The Bird Woman (23 page)

The rain had stopped, and the birds were starting up again. I wondered if that was the first time Liam had gone quiet or if
he’d been silent for days or weeks and I hadn’t noticed. With part of my mind I thought about hanging a wash, but when I saw
how blue and close the mountains were I knew not to bother, for there was more rain on the way. I tried to think about Liam,
but my mind didn’t want to go there. It stayed where it was, like the stopped hand of a clock. I heard a car draw up and park
on the other side of the wall, and I heard the door opening and someone getting out. My mind held itself very still, and it
held my eyes open so that the green world flowed into them, filling them up to the brim.

The door of the car slammed shut. Someone for my hands, I thought. But I hadn’t finished thinking about Liam, I hadn’t begun;
I hadn’t even given him the message.

But I’d started to see him again. And once I’d started I couldn’t stop.

One night I went to bed and woke with an ache in the pit of my belly. I waited for it to go away, but it didn’t, so I thought
it must be my period coming early. My period passed, and the pain got stronger. Then it dawned on me that it might be to do
with Liam.

There was something wrong in the studio, but what it was I didn’t know. Liam went there, the same as before, but it wasn’t
the same as before, he went in earlier, and he came out later and when he did he wasn’t dead tired but excited as well—he
was oozing the tiredness of defeat.

I thought about talking to Catherine, but she was busy and full of her own life. She called in less, and when she did it was
all the new job in Limerick.

“It’s a gas, so it is,” she told me. “They sit there, drinking in
every word I say—I’d swear they nearly think I know what I’m doing.”

But she hadn’t had any ideas. She’d done loads of sketches, but nothing that really grabbed her, she said. Certainly nothing
that filled her up till she couldn’t stop thinking about it, couldn’t focus on anything else.

“You make it sound like falling in love.”

“Do I?” She looked thoughtful. “If that’s what it’s like, I think maybe I’ll stick with the clay.”

I was embarrassed; it hadn’t occurred to me that she wouldn’t know. For an eighth of a second I wondered, was she a virgin
as well? No, she couldn’t be, I decided. Not Catherine. You couldn’t be the way Catherine was and never have slept with anyone
at all.

The weeks passed, and Catherine got used to the job. She came more often and started to notice our world again. Sometimes
she went to the studio to see Liam, but she never stayed there for long. If the evening was fine we sat outside and she smoked
and watched me and waited for me to talk.

But I didn’t, I couldn’t, the moment had passed.

About a month after this the Seeing came back, but not in a way I’d ever had before or ever want again as long as I live.
I opened the door on a woman who was a stranger to me, and I knew just by looking at her that she’d heard the things people
said and she’d come, without hope, for a cure. I knew, too, that she’d been ill for so long there was no point me even trying;
I wouldn’t get through to the sickness, there were too many layers in the way. But I brought her in, though I didn’t want
to, and I sat her down and listened while she found her few words and laid them out for me to look at with the front part
of my mind.

But with the other part—the part that isn’t mind at all but something else—I was reaching out in spite of myself and slowly
moving towards her. And as I did I met with the layers that covered her sickness, and the layers changed into forms, but not
ones you’d see with your eyes alone—more like those you’d half sense and half see inside a dream. Without thought I began
to name them, and each time I found a name for the form, it dissolved and another walked forward to take its place.

The first form was wrapped round in filth and its arms hid its face, so I named it as Shame and it left. Next came a figure
straight as a die, an awful, clear stillness about it, and I knew that suffering had made it so, and I named it as Courage.
Then came Despair, turned in on itself, naked and huddled and barely human, but at the sound of its name it went scuttling
away. Behind Despair was a wild-haired, demented figure, shaking with rage, and I knew I was looking at Pain. Then something
came forward shuffling and weeping, not caring who saw, so I named the form as Self-Pity and it was gone. After that I could
stand no more, so I closed myself down and told the woman I couldn’t help her.

If I could have let myself go on seeing and naming I might have got through to her sickness, but I couldn’t. To reach deep
into sickness you have to know darkness yourself, like must touch like, though your darkness may not be physical. And you’re
vulnerable, just like the sick, and what is available to you is limited and your courage is already sorely tried. I could
name and dissolve the outer forms, but each time I did I lost part of myself. I stopped because I was too afraid to go on.

She looked at me then with a weary derision and got slowly up from the chair and began to button her coat. Shame seized me,
but it was drowned out by anger, though I don’t think she knew what she was doing to me, I don’t think she had any idea.

It shook me, that Seeing, shook me so profoundly I couldn’t have told Liam or Catherine, couldn’t have got the words out if
I’d tried. Which I didn’t, for they were too deep in their own lives just then, and besides that I wanted only to push it
away and forget.

I must live with what I am, though it has driven me from the world I was reared to, a world that condemns me as surely as
that woman lived condemned by hers on account of the sickness from which she had failed to recover.

At last I had the wit to ask Liam straight out how the work was going.

We were in the kitchen, I’d chased the children off to bed, which was hard enough on those long, sweet summer nights. The
television was on—it was always on these days—and Liam was sitting while I was doing the ironing. I’m like my mother in that:
I can’t abide just watching with idle hands.

The news and weather finished. Prime Time came on, and we watched it through to the end. I lifted the last tea towel out of
the basket and ironed it carefully, poking the tip into all the corners, then folding it into a rectangle, pressing the rectangle
smooth. The basket was empty. I set the iron down on its stand, unplugged it, coiled up the flex, collapsed the ironing board,
put it away.

“It must be near finished, by now,” I said to no one in particular. The door was open onto the yard, and the summer dusk was
growing. The sky was beginning to thin and glow, and the trees were darkening against it. A little wind had got up and was
stirring the leaves.

Liam never took his eyes off the screen.

“It’s a good feeling, finishing,” I said deliberately. “Finishing what you set out to do, all the work red up and put away.”

Liam glanced across at me; then his eyes went back to the screen.

“No point finishing when what’s finished is only fit for scrap.”

I tried to think I hadn’t heard right, but I knew I had. Then I thought maybe it was finished but something of what he was
trying to put in was eluding him still. There were times when this happened. He’d get almost there—seven eighths of the way—then
no matter what he did he couldn’t get it the way he knew it should be. So he’d struggle and struggle till something changed
or gave, and after that he could always sort it more or less to his satisfaction.

Those times I had to watch what I said. Since I couldn’t see what was wrong in the first place, I mostly didn’t notice what
he’d done to put it right.

“It’s probably more nearly there than you think it is,” I said carefully. “You get too close and can’t see it—you tell me
that over and over. Maybe you need to stand back, take a few days away from it, not let yourself even go in and look.”

“You’ve not been listening to me, Ellen. The problem has nothing to do with being too close. The problem is that the piece
is no good. I’ve changed it and changed it, and now I’ve taken it too far and I can’t get it back.”

I’d never heard Liam talk this way. He reached over and turned the television off.

He said he’d hit something wrong about halfway in. The thing that he wanted, the lines he’d caught in the maquette, just weren’t
coming through as they should in the full-scale work. He’d been pissed off but not unduly worried. This had happened before—he
knew what to do—so he set about making a full-size polystyrene model. He would solve the problem on it and not mess with the
stone itself till he knew exactly what he needed to do. He’d solved it—or he’d thought he had—but when he
went back to the stone it still didn’t work. More drawings, another model, the same thing over again. He was scared by now;
he’d never gone this far without breaking through.

“You can start again,” I said, hearing the panic in my voice. “Put it down to experience, order new stone, don’t mind the
cost, the next one will be alright.”

“I could, but I’m not about to. You don’t understand, Ellen—it’s not about the commission at all, the commission is only coincidence.
I make abstract work, which means I’m exploring a language I’m also creating and only I know the linguistics. That doesn’t
matter. If it works, those linguistics make an energy inside the shapes and under the surfaces. Line and shape, balance and
imbalance, something glimpsed at the edge of vision. Starting again wouldn’t make any difference. I can’t hear the language
anymore. It’s as simple as that. I’ve stopped believing I ever heard it at all.”

He went quiet, and I thought he’d finished. But he hadn’t at all, it was only a pause, he collected himself, then went on
telling me things I neither understood nor wanted to hear.

He’d realised the language was lost to him because his confidence had gone. He’d tried every trick he knew to restore it,
but only ended up making things worse.

“I took out the photographs—photos I’d loved, that I’d used in the past when I’d hit a low. I would leaf through them, thinking,
God, this is wonderful stuff. Did I make these things, was it really me, not somebody else?”
He stopped talking, stared at the table. I waited. “Nothing,” he said, without looking up. “No excitement, no elation, just
a bunch of carefully angled photos of some fair-to-middling work.”

I stirred myself to protest, but he was too sure of what he was saying, too steady in his negation.

He said the light had gone out of the photos. Worse than
that, he knew for sure that the light had been self-delusion. But he also knew that artists went through these things. He
told himself not to bottle it up, to go to someone he trusted and talk it through till he got his courage back.

“Dermot?”

He shook his head. I remembered Dermot’s words about the review.

He’d lifted the phone to a painter called Luke, a friend of his since college days who’d been through just such a crisis.
“I dialled the number and waited while it rang, but when I heard Luke’s voice on the other end I put it down. I couldn’t talk
to Luke,” he said. “I was too ashamed.

“It’s like up until then I’d been riding around on a monocycle. And it was always easy—so easy I couldn’t understand why people
like Dermot went on about it being so hard. Everyone always said I was great—that they didn’t know how I did it—and it never
once occurred to me that I didn’t know myself. I only found that out when I fell off. When I got back on again and tried to
ride it, I didn’t know how.”

So far, I had listened in silence, but now my head went up and my mouth opened of its own accord.

“Why didn’t you come to me?” I demanded. “Why didn’t you tell me; why didn’t you let me try?”

He looked at me, astonishment on his face. Then he shrugged his shoulders and looked at the floor. I understood.

“It’s alright for other people,” I said bitterly. “Cures and superstition and such. It’s alright for them, but it’s not for
the likes of you—”

He went on staring at nothing. Finally he shook his head as though he was trying to clear a mist from across his vision.