Читать книгу The Bird Woman - Kerry Hardie - Страница 9

Icried a lot after Jacko died, so the doctor put me on antidepressants. 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 Ballyholme 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.)

“Correct,” he said. “On both counts. It’s the drugs. Why don’t you try Catriona?”

“Do I look like a dyke?”

“Silly girl—ugly word. Catriona’s so beautiful. Those red lipstick circles she draws on her cheeks. I’d try for her myself if I was able.”

“Is she a dyke?”

“Who knows? She might feel like giving it a go if you asked her nicely. Lots of people have a bit of both.”

“Speak for yourself,” I said. “I certainly don’t.” I was shocked. Besides, I was afraid of Catriona, though I didn’t say that to Michael. She saw blood coming out of the taps, which was worse than seeing people being blown to bits.

Michael stared at me, a long, slow, speculative look from those hooded eyes. “You’re very narrow-minded for a redhead,” he said.

I wanted to ask him what he meant, but I didn’t. I was afraid of my hair, even then.

Michael never touched me, never as much as took my hand walking back through the dark. And I was glad enough, for it kept things light and simple. My forwardness was really only bravado.

Robbie came and when he did Michael vanished from sight.

“Hubby alright?” he’d ask me afterwards. “Not pining?”

“Robbie,” I’d say. “His name’s Robbie.”

But he went on stubbornly calling him Hubby. I wouldn’t answer him when he did. I sulked, but he wouldn’t shift; it was Hubby this and Hubby that till I lost my temper.

“Lay off, would you? You’ve never even set eyes on him.”

But he had. He’d seen Robbie from a window.

“I wouldn’t want to meet him on a dark night down a back entry,” he said. “He’s the sort kicks the shite out of people like me—”

He had a point, though I didn’t say so.

Robbie hated coming to the hospital. Shame made him narrow his shoulders and kick out sparks with his steel-shod boots. His wife in that place, labelled forever, was more than he could handle. And no Barbara Allen. He’d wanted Barbara Allen as I never had, and now she was flushed down some hospital sluice, gone when she’d hardly started.

My mother came on the bus from Derry. I told her the doctor had said I could ask for a transfer to the hospital there. That way she could visit more often.

She gave me a long, straight look and told me I had a husband. Then she said Londonderry was just a wee village for talk, and folk said these things ran in families, and what about my two wee nieces? Had I no thought for Brian and Anne at all?

“Oh, folk know alright,” she added. “I don’t try to hide what can’t be hid, that’s not my way. But some things are best not advertised.”

Hard words, but there was a tenderness in that hospital, a looking-out-for-one-another that nearly made me not mind them. We were all raw with our own failure, and as well as that our minds were turned down low with drugs so we weren’t so keen on judging. That was a kind of liberation, for what could you do at the bottom but laugh—the laughter of gentleness, not of derision? Derision was for out there. Derision and fear-of-derision had landed us in here. We had broken ourselves on our own wheels, trying to be what we thought was required of us, trying to be “normal.” Failing. In here we moved slowly, taking care, as wounded things take care. Oh, there were dislikes and resentments alright, but only because we were human. Mostly we were as careful of each other’s sore places as of our own, or nearly so. And in a funny way there was no one out there as real for us as the ones inside that we lived with every day. Perhaps what bound us together was pity more than love. I don’t know, I don’t know where the one stops and the other starts.

I was discharged before Michael was. I wrote out my address and I said good-bye, and it never once crossed my mind that I might not see him again. I’d accepted the gifts he’d given me—gifts that were given freely, as you give when you are young. I took them without thought or gratitude; took them in the fullness of youth, when life is opening and everything seems natural and yours by right.

I sent him a postcard. Later on I scribbled half a letter, but I lost it on a bus. I never rewrote it. I was living my life, I forgot about Michael. When at last I remembered, my letter came back with “unknown at this address” scrawled over the envelope. Perhaps he’s alright, perhaps he’s alive, but I get no sense that he’s out there still. The depression was very bad with him; it never let him alone.

I am thirty-six and already so much left undone and regretted. What will I do when I’m old?