The Bird Woman (5 page)

“Correct,” he said. “On both counts. It’s the drugs. Why don’t you try Catriona?”

“Do I look like a dyke?”

“Silly girl—ugly word. Catriona’s so beautiful. Those red lipstick circles she draws on her cheeks. I’d try for her myself
if I was able.”

“Is she a dyke?”

“Who knows? She might feel like giving it a go if you asked her nicely. Lots of people have a bit of both.”

“Speak for yourself,” I said. “I certainly don’t.” I was shocked. Besides, I was afraid of Catriona, though I didn’t say that
to Michael. She saw blood coming out of the taps, which was worse than seeing people being blown to bits.

Michael stared at me, a long, slow, speculative look from
those hooded eyes. “You’re very narrow-minded for a redhead,’ he said.

I wanted to ask him what he meant, but I didn’t. I was afraid of my hair, even then.

Michael never touched me, never as much as took my hand walking back through the dark. And I was glad enough, for it kept
things light and simple. My forwardness was really only bravado.

Robbie came, and when he did Michael vanished from sight.

“Hubby alright?” he’d ask me afterwards. “Not pining?”

“Robbie,” I’d say. “His name’s Robbie.”

But he went on stubbornly calling him Hubby. I wouldn’t answer him when he did. I sulked, but he wouldn’t shift; it was Hubby
this and Hubby that till I lost my temper.

“Lay off, would you? You’ve never even set eyes on him.”

But he had. He’d seen Robbie from a window.

“I wouldn’t want to meet him on a dark night down a back entry,” he said. “He’s the sort kicks the shite out of people like
me—”

He had a point, though I didn’t say so.

Robbie hated coming to the hospital. Shame made him narrow his shoulders and kick out sparks with his steel-shod boots. His
wife in that place, labelled forever, was more than he could handle. And no Barbara Allen. He’d wanted Barbara Allen as I
never had, and now she was flushed down some hospital sluice, gone when she’d hardly started.

My mother came on the bus from Derry. I told her the doctor had said I could ask for a transfer to the hospital there. That
way she could visit more often.

She gave me a long, straight look and told me I had a husband. Then she said Londonderry was just a wee village for talk,
and folk said these things ran in families, and what about my two wee nieces? Had I no thought for Brian and Anne at all?

“Oh, folk know alright,” she added. “I don’t try to hide what can’t be hid, that’s not my way. But some things are best not
advertised.”

Hard words, but there was a tenderness in that hospital, a looking-out-for-one-another that nearly made me not mind them.
We were all raw with our own failure, and as well as that our minds were turned down low with drugs so we weren’t so keen
on judging. That was a kind of liberation, for what could you do at the bottom but laugh—the laughter of gentleness, not of
derision? Derision was for out there. Derision and fear-of-derision had landed us in here. We had broken ourselves on our
own wheels, trying to be what we thought was required of us, trying to be “normal.” Failing. In here we moved slowly, taking
care, as wounded things take care. Oh, there were dislikes and resentments alright, but only because we were human. Mostly
we were as careful of each other’s sore places as of our own, or nearly so. And in a funny way there was no one out there
as real for us as the ones inside that we lived with every day. Perhaps what bound us together was pity more than love. I
don’t know; I don’t know where the one stops and the other starts.

I was discharged before Michael was. I wrote out my address and I said good-bye, and it never once crossed my mind that I
might not see him again. I’d accepted the gifts he’d given me—gifts that were given freely, as you give when you are young.
I took them without thought or gratitude; took them in the fullness of youth, when life is opening and everything seems natural
and yours by right.

I sent him a postcard. Later on I scribbled half a letter, but I lost it on a bus. I never rewrote it. I was living my life,
I forgot about Michael. When at last I remembered, my letter came back
with “unknown at this address” scrawled over the envelope. Perhaps he’s alright, perhaps he’s alive, but I get no sense that
he’s out there still The depression was very bad with him; it never let him alone.

I am thirty-six and already so much left undone and regretted. What will I do when I’m old?

W
here was I? The day after the night I first met Liam. Saturday. I met him again in the street late that morning. He was walking
towards me, his head down, his eyes on the pavement, no sign of Noreen. I was dying with the hangover and the lack of sleep,
but I wanted to be out of the flat and away from Robbie, away from Robbie’s foul words, away from the misery in his eyes when
he came out with them.

I’d told him I’d messages to do. I was out the door almost before he knew I was going.

When I saw Liam my first thought was to turn on my heel and run, but I didn’t. I’d be past him in a flash, I told myself,
there was no call to be drawing attention to myself, running off like an eejit. So I went on ahead, my eyes on the ground,
the same as his were. Then the next thing I felt a hand gripping my arm and a voice saying my name out as if it was news to
me.

“You can leave go of my arm,” I said. “I’m not about to run off with your wallet.”

He let go. He said he hadn’t seen me till I was nearly past, he hadn’t meant to hurt me.

“How about a cup of coffee?” he added. “Wouldn’t you let me buy you a coffee or a drink or something? Would you fancy a bite
of lunch?”

No, I said, I didn’t want a drink, or not yet, and where was Noreen, wouldn’t she be wanting her lunch any minute now?

“That should keep you busy and out of trouble,” I added nastily.

“Noreen got the early train to Dublin. Said she couldn’t be doing with Northerners. Always arguing and complaining and telling
the rest of us what to do. Said
she
knows when she isn’t welcome, even if I don’t.”

“And don’t you?”

“Oh, I do. It’s coming through loud and clear, I just don’t want to admit it’s what I’m hearing—”

My head hurt, and I wanted to get away from him. By now I was well on my way to forgetting all about the business with him
the night before. It seemed like a dream, a stupid dream, and I was sick of myself and the way I let my imagination lead me
up garden paths. Then he put out his hand and took mine. Straightaway I was back there, ready to drop with the knowing of
what I had known last night. And with the fear of it.

He didn’t let go of my hand. Instead he put his other one under my elbow and drew me round to face him. I kept my head down,
my eyes well away from his. But I let him move his hands to my upper arms and hold them there to steady me. After a while
his hands dropped.

“Right,” he said. “Lunch,” he said, and steered me into the Sceptre and sat me down in a snug. Then off he went to the bar
and came back with sandwiches and pints of Guinness.

“I don’t like Guinness,” I said.

“You could do with building up.”

I don’t remember any more than that, I don’t remember what I said next or what he said next or whether I drank the Guinness
or left it sitting or poured it over his head. But I remember how I
pressed back into the chair, how I tried to get small and still inside my clothes to get away from him. He never touched me,
and I never touched him, but when I got back to the flat two hours later, I had a story ready for Robbie and I wasn’t slow
running it past him. I told him I’d rung my mother from a pay phone while I was out. Brian and Anne and the babies had been
there with her.

“They’re away off to the West for a week’s holiday,” I said. “They’ve rented a house—a place off the coast of Mayo called
Achill Island. Brian came on to ask did we want to come with them?”

Robbie was looking at me, but I was busy taking the dishes off the drainer and stacking them into tidy piles by the sink.

“We?” Robbie said, so I knew he’d bought the rest of the lie.

“Well, not exactly,” I said, still not looking at him. “He asked were you working, and I said you were. Then he said did I
want to come?”

A new cottage had been built hard behind the old one, its front door facing across to the other one’s back door. For the old
couple or maybe the young couple—family, anyway—a natural proximity. Sometime later someone had added a joining arm so the
two had become the one, with a bit of a yard in the space between. Hardly even a yard. Just a rough place for hens to pick
over and washing to hang, sheltered from wind and weather.

Achill. We’d been there four days. I had carried a kitchen chair out and was sitting doing nothing at all, the gnats rising,
the shirts I’d washed in the kitchen sink just stirring in the quiet air. Liam had gone off after groceries and a mechanic
to look at his car. There was a noise he didn’t much care for in the engine, he said, and maybe he wanted some time off from
me as well,
maybe he’d bitten off more than he could easily chew. For myself, I was glad to be on my own. My thoughts went wandering about
in the whitish sea light that you get off that western coast.

The yard was three sides cottage, with the fourth side closed off by a big thick dark fuchsia hedge, red now with hanging
blooms that were starting to drop. It was early September, a bare two months since they’d let me out of the hospital, a bare
four since the bomb had gone off that killed Jacko and left me not able to stop crying. The yard had been covered over with
a scrape of rough concrete, breaking up now so the weeds and the moss had taken hold, the whole place littered with things
that were most likely never going to be used again but just might come in handy one day: broken boards and odd stones and
shells carried up from the beach, floats for a fishing net in a tangled heap, a black plastic bucket half filled up with rainwater
over by the wall. A shallow brick drain was clogged up with silt and leaves and drained nothing.

If I lived here I might learn to do less, I thought. To wash less, to go on wearing things that were soiled. Even in the few
days we had been here the urge to clean it all up had died in me. I no longer itched to chuck out the junk, to unblock the
drain, to sweep it all down; I no longer wanted to do anything much except sit on the straight-backed chair in the soft bloom
of light and stretch out a hand to check the shirts on the line.

On the first day I’d washed all the windows in the kitchen. I’d intended doing the whole house, there wasn’t a clean window
anywhere; they were splattered with rain marks and mud and had deep layers of ancient cobwebs veiling the corners. Liam laughed
when he saw what I was at. I asked him why, and he went red and shook his head, but I pressed him and finally he said he thought
it strange to be starting in on cleaning on your holidays.

But that wasn’t why he’d laughed, and I knew it. I kept on at him, and he went redder, but still he wouldn’t say. In the end
he
gave in and told me about being on the sites in London and working alongside an old Cockney who thought Liam was way too innocent
and needed wising up. He had a dirty old tongue in his head, Liam said, but he meant well—he was forever passing on bits of
tips and information. It seems he’d told Liam to look out for women who were workers because women who were workers were always
on for sex.

I rinsed out the cloth in the water, then turned and washed down the last pane. But I didn’t give them a shine with newspaper
as I’d intended, and I didn’t wash any more. I was angry. I didn’t laugh and brush it aside; my mind closed like a trap round
his words. I remembered Robbie—what he’d said about knowing as soon as he saw me that I was repressed, a volcano ready to
blow.

I’d made a mistake with Robbie, I thought, and I was surprised at myself, for this was the first time I’d let myself think
such a thing.

Now it looked like I might well be on the way to making another one with Liam. I took my coat from the peg without a word.

“Where are you off to?” Liam wanted to know.

I didn’t reply. I shrugged on my coat and was gone through the door without looking back.

Out on the road I went steaming along, the wind on my face, my hair ripping out, the bog stretching red-brown to either side.
The sky was flying above me; the wind keened in the telephone wires; my ears sang with the lovely fresh running noise of water
going pelting down the ditches. With every step I took I was freer, the anger draining away.

“What ails ye?” Liam was asking me, coming up from behind.

“You know rightly,” I said, without slowing down. He started to say he was sorry, but I wasn’t having it, I turned around
to his face.

“Why shouldn’t women like sex?” I demanded. “And why do men have to sneer and joke if we do? Wouldn’t you think men would
be pleased that we like it? Wouldn’t you think it would make life easier all round?”

He started to try to say something, but I only laughed in his face. I threw my arms round his neck and pulled him to me; then
I undid my arms and pushed him away and went striding off over the bog, all the anger gone from me.