The Bird Woman (13 page)

I went to the Cork opening with Liam and Dermot and Marie. Liam was pleased. At that time I was always saying I’d do things,
and then when it came to the point, I backed off It was February. Suzanna was only thirteen months old. We’d left them with
Kathleen and Connor, but still I was anxious, for it was the first time and what if they woke and wanted me and I wasn’t there?

“They’ll live,” Marie told me, when I said I might just go and phone. Her grey eyes looked straight into mine and refused
to waver. “It’s your life as well as theirs, Ellen. It’s hard the first time, but after that it gets easier fast. Before you
know it, you’ll jump at the chance of a night away.”

Liam nodded and said she was right. Marie knocked back her drink and handed it to Dermot for a refill. I smiled, pretending
to agree.

I’d rather be home with them, I thought. Not having to stand here and smile and pretend and think of things to say.

We were in a pub with half an hour to go before the opening, standing up at the bar because Liam and Dermot were so tight
with nerves that they couldn’t sit down. Marie was wearing black—a black shirt, buttoned low and tucked into a skintight skirt,
with see-through black tights and high heels. I was wearing a dark-green dress that I’d bought in Belfast and still thought
of as almost new because it was hardly worn.

Marie’s naturally pretty, she has wavy brown hair, good skin, and a lovely mouth. But that night she didn’t look pretty—she
looked so sexy it fairly smacked you in the eye.

I made some remark.

She nodded, satisfied. “I wanted to look like a vamp, not a wife.”

I gaped at her. Once I’d have been excited if a girlfriend had said that. I’d have reached for my drink, thrown it into myself,
then got up to buy us more to be sure of a good night out. Now I caught myself in the mirrors behind the optics. I looked
as if I’d just swallowed a lemon. It stopped me in my tracks.

More than that, when I’d come here first I’d thought these women were dowdy and didn’t know the score. Now I felt incompetent
at being female in their company. In five years. And I never saw it happen.

“Don’t worry about it.” Marie was standing beside me, watching me watching myself in the mirror. “It doesn’t last, you’ll
get yourself back. It’s only what happens while you’re having the children—”

I saw myself flinch. Marie stared out from just behind my shoulder, and I couldn’t read her face and then I could. Suddenly
I knew that she’d had about enough of Dermot and was getting ready to move on. Still watching ourselves in the mirror, I saw
that she meant me to know. She nodded and twisted her mouth, a wry little smile at one corner. All this was nothing to do
with “the Seeing”; it was two women telling each other, in the way that women do.

I was glad when she dropped her eyes and turned back to Liam and Dermot. Marie was too much for me. Too female, too old, too
knowing. And somewhere, down in the depths of herself, she was suffering and alone.

After the show we went in a crowd to a restaurant to eat, and later again we moved to the hotel bar to go on drinking after
hours. By then we’d thinned down—the gallery staff, two journalists, and a handful of fellow artists. Liam and Dermot were
already blootered, but so adrenalined and euphoric that it hardly showed.

The place was packed, so we stood in a bunch at the bar. A man who might have been at the show came up to Liam and got into
conversation. Wants to meet the artist, I thought, looking around for Marie, who was busy with one of the journalists and
not to be distracted. Then I felt a hand on my arm, and Liam’s fan
was asking me what I was having and would I go over with Liam and meet his wife?

He got the drinks, and we made our way through the crowded room to a table at the back. “I’m Philip,” he said, putting down
his drink, “and this is Paula, my wife.” A pretty brunette with hairdresser-hair looked up and smiled through immaculate makeup
and patted the seat beside her.

We shook hands, introduced ourselves, and sat down. Right away Philip went silent and looked straight at Paula. I knew she
had something to say, but I thought it was Liam, not me, that she wanted to speak to.

“It’s no good you fighting it, petal,” she said, hardly glancing at Liam.

I thought I hadn’t heard her right.

“I saw you come in,” she told me. “That little lady’s making life very difficult for herself, I said to Philip. She’s got
it, but she’s making herself very busy pretending she hasn’t. She seems to think she can wish it away, but she can’t.”

Liam went still as a setter marking a scent. He stared at me and so did Philip, but I sat frozen, waiting for what might come
next.

“I’m a healer,” she said so casually she might have been telling us that she ran a boutique. “We’re from Sheffield, I’ve been
working here. We come over every few months for a week.”

I didn’t take my eyes off her.

“Group-healing sessions in Cork, then readings with private clients in the evenings,” she went on. “We’ve been here a week;
we’re going home tomorrow.”

“A faith healer?” The sound of my own voice surprised me.

She shook her head. “No, faith’s got nothing to do with it,” she said lightly. “A gift healer. And I’m a clairvoyant as well.”
I stared some more. She was in her late thirties and wearing a light-
blue dress that made her skin look translucent. Philip was in a grey suit, very smart, his hair groomed, his manner bouncy
and brimming over with good humour.

“We like coming to Ireland,” he told us. “People know what you’re talking about here—they don’t just think you’re a quack.”
There was suddenly an edge of bitterness in his voice, and his mouth turned down at the corners. Paula laughed, and straightaway
he perked up and was chirpy as a sparrow again. They were the oddest couple. Guileless, somehow. Transparent as children,
and nothing remotely bad or devious about them, nothing even I could reconstruct as evil.

She went prattling on about some man from the other side that she thought a lot of. She was telling us how excited he’d got
when he saw me come into the bar.

“He made me send Philip off to bring you over.”

I was like a rabbit watching a weasel—horrified and fascinated—hating what she was saying, unable to look away. And what she
said was completely mad, and I knew it was mad, yet she was so down-to-earth in herself that she nearly sounded sane.

“Ellen doesn’t want to see things,” Liam said. “It frightens her. She says she doesn’t want to know what she shouldn’t know—”

“Oh, but she’s right, absolutely right. So many people wandering around and they all want to talk, and most of them can’t
be trusted. You have to be selective. You have to be able to put your foot down when you need to and say no.”

There was a silence.

“If they’re all out there, wandering around, talking away,” Liam said slowly, “then how d’you get any peace to talk with the
ones you want?”

“It’s like being in a restaurant. Conversations go on all
around, but you aren’t listening to all of them, are you? You’re focusing in on the person you’re with, shutting out all the
rest.”

I screwed up my courage. “Who are ‘they’?” I asked her.

“Spirits,” she said, completely matter-of-fact.

“Are they dead?”

“Not always. Sometimes they’re just wanderers—people who’re asleep or in comas. They won’t do you any harm unless you let
them. Mostly they keep to themselves, but sometimes they don’t. Sometimes it’s like a drunk at another table who tries to
start up a conversation.”

“What do you do then?” Liam asked.

“The same as you’d do in a restaurant—tell them to go away. If I want to talk to someone, I start the conversation. I don’t
speak to just anyone.”

I gaped at her. She was a tough one alright, yet she seemed such an airhead, pretty and twittery and vague. Her lot was harder
than mine—it’s no joke having people no one else can see drifting in and out of your field of vision. What she had to live
with would have driven most people round the bend.

Then suddenly all the life seemed to leak from her. She said she was tired and needed her bed, so they wished us good night
and they went.

And I thought we were only waiting to get away from them. I thought we would crease up laughing the minute they were gone—

We didn’t. We sat there, saying nothing. I was tombstone-cold, though the packed room was hot with life.

After a bit we collected ourselves and headed back to the bar. It wasn’t the same. I was knocked nearly sober by the encounter,
but Liam was stumbling drunk and still he wouldn’t quit. He wanted more drink and more company, and when at last he could
take no more we went up the stairs to our room and he stretched himself on the bed and passed out cold.

I took off his shoes, his trousers and shirt, then I crawled in beside him and lay there, thinking of Paula, till the light
grew.

When we were up I asked for them at the desk, but I only knew their Christian names. The receptionist looked down the list,
then said she was sorry but they’d already left and she couldn’t give out an address without permission.

It changed me, that meeting, for it’s a strange thing to be recognised, even honoured, for something in you which you’d thought
was shameful and must be hidden away. It changed Liam too, for out of it came his idea that I should be at this healing game,
and once it was in his head he gave me no rest.

T
he first time Catherine came to the house it was to see Liam about an artists cooperative she was busy trying to set up. Liam
wasn’t around so I brought her into the kitchen and gave her a cup of tea. She wouldn’t sit down. Instead she leaned herself
against a press, her hands hidden in the stretched sleeve ends of her sweater, her tea mug nestling in the woolly cup of her
hands.

Whiskey got up from her mat in the corner and sauntered across to inspect her. Catherine glanced down absently, then nuzzled
Whiskey’s nose with one sleeved hand. After a bit she forgot about the dog and stopped nuzzling, but Whiskey put her nose
under Catherine’s elbow and nudged, then waited for more. Catherine rubbed the dog’s nose again. When she stopped Whiskey
looked at her consideringly, then took herself back to her mat.

Catherine’s a potter, but she makes nothing useful. She throws giant teapots, then covers them over with tangles of leaves
and flowers and insects in strange-coloured glazes that look as wet as water. There’s nothing delicate or beautiful about
these flowers; they have stems as thick as a man’s wrist, dark-red protruding stamens, giant insects crawling about in their
depths. All very sexual and unnatural, so it’s not just that her teapots are
huge, they’re very disturbing, which attracts attention and buyers.

She’s also elegant, really elegant, and it’s not to do with clothes but the way her bones hang together. She has white skin,
a crooked smile, and a mass of thick dark hair that falls to her shoulders but is cut to different lengths to take out some
of the weight. In fact, she looks a bit like Whiskey—not golden but dark, with the same long legs and narrow nose, the same
languid poise. She’s as odd as two left feet, but either she doesn’t know or she doesn’t care, she isn’t one bit interested
in what people think of her, so she’s free to do as she likes.

The day was cold, but the kitchen was far too warm to be wearing gloves to drink your tea. As I was thinking this she set
down her mug and folded the stretched sleeves back on themselves. Her fingers were red and swollen and sore.

“Chilblains,” I said.

She nodded. “Bad circulation. And working with water and clay. My studio’s so cold the tea cools nearly as soon as it’s poured.”

I said nothing.

“All my sweaters have stretched sleeves,” she told me. “That way I kill two birds with the one stone—the tea stays halfway
hot and my hands thaw out a bit. The trick is to finish the tea before it’s got cold or your hands have warmed up enough to
itch, which drives you mental.”

I’ve had chilblains. They’re not much to look at, but the level of quiet torment is powerful. So I nodded and sat there, sipping
and listening. I like tea so hot that it burns the back of your throat, but to drink it like that you have to concentrate,
you have to sip and not talk. Anyway, I liked watching her. That elegant, angular grace. And she was so sure in herself, so
unapologetic. I
felt I could leave it all to her, I didn’t have to think up words to fill the silence.

When she’d finished with chilblains she began on a piece she was making for a commission. I hadn’t seen her work then, so
I couldn’t properly follow her talk of insects and spouts and petals. It all sounded weird and unlikely.

“The idea at the start was definitely more than a little bit flaky,” she said. “I thought most likely it wouldn’t come off,
but I had to give it a try…. And now I have it almost there and it’s nothing only brilliant.” She laughed aloud with pleasure
at the thought of its brilliance. Her nose was running from coming in out of the cold, and she rubbed it on the folded-back
bit of her sweater. Her eyes shone, and half her hair had come loose from its clip and I sat there thinking her work mustn’t
be any good or she wouldn’t be boasting about it the way she was.

“You don’t talk much, do you?” she said abruptly.

“I used to,” I said slowly. “But then I sort of stopped.”

It was a peculiar thing to say, but I didn’t mind because it was what I wanted to say. Those days I mostly opened my mouth
and the words that came out were about as close to what I meant as an ice cream is to a glacier. So I didn’t talk much, or
not out loud, I talked inside in my head. Maybe that’s why I would get closer to Catherine than to anyone else I’ve known.
Because with her I could say what I meant to say, and though it was clumsy it didn’t sound too stupid with her listening.
People were always surprised at our friendship because Catherine’s successful and sought-after and social and I’m not. Seeing
us together made them stop and look at me twice. Which I liked. I liked seeing people stopped short, and I liked it that Catherine
sought me out.