Читать книгу The Bird Woman - Kerry Hardie - Страница 10

Where was I? The day after the night I first met Liam. Saturday. I met him again in the street late that morning. He was walking towards me, his head down, his eyes on the pavement, no sign of Noreen. I was dying with the hangover and the lack of sleep, but I wanted to be out of the flat and away from Robbie, away from Robbie’s foul words, away from the misery in his eyes when he came out with them.

I’d told him I’d messages to do. I was out the door almost before he knew I was going.

When I saw Liam my first thought was to turn on my heel and run, but I didn’t. I’d be past him in a flash, I told myself, there was no call to be drawing attention to myself, running off like an eejit. So I went on ahead, my eyes on the ground, the same as his were. Then the next thing I felt a hand gripping my arm and a voice saying my name out as if it was news to me.

“You can leave go of my arm,” I said. “I’m not about to run off with your wallet.”

He let go. He said he hadn’t seen me till I was nearly past, he hadn’t meant to hurt me.

“How about a cup of coffee?” he added. “Wouldn’t you let me buy you a coffee or a drink or something? Would you fancy a bite of lunch?”

No, I said, I didn’t want a drink, or not yet, and where was Noreen, wouldn’t she be wanting her lunch any minute now?

“That should keep you busy and out of trouble,” I added nastily.

“Noreen got the early train to Dublin. Said she couldn’t be doing with Northerners. Always arguing and complaining and telling the rest of us what to do. Said she knows when she isn’t welcome, even if I don’t.”

“And don’t you?”

“Oh, I do. It’s coming through loud and clear, I just don’t want to admit it’s what I’m hearing—”

My head hurt, and I wanted to get away from him. By now I was well on my way to forgetting all about the business with him the night before. It seemed like a dream, a stupid dream, and I was sick of myself and the way I let my imagination lead me up garden paths. Then he put out his hand and took mine. Straightaway I was back there, ready to drop with the knowing of what I had known last night. And with the fear of it.

He didn’t let go of my hand. Instead he put his other one under my elbow and drew me round to face him. I kept my head down, my eyes well away from his. But I let him move his hands to my upper arms and hold them there to steady me. After a while his hands dropped.

“Right,” he said. “Lunch,” he said, and steered me into the Sceptre and sat me down in a snug. Then off he went to the bar and came back with sandwiches and pints of Guinness.

“I don’t like Guinness,” I said.

“You could do with building up.”

I don’t remember any more than that, I don’t remember what I said next or what he said next or whether I drank the Guinness or left it sitting or poured it over his head. But I remember how I pressed back into the chair, how I tried to get small and still inside my clothes to get away from him. He never touched me, and I never touched him, but when I got back to the flat two hours later, I had a story ready for Robbie and I wasn’t slow running it past him. I told him I’d rung my mother from a pay phone while I was out. Brian and Anne and the babies had been there with her.

“They’re away off to the West for a week’s holiday,” I said. “They’ve rented a house—a place off the coast of Mayo called Achill Island. Brian came on to ask did we want to come with them?”

Robbie was looking at me, but I was busy taking the dishes off the drainer and stacking them into tidy piles by the sink.

“We?” Robbie said, so I knew he’d bought the rest of the lie.

“Well, not exactly,” I said, still not looking at him. “He asked were you working, and I said you were. Then he said did I want to come?”

A new cottage had been built hard behind the old one, its front door facing across to the other one’s back door. For the old couple or maybe the young couple—family, anyway—a natural proximity. Sometime later someone had added a joining arm so the two had become the one, with a bit of a yard in the space between. Hardly even a yard. Just a rough place for hens to pick over and washing to hang, sheltered from wind and weather.

Achill. We’d been there four days. I had carried a kitchen chair out and was sitting doing nothing at all, the gnats rising, the shirts I’d washed in the kitchen sink just stirring in the quiet air. Liam had gone off after groceries and a mechanic to look at his car. There was a noise he didn’t much care for in the engine, he said, and maybe he wanted some time off from me as well, maybe he’d bitten off more than he could easily chew. For myself, I was glad to be on my own. My thoughts went wandering about in the whitish sea light that you get off that western coast.

The yard was three sides cottage, with the fourth side closed off by a big thick dark fuchsia hedge, red now with hanging blooms that were starting to drop. It was early September, a bare two months since they’d let me out of the hospital, a bare four since the bomb had gone off that killed Jacko and left me not able to stop crying. The yard had been covered over with a scrape of rough concrete, breaking up now so the weeds and the moss had taken hold, the whole place littered with things that were most likely never going to be used again but just might come in handy one day: broken boards and odd stones and shells carried up from the beach, floats for a fishing net in a tangled heap, a black plastic bucket half filled up with rainwater over by the wall. A shallow brick drain was clogged up with silt and leaves and drained nothing.

If I lived here I might learn to do less, I thought. To wash less, to go on wearing things that were soiled. Even in the few days we had been here the urge to clean it all up had died in me. I no longer itched to chuck out the junk, to unblock the drain, to sweep it all down; I no longer wanted to do anything much except sit on the straight-backed chair in the soft bloom of light and stretch out a hand to check the shirts on the line.

On the first day I’d washed all the windows in the kitchen. I’d intended doing the whole house, there wasn’t a clean window anywhere; they were splattered with rain marks and mud and had deep layers of ancient cobwebs veiling the corners. Liam laughed when he saw what I was at. I asked him why, and he went red and shook his head, but I pressed him and finally he said he thought it strange to be starting in on cleaning on your holidays.

But that wasn’t why he’d laughed, and I knew it. I kept on at him, and he went redder, but still he wouldn’t say. In the end he gave in and told me about being on the sites in London and working alongside an old Cockney who thought Liam was way too innocent and needed wising up. He had a dirty old tongue in his head, Liam said, but he meant well—he was forever passing on bits of tips and information. It seems he’d told Liam to look out for women who were workers because women who were workers were always on for sex.

I rinsed out the cloth in the water, then turned and washed down the last pane. But I didn’t give them a shine with newspaper as I’d intended, and I didn’t wash any more. I was angry. I didn’t laugh and brush it aside; my mind closed like a trap round his words. I remembered Robbie—what he’d said about knowing as soon as he saw me that I was repressed, a volcano ready to blow.

I’d made a mistake with Robbie, I thought, and I was surprised at myself, for this was the first time I’d let myself think such a thing.

Now it looked like I might well be on the way to making another one with Liam. I took my coat from the peg without a word.

“Where are you off to?” Liam wanted to know.

I didn’t reply. I shrugged on my coat and was gone through the door without looking back.

Out on the road I went steaming along, the wind on my face, my hair ripping out, the bog stretching red-brown to either side. The sky was flying above me; the wind keened in the telephone wires; my ears sang with the lovely fresh running noise of water going pelting down the ditches. With every step I took I was freer, the anger draining away.

“What ails ye?” Liam was asking me, coming up from behind.

“You know rightly,” I said, without slowing down. He started to say he was sorry, but I wasn’t having it, I turned around to his face.

“Why shouldn’t women like sex?” I demanded. “And why do men have to sneer and joke if we do? Wouldn’t you think men would be pleased that we like it? Wouldn’t you think it would make life easier all round?”

He stared. He started to try to say something, but I only laughed in his face. I threw my arms round his neck and pulled him to me; then I undid my arms and pushed him away and went striding off over the bog, all the anger gone from me.

It’s a wonderful place, Achill; there never were such skies. I was used to skies from Derry, but still it wasn’t like Achill. Achill had the best skies that ever I saw in all Ireland. It could be ink black up ahead, but away to the left you’d see light breaking through in a shaft like a floodlight, while off to the right there’d be rain, a grey curtain, and behind that again you’d see where the rain had passed over and the land was shouldering its way back up through the gloom.

So we went striding along together, all thought of regret vanished clean away and Robbie only a flicker of guilt at the back of my mind.

Night came, and we sat by the smoking fire with a bottle of whiskey that I was throwing into me but Liam had hardly touched. It was awkward as hell, but I didn’t care. We’d ease up in bed and no need for talk—our bodies would say it all. Or that’s what I thought, but I’d reckoned without Liam: when I put my hand on his leg, you’d think he’d been stung by a wasp.

He hadn’t brought me here, he said, for that.

“Why not?” I asked him. “What’s wrong with that?”

It seemed Liam thought we should learn to talk first.

“If we can’t talk,” he said, “there isn’t a future—”

I gaped at him. No future was fine by me. A bit on the surface of me was playing with the notion of leaving Robbie, but deeper down that wasn’t what I meant to do at all. Deeper down I wasn’t leaving Robbie, I was having a bit of a fling with Liam and while I was at it destroying whatever shared future I’d glimpsed that night in the bar. I was trying to avoid my fate, you see; I thought I could go with him to Achill and then sneak back home again to Robbie. Outwit my fate, give it the slip.

So I sat there, not believing what I was hearing, thinking it all some game on his part that would resolve itself in an hour or so’s time in the bed. Only it didn’t. He’d taken himself off to a different bed the first night, and the next and the next. And for all I knew he would do the same tonight.

In the day we’d walked long, long walks, together but alone. And now we were both so miserable we were relieved to be apart.

I sat on, thinking these thoughts, glad of his absence, wondering should I cut my losses, find a bus, and head back to Belfast, but knowing I wasn’t yet able for Robbie or the city. Beside me on the windowsill were two oval stones, very white, and the skull of some long-dead ewe. Or some long-dead ram—how would I know? What did I know about sexing live sheep, much less something like this, stripped of its flesh and blood?

It was ugly, the bone grey and pitted, the horns broken off at the tips. A row of hefty grey teeth stuck out from the upper jaw, but the lower one had long since vanished away, and round holes, empty and dark, stared out where the eyes should have been. Once it was its own sheep, I thought, with some sort of life of its own and some sort of consciousness. Idly, I looked down at my hand in my lap, imagining the bones lurking under the flesh, wondering would they stay linked in the grave or fall away, like the sheep skull’s lower jaw.

I should have kept a tighter hold on my thoughts, for I got more than I’d bargained for. I watched, and my skin turned yellowy-blue, as though it was badly bruised, then puffed and swelled, and the yellowy-blueness darkened into black. A foul stench hung on the air, and I saw my flesh breaking open, heaving with maggots and pus. I screamed and jumped up. I tried to throw my hand off from me, but it stayed joined onto my arm. It was like trying to throw your own child away; you can’t do it even if you want to, you can’t rid yourself of a part of yourself just because you don’t like what it does or says or because it’s manky with maggots.

I don’t know how long it lasted: it might have been half an hour or only seconds. But I watched, and it all changed back. My hand was my hand, the flesh clean and regrown, and not a maggot in sight. I reached for my cigarettes, but the same hand shook so hard I couldn’t get one out of the packet.

Sweet Jesus, I thought. Not that again, don’t let it be that again. How am I going to live if I can’t even think a thought without seeing it act itself out before my eyes?

But it was—I knew well that it was. I was seeing things again. Barbara Allen and Jacko Brennan came flooding back, and my little bit of quiet and kind idleness in the broken yard was gone.

I sometimes wonder now, could I have left Robbie if Barbara Allen had lived? There are times when I think I could, but more often I think I couldn’t. He wouldn’t have let me take her, that’s certain sure, and I don’t think I could have defied the whole world and myself and gone off without her, but I don’t know. It’s no good thinking and saying to yourself “I’d do this” or “I’d do that.” You don’t know till it happens; you don’t know what you will find in yourself till it’s found.

What I do know is that I couldn’t have gone to Liam half as easily as I did if something of what had been between Robbie and me hadn’t died along with Barbara Allen.

But all that was ahead, and nothing to do with my standing there, shaking from head to foot, my eyes on the sheep’s skull, full up with fear. It wasn’t that I thought it foretold anything. It was it happening at all that scared me stupid. The bruising, the maggots, the pus—they had come and gone in a flash—but the speed of it all somehow only made the thing worse. It was as though my life were a bicycle I’d been riding happily down the road: one minute I was up there, the wind on my face, and the next I was sprawled on the tarmac, broken-boned and with all the wind knocked from me.

I didn’t hear the car; I didn’t hear Liam getting out or shutting the door or walking around the house. The first thing I knew he was standing in front of me, and I moved forward without knowing what I was doing and threw myself against him. His arms went around me and held me, and I never wanted him to let go. He held me without words, but small, soothing noises were coming from low in his throat, the same sounds you make to comfort a hurt dog.

I don’t know how long we stood like that, and I don’t know how we moved from being like that to sitting together there in the yard, his hand holding mine, me telling him in a big jumbled rush about what had just happened, about Barbara Allen and Jacko’s death, about the hospital and its drugs which had stopped me seeing things.

The empty eyes of the sheep’s skull stared from the sill.

“Is this the first time you’re after seeing anything since the hospital?”

I shook my head. “The night I met you—there was something then.”

He just nodded; he didn’t ask what. I put my hands over my face, and I started to weep. I felt the tears running through my fingers and down my wrists. He stroked my head, then he shifted a bit and put his arms round me again, and I wept into the warm place under his chin. After a while I stopped. I drew away from him. I patted my pockets, looking for something to blow my nose in, and I found a scrumpled bit of tissue and blew. I felt better. The weeping was a release, it had got me past the fear to a place where what was happening to me was simply what was happening, it wasn’t any longer something I was desperate to shut out.

“D’you think have I a screw loose?” I said when I’d finished blowing.

He shook his head. “I do not. You see things. Sometimes just things. Sometimes things that are going to happen but haven’t happened yet. That’s not the same thing as having a screw loose.”

I looked at him then. He was so serious and so innocent, his grey eyes very round and wide open, his brown curls lifting in the strengthening breeze. I started to laugh. He looked surprised, then a bit offended.

“What’re you laughing at?” he asked.

“You,” I said. “Is there nowhere you’d draw the line?”

“What d’you mean by that?”

“If I told you there was a wee man dancing a hornpipe on your left shoulder I think maybe you’d believe me.”

He smiled. “Why not?” he asked. “Because I don’t see something doesn’t mean it isn’t there. It just means I don’t see it.”

Fear hit me in the belly with the force of a man’s fist.

“You don’t see it because it isn’t there,” I shouted at him. “It’s a chemical in my brain, making me think I see things, that’s all. But they’re not there, they’re not there, they’re not there—”

Everything crumpled, and I started to sob again. “Easy now, easy,” he was saying, holding me tight in his arms and stroking my hair. “Easy, girl, easy.”

The wind had risen in the night. Storm waves rolled in, and the damp sands blew with flocks of shiny bubbles like tiny hermit crabs scurrying off sideways as fast as they could go. Further down there were big curvy swathes of pale foam, and I took off my shoes and walked in them, kicking the empty white fizz with my bare, bony feet, making it fly. The wind blew, and the clouds raced over the big, clean sky and the air snapped and rushed about my head like a flag. Where the beach curved out of the wind there were stranded castles of dark-cream foam like the tipped-out froth from hundreds of pints of Guinness.

A lone dog was trotting about, some sort of a collie cross, black and white with splashes of tan. When he came to a castle he’d crouch down and bark, his tail would lash back and forth, then he’d pounce. Nothing. The castle had disappeared, leaving only splatters of foam and claw marks deep in the sand. He couldn’t work it out. He’d stand there with such a puzzled, affronted expression on his face that I laughed aloud.

I was happy as a lark. We both were. Happy with the happiness of two people who have just found each other’s bodies and are amazed by them. Liam hadn’t moved away off from me after the time in the yard. It showed in a touch to my hair, a hand on my arm. Later, when I’d sat in beside him on the sofa, his arm had gone around my shoulders and stayed there. After that it was only a short step to bed and the pleasures of bed.

And pleasures they were. We had bodies that matched on a deeper, surer level than anything I’d known with Robbie, though Robbie was more athletic and knew better what he was doing. But Liam made me laugh, which Robbie never had. He talked to me, where Robbie was all silent concentration. And Liam got hungry—he was forever jumping out of bed and bringing back half the fridge and spreading it out on the coverlet. Then he’d feed me from his hand till I felt like a bird or a horse. Soon the sheets were greasy with buttery prints, and I slept with tiny islands of discomfort on my bare skin, never giving it a thought.

I should have known from that. I’m too fastidious by nature not to mind, and I didn’t. I thought I was only in ankle deep, when I’d waded in up to my neck.

But that day we were only beginning, and it seemed all the weight of the last hard months had fallen away and nothing but ease remained. We went strolling along the strand, the dog trotting behind us, the tide pulling out and out till you felt you might walk to America. Liam asked me why I feared it so—this habit I had of seeing things. Was it on account of not knowing if it would stop?

I didn’t answer him. I picked up a length of stick that the sea had laid down, and at once the dog was lepping and yapping for me to throw it. I didn’t. Instead I wrote my name in big broad strokes on the sand. Then I looked at Liam out of the corner of my eye and I wrote his name under mine. Then I wrote “Dandy the dog” under his. I took another peek at him to be sure he was watching me, and I lifted the stick and drew a big wide circle around the three names, linking us all together. He was disappointed, and I knew he would be. When I went to circle the names he had thought it would be with a heart. And it almost was, for it seemed a small thing to do for him when he’d made me so happy. But I held back, I wanted to stay in the happiness; I didn’t want to move on into hearts and love and all the trouble they’d bring. I dropped the stick and fell into step beside him.

“Sometimes, after Barbara Allen, when it started to happen,” I said, not answering his question, “I could make it not happen if I tried hard enough, but I had to shut myself down so tight it sometimes felt like I’d die. My head ached from keeping from thinking things, and my jaws ached from keeping my mouth clamped shut. That was the best thing about that place. The hospital, I mean. Having the drugs to stop it from happening, not having to do it myself.”

“What makes you so sure it was the drugs?”

I turned round to face him.

“You saw what happened in the yard.” I made my voice hard and cold so he’d know not to push. “It’s only started again because I’m off them.”

“Have you got those pills with you now?”

I shook my head. If you ask my mother she’ll tell you I’m a bad liar. I wondered would he see through me as easily.

“You wouldn’t go back on them, would you?” he asked.

“Just watch me. I’ve a prescription. I will if it’s going to start again.”

“How long between stopping the drugs and it starting again?”

I thought for a minute. I didn’t want to tell him the truth, but my mouth seemed to open and speak of its own accord. “The night I met you. But I was out of my head, things happen when you’re drunk. Yesterday was different—I was stone-cold sober.”

“The first time was when you were pregnant? It never happened before?”

“No.” I stopped and poked at a beached jellyfish with my toe. It was one of those clear ones with pale mauve marks in its centre. They don’t sting, or not from the outside anyway. It’s like putting your foot on a jelly cube warmed in the sun. Liam was watching me, waiting. “W-e-ll,” I said.

“Well?”

“I had kind of flashes before. Once or twice. Nothing much.”

He didn’t ask, he just looked at me with the question in his round grey eyes. He was good at that—just looking, not asking. I almost always fell for it at the start. This time I hadn’t meant to tell any more, but I did.

“We were over seeing my granny one Sunday,” I said slowly. “She lived outside Derry, a place called Dunnamanagh. It’s where my mother was born, there’s a farm. We’d had our dinner, we were only waiting for them to send us out so they could talk. Little pitchers have long ears, that’s what they’d say.” I wobbled the jellyfish with my toe. “It was spring, a beautiful day. I thought I’d go mad, stuck inside, behaving.” I sneaked a glance at him, but he wasn’t watching my face, he was watching my toe on the jellyfish. “Being thrown out was the best thing about those visits. The hay barn; looking for stray eggs; dandering about in the fields. There were four of us—me and Brian and my cousins, Heather and John. Heather was only nine, she was messing about, showing off, turning cartwheels over and over in the sun. It was lovely, so it was, the meadow all yellow with dandelions—”

I picked up a stone and threw it into the sea. The dog rushed after it and stuck his nose in where the stone had gone under. He brought his face up, and it streamed water. He looked at me reproachfully.

“I was watching Heather. One minute she was hands down in yellow flowers and the next there weren’t any flowers, just wee silver balls in the sun as far as the eye could see.”

“Silver balls?”

“Dandelion clocks. The flowers had all died and turned into clocks. I opened my mouth to call out, but the next thing they’d turned themselves back into yellow flowers. And it wasn’t like it is in a film when you go backwards or forwards, there wasn’t that wee blurry bit that comes up and says to you ‘watch out now, here comes fast-forward.’”

I threw another stone. The dog did his thing.

“And no one else saw what I saw,” I said. “I looked at them, and I knew for certain sure they hadn’t seen.”

“Did you tell Brian?”

“You’re joking me. Brian would have said I was mental.”

“What age were you?”

“Fourteen, maybe fifteen.”

“That was the first time?”

I shrugged. “The first time I remember.” I paused. “But I didn’t remember. I forgot on purpose; I never wanted to think about it again…I was only young, I thought I was going mad, it was really scary.”

He must have heard in my voice that that was it, I’d gone as far as I’d go, for he didn’t press me. Looking back, I can’t believe I talked to him the way I did. I could have lived with Robbie a thousand years and I never could have said to him half of what I said to Liam right from the start.