The Bird Woman (25 page)

I knew I shouldn’t be thinking this, but I was. I’d gone in behind the walls, dragging the gates shut, making them fast with
iron-shod bars as thick as a grown man’s thigh.

She didn’t stay much longer. She waited while Andrew leafed through to the end of the book; then she looked at her watch and
said she should be going. He shut the book. I watched his careful, closed face as he asked her if she thought she might like
to look at it again the next time she came.

She told him she’d like to. She said she would leave more time, she was sorry she had to go now.

It happens to me sometimes, this behind-the-walls-thing. Catherine calls it “race memory.” She says it’s those times when
you find yourself doing or saying things that you’d never let yourself do or say when you’re only yourself. Things that don’t
belong just to you, but to everyone in your tribe, to everyone who came before you. You’re tapping in to race memory.

When she said that the first time, I opened my mouth to protest, then I suddenly got it. The moment I did, it felt like she’d
dropped a round stone right into the heart of the pool of myself The stone sank down, and the ripples rose up and spread and
spread till they died away in my mossy fringes. Bull’s-eye.

So this time I knew that it wasn’t just me who’d been thinking that thought about trusting them and them turning against you;
I knew I was all the settlers who’d come to this country a long time ago and struggled to settle, to make new lives on forfeit
lands, knowing themselves to be hated.

“Planters,” that’s what they called us. A planted people, working the lands they’d lost through rebellion and confiscation.

I felt bad after Catherine had gone. I needn’t have bothered; I should have trusted my instincts.

A
UTUMN
/W
INTER
1998

I
was out on the hill picking plums, for I’d no one else in the book for that day and the children were gone till the evening.
I heard the car in the yard, and I knew right away it was Liam home from hanging a show in Waterford. I scrambled down from
the ladder and made for the kitchen, flushed with autumn and laden with windfalls and plums.

Liam said the show looked well, he was pleased with it, and so was the woman who’d hired him.

“She said there’s a permanent job coming up. She asked would I think of applying.”

I was delighted; I thought he must be over the worst if he’d started to think of a proper job. After all, he could always
pack it in if his confidence came back. There was the money as well, I’ll not deny that—but I’d dug in my heels over charging
a fee, so I didn’t mention the joys of a monthly pay cheque.

“I don’t want the job,” Liam said. “I’m not about to apply.”

I heard, but I didn’t take it in; I was too carried away with the thought of a bit of security and the prospect of Liam having
something to do that he might half like. Then his words hit me. I stopped and stared.

He stared back at me. Liam is so easygoing on the surface that sometimes I nearly forget what he’s like underneath.

“Why not?” I said, knowing full well I was wasting my breath.

“Spend the rest of my life hanging flavour-of-the-month crap painters? Painters still wet round the ears and only getting
shows because they’re doing the scene?” His voice was scornful and came through from a long way away. “Thanks, Ellen. Thanks
for the support.”

“You’re welcome,” I said. “I’m sorry I spoke, but I didn’t know Waterford specialised in crap painters. Somehow I sort of
imagined there’d be the odd one in there who was good.” I could hear the nastiness throb in my words, but I didn’t care. Was
it my fault that he’d lost his confidence and couldn’t work? Had I reproached him even once, or told him to pull himself together?

I stood there, all defiance, waiting for what he’d hit me with in return. He didn’t speak. Instead he got up and went out
without looking at me, so all I got by way of response was the click of the closing door.

I sat down and was filled with a feeling so empty and strange that I hardly knew where I was. I looked around, and I couldn’t
understand the sugar bowl or the tea mugs or the windfalls I’d picked up from the fading grass and set on the table less than
an hour before.

What had happened to us? Where was Liam, my Liam, who knew my most hidden self and forgave it, who loved me whoever I was?

I went outside in a daze and sat on the bench and leaned my head back against the old stone of the house. I stared at a dense
mass of fleshy leafed sedum and then at the pure, tall, white flowers of the Japanese anemones growing around the place. The
sweet wind rocked them and bounced them against the purplish-pink of the cosmos, while the raggedy yellow daisies that stood
as
high as my head dipped and glowed in the pale September sunlight. The thick mist of the morning had burned off hours ago,
and the mountains lay in long, pale mounds against the thin blue of the sky. Above me a few swallows hunted high up in the
sunny air. Watching them, I remembered I’d forgotten them all summer. They’d be gone soon, though I’d barely seen them, for
the months had passed in struggle and strife and now I would have to wait through winter’s emptier skies. I was filled with
grief at the loss.

I sat on, watching the tree shadows stretch themselves out across the fields in the autumn sunlight. In a month or two they’d
lie long like this in the middle of the day, and at four in the afternoon the night would be pressing in. Mud and water and
darkness. Sometimes frosty stars in the sky at night, frosty shards in the puddles in the mornings. But mostly mud, the secret
life of matter, the secret essence of life. All sentient life is dull, only the eyes shine. All sentient life is dense, warm,
soft, moist, liable to decay. Perhaps I could sit like this forever, I thought. Perhaps if I stayed close enough to matter—to
all that I saw, touched, tasted, smelled, heard—I would understand flesh. Perhaps I would even begin to understand why we
seem to need this flesh to decay in.

So we know who it is that is dying when we die.

It wasn’t a thought or a voice or a Seeing, yet there it was.

A flight of crows went over. I’d forgotten the crows as well. Great crowds of them climbed the skies in the autumn, lifting
and diving and falling, swishing their strong, black, raggedy wings through the thinning air. I felt better then about losing
the swallows. I thought of the centuries of autumns dying into winter here in this valley, the thousands of eyes that had
watched this death all down the years. I felt I was one with them but also only myself. I was mud and the sideways shine of
light on the mud.

I always thought Liam’s work was only his, that it went on somewhere else that was separate from me and didn’t affect the
life we lived between us.

There’s a painter Liam knows called Tom Gallagher, whose wife has devoted her life to her husband’s work, and the end of it
is that he’s famous. She has the most wonderful eye—Liam reckons she could have done it herself if she’d had a mind to—plus
she knows nearly more about painting than Tom does himself. She does everything: talks to the galleries; goes to the functions;
sources and buys his materials; keeps the books, the house, the garden; rears the kids. She creates all this space for Tom
to work in, and all he has to do is make great art.

I’ve never done a thing for Liam. I wouldn’t know great art if it leapt out and bit me on the nose.

He says he doesn’t want me to; he says he’d go crazy if he had to stare at his work every day, all day, and never an excuse
for doing anything normal.

“Besides,” Liam says, “Gallagher’s the real thing. He works from a place I only get to visit from time to time.… If he wasn’t
the real thing, Annette could have jumped through hoops of fire—it might have given him a better start in the early days,
but it wouldn’t ever have put him where he is now.”

But it isn’t just that I’ve not done anything for Liam—I’ve hindered as well as not helped. I didn’t know the first thing
about art when we met, and maybe I wasn’t as ready as I might have been to learn. I was awkward and shy, a fish out of water,
and I never wanted to go to the parties and openings where he’d have met the right people and got his face known. He never
pressed me, we never fought about it, and sometimes he went on his own, but mostly he didn’t. He despised the system—the doing
of the
rounds, the putting in of appearances—but lots of them do at the start; then they buckle down and learn how to work it. I
listened and sympathised when he ran it down, but when he showed signs of wavering I despised his change of heart aloud. I
would be like that: black is black and white is white and compromise only a sniff away from corruption.

Liam calls it the No-Surrender Mentality. The first time he said it I was furious.

“That isn’t fair,” I protested. “Look at Gerry Adams. You’ll not find him seeking out a middle way.”

“Sure, why would he?” Liam asked. “Isn’t he a Northerner, the same as you?”

That was a shock to me. The discovery that down here they think what the British think: that Northerners—Catholic and Protestant
alike—have more in common with each other than with them. (And may plagues descend on both their houses, wiping them from
the face of the earth and leaving it to more rational and deserving beings.)

But I see things now that I couldn’t see then. If Liam had done the rounds a bit he might have had more opportunities, and
more opportunities might have stretched him and given him confidence. Most likely more money as well, which would have made
our lives easier. It was alright when he was younger. Liam never gave a toss about being broke, and he doesn’t now, he’s not
an acquiring sort of a man. But we were living off an overdraft stretched as far as they’d let us stretch it, the children
were growing and needing, and everything had to be mended and fixed, there was nothing ever just thrown away. The house was
bad enough, but at least you could patch and make do. The car was much worse—the suspension going or the clutch giving up—these
were major disasters.

And it’s harder since the prosperity came with the Celtic Tiger. We wouldn’t be the only ones left behind, but sometimes it
feels that way. Sometimes when you’ve had a bad day then watched too many slick ads on TV, it feels like choosing not to make
money your aim in life is the same as choosing failure.

Sometimes when I looked at Liam I’d see him not as my husband, with all the complicated emotions and thoughts that that brings
up, but as a man nearing forty, with strengths and gains but also with losses and disappointments that would probably always
be there now. I’d see him like this and I’d be swept through with such love for this vulnerable, imperfect man who was quietly
folding and putting away his dreams that I’d wish from the bottom of my heart that I could have seen him this way before.
If I had, I think I’d have given up all my wants and needs—I might even have given
him
up if it meant he could have been what he’d dreamed once of being.

Then only days, hours later I’d swing right round and be filled with anger at him for poisoning our lives with this endless
depression. I was sick of art, I didn’t understand his work or what it meant to him, I didn’t care whether he was hanging
other people’s or making his own.

So all through that autumn and winter I argued it this way and that inside myself, the whole weary cycle over and over, the
whole weary drag through the days. Sometimes I wanted to kill him, and sometimes I’d only to glance at him and the pity rose
up so strong in me I nearly felt my heart would break. It was exhausting. Then, at the back end of January, a letter came
with “Limerick College of Art” on the front. He opened it and read it through.

“Catherine,” he said, passing it across to me.

I waited for more explanation, but it wasn’t coming so I read it instead. One of the lecturers in the Sculpture Department
had
taken time off on account of a family crisis, and they were looking for someone who might be willing to fill a temporary vacancy
at short notice. Liam’s name had come up. Would he by any chance be interested in two days’ teaching a week?

“Would he?” I heard myself ask.

“I expect so,” Liam said. “I’ll show him the letter.”

S
UMMER
1999

T
wo, sometimes three weeks ahead, the book was completely filled up. I was busy, too busy, you couldn’t just get sick and call
over, if you had an appointment with me you’d already been ill for a while.

Liam was busy too. The absentee lecturer hadn’t come back, and they’d asked if he’d think of another term, this time three
days a week instead of two. He said yes right away. He liked teaching and he was good at it, he began to find himself easier
to live with, and so did I. He stayed over in Limerick with colleagues a couple of nights a week, then came home and took
on other work as it came up, so the money situation eased as well. We needed a second car, so we bought one—not new, but newer
than anything else we’d ever driven before.