The Bird Woman. Kerry Hardie

name then the reason must be Catholic. I knew she wouldn’t like me leaving Robbie, for all she thought he wasn’t good enough. I’d married him, hadn’t I? I’d made my bed so I should lie on it. She was very strong on lying on your bed, was my mother, though the Presbyterian Church allows divorce. I waited, but she didn’t write back. I might as well have tossed a bottle into the sea.

      About two months after I’d sent the phone number, a letter came with a Derry postmark. I knew the handwriting. I turned it over and over, then I put it on the dresser, and it looked at me for a couple of hours, till I lifted it down and opened it. A single sheet, the writing on one side only. She had written telling me not to be expecting any phone calls. I’d moved to a different country, she wrote, it was too expensive to phone.

      I sat with the letter laid out on the table. Liam came in and asked who the letter was from, and I handed it to him. He read it through, which didn’t exactly take him all afternoon. I laughed, but he didn’t. Then he took my two hands in his, and the next thing I knew I was crying.

      “She can say what she likes, I don’t care—it’s nothing to me,” I said. I was shaking my head from side to side, the tears flying off my face, which I couldn’t mop with Liam holding on to both my hands.

      Liam didn’t speak, but he let go my hands and he put his arms round me and held me and stroked my hair.

      “You’re a long way from home,” he said. So I cried and cried.

      It wasn’t all like that. We had the usual rows—nothing spectacular, just run-of-the-mill complaints as we each of us discovered that neither one was as perfect as we’d let on. I thought when he said he’d do it tomorrow, he meant that he’d do it tomorrow; it took me a while to grasp that tomorrow meant sometime in the not-completely-distant future. For his part, he thought when I said tomorrow I meant sometime in the not-completely-distant future.

      There were other things—I could make a list, but it wouldn’t be a long one. All couples have one—ours was shorter than most, and bit by bit we were learning each other’s ways. It’s this thing in me that comes between us, always has, always will. Yet that was what brought us together, for Liam understood it before ever I did, and more than that, he didn’t mind the way I was.

      I changed down here. You change anyway, but I think the physical place that you live in makes for more difference than we sometimes allow. The buildings and streets of the city bring a particular alertness; the hard greyness sharpens the wits and the tongue, it hastens the feet. But the soft, dense colour of this place did its work on a sensual, physical level, sending me down from the mind and into the body, as rain finds the hollows and low places after long drought, filling them up so that they lose shape and turn into mud.

      So it was for me. I lost shape, inwards and outwards. My feet pulled through mud and forgot to resist it.

       Chapter 9

      There was a young one working in the supermarket in the town, a girl of maybe nineteen or twenty years of age. The first time I saw her I couldn’t get over her; I had to force myself not to stand and gawp, for she was the living, breathing spit of Robbie poured into a female form. After a while I got more used to seeing her, didn’t get the same shock. All the same, I could never entirely just shrug and pass her by.

      One morning I was over at the fruit and veg picking out onions, and there she was, up ahead of me, lifting bunches of bananas from a box on a trolley and setting them out on the shelf. She turned and glanced in my direction. Her face was a Pierrot’s—a dead-white, painted-on, chalky mask. I looked around, but no one else was staring. Maybe there was something going on that I hadn’t heard about, some children’s thing in the town to do with face painting or mime. She was a bit old for face painting, but it could be she was the face painter and she’d used some on herself as well…

      I went back to the onions, keeping my eyes to myself, concentrating, for I knew there was something up and I was growing afraid. When I’d finished with the onions I moved on to the carrots, then the mushrooms, then I started in on the fruit. The hairs on the back of my neck had risen, so I let myself sneak another wee look to find out what she was at. The thick white paint had entirely gone; her face was back to being pink and normal.

      I knew right away that it was Robbie, but I tried to pretend to myself that it wasn’t, for I didn’t want what I knew. All day I was jumpy and tense with waiting, but nothing happened. When I found I was sticking close to the phone, I took myself out to the garden and made myself dig and rake.

      Liam came home and found me out there, and he was delighted with all the work I’d done.

      “You must have a few farm genes in you after all,” he said. “From that crowd up in Dunnamanagh, your mother’s people.”

      The phone rang at nine. I picked it up, and it was my mother, telling me Robbie was dead. It seems he was driving someone else’s car—too fast and too full of drink most likely—and he’d smacked it into a wall and killed himself and the girl who was sitting beside him. My mother said that his sister Rita had phoned her; she’d said to be sure to let me know the funeral was in two days’ time.

      “Why would she want you to let me know?” I asked her. “I’d left him, hadn’t I? They surely don’t want me there at the grave?”

      “You’re not thinking of going?” Her question came sudden and fierce down the line.

      “Why are you telling me if you don’t want me to go?”

      She didn’t answer, and I didn’t expect her to. She was phoning because I was Robbie’s wife still. Phoning me so I’d know she’d been right all along.

      But she needn’t have worried, I didn’t want to see them bury Robbie, I didn’t want to go back to the North. But I sent flowers, yellow freesias, which have the sweetest scent I know and a shape like a promise if promises had shapes. I wept for him then, and I wept for Barbara Allen, and if I’d known how I’d grieve for him in the weeks to come I’d have gone to the funeral as well. I didn’t regret him, you see, and I thought that because there was no regret I wouldn’t have to remember.

      I was wrong. The minute his coffin was safe in the ground some wall came crashing down inside me and my body was filled with a longing so physical and intense that it felt like pain. I thought of Robbie, his brown eyes and his brown hair and his strong, whippy body so different from Liam’s, and my heart fairly broke. I wanted to see him one more time, to be in his company one more time; I wanted things to be as they’d been back then, when he was my song and I was his, and the song that we sang together was who we were when we sang it.

      It had taken me a year to do it, but I’d written at last to Robbie. I’d told him where I was and that I would sign any papers he cared to send my way. I never had an answer—I didn’t expect one—I knew that my letter would make him angry and remind him when he wanted to forget. But when I heard of his death, I was glad that I’d sent it. Sometimes silence can be every bit as bad as the worst of words.

      When the grieving came on me I had to endure it. I couldn’t stop it or change it by act of will. No more could Liam. At the start he had moved to comfort me, but I’d turned away from him, for I couldn’t bear his touch.

      Then when it had passed I tried to reach him, but he wouldn’t let me back. At first I thought that his distance would go once I’d drawn him into sex, but it didn’t. I couldn’t understand that: how could he make love with his body while his mind stayed cold and apart? Making love for me was all of myself. We went together into the Garden, we lost ourselves and remade ourselves, and afterwards everything started afresh.