The Bird Woman (19 page)

It wasn’t that I hadn’t thought of giving in and letting people come for my hands—I had. Not from pity for them, nor belief
in myself, but from the outside chance it might bring me some peace from this awful spiralling-thing that grew harder to bear
as one day followed another. I looked at Liam, but there was no softness and I knew it was all or nothing—he wasn’t going
to relent.

“Six months,” I heard myself say through the dread that
shortened my breath and made my hands shake and clung to me like a sickness.

“A year,” he said.

I nodded, unable to speak.

So I sold my soul for a mess of pottage, or rather a Stanley cooker and a car that mostly starts. I said that to Liam not
long afterwards, but he didn’t understand, for he didn’t know the story—Catholics don’t go in for the Old Testament much—so
I had to explain about Jacob and Esau and soup and birthrights.

He said selling your birthright wasn’t the same as selling your soul.

I said that in my case it was, for my birthright was freedom from ignorance and superstition, and now here I was, immersing
myself in them both. He looked at me then, for he remembered those words, and he knew I was quoting my mother. I knew that
he knew, and I meant him to. I felt bullied by him and cheated out of myself.

But for all I love the Stanley, I am sorry now I didn’t let him travel when he had the chance.

Liam was right. Life was easier when I did what he wanted and started putting my hands on the people who came—which was what
the thing inside me wanted as well. It had an outlet so it stopped backing up, and the feeling of having live electric cables
spilling inside me began to ease off. The spiralling didn’t stop, but whatever-was-causing-it flowed out through my hands
and I was only a sort of a storm drain that it passed through. I suppose it had been a good while building up in me, so by
the time I gave in it was a whole lot stronger than I even knew myself.

I’d nearly forgotten peace in the body, but now I remembered
and so did everyone else. Liam cheered up, and the children stopped squabbling and Whiskey followed me round the place, watching
me silently, swishing her tail. It was lovely, so it was. I relearned how to laugh.

There’s a lean-to shed opening off the kitchen that we used as a store for fuel. The roof was sound so it was dry, and it
was handy not having to go outdoors on a winter’s night to fetch in logs and turf for the fire. Now Liam cleared it out, plastered
the walls, laid a timber floor, put in electricity and a new door that opened straight onto the yard. He wanted to plumb in
a sink as well, for I needed to wash my hands a lot with this work. I wouldn’t let him. What was the point with the kitchen
so close?

It was pleasant enough at the start. People knocked, the same as before, and I’d take them through and we’d sit in my room
while they told me their stories. The Healing itself wasn’t near as bad as I’d expected either. I only did what I’d done before,
but now I allowed whatever-was-happening to happen, instead of using all my strength to block it from coming through. Which
was useless anyway—like trying to stop the river’s flow or the trees coming into leaf. More than that, when I didn’t block
it, it was kinder and easier to live with.

It was always local people back then. Country people who expected little, who’d lived a good while with whatever was bothering
them, had tried the doctor without relief, and now were ready to try my hands instead of another course of tablets. They weren’t
all strangers either—a few of them I’d have known from the library, and there were others I’d recognise from around the town.
If I eased them at all they were grateful, and if I failed them I never knew it, for they were at once too courteous and too
humble in their expectations to come back to me and complain. Everything was simple still; it was always minor or chronic
conditions I was dealing with—muscle strains and burns and skin
problems, bed-wetting, tinitis, and cramp. Debilitating, but not life-threatening. I never saw organ failure or cancer or
serious illness as I do now, I never had to reach very deep into pain or into life.

I have to admit that once I got the hang of the Healing I began to feel a wee bit excited. I thought it was partly me, you
see, and though I felt shy and shamed by it, there were times I felt important as well.

I hardly spoke at all to begin with, but after a while I summoned my courage and ventured the odd remark. The odd remark was
ventured back, and soon I began to enjoy the exchange. They were modest people for the most part, readier with a soft word
than a hard one, more likely to belittle their distress than to blow it up with complaint. When I was done they’d fumble for
their purses. I’d shake my head and turn away, but later I’d find gifts left on the step. Mostly home produce—eggs and vegetables,
sometimes flowers or plants, a dressed hen or a jar of honey.

I’m making it sound as though I decided then opened the door to a whole crowd of people standing outside only waiting to come
in. It wasn’t like that at all—two knocks a week, and I thought myself busy; half a dozen, I said I was run off my feet. Which
meant that the old life still wrapped me around, and I told myself nothing had changed, though underneath I knew different.
This new life was there at the core as the heart is—secreted in flesh, yet directing the life of that flesh.

Liam says now that I lied to him about Andrew and wouldn’t trust him. He doesn’t understand, I didn’t lie, Andrew
does
heal up well; all I did was stop his body from panicking so it could get to work on the cut.

Sometimes I think that’s all I ever do. No, that’s wrong. I don’t do anything, something works through me, my part is only
to let it.

This, as far as I can remember or work it out, is what happens when it happens. A tingling, shivery feeling begins in my head,
emptying it and opening it up in a way that I can’t describe. The tingling spreads over the body, then fades. Something starts
in the feet, it flexes my toes so I know that it’s there, it strengthens, then dies away. My hand lifts itself of its own
accord. It stiffens. The fingers stretch out. It places itself onto the body or above the body. Sometimes it stays there,
sometimes it moves itself on to somewhere else. It’s not so much that I let my hand do this, it’s more that whoever I am goes
missing so it does what it wants till whatever is moving it stops. Then my hand goes limp and falls away.

That’s all there is to it. Except that the place where the hand is gets hot, but I don’t feel any heat in the hand, I don’t
feel anything at all except the stuff at the start. It’s as though I’m full up with an emptiness that’s completely alive but
carries no feeling. I don’t know what this emptiness is, and I don’t know what happens when my hand’s doing its thing. I don’t
know if whatever it’s doing will heal or make things worse.

When the phone call about my mother’s cancer came from Derry, I’d no premonition, no warning at all. So from where I’m sitting
now, I can say that the death-seeings stopped after Robbie died and haven’t resumed.

I was pregnant when I saw Jacko Brennan blown up, and I must have been just pregnant when I saw the white-faced girl who was
Robbie’s death. But when I was carrying Andrew and Suzanna I never saw anything at all. Then, a few months after Suzanna was
born, the spiralling started, and since then a day
hasn’t passed without it. But no more Pierrot masks, no more deaths-before-their-time. The Healing came instead.

So this thing, whatever it is, laid off for Andrew and Suzanna. Which is strange when I think how afraid I was of pregnancy,
for I’d convinced myself that seeing things was to do with Barbara Allen.

Yet all the time I knew different, for I hadn’t been pregnant when I saw the dandelion flowers change into clocks, or heard
about Fiona Clarke, or knew, that night in the bar, that my future was Liam. But we make up our minds to what we want to believe,
and we’d rather roll a boulder up a mountain than shift away from that belief once it has set.

The change from seeing to healing was something to do with the children being born, but I don’t know much more than that.
I stopped thinking things, I experienced them instead. I left the realm of the mind, where I’d mostly lived, and was moved
full into the stream of the incarnate world. A baby in a rush basket, that’s what I was. Carried down to the river, laid in
the water, pushed from its banks by an unseen hand.

I hate the Bible, yet my hidden life is formed of its images and its language, its awful light is the light of my inner world.

I wonder what would happen if I had another baby now? I wonder would it stop this energy-thing coming through my hands and
destroying my peace of mind? I’ve never thought of that before. I wonder would it ease off as it did for Andrew and Suzanna,
or get stronger like for Barbara Allen and the other one I was carrying when I saw Robbie’s death? And while I’m at it, I
wonder, did it know that Barbara Allen and the other one weren’t going to make it anyway, so it went on pushing through? Or
did it just get rid of them because they were in the way?

What is it anyway? All I can say about it is that It is as It is. I could frighten myself, thinking thoughts.

I still had my hours at the library in the mornings, and then in the afternoons I was home with the children, so it wasn’t
as if I was hanging around doing nothing, only waiting. If Liam was there when somebody came, he minded the children, but
if he wasn’t, I had them near me while I worked. They were five and three when I started, so it’s natural to them, it’s always
been what I do.

Suzanna thrived on it, which was no surprise, for there’s nothing she loves like company. I’d tip out the bricks Liam had
made for her, and she’d busy herself building castles all over the floor, knocking them down again, chatting away as she worked.
It was harder for Andrew. He wouldn’t stay in the kitchen when someone came, he’d go next door with a book or he’d mess in
the yard and reappear when he heard the sound of a car driving off. He never liked strangers while they were strange, whatever
he might think of them later on, when they’d turned into people he knew.

They were chalk and cheese, the two of them, and it made me wild the way they carried on. Andrew always insisted on differentials:
on being first, on going to bed later, on getting more than Suzanna. I thought at the time he was only asserting his rights
as the eldest, but it could be that he was trying to make me understand that he wasn’t her.

If I gave her as much as I gave him, he worked himself into a fury, but if I gave him more, she let on not to notice, then
she made it her business to get even when I wasn’t looking. She might have been drawing or colouring, humming away quietly
to herself, the very picture of contentment. Then she’d take a wee look at her juice or the size of the biscuit I’d given
her, she’d shoot another wee
look at his, and go on humming. I’d turn my back and there’d be a yell out of Andrew. She’d jog his arm so he’d spill his
juice, or he’d drop a piece of his gingerbread man, and she’d stamp on it, quick as a flash. It was always over when I looked
round. He would be white with rage, and she would be smiling sweetly.