The Bird Woman (35 page)

I opened my mouth again, but he held up his hand. “I haven’t finished. You might as well know the truth, and you might as
well hear it from me. The two of them did that—they walked away from something they both of them wanted—they did that for
you because they both love you, though sometimes I swear to God I wonder why. Catherine took a job in Cork that she didn’t
want just to keep herself clear of Limerick. She stopped coming here, though you hardly even noticed. Liam fought his way
back up from the pit and turned himself into a painter. And then you find out and what do you do? You carry on like a five-year-old,
kicking and screaming because someone borrowed your best toy then put it back before you’d even noticed it was gone. Liam’s
not a toy, Ellen, he’s flesh and blood and so is Catherine, and you’ll have to decide if you love him or if he’s just there
while it suits you. And I’ll tell you something for nothing while I’m at it. If you don’t wise up and rein yourself in, you’ll
lose them both for good.”

I couldn’t speak. A sort of enormous numbness was on me. An enormous weariness too. All I could do was stare, and I never
felt the tears come into my eyes, I only knew they were there when they ran down my face.

“You know something else, Ellen? Catherine only slept with me because she couldn’t sleep with Liam. And she only did it the
once because try as I might I couldn’t convince her I’d do instead.”

It wasn’t all suddenly grand on account of what Dermot had told me. I wasn’t able to turn myself round and forgive them, and
nor did I even want to. But the beast let go of my entrails; it slunk away off and found someone else’s guts to lodge in and
eat up instead.

I cried a lot, I wouldn’t hear Catherine’s name, and for Liam there was this icy and unrelenting distance. But I didn’t follow
him round and scream abuse, and somewhere I knew that when he’d been punished enough I didn’t quite want him to go.

I
t’s
half past six and the light’s coming grey to the window, but it’s not as cold and clear as it promised last night. Sometime
around four a little wind got up and the moon clouded over, and that was the end of the frost and the cold, bright stillness.
The house is waking
—
I hear the small ticks and creaks that it makes when it’s stretching and changing
—
it’ll not be long now before there’s the sound of the heating kicking in.
Wumph.

Sometimes I feel that it’s hopeless, we’re different, too different, Liam and I. I look back and think it was hopeless even
before the Catherine-thing blew the roof off the house we had built together.

Then other times it seems that there’s a road through and we’re finding it, though every inch of the way is hard won. Maybe
it’s like that for everyone, I don’t know; I don’t know about anyone else, only us.

It would be easier if I wasn’t who I am.

The children will wake soon. Suzanna will be alright while I’m gone, tomorrow she’ll open her eyes and most likely head straight
for our bed. I never let them in unless they’re sick, I wasn’t let myself and neither was Brian, it gets to be a habit that’s
hard to break. They’re gone too old for our bed now, but that won’t stop her. And Liam is soft, they know that. When they
were little they’d come to his side the minute I was up, and he’d always lift them in.

It won’t be so easy for Andrew, but then nothing is.

I’ve learned to stop calling them “weans” the way we do in Derry, but I can’t take to “lads,” which is what they say in Kilkenny
regardless of sex. Liam says “lads” and I tell him there’
s
no way Suzanna’s a lad, and he laughs and says time enough for her to be finding that out for herself. I don’t like the word
“kids” either, so I always end up saying “children,” which is a bit formal even for my taste. There are times you frighten
yourself how like your mother you’re growing.

I’ll have a bath now and dress in the warm clothes I’ve put out for the journey. Maybe I’ll sleep on the bus. Maybe I won’t.

F
EBRUARY
2001

A
fter the first phone call comes from Derry I hold out for seven whole days.

Suzanna stands in the kitchen door announcing that people should visit their dying mammies, even mammies they don’t much like.
Andrew slips his hand into mine and tells me he thinks I’ll start crying again if I don’t go.

Then Anne’s on the phone, saying she’s failing much faster than anyone expected.

Anne says she’s asking for me.

I stand stock still with the phone to my ear, hardly daring even to breathe. Anne is truthful, I know she hasn’t made this
up. I wait, and the silence runs on and then there’s Anne’s voice, a little girl’s voice that’s told me
almost
the truth, but not quite.

“I asked was there anyone she wanted to see,” Anne blurts out. “She closed her eyes and didn’t answer. I thought she might
not have heard, so I asked did she want you to come? She opened her eyes, and she looked straight at me. She nodded her head.”

I see her when Anne says that. She’s propped up in the bed, her white hair against the snow white of the pillow, Anne fussing
her with questions.

If she’d asked for me, I’d have refused her. But she hasn’t asked—she has bent her stiff neck in assent.

So I will bend mine.

Liam wants to drive me up, but I won’t let him. Brian and Anne want me to stay with them, but I won’t do that either. I’ve
booked a room in a bed-and-breakfast. I’ll let no one help, I’ll do it alone.

Brian is angry when Liam tells him about the B and B on the phone, and Liam says he gets worse when he hears the address.
But it’s Liam he’s talking to, not me, so he has to mind his tongue.

“He says that address is the Cityside, but the hospital’s on the Waterside, the other side of the river,” Liam tells me. “So
I said it’s only a step to the bus station, you’ve told me so, and doing it this way you won’t be after him to drive you about.”

“It’s not driving me about that’s bothering Brian. It’s because the Cityside’s Catholic now, he wants me to stay with my own.”
I’m sorting and folding a heap of dried washing as I speak; I have one of Andrew’s vests flat on the table, and the way I’m
smoothing it out, my hand could pass for an iron.

“He thinks I’m making a statement,” I explain to Liam. “He thinks I’m telling him I’ve gone over to your lot and to hell with
mine—”

“And have you?”

I snort. “Jesus Christ, Liam, don’t you know me better than that? I don’t want my lot, your lot, nor anybody else’s lot either.
I was reared on the Cityside, I won’t be hounded across the bridge because Brian thinks it’s safer. And I live down here now,
I’m married to a Catholic—you could nearly say I’m entitled. Besides, I don’t like the Waterside, it’s a dreary hole.”

“Ellen, I’m driving you. I’ll turn round and come straight home if that’s what you want, but I’m going to take you—”

I won’t let him. You can do what you like when you’re the
injured party. I’ve become a wee Napoleon, standing firm on the moral high ground.

I rest my face on the cool of the window and watch the winter fields.

I’d caught the Dublin bus in Kilkenny, but it was running late. I’d made up my mind if I missed the Dublin to Derry connecting
bus then I’d turn straight round and come home.

But I didn’t miss it. We’d made good time on the road.

Once onto the Derry bus I lean back and close my eyes, a partition against the voices filling the air around me. A group from
Derry on a two-day jaunt to Dublin. A bit of sightseeing, a lot of shopping. The exchange rate’s strong in their favour—they
have the Dublin shops bought out.

A soft gold light spreads over the fields and the hedges, it catches the empty branches of ash and chestnut, and lights the
red of the sally-stems to fire. Horses and cattle stand about in their pastures, casting long shadows that lie beside the
longer shadows of the empty trees. Farms and yards and barns. The straggled roadside dwellings glow through the February afternoon,
and in that mythic light every house is become a home.

Brian phoned last night—he said she was half delirious, he said she was saying my name.

I didn’t believe him. I know Brian—he said it to stop me changing my mind.

If she’d asked for me I wouldn’t be on this bus now, I’d be safe at home with my hands on someone and the next one waiting
outside the door. I don’t want these two worlds of mine coming visiting each other. I might have once—before the Healing began—but
not now, I know what they’d think of the Healing in the North.

My head aches and aches. My belly is knotted tight with fear.

The bus runs on up through Meath and then Louth. The sun has dropped low, it disappears and appears again between the little
hummocky hills of Monaghan; the twilight’s a river of shadow that flows. We pass a white farmhouse that stands among trees
and barns, lights shine in the ground-floor windows, the curtains are still undrawn. Everything tidied and tended—trim flower
beds in front of the house, hedges cut tight and round. The closer we come to the border, the neater and straighter things
get.

In Monaghan town the bus pulls in at the depot. There’s a corridor with signs for the ladies and gents, and a snack bar that
smells of steam and frying rashers. I find a smeary tray and stand in the queue to buy a sandwich that I don’t want and a
cup of tea I’d nearly sell my soul for. There are tables in the snack bar, but I can’t seat myself in that yellow world of
electric light, I need a private no-place refuge, the patch of glass that the world has slid past all afternoon and soon will
slide past again. I carry the tea across the yard to the shadowy bus, settle back into my seat, and nestle the cardboard cup
in my two cold hands the way Catherine does.

Catherine. Best not go there.

People are trickling back onto the bus, the driver shuffles around in his seat, switches the lights on, starts up the engine,
and pumps the horn a couple of times in a final warning. A man standing propped against the wall takes a last hard drag at
his cigarette, knocks it out, slides the butt back into the packet. A small bright trail of red sparks falls and is gone.
He climbs back on the bus, it moves off over the tarmac, swings out onto the road.

The women have talked themselves dry, the driver has turned off the radio, the bus has gone quiet. He turns off the lights
as well, and folk settle themselves to sleep. Here and there hands reach up for the overhead switches. Thin pencils of light
score the shadows.

I lean my cheek against the glass and follow every tree and field and roadside petrol station. The winter sun has slid down
behind the rim of the world, leaving only a red-gold burn on the horizon. Above the burn is a stretch of light so pure and
colourless and cold that I am emptied of myself, transformed into a being ancient and unfleshed. All I know is loneliness
and longing for this cold, dark land I live my life in. I reach up my hand to my face and feel the salt tears.

It’s dark, but I’m watching still, watching the signs for the names that I only see now in newspapers or in books. Enniskillen
comes up, but it seems far too close. We pass a warning sign for children crossing—a triangle of black and red on white—and
that’s how I know. We’re over the border, and I haven’t noticed, we haven’t even been stopped.

I can’t believe it. Where are the watchtowers and search-lights, the British soldiers shouting and pointing ArmaLites in your
face? That’s how it always was and it always would be. Oh, it hadn’t been once, I knew that. But that was a million years
ago—nearly before I was born.

Brian said Daddy used to talk of the old days of small-time smuggling. He’d said the biggest part of an excise man’s job was
knowing when to take your glasses off and when to put them back on. Brian remembers more about Daddy than I do. Daddy was
shortsighted, Brian is too. She has eyes as keen as a razor, and I have them from her, along with all the rest.

And now the border is only a country road in the dark. I’m not so innocent that I don’t know it won’t be that innocent—there’ll
be night-sight cameras and telescopic lenses and eyes behind gun sights, just as it was before, only hidden. All the same
it’s a shock. This must be Normalisation, I think, and here am I, hankering after the good old days of ArmaLites and torches
and north-of-England accents coming at you from behind a blind of
light. Normalisation seems wrong somehow, I feel the panic rise in my throat.

Hard on the panic comes the excitement. The road signs are floating up at me out of the dark like songs that have lodged themselves
deep in my heart but I haven’t heard in years. Dromore and Irvinestown and Pomeroy; Newtownstewart and Gortin and Strabane,
the headlights throwing up names of places I thought I’d lost forever. I sit very still and upright in the sleeping bus, my
hands loosely clasped, the tears running down my face and dripping off my jawbone into my lap. I feel like an open wound.
I wonder who I was when I left and who I am now, and will I ever find my way back to anywhere at all?

The bus stops at Omagh, and everyone wakes up and stands up and pulls things down from the luggage racks and struggles into
their coats. All change. Some people get into cars or disappear into the dark, but the shopping-spree women don’t, they’re
all heading home to Derry. Our bus is late in, we’ve missed the connecting bus, and our driver looks at his watch as though
the position
of
its hands is news to him.

“There’d be another along for yous any time now,” he says. He waves his hand at the waiting room and makes himself scarce.

I can see why when we get inside and the Derry ones find out that “any time” means they’ll have to hang around for more than
an hour.
It’s a disgrace, so it is; he knew rightly; he should have phoned on ahead and made the other bus wait
—They all begin to kick up and give out, they’re all going to write and complain and demand that their fares be refunded.