The Bird Woman (37 page)

And the linen from the Ulster Weavers? That might have been innocent, I think. A woman who’d buy that skirt might well think
a tablecloth the thing to send—might even think it signalled acceptance of what she’d have seen as another dubious Ellen-liaison.
But I still can’t believe she’d thought I’d like it.

But none of that matters now, for here she is, day in, day out, the dutiful daughter-in-law, keeping our vigil. The nurses
call her Anne too.

She looks tired, and why wouldn’t she? For there’s little as exhausting as a death watch, few places as disinfected and overheated
and generally draining as a big, busy hospital in the middle of winter and not a window open anywhere and most folk worn out
with staring fear and mortality straight in the face.

I’ve been here three hours, and already I’m climbing the walls. All I can think of is going through those doors, getting onto
the bus, and never, ever coming back here again.

At last Anne stops stirring her coffee, lifts her head, and looks me in the eye. I don’t know what she sees there, but what
I see are the purpley-black stains at the insides of the eyes where the skin is thinnest, and the distant look that says that
the person inside is stretched to the limit and neither knows it nor cares, for there’s a good way still to be travelled.

“How do you find her?”

I lift my shoulders, then drop them and shut my eyes briefly. What is there to say?

“Did she open her eyes?”

I nod.

“Did she speak to you?”

“She did.”

“Ellen, I’m so glad. I’m so glad you came—”

I nod, ashamed that I’m not. I hope Anne won’t ask me anything else, I don’t want to say what my mother said, but I know well
I can’t just sit here and hand her a pack of old lies.

Why can’t I? I don’t know, I’ve no problem with lies in the usual run of things; it must be the way she’s been with my mother
all these days.

But instead of asking she touches my hand.

“You must be worn out,” I say.

She shrugs and reaches into her shopping bag. She brings out a package wrapped in greaseproof paper, opens it, and pushes
it across the table.

“Ham sandwiches. The wheaten bread’s homemade. One of the neighbours makes them for me every day.”

I take one, though I don’t really want it.

“The food in here’s sort of dead,” she adds. She sounds apologetic, as though she doesn’t like to be criticising the hospital
in any way. But she’s right—all around us are opened plastic cartons and people lifting dead food to their faces.

“There’s no call for the two of us to be in here,” I tell her. “I’ll do this afternoon, give you a bit of a break.”

She looks at me as though I’m speaking Chinese.

“You go on home, Anne,” I say carefully. “I’ll stay with her. It’s what I’m here for, isn’t it? I didn’t come all this way
to go shopping.”

Anne opens her mouth to speak then she closes it. She goes on looking at me. Her greeny-brown eyes fill with tears that well
over the rims, roll down her cheeks, and splash on the table.

“You’re tired,” I say as gently as I can.

She nods, reaches for her bag, extracts a tissue, dabs at the wet places on her face.

“I suppose I must be,” she says after a while. “It was you saying go home that did it…. What’ll I do at home? I thought. The
girls won’t be back yet, there’s no one to feed, I get up at five so’s to have all the housework done before I come out—”

“You could lie on the bed.”

Her eyes fill again. She nods wordlessly, then her shoulders start to heave. Her hand closes round the tissue, and she lifts
it to her eyes. I sit on, watching, saying nothing. More tissues. I get up and go to the counter and come back with two more
cups of coffee.

She’s finishing her mopping and blowing. I set the coffee down on the table. She pulls the cup to her, picks it up, sips,
tries out a shaky smile.

“Look what you’re after doing to me,” she says. “You’re only home, and you have me cryin’ like a wean.”

I smile back. “Same old fiddle, same old tune,” I say. “I’m only home and look at you, blaming all your troubles on Ellen.”

“Are you calling me an auld fiddle, Ellen McKinnon?”

“I am,” I say. “Now away home and lie down on that bed before the varnish falls off you altogether.”

She nods and gathers up her things. She folds the greaseproof paper over what’s left of the sandwiches and pushes them across
the table at me. I don’t want them, but I take them to please her. It’s weird, I can’t stop smiling, I’m trying as hard as
I can to encourage her, though I can’t imagine why.

Now we’re both standing up. She makes a wee lurch towards me, I put out my arms and straightaway hers are around me, holding
on tight. Only for a moment. Then she pulls away.

“The girls’ll be in around five,” she says. She goes out through the doors without looking back.

So there I am, back by her bedside, nothing to do but stare at her closed face or walk across to the window and look at the
monochrome world beyond it, all smudged and smeared in the rain. Through the grey light I can see the Sperrin Mountains, their
mounded slopes like a school of whales rising out of the sea. I think of the loose blue chain of the Blackstairs that I look
for first thing every morning from the kitchen door. I think of Liam, the smell of his warm, drowsy, waking-up body beside
me. Everything seems such a long way away, such a long time ago.

Was the bus only yesterday? Was this morning only this morning?

I look at the figure in the bed. The skin is puffy and yellow, the belly grossly swollen, that wonderful head of white hair
has thinned and gone sparse. The hands—half opened, half closed—lie awkward and motionless on the folded sheet.

I hadn’t thought she’d have a room to herself. I hadn’t thought, that’s the truth. I’ve been so wrapped up in myself and the
misery of Liam and Catherine, so intent on refusing to go, that I’ve hardly considered her at all—

But it makes me wild that I’ve come all this way and she’s spoken to me, and that’s it—no more. She won’t come out again for
a second look.

If she hadn’t at all I wouldn’t have minded. But she has, so I know now she can if it suits her.

I turn my back and stand very still so she’ll take a quick wee peek while she thinks I’m not looking. I turn back fast to
catch her peeking, only she isn’t. She’s lying there, the same as before, that awful slack-jawed look on her face, the breathing
heavy and noisy through her open mouth.

For a moment I’m almost stricken. She thought bed-in-the-day a disgrace. Others might do it—not her—she stayed on her feet
till she couldn’t stand up, and it was all worse after Daddy had died because she only had us to mind her. We entered her
room on sufferance. It was in the door with us and away back out again the minute the tray was set down. And no hanging around
or asking her how she was. In the whole of my childhood I only remember her being bed-sick three or four times.

I look away in a moment of decency. It doesn’t last, and the next thing I’m back at the staring. Anyone can look at her, anyone
can come in anytime they want to—where is there left for her to go but behind her closed lids? She could die now, with me
standing watching her own death take her. Yet I’m still on the outside: as long as her eyes are shut she’s safe from me.

A nurse sticks her head round the door, but when she sees me the smile she wears fades down to neutral. She rearranges her
face and comes in. She nods at me, then crosses to the bed and starts checking tubes and drips. She’s very thin, and she looks
far too young. She has straight light-brown hair clipped back behind her ears and grey eyes set into a scrape of pale skin
that barely covers her bones. I watch her. Her thin arms poke out from the short pink sleeves of her uniform, her hands on
the tubes and machines are raw-looking, knobbly with bones.

“Where’s Anne?” she asks me, a quick glance thrown in my direction.

“Away home for a rest.”

She nods, tight-lipped.

“Are you the one lives down South?” She doesn’t look up from the monitor.

“I am.”

“She was askin’ for you.”

I’m startled. “She was?”

“She was, aye. Yesterday and the day before, over and over.
Ellen, Ellen, where’s Ellen? ‘
Twas all you’d hear out of her. Anne told her you were on your way, and she quietened down. She looked for you when she woke,
so she did, but you hadn’t come. Then she told Anne you were takin’ your time, bein’ on your way. Then she stopped askin’.”

She’s at the pulse now, my mother’s limp wrist between her long, chapped fingers, her pale eyes veiled behind deep lids. The
lids flick open, the eyes look straight into mine. I stare back, my hostility out around me like an unsheathed knife. Her
eyes drop.

“Well I’m here now,” I say.

So Brian was telling the truth after all.

T
UESDAY

I
phone home using a phone card. I ring from the public phone in the hospital or else from the hall of the B and B. I don’t
use the mobile. I’ve run the battery flat and told them it doesn’t work from the North to the South. I can’t risk them phoning
me, unprepared.

I speak to Liam, and then I speak to Suzanna. Last of all Andrew comes on the line. I listen to his silence. I can see him
as though he’s standing beside me, the squirm of his body, his desperate, tongue-tied need. I can’t manage the phone, nor
the longing in me, can’t find the words to reach him, though my need’s near as desperate as his. So I tell him to put his
father back on, and when Liam speaks I try using anger to push him away but it isn’t any good, so I tell him I have to go.
I put down the phone, then stand there and stare down the lighted corridor, seeing nothing.

“She said it won’t be that long now, but they don’t think today or tomorrow. She said we might think of a rota to stop us
from getting too worn out.”

Anne has been talking to the ward sister. Now she’s talking to me. We walk the corridor, the night pressing black at the window.
A girl has just passed us, head down, her face stained with tears. I recognise her, she’s the daughter from the room next
door. We’ve watched them—the long, draining hours, the pain of the vigil, the sudden flurry when death finally comes. And
now this bewildered departure.

Our turn next.

Brian and the girls are in with her. Soon Anne will take the girls home, and Brian and I will wait on.

“Brian doesn’t want her left at all,” Anne says. “He says he’ll stay here all night, every night; he doesn’t care what they
say about it not being today or tomorrow, he won’t have her die alone.”

I look at Anne. She’s near that place that’s too tired to judge or argue, the place where you no longer try to change anything,
you simply accept what someone says as fact and work from there. Yet she looks better than she looked when I came. Her hair
has been washed, and she has on a skim of makeup; the shadows under her eyes are less black. I take her arm and turn her around,
and we pace back the way we’ve come.

She likes being with me. It’s strange, for she didn’t before. I was Brian’s wee sister, to be relied on to say the wrong things
and do the wrong things, to upset Brian. I’m still Brian’s wee sister, I still upset Brian, but it’s different now, she’s
stripped down by exhaustion and vigil, and I am stripped down by this journey back through the years. And all in the space
of thirty-six hours.

I like being with her too, which is even stranger. Brian I can do without, though I fell on his neck when I saw him last night.
Two hours—that’s all it took—by the end of two hours I’d forgotten the rush of joy at the sight of his face, at the sound
of his voice, at the feel of his arms about me. Now we’re thirteen and eighteen again. Implacable. If he says the corridor’s
white I’ll swear on the Bible it’s painted brilliant scarlet.

“I’ll stay,” I tell Anne, “if he’s made up his mind he won’t shift. You go with the girls, I’ll bed down here in that room
the nurses use, get a few hours’ sleep on the floor, then send Brian home to his bed and sit with her till the morning. He
can come back in before his work if he wants to. If he goes to his work at all, that is.”

So I call Brian out and tell him the plan, and surprise, surprise, he agrees. The daughters are summoned. They stand looking
down at the grey vinyl tiles and listen to their mother. Sometimes they shoot out a look to check on this half-new aunt of
theirs, and see does she match with the story. They’re good-looking girls, though it’s too soon to say if the looks will last.
Linda and Carol—fifteen and thirteen—they both have their mother’s fine skin and Brian’s brown eyes and that bloom that makes
the young beautiful whatever may change later on. They wear school uniforms and carry their school bags. They’ve come straight
from school for the second day in a row.

I can’t read them at all. They’re closed off from the adult world, deep in their good-girl acts, which they wear like cloaks
around themselves, buying time inside to become whatever it is they’re becoming. I feel no bond with them—they are snails,
not yet ready to venture their little soft horns out to check on the air.

Yet I am sorry to watch them go off down the corridor, one on each side of their mother. They take with them the sweet everydayness
of life and leave us here in mortality and sickness. I feel the lonely night world of the hospital closing around me.

“What did she say to you?” Brian asks.

We’re banished to the corridor—the nurses are checking and measuring, going about their cool, arcane duties. It’s three in
the morning. I’ve slept fitfully for an hour or two in the nurse’s room, then I’ve come to find Brian to send him home to
Anne as I’ve promised.

He won’t go. Or not now, not when I tell him to. Instead he is hanging about, unable to leave, and I’m cross, for I’m headachey
and tired and I could be safe in my little room, sleeping.

“What did she say?” he asks again. “Anne said you told her she spoke to you.”