The Bird Woman

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.