The Bird Woman (36 page)

I look around me. The place is brand-new, it’s warm and clean, there are upholstered seats and toilets that work and phones
lined up along the wall. I think of the quiet people I live among now and how glad they’d be of a waiting room that’s kitted
and fitted out like this one is.

Not this lot. When they finish giving out they start into phoning up whoever is meeting them and giving out all over again
because they’ll be late. This is all new to me—Derry, het up about lateness?—I begin to wonder should I ring the B and B?
I cross to the phone, but I only have Southern coins on me so I open my mouth and ask can anyone change them?

They won’t hear of changing anything, I’m showered with twenty pence pieces, advice on the new dialling code, and have I far
to go when we get there, and do I know the city, and do I need a lift?

I thank them and make the call Then I sit myself down on a comfortable new seat in this comfortable new waiting room and look
around me again. I decide that someone believes in this Peace-Process-thing because ten years ago when a place got blown up
they erected a makeshift shelter against the next time there might be a bomb going spare. Or else they built giant bunkers—narrow
entrances, reinforced concrete, slit windows fitted with shatterproof glass. But this place is no bomb shelter, and there’s
nothing temporary about it either.

M
ONDAY

I
t’s dark still, but I can make out the rectangle of the window, filled with a faint orange light. Street light. I stretch
out my arm, fumble around for the light switch, lift my watch. Seven thirty. I’ve woken over and over all night, looked at
the time, fallen back down into dream. Now I throw back the covers and swing my feet to the floor, glad to be giving up trying
to be asleep. I’d planned on an easy start this morning, but that was eons ago—there’s no way I want to put my head back down
on that pillow now. I make tea from the kettle on the dresser and take the mug back to bed.

It’s a nice room, small, simply furnished, and clean, with a single bed and its own shower and toilet. The floor has been
stripped and sanded; the walls are white; an ocher-and-red-striped rug lies beside the bed for my feet. An old house, carefully
refurbished. Tasteful. About a million miles from the Derry I thought I knew.

The same goes for everything else I’ve seen so far. I walked around last night to get the bus out of my legs, and nothing
is as it had been when I left. The Strand Road isn’t itself anymore—it’s all new shops and arcades, big fancy supermarkets,
smart bars with see-through windows and a clientele happy to lounge about
in low designer chairs. I wondered who they were, these folk who liked to be visible when they were out enjoying themselves,
and what had happened to getting drunk in privacy and semi-darkness? It was odd, this turning-around of the old ways—the citizens
hanging about in the streets didn’t seem to be that much changed.

Now I hear the small clickings and gurglings in the pipes as the heating comes on and the house wakes itself to the day. The
orange light in the window changes to grey, it catches the cold shine of rain on the glass. I sip at the tea. I try to step
clear of the night, of its dreams, but the shame of them clings about me like cobwebs I can’t shake off. I’m standing on a
wooden chair in the scullery. It’s cold and I’m crying. She’s pulling my head back by the hair and forcing a glass of soapy
water hard against my shut lips so I feel them bruise on my teeth. I must take a gulp, swill it around, hold it, then spit
it out. Then the next and the next and the next till the glass is empty. I’m crying, her hand grips my hair, I try to swill
but I swallow instead and I retch. Then a wet warmth, flooding my knickers and trickling down my legs.

I had woken and reached my hand down. No wetness. Just the cotton cloth of my nightgown, soft and intimate with sleep.

The bus station’s new and the library’s new and so are a fair few buildings around it. But it isn’t as new and smart as it
looked last night in the dark. Some of it’s new and smart, but a whole lot more is new and tacky and rapidly getting tackier.
There are still some old faithfuls hanging about, but not for long—they’re too shaken and battered about by the years of bomb
blasts. Knocking them down will be cheaper than shoring them up, and that’s what they’ll surely do, making space for a whole
load of brand-new sharp-edged tat to rise in their place. But behind all the newness the old face of the city still shows,
and it’s not that much
changed. An aging woman, after a long night out on the town, her mascara smudged, blotches and wrinkles showing through caked
foundation, only the faintest traces of lipstick left in the corners of the mouth.

I ask for a bus that goes all the way to the hospital, and they point to the one that’s waiting. I climb on and sit there,
sure that I’ve only closed my eyes, that all the years down South are no more than a doze by the fire and it’s here I’ve been
all the time. But inside those sleeping years live Liam and Andrew and Suzanna, live all the people who fill up my life so
I hardly think of Derry from one month to the next.

The driver is running the engine to give us a bit of heat while we wait. Already the shock of the newness has gone—already
it feels as familiar as the toothbrush I take in my hand every morning to clean my teeth. I wonder if she’s waiting for me,
or if that stiff-necked bend was a whim, at once forgotten or regretted. Suddenly I can hardly bear it that the bus is sitting
here, waiting. If this has to be done I want it done now and over.

I never forgave her for the soapy water. I suppose I could want to forgive her with my mind, but I couldn’t with the rest
of me, it wouldn’t let me, it would rise in revolt as my child’s gorge rose at the taste of the soap. Catherine says you carry
memory in your body. As far as I’m concerned memory lives in your mind and a bit in your nose as well, for we all know those
smells that pick you up by the scruff of your neck and lift you back into times and places you thought were long gone. But
after the dream I had last night I’m not so sure.

Taig.
That was the word she hated the most, but everyone said it, their mas didn’t wash out their mouths with soap. Walk down the
street any day and you heard far worse.

No one else had her for a mother. No one else had her breathing down their necks.

She cut our hair with the black steel scissors she used for cutting cloth. We both got the same—a fringe, then the rest in
a pudding-bowl curve so it fitted your head like a helmet, though Brian’s was shorter at the back and sides than mine. It
hadn’t mattered in Dunnamanagh, but it mattered when we moved to Derry, for we were growing into self-consciousness and needing
to look the same as everyone else. My hair shot into frizz the minute it dried. I looked like a red-haired goblin after a
bad electric shock.

“Scaldy, Scaldy,” they called when they saw.

“Don’t mind them, Ellen,” Brian would whisper under his breath. “Don’t mind them, it’ll grow again, minding them only makes
them worse.”

But I cried, I couldn’t help it—it was back in the days before I’d discovered anger. Sometimes Brian protected me, mostly
he didn’t. Too many, and he’d join in with them, and that always made them fiercer.

Everyone was afraid; there was no one who wasn’t afraid of the rest when the rest held together and stood against them.

I sit very still in my seat, amazed that I’ve never seen this before.

All the times Brian hadn’t protected me.

Now I see that he couldn’t have—not even Buster Rice protected his sister, they would have killed him for being soft if he
had. Hard men aren’t allowed to be soft. Man-big or boy-small, it’s the same script.

And Brian wasn’t hard. If there was a hard-man in our house it was my mother.

And it was a hard road she made us walk, and she neither thought nor cared what it was like for us. She had her principles,
which would be ours—that was enough for her.

I swallow to rid myself of the taste of soap that clings like a film of fat to the back of my throat.

There’s a throbbing roar as the driver revs the engine. I come back from wherever it is I’ve been. I look about me—the bus
is near filled, and I never saw them getting on, nor buying their tickets, nor arranging themselves on the seats. The bus
swings out into the street. All the impatience drains from me. I know myself naked and unprepared.

They’ve warned me that she’s not great today, that she may be too tired to talk. I don’t mind, I’ve nothing to say to her,
but I open the door and I think I’m in the wrong room. Then I realise I’m not.

I sit down in the visitor’s chair and I stare at a face that’s so changed by drugs and sickness I’d have passed it in the
street without a glance. I don’t know what to do, I’ve never done this before, I wish she’d open her eyes then she’d know
that I’m here without me having to tell her. I try to make the words come out of my mouth, but I can’t. I feel panicky and
trapped, and nothing useful is coming through from anywhere else. I don’t want to be where I am, but it’s what I’m here for,
and where else is there in all this city for me to go? I feel empty and uninhabited—a building gutted by fire, the inside
all blackened and charred. I sit for a long time watching and waiting.

At last she opens her eyes, but she doesn’t see me. I don’t think she’s seeing anything at all, although her eyes stay open.
I shift noisily on the chair, and she moves her head very slowly and looks in my direction. Her eyes don’t change when she
sees me. I’m still trying to speak, but then she does.

Anne appears in the doorway. She draws back a step, surprise on her face, yet I phoned last night from the B and B and this
morning she’s stayed clear deliberately, to give me the first hour alone with my mother.

I mustn’t be the Ellen she expected.

When she’s through greeting me she goes to the bed, bends, kisses my mother lightly on the forehead. Then she asks her how
she is and how her night has been.

Nothing. The old woman who lies on the bed has gone away off somewhere else. The eyes don’t open, the face doesn’t change.

Anne goes on talking.

“Isn’t it great to see Ellen, and her looking so well?” she asks the comatose form on the bed. “I thought she’d be tired out
after all that travelling, but here she is, fresh as a daisy, not a bother on her at all. The girls said to tell you they’re
coming here straight from school but you needn’t be getting ideas—it’s not you they’re wanting, it’s their Aunty Ellen. They
can’t wait to get a wee look at her after so long.”

She puts her shopping bag on the bed as she talks and takes things out of it and puts them on the bedside locker or in its
drawer. There isn’t much: eau de cologne, two clean nightdresses, a straggly posy of winter jasmine, a bottle of orange squash.

“Linda wasn’t herself this morning; she’s anxious about that French test they’re having in class.… A wee bit of anxiety’s
no bad thing—she’s inclined to be overconfident. And Brian said to remind you he has a meeting tonight, but it’s straight
after school so he’ll be in directly it’s over.”

Then she sits herself down across the bed from me and asks me about my journey. We discuss the B and B, the new bus station
in Omagh, the changes I’ve noticed in my short time in the city. Somehow she manages to include my mother in the conversation.
I can’t work out quite how she does this, for the non-participation of the body in the bed is total and unyielding. It’s like
one of those plastic maze games Brian and I used to fight over at Christmas when we were children. You tipped it this way
and that, and the silver ball ran around, backwards and for
wards, in and out of dead ends, almost but never quite reaching the centre.

It’s no good, I can’t do it, can’t find my way into this maze of a game that Anne’s so adroit at playing.

She sees my helplessness and gets to her feet.

“You’ll be wanting a wee cup of coffee and maybe a sandwich, Ellen. There’s a snack bar we can go to down the stairs.” She
turns to my mother. “We’ll not be away long now, Edith. Just you relax and have a wee doze while we’re gone.”

The snack bar’s an unenclosed area at the hospital entrance, tables and chairs in a row, a shop full of pastel teddies and
fluffy rabbits and those flowers that look so fake they might as well be. All the tables are occupied except one, so we put
our things down and go to the counter and Anne asks for two cups of coffee and two Club bars. The woman behind the counter
calls her by her Christian name.

It’s strange, I think. Here am I, reared by my mother’s people, not knowing my father’s, but my children have never set eyes
on this aunt of theirs, for they’re reared to their father’s side alone.

Anne sits across from me at the table, stirring her coffee slowly and carefully. She has fine skin, a bony nose, and a wide
mouth that’s stretched across over-large teeth. As well as that she is tall and long-waisted, and her wavy brown hair is tucked
in behind her ears. Nothing to write home about. She’s wearing a dark tweed skirt that shows up her heavy hips, and a grey
poloneck jumper in an easy-care wool blend. I wonder what I think of her. Then I wonder if I’ve ever really thought of her,
or if she’s always just been Brian’s wife.

I try to remember what she was like when I first met her.

“Dull. Smug. Boring. Perfect for Brian,” I’d said to my mother, who’d looked at me with tight lips and cold eyes, so I’d
gone upstairs and wept, though I didn’t know why, for looks don’t kill and where was the sting of words that I’d expected?

It was the loss of Brian that had me stretched on the bed, sobbing into the quilt. Anne hadn’t taken him away from me, we
hadn’t been close since my early teens, but I hadn’t ever entirely given up hope. Not until he married Anne, that is, and
I saw what it was that he wanted: domesticity, respectability, a quiet life. I suppose then I finally realised I was on my
own.

Anne had been kind to me in her way, she had tried to water me down and tidy me up and make me generally more acceptable to
the world and to myself. She hadn’t liked Robbie any more than Brian had, but she’d found in herself the self-restraint not
to say so. She’d softened Brian when she could, tried to stand back when she couldn’t, and taken my side against my mother
in the days before I upped and walked out.