The Bird Woman (2 page)

I heard the door open, but I kept my head well down, I was bent over the sink, scraping away, the tears still dripping.

“
Daddy,” came Suzanna’s voice, cool as you please, from somewhere to the left of me. “Daddy, why is Mammy crying again?”

“O where hae ye been, Lord Randal, my son

O where hae ye been, my handsome young man?”

“I hae been to the Wildwood; mother, make my bed soon,

For I’m weary wi’ hunting, and fain wald lie down.”

I sit at the table and say it aloud. It’s a poem I learned at school
—
years and years ago in Derry, when I still called it Londonderry, when I still knew who I was.

It’s a ballad, very old, about a young, strong man who goes out hunting with his hounds and comes home sick and dying. His
mother keeps tormenting him
—
where’s he been, what’s he eaten, where’
s
his hounds? All these questions.

“O they swell’d and they died; mother, make my bed soon….”

His
true love has poisoned him, see. His hounds have died, and you know rightly that’s what’s about to happen to him too. His
mother can’t save him, no one can, for he’s been to the Wildwood, a place I know well.

Liam found me in the Wildwood. He picked me up, lifted me onto his horse, carried me clean away. In the early years, whenever
I was so homesick for the North that I was certain sure I couldn’t thole it down here for another minute, I’d hear the words
in my head and something would change. It always worked.

And later on, whenever I was fed up with Liam, or out of sorts with my life, I’d think of the Wildwood and how he saved me
from it, and I’d calm down.

Missing somewhere may not only be about wanting to be there, it may be a bone-deep need for the voices and the ways you were
reared to, even when you know well how lonely they’d make you now. Lonely with that special, sharp loneliness that comes when
you’ve got what you longed for and it isn’t enough anymore
—
it isn’t ever going to be enough again.

And that’s what’s ahead of me now. The bag’s packed, the alarm’s set, but I’m walking the night house, sleepless. And when
I’m not walking I’m sitting here all alone.

All alone, and trying to frighten myself into remembering how Liam saved me, to frighten myself into being so grateful again
that I’ll forgive him for what he’s done. I try, but it doesn’t work. The kitchen doesn’t work either, though I love the kitchen
at night
—
its lit quietness, the floor washed, the work done, everything red up and put away. But the kitchen is different; everything’s
different and so far away from itself it might not ever get back.

I go upstairs again, past our shut door, with Liam sleeping behind it. I want to shake him awake, but what’s the use? Liam
awake won’t
bring me sleep, and I’m sick of hearing my own voice saying the same things over and over.

Suzanna’s door’s next. I go in and watch her, flat on her back, her duvet pulled into a scrumpled nest all around her. You
could dance a jig on Suzanna and she’d only stretch and maybe smile and wriggle back down into sleep. She’s eight years old,
full up with herself, her own child. She has Liam’s soft brown curls all round her head, and it’s her will against mine.

I stand at the half-open door of Andrew’s room, but I don’t go in, for the slightest movement wakes him. Andrew is different
—
so different you’d nearly think him Robbies child and nothing to do with Liam at all. But Robbies child was a girl, and she
slid from out of me way before her time. I held her in my hand
—
all the size of her
—
and I called her Barbara Allen, after the song. Then the ambulance came and they put me on a stretcher and one of the ambulance
men took her, he said he would mind her for me, but he lied, for I never saw poor wee Barbara Allen again. That was the day
I saw Jacko Brennan die in a bomb a full month before it happened. Then they put me into the hospital and they filled me up
with drugs to keep the Wildwood away.

S
EPTEMBER
1988

T
he first time ever I saw Liam he was standing at the bar of Hartley’s in Belfast. I was married to Robbie then—I’d been married
to Robbie for near on four years for all I was only twenty-three. I was married and that was that; I’d no more thought of
going off with anyone else than of dandering down to the travel agents and booking myself a nice wee holiday on the moon.

I was to meet Robbie around eight, along with a bunch of his drinking friends that he’d known from way back. I walked in,
and the minute I saw Robbie I knew from the cut of him that he hadn’t just strolled through the door. Stan and Rita were there,
they were sitting at a table along with a couple more of our crowd, plus a black-haired girl with a widow’s peak whom I’d
never laid eyes on before. She was wearing jeans and a sweater, and she hadn’t a scrap of makeup on her, though it was Friday
night and there wasn’t another woman in the place without heels and lipstick and mascara. She wasn’t talking to anyone, and
no one was talking to her.

Robbie was up at the bar buying a round, and he called me over.

“Mike phoned,” he told me. “Christine started early. He’s away up to the hospital to hold her hand—”

“I thought she wasn’t due for another month?”

“So did she. But she got ahead of herself, and nothing would do her but she had to have Mike. I told them a bit of a story
at work, and they’re not expecting me back till sometime next week. I’m covering for Mike while he’s otherwise occupied, I’ve
been round at the gallery all afternoon.

“This is Liam,” he added. I looked up at this tall, thickset man with brown curly hair and grey eyes. “He’s from Dublin, so
he is. He’s up here about a show in the Arts Council Gallery.”

Robbie was an electrician with a firm on the Lisburn Road, but he did nixers on the side whenever they came his way. His mate
Mike did the lighting for the Arts Council Gallery, and he made sure to always ask Robbie when he needed an extra hand.

“Robbie’s been great,” Liam said. “We’ve been sorting out what we’ll need for the show—”

Robbie nodded, but he didn’t say anything. I knew right away he didn’t like this Liam. Then the drinks came and more chairs
were fetched across, and when everyone finally settled down again, there I was, beside Liam.

Liam was introduced all round and so was the black-haired one in the jeans, whose name, it seemed, was Noreen. Liam told us
he was a sculptor, and your woman Noreen was a potter from Cork and something called the Crafts Council of Ireland was organising
a group exhibition in the North in November. They were up here in Belfast, he said, to look at the “space.”

No one was listening; none of us cared. I saw Stan look at Robbie, and his eyes closed down from inside, plus that wicked
wee pulse that means he’s up to something was showing beside his
mouth. After that, I knew not to bother my head with them; that look of Stan’s meant Liam and Noreen wouldn’t be with us for
long.

Stan wouldn’t be one for socialising with those from the other persuasion. Especially not when they came from the South.

Liam gave me a cigarette. I was only a few weeks out of the hospital and still smoking like a chimney. He brought out a lighter
and stuck it under my nose and flicked it. It didn’t light. He looked at it, surprised, then shook it and tried it again,
but still it didn’t light. I remember being surprised that he was surprised by his lighter not lighting; I mean, it isn’t
exactly unusual—lighters are always playing up or running out or just not working. I was watching him and thinking all this
in an idle, distant sort of a way; then I glanced down at his other hand, laid flat on the table, and I got this terrible
shock. It was a big hand, broad, with a thatch of brown hairs on the back and nails that weren’t that clean. I looked, and
the noise of the bar dropped away and I couldn’t look anywhere else, for I knew for certain sure that I had some business
with this Liam that I didn’t want.

Business? Ah, tell the truth, Ellen. You knew this “business” of yours was bed, and maybe a whole lot more.

I dropped my cigarette, and it rolled onto the floor. I bent down and started fishing around for it, the sweat springing out
on my skin.
I
’
m going crazy again,
I thought, though I wasn’t seeing anything and nothing was happening that definitely shouldn’t be happening; there was only
this weird knowing-something-ahead-of-its-time that always frightens me stupid.

I didn’t want to come up, I’d have stayed right there, safe among the chair legs, but Robbie was watching me like a hawk since
the hospital, so I didn’t dare.

I found the cigarette, wet through in a puddle of beer, then I
unbent myself and lifted my head up over the edge of the table. My eyes met Robbie’s.

For
fuck’s sake, woman,
Robbie’s eyes said,
for fuck’s sake get ahold of yourself
—

Implacable, his eyes. No softness, nowhere to hide. So I knocked back the vodka, straightened my backbone, and turned to this
Liam and talked.

I drank a lot that night, and I wasn’t the only one.

I was waiting for Stan—it was always Stan who made the moves—but he didn’t; he let them sit on.

He’d glance across at Liam, who was labouring away, trying to get the conversation up and running; then he’d sneak a wee look
at Noreen, but she’d given up and was staring into her glass.

Sound move. She wanted to go—any fool could tell you that—but she couldn’t catch Liam’s eye, he was way too busy with me.

I began to wonder what game Stan was playing. Stan could be cruel—a cat-and-mouse streak a mile wide. Was he waiting for Robbie
to catch on that someone was trying too hard with his wife?

The paranoia was fairly setting in when Stan starts reminding Robbie we’re meeting up with Suds Drennan and Josie at ten.
Then he turns round to Liam, his face dead serious, and he tells him he’s sorry but the place we’ve fixed to meet Suds and
Josie in wouldn’t be anything like the bar we’re in now.

Liam nods and smiles warily. He knows he’s being told something; he just hasn’t figured out what.

Stan says what he means is the bar we’re going to wouldn’t be that mixed.

They’re all attention, even Noreen. This is Belfast after all,
this is what they’re here for. Stan says “hard line,” he mentions their accents, he mentions the fact that Liam’s called Liam,
which is a Catholic name…. He lets his voice trail off regretfully. They understand.

Northerners love frightening Southerners—telling them what not to say, where not to go, where not to leave their Southern-registered
cars—seeing their eyes grow large and round. The Southerners love it too, you can nearly hear them telling themselves what
they’ll tell their friends when they go back home down South.

Everyone loves it: the drama, the bomb blasts, the kick of danger in the air. So who’s suffering, tell me that? No one at
all, till some unreasonable woman starts into grieving over the daughter blown to bits, the son sitting rotting in jail, the
husband shot through the head, his body thrown down an entry or dumped on waste ground.

Some woman, or maybe some man. For men grieve too, and even your hardest hard-man is not as hard as he likes to let on when
it comes to next of kin. And children are soft; children cry easily and long.

It’s a sorry business alright, we humans are a sorry business, the way it’s all mixed up inside us, the ghoulish bits that
come alive watching the horror, the soft, gentle bits that will go thinking the sky’s fallen in when we find out that someone’s
not coming home to us ever, ever again.

Where was I? In Hartley’s, 1988.

So we left them sitting there, the two of them, and went dandering off up the road to the Lancaster, which is a mixed bar,
safe as houses, where you’ll get served till two in the morning, no bother at all. And I was drunk, and frightened even through
the drink. I thought if I could only get clear of Liam that awful feeling that he was my fate would vanish away.