The Bird Woman (8 page)

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 Slieve-more,
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.

Bird sounds, wind sounds, the lapping of water. It was all so quiet and far away it felt as though there was no one left on
the face of the earth but me. But for all the absence of people, I wasn’t alone. The cracks in the rocks beside me were crammed
with whelks and winkles; further down they were spiky with blue-black mussels and clogged with drying seaweed that shifted
before my eyes. The more I looked, the more I couldn’t stop looking. There were limpets everywhere, and between the limpets,
barnacles, and crawling over them glistening flies as big as the nail on my thumb. Huge blue-grey sea slaters scuttled the
rocks, sand fleas hopped on my feet, and the seaweed laid down by the tide in heaps was heaving with questing birds. Everywhere
you looked everything was jam-packed with life, doing nothing at all with itself except living.

And the more I saw how alive it all was, the more I got this creepy feeling that it was way
too
alive, it was all too busy and strong for me, and if I went on looking another minute it might do like the skull had done
and turn into something else.

So I stopped looking. I scuttled across the rocks like one of the slaters, and when I found Liam, I flung myself at him, demanding
a bus.

“A bus?” he said, his hands on my shoulders, pushing me off and holding me there. “Where to?”

“Belfast,” I said.

“Back to Robbie?” he asked, the anger showing in his eyes and tightening his mouth.

“None of your business.”

“What if I think it is?”

It’s nearly three in the morning, very dark, for the cloud has thickened and crowded out stars and moon. I’ve been a long
time remembering Achill; it’s been strange to see it so close up in my mind when I haven’t really thought of it for years.
I suppose I was already deep in love with Liam, but I didn’t know it, I thought it was only my body responding to his. And
I thought I could live rationally, could make that body give up what it wanted and do whatever I told it to do.

But I didn’t go back to Robbie. Liam was angry enough to say what he thought of him, and somehow after that I couldn’t make
him big enough in my mind to submit again to that life.

Instead I went running home to my mother in Derry. Did I say that? Here am I, sleepless with dread at the thought of the morning
and what it will bring, when back then Derry was home and my mother and refuge of sorts.

A delusion that even then was short-lived. After a week of her I was so beside myself I walked into the town and had all my
mass of flame-red hair cut short in some sort of crazed, inarticulate protest. I came home near bald and wild with dread that
I’d driven Liam off from me for good. Which was what I wanted and what I couldn’t bear.

I looked in the mirror. This poky white face like a rat’s with tufts of red all around it looked straight back out at me.
I got out
the antidepressants and sedatives they’d given me in the hospital and shook a whole load of tablets into my hand. That felt
good; it felt painful and dramatic. Then I caught myself on. There were neighbours of ours, RUC men, who’d been shot at their
own front doors. I knew what death looked like—I didn’t want to be dead.

I picked up the nail scissors and eased the sharp points in under the flesh of my palm till the blood began to come. It hurt,
but at first I liked that because it made me forget how I was hurting over Liam. Then I stopped liking it; I looked at myself
and what I was doing and filled up with self-disgust. I set down the scissors and sat at the window reading the graffiti on
the walls of the houses across the way. IRA S
CUM
and D
EATH TO ALL
T
AIGS.
I felt sorry for myself and martyrish—Romeo-and-Julietish—as though by falling in love with a Catholic I’d gained some sort
of special status. I wept till my eyes were swollen and red, and I felt much better. I knew I wanted to go on living, I just
couldn’t work out how.

My mother gave out when she saw my hair, which got up my nose because she was never done telling me to tie it back and stop
it from flying away out like a flag. I said there was no pleasing her. She said to keep a civil tongue or I wasn’t welcome
in her home.

“It’s my home too,” I said.

“It is not,” she said. “You’ve a home of your own in Belfast, in case you’d forgotten. A husband as well, and it’s time you
were thinking of going back to him.”

So there it was, out on the table. She wasn’t blind—no phone calls, no sign of Robbie, no talk of me going away.

I saw the stiff line of her shoulders, and my heart sank inside me, for I’d backed myself into a corner and I knew that I’d
have to tell her the truth or go.

Not right away though. Instead I got the bus to the Water-side, tramped up the hill to Brian and Anne’s, and stood ringing
their bell in the pouring rain, desperate for someone to talk to.

“Merciful God, Ellen,” Anne said when she opened the door, “whatever have you done to yourself? You look like a scalded fox
with a dose of the flu.”

That was better than a rat, but only marginally. I decided there was no way I was going to tell her anything, not even the
amended version I’d worked out on the way over. In this version I’d thought I might say I was
maybe
thinking of leaving Robbie, and Liam wasn’t going to appear at all. Anne was no fool though—I knew she might spot that there
was someone else lurking—so I had a contingency plan prepared with Liam’s name changed to Fred. That way I’d only have to
deal with the leaving-Robbie issue; I could leave the Southern Catholic bit till later or not at all.

But Anne knew more than I thought. She took me in to the fire and brought me a glass of wine and a towel to dry what was left
of my hair.

“Brian’s away out at a meeting, and the weans are in their beds,” she said. “We’ll have a nice wee talk, so we will, you can
tell me all about it.”

She was friendly and sister-in-lawish and fishing for information, but the harder she tried the more I shut tight as a clam.
In the end she told me out straight that my mother had phoned while I was on my way over. It seemed Robbie had rung up looking
for me. He’d asked her if we were back from Achill.

“I needed to get away from Robbie,” I said, “so I told him I’d gone with you and Brian and the weans to Achill. He knows you
can’t stand him. I knew if I said I was going with you he wouldn’t want to come.”

That stopped her in her tracks. In Anne’s world the more you disliked someone related to you the more they weren’t supposed
to know that was the way you felt.

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that in a city the size of Derry there’d have been somebody I could have talked to, but there wasn’t.
I was always too awkward and shy, could never join in the way I saw other girls do, couldn’t whisper and confide. So I’d kept
myself to myself and spent my time waiting for when I might leave.

It was the same now. I sat there, saying less and less, getting lower as each minute passed. And the longer I sat on Anne’s
good settee in her clean and tidy living room with her clean and tidy life all around me, the surer I was that I had to find
the courage in me to walk through the door and out into the storm. And the surer I was that I had to, the surer I was that
I couldn’t. Suddenly I understood that the life I had with Robbie was all about getting away from this. Then I knew that I
hadn’t gone far enough, that I had to leave the life I was living and travel further and make another one over again. I saw
the seal heading down into black water, and I knew I had to learn how to drown.

And fear of it stopped my throat, so I choked on the glass of wine Anne had poured for me, sending it flying all over her
sofa, and me flying out of the door.

When I got home I apologised to my mother for giving her lip. She nodded her head without looking at me, but I saw her mouth
tighten with satisfaction and I had to clamp my own shut or I’d have been out on my ear.

I lasted another three days with her then I took the deepest breath of my life, phoned the number Liam had given me, left
a message for him, then got on a bus that was headed down South.

I
t was dark when the bus pulled into Kilkenny city. There were people waiting on the pavement, but I kept my eyes in front.
I’d been worrying myself sick all the way down. Would Liam meet me when I got there? Would I still want to see him if he did?
Could I even remember what he looked like? I closed my eyes tight and pictured as hard as I could, but all I got was Robbie.
I stared out at the lights and the darkness because it was better than staring in at Robbie’s face, which wouldn’t go away.
I tried again for Liam, but the harder I tried the more completely I’d forgotten. Kilkenny was coming up on every signpost,
so I knew we were near. By the time we’d swung off the ring road, I was wound up tight as a scream.

The bus drove into the station yard and stopped. I reached up and took my things from the rack, then walked slowly, slowly
down the centre aisle. I climbed down the steps, my eyes on my feet. I lifted my head and there he was, and I knew him right
away.

He took my bag and pulled me to the side so the girl behind me could get past. Then he stood there, looking down at me, smiling
like an idiot.

“You’ve no hair.”

“Not much. Anne says I look like a scalded fox with a dose of the flu.”

“Who’s Anne?”

“Brian’s wife.”

“Ah. The sister-in-law. Is this all the luggage you have?”

“There’s another one in the hold.”

We went round to the side of the bus where the driver was unloading. I pointed to a small blue suitcase.

Liam lifted it out, set it down on the pavement, folded me into his arms, and that was that. Or it was till we reached the
house and we had a row over nothing at all on account of the state of our nerves. Then we went to bed and that was that again.

Liam is a stonemason and a sculptor. He went to art college in Dublin, spent a couple of years in a stonemason’s yard in Cork,
then moved himself here because he’d had about enough of cities. Liam comes from Tipperary—that’s the next county—a place
called Graigmoyla, forty-odd miles to the west of here.

“Kilkenny seemed a good compromise,” he’d told me on Achill. “Close enough to home but not too close. People I knew around
the place to give me a start.”

By that he meant near enough to see his family when he wanted to, but not so near that they’re forever dropping in. Liam is
one of five, and he’s slap in the middle. Connor’s the oldest; he lives in the home-place with Kathleen, his wife, and they
work the family farm. His father still lives there, and he keeps his hand in, though these days he does less and less. Then
there’s Eileen and Liam, and after him, Carmel and Tom. Liam thinks a lot of his family, especially Connor and Kathleen, but
he has to have a bit of a distance from them or he feels like he needs to come up for air.