The Bird Woman (39 page)

But it’s hard being stripped of your trappings. It’s been with me so long I don’t know who I am now it’s gone.

Visitors come every evening, some in the day as well. Men and women out of my childhood, uncles and aunts, cousins I haven’t
seen for years, towing shy country weans by the hand. A steady procession. Anne laughs and says that it’s me that they’re
after.

“They want a
wee juke
at you, see have you grown two heads and webbed hands from living so far down South.”

But Brian scowls and looks serious when we joke, and we learn to keep our chat for when he’s out of the room.

She says his first loyalty went to his mother, that he tried to make up to her for the husband she’d lost, that he’s always
been baffled and hurt by his failure.

I look at her hard when she says this. She looks steadily back, then drops her soft, tired eyes.

“There were times in the early years I was jealous enough,” she says. “I felt I had but half a husband.”

She’s right, I think, though I hadn’t seen it before. Brian beside my mother’s chair: a teenage boy, standing guard for his
dead father.

Anne is generous, as I never have been. I think of Liam and Catherine, and something has changed but I don’t know what. I
stop because there is suddenly loss in my thoughts, and pain.

My aunts and uncles come into the room with us. The rest stand about in the corridors, country people from Dunnamanagh, chatting
softly together. Before they leave, the cousins come briefly in to see her, their faces grave, their few words quiet and kind.
Then they go back outside, collect up their children, make their farewells.

“They don’t want to intrude,” Anne says. “They’re here to support us, not get in the way.”

Anne’s sisters come, and she goes out into the corridor to talk to them. Anne’s neighbours come, never staying long, always
leaving a basket or a covered plate behind them. I see that she’s loved.

By midnight even the last of the old ones have gone, and we’re left to ourselves. I miss them, their white hairs, their stooped,
rheumaticky limbs, their steady acceptance of dying. And the fact that they claim her relieves me of some burden. She is Edith
again—their sister as much as my mother—had been Edith before ever Brian and Anne and I had known her, is not entirely ours,
nor her life entirely our fault.

Liam wants to come. We’ve argued over the phone. I tell him he’s more use at home with the children.

I don’t know what’ll happen if Liam comes, and that’s the truth. It’s like being married to Robbie again—threatened on every
side and only myself to rely on.

If he comes I’ll be more vulnerable, everything could fall apart. If I do it alone I’ve a better chance of getting out intact.

I was drawn too far out of myself by that blowy black night
and the window. I went too far down a road I’ve no wish to travel, and now I’m afraid. It was that Joanne who called me back—the
shock of what she said, the injustice.

I hate her now, and I want her to know it. If I meet her along the corridor I drop my eyes and move to the other side, and
when she comes into the room I turn my back. She doesn’t try to speak to me. She goes about her duties and then leaves.

I see Anne watch, then look at me, eyebrows raised, her eyes enquiring, trusting.
What’s going on?
they ask.

I look at her and I make my gaze run through her to beyond. I think Anne remembers the old Ellen then—the hard young sister-in-law,
foul-mouthed, eyes full of angry contempt.

I’ll close myself up and hold on, get through this as quick and as whole as I can. Beyond that I dare not think.

They sent me off, my husband and my children, but I don’t know what I’m doing or why I’m sitting here waiting for her to die.
Brian is right, I grudge her even this. But she never softened herself to me nor helped me when I needed it, she judged me
by her own relentless standards. I think this, yet I know I’m the same, and if she’d tried to help me I’d have done what I’m
doing to Liam now and not have allowed her near me. Maybe it’s pride, or maybe I don’t know how.

Anne’s on at me to move out of the B and B and stay in their house. It makes no sense, paying out all that money, she says,
and not knowing how long it will be to the end. But the little room’s a lifeline for me; sometimes it feels like the only
anchor I have left.

When I was home, living my life, I thought that the Ellen who lived it was who I truly was. But now that I’m back in my-own-place-that-isn’t-my-own-place
I’m not so sure. Sometimes I feel there’s a self that’s behind the self I had thought of as me.
And sometimes when the self-that-I-thought-was-myself loosens its moorings I grow more aware of this other self, and I am
afraid.

The odd thing is that this other self—this deeper, stranger self—increases my sense of disintegration. It has no name, you
see, no identity nor personality nor any need of either. It makes no claims and is deeply, endlessly itself.

T
HURSDAY

A
nne says she could have gone to the hospice to die, but she asked to stay here, where she knew the staff from the time before.

Anne says Brian wanted the hospice. He thought it would be easier and quieter for her there, but she wouldn’t shift so he’d
bowed to her choice.

I look at my watch. It’s half past seven in the morning. Anne has sent Brian off for air and some breakfast. He didn’t want
either, but she told him he needed to keep up his strength so he went like a biddable child. I think of Anne as a passive
wife, but I see now that she is for Brian what Liam once was for me: a safe anchorage from the turbulence and storms of my
own nature. It’s an authority right at the heart of their marriage, though mostly it stays well concealed.

Vigils are hard journeys into rocky and comfortless terrain, with no one knowing how they’ll measure up till they’ve measured
up or failed. You get so strange yourself that you hardly notice another’s strangeness, and it’s only after Brian has gone
that I know the relief of his absence. I look at Anne, and I see that her shoulders have slackened, her hands lie loose in
her lap, the room feels bigger, quieter, more at ease. Even my mother
sinks deeper into unconsciousness, the sag of her form minutely more pronounced. So Brians relentless concentration has reached
her. His overwhelming will that she should live has stiffened her.

I go to the nurses’ kitchen to make tea.

Joanne’s in the kitchen. She’s doing something at the worktop with her back turned to me. Her bony elbows stick out, her long,
fairish hair hangs lank; her neck above the pink uniform looks stalklike and frail as a child’s. I hesitate in the doorway
when I see her, half turn, then turn back and make myself go in. She’s seen my reflection in the window. She doesn’t look
round.

I go to the press for the delph, find a tray, drop tea bags into both cups, am busy being indifferent to her presence.

There’s a yelp of pain to my left and a sudden clatter. A knife skids across the floor.

I don’t know what happens next or where all the blood is coming from. I’m so tired that time seems to break into pieces that
move themselves round and won’t join up or make sense.

I don’t know what happens except that I’m lifting my hand from her wrist, and the long open gash that I’m certain was there
is a line of pink, puckered skin. There’s blood on her hand, on the pad of her thumb, on the upper part of her wrist, but
it’s drying and smearing. And my hands are alive, though not in the old way, the emptiness is there, but they haven’t stiffened
and splayed.

Her eyes are like saucers.

Yet she accepts it, despite all that training, despite the hightech machines she operates every day with such effortless skill.

I know this because of the look on her face. I know that she understands what’s been done.

She brings her face close to mine.

“For Jesus’ sake, would you not help her? Would you not help your own mother?”

“She’s away beyond help.” I can hear my voice, cold and hard. “There isn’t a thing I can do—”

“Not help her to live, that’s not what I’m sayin’ at all. Help her to die—”

Her words are in my head, and I can’t get them out.

I try to forget this vigil, to forget that the woman in the bed is my mother, to sense her as I’d sense someone anonymous
and deeply sick and striving for release.

I stand by the window, staring out at the growing daylight. I’ve never done this before. I’ve never done anything before,
it’s all been done for me, I’m only even beginning to understand that now.

Suddenly I am flooded with an enormous pity. Pity for her, pity for us all. I see us standing, tiny figures viewed from low
down, black against a vast and darkening sky. I see our immense mortality. I am filled with tenderness like awe.

I turn from the window and close my eyes. I’m like an egg that’s being separated—the outer myself falls away like the gluey
mass of the white slipping over the edge of the shell.

With the white gone, my being lies open and still and ready. That’s the only way I can describe it. I feel nothing I can name
or identify, but my spine undoes itself from its drooping wilt and straightens out. My shoulders drop and my breathing stills,
and I feel both drunken and alert.

Then I see a bird, scrabbling frantic and dark against glass. I try to open my eyes, but I can’t. I’ve gone too deep in, I
can’t bring myself far enough out to give my eyes the order, I have to stay inside with the bird. And I know not to coax or
catch this
bird, I know it can fly out itself—the window’s open, it’s trapped by its fear alone.

Inside myself, I lean forward, clap my hands loud and sudden. It shoots from the glass and is out through the window, a couple
of little swooping dips, then it’s gone into a darkness that’s the same as light. My eyes fly open. I look at my mother in
the bed, and I know she’s gone too. As soon as I see her dead I know that I want her here, I haven’t finished, there’s so
much still to be questioned and tested and understood.

But it’s done, she isn’t about to turn back, any more than a stranded seal will heave itself back up the beach once it’s found
the first wave of the sea.

Then the door opens and Brian is there. He makes a small, quick noise in his throat and is out again, yelling for a nurse.
The nurse comes, puts a hand on the wrist for the pulse. Brian watches, white-faced and stunned. For a moment his eyes stare
into mine, but there’s no recognition. No tears either—he’s somewhere too deep for tears.

Anne goes to him. Very gently her hands go up, one to each side of his face, and she stands there looking quietly into his
eyes. A long, deep shudder runs through him, but still he can’t weep. He puts his arms round her, buries his face in her shoulder,
hides himself from my eyes. I feel as though I’m afloat in the room, no one to hold, no Liam to drop anchor in, no one to
tell me what to do. That’s a shock—the raw need I have for Liam when all through these days I’ve been trying so hard to push
him away.

The room has filled up, the ward sister and a doctor and another of the nurses on duty. I hear Anne asking the sister if we
can stay with her. The medical people dissolve away, and we’re left as before. Anne goes to the bed, bends to kiss her dead
mother-in-law, then looks up at Brian and asks will he phone the school.

“Ask them to put the girls into a taxi. They’ll want to be here.” She’s stripping the drips from my mother’s arms as she speaks,
ravelling the tubes and hooking them loosely over the machines. I open my mouth to protest, then understand there’s no need
anymore, and the next thing I know I am helping. We pull down the sheets, then bend to her, one on each side; we lift and
straighten her out, her body still warm and yielding under our hands.

“What are we doing?” I ask.

“Laying her out,” she answers without looking up. “Making a start on it anyway. The undertaker will do the full job later
on, but we’ll do what we can for her while we still have her. Brian will be back here in a minute and the girls won’t be long
after. Then we can sit with her.”

I move down to her feet and begin to strip away the tubes from her legs, careful to pull off the plasters in one swift motion
so that it doesn’t hurt. We push the machines away. Anne has taken a long grey silk scarf from her handbag. She places it
gently under my mother’s jaw and ties it on top of her head, the ends sticking out on either side, waggish and irreverent.
She sees the effect and tucks the ends neatly in under the scarf, as she’d have liked. Together we pull up the bedclothes.
Anne lifts the old, limp hands from under the sheet and places them on the breast. Her every movement is tender.

Some women have death built into them as surely as they have life. They know what to do, and they know how to do it, though
no one has told them or shown them or taught them. I live my life with the sick, but I’ve rarely seen death, for I always
refuse all requests to help with someone’s passing. Now I feel neither fear nor distaste, yet I know that I’ve none of Anne’s
sure
instinct. I watch her drawing the chairs to the bed, amazed that so plain and tired a face can hold such grace.

The minister comes, his face careful and solemn. The girls stand, their young faces open and damp. I’ll have to wait to find
out my emotions.

The minister finishes his prayers, takes up his hat, says he’ll call up to arrange the funeral details later on. He summons
Brian over on his way out and says something into his ear.

The door shuts behind him. Anne raises her eyebrows in question.

“He said not to forget they’ll be needing the bed.”

Which is true, but the hospital is graceful to the last. No one hurries us, they say we can sit for as long as we like.

So we do, or rather the others do. Not me. I light out—there’s no way round it—I manage about half an hour, and then I can
stand it no longer. When the dying’s done, everything’s done, that’s the truth. All the wakes and the funerals in the world
can’t change that.