The Bird Woman (4 page)

Well, Rita buckled down, she went out to work, reared the two young ones, never looked at another man nor missed out on a
prison visit. Not for Larry’s sake, mind, but to keep Larry’s comrades in the Organisation off her back—or that’s what she
told Robbie. And she told him she’d be gone the minute Larry was out, but he never really believed her. He thought it was
only talk.

Larry did five years then got early release, and home he came. The key was in the lock, the fridge was stuffed with food,
the whole place was spotless. But when Larry lifted his voice and yelled for Rita he knew from the feel of the silence that
the house was empty.

He went mad. He went straight to the mother—no joy—then he went and got Robbie out of his work, for if anyone knew where she’d
gone it would be Robbie.

But Robbie didn’t know. He told Larry over and over till Larry had no choice but to believe him.

Larry started coming on heavy. He wanted her found or he’d know where to lay the blame, he told Robbie. Robbie was soft for
his sister, he said, and every bit as bad as she was. He wasn’t rational. Robbie was sorry for Rita, but in his book she shouldn’t
have left no matter what, so he let himself be worked on and shamed by Larry, and the end of it was that Robbie said he would
find her, and off he went with Larry to leave no stone unturned.

They asked everyone, they looked everywhere, they even sent Avril to the women’s refuge to check if she was there. But Rita
wasn’t in Belfast at all; she was on the boat with the kids and heading for London, where the cousin of an aunt-by-marriage
had promised to make room for them till they got a start. The mother knew alright, but she wasn’t saying. If Larry found Rita,
the mood he was in, Rita wouldn’t be walking for months.

So, no joy all over again, and off they went to a bar to make a few further enquiries. Larry started running Rita down. He
said
she was a fat, idle, good-for-nothing hitch, a toe rag, not fit to lick the corns on his feet, and a whole lot more besides.
Robbie took it for a bit then he said that was his sister Larry was slagging off, but Larry didn’t care whose sister she was,
he got worse and worse, till the filth fairly rolled off his tongue. So Robbie hit him—which took some courage—and soon they
were rolling around on the floor among the chair legs, half the bar either joining in or trying to pull them apart.

Robbie made it home in the early hours. He was battered and bruised, his tail between his legs; he was looking for comfort,
but I wasn’t there.

No way was I there, I wasn’t stupid. I was afraid of Larry, and there was a girl I was friendly with just round the corner
who owned a passable sofa. I left no note, in case they came looking.

The next day I took my time. I went to a lecture then sat on in the coffee bar, and when I got home I let myself in very quietly
and stood in the hallway, listening. Silence. The flat was empty, Robbie away back out to work. But he wasn’t away back out
to work. He was there, in the kitchen, waiting.

“Where were you?” he asked, but I didn’t answer. He lifted his hand, and the black eye he gave me took weeks to lose its colour.

That was back in the early days, we weren’t long married, and I suppose I bought into the hard-man myth along with near everyone
else in Belfast at that time. And he was sorry, really sorry—he promised he’d never do it again, and he didn’t.

But not doing it again was killing him—even I could see that—it was the reason he shook me till my teeth rattled; it was why
he couldn’t let me be when we were out together.

And he was a nice lad when he let himself off the hook. That’s all he was, just a lad who thought he had to be a hard-man,
take no shit, drink till he couldn’t stand up, and look out for his own. He was bright too—every bit as clever as I was. He’d
grown up on the streets, education was crap, but a part of him hungered after it. That’s why he hung round with students—it
wasn’t only to pick up girls, the way he let on. And he wasn’t a hard-man either, he was a soft man with a hard-man’s training.
His own man as well, for he’d feinted and ducked and somehow stayed clear of the paramilitaries. Not so many—reared as he
was—managed that at all.

So that was Robbie, poor Robbie that never did anything on me but what he’d been programmed to do: find a girl, stick a ring
on her finger, get some kids on her, feed them and clothe them, and keep the whole show on the road whatever the cost. Well,
we’ll leave Robbie out of this now, I’ve nothing to hold against him—not the torn knickers, nor Barbara Allen, nor the hospital
for the mind that came after the hospital that saw the last of Barbara Allen. He couldn’t help himself. He was near as much
a victim of himself as I was.

And those were strange times, and people found strange ways of coping. Sometimes down here I remember those times and hardly
believe myself that some of the things that happened happened at all. And I couldn’t ever talk about them to folk here. They’d
think I was mad or I’d made them up.

I
cried a lot after Jacko died, so the doctor put me on anti-depressants. He said they might do the trick.

I took the tablets and felt even worse, so I cried
all
the time, and the more I cried the more I couldn’t stop. Robbie kicked up, so I kept going back, but nothing the doctor did
seemed to make any difference.

Robbie said he’d come with me the next time, and I was glad. He talked to the doctor, the doctor talked back, then the doctor
sighed and said that a week or two in Purdysburn might be worth a try. Robbie looked at me, I nodded my head, and the doctor
filled in the forms.

What you can’t see doesn’t exist. If you start into seeing things that aren’t there at all you have to be schizophrenic or
mad. Purdysburn is Belfast’s mental hospital, so my going there made sense to me as well as to Robbie. And it wasn’t so bad,
once I was used to it. Plus it was such a relief not to have to try to be normal that the crying stopped a few hours in, and
I hardly noticed.

The dining room frightened the wits out of me that first night. All those mad people, eyes down, eating away; I was terrified
someone would take it into their heads to speak to me.

Then when no one did I started wishing they would.

“D’you not want that?” It was the fella sitting across from me, leaning forward, staring at the potato bread I’d been pushing
around my plate. I didn’t answer.

“Give it to Annie,” he said. “Annie’s mad for potato bread.” He still hadn’t looked at me, but I was looking at him and what
I saw was a pasty-faced lad hardly older than I was, with hoody owl eyes that looked out from behind those round National
Health glasses, the same as John Lennon wore.

“You’re a picky eater,” he said to what was left of my Ulster fry. He had little slim wrists and brown tufty hair that stuck
out round his head as though he’d just woken up.

“I’ve a tapeworm,” I told him. “That’s why I’m thin.”

“You have not. If you had one of them you’d have cleared the plate.”

“It’s asleep,” I said. “On account of the medication.” He lifted his eyes slowly and looked at me and didn’t look away. His
eyes were light blue, and the lids were large and his gaze seemed to come from a long way off.

“Which one’s Annie?” I asked, just for something to say.

“The auld doll at the end of the next table.”

His name was Michael. After that, I always sat beside him in the dining room. He was the first person I’d spoken to, and that
gave him stability in my uncertain world. That, and the impermeable distance in his half-closed eyes. He was in because he’d
tried to drown himself. He didn’t tell me this right away, he waited till he was used to me, then he sprang it on me one afternoon,
the two of us sitting in the dayroom, smoking.

“It takes all sorts,” I said when I’d heard his news. “The Lagan’s a dirty old river, I wouldn’t go jumping in it myself.”

“Who said anything about the Lagan?” He stared into the middle distance. “I built a raft, so I did. Pushed off from Bally-holme
Bay.”

“Where’s Ballyholme Bay?”

“Bangor, County Down.”

“Rafts are so you can float, not so you can drown.”

“Fair point,” he said. “I had a bike, a Harley.”

I stared. For a moment I wondered if he was
really
mad.

“It’s a hard world, so it is,” he said carefully. “I couldn’t just go off and leave her now, could I?”

It took me a minute to get it. “You put the
bike
on the raft?”

He nodded and lit another cigarette. “I put the bike on the raft and chained my leg to the wheel. That way we’d both go down
together—”

“Sounds like a cry for help to me,” I said firmly.

“Don’t be negative.”

“I’m not being negative.
Oh look, there’s a man and a bike on a raft. Looks like they’re floating out to sea
—Did it not cross your mind that someone might try their hand at a rescue?”

“It was four o’clock in the morning. I’d have been home and dry—or more to the point, wet—but for this wee lad running away
from home.” He was staring at me as he spoke, with that blank owl gaze that told nothing. “He takes one look, sets down his
red plastic suitcase, and scuttles off to raise the alarm—”

“You could have jumped in right away,” I said stubbornly. “You didn’t have to wait around.”

“I got the tides wrong. It wasn’t deep enough to drown.”

He was serious. I wanted to laugh, but I stopped myself. Either the story was true or it wasn’t. Either way, he was mad. I
wasn’t prepared for his question.

“And you?” he asked.

“Me?”

“There’s no one else in the room, is there?”

“I had a miscarriage,” I said. “Then something else happened. And after it happened I couldn’t stop crying.”

A raised eyebrow and that look again.

“It’s true,” I said. (Why was I sounding defensive?)

“There’s more.”

“No, there isn’t.”

“Yes, there is.”

“I see things that don’t happen. Sometimes they happen, but not always. And not till a good while after.”

Then I told about walking down the street and seeing the bomb going sailing over the security fence and onto the roof of the
bar. How I was somehow inside the bar at the same time as being outside, watching. And then about seeing Jacko Brennan being
blown to smithereens.

“And I’m screaming and screaming,” I said. “And people are coming running and they’re taking me to the hospital and I’m losing
Barbara Allen, which is what I call the baby.” I could hear my voice, and it was going high and shaky. He held out his cigarettes,
and I took one and he lit it and I saw that my hand was shaking as well as my voice.

“Only it didn’t happen,” I said. “I mean, Jacko dying didn’t happen. Losing Barbara Allen happened alright. But six months
later Jacko died, and it was all the way I saw.” He waited. I took a long drag at the cigarette and went on. “It was evening.
I was ironing, and the window was open and I heard the blast and I knew exactly where it came from and I knew that Jacko was
dead. But this time I didn’t see a thing. I went on ironing. But the shaking started in my hands, and it went up my arms and
wouldn’t stop. I sat down and waited for Robbie. Robbie came in, and he said it was true; there’d been a bomb and Jacko was
dead, but that was all hours and hours ago. Funny, wasn’t it? Jacko, dead like that? And why hadn’t I turned the light on,
why was I shaking?

“That’s all he said. He never once mentioned me seeing it all
six months before it ever happened. Maybe he didn’t want to think about that or maybe he saw the state I was in and he didn’t
want to make things worse…. But he took me over to the hospital, and they gave me sedatives. They said it was shock. The next
day I started this crying-thing, and it wouldn’t stop.”

“Who’s this Jacko Brennan?”

“No one special. I only knew him to nod to, say hello—”

“That’s not mad, it’s clairvoyant.”

“There’s no such thing, stupid. People who see things are mad.”

“You’re mad if you think that. You should be in Purdysburn.”

“I
am
in Purdysburn, and so are
you”
I glared at him. “Anyway, what’s so great about what you did? What’s so great about trying to drown yourself?”

He looked back at me, unblinking. For a moment I wanted to kill him; then I started to laugh and I couldn’t stop. I laughed
and I laughed, and when I came up for air, he was looking at me still, his expression completely unchanged.

“That’s more like it,” he said.

After that I had company. Michael and me, a twosome. It was June, and the trees in the grounds were green and thick in the
summer night. The dayrooms were all on the ground floor, and it wasn’t a heavy-duty part of the hospital, most of the windows
weren’t locked. After dark people flitted about like moths. The staff must have known, but nothing was said. Perhaps they
were sorry for us; or perhaps it kept us quiet, and they didn’t care. I’d climb with Michael through a window of the empty
dining hall, and we’d walk about under the trees and lie on our backs spotting stars through the darker darkness of leaves.
We told each other stories, sometimes from books, sometimes incidents that had happened in the past. It was lovely, so it
was. Words
spoken into the night. Small, soft words, far off and glimmery like the summer stars. Sometimes we climbed into the trees
and sat in the forks of their branches, swinging our heels. I was better at climbing than he was, more agile, more sure-footed;
I’d join my hands into a stirrup to give him a start then I’d scramble up behind him.

After the first week I asked Michael if he fancied having sex with me, but he turned me down.

“Sorry,” he said. “Nothing doing.”

“Why not? Are you gay?”

He gave me his sniffy look. “I don’t fancy you,” he said. “Besides, I’m married.”

“What’s that got to do with it? Anyway, I don’t believe you.”

“That I’m married? Or that I don’t fancy you?”

“Both,” I said. “I don’t think you’re married. I think you fancy me but you can’t get it up.” (It was wonderful, that hospital.
All your inhibitions went sailing off down the river.)