And he asked no questions. He sang no songs. He stuck to the counter at the far end. His back glued to the wall and his hand rubbing his own knee. An umpire at the match of life, and quietly putting away a long line of little Bacardi and Cokes and watching the world around him, with buckets of tears floating in the air before his face.

One evening in April, just as the light faded from the sky, a blue, watery light, Gussie decided to build a fire in the grate. He was going to fetch more turf from the shed at the back when he was struck by terror. A long lane flanked by giant boulders and heather, and swept by salty gusts from the Atlantic twisted down to the turf shed. Gussie was halfway down when he became aware of a smell. He couldn’t place it but it frightened him. It drove him back. It tightened his chest and made his stomach want to heave.

What could he do but retreat to the chalet? It was a cold April evening, and showery. And yet he sat all night at the empty fire grate.

The following morning he realized that the sewage was blocked in the pipes under the chalet and had poured up through a manhole just ten metres from his front door, on the edge of the main road. All that mess, all that pink toilet roll on the roadside, was crying out to heaven. It was Gussie Delaney’s waste. His diet. His private stool. Never meant for public inspection. But now it was reeking to high heaven, and the passing cars were splashing through it.

Someone is going to stop and come up to the door of the chalet, all angry and red in the face and ask him about that! Is this your sewage? Well, it’s all over my lovely new Mitsubishi now, and I don’t like that. But the one who finally came was Father Lee, with a social worker from Galway. A nice young man with stone-washed blue dungarees, and a rainbow-coloured shirt with no collar. Birdie met him later in the hospital. The two men strolled up the lane and knocked gingerly on the hall door. They had news from the Regional Hospital about his mother.

‘It’s open,’ he called out. ‘It’s open.’

For Gussie was glad they had come. As they stepped into the hallway, he could see them and they could see him. He was sitting on the toilet with the door ajar, and his trousers around his ankles. He laughed.

‘I’ll be with yis in a jiffy,’ he said.

And he burst out laughing.

‘I’m just trying to shit,’ he said. And he contorted his face until it swelled and grew red and the jugular sat up on the side of his neck like ivy on a tree.

‘Am just trying to shit,’ he said. ‘Am just trying to shit.’

4

‘OH NOW Mrs Delaney, sure you’d be far better off in a nursing home where we could keep an eye on you. Ha ha! Only joking. No but seriously. Think about it. A nursing home near Oranmore, on the Clare road.’