One night in the cement toilet, an old man was buttoning his urine-soaked coat and staggering from wall to wall. Gussie tried to pass him in the doorway but the old man didn’t let him. Instead he hugged him. And Gussie didn’t resist. For a second the two men were locked in an embrace.

‘Good man yourself,’ the old fellow whispered, like a soldier dying. Gussie could feel the piss on his leg. It was seeping from the old man’s coat. But yet he hugged him fiercely in desperate solidarity. It wasn’t much but it was a moment. That was the first time Father Lee paid Birdie a visit.

‘I think he’s lonely,’ the priest suggested.

Birdie laughed. And then with a smile as inviting as an empty fire grate she said, ‘Sure for goodness sake, Father, we’re all lonely.’

When the young people came to that pub they came in droves and stuck together. Or they came in flocks and were in and out before anyone could catch them. Or they came when they were least expected, like swallows in a wet April.

And they always arrived like apparitions out of heaven, on the coldest and saddest and most empty night in the year. When the money was spent. When Gussie had polished off his three pints. And he had no more cash in his pocket. And even if he did, he’d have to negotiate with the clock that said midnight, and the long face of the landlady, so terrible that it regularly hunted him out the door.

That’s when they came. When the landlady’s face was growing longer and longer, as she was clipping up the glasses from empty tables and washing them and drying them and putting them on the shelves with a determination that suggested she might like to close the bar for a thousand years. That’s when they came. That’s when they arrived. The young people. As if they were from a different planet. Singing laments in Irish about loss and sorrow. Their perfumes driving the old men insane. And of all the flocks and herds and swallows and apparitions, there was nothing quite like the amateur drama group. They’d come at one or two in the morning. With trophies from remote drama festivals in Tubbercurry or Ballyshannon, and they’d stand in a circle and sing songs from American musicals. They’d stand like a flock of geese in the centre of the room, their heads up, their necks stretched. Like geese.

Yes, Father Lee said, they were like geese. But they’d liven up the night. And even long-faced Mrs What-ever-her-name-was couldn’t put them out or refuse them drink. Father Lee described it all. He was keeping an eye on Gussie at the time. Father Lee would keep an eye on everyone. He was always there. On the high stool at the far end of the bar.

It was the priest who gave Gussie an old bicycle to get around with. It was he who signed forms so Gussie could collect the dole, when his pay from the school dried up that September. A lean and beautiful priest. Yes. With black hair and thick black brows above his dark Connemara eyes. And didn’t Birdie always respect the priests, whether they were beautiful or not?