The Bird Woman. Kerry Hardie
well on my way to forgetting all about the business with him the night before. It seemed like a dream, a stupid dream, and I was sick of myself and the way I let my imagination lead me up garden paths. Then he put out his hand and took mine. Straightaway I was back there, ready to drop with the knowing of what I had known last night. And with the fear of it.
He didn’t let go of my hand. Instead he put his other one under my elbow and drew me round to face him. I kept my head down, my eyes well away from his. But I let him move his hands to my upper arms and hold them there to steady me. After a while his hands dropped.
“Right,” he said. “Lunch,” he said, and steered me into the Sceptre and sat me down in a snug. Then off he went to the bar and came back with sandwiches and pints of Guinness.
“I don’t like Guinness,” I said.
“You could do with building up.”
I don’t remember any more than that, I don’t remember what I said next or what he said next or whether I drank the Guinness or left it sitting or poured it over his head. But I remember how I pressed back into the chair, how I tried to get small and still inside my clothes to get away from him. He never touched me, and I never touched him, but when I got back to the flat two hours later, I had a story ready for Robbie and I wasn’t slow running it past him. I told him I’d rung my mother from a pay phone while I was out. Brian and Anne and the babies had been there with her.
“They’re away off to the West for a week’s holiday,” I said. “They’ve rented a house—a place off the coast of Mayo called Achill Island. Brian came on to ask did we want to come with them?”
Robbie was looking at me, but I was busy taking the dishes off the drainer and stacking them into tidy piles by the sink.
“We?” Robbie said, so I knew he’d bought the rest of the lie.
“Well, not exactly,” I said, still not looking at him. “He asked were you working, and I said you were. Then he said did I want to come?”
A new cottage had been built hard behind the old one, its front door facing across to the other one’s back door. For the old couple or maybe the young couple—family, anyway—a natural proximity. Sometime later someone had added a joining arm so the two had become the one, with a bit of a yard in the space between. Hardly even a yard. Just a rough place for hens to pick over and washing to hang, sheltered from wind and weather.
Achill. We’d been there four days. I had carried a kitchen chair out and was sitting doing nothing at all, the gnats rising, the shirts I’d washed in the kitchen sink just stirring in the quiet air. Liam had gone off after groceries and a mechanic to look at his car. There was a noise he didn’t much care for in the engine, he said, and maybe he wanted some time off from me as well, maybe he’d bitten off more than he could easily chew. For myself, I was glad to be on my own. My thoughts went wandering about in the whitish sea light that you get off that western coast.
The yard was three sides cottage, with the fourth side closed off by a big thick dark fuchsia hedge, red now with hanging blooms that were starting to drop. It was early September, a bare two months since they’d let me out of the hospital, a bare four since the bomb had gone off that killed Jacko and left me not able to stop crying. The yard had been covered over with a scrape of rough concrete, breaking up now so the weeds and the moss had taken hold, the whole place littered with things that were most likely never going to be used again but just might come in handy one day: broken boards and odd stones and shells carried up from the beach, floats for a fishing net in a tangled heap, a black plastic bucket half filled up with rainwater over by the wall. A shallow brick drain was clogged up with silt and leaves and drained nothing.
If I lived here I might learn to do less, I thought. To wash less, to go on wearing things that were soiled. Even in the few days we had been here the urge to clean it all up had died in me. I no longer itched to chuck out the junk, to unblock the drain, to sweep it all down; I no longer wanted to do anything much except sit on the straight-backed chair in the soft bloom of light and stretch out a hand to check the shirts on the line.
On the first day I’d washed all the windows in the kitchen. I’d intended doing the whole house, there wasn’t a clean window anywhere; they were splattered with rain marks and mud and had deep layers of ancient cobwebs veiling the corners. Liam laughed when he saw what I was at. I asked him why, and he went red and shook his head, but I pressed him and finally he said he thought it strange to be starting in on cleaning on your holidays.
But that wasn’t why he’d laughed, and I knew it. I kept on at him, and he went redder, but still he wouldn’t say. In the end he gave in and told me about being on the sites in London and working alongside an old Cockney who thought Liam was way too innocent and needed wising up. He had a dirty old tongue in his head, Liam said, but he meant well—he was forever passing on bits of tips and information. It seems he’d told Liam to look out for women who were workers because women who were workers were always on for sex.
I rinsed out the cloth in the water, then turned and washed down the last pane. But I didn’t give them a shine with newspaper as I’d intended, and I didn’t wash any more. I was angry. I didn’t laugh and brush it aside; my mind closed like a trap round his words. I remembered Robbie—what he’d said about knowing as soon as he saw me that I was repressed, a volcano ready to blow.
I’d made a mistake with Robbie, I thought, and I was surprised at myself, for this was the first time I’d let myself think such a thing.
Now it looked like I might well be on the way to making another one with Liam. I took my coat from the peg without a word.
“Where are you off to?” Liam wanted to know.
I didn’t reply. I shrugged on my coat and was gone through the door without looking back.
Out on the road I went steaming along, the wind on my face, my hair ripping out, the bog stretching red-brown to either side. The sky was flying above me; the wind keened in the telephone wires; my ears sang with the lovely fresh running noise of water going pelting down the ditches. With every step I took I was freer, the anger draining away.
“What ails ye?” Liam was asking me, coming up from behind.
“You know rightly,” I said, without slowing down. He started to say he was sorry, but I wasn’t having it, I turned around to his face.
“Why shouldn’t women like sex?” I demanded. “And why do men have to sneer and joke if we do? Wouldn’t you think men would be pleased that we like it? Wouldn’t you think it would make life easier all round?”
He stared. He started to try to say something, but I only laughed in his face. I threw my arms round his neck and pulled him to me; then I undid my arms and pushed him away and went striding off over the bog, all the anger gone from me.
It’s a wonderful place, Achill; there never were such skies. I was used to skies from Derry, but still it wasn’t like Achill. Achill had the best skies that ever I saw in all Ireland. It could be ink black up ahead, but away to the left you’d see light breaking through in a shaft like a floodlight, while off to the right there’d be rain, a grey curtain, and behind that again you’d see where the rain had passed over and the land was shouldering its way back up through the gloom.
So we went striding along together, all thought of regret vanished clean away and Robbie only a flicker of guilt at the back of my mind.
Night came, and we sat by the smoking fire with a bottle of whiskey that I was throwing into me but Liam had hardly touched. It was awkward as hell, but I didn’t care. We’d ease up in bed and no need for talk—our bodies would say it all. Or that’s what I thought, but I’d reckoned without Liam: when I put my hand on his leg, you’d think he’d been stung by a wasp.
He hadn’t brought me here, he said, for that.
“Why not?” I asked him. “What’s wrong with that?”
It seemed Liam thought we