The Bird Woman. Kerry Hardie
was happy as a lark. We both were. Happy with the happiness of two people who have just found each other’s bodies and are amazed by them. Liam hadn’t moved away off from me after the time in the yard. It showed in a touch to my hair, a hand on my arm. Later, when I’d sat in beside him on the sofa, his arm had gone around my shoulders and stayed there. After that it was only a short step to bed and the pleasures of bed.
And pleasures they were. We had bodies that matched on a deeper, surer level than anything I’d known with Robbie, though Robbie was more athletic and knew better what he was doing. But Liam made me laugh, which Robbie never had. He talked to me, where Robbie was all silent concentration. And Liam got hungry—he was forever jumping out of bed and bringing back half the fridge and spreading it out on the coverlet. Then he’d feed me from his hand till I felt like a bird or a horse. Soon the sheets were greasy with buttery prints, and I slept with tiny islands of discomfort on my bare skin, never giving it a thought.
I should have known from that. I’m too fastidious by nature not to mind, and I didn’t. I thought I was only in ankle deep, when I’d waded in up to my neck.
But that day we were only beginning, and it seemed all the weight of the last hard months had fallen away and nothing but ease remained. We went strolling along the strand, the dog trotting behind us, the tide pulling out and out till you felt you might walk to America. Liam asked me why I feared it so—this habit I had of seeing things. Was it on account of not knowing if it would stop?
I didn’t answer him. I picked up a length of stick that the sea had laid down, and at once the dog was lepping and yapping for me to throw it. I didn’t. Instead I wrote my name in big broad strokes on the sand. Then I looked at Liam out of the corner of my eye and I wrote his name under mine. Then I wrote “Dandy the dog” under his. I took another peek at him to be sure he was watching me, and I lifted the stick and drew a big wide circle around the three names, linking us all together. He was disappointed, and I knew he would be. When I went to circle the names he had thought it would be with a heart. And it almost was, for it seemed a small thing to do for him when he’d made me so happy. But I held back, I wanted to stay in the happiness; I didn’t want to move on into hearts and love and all the trouble they’d bring. I dropped the stick and fell into step beside him.
“Sometimes, after Barbara Allen, when it started to happen,” I said, not answering his question, “I could make it not happen if I tried hard enough, but I had to shut myself down so tight it sometimes felt like I’d die. My head ached from keeping from thinking things, and my jaws ached from keeping my mouth clamped shut. That was the best thing about that place. The hospital, I mean. Having the drugs to stop it from happening, not having to do it myself.”
“What makes you so sure it was the drugs?”
I turned round to face him.
“You saw what happened in the yard.” I made my voice hard and cold so he’d know not to push. “It’s only started again because I’m off them.”
“Have you got those pills with you now?”
I shook my head. If you ask my mother she’ll tell you I’m a bad liar. I wondered would he see through me as easily.
“You wouldn’t go back on them, would you?” he asked.
“Just watch me. I’ve a prescription. I will if it’s going to start again.”
“How long between stopping the drugs and it starting again?”
I thought for a minute. I didn’t want to tell him the truth, but my mouth seemed to open and speak of its own accord. “The night I met you. But I was out of my head, things happen when you’re drunk. Yesterday was different—I was stone-cold sober.”
“The first time was when you were pregnant? It never happened before?”
“No.” I stopped and poked at a beached jellyfish with my toe. It was one of those clear ones with pale mauve marks in its centre. They don’t sting, or not from the outside anyway. It’s like putting your foot on a jelly cube warmed in the sun. Liam was watching me, waiting. “W-e-ll,” I said.
“Well?”
“I had kind of flashes before. Once or twice. Nothing much.”
He didn’t ask, he just looked at me with the question in his round grey eyes. He was good at that—just looking, not asking. I almost always fell for it at the start. This time I hadn’t meant to tell any more, but I did.
“We were over seeing my granny one Sunday,” I said slowly. “She lived outside Derry, a place called Dunnamanagh. It’s where my mother was born, there’s a farm. We’d had our dinner, we were only waiting for them to send us out so they could talk. Little pitchers have long ears, that’s what they’d say.” I wobbled the jellyfish with my toe. “It was spring, a beautiful day. I thought I’d go mad, stuck inside, behaving.” I sneaked a glance at him, but he wasn’t watching my face, he was watching my toe on the jellyfish. “Being thrown out was the best thing about those visits. The hay barn; looking for stray eggs; dandering about in the fields. There were four of us—me and Brian and my cousins, Heather and John. Heather was only nine, she was messing about, showing off, turning cartwheels over and over in the sun. It was lovely, so it was, the meadow all yellow with dandelions—”
I picked up a stone and threw it into the sea. The dog rushed after it and stuck his nose in where the stone had gone under. He brought his face up, and it streamed water. He looked at me reproachfully.
“I was watching Heather. One minute she was hands down in yellow flowers and the next there weren’t any flowers, just wee silver balls in the sun as far as the eye could see.”
“Silver balls?”
“Dandelion clocks. The flowers had all died and turned into clocks. I opened my mouth to call out, but the next thing they’d turned themselves back into yellow flowers. And it wasn’t like it is in a film when you go backwards or forwards, there wasn’t that wee blurry bit that comes up and says to you ‘watch out now, here comes fast-forward.’”
I threw another stone. The dog did his thing.
“And no one else saw what I saw,” I said. “I looked at them, and I knew for certain sure they hadn’t seen.”
“Did you tell Brian?”
“You’re joking me. Brian would have said I was mental.”
“What age were you?”
“Fourteen, maybe fifteen.”
“That was the first time?”
I shrugged. “The first time I remember.” I paused. “But I didn’t remember. I forgot on purpose; I never wanted to think about it again…I was only young, I thought I was going mad, it was really scary.”
He must have heard in my voice that that was it, I’d gone as far as I’d go, for he didn’t press me. Looking back, I can’t believe I talked to him the way I did. I could have lived with Robbie a thousand years and I never could have said to him half of what I said to Liam right from the start.
“It’s in you and that’s fine; I don’t think there’s anything to be frightened of. I think you should learn to handle it, not go back on the drugs.”
We were looking down on the heave of a big dark sea, the waves coming in short and strong to smack up hard on the great bank of stones where we sat. They were sea stones, heavy and round, knotted and veined like wood, rattled and rolled by the crash of each breaking wave.
The beach curved off to the right, where it ran into dunes and sheep-grazed sea turf. The low dunes were sunlit, the grass brilliant green, the sand a rich gold, but above, the sky was slate black and the gulls rose into it, shining like chips of quartz in the stormy light. There were cormorants