Read the book: «The Bird Woman»
The Bird Woman
Kerry Hardie
For Sean, who walked with meevery step of the way
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Epilogue
Glossary
Kerry Hardie an interview with Declan Meade
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Kerry Hardie
Copyright
About the Publisher
Every year in Ireland about twenty thousand people go to healers looking for cures for an extraordinary range of things: burns, brucellosis, skin cancer, bleeding. And many claim to be cured.
[These healers are not] chiropractors or homeopaths or that whole section of alternative medicine: those who have developed unorthodox skills and knowledge to put at the service of the sick…They claim neither special training, knowledge, nor skills, but a gift passed from God. Or from nature. Or from inheritance. Or passed on from someone else. Ultimately they do not know whence the gift comes…
They are not faith healers either. An infant who heals can hardly be said to have faith…Faith healers rely on prayer and faith: these do not. The phenomenon of these healers is comparable to water diviners in that they use a gift that nobody can begin to understand, yet many avail of…
The more you know of these gift healers the more baffled you become. No one seems able to offer an explanation for their extraordinary abilities. The more baffling this mystery grows, the more fascinating it becomes. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
—FROM The Gift Healers BY REBECCA MILLANE, BRANDON PRESS 1995
Prologue
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.
Chapter 1
SEPTEMBER 1988
The first time ever I saw Liam he was standing at the bar of Hartley’s in Belfast. I was married to Robbie then—I’d been married to Robbie for near on four years for all I was only twenty-three. I was married and that was that; I’d no more thought of going off with anyone else than of dandering down to the travel agents and booking myself a nice wee holiday on the moon.
I was to meet Robbie around eight, along with a bunch of his drinking friends that he’d known from way back. I walked in, and the minute I saw Robbie I knew from the cut of him that he hadn’t just strolled through the door. Stan and Rita were there, they were sitting at a table along with a couple more of our crowd, plus a black-haired girl with a widow’s peak who I’d never laid eyes on before. She was wearing jeans and a sweater, and she hadn’t a scrap of makeup on her, though it was Friday night and there wasn’t another woman in the place without heels and lipstick and mascara. She wasn’t talking to anyone, and no one was talking to her.
Robbie was up at the bar buying a round, and he called me over.
“Mike phoned,” he told me. “Christine started early. He’s away up to the hospital to hold her hand—”
“I thought she wasn’t due for another month?”
“So did she. But she got ahead of herself, and nothing would do her but she had to have Mike. I told them a bit of a story at work, and they’re not expecting me back till sometime next week. I’m covering for Mike while he’s otherwise occupied, I’ve been round at the gallery all afternoon.
“This is Liam,” he added. I looked up at this tall, thickset man with brown curly hair and grey eyes. “He’s from Dublin, so he is. He’s up here about a show in the Arts Council Gallery.”
Robbie was an electrician with a firm on the Lisburn Road, but he did nixers on the side whenever they came his way. His mate Mike did the lighting for the Arts Council Gallery, and he made sure to always ask Robbie when he needed an extra hand.
“Robbie’s been great,” Liam said. “We’ve been sorting out what we’ll need for the show—”
Robbie nodded, but he didn’t say anything. I knew right away he didn’t like this Liam. Then the drinks came and more chairs were fetched across, and when everyone finally settled down again, there I was, beside Liam.
Liam was introduced all round and so was the black-haired one in the jeans, whose name, it seemed, was Noreen. Liam told us he was a sculptor, and your woman Noreen was a potter from Cork and something called the Crafts Council of Ireland was organising a group exhibition in the North in November. They were up here in Belfast, he said, to look at the “space.”
No one was listening; none of us cared. I saw Stan look at Robbie, and his eyes closed down from inside, plus that wicked wee pulse that means he’s up to something was showing beside his mouth. After that, I knew not to bother my head with them; that look of Stan’s meant Liam and Noreen wouldn’t be with us for long.
Stan wouldn’t be one for socialising with those from the other persuasion. Especially not when they came from the South.
Liam gave me a cigarette. I was only a few weeks out of the hospital and still smoking like a chimney. He brought out a lighter and stuck it under my nose and flicked it. It didn’t light. He looked at it, surprised, then shook it and tried it again, but still it didn’t light. I remember being surprised that he was surprised by his lighter not lighting; I mean, it isn’t exactly unusual—lighters are always playing up or running out or just not working. I was watching him and thinking all this in an idle, distant sort of a way; then I glanced down at his other hand, laid flat on the table, and I got this terrible shock. It was a big hand, broad, with a thatch of brown hairs on the back and nails that weren’t that clean. I looked, and the noise of the bar dropped away and I couldn’t look anywhere else, for I knew for certain sure that I had some business with this Liam that I didn’t want.
Business? Ah, tell the truth, Ellen. You knew this “business” of yours was bed, and maybe a whole lot more.
I dropped my cigarette, and it rolled onto the floor. I bent down and started fishing around for it, the sweat springing out on my skin. I’m going crazy again, I thought, though I wasn’t seeing anything and nothing was happening that definitely shouldn’t be happening; there was only this weird knowing-something-ahead-of-its-time that always frightens me stupid.
I didn’t want to come up, I’d have stayed right there, safe among the chair legs, but Robbie was watching me like a hawk since the hospital, so I didn’t dare.
I found the cigarette, wet through in a puddle of beer, then I unbent myself and lifted my head up over the edge of the table. My eyes met Robbie’s.
For fuck’s sake, woman, Robbie’s eyes said, for fuck’s sake get ahold of yourself—
Implacable, his eyes. No softness, nowhere to hide. So I knocked back the vodka, straightened my backbone, and turned to this Liam and talked.
I drank a lot that night, and I wasn’t the only one.
I was waiting for Stan—it was always Stan who made the moves—but he didn’t; he let them sit on.
He’d glance across at Liam, who was labouring away, trying to get the conversation up and running; then he’d sneak a wee look at Noreen, but she’d given up and was staring into her glass.
Sound move. She wanted to go—any fool could tell you that—but she couldn’t catch Liam’s eye, he was way too busy with me.
I began to wonder what game Stan was playing. Stan could be cruel—a cat-and-mouse streak a mile wide. Was he waiting for Robbie to catch on that someone was trying too hard with his wife?
The paranoia was fairly setting in when Stan starts reminding Robbie we’re meeting up with Suds Drennan and Josie at ten. Then he turns round to Liam, his face dead serious, and he tells him he’s sorry but the place we’ve fixed to meet Suds and Josie in wouldn’t be anything like the bar we’re in now.
Liam nods and smiles warily. He knows he’s being told something; he just hasn’t figured out what.
Stan says what he means is the bar we’re going to wouldn’t be that mixed.
They’re all attention, even Noreen. This is Belfast after all, this is what they’re here for. Stan says “hard line,” he mentions their accents, he mentions the fact that Liam’s called Liam, which is a Catholic name…He lets his voice trail off regretfully. They understand.
Northerners love frightening Southerners—telling them what not to say, where not to go, where not to leave their Southern-registered cars—seeing their eyes grow large and round. The Southerners love it too, you can nearly hear them telling themselves what they’ll tell their friends when they go back home down South.
Everyone loves it: the drama, the bomb blasts, the kick of danger in the air. So who’s suffering, tell me that? No one at all, till some unreasonable woman starts into grieving over the daughter blown to bits, the son sitting rotting in jail, the husband shot through the head, his body thrown down an entry or dumped on waste ground.
Some woman, or maybe some man. For men grieve too, and even your hardest hard-man is not as hard as he likes to let on when it comes to next of kin. And children are soft; children cry easily and long.
It’s a sorry business alright, we humans are a sorry business, the way it’s all mixed up inside us, the ghoulish bits that come alive watching the horror, the soft, gentle bits that will go thinking the sky’s fallen in when we find out that someone’s not coming home to us ever, ever again.
Where was I? In Hartley’s, 1988.
So we left them sitting there, the two of them, and went dandering off up the road to the Lancaster, which is a mixed bar, safe as houses, where you’ll get served till two in the morning, no bother at all. And I was drunk, and frightened even through the drink. I thought if I could only get clear of Liam that awful feeling that he was my fate would vanish away.
At the Lancaster we fell in with the crowd we still knocked around with from student days, so we sat down and set about getting much drunker. And somewhere along the way Robbie began collecting money. He was organising a carry-out to drink back in the flat.
It had got so late it had turned into early. There was no drink left, half the crowd had gone home, and the rest were mostly passed out in their seats or they’d slithered down onto the floor. Suds was still hanging in there, but wee Peter Caulfield was out for the count and so was Suds’s girlfriend, Josie.
Time for bed. Robbie made it up onto his feet, shook Stan awake, pulled out the spare blankets, and dumped them onto the floor. Stan was all for bedding down there and then, but Rita was soberer—she found their coats and somehow got him downstairs. Then she heaved his arm over her shoulders and staggered him off up the road.
Suds had given up; he was curled on the floor like a baby, and there was no way Josie was about to wake him up and take him home. I shook out a blanket and covered her up, then I threw another one over the foetal Suds. He stirred, tucked the edge of it in under his chin, smiled, and snuggled down deeper into the manky old carpet without once opening his eyes.
I thought I’d start lifting the glasses and bottles out into the kitchen, but I couldn’t seem to aim my hand straight, so I sat and smoked a cigarette instead. I could drink for ages without passing out or vomiting in those days. I thought I was great and Robbie was proud of me; I never once stopped to ask myself did I like it or what was the point or was it worth the crucifying awfulness of the hangover the next day.
I was desperate for bed, but I held off joining Robbie; I wanted to be certain sure that he wouldn’t wake up. I didn’t like sex with Robbie when he was really drunk, I could have been anyone or no one for all he cared, he was clumsy and rough and only thought of himself.
I’d have bedded down with the rest on the floor, but I knew there’d be no holding Robbie if he woke in the morning and I wasn’t there alongside him where I belonged. He’d accuse me of doing I-don’t-know-what with I-don’t-know-who—then he’d take me by the shoulders and shake the teeth near out of my head while the rest of them scuttled off-side as fast as they could like so many crabs with the runs. And it was all in his head. There wasn’t a sinner who wasn’t way too afraid of him to look sideways at me, much less try to get a leg over Robbie’s wife.
But if I hated Robbie in bed when he’d drunk too much, I hated him worse when we were out together and the drink took him in that twisted way it sometimes did. There were times he got so jealous I couldn’t even take a light off someone. I’d be grabbed by the wrist, pulled from a room, pushed into a corner of some landing or hallway, and fucked against the wall. That was Robbie with the drink on him: not caring how I felt, not caring if anyone saw, not caring about anything except himself and whatever it was that was eating him alive.
I’ve seen me walk home holding my skirt closed to keep it up, torn knickers stuffed into my pocket, dead tear trails running down my face.
And in the morning he’d be all over me: how sorry he was, how he knew I didn’t look at other men, how it was only the drink—
If he remembered at all, that is.
And I learned fast; I’d forgive him fast—at the start because I was shocked and ashamed, later because I knew if I didn’t he’d stop being sorry and start into listing the things he’d seen me do with his own two eyes. What I’d said to this one, how I’d flirted with that one—
It was a funny time, I can see that now, and I know what Liam means when he says he can’t understand why I stood for it. But it wasn’t like that—it wasn’t a question of standing for things.
I was young, I didn’t know much, I thought if he was that jealous it meant he was dying about me.
And I was dying about him—I really was—he was that good-looking and streetwise and together. Sometimes I’d be waiting for him and I’d see him coming up the street before he’d spotted me. Then I’d stand there, watching him, and I couldn’t believe my luck.
Chapter 2
When I met Robbie I was a good girl trying hard to be a bad one. I was at Queens, studying Russian and living in a flat with four girls from Lurgan who were all doing geography and knew each other from school. I’d got talking to one of them in the coffee bar at the end of the first week: they’d rented this flat, she said, and there was a room going spare if I didn’t mind it being a wee bit poky.
“How poky’s a wee bit poky?” I asked.
“There’s space for a single bed. And a window as well, but it’s too high up to see out.”
I said yes right away. It was cheap, and already I hated my landlady. Besides, if there’d been enough room they’d have stuck in another bed and I’d have had to share. But they didn’t really want me, nor I them. They were into country and western and the Scripture Union and cocoa in their pyjamas and studying hard. I wasn’t, but I might as well have been. I was stuck with them, knowing there was more to this student-thing than I was getting, not knowing how I was going to lay hands on it. Until I met Robbie, that is, and everything changed.
It was in the canteen of the Students Union. I mostly didn’t go there because it was cheaper to eat at the flat, but I was going to see a Russian film at the University Film Theatre and there wasn’t time to go back before it began. There I was, a plateful of food on a tray in one hand, cutlery from the plastic bins in the other, when Robbie knocked into my elbow and near sent the whole lot flying.
“Sorry,” he said.
“That’s alright,” I said, though my fried egg had a wet, orange look to it and the chips and sausages were afloat in spilled Fanta. Then he was trying to give me his plate and I was refusing and he was insisting, and the end of it was we were sitting at the same table sharing his chips and his fry and I never did get to The Battleship Potemkin and the girl I was supposed to see it with never spoke to me again.
After that I was Robbie’s girl.
I thought it had all been a providential accident, but a week hadn’t passed before he was telling me he’d had me picked out, he was only waiting his chance.
“What d’you mean by that?” I asked him.
“I fancied you, stupid,” he said, sliding his hand between my thighs. But I wasn’t having that, or not right away, so I made him spell it out.
He’d fancied me, he said. He’d seen me around, but somehow I always vanished before he got near enough to speak. Then there I was, right under his nose, so he’d knocked into me, just to get talking like, and look how we’d ended up.
Robbie wasn’t a student, but he lived two streets up and he shared a flat with students. He used the university canteen because it was a good place to pick up girls. He looked at me hard when he said the last bit, but I wasn’t going to rise to that one; I knew it was sort of a test to see would I make a fuss.
I didn’t rise, but I did take my courage in both hands and I asked him why he fancied me. I wasn’t fishing for lies or for compliments either—I badly needed to know.
He said it was my hair, but he wouldn’t say anything more. Later, when we’d been to bed a few dozen times in about two days, he said he’d been right, so he had, I looked so repressed, a volcano waiting to blow.
I didn’t say anything. Part of me was offended, and part of me was the opposite. Repressed at least held potential. And I sort of liked the volcano bit. But maybe he’d meant frustrated?
A couple of weeks later I moved into Robbie’s flat. His flatmates smoked dope and drank way too much and never went near the Scripture Union. I was shy with them, but I liked them as well, and soon I knew loads of the wrong sort of people and felt I was halfway alive.
Just the same, it wasn’t that long before we started looking around for a place of our own. It was Robbie’s idea, but I was into it too. We wanted to be by ourselves.
We found a place and moved in, and Robbie began to talk about getting married. I’d say I was nearly flattered to begin with, but then it dawned on me that he meant it and I panicked.
I couldn’t, I told him, I hadn’t even finished first year. Besides, I was way too young, and everyone would think I was pregnant.
He gave me a funny look.
It was a shock that look, I can tell you.
“Hold on now,” I said to him, hardly knowing what I was saying. “Marriage is one thing—I could maybe even get used to it. But not pregnancy. Pregnancy is definitely, definitely out.”
He laughed and said he could always get a rise out of me, and when did I want to get married, what about early July? He’d take extra time, and we could go off somewhere over the Twelfth Holiday and I could start into my second year with a ring on my finger, then everyone would know who owned me.
You’d think, wouldn’t you, that I’d have had the wit to hear that, but I didn’t. I never had sense—my mother was never tired telling me that—I never had any idea of what I was doing till it was done.
Before we were married I took Robbie home to Derry for the weekend. Londonderry, I should say, for I was a proper Protestant then, a paid-up member of the tribe. It only turned into Derry after I’d moved down South.
We went to Londonderry on the bus. Separate rooms and best behaviour. Robbie’s idea. I could have told him for nothing we weren’t about to get anyone’s blessing.
My brother, Brian, took me aside about half an hour after the introductions.
“You’re not serious, are you?” He didn’t expect an answer.
I phoned my mother from Belfast for her verdict, though it was plain as the nose on her face what she’d thought. But I couldn’t ever leave her be, I always had to force her hand, to make her spell things out in black and white.
There was a small, deep silence down the phone line. Then, in that neutral, damning voice of hers, she told me he was common.
And I laughed aloud, for he was, he was all the things she had reared me against—he was working-class, sectarian; he drank too much; he neither knew nor cared what people thought.
And there was I, the teacher’s daughter.
I laughed, but she’d hurt me and she’d meant to.
Poor Robbie, he wanted me to have my family’s blessing; he was trying in his own way to do right by me.
Dream on. The only thing in his favour was that he wasn’t a Catholic, but even I couldn’t make her say that out loud, for being sectarian was part of being common.
So that was that. My father was dead, and I’d no other siblings, which meant there was no one else to object except for Robbie’s family. And they did, by Christ they did. If they said I was the wrong girl for him then that was far and away the kindest thing they said.
None of them liked me. His brother Billy said four years, five at the most—it would take that long for the bed to cool. And there’d be no children—not unless I got caught—there’d be nothing to hold us together, so we’d part.
His sister Avril said my mother’s unsayable: at least she’s a Protestant. Which shocked his sister Rita, for it had never once occurred to her that anyone belonging to her would even think of marrying out.
They said all this to Robbie behind my back, knowing full well he’d repeat every word to my face. He wouldn’t listen any more than I would. He booked the Registry Office, and he put the notice in the paper; then he told them they could come if they wanted or stay away, it was all the same to him.
We didn’t even ask my family.
In the end they all came, but Billy was right, it was four years and only half a child, and yes, he was right again, I was taking no chances, I hadn’t been on the Pill that first night with Robbie, but I was round at the family planning clinic first thing the next morning.
The baby—what there was of her—was only because I got drunk and slipped up.
You’ll think me hard, but I wasn’t hard, only very young. And you weren’t reared there, you don’t know what it is to grow up in a place where everything seems normal enough on the surface but underneath it’s all distorted and wrong. And the worst part is that you don’t even know it’s distorted because for you it is normal, and if you don’t leave it behind and live somewhere truly normal, you’ll never find out.
I suppose the Catholics were right when they called it a war, though our lot denied it. It was a war, but it wasn’t like a normal war; there weren’t any uniforms or fronts or advancing-and-retreating armies, and when the peace finally came there wasn’t any going back home to your own place and learning how to forget. A civil war.
A few years back, Liam showed me a catalogue someone had sent him, the work of a German painter called Otto Dix. These were portraits Dix had done in Germany between the two World Wars, Liam said, when Germany was all busted up and the streets were full of profiteers and prostitutes and starving young soldiers minus their arms or legs.
But it wasn’t despair that Otto Dix had painted; it was people who’d made money fast and were getting through the pain of the world by living as hard as they could. Black-marketeers, pimps, club owners, satirists. The paintings were normal, but at the same time they were distorted, they fairly glittered with rage and hope-lessness, they hurt you as you looked. I glanced through the first few pages then shut the catalogue fast and put a big pile of ironed clothes down on top of it to cover it up. I wanted to be by myself with it, to turn the pages slowly and stare at the pictures, which frightened me yet somehow brought me home.
Robbie only ever struck me the once, and that was on account of his sister Rita leaving her husband and my not being home all night.
Rita was fifteen years older than Robbie, she had more than half-reared him, so his feelings were softer for her than for Avril or any of the brothers. Rita was married to a man by the name of Larry Hughes, who had strong paramilitary connections. Larry was UDA and no picnic to live with, but he’d got himself a longish stretch for aiding and abetting on a murder charge, so it was a good while since she’d had to.
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 bitch, 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.
Chapter 3
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?
The free sample has ended.
