The Bird Woman (7 page)

“The first time was when you were pregnant? It never happened before?”

“No.” I stopped and poked at a beached jellyfish with my toe. It was one of those clear ones with pale mauve marks in its
centre. They don’t sting, or not from the outside anyway. It’s like putting your foot on a jelly cube warmed in the sun. Liam
was watching me, waiting. “W-e-ll,” I said.

“Well?”

“I had kind of flashes before. Once or twice. Nothing much.”

He didn’t ask, he just looked at me with the question in his round grey eyes. He was good at that—just looking, not asking.
I almost always fell for it at the start. This time I hadn’t meant to tell any more, but I did.

“We were over seeing my granny one Sunday,” I said slowly.
“She lived outside Derry, a place called Dunnamanagh. It’s where my mother was born, there’s a farm. We’d had our dinner,
we were only waiting for them to send us out so they could talk.
Little pitchers have long ears,
that’s what they’d say.” I wobbled the jellyfish with my toe. “It was spring, a beautiful day. I thought I’d go mad, stuck
inside, behaving.” I sneaked a glance at him, but he wasn’t watching my face, he was watching my toe on the jellyfish. “Being
thrown out was the best thing about those visits. The hay barn; looking for stray eggs; dandering about in the fields. There
were four of us—me and Brian and my cousins, Heather and John. Heather was only nine, she was messing about, showing off,
turning cartwheels over and over in the sun. It was lovely, so it was, the meadow all yellow with dandelions—”

I picked up a stone and threw it into the sea. The dog rushed after it and stuck his nose in where the stone had gone under.
He brought his face up, and it streamed water. He looked at me reproachfully.

“I was watching Heather. One minute she was hands down in yellow flowers and the next there weren’t any flowers, just wee
silver balls in the sun as far as the eye could see.”

“Silver balls?”

“Dandelion clocks. The flowers had all died and turned into clocks. I opened my mouth to call out, but the next thing they’d
turned themselves back into yellow flowers. And it wasn’t like it is in a film when you go backwards or forwards, there wasn’t
that wee blurry bit that comes up and says to you ‘
watch out now, here comes fast-forward.”
’

I threw another stone. The dog did his thing.

“And no one else saw what I saw,” I said. “I looked at them, and I knew for certain sure they hadn’t seen.”

“Did you tell Brian?”

“You’re joking me. Brian would have said I was mental.”

“What age were you?”

“Fourteen, maybe fifteen.”

“That was the first time?”

I shrugged. “The first time I remember.” I paused. “But I didn’t remember. I forgot on purpose; I never wanted to think about
it again.… I was only young, I thought I was going mad, it was really scary.”

He must have heard in my voice that that was it, I’d gone as far as I’d go, for he didn’t press me. Looking back, I can’t
believe I talked to him the way I did. I could have lived with Robbie a thousand years and I never could have said to him
half of what I said to Liam right from the start.

I
t’s in you and that’s fine; I don’t think there’s anything to be frightened of. I think you should learn to handle it, not
go back on the drugs.”

We were looking down on the heave of a big dark sea, the waves coming in short and strong to smack up hard on the great bank
of stones where we sat. They were sea stones, heavy and round, knotted and veined like wood, rattled and rolled by the crash
of each breaking wave.

The beach curved off to the right, where it ran into dunes and sheep-grazed sea turf. The low dunes were sunlit, the grass
brilliant green, the sand a rich gold, but above, the sky was slate black and the gulls rose into it, shining like chips of
quartz in the stormy light. There were cormorants coming in off the sea in small, straggly bands, and half a mile back a big
grey seal had stuck its head up out of the water and stared its fill.

Liam was telling me what to do but pretending not to. He’d held off a good while, but he was comfortable with me now so he
let himself. Men seem to think that’s what women want of them, and maybe we do, or maybe a part of us does. I did with Robbie;
I didn’t know what I was doing in Robbie’s world, so I thought it was great to have someone to ask who’d know the answers.
Then slowly it dawned on me that Robbie didn’t know either. I wasn’t supposed to notice, but I couldn’t help myself, so after
a while I
stopped asking. He went on telling me anyway, and I’d stand there looking at him, the rage rising up in me, spilling over
into my face in judgment. He must have seen it, but it didn’t stop him; it only made him worse.

“There’s no way you’re mad, Ellen, only clairvoyant,” Liam said. “This thing is a gift; you shouldn’t be trying to blank it
out with drugs.”

At first I couldn’t believe what he was saying. In my book hearing and seeing things that aren’t there is schizophrenia. Go
back a hundred years or so and it’s possession. No part of me could accept, as Liam did, a world full of beings and things
that were real as day but we couldn’t see. Even thinking a thing like that outside in the wind and the air with Liam beside
me scared the living daylights out of me. Letting it creep in when I woke at night gave me the screaming abdabs. I’d grab
hold of him and scurry into his body looking for refuge, only I didn’t go telling him that, I let on it was all appetite.
The way I was reared, you didn’t say if something scared you—that was weakness. You didn’t let others see weakness, even your
nearest relations. Weakness was a secret between you and God, who knew anyway, who wrote it all down in a big black book and
judged you and found you wanting.

There was another thing about the way I was reared that kept smacking me in the face with Liam, and the more I tried to wriggle
my way around it, the more it stood in front of me blocking my path. My mother was a woman with very strong views on what
you did or did not do, and one of them was that it was just plain ignorant to remind a Catholic that he or she was a Catholic.
Especially if you had time for them. It was something you left unmentioned, out of good manners.

And now here was Liam, as Southern and as Catholic as they come, and for the life of me I couldn’t turn round and say that
believing there were things in the world you couldn’t see was Catholic, and seeing things that weren’t there was even more
Catholic, which he was, but I wasn’t. More to the point, letting go and seeing what might happen would have been like deliberately
stepping off from a narrow ledge to fall into bottomless darkness.

Suddenly all the comfort I’d had from Liam flew out the window. He was ignorant and superstitious, and that was the reason
he’d listened so patiently to all my talk. I was better off with Robbie—Robbie didn’t live in a whole moither of strange half-notions;
Robbie had his two feet on the ground.

But thinking of Robbie was as dangerous as walking into the heaving sea. I hadn’t phoned or sent a postcard, and today was
the very last day of the time I’d said I’d be here with Brian and Anne. If I didn’t come home now he’d ring up my mother.
No, he’d leave it a day or so longer because he wouldn’t want to admit that he didn’t know where I was. You’d think I’d have
lifted a phone even then just to cover my back, but I didn’t. I’d got into a strange mood of fatalism and I didn’t seem able
to act or make up my mind—all I could do was let things drift.

So I sat there on that wall of stones with my face turned into the wind and my hair flying back behind me, caught between
the devil and the deep and not sure which was which. I kept my eyes fixed on the sea. The dog stuck his head under my arm
and butted at it. He wanted sticks thrown, but it was too rough, and anyway I wasn’t in the mood.

After a bit the dog left off nudging and threw himself down on the stones in disgust. Still I didn’t speak, though I knew
that Liam was waiting. I didn’t speak because I couldn’t; it was as if my whole body was caught between these two men and
what they were trying to make me be, and all it could do was freeze and refuse. Then the seal we had seen before came back
and stuck its
head up out of the water and stared at us. I looked straight into its eyes, and it looked straight back into mine. They were
huge and soft, like liquid filling a glass right up to the brim and ready to spill over. The dog sat up beside me and started
to mew; then he let a yap out of him, and the seal gave us this sorrowful pitying look and slid slowly down under the water.
It must have gone motoring about under there because after a while it broke the surface again, only this time it was further
over and closer in.

It’s the strangest thing, a big grey seal in a strong running sea, for it isn’t like anything that should be in the sea at
all, it isn’t fishy or birdlike or scuttling, but a warm-blooded mammal with eyes more human than a dog’s. More human than
most humans, if by human you mean full of speech and feeling. Yet it lives in the endlessness of the unbounded seas, and you
can see that it can handle all that, even the loneliness. It can live down there where the pull and slide of deep water changes
all colours and rubs out all edges; it can handle the fish world of swayings and scuttlings, then poke up its head and look
with over-water eyes at our oxygen world, which is fixed and flashing with daylight.

And when it comes in close and swims around, staring, you can’t help feeling that it is like searching for like, searching
for warm, milky creatures that know the beat of hot blood and suckle their young. If you speak or sing it draws nearer, and
its kingdom looks out through its eyes and enters us through ours.

When I saw that seal I wanted to weep for myself, for I knew with a strange, strong knowledge that if I did as Liam said I
might learn to be easy out there, I might even come to love the slide and suck of great moving masses of water far out in
frontierless seas. But I knew as well that for any ease and joy I might have in that other kingdom, I’d always fear it, and
I’d never stop wanting to be one thing only and undivided—I would never, ever get over the awful loneliness of being
other.
I didn’t want to see things or hear
things or live under the sea; I didn’t want to be different or special like that, only to be special to some man who wasn’t
broken and hard like Robbie and maybe have another Barbara Allen to hold in my arms.

But at that time I couldn’t seem to stay out of the other world nor find the courage to fully enter it either. I still can’t,
I still live caught between the two, though at least when the underworld claims me now I know to hold my breath so I don’t
come up near drowned. But back then, I sat on the stones with Liam knowing nothing beyond what I was reared to. I was the
child who has only ever seen what is revealed by day, who hasn’t known that in darkness you lose what is near but you see
beyond into galaxies.

I remember looking up at Liam from a long way off, and he got to his feet and stretched down and pulled me onto mine and we
tramped off over the short, springy grass, which he said was called machair, with Dandy dancing alongside and the sheep getting
up and moving off at sight of him, sheep with curling horns like my skull on the windowsill, and arses dyed indigo blue.

Boredom and fear belong to the mind, and pain and exhaustion belong to the body, but the spirit knows none of these things—the
spirit knows only light. So we moved off, and the movement must have jogged me out of the mind and its fear and into the body—home
of pleasure as well as pain—which still glowed with its discovery of Liam’s.

And maybe into the spirit as well, for it is amazing, looking back, how easily I sloughed off the seal and its dark warnings,
and went skipping and dancing like Dandy into Achill’s shifting light.

M
arie and Dermot will be here on Thursday,” Liam said. “We’re welcome—for as long as we like—but I’d need to be thinking of
getting back.”

Dermot was Liam’s friend, the one who’d lent him the cottage, which belonged to Dermot’s family on account of his mother being
from Achill. He’d told me that much, but nothing at all about anyone coming.

“What day’s today?” I asked, blank as I could manage.

“Tuesday.”

I got up from the table and made a fresh pot of tea. I took my time, heating the pot, and then sliding the lid in carefully
under the rim, making sure there was no rattle from the tremor in my hand.

I carried the teapot to the table.

“There’s an architect looking for me for some work,” Liam said, “and I’ve put him off twice already. It’s a good job, and
there’s others will jump at the chance if I don’t turn up and show willing.”

Liam went on talking about this architect, enthusiasm in his voice. I poured the tea, schooling my face to say nothing.

“A new house, no expense spared,” Liam said. “The client’s rich—seriously rich—wants the fireplaces hand-carved in Kilkenny
marble, plus balustrades and fountains and garden
ornaments as well. God only knows what it’ll look like, but I’m not about to argue. With luck it’ll pay for my own work for
at least a year.”

I hardly listened. I’d thought there was no time limit, no end, that it was only me that had anything to decide or go back
to. And I wanted him to ask would I come home with him to Kilkenny. Ask—so I could turn him down.

I buttered more toast and slathered it in marmalade and ate it without speaking or looking at him. He said later he was watching
for the slightest sign, but I didn’t let on.

Why would I? His body told me I was the world to him, yet here he was, chatting away, fireplaces and features and to hell
with me.

When we’d finished breakfast we left the dishes in the sink and went out. Dandy wasn’t at the door, but we weren’t five minutes
down the road and there he was, trotting along, business as usual. He’d adopted us, waited outside the door most mornings,
and when we came back he’d go off home up the hill. I wanted to feed him, but Liam said no, somebody owned the dog. He only
came with us for company and a walk.