The Bird Woman (43 page)

All the political changes, yet the bottom line is still the same word, which is
careful.
Careful who you speak to, careful what you say, careful who you choose to look in the eye. And no identification marks outside
your own territory. No badges, tattoos, uniforms, no talk that might give you away. Peace it may be on paper, but on the streets
and in the houses it’s an armed and arm’s-length peace.

I’ll tell Liam Daddy’s secret, and he’ll think it surprising and strange. But that will be the end of it—no big deal.

It’s their lives, Ellen, not ours. Let it alone. It doesn’t matter. It all belongs in the past.
I am hearing him speak.

And hell be right, but hell be wrong, and his words will make me lonely. But I’ll say nothing, for I’m sick of defending what
I’ve no will to defend anymore.

Below me the snow is falling on the Bogside. Smoke slides out from the chimneys and wanders up into the snowy air. Coal, the
acrid sharpness of it, mixed in with the damp, frosty smell of the snow. These smells, coming out of my childhood. They dissolve
me somewhere a long way down.

The longer you live away from it, the more Liam’s words make sense. But when you’re here, inside it, he is wrong because it’s
real. And so many dead, so many lives eaten by prisons, so many families distorted and maimed.

The hills rise slate blue and snowy behind the city. Above, the thick sky broods, heavy with snow cloud. Whatever I’m looking
for, I’m not going to find it here, and my feet might fall off with the cold.

I only go in to get warm.

I’m down from the Walls, and there’s the Guildhall ahead of me with B
LOODY
S
UNDAY
E
NQUIRY
on a banner across the front of it. I go in through the entrance, and the man in the glass cubbyhole looks me over and nods
me into the hall.

Inside the big doors, there’s that table that used to be everywhere—the one you put your handbag on while they went through
its contents, the one you dumped your shopping on for them to search. The usual uniformed searcher stands beside it.

“The Enquiry?” she asks me, waving that metal thing with the hoop on the end that screeches if you’ve a gun or a bomb stuck
down your knickers.

I nod, but I’m not at all sure. She smiles a smile so sudden and
warm that I feel I can’t let her down by changing my mind. She runs the hoop-thing over me and it doesn’t shriek, so she says
to go on up the stairs and someone at the top will direct me.

I go up the carved and polished staircase, feeling way too damp and scruffy to be in here at all. The man at the top agrees,
for he takes one look and he knows right away I’m no lawyer.

“Up those stairs,” he says, waving his hand at a door that’s marked P
UBLIC
G
ALLERY.

There’s a heavy old wooden door, and I pull on it and it creaks slowly open. There are more stairs ahead, only these are narrow
and steep, not at all like the wide, gracious staircase I’ve just ascended. I want to turn then and run, but some stubbornness
comes upon me so I don’t. They open onto a scatter of people sitting in steeply raked rows in the shadows. It’s a gallery,
high up under the roof, and away down below is the Guildhall and the Enquiry. I stand till my eyes have adjusted, and then
I slide in and sit down.

Two big screens are suspended in front of me. On the first you can see the witness close up, while the other one shows the
photos and papers the lawyers are discussing. I peer over the balustrade. They’ve cleared out the whole of the floor of the
Guildhall and set it up so it looks like a courtroom or maybe a stock exchange.

I concentrate and begin to get the hang of it. The witness giving evidence is finishing what he’s been saying, and the man
who seems to be in charge of the show is asking the lawyers if they’ve any more questions for him. No one does. The head man
tells the witness he can go. He goes. The next one comes in and sits in the witness seat, and I see him away down below but
also up on the screen there in front of my nose.

This next man is called Sheehan, and he looks about sixty—maybe even seventy—and he takes his time about sitting down.
The head man waits till he’s settled, then says in this gentle, dead-polite voice that he thinks perhaps Mr. Sheehan may have
some objection to taking the oath?

Mr. Sheehan looks surprised. “No,” he says, “I’ve no objection.” Then he gives out the oath in a ringing voice that is unafraid.
It seems he’s a farmer and he’s only been on two marches in his whole life, but one of them was the civil rights march on
Bloody Sunday.

I sneak a look round. The public gallery is half empty. I feel stubborn and awkward, I know that my tribe didn’t suffer, I
haven’t the right to be here, sitting with those who did.

I don’t care, I decide. I’ll sit it out. I won’t connive as my father did. I want no more secrets and exclusions.

Then I look up at the carved wooden ceiling with its long hanging lights and I look across at the tall stained-glass windows
and I look down into the body of the hall stuffed with lawyers and computers and I feel a sort of hatred for it all. For the
new world of technology and suave privilege and for the old grandiose world of stubborn, entrenched possession, a world that
looked after its own but only just; and only in return for their violent loyalty, for their ongoing savage willingness to
make the Croppies lie down.

And there in the middle of it all is this stubborn old man, this farmer who might be a neighbour of mine at home.

He begins his story, tells how he ran with the crowd from the Saracens, tells about fear and crouching and waiting and not
knowing where to run to next that’s away from the shooting.

Then he tells how he runs doubled over and gets to this place and hunkers down in fear of his life and beside him’s this man
that he knows.

“My son Willie’s lying down there,” the man says to him. “He’s dead as a maggot, they shot him.”

When they call a five-minute break for the stenographers, I take up my coat and walk out. I head back over the ring road,
for I want the new walkway again, though the river’s running dark and choppy with waves. And there are the black shags, still
fishing away, and the rain comes, stinging my face with half-formed sleet, and I feel about as homeless as ever I’ve felt
and belonging nowhere, nor in either tribe, and knowing there’s no one I can speak to, neither in the North nor in the South,
for everyone here has ground to defend and everyone there is too angered and shamed by this long, grim drag back into the
past.

I think of the man who said that about his son being dead as a maggot, and I wonder where he is now and what state his heart’s
in.

I think of the squirm of maggots, their undeadness, yet they are death itself, they are all that is mortal of us exploding
into maggot, consuming itself with itself. The man was right, his words exact, his poor son dead as a maggot.

I think of myself, seven years old at the time. Something had happened, I’d known that, but it happened to them, not to us,
I remembered low voices around me speaking of “just deserts.” Then I think how I was neither an adult when these Troubles
began, nor a child born into them and knowing nothing else. All I knew was this blurred thing—a time of peace bleeding into
a time of violence, a homelessness even within time.

They say home is where the heart is, but surely to God the heart can be where the home is, the heart can be at home in homelessness?

And I know I am back here now, not just for my mother as I’d told myself, but because of this terrible need in me to join
up the island, to know oneness instead of division, for only then can I live somewhere—North or South—and call it home.

And maybe there’s Liam in there too. Maybe that nurse and my mother were right, and I haven’t quite won through yet.

But I know now what Mr. Sheehan has seen and heard, so I know that my only way forward is further forward into homelessness,
for only in homelessness can we dwell on this island on a deeper level than the political, on the level of life and of the
heart.

To live without identity, except as a human being.

Because life, the birth-and-death essence of life, is flow, not security. It cuts all ground from beneath our feet, it picks
us up and carries us where it will until at the last it dumps us down into death. And only in living beyond the tribe, in
identifying beyond the nation-state—its ruthless, proud identity—is there room for the heart, where lies freedom.

And that’s that, once I’ve felt all that there’s nothing left to feel, I’m emptied out and near dead with exhaustion. I have
to get something to eat, I think, I can’t even look for a bus or a taxi, much less walk back to Brian and Anne’s in the freezing
cold.

The dusk is seeping up out of the pavements, the cars stream past with their headlights on, the traffic lights up ahead are
an orange stain. I lean myself on the wall at the entrance to Tesco’s. I don’t remember leaving the river or crossing the
ring road, I don’t know how I’ve got here or how I’m going to get myself back all that way over the bridge to the Waterside.
I look through the windows at the lit shop. I can’t go in, and I can’t go on.

All I can think of is Anne’s spotless kitchen and Anne making tea for me, telling me everything will be alright.

I go on standing there, blankly watching. The day is changing to four-o’-clock night, the shoppers are losing heart, the old
ones
are scuttling off home to their hearths, heads down, collars held tight.

Then a hand is pulling the sleeve of my coat, and someone is saying my name. I turn and look into the face of a stranger.
A woman, no older than I am, her face white, the dye growing out of her hair, the reek of cigarette smoke on her coat.

“Joanne sez you’re a Derry woman. She sez yer ma is only after dying yesterday, God rest her. Joanne’s over there, she sez
not to bother you, but it’s not for myself I’m askin’; I wouldn’t ever ask for myself, it’s for the wean—”

I stare at her. She wants something, but I don’t know what.

“Joanne sez to leave you be, but I know well you’ll not refuse me. The poor wee wean’s tormented.”

I don’t know what to do, so I look away. Joanne is standing on the pavement on the other side of the road. She has on a heavy
dark coat, and her eyes are upon me, begging me not to mind.

I understand. Joanne has talked about her cut wrist, and now this woman wants a cure for a child. I turn back to face her.
She’s still holding tight to my sleeve.

“Joanne’s my sister-in-law, so she is. She told us about what you did in the hospital. The doctors have give up, so they have,
but the poor wee wean cries day and night, it has him tormented….” She drags with her free arm, pulling a child out from where
he’s hiding behind her coat. She lets go of my sleeve, puts her hand under his chin, and lifts up the face for me to see.
The child wears a cotton hat pulled down low, a woolly hat over it, a cotton scarf loose at his neck. He’s about two years
old, and his face is scaly and red, the skin all broken and flaking.

As soon as she lets go my sleeve I have to stop myself running. I feel the panic rise up, a black wave of fear of herself
and the child, and she senses it, for she grabs me tight by the arm again. Joanne has crossed over the road and stands only
yards away on
the pavement, not knowing what to do. The child starts to cry, not a roar but a whinge, an awful dragging whinge that tears
at your nerves. The mother lifts him. He squirms and fights in her arms, the whinge growing louden There’s no way out.

“Give me the wean.” I speak without knowing I’m going to. The woman gives me the child, and he struggles and kicks. I hold
on. He quietens. I wait till he’s still then put one hand onto his forehead. I don’t want to do this; I want them to go away
and leave me alone, but the emptiness is there.

I hand the child back to his mother. He snuggles down into her arms, puts his head on her shoulder, closes his eyes, and sleeps.
Gently, her hand just touches his hair, then she fumbles around for her bag, very careful not to disturb him. I shake my head
and walk away.

Joanne’s quick steps run behind me. I want to run myself, but I can’t.

“Where are you for?” she asks when she catches me up.

I tell her.

She walks me to William Street, finds a taxi who’ll take me, pays my fare in advance, and hands me in.

M
AY
2002

T
here’s a stand of tulips in the corner of the yard that blooms
every year. You’d think they were planned
—
their colour against the old wall
—
but it wasn’t so, it was only a stray bulb that Liam let fall on his way to somewhere else.

It lay on its side in the rain then it put out some roots, and they clamped themselves into the earth. I found it like that,
and its sorry tenacity pulled from me some instinct of sympathy or recognition. I scooped out a hole, circled the planting
with stones, left it alone.