The Bird Woman (40 page)

It’s black dark when Brian’s car pulls up alongside me. I’ve been wandering round the Glen for I don’t know how long, looking
for her in this place we once lived.

I haven’t found her yet. Maybe she’s travelling so close beside me I can’t see her.

Brian’s headlights slide over the pavement in front of me, and I step into the shadow. Funny how deeply reflex is printed
inside you. It’s years and years since I’d lived in a place where a cruising car might mean something best avoided.

Brian stops the car, reaches over, opens the passenger door, and calls my name. I glance back, but I’m so cold and numbed
that I don’t hear him. He calls again, and I hear him, though his voice seems a long way off.

“Get in, Ellen,” he says.

She looked at me only the once, spoke to me only the once, for days and days she’d barely been there in her body at all. I’ve
watched her die, pulled the tubes from her wrists and ankles, helped Anne straighten her limbs and tie up her jaw. Yet the
minute the life left her flesh she was here like an overhead light switched on in a darkened room.

I get in.

I ran down the stairs and out of the hospital; I’ve tramped through the Waterside, over the bridge, all the long length of
the Northlands Road, and she’s been with me all the way, every step. And she stayed there in the hospital room with Anne and
Brian and the girls. And she’s in the car with us now. She was on the pavement beside me before I got in.

I try to do the seat belt up, but my hands shake so hard from the cold that I can’t get the click-bit to click. Brian watches
me for a moment, then leans across and does it for me. He turns the car round.

“How did you know I was here?”

He doesn’t answer. I take a quick peek, and there’s that muscle, jumping beside his jaw. Brian thinks people should do what
they ought to do, he doesn’t like it when they do what they want or need to do instead.

He turns the fan up to full, then switches it from windscreen to feet. If I’m grateful for the blast of heat I don’t say so,
I sit there staring ahead, not opening my mouth. If Brian won’t talk then neither will I.

I’m not being difficult on purpose—that’s what he won’t understand. I’m all twisted up inside, exactly the same as he is.
I’m doing the best I can in my way.

Yet I’m glad enough to be rescued from the pavements. There were lights behind the curtained windows of the house we’d once
lived in, there were lights on in the houses where our neighbours had lived.

I watched people coming home, doors opening onto hallways where I’d once been welcome, light spilling onto pavements where
I’d played. I found myself putting names on every family along the road, and that surprised me, for I never cared for such
things, I’d always been too busy with itching to get away. Everything looked much as I remembered it looking, though the people
I’d known didn’t live here now, and the graffiti on the walls belonged to the other side.

“Who made the Prods leave?” I ask Brian now.

“It’s Prods that force out Taigs, not the other way round,” he says wearily. He sighs as though I’m an irredeemable irritation,
yet one he’s forced to tolerate through accident of blood. “No one ‘made the Prods leave,’ no drama, no mobs in the night.
We went of our own accord.”

I wait. Brian sighs again, but I know he’ll be drawn. Never one to miss out on delivering a lecture is Brian. You’d know from
half a mile away that he’s head man in some school.

“A lot of police lived there in our day. Soft targets. Even the RUC came home to their beds—”

I go on waiting.

“The IRA took to shooting them on their doorsteps. A minor fucking detail that seems to have slipped your mind—”

“I remember,” I say.

“So the ones who were still alive took it into their heads to move,” he says. “A senseless notion, I grant you, but it avoided
the inconvenience of being shot.”

“And the rest?” I’m fed up with all this sarcasm and portentousness.

“The City Council built new houses on the Waterside. New houses, all mod cons,
a safe estate.
They moved. Now they’re paying protection money to their own.”

He glances over.
Do I need that spelled out as well?
the look says. But I haven’t been gone that long, I know what he’s saying.

“What does it matter, anyway? We’re just bigots who want to keep Catholics under the heel.”

“Well, it’s true, isn’t it?” I’m angry now. Back four days after twelve years, everything different, everything still the
same. “No jobs, no votes, no housing. When they tried to change things peacefully they were attacked.”

“It
was
true, Ellen. It’s not true now. It’s not about that anymore.”

“What is it about then?”

Brian stares ahead. We’ve swung left off the Northlands Road, and we’re dropping down past the big, smug houses of the Rock
Road. His silence goes on so long I think he’s not going to answer me, but he does. “Hatred,” he says slowly. “That’s what
it’s always been about. Three hundred years that was yesterday. We got their land, they want it back, and they want us away
to hell. And they want to walk on our faces just like we walked on theirs.” He stops, and I think he’s finished but he hasn’t.
“You can add in fear to that. They were afraid, living under us, and now we’re afraid of living under them. They say if we
can’t take what’s coming we should go back where we came from. But it’s not as simple as that, Ellen. No one wants us, we’ve
been here too long, there’s nowhere to go back to.”

I don’t speak. It’s true, but it’s his problem, not mine. I can’t get my head back into the mind-set that thinks a country
not governed from Britain’s unsafe. We turn right onto the Strand Road at the bottom. It’s desolate down here, the wide street
all but empty, the half-derelict buildings like stage sets for a film. A
long wall of corrugated sheeting lifts and bangs in a bitter wind straight off the Foyle.

Further on it doesn’t look so bad. There are lights and new bars and aging new supermarkets. A few passersby walk fast, heads
down, collars up, a hand at the neck to clutch the coat tighter in round them.

“You can let me off here,” I say. Brian slows for the lights, but they change to green as we reach them. Brian puts his foot
down and accelerates round the corner.

“Brian, let me out. I need to go back to Great James Street.”

“What for? I’ve been there. Your things are in the back. You’re staying at the house.”

“I’ve not paid—”

“I’ve paid. And no more runners. I haven’t the time to be driving round looking for you.”

“I don’t want to stay at your house—”

“I don’t give a shit what you want, Ellen. Your mother just died, the house is filling up, Liam’s coming tomorrow—”

“Liam? You rang Liam?”

“You heard.”

“Let me out—”

He doesn’t even slow down.

“Brian, let me out, you’ve no right to do this, you’d no right to ring Liam—”

“Says who?” His voice is angry and hard. “Liam’s mother-in-law just died—his children’s grandmother—he’s a right to be told.
Anyway, it was Anne who phoned, she thought you might have gone back on the bus, she wanted to know if you’d rung for him
to meet you. When he said you hadn’t she sent me out looking—”

“How did you know I’d be in the Glen?”

“A wee bird told me.”

There’s no one like a brother to press all your buttons and
take you straight from flat calm to blind rage. I’m twelve years old again, and my hand flies up to smack him one hard on
the nose. I catch myself on just in time, force my hand down, then sit on it to stop it from doing a repeat performance.

“I knew because I knew,” Brian says. “You’re not the only one that’s psychic around here.”

I hear him, but it takes a minute for the words to sink in. I sit staring ahead at the buildings flicking past, the car lights
flicking past. He doesn’t speak again till we’re over the bridge and back in the Waterside.

“I wouldn’t have your other gifts, but.” His voice is heavy and sneering. “They must come with the red hair. Liam tells us
you’re doing great business, can’t keep up with the demand. He says you’ve always had your wee gift, though it’s stronger
these last years.” There’s a longish pause, so I know there’s more coming. “Funny you never let on about it up here. But then
I’d say you’re well used to keeping things to yourself. I’d say you don’t talk much about your wee visit to the mental hospital
now that you’re living down South.”

The shock of what he says runs through me. I sit rigid, trying not to show that he’s scored a hit. I glance at his hands on
the wheel, the set of his face in the passing headlights. The strangeness of this day is strong upon me: the vigil and our
mother’s death; this intertwining of our lives when I’d thought the threads long cut.

They had never been cut, nor ever would be, not in life nor in death. Brian dwells inside me. Our ancestors dwell inside me.
Their furious unbelief is mine as much as Brian’s.

But the longer I sit in this car, hands now quiet in my lap, looking ahead, the less there is in me of hurt or rage at either
Brian or Liam. This sudden gift of an inner peace is something I’m coming to know, though I have no understanding of it.

There is nothing to say. I’m filled with an emptiness that watches from a long way off.

I walk through her kitchen door, and Anne’s cutting sandwiches. She looks up, smiles, then sees the expression on Brian’s
face behind me. She puts down the knife and takes me upstairs. She draws the curtains across the spare-room windows, assures
me the bed is aired and comfortable, smoothes a pillow with her hand. I ask was it her or Brian that Liam had told about the
Healing?

“Brian.”

“When you were phoning to get me to come?”

She shakes her head. “A couple of years ago. They’d told your mother she needed a mastectomy, so Brian was ringing to let
you know. Liam answered the phone. He said you were working, and he didn’t know when you’d be finished; it was someone who’d
come without an appointment. Then Brian asked him what it was you were working at, and Liam told him.” She picks up the towel
she has laid on the dressing table, refolds it, hangs it over her arm. “And then your mother decided she didn’t want us to
tell you, so Brian never rang back. But Brian said they had quite a wee chat…. Did Liam not mention it at all?”

“Not a word.”

“Men are funny sometimes.”

“What did Brian say?”

“About the people coming to you?”

I nod. She can’t say
healer.

“He was a wee bit upset to begin with, but then he calmed down. He didn’t talk about it after that, but I think deep down
it made a sort of a sense to him.” She pauses, looks down at the towel, takes courage. “He’ll sometimes know things ahead
himself…. Sort of premonitions.”

“What kind of things?”

“There was a Saturday there, a few years back, and Carol was heading off into the town. He lost his temper with her over nothing
and wouldn’t let her go. Later there was a bomb in the town—the very street that Carol would have been in, and at the exact
same time. A wee girl in Linda’s class lost her leg, but no one was killed. Later he told me he knew not to let her go, but
he didn’t know why. He picked the fight because he couldn’t help himself—it was on account of the strange tight feeling he
had inside him. It frightened him, knowing like that. Is that the way it is for you?”

I shook my head. “I never know anything about the children or Liam. Mostly it’s only about the people who come to me. Sometimes
I’ll know what’s wrong with them before they’ve anything said. If it’s an injury then I might know how they got it. Things
like that.”

“Brian said he was on a long time with your Liam, I think he surprised himself. He said Liam had his feet on the ground, yet
he sounded as though he believed in what you were doing…. And he didn’t think Liam was looking for money. I’d say that surprised
him as well.”

“Healers are all quacks and charlatans?”

She blushes and smoothes the towel on her arm. “Something like that. Does it work, Ellen?”

“Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t. It works enough for people to talk, then others come because of what they’ve
heard.”

Anne nods. She’s backing slowly out of the room, but she turns when she gets to the door.

“It’s good she died, Ellen. She held off the morphine as long as she could, but the pain got too bad. I know it’s hard when
you hadn’t talked, but at least you got to see her.”

What is there to say? And besides, I’m not angry with anyone
anymore, and the curious, empty calm I felt in the car is still with me.

I unpack my things then there’s a knock on the door, and Linda comes in with that towel again and a pot of tea and a sandwich.
I’m glad of the tea, but I wave the food away. Linda looks at the sandwich and says that her mother’s told her not to come
back till she’s seen me eat the lot.

I make myself take a bite. Chicken. I’m surprised at the surge of appetite rising to meet it.

After she’s gone I wash my face and sit on the bed, but the doorbell keeps ringing. There are footsteps and voices, doors
being opened and closed.