The Bird Woman (21 page)

And Liam accepted it from them. He laughed and tousled their hair, and they sat on the ground beside him and watched while
he sorted and counted. Then he gave them five pence each, but the rest he put in his pocket and deposited in an An Post savings
account in my name. A few months later when nothing had changed and the energy kept coming through, he gave me the post office
book. I opened it, and looked at the balance, amazed.

“Alright,” I said, “I’ll put a box out for donations.”

Liam stood watching me very intently, letting the silence run on.

“They can leave it if they want to and not if they don’t. It’s all the same to me.”

And it was.

L
iam Kiely’s pieces, though attractive, show little real development’… blah, blah… ‘formulaic and obvious’… blah, blah… ‘the
large untitled piece has a certain vigour, but most of this work lacks energy’… blah… ‘disappointing and predictable’… blah…
‘an artist capable of so much more.’”

It was a review of a group show in Galway. A show
to highlight the work
—so ran the blurb—
of seven midcareer artists currently living and working in Ireland,

It was awful, I never knew a few words in a newspaper column could hold so much pain. Liam’s work had drawn nothing but praise
until then, not so much as a lukewarm review. And now this. Worse than lukewarm—plain bad—and the tone so easily, spitefully
dismissive. I wanted to kill the reviewer.

Liam tossed the paper casually onto the table.

“You can’t win them all,” he said. He lifted Suzanna onto his lap and sat with his arms wrapped around her.

Catherine phoned as soon as she read the review. She said it was shite—Liam’s work in that show was serious and strong—she
reeled off a whole list of artists they both knew who’d said the same.

Then Dermot called round. He’d read the review, but he read
it again, shaking his head, whistling softly at the more negative phrases.

“Tom Maguire,” he said when he reached the end. “Who the hell’s he, anyway?”

“No idea,” Liam said.

“Some pup wanting to make a name for himself. Don’t take it to heart; it doesn’t have to be negative. Sometimes we all need
a kick in the pants.”

So I thought I’d kill Dermot instead, but before I had time to gather myself, he was gone. Liam stared after him, baffled
surprise on his face.

The sound of Dermot’s car had hardly faded when we heard another pull into the yard. Catherine.

“Marie finally left him,” Catherine said when I’d calmed down enough to tell her what Dermot had said. “Yesterday. And this
time she means it, she’s at her sister’s with the children, she’s looking for somewhere to rent.”

Liam gaped at her. “Why didn’t he say anything? Why didn’t he tell us?”

Catherine and I stared back.

“Oh, I knew things weren’t great,” he said to our silence. “But it’s always been stormy—right from the start—I never thought
they would split.” He went to the phone.

We heard him ask Dermot did he fancy meeting up for a pint. He listened, grunted, said something noncommittal, put down the
receiver.

“He says Marie’s away for a couple of days. He doesn’t want to meet. He says he’s busy.”

I got up and put the kettle on. Catherine looked at the table.

“He’s my closest friend,” Liam said. “Why can’t he tell me?”

“Maybe telling you would be like admitting to himself that it’s real.” Catherine spoke slowly and carefully. “And you know
what Dermot’s like—there may be the odd problem now, but everything’s always going to work out.”

“He told
you—
”

“I’m not married. Besides, he’s not jealous of me. In work terms, I don’t count.”

The next day Liam cut out the clipping, highlighted it in orange Day-Glo, and stuck it up on the workshop wall. He had no
experience of adversity; he didn’t know what he was doing.

I always knew by Liam’s walk when he’d finished something. He’d come out of the studio slowly, an odd, dazed look on his face;
then with each step away from the workshop, the strangeness around him faded and changed. He’d been off somewhere else, a
long way away, but now he was remembering that he’d lived here once, and might live here again.

When he reached the door he’d be fully back; his head would go up, he’d lep the steps, and stand in the kitchen shouting.

“Ellen, Ellen, where are you? Come out here and see what I’ve done.”

It could be anytime; I could be anywhere.

If I’d seen from an upstairs window, I might not answer him, I might stand pressed against the wall behind the door instead,
my whole being shot through with simple happiness at his need. He’d find me, then he’d grab hold of my wrist and pull me downstairs
and over the yard.

“What are you waiting for, woman?” he’d say as I hung in the studio doorway. “Come here and see; I need to know what you think.”

Only he didn’t. We both knew it didn’t matter what I thought, that what he wanted was to show me—me, his Ellen—to say,
I did this for you,
which wasn’t true either, he’d done it for himself.

And I loved it, all of it. Knowing he was fully there, fully himself, and the person he most wanted to see him being like
this was me. Afterwards, if the children weren’t there, we’d make love.

I don’t know when the way we were together started to change, but one day I caught myself remembering, so I knew then that
it had gone. The realisation brought a strong, dark tide, like grief. It dawned on me that I’d lost something, and if I didn’t
watch out I might lose a whole lot more.

Liam is sociable by nature—warmhearted, good-natured, liking a bit of craic. He attracts attention, and attention releases
something in him, like the fragrance rising out of cut hay in fine weather.

I never was comfortable in company. Then, when all this started up I wanted to stay clear of outside eyes and ears.

“Where’s Ellen?” they’d ask in the pub, at an opening or a party.

“Babysitting.”

I was always babysitting. The men said I was great, but the women made him feel selfish. It had made sense when the children
were babies and there was no money, but later on things could have changed and they didn’t. People stopped asking. It never
occurred to me that it might be lonely for him or that our lives might grow apart. Robbie had liked going out with the lads,
he didn’t need me alongside him—mostly he didn’t want it. Just as long as I was always there when he got home.

So Liam was relieved when Catherine decided to be my friend. It lessened my isolation and he had someone else to help him
carry its weight.

Or that’s what I tell myself when I’m feeling rational.

It’s not comfortable, living the way I do, being one thing with part of myself while the rest of me’s off at a distance, watching.
Some healers aren’t this way at all. They’re not separate within themselves; they don’t know what’s coming to them from the
conscious level and what they’re getting from another level; it’s all mixed up in the one big stew, and they don’t care. Not
me. I don’t want darkness and moil and chaos. I crave long windows filled with the clear light of day.

Presbyterians are into the rational. The first hint of the irrational and there’s an audible shifting onto higher, drier ground.
Catherine says the rational bit is strange when you think about Luther.

I ask her why, and she says that Luther believed salvation was always through grace, never through works, and grace isn’t
rational.

I think it’s strange that Catherine knows about Luther when I don’t.

It’s even stranger when you think of the Bible. All those miracles, yet we cling to what we can see and touch. Presbyterians
have services of healing. The sick line up and the minister lays on his hands, but everyone knows it’s sort of token; the
minister isn’t Christ, and you’d need to be a bit weak in the head to believe that such things can happen now. It’s not like
Catholics, saving up their pennies, going off to Knock or to Lourdes or Med-jugorje for a cure.

Liam says my life would be easier for me if I’d been born a Catholic: I’d let go, leave off fighting myself, just let whatever-it-is
flow through me as he does when he’s cutting stone.

He says this, then he stops. It’s because he’s an artist as well as a craftsman, and the artist in him knows that flow is
only half the story. The vision comes through the fight; the work comes through the flow—that’s what he’s always telling me.
So he looks at me and closes his mouth. Neither of us knows what I’d be like if I’d been born Catholic.

Liam is proud of what he calls “my gift.” At the same time he’s more than a wee bit uneasy. There’s this closed, secret place,
and I’m in there with only the person who’s come to me to be healed. And it’s not just secret in the sense of being confidential
(so I can’t say and he can’t ask), but secret in the sense that something happens in there and neither of us knows what it
is.

And secrets are powerful, so I become powerful—although it’s not my power.

And the secret brings us closer because he protects it, but also it keeps us apart because it’s only mine.

It’s as though there’s a way through the great tangled hedge of thorn that grows around Sleeping Beauty’s castle. I don’t
know
the way through, but sometimes it’s there; sometimes it opens like the Red Sea parting. But not at will—only when I’m allowed—that’s
important. And I can’t bring out any memory of what I did when I was there.

I’m not the prince or Moses—what happens in there has nothing to do with me, with Ellen. Yet sometimes I can come and go.

I’m a channel. There it begins and ends.

Catherine and I weren’t close straightaway. First I had to get used to her, and then I had to get over the nun-thing, which
was there like a door I pretended I couldn’t see. A closed door, and one that we only ever glanced at in passing.

“In the convent… ” she might say, as I would say “in Derry… ”

When she did I would change the subject or else go on with the conversation as though I hadn’t heard. After a while I thought
of that convent as something that had happened once, a long time ago, like my father’s death when I was no more than a
child. Something regrettable and best forgotten. Something we’d never explore.

I didn’t exactly stop talking to Liam because I had Catherine, but he ceased being my only outlet, and I got more selective
in what I said. And Catherine was easier to talk to: she picked up on things I hardly knew I was saying; she backed off straightaway
if she touched on somewhere I didn’t want her to go.

It’s lonely, being different. I am like the seal—a big, blubbery mammal moving deep underwater, living with all those fins
and scales and gills. Then the dive up for air, the looking around at the oxygen world, the sinking back down to life with
the fins and the gills.

Having a place in both worlds. Belonging in neither.

I
n the spring of ’97 Liam had landed a big commission.

A good commission too—one that excited him and caught his imagination. When the letter came he’d known what it was, his shoulders
had tensed, then he’d turned away and taken a long, slow breath before he’d torn it open. I’d waited.

This sort of commission doesn’t fall from the sky; there’s a whole long story behind it, starting with a committee and a list
of names. The committee meets and looks at the list, then sends out letters to some of the artists asking them to submit a
proposal for the site. Mostly the artist is given a theme or a subject, and it’s a good thing, career-wise, even to be asked.
So all the artists beaver away, and then the committee sits back and chooses which one it wants.

It’s a bit like a competition, except it isn’t because you can only enter it by invitation. Liam had spent ages on the proposal,
and he’d worked knowing ten other sculptors were all doing the same. The system made me angry and always had. We’d argued
it backwards and forwards for years.

“Either it’s a competition and anyone can enter, or it isn’t. This way they get all this work out of you for nothing.”

“Not for nothing. I’m getting a fee, remember?”

“Call that a fee? You do all this work for a pittance, then they
can turn round and give the job to somebody else. If they like what you do they should make up their minds and just offer
you the commission.”

Liam would laugh at my words and rumple my hair as though I were Suzanna. The system was the system; it didn’t bother him,
or it didn’t back in the days when the letter mostly said that his work had been chosen.

Not always though. Sometimes the letter said they liked his idea and were glad they’d seen it, but the project was being awarded
to someone else. To be fair to him, it was only ever a couple of days of gloom, and then he’d laugh at himself and move on.
He had a buoyant temperament and a good attitude.

“No one’s forcing me to be a stonemason,” he’d say. “It’s what I want to do—end of story.”

I suppose the problem was mine, not his; I was defensive for him—I couldn’t bear to see him rejected and hurt.

But this time there’d been good news in the letter. He’d grabbed me by the waist and whirled me around in the kitchen, then
he’d made for the studio, humming under his breath.

It was a piece on emigration they wanted, but not the usual—no rags or stick-thin limbs, no desperation. It was the emigration
of choice they were interested in—the people who left on account of an inner hunger, a craving for a wider experience than
they could have had at home.

Liam said that in among the starving there must always have been such people, but for years so many had
had
to leave it probably felt like heresy to speak of choice.

“But now the country’s booming, so it’s okay,” he said.

I was as pleased and excited as he was. There was stability for us both in a commission. It was good for Liam to work on something
he knew would be shown and good for me to be able
to budget and plan. And one thing led to another. A commission like this involved opening ceremonies and politicians and media
exposure, it meant his name would be around in the public mind. And perhaps more work would come out of it; there was luck
as well as talent in success, and it did no harm to dream. Anyway, it was a cheque in the bank, for they paid half the money
up front and the rest would come when the piece was handed over.