Читать книгу The Bird Woman - Kerry Hardie - Страница 6

KILKENNY, FEBRUARY 2001

Sometimes life goes on at an even pace for months, years, the rhythm the same, one step following after the step before, so you get to thinking that it’s always going to be this way, and maybe part of you even longs for something to change.

Then all of a sudden it does. And when it does, it doesn’t change only the once. The first change comes, then the next, and before you know it the changes are at you so thick and fast that you’re running as hard as you can and still you’re not keeping up.

The phone call came from Derry, and everything changed. My brother, Brian, rang, only he didn’t—he got his wife, Anne, to phone for him. I listened until I’d got the gist; then I made her go and get Brian.

“I’m not being uncivil,” I told Anne. “But it’s his mother we’re talking about, not yours. Some things even Brian has to do for himself.”

I heard Anne put down the phone; then I heard footsteps and voices off, then footsteps again and the phone being lifted.

“Yes, Ellen,” Brian’s voice said down the line.

It was strange hearing Brian. If you’d asked me I’d have said I’d forgotten what his voice even sounded like, but the minute I heard it I knew every nuance and inflection—I even knew what his face looked like as he talked.

Only I didn’t. It was more than ten years since I’d laid eyes on Brian; he might be fat and bald for all I knew, he might have grey hair and reading glasses. He might have three toes missing from his right foot or no right foot at all.

But if he did, all that was in the future. For the moment I spoke to the brother who lived in my mind.

“Cancer,” I said to Liam, the word sounding strange, as though I was being needlessly melodramatic. “It seems she had a mastectomy two years ago, but she wouldn’t let them tell me. This is a secondary—something called ‘metastatic liver cancer.’ They’re talking containment, not cure.”

Liam stirred in his chair, but he didn’t speak; he waited for me to go on.

“Brian said she’s been living with them for the last two months. Anne’s off work, and the Macmillan nurse has been calling in. She took bad four nights ago, and now she’s in the hospital. They told him she might have as much as two months, but more likely it’ll be weeks…No one’s mentioned sending her home.”

We had ordered the children next door to do their homework, had banished them, unfed, and with no explanation. They were too surprised to object. Now Liam was searching my face, but I kept it blank and calm. Liam had never been to Derry, had never met any of my family; my life up there predated him and belonged entirely to me.

There was power in that and also safety: I could dispense information as I felt inclined, could tell him or withhold from him, I didn’t have to let him see what I didn’t want seen.

So I talked on, my voice as flat and dead as my face, and I knew as clear as I knew anything that keeping him shut out like this was dangerous and wrong. But I was a long way off from myself, and I couldn’t get back. I didn’t want to get back; I was too afraid of what might be there waiting for me if I did.

“How many hours’ drive to Derry?” Liam asked. “Five? Six? We’ll bring the children. When do you want us to leave?”

“I don’t.”

“Wait till she’s nearer the end? You’d be taking a bit of a chance, wouldn’t you? But if you want to be there when she dies…?”

“You’re not listening to me, Liam,” I said. “I’m not going. Not now, not next week, not next month, never. And neither are they.”

“Ellen, she’s your mother, you have to go—”

“Have to? Who says? Why do I have to?” So much for flat and dead—I could hear the hysteria rise in my voice.

“Because you’ll regret it for the rest of your life if you don’t.”

Liam’s mother had died of a stroke when Andrew was not quite two and I was heavy with Suzanna. It was a long vigil, and they were all there—her husband, children, grandchildren; her brothers and her only sister. I wasn’t. Liam had said I was better off at home; he said everyone would understand. But I hadn’t stayed away on my own account, I’d stayed away for Maura herself. I’d liked Maura; she was a big-boned, overweight countrywoman, red-faced and dowdy, with wonderful deep, warm eyes. She was devout, too—Liam was anxious when he brought me there first, for all that he swore to me he wasn’t. But she’d never said a word about my not being Catholic, or our not being married, or Andrew not being christened, not a word. Maybe she’d felt for me because I was a stranger, or maybe she’d liked me as I’d liked her. Whatever it was, she’d always taken my part.

Liam had thought it the best of deaths, but I hadn’t. I wouldn’t want to die like that myself, everyone pressing and watching, I’d want a bit of privacy and peace. So I’d cast around for something to do for her, and staying away was all I’d been able to think of.

But that was Maura. It wasn’t why I wouldn’t go North to see my own mother.

“It’s the last chance we’ll have to set things right,” he told me now. “She’ll see her grandchildren before she dies.”

I sat there, my belly full of this cold emptiness, waiting for the surge of anger that would protect me from despair. It didn’t come. Instead I felt tears rising up in me, and I pushed them down. I looked for the thing that comes through me and into my hands, but it wasn’t there; my body felt only numbness and exhaustion. I stood up and crossed to the sink, ran cold water into it, fetched potatoes from the larder, the tears running soundlessly down my face. Liam got up from his seat and tried to hold me, but I pushed him away.

“I have to make the dinner,” I said.

“Dinner can wait. Leave that, Ellen. Sit down; we have to talk.”

“Talk? What for? What’s there to say? She’s my mother, this is my business, not yours. But I can’t stop you going if that’s what you want. Do what you want—you will, anyway—but I’m not going and neither are they, and that’s flat.” I dumped the potatoes into the water and covered my face with my hands. My whole body shook with those great gulping sobs I thought I’d left behind me in some childhood drawer with the ankle socks.

Liam had the wit to sit himself down again and wait. Gradually the heaving died down, but the tears still came; they slid under my hands and ran down my wrists and soaked themselves into my sleeves. At last I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand, blew my nose in a tea towel, and turned to face him.

“I know she’s my mother, you don’t have to keep saying it,” I said. “But I don’t want to see her again. And I never want to forgive her. Never, ever, ever, Liam. That’s what I’m saying, and that’s what I mean.”

“Why?”

I stared.

He stared back, waiting.

“You know well why,” I said slowly.

“No,” he said, “you’re wrong, I don’t know. I know you don’t like her. But I don’t know what she did to you to deserve the way you feel.”

I couldn’t speak.

“What did she do to you that’s so bad, Ellen, tell me that? Not come to our wedding? I wrote to ask her—you didn’t. It was obvious you didn’t want her there.”

“She never came to see the children—”

“You’d have shut the door in her face if she had—”

I put my hands over my ears like a child.

“She made me what I am.”

That silenced him. It silenced me as well. I turned my back and started in on the potatoes, the tears running down my face again—yet again—and dripping into the muddy water. Sometimes I don’t know what I’d do without domestic tasks. The simple, ancient rhythm of them. I’d no idea I felt like this, no idea it ran this deep.

I heard the door open, but I kept my head well down, I was bent over the sink, scraping away, the tears still dripping.

“Daddy,” came Suzanna’s voice, cool as you please, from somewhere to the left of me. “Daddy, why is Mammy crying again?”

“O where hae ye been, Lord Randal, my son, O where hae ye been, my handsome young man?”

“I hae been to the wildwood; mother, make my bed soon, For I’m weary wi’ hunting, and fain wald lie down.”

I sit at the table and say it aloud. It’s a poem I learned at school—years and years ago in Derry, when I still called it Londonderry, when I still knew who I was.

It’s a ballad, very old, about a young, strong man who goes out hunting with his hounds and comes home sick and dying. His mother keeps tormenting him—where’s he been, what’s he eaten, where’s his hounds? All these questions.

“O they swell’d and they died; mother, make my bed soon…”

His true love has poisoned him, see. His hounds have died, and you know rightly that’s what’s about to happen to him too. His mother can’t save him, no one can, for he’s been to the Wildwood, a place I know well.

Liam found me in the Wildwood. He picked me up, lifted me onto his horse, carried me clean away. In the early years, whenever I was so homesick for the North that I was certain sure I couldn’t thole it down here for another minute, I’d hear the words in my head and something would change. It always worked.

And later on, whenever I was fed up with Liam, or out of sorts with my life, I’d think of the Wildwood and how he saved me from it, and I’d calm down.

Missing somewhere may not only be about wanting to be there, it may be a bone-deep need for the voices and the ways you were reared to, even when you know well how lonely they’d make you now. Lonely with that special, sharp loneliness that comes when you’ve got what you longed for and it isn’t enough anymore—it isn’t ever going to be enough again.

And that’s what’s ahead of me now. The bag’s packed, the alarm’s set, but I’m walking the night house, sleepless. And when I’m not walking I’m sitting here all alone.

All alone, and trying to frighten myself into remembering how Liam saved me, to frighten myself into being so grateful again that I’ll forgive him for what he’s done. I try, but it doesn’t work. The kitchen doesn’t work either, though I love the kitchen at night—its lit quietness, the floor washed, the work done, everything red up and put away. But the kitchen is different; everything’s different and so far away from itself it might not ever get back.

I go upstairs again, past our shut door, with Liam sleeping behind it. I want to shake him awake, but what’s the use? Liam awake won’t bring me sleep, and I’m sick of hearing my own voice saying the same things over and over.

Suzanna’s door’s next. I go in and watch her, flat on her back, her duvet pulled into a scrumpled nest all around her. You could dance a jig on Suzanna and she’d only stretch and maybe smile and wriggle back down into sleep. She’s eight years old, full up with herself, her own child. She has Liam’s soft brown curls all round her head, and it’s her will against mine.

I stand at the half-open door of Andrew’s room, but I don’t go in, for the slightest movement wakes him. Andrew is different—so different you’d nearly think him Robbie’s child and nothing to do with Liam at all. But Robbie’s child was a girl, and she slid from out of me way before her time. I held her in my hand—all the size of her—and I called her Barbara Allen, after the song. Then the ambulance came and they put me on a stretcher and one of the ambulance men took her, he said he would mind her for me, but he lied, for I never saw poor wee Barbara Allen again. That was the day I saw Jacko Brennan die in a bomb a full month before it happened. Then they put me into the hospital and they filled me up with drugs to keep the Wildwood away.