Everyone had blue hair. Permed with the fastidiousness of women who spent a lifetime in the golf clubs of Connaught, and couldn’t quite understand where the time had gone. The matron was an overweight woman from Longford with military airs. She said she had twins and a husband who farmed near Loughrea. And her bedside manner was straight out of a comedy. She spoke in a loud voice. Did she think that all old people were deaf? She told Birdie there was a red cord hanging from the ceiling in the bedroom. Showed her how to pull it in an emergency. Did she think Birdie didn’t know how to pull a string? And there was a common room down the hall where she could play cards and bingo, and listen to local musicians who came in every Tuesday night. Do you dance? she asked Birdie.

Did she think Birdie was a complete fucken idiot? Of course she didn’t dance. She was eighty-one years of age.

‘Well,’ the matron said with a sweet smile, and as if to sum up her wonderful nursing home, ‘if there’s anything you need, all you have to do is ask.’

Birdie assured her that there was nothing she needed. She never needed anything. She had never put anyone to any trouble ever in her life, and she wouldn’t be about to do so now that she already had one foot in the grave. Gussie misread that. He thought she was going to surrender. Thought that his mother was being polite. A sure sign of agreement.

On the way home he talked nonstop about ‘your new place’ as he called it. He was witless. He had always been witless.

The house Birdie lives in has only one toilet, which is upstairs. And Birdie is fragile on the stairs, especially in the morning when she has dizzy spells. But nobody is going to force her into a nursing home!

Gussie always feared that some day he might find her stuck to the leg of the old sideboard that stood at the bottom of the stairs. If she agreed to go into the nursing home, he contended, she could sit back and watch all her favourite television programmes without worrying about the stairs. And she would have a sit-in shower. A toilet on the same level. No stairs to climb ever again. And a staff of sweetly perfumed nurses to help her wash at any hour of the day or night. According to Gussie, the matron was another Mother Teresa. A vessel of compassion. It’s not what Birdie thought. It was a dream come true, Gussie said. Such kindly staff! Such cozy rooms! She would be free, finally, of that big house in the Galway wilderness, with all its moss-infested lawns and dead apple trees, and a forest of nettles in the back garden, and the ancient stables with the broken door, which had to be held in place with two heavy bolts of metal. She’d be free of all that bloody worry, he said.