The Bird Woman (38 page)

“She did.”

“Well?” He waits.

“She asked me did I still catch birds.”

“What?”

“She asked me did I still catch birds.” I say it again, though I know he heard me the first time. He’s looking at me, but
the eyes behind his heavy glasses are odd in their distance. I feel suddenly dizzy. It’s as though I’m on this escalator that
keeps changing direction; I try to step off, but I’ve forgotten where it was I wanted to go.

“D’you not remember?” I ask him. I can hear my own voice, supplicating.

“I do surely.” He sounds short-tempered, almost annoyed. “What did you say?”

“I told her I did.”

“And after?”

I wait. I don’t want to tell him the next bit, but I have to. It’s on account of the hospital and the death watch. And all
the distant years coming crowding in.

“She said,
You have it off your father. Your father always had good hands.”

“She said that?”

I nod. “Will you go on home now, Brian? I promised Anne I’d send you home.”

“Did she say anything else?”

“Not a word. If you’re not going, then I am. No point the two of us killing ourselves.”

“You’re only here and you Ye crying to be gone. Could you not watch with her a wee bit longer? She’ll not be here next week
to watch with.”

“Neither will I, thank God.”

“You were always the hard one, Ellen.”

“What choice had I? When did I ever get any help from her?”

“She never had any help from anyone.”

“There was help there if she’d wanted it.” Suddenly I’m furious, shaking with rage, my whole being clenched in a knot of anger.
I’ve no idea what’s happening. “But she wouldn’t take it, she couldn’t stand to be beholden to anyone. And she didn’t care
how we suffered, so long as she had her pride.”

“We didn’t suffer.”

“What?”

“You heard. We were well fed, well clothed, well minded. What more did you want? We didn’t suffer.”

I look at him, without seeing him. He is right. Whatever else it was that I’d wanted, it didn’t have a name, or didn’t exist,
or couldn’t be given. Had I ached for something from her that wasn’t there? I see the dark, frantic wings of the trapped birds
against the pane, their dive for shelter behind the flowerpots that stood on the sill, the storm of light pouring in through
the sealed window. I feel their small lives beat in the cup of my hand, the softness of feathers, the way they struggled and
fought, then suddenly stilled. They would raise up their heads from my hand and look round, their eyes bright, curious. I
would carry them to the door and throw them into the air. I talked to them all the time—I never stopped speaking—and often
I didn’t catch them at all, I’d put my hand close and they’d hop themselves on, their small
claws clinging onto my finger, their eyes alert and amazed. She was a great one for windows open and the virtues of fresh
air. She always called for me when a bird had got into the room.

I am still now, the anger all gone. I am stilled in some hand that is holding me as I held a finch or a swallow all those
years ago. I look at Brian, and this time I see him, I see the tears stand in his eyes. I feel the fall of tears down my cheek.

The days are harder than the nights, yet the nights are harder than the days. By day I feel empty and cold; somehow the constant
people and noise and hospital clatter push me further into a place of alienation. All day I long for the night, but night
comes bringing no relief. I’m alone with her, silence and darkness for company. The empty, cold feeling falls away, and a
maelstrom of furious emotion rushes to take its place.

Even as I’m experiencing this, I’m amazed by it. My childhood may not have been a bed of roses, but Brian’s right, there hadn’t
been hardship, nor anything obvious to account for the chaos of feeling that kidnaps me now. And I’ve no one to turn to, no
Catherine to phone, no Liam by my side, no safe ground anywhere anymore.

So I stand with my back to her, watching myself in the great dark sheet of the window, the lit room behind me shimmered by
rain that runs down the glass. Reflected, my mother lies propped on the pillows, her head drooping forward and lolling a bit
to one side.

“After the first chemo most of her hair fell out, but it seemed to regrow overnight. This time they started the chemo then
stopped,” Anne had said. “It was doing no good, she’s already too far gone.”

Her hair had turned white after Daddy died, but if anyone asked her she claimed she’d been raven’s-wing black, like her sis
ters. Years ago Brian had told me different; he’d said she’d been flame red like me. I’d called him a liar, for why would
anyone say their hair had been black if it hadn’t? He’d taken me up to his room, lifted his school
Macbeth
off the shelf, showed me the fading photo he kept between its pages. There she was, a young woman seated on a wall, swinging
her feet, her hair a red flag on the green of the trees.

We had stared at it, the two of us, and then he’d put it back between the pages and closed the book. I’d asked why she claimed
it was black, and he’d shaken his head, for he didn’t know. He’d made me promise never to tell, and I never did, not even
Liam. I’d understood why I had to promise. Somehow it was shameful to both of us, catching her out in that lie.

The funny thing is I was eight years old when he died, which is old enough, yet I’ve no memory of her hair being red at all.
And now it’s only the ruins of that hair that make me know for certain sure it’s her.

By the second night the chaos inside me’s so bad I start talking to her reflection. Or rather I talk to her hair, reflected.
The bloated yellow face beneath it belongs to someone else.

But I don’t talk as Anne talks, this isn’t inclusion, it isn’t a gentle mulling over of the day’s events.

I’m calling her to account.

“I’m not here by choice,” I tell her. “You needn’t think I’ve wasted a thought on you in years—”

She doesn’t stir.

I get braver, my words get harder and wilder. I’m trying to wake her up, to force her out from her stupor.

Nothing. I stand there addressing the bed-ridden figure that floats behind my other-self in the glass.

A strange feeling grows in me that there’s no need to waken her, that if I speak to her in the black window, she’ll hear me
as
she never heard when I spoke to her face to face. I get excited. I wonder why I haven’t thought of this before. She’s mine,
I finally have her captive, she can’t escape into silence or tasks-that-have-to-be-done, can’t turn away, can’t even answer
me back. I drag the chair over to face the window, careful not to look at her form in the bed. I sit myself down and tell
her about my life.

To start with it’s like a first meeting, a sketching in of the principal figures and details, I’m not yet ready to trust her
with more.

When I’ve done the outline I tell her about the journey up, I tell her about the B and B, making sure to include how much
it costs because she always wants to know prices. I’m working up to my dream, which was really a memory. I tell her about
it. I say she was wrong to punish us for using words she didn’t like.

“If there’s a word there’s a reason for it. Words don’t just come out of nowhere. An ugly word means an ugly feeling, you
can’t just ban the word and expect the feeling to go away. Or you can, but it’s called repression. Did they not teach you
that at school? Oh, pardon me, my mistake, you were the teacher—”

Still no reaction. I take a breath and forge on. “Ugly words are a form of bullying. So is banning them. You can banish a
word, but not the feeling behind the word. It just stays down there, festering, getting stronger, turning into a hate that’s
worse than it was at the start—

“Did you not know that?” I demand of her slack-jawed face in the window. “Did you not know you were fostering hate? And did
it not once cross your mind that some of that hatred might splash over onto you?”

After that there’s no stopping me. I’m off in full flight when the door on the far side of the bed opens in the window, and
that nurse is there, the undernourished one with the light-grey eyes.
She stares at the back of my head, but I don’t move. Let her think what she likes, what’s she to me, why should I care?

She comes in and goes to my mother. She’s on the door side of the bed, so I watch her reflection in the window.

She can’t stand me—a babe in arms could see that. Well, I’ve no great grah for her either.

“What’s your name?” I ask her window-face as she takes my mother’s wrist in her hand and checks her pulse. She doesn’t reply
till she’s finished counting.

“Joanne,” she says, replacing the wrist on the cover. “Joanne Doherty.”

“You like her, don’t you?”

She looks startled. “She came in for the chemo the last time,” she says slowly. “Just for the day, like—the chemo’s all outpatients
here. I got to know her then. We all liked her, so we did, she had a word for everyone and she never complained—. But she
always looked for me first when she came in.”

“What have you got against me?”

She drops her eyes, and the colour beats in her pinched skin. She knows I’m way out of line to ask, but she’s out of line
herself, she shouldn’t have got involved like this, and once she had she shouldn’t have let it show. She lifts her face, and
for what suddenly seems a long time the blue-grey eyes in the window look straight into mine.

“You didn’t come,” she says at last, the words so low that I only just catch them. “She was askin’ for you and askin’ for
you, and you didn’t come.”

“I’m here now.”

“Now’s too late. She wanted to talk to you, so she did.”

“She should have thought of that before,” I say to the window.

“Before what?”

“Before she got herself into this state.”

She doesn’t speak. She walks round to the other side of the bed to check on the liquid in the drip. She has her back to the
window now, so her face is hidden.

“What did she ever do on you?” she asks without looking round. Her voice comes from just behind me.

“Nothing,” I tell her narrow back in the window. “Not a thing, that’s the point; she only ever gave us what she had to. And
that was only to stop the neighbours talking.” It sounds weak and self-pitying, even to my ears. I know I need more.

“My husband’s a Catholic,” I say, knowing that this Joanne is one as well. “She never met my husband; she never forgave me;
she never even came to see her grandchildren.”

She stands for a moment, motionless.

“She told me you didn’t want her to, and you never came home. She said you felt shamed by your husband. She said it was you
as couldn’t forgive yourself.”

Then she’s out the door and away off down the corridor and I’m left with all the air knocked from me.

W
EDNESDAY

T
he third day, but it might as well be weeks, the intensity of this waiting swallows us all I sit by her bed, take the odd
walk round outside, sleep fitfully in the B and B or stretched on a padded seat in the nurse’s room. Anne has brought in a
sleeping bag, and the nurses give us blankets. They offer to put up a folding bed in the room with my mother, but I refuse
it, there’s no way I could sleep in there beside her. Brian is the same. He knows she wouldn’t allow it.

Sometimes Brian and I take shifts with the sleeping bag, and it’s like being back in childhood again—creeping in, smelling
his intimate Brian-smell on the padded cloth.

Love is strange. You can’t make yourself feel it, can’t command it at will from anyone else; it just comes when it comes and
that’s it—the whole story—except that its coming is always, always grace. Well, there isn’t much grace in me now—for Brian
or anyone else—but the sleeping bag helps, and the dead exhaustion in his face makes me softer with him, less inclined to
snap and contradict.

For the first two days I was here, Brian went into work, though he must have been about as much use as a zombie. Maybe
he needed somewhere to go—like me with my little room in the B and B—or maybe he thought the school would grind to a halt
without him.

The consultant says anytime now, so Brian has stopped going to work. Anne stays for most of the night, and the three of us
live locked together, taking turns to go off to eat or to catch a few hours’ sleep and a wash. Carol and Linda are mostly
here, but they’re still going to school in the day so Anne won’t let them stay after midnight. She drives them home and comes
back, or else Brian does.

Nothing is coming through to me here. I send my mind down to my hands to feel around for it, but nothing stirs.

Time was when I thought I’d have bartered my own child to be rid of it. But now when I need some help for myself it has fucked
away off and left me to do it alone.

And now that it’s gone I am nothing. It must be all those years of folk being grateful right down to the depths of their beings
that has me this way. Gratitude makes for respect. I must have begun to think that it’s me they’re respectful of, that I’m
somehow worthy of this respect. It makes up for so much. The long hours and loss of privacy. The distance from Liam. The time
not spent with the children. The secrets that have to be kept.

So I’ve let myself think it was me, but it isn’t. I’ve let myself forget I was only ever a channel for Whatever-it-is to pass
through.

If you think it’s you then you separate yourself somehow from humanity, and if there’s one thing in the world I’m certain
sure of it’s that we’re all the same. That’s not the same as saying we’re all born equal—you’d have to be blind and deaf to
swallow that one—but we’re all born into flesh, flesh that is mortal and suffers.

So all the time it was Itself, not me. I was only ever the glass that held the wine.

And it was the wine that was wanted, for who in their senses cares for the glass when they need to drink?

On the journey up in the bus, I’d thought about telling Brian. I’d even chosen the words I’d use, I’d answered questions with
that fluency that’s never mine outside of these conversations I have with myself inside my head. Now I think I must have been
mad to have entertained the idea at all. Or maybe I’ve just been living too long amongst Catholics.