The Bird Woman (16 page)

“There are holes in the roof so the bees can come and go,” she’d said. “An opening into the house as well, so they’ve only
to stick in a spoon and scoop when they’re looking for honey.”

I’d liked that. Mostly I get angry when strangers come knocking and asking, I shake my head and shut the door fast and leave
them to think what they like. But this one was different. After she’d gone I kept hearing the drone of the bees and seeing
a golden darkness of massed bees and sweetness. For days I listened, and I didn’t like the silence of our house; it seemed
a poor, thin thing, and the house not alive.

But I didn’t tell Liam about her, for I knew he’d only use it against me the next time I turned someone away. Liam was reared
with softness, you see, he was taught it so he expects it back, and he has an ease about him that means it often comes. He
can draw it from people—even from me—and he never even knows he’s doing it.

I’m not like that, nor ever was. It was always all suspicion with me, the expectation of hardship. Anger comes easy—Til blaze
up, and the life will blaze up in me and I don’t have to feel the fear. But Liam can wait through the anger till it burns
off and I get to the fear underneath. Then he’ll sneak up on me, offering me comfort, and I can’t defend myself against him.

I
took the job in the library, and it paid for Andrew to go to play school. He cried at the start, then got used to it; he
liked the stories and bringing home paintings, and when he saw the nature table he thought he’d died and gone to heaven. As
for Suzanna, she was happy as a sandboy at Kate’s house, and Kate’s mother, Teresa, brushed away my thanks. Life was easier
with Suzanna; the children were company for each other, and wasn’t she always leaving Kate over with us anyway?

“It’s great, knowing you’re there for the asking,” she said. “Not having to go looking for babysitters, not having to worry.”

And I liked the work. Books, quiet voices, speaking only when I was asked something, not having to think up things to say
like in the pub. It was a small library, open only for limited hours, and after the first week of instruction I was mostly
by myself. I liked that too. Having a world that was all my own, that Liam wasn’t part of, nor the children.

The spiralling held back in the library. I’d feel it in my feet alright, but it was only a shadow of itself that started up
then died away. I knew what it was saying.
I
’
m here and don’t you forget it.

I wasn’t about to forget it. At work it was only reminding me, but at home there was no such restraint. As the months passed
it gathered itself, growing stronger and more intrusive till I was finding myself near as hard to live with as Liam was. It
did what it
liked, when it liked; sometimes it started just when the dinner was ready, or as I was on my way out through the door. I stopped
it then—I closed myself down—which worked if I acted fast and made sure that it knew that I wasn’t messing. I know that sounds
odd and vague, but it’s hard to find words to explain something that isn’t visible or rational.

And closing myself didn’t solve the problem. When I put it on hold it stayed inside waiting, and all the time it was waiting
it was punishing me till I let it out to run its course. It was as if I was filled with this weird electricity. It crackled
inside me and fizzled my nerves so I started nearly out of my skin at a sudden touch or a noise.

I couldn’t help myself; I was so used up with bearing it all that I’d nothing left over for anything else. And soon I was
so used up that I even left off fearing the currents themselves. Which is not to say that I grew unafraid or lost the conviction
that something fierce and alien was using me as a path. But I grew used to it, like the pain of an arthritic knee or the kick
of a baby inside you. Never comfortable, but something you thole because you have no choice.

But if it’s a knee or a baby you know why.

In a mixed marriage schools are potholes. You see them ahead, but somehow the steering pulls and before you know it you’re
into them anyway.

Liam wanted them to go first to the national school, which is local and Catholic, then at second level to Kilkenny College,
which is Protestant and fee-paying.

“If we do that they’ll have both traditions,” he told me. “We just put their names down now for Kilkenny College, and have
it all settled. That way there’ll be no fighting between us, no last-minute scrambling to get them in—”

I thought it was all my worrying about Andrew that had brought this on, but I think now he knew there was stuff coming up
that I’d find hard to swallow. First Communions, for starters. I was so ignorant back then that I hardly knew what a First
Communion was. I know now, for Andrew keeps me informed.

“What’s the point in putting them down for a fee-paying school when we couldn’t afford it?” I asked him. The truth was I didn’t
want to plan; I didn’t want to have to think or decide till nearer the time.

“There are grants if one of the parent’s a Prod,” Liam said. “Anyway, I’ll be famous by then, we’ll have money coming out
of our ears.”

“I’m not sure I’d want that,” I told him.

“Not want money coming out of our ears? Why ever not?”

I shook my head. “Not the money, the school. I’m not sure I’d want them taught fear the way I was,” I said.

As soon as the words were out I was wondering. Was it true, what I’d said? Did they teach me fear, or did I bring fear to
what they taught me? I don’t know, nothing stays the same anymore, everything shifts and changes. I only know that the squat
dark church on the Northlands Road comes into my dreams, and the flavour of those dreams is dread.

But Liam was off like a horse when the starter flag drops. No one taught fear like the Church taught fear, end of story, no
competition. Which is what I can’t stand about Catholics—it always has to have been worse for them than for anyone else. But
I didn’t argue because I didn’t want to—I didn’t want to talk about religion at all, it made me too afraid. And I couldn’t
say that because it wasn’t rational, and being irrational made me afraid as well.

It was different at the start. Back then we could say what we liked; we liked saying what we liked, it was so freeing. I remember
the early days, the things I came out with, the way Liam laughed till I blushed with shame.

“My mother would never allow us to call Catholics Taigs,” I’d told him once happily, out of my happiness. “She said plenty
of Catholics were decent, good-living people. It wasn’t their fault that their church taught them ignorance and superstition.”

Liam’s eyes had opened wide. He’d stared at me, then he’d cracked up—you’d have thought what I’d said was funnier than
Cheers
and
Fawlty Towers
wrapped up together. I stared in my turn. Why was he laughing? What was the joke?

Then I’d heard myself, and I’d understood. Something had shifted inside me; a hairline crack had opened up on a smooth-plastered
wall, a fine fall of dust, and I’d laughed along with him. It was like one of those dreams where you go to a party and look
down and find you’ve no clothes on. Then you wake, sick with relief because no one has seen you, no one at all, it was only
a dream.

After that I could say what I liked. He’d look at me, amazed and bemused, but he took no offence nor ever held my words against
me. I know now that that was easy enough for Liam, who hasn’t a paranoid bone in his body and has never been hurt for being
Catholic. But it seemed to me wonderful after the North, where everyone’s always offended at everything all the time.

I said the wrong things because I knew no different. Up there we were too afraid to talk face to face, so silence seemed the
only way. We talked among ourselves of course, told one another what
they
thought, what
they
were after, we stoked our own fears till they blazed up and licked at the rafters. For the rest, we left it to the politicians
who defended and accused from the safety of the television studios. We listened to our own and turned away from theirs, unable
to hear, deafened by the anger that rose in our
blood and beat in our eyes before they were through the first sentence.

But at least that “ignorance and superstition” stuff I’d said only to Liam. Far worse was the time when his brother Tom was
setting me straight on what the South thought of the North.

Southerners, Tom maintained, were evenhanded. “We might not like Northern Protestants much, but we wouldn’t be pushed about
Northern Catholics either. They’ll never forgive us the Treaty. Seventy years on and they’re still saying we sold them out,
still accusing us of leaving them stranded under British rule.”

I was astonished. “Sure, what way could you have stopped it?”

“Gone on fighting. Or that’s what they come down here telling us.”

“What business of yours was it anyway?” I was all indignation on his behalf. “You’d got down here, hadn’t you? You’d no call
to go interfering up North; we didn’t want any part of an Irish state.”

There was a small, deep pause. “Protestants didn’t want it, Ellen,” Tom said gently, “Catholics did.” Another silence. “Tis
the one island, Ellen. Some would say
our
island. And by that, I mean all of us.”

For the first time I saw the border as he did: a red line wriggling the map, following no logic of landscape, dividing where
there should be no division. And Liam’s family wouldn’t be hard line at all; they don’t like the IRA going blowing people
up, and they wouldn’t be slow to say so.

After a while down here I began to hear myself, and I didn’t always like what I heard, but also I began to notice my aloneness.
You only find out who you are when you live among strangers, when there’s no one else the same as you to agree and tell you
you’re right. And you’re different when you’re reared the other way—it’s a different tribe, you learn different habits, there’s
dif
ferent things expected of you. I began to unlearn the different ways, but who was I going to be instead? I couldn’t just turn
myself into someone I wasn’t.

The more I heard myself, the more I fell silent; if I hadn’t had Catherine to talk to I’d have turned mute as a swan. Her
being my friend was her decision, not mine. She made the running, all I did was leave the door open when she came. And perhaps
she’s so odd in herself that she didn’t notice the oddness in me or in what I was saying. But she’s odd in a social, extroverted
way—she isn’t gauche as I am.

I tried to talk to Catherine because I wanted to make the words in my head come out of my mouth and not stay stuck inside
going round and round. But it was hard. I couldn’t tell her about the Healing and I couldn’t talk about my old life with Robbie,
so all that was left was Liam and the children, and local things that happened nearby. One time I began on some story about
Robbie, but when I said the words out loud they sounded so strange and unreal that I hardly believed it myself. These people
here lived in a different world—so soft—how could they know?

This thing in me didn’t help either. It made me different a second time over, and that was hard too.

So Catherine started coming to the house as Liam’s friend, but nearly before I noticed it I was treating her as mine. Then
Liam told me she used to be a nun.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Nuns are sort of taboo in my world, they’re
them
not
us,
seen but not spoken to—you wouldn’t want to, their very existence makes you nearly more uncomfortable than priests. Anyway,
nuns are all ancient and plain, any fool knows that, there was no way that Catherine could ever have been a nun.

So I thought he was joking, I didn’t believe him, but he went on insisting and after a bit it dawned on me that it might be
true. I was really upset, but Liam was pleased with himself, he knew he’d tipped over my neat little applecart, and he couldn’t
bring himself to hold back from making it worse. He swung back his chair, laced his fingers together behind his head, and
told me she’d been a Cistercian.

“Oh, yes,” I said, tipping carrots out of a saucepan, knowing there was more coming. “And what’s so great about that?”

“Cistercians are contemplatives.”

“You mean they don’t talk?”

“Only when they really need to. They pray for the world instead.”

“What,
all
the time?” I was shocked again. “Whatever use is that?”

Liam laughed. “Nothing exists unless you can see it and touch it, isn’t that right, Ellen? And you with the invisible running
through you—”

I glared at him. “Would you ever fuck off and stop patronising me?”

Whiskey got up from her mat and stood there, regarding me steadily. She doesn’t like it when I swear at Liam. It’s the tone
of my voice; she knows that we’re close to a fight.

“Liam says you don’t like it that I used to be a nun.”

“Why should I care what you used to be? It’s got nothing to do with me.”

“He said you think I should have told you.”

“Liam’s very full of my opinions all of a sudden. What else did he say?”