The Bird Woman

by Kerry Hardie

Genres: Literary Fiction; Psychological Thrillers

Synopsis

Ellen McKinnon's clairvoyant experiences damage her mental and physical health. She must face and assimilate an unwanted but unavoidable family secret, experiencing a revelation that turns her life around in this insightful look at the rift between mysticism and rationalism.

Release date: October 14, 2009

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 384

Sample

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’tbring 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 Robbies child and nothing to do with Liam at all. But Robbies 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.

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 whom 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.


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 what happened only 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 Rob