The Bird Woman (3 page)

At the Lancaster we fell in with the crowd we still knocked around with from student days, so we sat down and set about getting
much drunker. And somewhere along the way Robbie began collecting money. He was organising a carry-out to drink back in the
flat.

It had got so late it had turned into early. There was no drink left, half the crowd had gone home, and the rest were mostly
passed out in their seats or they’d slithered down onto the floor. Suds was still hanging in there, but wee Peter Caulfield
was out for the count and so was Suds’s girlfriend, Josie.

Time for bed. Robbie made it up onto his feet, shook Stan awake, pulled out the spare blankets, and dumped them onto the floor.
Stan was all for bedding down there and then, but Rita was soberer—she found their coats and somehow got him downstairs. Then
she heaved his arm over her shoulders and staggered him off up the road.

Suds had given up; he was curled on the floor like a baby, and there was no way Josie was about to wake him up and take him
home. I shook out a blanket and covered her up, then I threw another one over the foetal Suds. He stirred, tucked the edge
of it in under his chin, smiled, and snuggled down deeper into the manky old carpet without once opening his eyes.

I thought I’d start lifting the glasses and bottles out into the kitchen, but I couldn’t seem to aim my hand straight, so
I sat and smoked a cigarette instead. I could drink for ages without passing out or vomiting in those days. I thought I was
great and Robbie was proud of me; I never once stopped to ask myself did I like it or what was the point or was it worth the
crucifying awfulness of the hangover the next day.

I was desperate for bed, but I held off joining Robbie; I wanted to be certain sure that he wouldn’t wake up. I didn’t like
sex with Robbie when he was really drunk, I could have been anyone or no one for all he cared, he was clumsy and rough and
only thought of himself

I’d have bedded down with the rest on the floor, but I knew there’d be no holding Robbie if he woke in the morning and I wasn’t
there alongside him where I belonged. He’d accuse me of doing I-don’t-know-what with I-don’t-know-who—then he’d take me by
the shoulders and shake the teeth near out of my head while the rest of them scuttled off-side as fast as they could like
so many crabs with the runs. And it was all in his head. There wasn’t a sinner who wasn’t way too afraid of him to look sideways
at me, much less try to get a leg over Robbie’s wife.

But if I hated Robbie in bed when he’d drunk too much, I hated him worse when we were out together and the drink took him
in that twisted way it sometimes did. There were times he got so jealous I couldn’t even take a light off someone. I’d be
grabbed by the wrist, pulled from a room, pushed into a corner of some landing or hallway, and fucked against the wall. That
was Robbie with the drink on him: not caring how I felt, not caring if anyone saw, not caring about anything except himself
and whatever it was that was eating him alive.

I’ve seen me walk home holding my skirt closed to keep it up, torn knickers stuffed into my pocket, dead tear trails running
down my face.

And in the morning he’d be all over me: how sorry he was, how he knew I didn’t look at other men, how it was only the drink—

If he remembered at all, that is.

And I learned fast; I’d forgive him fast—at the start because I was shocked and ashamed, later because I knew if I didn’t
he’d stop being sorry and start into listing the things he’d seen me do
with his own two eyes. What I’d said to this one, how I’d flirted with that one—

It was a funny time, I can see that now, and I know what Liam means when he says he can’t understand why I stood for it. But
it wasn’t like that—it wasn’t a question of standing for things.

I was young, I didn’t know much, I thought if he was that jealous it meant he was dying about me.

And I was dying about him—I really was—he was that good-looking and streetwise and together. Sometimes I’d be waiting for
him and I’d see him coming up the street before he’d spotted me. Then I’d stand there, watching him, and I couldn’t believe
my luck.

W
hen I met Robbie I was a good girl trying hard to be a bad one. I was at Queens, studying Russian and living in a flat with
four girls from Lurgan who were all doing geography and knew each other from school I’d got talking to one of them in the
coffee bar at the end of the first week: they’d rented this flat, she said, and there was a room going spare if I didn’t mind
it being a wee bit poky.

“How poky’s a wee bit poky?” I asked.

“There’s space for a single bed. And a window as well, but it’s too high up to see out.”

I said yes right away. It was cheap, and already I hated my landlady. Besides, if there’d been enough room they’d have stuck
in another bed and I’d have had to share. But they didn’t really want me, nor I them. They were into country and western and
the Scripture Union and cocoa in their pyjamas and studying hard. I wasn’t, but I might as well have been. I was stuck with
them, knowing there was more to this student-thing than I was getting, not knowing how I was going to lay hands on it. Until
I met Robbie, that is, and everything changed.

It was in the canteen of the Students Union. I mostly didn’t go there because it was cheaper to eat at the flat, but I was
going to see a Russian film at the University Film Theatre and there wasn’t time to go back before it began. There I was,
a plateful of
food on a tray in one hand, cutlery from the plastic bins in the other, when what happened only Robbie knocked into my elbow
and near sent the whole lot flying.

“Sorry,” he said.

“That’s alright,” I said, though my fried egg had a wet, orange look to it and the chips and sausages were afloat in spilled
Fanta. Then he was trying to give me his plate and I was refusing and he was insisting, and the end of it was we were sitting
at the same table sharing his chips and his fry and I never did get to
The Battleship Potemkin
and the girl I was supposed to see it with never spoke to me again.

After that I was Robbie’s girl.

I thought it had all been a providential accident, but a week hadn’t passed before he was telling me he’d had me picked out,
he was only waiting his chance.

“What d’you mean by that?” I asked him.

“I fancied you, stupid,” he said, sliding his hand between my thighs. But I wasn’t having that, or not right away, so I made
him spell it out.

He’d fancied me, he said. He’d seen me around, but somehow I always vanished before he got near enough to speak. Then there
I was, right under his nose, so he’d knocked into me, just to get talking like, and look how we’d ended up.

Robbie wasn’t a student, but he lived two streets up and he shared a flat with students. He used the university canteen because
it was a good place to pick up girls. He looked at me hard when he said the last bit, but I wasn’t going to rise to that one;
I knew it was sort of a test to see would I make a fuss.

I didn’t rise, but I did take my courage in both hands and I asked him why he fancied me. I wasn’t fishing for lies, or for
compliments either—I badly needed to know.

He said it was my hair, but he wouldn’t say anything more.
Later, when we’d been to bed a few dozen times in about two days, he said he’d been right, so he had, I looked so repressed,
a volcano waiting to blow.

I didn’t say anything. Part of me was offended, and part of me was the opposite.
Repressed
at least held potential. And I sort of liked the volcano bit. But maybe he’d meant
frustrated?

A couple of weeks later I moved into Robbie’s flat. His flatmates smoked dope and drank way too much and never went near the
Scripture Union. I was shy with them, but I liked them as well, and soon I knew loads of the wrong sort of people and felt
I was halfway alive.

Just the same, it wasn’t that long before we started looking around for a place of our own. It was Robbie’s idea, but I was
into it too. We wanted to be by ourselves.

We found a place and moved in, and Robbie began to talk about getting married. I’d say I was nearly flattered to begin with,
but then it dawned on me that he meant it and I panicked.

I couldn’t, I told him, I hadn’t even finished first year. Besides, I was too young, and everyone would think I was pregnant.

He gave me a funny look.

It was a shock that look, I can tell you.

“Hold on now,” I said to him, hardly knowing what I was saying. “Marriage is one thing—I could maybe even get used to it.
But not pregnancy. Pregnancy is definitely, definitely out.”

He laughed and said he could always get a rise out of me, and when did I want to get married, what about early July? He’d
take extra time, and we could go off somewhere over the Twelfth Holiday and I could start into my second year with a ring
on my finger, then everyone would know who owned me.

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that I’d have had the wit to hear that, but I didn’t. I never had sense—my mother was never tired
telling me that—I never had any idea of what I was doing till it was done.

Before we were married I took Robbie home to Derry for the weekend. Londonderry, I should say, for I was a proper Protestant
then, a paid-up member of the tribe. It only turned into Derry after I’d moved down South.

We went to Londonderry on the bus. Separate rooms and best behaviour. Robbie’s idea. I could have told him for nothing we
weren’t about to get anyone’s blessing.

My brother, Brian, took me aside about half an hour after the introductions.

“You’re not
serious,
are you?” He didn’t expect an answer.

I phoned my mother from Belfast for her verdict, though it was plain as the nose on her face what she’d thought. But I couldn’t
ever leave her be, I always had to force her hand, to make her spell things out in black and white.

There was a small, deep silence down the phone line. Then, in that neutral, damning voice of hers, she told me he was common.

And I laughed aloud, for he
was,
he was all the things she had reared me against—he was working-class, sectarian, he drank too much, he neither knew nor cared
what people thought.

And there was I, the teacher’s daughter.

I laughed, but she’d hurt me and she’d meant to.

Poor Robbie, he wanted me to have my family’s blessing; he was trying in his own way to do right by me.

Dream on. The only thing in his favour was that he wasn’t a Catholic, but even I couldn’t make her say that out loud, for
being sectarian was part of being common.

So that was that. My father was dead, and I’d no other siblings, which meant there was no one else to object except for
Robbie’s family. And they did, by Christ they did. If they said I was the wrong girl for him then that was far and away the
kindest thing they said.

None of them liked me. His brother Billy said four years, five at the most—it would take that long for the bed to cool. And
there’d be no children—not unless I got caught—there’d be nothing to hold us together, so we’d part.

His sister Avril said my mother’s unsayable:
at least she’s a Protestant.
Which shocked his sister Rita, for it had never once occurred to her that anyone belonging to her would even think of marrying
out.

They said all this to Robbie behind my back, knowing full well he’d repeat every word to my face. He wouldn’t listen any more
than I would. He booked the Registry Office, and he put the notice in the paper; then he told them they could come if they
wanted or stay away, it was all the same to him.

We didn’t even ask my family.

In the end they all came, but Billy was right, it was four years and only half a child, and yes, he was right again, I was
taking no chances, I hadn’t been on the Pill that first night with Robbie, but I was round at the family planning clinic first
thing the next morning.

The baby—what there was of her—was only because I got drunk and slipped up.

You’ll think me hard, but I wasn’t hard, only very young. And you weren’t reared there, you don’t know what it is to grow
up in a place where everything seems normal enough on the surface but underneath it’s all distorted and wrong. And the worst
part is that you don’t even know it’s distorted because for you it
is
normal, and if you don’t leave it behind and live somewhere
truly
normal, you’ll never find out.

I suppose the Catholics were right when they called it a war,
though our lot denied it. It was a war, but it wasn’t like a normal war; there weren’t any uniforms or fronts or advancing-and-retreating
armies, and when the peace finally came there wasn’t any going back home to your own place and learning how to forget. A civil
war.

A few years back, Liam showed me a catalogue someone had sent him, the work of a German painter called Otto Dix. These were
portraits Dix had done in Germany between the two World Wars, Liam said, when Germany was all busted up and the streets were
full of profiteers and prostitutes and starving young soldiers minus their arms or legs.

But it wasn’t despair that Otto Dix had painted; it was people who’d made money fast and were getting through the pain of
the world by living as hard as they could. Black-marketers, pimps, club owners, satirists. The paintings were normal, but
at the same time they were distorted, they fairly glittered with rage and hopelessness, they hurt you as you looked. I glanced
through the first few pages then shut the catalogue fast and put a big pile of ironed clothes down on top of it to cover it
up. I wanted to be by myself with it, to turn the pages slowly and stare at the pictures, which frightened me yet somehow
brought me home.

Robbie only ever struck me the once, and that was on account of his sister Rita leaving her husband and my not being home
all night.

Rita was fifteen years older than Robbie, she had more than half-reared him, so his feelings were softer for her than for
Avril or any of the brothers. Rita was married to a man by the name of Larry Hughes, who had strong paramilitary connections.
Larry was UDA and no picnic to live with, but he’d got himself a longish stretch for aiding and abetting on a murder charge,
so it was a good while since she’d had to.