty sort of coincidence. I was frightening myself, so I pushed it all to the back of my mind and tried hard to keep
it there, well out of sight. Over time I mostly succeeded, or maybe I mostly forgot. But I got so I didn’t like overhearing
things; if someone had something to say to me they could stand themselves in front of me and look me straight in the eye.

Then we lost a hardly there baby, and everything changed again. But this time it wasn’t like Barbara Allen; I didn’t even
know this baby was there till it wasn’t.

It happened like this. We’d gone to the River Barrow one Sunday morning in early summer. Liam wanted to fish, so we walked
till he’d chosen his spot; then I’d left him to it and wan
dered off by myself The Barrow’s a lovely river, broad and generous, running through meadow and woodland and small, quiet
towns. It’s good walking too, for it used to take barges, so there’s an old tow path hugging one of the banks.

That day there wasn’t a sinner around, and I’d thoughts to think so I’d walked a long way—to one of the eel weirs—before I’d
even noticed how far I’d gone. It was a dry May, so the level had dropped, and when I saw the smooth pool of the weir in that
leafy place I took it into my head to wade out and take off my clothes and swim where the water was deep.

I knew nothing of eel weirs back then or I’d never have ventured near it. I know now. The weir is formed by two walls of stones
that rise out of the bed of the river and meet in a V, not quite closed at the join, which is where the nets are set when
the eels are running. The eels come through when the floodwaters rise, are guided into the weir by the walls, then sucked
to the netted gap on the fast-flowing water deep in the pool. But as I’ve said, I knew nothing of this, saw only the smooth
green surface between the walls and the shallow race to each side, where the water plunged past the weir. And I love being
naked in the river, the water so soft and murky; I wanted to float about in it watching my white limbs wavering down there
in the silty silk.

But there was to be no floating. I slipped crossing over the race and never gained the pool at all.

It happened in a flash. One minute, up there in the sunny air, and the next, I was under the water, a great blind current
rolling me over and over. Then a hand reached in and caught hold of my hair and up I came, spluttering and choking, my lungs
full of water, the hair near ripped from my head.

Liam’s hand.

The feel of my wet cotton dress on my skin in the chilly May sunshine, the huge force under the water that had me then let
me
go. The cold bite of my flesh, the young green of the leaves, the empty smell of the water under the flowering thorn—

And another force starting a wrenching inside me that wouldn’t let up until it had done its work and the baby was gone.