Free The Bird Woman by Kerry Hardie

truth or go.
    Not right away though. Instead I got the bus to the Water-side, tramped up the hill to Brian and Anne’s, and stood ringing
     their bell in the pouring rain, desperate for someone to talk to.
    “Merciful God, Ellen,” Anne said when she opened the door, “whatever have you done to yourself? You look like a scalded fox
     with a dose of the flu.”
    That was better than a rat, but only marginally. I decided there was no way I was going to tell her anything, not even the
     amended version I’d worked out on the way over. In this version I’d thought I might say I was
maybe
thinking of leaving Robbie, and Liam wasn’t going to appear at all. Anne was no fool though—I knew she might spot that there
     was someone else lurking—so I had a contingency plan prepared with Liam’s name changed to Fred. That way I’d only have to
     deal with the leaving-Robbie issue; I could leave the Southern Catholic bit till later or not at all.
    But Anne knew more than I thought. She took me in to the fire and brought me a glass of wine and a towel to dry what was left
     of my hair.
    “Brian’s away out at a meeting, and the weans are in their beds,” she said. “We’ll have a nice wee talk, so we will, you can
     tell me all about it.”
    She was friendly and sister-in-lawish and fishing for information, but the harder she tried the more I shut tight as a clam.
     In the end she told me out straight that my mother had phoned while I was on my way over. It seemed Robbie had rung up looking
     for me. He’d asked her if we were back from Achill.
    “I needed to get away from Robbie,” I said, “so I told him I’d gone with you and Brian and the weans to Achill. He knows you
     can’t stand him. I knew if I said I was going with you he wouldn’t want to come.”
    That stopped her in her tracks. In Anne’s world the more you disliked someone related to you the more they weren’t supposed
     to know that was the way you felt.
    You’d think, wouldn’t you, that in a city the size of Derry there’d have been somebody I could have talked to, but there wasn’t.
     I was always too awkward and shy, could never join in the way I saw other girls do, couldn’t whisper and confide. So I’d kept
     myself to myself and spent my time waiting for when I might leave.
    It was the same now. I sat there, saying less and less, getting lower as each minute passed. And the longer I sat on Anne’s
     good settee in her clean and tidy living room with her clean and tidy life all around me, the surer I was that I had to find
     the courage in me to walk through the door and out into the storm. And the surer I was that I had to, the surer I was that
     I couldn’t. Suddenly I understood that the life I had with Robbie was all about getting away from this. Then I knew that I
     hadn’t gone far enough, that I had to leave the life I was living and travel further and make another one over again. I saw
     the seal heading down into black water, and I knew I had to learn how to drown.
    And fear of it stopped my throat, so I choked on the glass of wine Anne had poured for me, sending it flying all over her
     sofa, and me flying out of the door.
    When I got home I apologised to my mother for giving her lip. She nodded her head without looking at me, but I saw her mouth
     tighten with satisfaction and I had to clamp my own shut or I’d have been out on my ear.
    I lasted another three days with her then I took the deepest breath of my life, phoned the number Liam had given me, left
     a message for him, then got on a bus that was headed down South.

Chapter 7
    I t was dark when the bus pulled into Kilkenny city. There were people waiting on the pavement, but I kept my eyes in front.
     I’d been worrying myself sick all the way down. Would Liam meet me when I got there? Would I still want to see him if he did?
     Could I even remember what he looked like? I closed my eyes tight and pictured as hard as I could, but all I got was Robbie.
     I stared out