The Bird Woman (30 page)

Catherine was always so sure of herself, it was hard to argue with her statements. She’d set a plate on the table in front
of me. Glazed tiles, arranged on it like biscuits. I moved them around with my finger.

“Let your hair down, Ellen,” she said out of nowhere.

I reached behind me and undid the clips. Its red mass sprang free and floated around my shoulders.

“Now you look like a witch.”

“Perhaps I am,” I said, looking straight into her eyes. “Two hundred years ago I’d have been burned. A hundred, and no decent
man or woman would have come to my door.”

“They’d have come at night,” Catherine said softly. “Times change, Ellen.”

“If I’d told my mother I saw things she’d have got the Elders to pray.”

“What are Elders?”

“Pillars of the Church. Righteous Men. Even the very occasional Righteous Woman.”

“Maybe they’ve changed too.”

“Maybe. Pigs may fly about on broomsticks—anything’s possible.” Catherine didn’t move or take her eyes from my face. “You’re
thinking Ellen’s off again, better not say anything or she’ll get worse? Daniel O’Connell said Irish freedom wasn’t worth
a single life—that’s what Liam’s always saying to me when he’s trying to justify not giving a damn. And you know the weirdest
thing? I get so angry when he says that, I could nearly vote Sinn Fein. I can accept his not giving a damn—maybe I wouldn’t
either if it wasn’t my home—but it’s the self-righteousness that gets to me, the holier-than-thou—”

“Am I being self-righteous?”

“You’re not being anything. You’re sitting there and listening, the way you always do. I’ve drunk too much—”

“Why don’t you drink some more?”

“Because the bottle’s finished.”

“There’s another one.” She got it out and opened it. She poured its redness
glug glug glug
into our glasses. She lifted hers to mine, I lifted mine to hers, and all the Northern-ness that comes upon me when I’m drunk
slid away. She cut herself a wedge of cheese and pushed the board across to me. I took a big lump off the best bit of the
gooey one and slathered it onto a piece of bread.

“I won’t let Suzanna do this,” I said, biting into it. “I make her cut from the edge, not the middle, and if she takes a lot
I tell her not to be so greedy.” I laughed, and a burst of crumbs flew out across the table. “And I won’t let her talk with
her mouth full,” I said, my mouth full. “I hate putting manners on them.”

“Then why do it?”

“Because my mother lives in me. Because I hate children who haven’t any. Its a pain. You tell them not to do something, then
you can’t do it yourself. Except when they’re not looking, and they almost always are.”

“My mother had a way round that one.
Do what I say, not what I do.
She loved saying that; she loved turning round and doing whatever it was she’d just told us not to, right in front of our
eyes.
I
’
m grown up, I can do whatever the hell I like.
That’s what she meant. I couldn’t wait to be grown up.”

“But the minute you were, you went and joined a convent.”

“I did,” she said. “What did you want to be? A wife?”

“Catch yourself on, Catherine. Why would I want to be a wife?”

“You were only twenty when you married Robbie. Still a student—maximum independence time. That’s nearly as bad as me and the
convent.”

“Jesus, Catherine, marrying Robbie was sex, the exact opposite to a convent. Though God knows why I imagined I had to get
married for it; maybe I thought I could have it more, or better. Or maybe it was the part of me that wanted to be respectable.
And Robbie was very insistent, he wanted Property, but I hadn’t the wit to see that then.” I put my hands behind my neck and
ran them up through my hair. “I like sex,” I added drunkenly, suddenly remembering the afternoon and Liam. “D’you not like
it, Catherine? You don’t seem to… ?”

“Did Liam?” Catherine asked, ignoring my question.

“Did Liam what? Like sex?”

“Did Liam want Property?”

I thought a minute. “No, Liam wasn’t into Property. In those days Liam only wanted me the way I was, that’s why I’m here.”

“And what did you want?”

“Sex.” Catherine’s eyes rolled heavenwards, so I thought again. “And refuge as well, I suppose. It all got mixed up—Liam and
sex and refuge. Then Liam stopped being a refuge, and everything changed—” I sighed. “It was complicated. I was in love with
him, and I wanted him to look after me, but part of me thought he’d turn out to be Robbie underneath. I had a bag always packed
that first year. Money, documents, everything. I was waiting all the time for him to change into Robbie.”

“But he didn’t.”

“No, he didn’t.” I stared into my glass.

“Were you happy when you came here first?”

“Was I happy? Yes and no. Yes, on account of Liam—very. No, on account of here.”

“What was wrong with here?”

“Too quiet, too different, too Catholic. That made me angry.”

“Why did that make you angry?”

“So arrogant. The assumptions. The One True Church, and everyone else in the whole of the world a heathen or else a heretic.
All those saint’s days and feast days and masses for everything.”

“’A Protestant parliament for a Protestant people,’” Catherine quoted softly.

I looked at her, thinking I might ignore that one. Then I suddenly sat up straight in my chair, and my eyes must have opened
wide because hers dropped to the table.

“Catherine, look at me,” I said.

She wouldn’t.

“Catherine, you know, don’t you?”

“Know what?”

As soon as she spoke I knew that she knew, but I had to go and say it anyway. “You’re pregnant.”

I have nothing up on the walls of my room—no crosses, saints, Madonnas, no pictures of Indian gurus or Zen masters or Tibetan
Rimpoches. I don’t go in for candles or incense or crystals, there are no ornaments, the walls are painted white. And you
wouldn’t believe how many times someone or other has looked round sadly and told me how bare and cold the place looks, how
even a Bridget’s cross would help.

I supposed at first it was Catholicism made them this way, but now I’m not so sure, I think it may have more to do with human
nature. People
want
the miraculous, they like signs and symbols—the invisible Invisible is way too far away.

And they want to believe in clairvoyance. They want their privacy invaded, they want to believe that I’m sitting there reading
their minds when I’m not. Oh, I have the odd flash—like knowing that Catherine was pregnant—but these flashes rarely come
to order, and often as not I get things all mixed up and messed around. I’ll know something and I’ll think it’s about someone
sitting in front of me, when it really belongs to the man who’s waiting outside.

Not so long ago I met a woman who does this clairvoyance-stuff to help her with diagnosis. She told me such mistakes are lack
of experience, and if I practised more it would come clear. Healers like her never question their methods, mostly healing
has been in the family for generations, so it’s natural to them—they don’t run round like headless chickens thinking they’re
witches or warlocks or maybe going mad. Everyone has their ways. Let them see or do what they want, if it works, it works—there
isn’t any arguing with a cure. But their ways aren’t my ways,
I’d never practice to see things better, I don’t do this healing-thing because I want to, I do it because it’s in me and I
can’t escape.

Just the same, when Catherine wouldn’t tell me who she was pregnant by, I went upstairs and broke my own rules and tried to
see. Nothing, or almost nothing—a buzzy mishmash of blurry voices and faces, like when the reception on the television’s gone
on the blink. She may have been telling the truth when she’d said it was no one I knew, or the knowing may have been closed
to me, or I may just have been too drunk. Whatever it was, I gave up, then turned on my side and passed out.

The phone woke me far too early, it rang and rang and rang till I finally stumbled out of bed to find that Catherine had got
there first.

“Yes, she’s here, she’s fine. We rang you last thing last night, but you must have been asleep.”

“Liam?” I sat on the stairs wishing I could die. Catherine held out the phone, I could hear Liam’s voice coming out of it,
and I shook my head. Which was a mistake, so I held on to it with both my hands instead.

“Certainly you woke us. Wasn’t that what you meant to do? Now go and have breakfast or paint a picture and leave us in peace
to get back to our beds.” She put down the phone.

She was as white as a sheet and looked as though she might be about to be sick.

“What time is it?” I asked her.

“Half seven. We didn’t get to bed till after three.” She lifted the receiver off and laid it down beside the phone.

“I’ve got someone coming at nine thirty,” I said.

“So you kept saying last night, which is why the alarm clock is by your bed, set for eight thirty. If you’ve any sense at
all you’ll turn it off.”

“Catherine, are you all right?”

“I am, no thanks to Liam. Do what you want about the alarm; I’m away back to bed.”

“Did we really ring him last night?”

“I’ve no idea. I’m sure we would have if we’d thought of it.”

“Catherine—”

“What?”

“I love you.”

She grinned a lopsided grin and turned on her heel.

L
iam had used his head and pinned a notice up on the door that said I’d been called away.

I was home by eleven, but I might as well not have bothered myself, for as I showed the next one in, I knew my hands had gone
dead. I sent her home, then pinned up a new piece of paper that said I’d be gone till tomorrow.

The children were at school, and Liam was out on some job, so I put the kettle on, knocked back a pint of cold water, then
sat at the kitchen table, finishing off the cure with more toast and tea. I was out of the habit of drinking these days, but
even so I felt a whole lot worse than I ever remembered feeling before. It crossed what was left of my mind that Whatever-it-was
didn’t like alcoholic excess, but I pushed the thought away. Why shouldn’t I drink too much if I wanted to? Why was I being
punished like this?

Catherine had said that the pregnancy came from a one-night stand, but I didn’t believe her, she was too closed off and unwavering
when she met my eyes.
That’s my story,
her gaze had said defiantly,
and that’s the one I’m sticking to.

I hadn’t pressed her. She was anxious and humiliated behind the tight self-control, she wasn’t having fun.

We’d both gone back to bed after Liam’s phone call, and I’d slipped into one of those fretful dozes when you float so close
to
the surface of sleep that you nearly think you’re awake. Then I fully woke and lay there listening to Catherine moving around
downstairs, knowing she hadn’t been able to go back to sleep and needed to talk. I put my palms on my temples and waited for
the pain to ease, then got out of bed in my borrowed nightgown and padded downstairs, pretending I wanted tea.

I’d talked of abortion the night before. She said she’d been expecting that word to put in an appearance.

I’d waited, but nothing followed.

“Well?” I’d finally asked as gently as I could.

She’d shaken her bowed head wordlessly, so I’d left it at that.

But in the morning, sitting again at the table, I had another go. I said I knew how hard the thought was when you were Catholic
(which I didn’t), but perhaps she should allow herself to consider it as an option.

She looked at me this time. “I can’t,” she said. A long pause. “I don’t disagree with abortion, though I think it’s often
sad. But no one can judge what another human being is able for, sometimes not even the person themselves.”

Another long pause.

“I don’t know if I’m even a Catholic anymore,” she went on slowly. “I don’t go to mass or obey the rules or agree with the
doctrine, it would be like trying to squeeze myself into a favourite dress that’s gone too small. Yet I don’t know if I could
be anything else, no matter how hard I tried….”

She stopped, looked at the table, looked up again. “It’s not because of the Catholic-thing that I’m saying no to abortion.
It’s because I want to live inside the flow of my life, I don’t want to try to control it to suit myself.”

I sat looking at her. She looked steadily back at me.

“What exactly do you mean by that?” I asked her

“’Wherever I am led I move.’”

She said it like a quotation. I asked if it was.

“Yes,” she said, but that was all.

“Catherine, am I being very insensitive?”

She shook her head. “Hardly at all.” She smiled, but it wasn’t a real smile, it was put on for me.

We both started talking together.

“Catherine, you should eat something—”

“Look, Ellen, I’m thirty-eight, I’m on my own—”

Then we both stopped.

“I’m on my own, I know it’s not going to be easy,” she finished.

I got up and cut some bread and put it in the toaster. She was right. It wasn’t.

Before the children got home I went up to bed and slept for a couple of hours. When I woke I felt much better.

They came flying in through the door, soaked through and bright-eyed with expectation. I made them sit down and eat while
I cleaned out their lunch boxes and hung their coats up to dry. They wanted to tell me what Daddy had cooked, how late he’d
let them stay up, the brilliant programme he’d let them watch that I never allowed them to see. I didn’t mind, though most
times I’d resent Liam playing Mister Nice Guy and leaving the discipline to me. But what did it matter? Here we were, the
three of us together, beside ourselves with the pleasure of just that.

Often I go through my life forgetting what I’ve got, concentrating on the problems, then once in a while something happens
that reminds me, and everything changes. So I didn’t care what they’d watched or how late they’d stayed up, and they spotted
it right away. Even Andrew stopped holding back and wriggled in
close to my chair to tell me the highlights from the forbidden programme.