That’s what she told Father Lee after choir practice the following Saturday evening. She was the last to leave the sanctuary, the guitar still hanging around her neck, and the guitar case still open on the sanctuary floor. She didn’t mince her words.

Gussie cooked porridge for himself every morning. It was a discipline that ensured he got out of bed. His daily roughage had become a matter of great importance. He believed that roughage was the answer to the bowel discomforts. But breakfast only brought him to ten o’ clock. The rest of the day stretched before him like a terrifying abyss, and he knew that such a gaping emptiness could easily push him back to the excesses of dancing again with Sinead O’Connor. He couldn’t always rely on Sooty the cat to save his life, so he invented timetables and strategies to get him through the day.

He divided everything into sections. Times to be out of the house. Times to circulate the juices on a long walk and firm up the rectal muscles that no longer enjoyed the natural firmness of his teenage years. Time for dinner. Time for tea. Time for television. And he saved the pleasure of television for the evenings. It was only a black-and-white set, which he kept hidden in the corner underneath a tartan blanket in case someone might come from the post office looking for a TV licence that he didn’t have. So he uncovered it only at night, when the curtains were closed.

This too was risky. Because he fell in love with Sharon on Home and Away, a teenage character in an Australian soap opera. He looked forward to it all afternoon, and snivelled into the toilet roll in sympathy with all her little upsets. Sometimes Sharon did bring him to excesses and ledges that equalled his adventures in the toilet with the DIY gallows, but Birdie guessed that the social workers spared her the more disturbing details.

Every Saturday night he cycled to the pub. It was three miles away, down a labyrinth of lanes and past many giant rocks. A tiny pub with a galvanized roof painted green, tucked into the hill at the end of a road that went nowhere else except to the stones of the seashore. There was a concrete floor and a pot-bellied stove. There were old men in damp overcoats and greasy caps. And there was a lady who ran the show and lived in the adjoining house. A lady with a face that suggested frequent bouts of indigestion. She wore a green cardigan too big for her, and she had a chin that would split hailstones. Her son was the image of her. He’d be there sometimes in a navy-blue school blazer and with a Bic biro stuck in his gob as he pulled pints. The scholar. Always on the verge of doing his homework.

The atmosphere varied from one extreme to the other. For weddings and funerals and the infrequent successes of the local drama group in the regional competitions, the little pub became the hub of the world. A junction of nations and emotions. But for the rest of the winter it was empty. Silent. Redolent only with the remorseful sighs of old men clutching the bar and staring bleakly at their pints. Stretching their long necks every time the door opened, as if Grace Kelly might walk in. But their expectation was half-hearted. They had been hardened by lives without surprises.