The Bird Woman (14 page)

She nodded and set down her empty mug on the draining
board and asked when would be a good time for her to come back.

“I’ll tell him you called,” I said. “Why don’t you ring before you come over the next time and then you’ll be sure of catching
him in?”

I told Liam that Catherine Casey had called in about some co-op thing for buying materials, and would call back another time.

He was interested right away. He said it was time they got themselves organised and what did I make of Catherine? Had I liked
her, did I think she was strange?

“She’s beautiful,” I said. Somehow it was all I could think of to say.

“Is she? Well, yes, I suppose she is, I hadn’t thought of her like that. Just that she’s easy on the eye.”

“She went on about teapots and flowers. Told me how brilliant her work is.”

Liam laughed. “That would be Catherine alright. She gets a bit carried away with herself. She doesn’t mean it the way it sounds;
she just gets overexcited.”

Liam says I have a judgmental face. I think he’s right. Too many Covenanters in my lineage, my mother from a long line of
Ulster-Scots Presbyterians, my father a Presbyterian out of Glasgow, moved to Derry for his job in Her Majesty’s Customs and
Excise Service. My face is narrow, the nose too long, the skin too white, the eyes too light, the hair too red and wild. Not
carrot red but blazing fire-flame red; it springs round my head like burning wire, crackles with all the life that’s somehow
not in my face. You’d think it would ease my face of some of its judgment, hair like that, but it doesn’t. In an odd, demented
way it adds to the effect.
Sometimes I leave my hair loose, and it tickles like spiders crawling my face, but I’m not about to go for the rat look again,
so mostly I pull it back hard and tie it tight on my neck. I like it like that. I like economy and plainness.

Liam doesn’t. Back then he’d take the bands from my hair and shake it loose, and when I protested he’d tell me I should have
been a nun. I’d tell him Presbyterians don’t approve of nuns, Presbyterians don’t renounce the world, they live in it instead.
He’d look at me then; he’d call me his Wee Puritan, but sometimes—even in those days—he’d call me his Wee Black Bigot instead.
On Puritan days he’d offer to show me how to live in the world. I’d tell him I already knew, but to go on ahead and show me
again, if that was what he wanted—

Afterwards, he’d tell me he liked corrupting Puritans.

That was okay by me—I liked being corrupted—but on Wee Black Bigot days I’d get thick with him, and wouldn’t be shown.

“To hell with you, Ellen,” he’d say, “you’ve a Presbyterian soul.”

It would be my turn to look at him then. Liam isn’t sectarian—he doesn’t think Presbyterians are heretics, and he doesn’t
much like pious Catholics or the Church.

He thinks that means he’s free from bias.

But you don’t see your own ways unless you’re with someone who wasn’t reared as you were; you don’t notice the things you
do without question unless you’re standing alongside someone not bred to those ways. And there I was, reminding him with my
every gesture, and it wasn’t comfortable. And Liam likes comfort, so in his heart he doesn’t like Presbyterians, even lapsed
ones like me, who don’t like us either.

It’s no different for me. “I’m not a bigot,” I’d tell him. “I’m only how I was reared.”

Liam has one of those fleshy, almost hairless bodies, very strong, very full of health and good humour and well-being, so
he doesn’t dwell up in his mind, he lives a warm, sensual life through his flesh. And there’s something lovely about a man
like that, especially when he’s young; he gives off a sort of vitality, you feel you could warm your hands on him, and I did—I
still do.

But because he loves life and the body’s life, there’s a part of him that’s threatened by economy and plainness. So he wanted
me to be me and not me—the two things at the one time—and I couldn’t. I still can’t, I can’t loosen up, I can’t ever just
give in and do what he wants, no matter how badly he wants it. If I did that I’d lose myself, and I’ll never, ever do that
again, or never willingly. One Purdysburn was enough for me, I’ve no wish to learn my way around another.

Sometimes I’d undo the bands and take out the clips and let my hair down for him myself. Those times he’d say that if he didn’t
know me for a Presbyterian he’d think I was a witch. But he knew there was no part of me was a witch no matter how he might
yearn for it. Witches are too slack, too earthy, for a woman of my temperament—witches don’t mind dirt. And somewhere he was
relieved, for he liked the transparency of me; he didn’t want to have to deal with all that underworld of twisty darkness,
though he thought he longed for it.

So I’m perfect for him, the combination that makes life impossible for me and safe for him. I’m a living, breathing contradiction,
a travesty of nature, a Puritan with second sight.

Catherine came back without phoning first, and Liam wasn’t there so she hummed and hawed then asked could she leave him a
note? I invited her in.

Tea again and that business with her hands in her sleeves
around the mug till she’d warmed them enough, then the mug set down and the sleeves folded back.

Suzanna was in her highchair eating mashed-up banana and making a mess. For something to say, I asked Catherine had she finished
her teapot.

“I went on about it, didn’t I? I do that. I know I should hold back and be cool, but I forget. I suppose now you think me
the most unmerciful show-off?”

I’d nodded before I could stop myself, but she only laughed. I couldn’t work her out, but I didn’t seem to be offending her,
which was somehow relaxing and caught me off my guard.

“I’m onto a new one, completely different from all the others so far. I’d tell you it’s going to be great, but you’ll only
think I’m too full of myself again—”

“Don’t you get tired of teapots?”

“I do, oh, I do, I get so I’ve totally had it with teapots—I never want to see another as long as I live…. Then I’m lying
in bed, thinking of nothing at all, and a new one floats into my head.”

She was off again. When they came floating into her mind, she said, she didn’t just see the teapot, she saw it where it should
be, saw the setting that showed off its true potential.

“Like where?”

“Oh, you know, somewhere grimy. A student flat or an attic, or one of those cloakrooms you see in old Georgian houses, all
broken floor tiles and elephant-foot umbrella stands and jumbles of bootjacks and Wellies. But they never end up in places
like that—they’re too expensive. It’s my own fault. Well, not entirely—the gallery’s pretty strict on pricing. But the end
of it is they cost so much that normal people can’t afford to buy them.” She stretched out a hand and helped herself to a
piece of shortbread from the cooling tray. “So I set them up in places where they look the way
they
should
look and I have them photographed. Then someone rich comes along and takes them home to live on a blond wooden floor or a
Persian rug.” She shrugged and poured herself more tea from the pot. “I shouldn’t complain. I do what I like doing most, it
pays the bills, and at least there’s no danger of anyone taking me remotely seriously—”

“Don’t you want to be taken seriously?”

She shook her head. “I’d hate to be taken seriously—”

Out went the hand for more shortbread. She ate it, then licked the crumbs off her swollen fingers.

“Are you from a big family?” she asked abruptly.

“No, why?”

“Because both times I’ve come here you’ve been baking.”

“Suzanna’s birthday cake,” I said. “She’s two on Sunday. You don’t have to be from a big family to bake.”

“No, but it helps. Mind, I’m from a big family and I don’t bake at all. Reaction. That’s what the teapots are about. I mean,
teapots must be
the
symbol of rural Irish hospitality, and here I am, making them into oversized grotesques with strong sexual undertones—and
they’d even pour if you could lift them.”

“How many of you are there?” I’d had enough of teapots.

“Seven. And you?”

“Two. Only me and an older brother. My father died when I was eight.”

“That’s tough. Did your mother remarry?”

“Indeed she did not.” I must have spoken more bitterly than I’d intended, for I saw the startled look on her face. “It would’ve
been against her principles,” I said, to explain.

“You make her sound fierce.”

“She was. Is, I should say, she isn’t dead. It was a stiff upbringing, alright, I could resent it if I let myself, but what’s
the point? That’s the way she was, and I daresay it was hard enough, being
left with two young children to rear. That’s what everyone told us anyway. We were Millstones around her Neck.”

“Does she visit often?”

I shook my head and wiped banana sludge from Suzanna’s face.

“Not since I came to live down here. Which is six years now.”

“But she’s seen the children?”

“No. She’s never set eyes on Liam either. He phoned her when Andrew was born, and she sent a stuffed donkey. He phoned again
for Suzanna, and she got a babygrow from Marks and Spencers.” Why was I telling her all this stuff? I rubbed at Suzanna’s
mouth again, and she gave me a glare. “My mother’s not a maternal sort of woman,” I added.

“Are you a Catholic?”

For a minute I thought I hadn’t heard her right. I’ll never get used to being asked that straight out, in the way that people
do down here; in the North you’d never ask—it wouldn’t be civil—you work it out from clues and intuition.

“Presbyterian,” I said, cold as I could. “But I don’t like religion, I’m not religious.”

“I am,” she said, finishing off another piece of shortbread.

I was startled. She didn’t look one bit that way, and in my book being religious didn’t go with being an artist, or making
sexual teapots, or having the sort of looks that Catherine has.

Just the same I was careful not to say anything, for I didn’t want to encourage her. I hate it when people start telling you
what they believe in. It’s boring and embarrassing and none of my business anyway. So I wiped away, getting the last stray
blobs of banana off of Suzanna’s chin.

Suddenly Catherine’s hands pushed themselves into my line of vision. She held them out to me, palms down, the redness and
swelling right there in my face. I knew what she wanted.

“No,” I said, without looking up.

She withdrew her hands.

“There you go,” she said lightly and turned away. When she turned back she’d folded her arms, and the sweater sleeves covered
her hands.

I got up and started stacking the cups and the plates that were scattered about on the table.

“There’s creams you can get from the chemist,” I said, turning my back on her, carrying them across to the sink. “And you
might think of buying yourself another heater.”

No answer. I glanced round, but she was already half out the door. I’d no desire to stop her.

C
atherine would never have asked me about her hands if it hadn’t been for Martin Foley and his second wake. Martin Foley had
been a close friend of Liam’s at college, but he was gay, so after they’d finished he’d gone off to London to live a more
open life. For a while there were great reports of his doings, then the first flush wore off, and word came less frequently.
Which was only as you’d expect—lives change, the focus shifts. They still phoned each other, but less and less often, and
both times when Liam was over in London, Marty had been away. A couple of years later a mutual friend had run into Marty and
came home saying he’d gone very thin and didn’t seem to want to know him anymore.

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that Liam would have known from that? But he didn’t; he wasn’t used to disaster.

After the funeral he’d gone to see Marty’s parents to ask if he could do a headstone for the grave. They were dead pleased,
they said he could do what he liked, for Marty had thought so much of him. They wanted to pay but he’d told them not to insult
him.

It had taken Liam a long time to complete the headstone because it was so emotional for him. He’d been terrible fond of Marty,
and it grieved him that he hadn’t been trusted enough to be told about his sickness. But Marty had kept it from everyone—
even the parents hadn’t known till almost the end. He’d told them he’d wanted to spare them the shame.