The Bird Woman (29 page)

Because I’d been in bed with Liam.

I hadn’t meant to, I’d cleared the afternoon just as I’d promised, seen the morning’s last patient and made a sandwich before
starting out. But the door had opened, and there had been Liam, home from a job in Wexford that couldn’t be finished because
the parts for the lighting rig hadn’t arrived.

No children, no patients, and way too often these days we both fell into bed too tired for anything but sleep. And now here
was I, late and getting later, and no excuse to my name.

It was hopeless, I’d have to find someone to ask or I’d never get there at all. At least the rain had eased, and the sky,
which had hung too low and too still for a week, was lifting and moving at last. The ditches were choked with July, so the
water flowed in
wide brown streams down the sides of the road and gushed up from under the wheels. It felt like early October.

A turn in the road saw an old man walking ahead, a stick in his hand and a dog at his side, driving a cluster of cows and
their big hefty calves through the rain. It wasn’t that common a sight anymore. Mostly they let the dog do the work while
they sat in the car with the window down and a hand with a switch hanging out to thwack at the rump of a cow. I slowed to
a crawl, wound down the window, and asked him could he direct me to Catherine Casey’s?

He could. He stood in the rain that dripped off his cap and ran down his face and told me which road to take and which to
pass by. Then he made me say the whole lot over as though I was slow, which I was, for I got it all the wrong way round more
than once. When he was finally satisfied that I had it, he lifted his hands off the window to let me go on. The dog nipped
at the heels of the cattle and kept them close to the side of the road while I eased myself past. I looked in the mirror,
lifting my hand in thanks. He was still standing watching me through the rain.

When I pulled the car into Catherine’s gates the house seemed somehow bigger than I remembered, and tidier and smarter as
well. Ours needs repainting, I thought, the chimney leaks, the stonework could do with repointing. I got out, feeling suddenly
complicated and hostile. It was partly getting so lost and partly because I’d just realised that Catherine had this cared-for-looking
house when she let on not to give a toss about appearances.

I went round to the back, but she didn’t bring me in, she walked me straight across to the studio through the rain. I mumbled
about being lost and driving around in circles.

“I thought you’d have known the way by now.”

“It’s hard. One false turn puts you wrong so you can’t get right, the roads turn back on themselves, and you can’t see the
sky for hedges. I’d be driving round yet if I hadn’t found a man with some cows.”

So she wanted to know who I’d asked, and she named him right away from my description. I told her he’d put his hands on the
wound-down window and wouldn’t let me go till I had the directions by heart.

She laughed at that. “Ah, he knew who you were of course, no flies on Peter Nolan. He probably kept you talking to see what
he made of you, he’ll be working out will he give you a try if ever he gets sick.”

I didn’t like that. It felt as though I were undressing in a room at night, thinking the curtains were closed when they weren’t.
I thought of him staring after me as I’d driven away. I
know who you are,
that look had said.
You’re that healer woman from the North who lives over Crohane way.

One of the things I’d liked about living down here was no one knowing anything about me. Not who my mother was nor my brother
was; not what part of Derry I was from; not even where it was I went to school. I didn’t come from here, wasn’t one of them,
was invisible for all I stuck out. Now total strangers had seen me undressed. That shook me. I gave up trying to talk my way
around Catherine and lapsed into silence.

The studio had once been some sort of an outbuilding—not a barn, it wasn’t high enough, but a line of stone sheds for animals
and fuel and tack. She’d had a load of work done on it; all the dividing walls had been knocked except for one, and the whole
space had been plumbed and floored and wired and reroofed. There were only two areas now: the studio space, which was more
or less as it had been, and a long, narrow gallery running off on the other side.

It was amazing, a total transformation, I could hardly believe it had once held Catherine’s store, a dark, chaotic place that
smelled of earth and rats and neglect. She would disappear into it and come out carrying discarded treasures—insects and teapot-flowers
and little baked tiles, their centres puddled with shiny glaze. Suzanna always begged the flowers, but Andrew wanted the insects—he
liked it that they were imaginary, yet all the details were to proper insectlike specification. I loved the tiles, which weren’t
really tiles at all, but small squares of clay she’d been using to try out new glazes. Catherine had taken to saving them
for me, she’d asked me what it was about them, but I didn’t know. All I could say was I’d always liked samples. Wool cards
and paint charts and those flick-through books of curtain fabrics. Scraps of bright texture and colour.

There was a picture of a monastery in Tibet I’d seen once, but I didn’t tell her that. It had white walls on a clear blue
sky and strings of small, bright flags that fluttered about in the wind. Prayer flags, it said on the caption. I’d looked
and looked till I nearly heard their snapping and flapping, I was filled with a happiness so intense that I’d torn out the
page and folded it into the back of a book. I forgot all about it for years, but I found it again and my hands trembled with
eagerness as I was opening it out. Nothing. Whatever the happiness was, it had taken itself off somewhere else.

It was a lovely place now, this little gallery of hers, warm and hushed, with rough-stone walls painted white. The lights
glowed and the floor was slabbed in slate and everything felt clean and quiet and safe. There were trestles and plinths with
sculptures displayed on them, niches built into the walls, and not a giant teapot in sight.

I couldn’t think what to say, so I said it was lovely and warm.
Catherine said she’d put the heat on early because she was expecting me. There was no edge to her voice, but she wasn’t looking
at me, she was fiddling with the lights, making sure she had them just so.

“Now,” she said, and I knew I’d have to look.

In the end it was easy because there were lots of things I liked so much that I wanted to reach out and touch as soon as I
saw them. I completely forgot about saying the right things and walked around stroking and poking and exclaiming. Catherine
began to smile and then to laugh aloud at my reactions. I’d never understood those teapots of hers, they were too big and
too wrong, they mocked at themselves and at me. What was the point of a teapot twenty times too big and heavy to use? And
all those nasty, weird-coloured flowers, those sinister insects with long legs and longer stings. She’d reversed the symbol
alright. Poisoned chalices—that’s what they were—and Catherine, daring everyone to go ahead and buy them for their architect-designed
dream homes. They did too. Hence all this cash for new roofs and slate floors and fancy lighting.

But this stuff was innocent, it was all the things you’d squatted to wonder at, poked with a careful finger, dropped in a
plastic bucket to carry home. And it didn’t fade or lose its shine or stink. It lived on, enhanced, in the way it had lived
on in your child-self’s imagination.

She’d used wood and glass as well as clay, and all her talent for fantasia had been let rip. Marvellous banded stones lay
in pools of clear glass; herring sprats looped in figures-of-eight through vitreous water; ceramic seaweed rippled and flowed
down walls. There were conger eels half emerging from sinister holes, lobsters that sported jewelled backs, wondrous jellyfish
made out of clay and glass. There were rock pools full of sea anemones, fantastic fishes,
little shrimps and crabs. Found objects were mixed in with Catherine-things, and lifelike replicas of fish and sea creatures
swam beside fish and sea creatures from Catherine’s riotous imagination. Some of the pieces were enormous, and some were miniatures;
some were subtly distorted as water distorts.

Impossible not to reach and touch, shocking to stretch out your hand to glass, not the cool of water—yet each time the expectation
overcame me and my fingers tried again.

At last I was done. I looked at her amazed, and she looked back, her mouth all smiling, then we fell into each other’s arms
and laughed and laughed.

“Stay for supper,” she said at last, pushing me away to look at me but still holding tight onto my upper arms. “Ring Liam,
tell him I need you, let them do without you just this once.”

“Has Liam seen?” I was already crossing to the phone on the wall.

“No. Dermot’s seen drawings and the first few bits and pieces coming out of the kiln. Nothing for ages though, I’ve gone very
secretive, no one’s seen it for months, and no one else has seen it like this. It’s not finished yet, but it’s near. This
is a private view, assembled for Ms. McKinnon alone.”

“What I do is pure kitsch,” Catherine said, her eyes dancing over the rim of the wineglass. “That’s why I get away with it.
If I made ‘proper’ art and it sold the way I sell, every decent artist in the country would be after my blood. As it is they
forgive me. They come to my openings and chat up the buyers and invite them to their own shows. I overhear them. They’ll be
asking a buyer which piece he’s bought, and then they’ll go on about what fun my work is, and
so
refreshing. But if the buyer
hasn’t
bought, they’ll let him know he has taste—” She laughed, and there was nothing hidden behind it.

“Don’t you mind?”

She shook her head. “Why should I, don’t I get to do what I want? Besides, they’ve a point, there are serious artists with
oodles of talent who’ll work their guts out all their lives and have to get by on crusts.”

She reached out and helped herself to another dollop of pudding. “You sure you won’t have any more?” I shook my head. She
was quite drunk, and so was I. We were having a lovely time, the two of us, eating and drinking and talking away about anything
that came into our heads. Well, not anything—almost exclusively ourselves. We’d clean forgotten our prickles of earlier on,
we only remembered how much we liked each other, how happy we were to be together again like this.

“Of course there are millions more crap artists than good ones.” She scraped out the dish and licked the creamy mess off the
back of the serving spoon. “Mostly they know they’re crap, but sometimes they don’t, so they go on struggling long after they
should have stopped. The crap-ones-who-know catch on pretty fast and do something else. Unless they’re making money out of
their crap, like me.”

“How can you say you’re crap, Catherine?” I demanded angrily. “How can you make all these beautiful things and run yourself
down like this?”

“You know something, Ellen, you’re making me nervous. You never liked Bugs and Blooms, and they’ve paid the bills for years.
Would you think you could start into hating this stuff, then maybe it’ll sell? I’ve an overdraft as long as your arm with
all the work I’ve had done on this place.”

“It’ll sell,” I told her, picking up the bottle and filling both our glasses. It was the second bottle. I knew I had to drive,
but I didn’t care. I didn’t care if I hit something or got stopped by the Guards or didn’t get home at all. Suddenly I was
sick and tired of my life,
of its discipline and relentlessness, of all those people wanting me to fix their bodies, of Liam who disappeared into the
studio to paint every moment that he wasn’t out working, of the smugness of this newly prosperous country that thought so
much of itself I barely stopped short of being sick and tired of the children while I was at it.

I looked across at Catherine. She was sitting with her head thrown back, watching me. I wished that I was beautiful like her.
Mostly I look in the mirror and my face looks back at me, so I stick out my tongue at it but I don’t really mind it—its just
the way I look.

Now here I was, longing to be beautiful like Catherine, longing hopelessly and with an intensity that I rarely felt for anything.
What was happening to me? I fought my mind back to what we were talking about before I’d thought about Catherine being beautiful.
Art. We’d been talking artists and art.

“Is Dermot one?” I asked. “A crap-artist-who-doesn’t-know-he’s-crap?”

A spasm almost like pain crossed her face. “No, Dermot’s not crap,” she said slowly. “Dermot’s probably one of those artists
who’s good but will never be
really
good, no matter how hard he tries. But just for a moment—somewhere back there—he very nearly was. And art matters more to
him than anything else, and trying as hard as he does is eating him alive.”

“But why?”

“Why what?”

“If he’s trying so hard and he has it in him—”

“Why will he never be really good?” She shrugged. “Who knows? The moment passed, and now it’s too late. Perhaps if Marie hadn’t
left. Sometimes a shock like that can make you, but sometimes it does you in instead….”

Her voice trailed off. I nearly asked her about Liam, but I was afraid of what she might say. I dragged the conversation stubbornly
back to where it had started.

“But you’re not crap, Catherine, you’re so talented—”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“And so accomplished. Technically, I mean. So accomplished
technically
—”

“Will you look who’s talking? I thought you weren’t supposed to know about art?”

A thought struck me. “Don’t you
want
people to take you seriously? Don’t you
want
to be famous?”

She shook her head.

“Why ever not?”

“Fame has its drawbacks. I’ve seen a load of people make awful eejits of themselves once they got famous. And I like my life
the way it is.”