The Bird Woman (27 page)

She smiled, an ironic self-deprecating smile. “You can make yourself believe almost anything if you want to believe it badly
enough—” She picked up her empty mug and drained it. “The cough kept getting worse so they sent me to a specialist. He did
tests for TB, but they came back negative, so then he wanted me in hospital for observation. I went, but they couldn’t find
anything, not even a chest infection, so they thought it might be psychosomatic. Then my sister came to the hospital to see
me. She stood by the bed and told me enough was enough. She made me get up and get myself dressed in the clothes she’d brought,
then she took me home. She left my habit laid out on the bed like someone who’d died. After that the cough went away and it
never came back. So you see, I never decided to leave, I wanted to stay, it was only my body that didn’t. I suppose I must
have been deeply unhappy—”

I stared. “Why did you want to stay if you were unhappy?”

“For God,” she said simply. “I wanted God, and I thought a convent was the quickest way. I didn’t care about being unhappy.”

She stopped. I knew she wanted me to say something, but I didn’t because I couldn’t. I was embarrassed for her. I was even
more embarrassed for myself because she was my friend.

“You think I’m cracked, don’t you?”

I nodded. She waited again, but still I didn’t speak.

“I suppose I had what you’d call a very privileged childhood,” she said quietly. “I always wanted the best, and everyone always
went out of their way to try to see that I got it. I had so much, and so much was never enough….” Her voice trailed off.

“It’s sort of hard,” I said carefully, “from where I’m coming from, to understand why you’d want God at all.”

She looked at me as though I was a bit slow. “I told you, I wanted the best. God was the best, so I wanted God. That’s why
I
wanted to be a contemplative. It was the purest, or that’s what I thought at the time.”

I didn’t look at her. I concentrated on the apples I was peeling for a tart. In that moment it seemed as though my whole life
I’d been doing the opposite. Trying to get away from God. All my life I’d been running, and God had been thundering after
me. Raging from pulpits and platforms, shooting out of people’s mouths in tongues of fire,
Thou Shalt Nots
falling thick and fast, like rain. I’d felt harried and persecuted and spied on. The hundred and thirty-ninth psalm had pursued
me:
Thou knowest when I sit down and when I rise up; Thou discernest my thoughts from afar…
.
Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?
But down here was different, down here was ignorance and superstition. My mother’s words, and here was I, thinking them.
Down here was the first time in my life I’d felt even halfway safe from God. I could do what I liked, far away from those
terrible psalms.

“What have you got against nuns, Ellen?” She was smiling now. “Apart from Presbyterian bigotry, that is? I bet you’d never
met a nun in your life till you came here.”

“Presbyterians don’t consort with nuns,” I said calmly, not taking my eyes off the apples. Or I hoped it was calmly, I didn’t
feel it—I didn’t like that “Presbyterian bigotry” bit. Which was illogical as well, for I was always calling Presbyterians
bigots. But that was my right, not hers.

“Were you a virgin when you joined?” I asked just to cover up.

“I was. Don’t look so shocked. I wanted God, I was very determined, I thought you had to be a virgin to get close to God.
And you don’t join, you
enter.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I don’t blame you for thinking I’m cracked.”

This time I looked at her, but still I didn’t speak.

“I understand, really I do,” she said. “If I wasn’t me,
I
’
d
think I was cracked as well.”

I didn’t like that either. I felt patronised and condescended to. The anger was rising strong in me, and I didn’t want to
stuff it down anymore.

“No, you don’t,” I said quietly, “you don’t understand at all. You think you do, but you don’t, you’ve got no idea what I
think inside or what I feel and you never have. How would you? You’ve never been to a Presbyterian church. You’ve never even
been to the North, you’ve never bothered your arse, you’ve got all these assumptions you just assume that I share.” I heard
my voice. It was still quiet, but she couldn’t have missed the fury.

“You think you know everything, but you don’t.” My voice was finally rising. “You know fuck-all about anything—”

I got up, carried the peeled apples across to the sink, and came back and stood by the table. I couldn’t stop my hands from
shaking. I cast around for some way to prove to her that I was right and she was wrong. My eye fell on the open tin half full
of the shortbread she’d just been eating. I picked it up, then slammed it hard back down on the table and pushed it under
her nose. “You don’t even know what a tray bake is,” I yelled in her face. “You don’t even know you don’t know, you don’t
even care, you don’t even
want
to know—”

It was too much. I gave up. I sat down abruptly, laid my head on my arms, and cried, though I didn’t know why. Once I’d started
I couldn’t stop. I cried so long and so hard that I got that funny gulpy thing I haven’t had for years. When I came round
enough to want to stop I realised that Catherine was standing over me, stroking my hair. She must have been like that for
ages, but I didn’t know it. She pushed a not-very-clean tissue into my hand, and I wiped and blew.

At last I calmed down enough to hear her voice, but I still couldn’t speak. “Ellen,” she was saying urgently, “Ellen, tell
me about tray bakes.”

I gulped and spluttered. The tissue was a sodden mess in my hand. At last I could speak.

“Wise up, would you, Catherine? I just got upset….”

“No, tell me,” she said, sitting down again. “I want to know.”

“A tray bake’s what you were eating,” I managed, my voice very small and shaky still. I stopped. “For Christ’s sake, Catherine,
this is ridiculous, I don’t know why I said it, it’s got nothing to do with anything—”

“Tell me.”

“A tray bake’s a baking tray slathered with flour and butter and eggs and stuff in different combinations. You bake it. You
cut it into squares while it’s hot, and when it’s cooled down it goes into a tin.” I was dabbing away at my nose as I spoke.

“The tray-bake tin,” I added. “You’d know it right away. It has to be full all the time, that’s really important—it shows
you’re a virtuous woman.” Suddenly I heard myself, and I started to laugh and I couldn’t stop. It was the other side of the
crying. It was like when you’re a child and you do whirlys too long, so you have to unwind in the other direction to stop
yourself falling over. Catherine didn’t laugh. At last I was through it. I felt flat, calm, completely exhausted.

“A virtuous woman, her price above rubies,” Catherine said quietly.

“I thought Catholics didn’t get to read the Old Testament?”

She shook her head, but she didn’t say anything. I was glad. I didn’t want to talk anymore, I was through with talking.

Two weeks later I put back a shoulder, and that was a first. A neighbour came without an appointment, his young daughter held
in his arms. I glanced at the child, and I saw right away what was wrong.

“Take her to Casualty, Mikey,” I told him. “I think her shoulder’s out.”

He pushed her towards me as though he was thrusting a gift on me that I was too modest to take. “Well, put it back then,”
he said. “Isn’t that what I brought her for?”

I told him I didn’t do bones, I didn’t know how, he’d be better off at the hospital.

“You can do it,” he said, “I know well you can. And you might as well do it now, for I’ll not take no for an answer.”

So I took hold of Geraldine’s arm, and before I knew it I’d given it a bit of a twist and her shoulder had clicked back in.

Mikey nodded his satisfaction; it was only what he’d expected, he’d no idea of the shock I’d just got because it had happened
all in one go and without anything coming into my hands at all.

That’s the way of it now with bones and disks. Nothing else. I do them because people ask, but it isn’t the Healing, it’s
technical through and through.

It’s nearly as though my hands have been taught a new skill from all the time that they’ve spent at the Healing.

When I’m doing the Healing now it’s different from how it used to be. I get hollow, like a pipe, and it’s like there’s something
inside the pipe, but I don’t know what. It isn’t like flowing water or even an electric current anymore—it’s more a dynamic
emptiness that has no colour or substance.

I don’t feel occupied or invaded when it comes, but I feel myself being moved effortlessly to the very outside of myself so
it
can take up all the available space. What is this
it
that I speak of? Who knows? It’s something without form or outwardness, yet its strong—much stronger than I am.

Maybe it’s life itself?

Right from the start, it came when it wanted, left when it wanted, gave me no choice or say. It would stretch out my hands
and place them where it directed them—sometimes they stayed on the body itself, but sometimes they held themselves over it,
on the level the Alternatives call the “aura.” I didn’t have to know anything, I only had to follow my hands.

I still don’t know much and I don’t seek out patients, they seek me out, and I promise nothing. These days if I don’t feel
the emptiness in my hands—if they don’t uncurl and go from slack to rigid, fingers separate—then I keep them to myself. I
shake my head and turn away, and they hate me and I can’t stop them. They hate me because the sick will always hate those
they think can return them to health but deny them.

At first I thought if the emptiness came it meant that the Healing would work and the patient would recover.

But I found that it wasn’t always to be like that.

Which upset me. I couldn’t think what the emptiness was coming for if it wasn’t going to do its stuff and heal.

Then I noticed that sometimes people didn’t just not get better—they might get much worse, and quite quickly. Twice I had
people with late-stage cancer, and I felt the emptiness in me so fierce I was certain sure they’d recover. But they went home
and told everyone they felt much better, then inside the week they were dead. For both of them it was the same.

For a while there I wouldn’t touch cancer. I was too afraid of what might happen when I did. Afraid for myself as well. I
remembered the woman whose presence had summoned those awful figures I’d seen and named.

Sometimes I think that the body pursues sickness, seeking out the truth of its own mortality. It wants to know about death,
which the mind disallows and denies.

The body, knowing that truth, carries it back to show to the mind so the mind will understand its fate and begin to doubt
itself. Or that truth is carried forward—entering death—abandoning body and mind. And the world is constantly readjusted by
the presence of that truth. This is the sinew in the meat of incarnation, which is what we are here to eat.

Such carnivorous language. I think these things but I don’t understand them.

“Decay is the beginning of all birth, the midwife of great things… the deepest mystery that He has revealed to mortal man.”
That’s Paracelsus, a doctor and a mystery man of the Middle Ages. When I left the library the head librarian had given me
a book about him and his writings. Catherine’s always trying to give me books about psychology and healers and therapies but
I don’t want them. I want to know only basic bodily functions. I read that Paracelsus book because it was a gift.

Incarnation does for us—the jaw throbs with abscess, the head explodes with migraine; pain gathers the body and mind to itself,
it’s the only thing that brings us to heel. Without it we strut like feathered cocks, having no need of Paracelsus’s mystery.

Our flesh is of the world—it is us and is not us; it’s the part of us that belongs to the world. When it’s time for us to
get free of our flesh, we’ll get free.

Carrion eaters—jackals, hyenas, vultures—haunt the nightmarish fringes of the imagination. Circling and waiting, they are
the mind’s blind terror at the body’s inevitable dissolution. They have their uses. The body is only itself, only clay to
go back to the clay, to go down the craw of a vulture, to fuel its vigil
up there in the hot, high sky, to be transformed then ejected through its anal passages.

I’ve stopped refusing cancer now. I tell them it’s their choice, it’s up to them, that I don’t know if what I do will make
them better or make them worse. Then I see the fear in their faces and I soften. I tell them I’ll try if they want but it’s
up to God. For some reason that I can’t fathom, that reassures them.

What happens has nothing to do with me, it’s between the spirit and what it wants from its fleshly incarnation. And I think
that has very little to do with us, or at least with the part of us that we think of as us.

It has to do with whatever is happening between the spirit and God.