The Bird Woman (6 page)

It’s a wonderful place, Achill; there never were such skies. I was used to skies from Derry, but still it wasn’t like Achill.
Achill had the best skies that ever I saw in all Ireland. It could be ink black up ahead, but away to the left you’d see light
breaking through in a shaft like a floodlight, while off to the right there’d be rain, a grey curtain, and behind that again
you’d see where the rain had passed over and the land was shouldering its way back up through the gloom.

So we went striding along together, all thought of regret vanished clean away and Robbie only a flicker of guilt at the back
of my mind.

Night came, and we sat by the smoking fire with a bottle of whiskey that I was throwing into me but Liam had hardly touched.
It was awkward as hell, but I didn’t care. We’d ease up in bed and no need for talk—our bodies would say it all. Or that’s
what I thought, but I’d reckoned without Liam: when I put my hand on his leg, you’d think he’d been stung by a wasp.

He hadn’t brought me here, he said, for
that.

“Why not?” I asked him. “What’s wrong with
that?
”

It seemed Liam thought we should learn to talk first.

“If we can’t talk,” he said, “there isn’t a future—”

I gaped at him. No future was fine by me. A bit on the surface of me was playing with the notion of leaving Robbie, but deeper
down that wasn’t what I meant to do at all Deeper down I wasn’t leaving Robbie, I was having a bit of a fling with Liam and
while I was at it destroying whatever shared future I’d glimpsed that night in the bar. I was trying to avoid my fate, you
see; I thought I could go with him to Achill and then sneak back home again to Robbie. Outwit my fate, give it the slip.

So I sat there, not believing what I was hearing, thinking it all some game on his part that would resolve itself in an hour
or so’s time in the bed. Only it didn’t. He’d taken himself off to a different bed the first night, and the next and the next.
And for all I knew he would do the same tonight.

In the day we’d walked long, long walks, together but alone. And now we were both so miserable we were relieved to be apart.

I sat on, thinking these thoughts, glad of his absence, wondering should I cut my losses, find a bus, and head back to Belfast,
but knowing I wasn’t yet able for Robbie or the city. Beside me on the windowsill were two oval stones, very white, and the
skull of some long-dead ewe. Or some long-dead ram—how would I know? What did I know about sexing live sheep, much less something
like this, stripped of its flesh and blood?

It was ugly, the bone grey and pitted, the horns broken off at the tips. A row of hefty grey teeth stuck out from the upper
jaw, but the lower one had long since vanished away, and round holes, empty and dark, stared out where the eyes should have
been. Once it was its own sheep, I thought, with some sort of life of its own and some sort of consciousness. Idly, I looked
down at my hand in my lap, imagining the bones lurking under the flesh, wondering would they stay linked in the grave or fall
away, like the sheep skull’s lower jaw.

I should have kept a tighter hold on my thoughts, for I got more than I’d bargained for. I watched, and my skin turned
yellowy-blue, as though it was badly bruised, then puffed and swelled, and the yellowy-blueness darkened into black. A foul
stench hung on the air, and I saw my flesh breaking open, heaving with maggots and pus. I screamed and jumped up. I tried
to throw my hand off from me, but it stayed joined onto my arm. It was like trying to throw your own child away; you can’t
do it even if you want to, you can’t rid yourself of a part of yourself just because you don’t like what it does or says or
because it’s manky with maggots.

I don’t know how long it lasted: it might have been half an hour or only seconds. But I watched, and it all changed back.
My hand was my hand, the flesh clean and regrown, and not a maggot in sight. I reached for my cigarettes, but the same hand
shook so hard I couldn’t get one out of the packet.

Sweet Jesus, I thought. Not that again, don’t let it be that again. How am I going to live if I can’t even think a thought
without seeing it act itself out before my eyes?

But it was—I knew well that it was. I was seeing things again. Barbara Allen and Jacko Brennan came flooding back, and my
little bit of quiet and kind idleness in the broken yard was gone.

I sometimes wonder now, could I have left Robbie if Barbara Allen had lived? There are times when I think I could, but more
often I think I couldn’t. He wouldn’t have let me take her, that’s certain sure, and I don’t think I could have defied the
whole world and myself and gone off without her, but I don’t know. It’s no good thinking and saying to yourself “I’d do this”
or “I’d do that.” You don’t know till it happens; you don’t know what you will find in yourself till it’s found.

What I do know is that I couldn’t have gone to Liam half as easily as I did if something of what had been between Robbie and
me hadn’t died along with Barbara Allen.

But all that was ahead, and nothing to do with my standing there, shaking from head to foot, my eyes on the sheep’s skull,
full up with fear. It wasn’t that I thought it foretold anything. It was it happening at all that scared me stupid. The bruising,
the maggots, the pus—they had come and gone in a flash—but the speed of it all somehow only made the thing worse. It was as
though my life were a bicycle I’d been riding happily down the road: one minute I was up there, the wind on my face, and the
next I was sprawled on the tarmac, broken-boned and with all the wind knocked from me.

I didn’t hear the car; I didn’t hear Liam getting out or shutting the door or walking around the house. The first thing I
knew he was standing in front of me, and I moved forward without knowing what I was doing and threw myself against him. His
arms went around me and held me, and I never wanted him to let go. He held me without words, but small, soothing noises were
coming from low in his throat, the same sounds you make to comfort a hurt dog.

I don’t know how long we stood like that, and I don’t know how we moved from being like that to sitting together there in
the yard, his hand holding mine, me telling him in a big jumbled rush about what had just happened, about Barbara Allen and
Jacko’s death, about the hospital and its drugs which had stopped me seeing things.

The empty eyes of the sheep’s skull stared from the sill.

“Is this the first time you’re after seeing anything since the hospital?”

I shook my head. “The night I met you—there was something then.”

He just nodded; he didn’t ask what. I put my hands over my face, and I started to weep. I felt the tears running through my
fingers and down my wrists. He stroked my head, then he shifted
a bit and put his arms round me again, and I wept into the warm place under his chin. After a while I stopped. I drew away
from him. I patted my pockets, looking for something to blow my nose in, and I found a scrumpled bit of tissue and blew. I
felt better. The weeping was a release, it had got me past the fear to a place where what was happening to me was simply what
was happening, it wasn’t any longer something I was desperate to shut out.

“D’you think have I a screw loose?” I said when I’d finished blowing.

He shook his head. “I do not. You see things. Sometimes just things. Sometimes things that are going to happen but haven’t
happened yet. That’s not the same as having a screw loose.”

I looked at him then. He was so serious and so innocent, his grey eyes very round and wide open, his brown curls lifting in
the strengthening breeze. I started to laugh. He looked surprised, then a bit offended.

“What’re you laughing at?” he asked.

“You,” I said. “Is there nowhere you’d draw the line?”

“What d’you mean by that?”

“If I told you there was a wee man dancing a hornpipe on your left shoulder I think maybe you’d believe me.”

He smiled. “Why not?” he asked. “Because I don’t see something doesn’t mean it isn’t there. It just means I don’t see it.”

Fear hit me in the belly with the force of a man’s fist.

“You don’t see it because it isn’t there,” I shouted at him. “It’s a chemical in my brain, making me think I see things, that’s
all. But they’re not there, they’re not there, they’re not there—”

Everything crumpled, and I started to sob again. “Easy now, easy,” he was saying, holding me tight in his arms and stroking
my hair. “Easy, girl, easy.”

The wind had risen in the night. Storm waves rolled in, and the damp sands blew with flocks of shiny bubbles like tiny hermit
crabs scurrying off sideways as fast as they could go. Further down there were big curvy swathes of pale foam, and I took
off my shoes and walked in them, kicking the empty white fizz with my bare, bony feet, making it fly. The wind blew, and the
clouds raced over the big, clean sky and the air snapped and rushed about my head like a flag. Where the beach curved out
of the wind there were stranded castles of dark-cream foam like the tipped-out froth from hundreds of pints of Guinness.

A lone dog was trotting about, some sort of a collie cross, black and white with splashes of tan. When he came to a castle
he’d crouch down and bark, his tail would lash back and forth, then he’d pounce. Nothing. The castle had disappeared, leaving
only splatters of foam and claw marks deep in the sand. He couldn’t work it out. He’d stand there with such a puzzled, affronted
expression on his face that I laughed aloud.

I was happy as a lark. We both were. Happy with the happiness of two people who have just found each other’s bodies and are
amazed by them. Liam hadn’t moved away off from me after the time in the yard. It showed in a touch to my hair, a hand on
my arm. Later, when I’d sat in beside him on the sofa, his arm had gone around my shoulders and stayed there. After that it
was only a short step to bed and the pleasures of bed.

And pleasures they were. We had bodies that matched on a deeper, surer level than anything I’d known with Robbie, though Robbie
was more athletic and knew better what he was doing. But Liam made me laugh, which Robbie never had. He talked to me, where
Robbie was all silent concentration. And Liam got hungry—he was forever jumping out of bed and bringing back half the fridge
and spreading it out on the coverlet. Then he’d feed me from his hand till I felt like a bird or a horse. Soon the
sheets were greasy with buttery prints, and I slept with tiny islands of discomfort on my bare skin, never giving it a thought.

I should have known from that. I’m too fastidious by nature not to mind, and I didn’t. I thought I was only in ankle deep,
when I’d waded in up to my neck.

But that day we were just beginning, and it seemed all the weight of the last hard months had fallen away and nothing but
ease remained. We went strolling along the strand, the dog trotting behind us, the tide pulling out and out till you felt
you might walk to America. Liam asked me why I feared it so—this habit I had of seeing things. Was it on account of not knowing
if it would stop?

I didn’t answer him. I picked up a length of stick that the sea had laid down, and at once the dog was lepping and yapping
for me to throw it. I didn’t. Instead I wrote my name in big broad strokes on the sand. Then I looked at Liam out of the corner
of my eye and I wrote his name under mine. Then I wrote “Dandy the dog” under his. I took another peek at him to be sure he
was watching me, and I lifted the stick and drew a big wide circle around the three names, linking us all together. He was
disappointed, and I knew he would be. When I went to circle the names he had thought it would be with a heart. And it almost
was, for it seemed a small thing to do for him when he’d made me so happy. But I held back, I wanted to stay in the happiness;
I didn’t want to move on into hearts and love and all the trouble they’d bring. I dropped the stick and fell into step beside
him.

“Sometimes, after Barbara Allen, when it started to happen,” I said, not answering his question, “I could make it not happen
if I tried hard enough, but I had to shut myself down so tight it sometimes felt like I’d die. My head ached from keeping
from thinking things, and my jaws ached from keeping my mouth clamped shut. That was the best thing about that place. The
hos
pital, I mean. Having the drugs to stop it from happening, not having to do it myself”

“What makes you so sure it was the drugs ?”

I turned round to face him.

“You saw what happened in the yard.” I made my voice hard and cold so he’d know not to push. “It’s only started again because
I’m off them.”

“Have you got those pills with you now?”

I shook my head. If you ask my mother she’ll tell you I’m a bad liar. I wondered would he see through me as easily.

“You wouldn’t go back on them, would you?” he asked.

“Just watch me. I’ve a prescription. I will if it’s going to start again.”

“How long between stopping the drugs and it starting again?”

I thought for a minute. I didn’t want to tell him the truth, but my mouth seemed to open and speak of its own accord. “The
night I met you. But I was out of my head, things happen when you’re drunk. Yesterday was different—I was stone-cold sober.”