After that, Christmas was an anticlimax, for both Gussie and Sooty, who took up residence in an orange box beside the fire.

3

ONE OF THE happiest moments that Birdie can recall from Gussie’s childhood occurred when the little girl from Italy, on the bus to Galway, opened the cage and released her yellow canary. First it sat on top of the girl’s head, and made everyone on the bus fall about with laughter. Then it flew down the bus and landed on Gussie’s head. He was nine years old. The canary was pecking his scalp. Such an honour! Being chosen out of all the others. It was like some kind of divine selection. And it was so funny. And whatever salt or oil was in his short hair, Gussie’s head was the only skull on the bus that the little yellow bird was bothered with. Birdie and the child walked on air for the rest of the day as they shopped in Galway. Yes. Those were the days alright. A far cry from the seedy bus Gussie ended up on at the age of forty-one.

The seedy Cornagore bus that passed the chalet at two every Thursday heading for Clifden contained a sad army of old men wearing damp coats and hats that resembled tea cozies. Old-age pensioners clutching wicker shopping bags. Gussie travelled on it every week while he remained in Connemara. He’d buy The Irish Times in Clifden and read it in the café. Plumes of smoke and steam rising from hot plates of sizzling fish. He’d buy a bottle of whiskey in the off-license and have half a pint of stout in McCabe’s bar. All preliminaries of course. All strategies to steady himself before the pilgrimage to the top of the hill.

Some things a mother should never hear. Should never be written. Should never be done. But Gussie did them and by the time the doctors and the social workers, and the psychiatric nurses, were finished with him, Birdie had become privy to her son’s most hidden and secret and shameful anxieties. It was like dismembering a butterfly. Except that Gussie didn’t seem much like a butterfly. A cockroach perhaps. But not a butterfly. No.

Siobhan Joyce was the butterfly. The girl in the bread shop at the top of the hill. And every week, after his libation in the public house, his tummy fortified with egg and chips, Gussie would make his way to her door with the devotion of a man on the outskirts of Mecca.

Fresh bread was piled like white bricks on the shelves. The floor dusted with flour. Small, white paper bags in neat bundles on the counter. Everything deliciously white. The aroma of cakes baking in the ovens. A door of fogged glass behind the counter, which led to an inner sanctum from which Siobhan came and went. That was another world in there. It was a sanctum beyond his reach. He’d come into the shop with breathless excitement, after ascending the hill. Her shop was at the very top of the street. He’d be puffing. Winded. Unfit. And Siobhan was a glorious brooding presence behind the counter. Seventeen years old. Still uneasy with her great breasts. Long chestnut hair falling over her embarrassed eyes. She dressed in white.