2

A NUN CAME to Birdie’s door the next morning. That was the first day of the snow. She was a small old lady with a shopping bag and puffed cheeks that drooped like a sad dog’s, and her skin was purple from bad circulation.

Birdie never liked nuns. Why should she? But she let her in and made her tea, and they sat in the drawing room talking about the flecks of snow that were falling outside in the grey morning light.

The nun confided in her that she had spent two years attending psychiatrists and therapists, for depression, which had eaten her up since the incarceration of her local priest on charges of interfering with altar boys. Touching them. And making them use their mouths to touch him. Oh by Jesus, she had chapter and verse, this nun! She had suffered torments of unimaginable intensity, says she, in her lonely cell in the convent for a number of years, thinking about all those details. She was destroyed to think that the Church was rotten to the core. And humiliated every time she turned on a programme on the wireless or went into the shopping centre wearing her veil. Eventually it all became too much for her and she was taken away in the ambulance.

They gave her depression a name after a few weeks. It was a chemical imbalance of some sort, they told her, so she knew at least she wasn’t responsible for that. They assured her that as long as she took her medication, she could live a normal life.

But it wasn’t that easy to live a normal life, because the seven old ladies who made up the convent didn’t want her miserable face and bleak emotions haunting the polished pine floor of their dining room any more. And so she was forced to find a small bedsit in the town and live whatever semblance of a nun’s life she could, wandering around the town with her shopping bag, and praying in the back of the church, and delivering oranges and apples to the patients in the hospice.

While she was speaking, Birdie began to cry. It wasn’t anything to do with the poor nun. Since the Vet had died, Birdie was used to nuns who would come to the door, sit down in the drawing room and tell her their life story before the kettle was boiled. But while she had been looking into the nun’s eyes, a strange kind of panic crept up on her. An impossible sadness overwhelmed her. Maybe it was the dark sky, now full of snow, and snow falling in little flecks. Frantic. Like swarms of bees.

She interrupted the nun to explain that she must be leaving immediately for the hospice, because she had not seen her son since the day before yesterday. She rushed out into the garden, with no coat or shoes, and went down the avenue, into the snow, as if she was going to run all the way, and the nun still standing at the hall door in amazement, and the snow falling, first like bees swarming, and then, heavier, like tufts of cotton, floating to earth, and almost immediately weighing down the bushes.