The Bird Woman (17 page)

“That you think that if I had to be a nun I could at least have stayed a nun. Not go giving it up and pretending to be normal.”

Liam’s big mouth. Alright, that’s what I’d said, but he didn’t have to repeat it to her face. I was taking the dishes from
the rack. Carefully, so they didn’t chink on account of the shake in my hands. They’d been laughing at me, I was sure of it.
And I don’t like being laughed at, it makes me go stubborn inside.

“I can’t imagine wanting to be a nun,” I said at last. “Even if I was a Catholic.”

“Would it help at all if I talked about it?”

“No. Definitely not.”

She stood there, not saying anything.

“I didn’t mean to offend you.”

I was suddenly contrite, God knows why—she was the one who’d deliberately misled me. “You haven’t offended me.”

I waited for more, but none came. I wished she’d say something or go away, but she did neither.

I went to the hooks by the door and took down my jacket.

“I have to get the children,” I said. She didn’t move. I put on the jacket and picked up the keys.

“It’s not the nun-thing I mind,” I said suddenly. “It’s you not telling me.”

“I thought I had—indirectly—I forgot that you wouldn’t understand. If you’d been Catholic, you would have. Most people are,
so you don’t think about it, and you just make assumptions.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Ellen, speak to me.”

I just looked at her. I wanted to speak, but I couldn’t because I knew I wasn’t allowed to say what I wanted to say. I shook
my head.

“Ellen, say it.”

“Did it never occur to you that your assumptions might be a wee bit arrogant?”

She flushed. I’d never seen her do that before. “Perhaps they
are,” she said slowly. “I’m sorry I didn’t make myself clearer. It’s not such an easy thing to drop into a conversation.”

I nodded and walked through the door and away from her across the yard. I wanted to run back and say I was sorry; I hadn’t
wanted to be ignorant and rude, it was just that I was confused because she wasn’t who I thought she was and everything was
changing and going wrong. And I was so tired from what Liam calls the-invisible-running-through-me. So tired and angry and
frightened. And it kept getting more all the time, it wouldn’t stop.

I wanted to say all that but I didn’t, and she was my last chance. It was no good talking to Liam anymore, all he did was
tell me what I should do—he’d long since made up his mind.

I opened the door of the Renault, repositioned the cushion so it covered the hole in the seat, climbed in, and turned the
ignition. It started first time, but I hardly noticed, I felt so deadened and hopeless. Then there was a knock on the window
and it was Catherine, so I wound it down the two inches it goes before it jams. She didn’t speak. She put her hand flat through
the window, the fingers splayed out, and I put my hand up and touched her fingers with mine. I looked at her, and she made
a face and shrugged her shoulders. I knew she meant it was all a fuck-up and what-the-hell, and we’d gone too far together
to turn back now.

A magpie has tail feathers set in a fan that spreads out from under the two at the centre, making twelve in all. These feathers
are black-dipped-in-petrol—they shine with greens and purples and peacock blues. The head is black, and the wings are white
with blue side feathers and black-and-white primaries. The bird is mostly head, though it doesn’t seem so when it’s on the
move on account of the tail being so long. The beak is very strong and sharply undershot.

How do I know this? From lifting a dead magpie, spreading its wings and its tail, taking a good, long look. Where did I get
this magpie? From the heap of birds that Connor took from his trap and threw on the ground, their necks wrung, one Sunday
when we were over visiting.

Connor had a contraption set up in the garden. He was proud of it, so it had to be inspected. It was like a cage, but semidetached,
the one half closed with a live magpie in it, the other half with the tunnel-like entrance you’ll find in a lobster pot.

“The magpie in the trap’s called a lure,” Connor said. “He’s in there, calling out, so the magpies up in the trees fly down
and find their way into the other half and can’t get out. Beautiful, so it is.”

He had four of them trapped in there. He reached in, pulled out the birds one by one, and wrung their necks. But he left the
first bird—the one called “the lure”—to go on calling out.

“’Tis cruel,” I told Connor. “Getting them down to aid him, wringing their necks like that.”

“’Tis not to aid him they come, girl, ’tis to kill him,” Connor said. “He’s a stranger, and he’s trespassing inside their
territory. ’Tis murder they have on their minds, not aid.”

I didn’t believe him. The place is full of magpies; they’re too busy raiding the songbirds’ nests and tearing at rabbits squashed
on the road to bother with killing each other. But aid or murder, it made no difference to Connor. He’s a hunter, he liked
his trap, liked wringing their necks and throwing the feathery corpses down in a heap. And magpies are vermin, everyone knows
that, who cares if they’re killed?

“Well, don’t be lending it to Liam,” I told him. “I won’t have it. And don’t either of you start thinking you can set it up
and I’ll get used to it because I won’t.”

“’Tisn’t cruel, girl,” Connor said. “’Tis the magpie that’s cruel,
not the trap.” But he didn’t push it. He likes me, and I like him, and I like the way he calls me
girl.

I picked one up from the pile. I could feel how warm its flesh was; I could feel its life around it still, like a shroud.
It was September, the air growing thinner, the haws on the whitethorns blooding, the crows and the magpies gathering, ready
to take back their own. The trees were still full, the grass still green, yet everything waited, everything knew. I loved
this moment: the swallows gathering on the lines, the cold lick under the warm autumn air, the feeling that something ancient
and fierce was crouched down, waiting its time. I walked off a little way from Connor and Liam, the dead magpie in my hands.

Sometimes I think all of the body is holy and all that the body does is holy. All the bad things it does as well as the good
things—everything—lusting, drinking, stealing, even murder. But I can’t explain that or understand it. It isn’t all good,
any fool knows that. But somehow it’s all holy.

What I think I mean is that everything is one. It’s not that good and evil don’t exist—they exist alright, and good is still
good, and evil is still evil—but they both belong to God, are of God, and God must be everything or He wouldn’t be God at
all.

I don’t say this to anyone except myself. But no one can stop me thinking it. Even I can’t stop me thinking it, though God
knows, I try hard enough.

This isn’t the sort of thinking I was reared with. Back then there was Right and Wrong, and in the middle was God, just and
exacting, silent and clean, clothed in unending light. Right stood to one side—solitary and upright—his back forever turned
on sinful Wrong. And no shady in-between place, no way these two could ever be associated; they were worse than neighbours
whose grandfathers had disputed a boundary years before, the ill feeling
going down through the generations, growing fiercer as time passed.

But I don’t believe in God, and if I did I’d hate Him. Yet I know that everything is holy, and I know it from that time I
was holding the magpie, while Liam and Connor stood there together and talked. And it wasn’t a strange or frightening experience;
it was calm and quiet as morning and brought me great peace.

Everything. Not some things only—not life only, or the universe only, but
everything.
Holy and praising God. Even though God doesn’t exist, has never existed, and never will.

So I think this, and then I think, I
can’t be thinking this, can I be thinking this?
And I know that I am. But I don’t get afraid. It comforts me, though I don’t want to think it at all.

And mostly I don’t. I cook, mind the children, do the housework, go to work. I’m a proper wife and mother. I don’t believe
in God.

Magpies are cruel, everyone knows that. And they’re valiant, territorial, beautiful, rapacious, fearless. Nothing is simple;
everything is part of everything else.

“It’s making you sick, Ellen, holding it back, turning people away, pretending you haven’t the gift. You have to let people
come, you’ve no choice.”

I stared at him. Was it really Liam who was saying these things, trying to make me do what he knew I couldn’t?

I should be less secretive, he said. I should be grateful.

If you do not bring forth that which is in you, that which is in you will destroy you.

That’s from the Gnostic Gospels. Or so Liam said. He stood in the kitchen, stubbornly saying such things, while I sat at the
table, stubbornly hating him. I didn’t know where he got this
stuff from. I’d had the Bible stuffed down my throat from the time I could walk, and I never once heard of the Gnostic Gospels.
Maybe they’re Catholic. More likely he had the quote off Dermot’s Marie. He used to crack up when Marie first got into this
stuff, started reading those New Age books, talking that way that they talk. Then he started doing the same himself.

He went from me; I didn’t know who he was anymore.

If I’d let it out, my life would be easier, he said. So would his, so would the children’s. I was making everyone suffer.
The Gospel According to Liam.

“I have a job,” I told him, “I haven’t time for another. I work in the library, remember?”

“Give it up. Do this instead.”

“I can’t.”

“Can’t give it up, or can’t do this?”

I stared at him again. He knew what I meant.

“Ellen, why can’t you?”

“I just can’t.”

It was true. He could see what it did to me even to speak of it, even to sneak a look at it sideways and indirectly.

So he left off badgering me for a bit, but we both knew he’d get back to it.

Who was this stranger, where had he gone to, my Liam who held the gate open and waited beside it, who never set dogs to my
heels?

C
atherine had been hanging about the kitchen since Christmas, dropping the odd hint, giving me the chance to talk.

It screwed me up, for I wanted to talk, but even more than I wanted to, I didn’t. We were outside—Catherine’s idea—she said
she’d smelled the spring on her way over and now she wanted to find its first stirrings. What she had smelt I don’t know,
for the rain had eased but the wind prowled the yard, sinking sharp little teeth into any bit of flesh exposed. Catherine
squatted on her hunkers, poking around in the muddy grass, pulling it back from the spikes of dark leaves that were going
to make snowdrops. Catherine can’t ever just look, she has to be touching things, feeling them, getting her fingers dirty.
The wind blew her hair round her face and pulled at the long, coarse manes of the horses beyond in the field where the shadows
were taking over. The crows moved about on the sodden grass, their untidy black feathers poking up like fingers.

It was five o’clock. I pushed my hands further down into the sleeves of my coat and waited for her to tire of her nature studies.

“Do you get pleasure from it?” she asked me out of nowhere.

“From what?” I asked, sharp as the wind. As soon as she’d opened her mouth I’d smelled Liam. Well, I thought, she’d have to
work hard if she wanted information.

“From the Healing.”

“What healing?”

She swivelled her gaze from the snowdrops and stared up at me.

“The thing you do that makes people better.”

“That people
think
makes them better.”

“Okay. The thing you do that people
think
makes them better. Do you get pleasure from it?”

“Pleasure?” I gave a sort of a laugh. “You must be joking.”

“Why d’you say that?” She poked at the snowdrop leaves again, pretending she’d never seen them before.

“Because it’s horrible.”

This time there was real surprise in her face. “Horrible? Oh, Ellen, I’m sorry, I never thought it might be like that. What
way horrible?”