The Bird Woman (9 page)

Which suits me as well. I like the Kielys now that I’m used to them, I do my bit in the family-thing, but I wouldn’t want
to live in the midst of the nest. Liam comes and goes, and they’re tactful
enough to keep their distance and give us a bit of space. We have his mother to thank for that. She laid down the rules in
the early days—without her, it might not have entered their heads to hold back.

We’re not one of these couples you never see apart. Not now, anyway, though we were to begin with, when I was new and everything
was strange. I was glad enough of it back then, but it’s different now and I wouldn’t want to be always tagging along in Liam’s
wake. It passes, the twined-fingers stage. You don’t see it going till it’s gone.

I’m getting ahead of myself again. When first he came to Kilkenny, Liam stayed with Dermot Power and his wife, Marie, the
same two who’d lent him the house on Achill. Dermot was a painter, his oldest friend, so Liam wasn’t shy about cluttering
up their living-room floor while he looked around for a house he liked at a rent he could scrape together. He was in no hurry,
so he stretched his welcome. It’s a good story now—they laugh in the telling—but by all accounts he wore their patience thin.

Liam knew what he wanted, you see, and he wasn’t about to compromise just to have somewhere to live. He wasn’t like Robbie,
saying yes to the first place we saw that wasn’t a total dump. Liam watched and waited, taking his time. At last he found
a stone-built farmhouse with outbuildings and an owner willing to rent at a price he could afford. There was even talk of
a lease, but it was only talk, the documents never appeared. Liam said quietly that he might be interested should Mr. Fitzgerald
ever be thinking of selling. Mr. Fitzgerald let on not to have heard, but Liam knew well that he had. They understood each
other. He would live there, and if it worked out to their mutual satisfaction it might come to a sale.

Back then that was part of buying a house—goodwill and
compatibility were valid currency, to be taken into account. Not now. These days no one cares who you are so long as there’s
a bank to come up with the mortgage. And neighbours don’t matter the way they used to now that everyone has a car.

For two years Liam had rented, but by the time I stepped off the bus he was already mired in the long, slow business of buying.
It all took forever. Mortgages were hard to come by, and he’d no fixed income to show. His family helped: his father stood
guarantor with the bank, and Connor and Kathleen lent him money for the deposit. The worst part was getting permission from
Pat Fitzgerald’s five siblings. Pat (he’d long ceased being “Mr. FitzGerald”) was the oldest son, so he had the farm, but
the house had passed to them all when the old people died and emigration had scattered the rest to England or America. Two
of them were hard to find but easy enough to persuade. The other three had done well for themselves, they’d no urgent need,
so they couldn’t quite make up their minds to the sale.

“It’s only natural,” Pat said. “It’s where they were reared, so they’ll take their time. Push, and they’ll dig in their heels;
we have only to leave them be and they’ll come round.”

So they were let be, and they came round. I wasn’t surprised, I’d been watching Liam, and I knew well he’d have his way. Robbie
could want something and there’d be hell on if he didn’t get it. Then he’d spot something else and away he’d go, the first
thing entirely forgotten and left behind. Not Liam. Liam knew when to push, and he knew when to wait, it was nearly sinister,
this relentless patience. It shocked me a bit. I had thought him all ease and good nature, but it seemed there was a whole
lot more to him than I’d let myself notice.

It’s a narrow house, two stories high, tucked sideways into a steep treed hillside with a muddy half-cobbled yard at the back
and a mesh of fields at the front. A lovely place, secret and domestic, the small, ambling meadows like thrown-down cloths
scattered over with horses and sheep.

There’s a few other houses around the place, but nothing too close, I can hear Haydn’s dogs at night, and a voice if it’s
raised to a shout. In winter there’s the shine of Fitzgeralds’ lights through the empty trees when I’m bringing in fuel from
the yard. Quiet. That’s how it was when I came here, that’s how it is still in spite of the cars drawing up to bring folk
for my hands. A quiet green place of spring wells and stone walls studded with white thorn and ash. About as far from Derry
as the moon.

Around the yard there are outbuildings in different stages of dilapidation. There’s a gate at the side that leads to a bit
of an orchard with old, twisty trees climbing the slope, and behind them the land rising steeply up to the ridge. Below the
house the land slopes gently down, and off in the distance the Blackstairs Mountains walk the horizon. The main gate from
the yard opens into our boreen, which gives onto a single-track road, which gives onto another road where two cars can pass
if you’re careful.

There are more houses now. Coady’s empty dwelling-house by the spring well has been renovated, and there are new bungalows
here and there on the road that leads up to the ridge. I don’t mind it, though at first I did. I’d got used to solitude; I
didn’t want neighbours.

When first I came here the place was more like a barn than a house. The roof leaked, the plaster walls blossomed with damp,
the windows rattled at every breeze. Liam saw none of its defects. He showed me around like a man showing off a mansion; I
might have been looking at antique rugs stretched on polished wood floors, at traceried ceilings, at mahogany sideboards laden
with
fine bone china. He had all sorts of plans for the house—its potential had long since changed in his mind into fact.

The front door opened directly into what had once been a traditional farm kitchen, with a flight of stairs climbing up the
back wall, and two small rooms opening off it at either end. But time passed, Pat married, his new wife had set about making
changes as new wives do. When she’d finished, the old range had gone and the big room had been divided. In the poky, wee kitchen
an electric stove stood on rickety legs, and a miserable one-bar heater burned pound notes if you turned it on, which we rarely
did, for we’d no pound notes to burn. Somewhere along the line Pat and his wife had built themselves a new bungalow three
fields away and put the house up for rent. The bungalow was double glazed with fitted everything. Liam was planning to undo
most of the changes and bring the house back to what it had been.

Upstairs there were three bedrooms and a makeshift bathroom that took up part of the landing. It had a sink, a toilet, a rust-stained
bath, and a paraffin stove that took the edge from the cold. The bedrooms were small and low-ceilinged, their rectangular
windows set low down near the floor so you had to kneel on the boards to look out. In the biggest bedroom was a double iron
bedstead with an old feather mattress, the sort with a hollow in the middle that you both fall into no matter how far apart
you’ve started out. Not that I minded until I was pregnant. I liked sleeping sprawled over Liam.

So it was no palace, but that didn’t bother me. The flat in Belfast hadn’t exactly been
Ideal Home
country either, and there I’d opened my eyes every morning on Robbie’s bony shoulders, which never quite lost their tension,
even in sleep. Here I would open my eyes and there would be Liam, flat on his back and snor
ing his head off, his brown curls rising and falling with every breath. I’d wriggle and squirm myself closer into his arms,
then lie there smiling like an idiot until I grew bored with contentment and kicked him awake.

There was an ash tree outside the window and on windy nights in summer it swished and tapped on the glass, and on windy nights
in winter it rattled and banged, and there was nothing I loved more than its lonely, companionable sound. Liam loved it too,
he would never have cut it down, but when Andrew was four he was plagued with dark dreams and he’d wake in fear at the sound
and the shadows moving across the wall. So the ash tree went, and I had to content myself with the one further round to the
side of the house, which kept a civil distance and was never intimate with us. I’m sorry now that I let Liam cut it down,
I should have taken time with Andrew and brought him back to loving the tree, for from that day he wanted everything that
frightened him removed from him and there’s no peace in living like that.

But all that was a long way off. It was autumn when I came here, and I was stunned by this bosomy, treed land with the blue
hills rising up from its plains and the march of bluer mountains away to the east. I had never been to “the South” that was
south, I thought it would all look like Achill or Donegal—acid land, wild and empty, all wind and sky and that haunted light.
Nothing had prepared me for the ease of this place, its soft skies and luxuriant growth, its wide meadows and its loose brown
rivers.

Settled weather. There never was an autumn like it. Day followed day, week followed week, we would wake to mist like a wraith
at the window, breath-thin, a wash of moisture drifting about the house, the sheds, the trees. The fields were heavy with
dew; the
horses and sheep stood up to their hoofs in vapour, grey as the sea, Even as I watched, the meadows brightened. By eleven
the mist had burned clear.

Then sunlight, silence. Each day, the air higher and thinner. Leaves dropping down in the stillness, knocking against the
layered branches, a hollow, papery sound. And the cheep of birds, small flurries of song, the chestnuts fiery, the ash going
lemon yellow in the soft, clear light. At evening the sky all around the horizon laid out with layered white cloud, like fresh,
folded linen. Above this, a pure, thin blue, with combings of fine cirrus, the wisps of an old woman’s hair.

I’d no idea what I was doing there, only kept from panicking by squashing down all thought. Derry, Belfast—they seemed like
stories I’d invented, black-and-white photos, a long way away and in another time. I would wake in the early morning and lie
in the breathing stillness, so happy I dared not move.

I should do this remembering more; it might bring me contentment. What’s happiness? Nothing at all. Wind in the trees. You
only notice when it dies away.

We hid ourselves from Liam’s family, but with his friends it was different.

“This is Ellen,” he’d say. No explanation, no word of where he’d got me from. It must have seemed strange to them—one day
I hadn’t existed, the next I was part of his life. A few of them asked about Noreen, but he only shook his head and smiled.
Maybe they saw the way we were together and that stilled their tongues.

They seemed an odd lot, scruffy and garrulous, into music but indifferent to fashion. That was strange to me. There was more
money in the North in spite of the unemployment, and if you were young you were mad for style. Here it was the opposite.
Most of Liam’s friends seemed to live in jeans, and the girls my age hardly bothered with makeup at all. Everything was borrowed,
thrown together, improvised. They thumbed lifts or rode around the place on antique bicycles; the few cars they had access
to were clapped-out wrecks that no one ever serviced, much less washed.

But it didn’t stop them enjoying themselves. Any excuse was a good excuse, and what money they had disappeared right away
on a good night out with plenty of drink. Just the same, the talk was all of America and emigration and getting your hands
on a green card.

That was then; it’s all completely different now. The banks are lending, the emigrants are coming back home, and everyone’s
learned about possessions with the speed of light. But then was when I came, and it was so unlike what I was used to, it fairly
made my hair stand up on end.

But Liam looked out for me, he knew I was frightened still, alert for any hint of the things I saw that weren’t there. We’d
be in company, and something would shift on the edge of my vision; I’d tense, but before I’d had time to panic, there he’d
be, at my side. And it wasn’t like it had been with Robbie, I didn’t feel hunted down by his eyes, just less always the stranger
in the crowd. Which was odd, when you think about it, because for the first time in my life I truly was.

I knew I ought to write to Robbie, but I couldn’t put pen to paper and I couldn’t bear to ring him up and hear his voice.
You think with a new love you’ll leave off loving the old one, but it doesn’t always work like that, or it didn’t for me.
I knew I’d never go back to Robbie no matter what happened with Liam, but I cared for him still and I knew I’d hurt him sore.
And I was his lawful wife, and Robbie set store by such things; if I wasn’t going
back I should tell him so he could get himself a divorce. Robbie needed a wife—and children, too—that way lay his only chance.
But I didn’t write or phone, I sent no word.

I signed on in the nearest town. There were no jobs anyway—half the country was signing on, they asked about qualifications,
and when I said a degree in Russian they shoved the forms across at me, the same as in the North.

Liam was standing beside me, one hand on the counter, the other one dropped to my leg, which he planned to squeeze if I needed
help.

“Different country, different ways,” he said. “One squeeze for yes, two for no.”

I was nervous as a kitten, for I’d got it into my head that they’d turn me down flat if they found out I was a Prod. But they
didn’t. I answered their questions and filled in their forms, and I didn’t need help from Liam. Then they said it all had
to be processed and told me when to come back.

The minute we were outside the door, Liam asked me about the Russian.

“Did I not tell you?” I said, all surprise, though I knew very well that I hadn’t. Robbie had used it against me—he’d liked
going on about fancy degrees and a fast track to the dole, while he was only City and Guilds but it paid the bills. I’m being
hard on Robbie, I know that. Robbie was a grafter, never out of work, and he measured himself by the wage packet he brought
home. I took any job that came up—unskilled and low-paid, I wasn’t fussy—but they never lasted that long, and I felt inadequate
when I wasn’t working, so Robbie’s sneers got to me.