Well, Gussie is dead now. He’s lying in the cold marble sanctuary of the church, waiting for the priest to skite a bit of holy water on him and take him to the cemetery. He’s stretched in the oak box that will house him for the next hundred years. Dead as a dead fly.

Little did he know what was up the road. With all his confidence of what the future would be like. All his talk that evening, when they came home to Birdie’s house, as he stood in the kitchen, going on and on and on, while the kettle boiled. On and on about how the future was going to be really nice and tidy and Birdie in her snug little nursing home with the fat Mother Teresa administering hourly enemas for the greater comfort of the inmates. He didn’t know the future was going to be nice and tidy with him in his little oak box, waiting in the church for the morning gravediggers to plant him six foot under in the hill graveyard.

The day they returned from viewing the nursing home, she just listened and listened, and stared straight ahead as he drove towards Ballinasloe. Until they finally reached her derelict home. The lights of his car lit up the grey stone house and the limbs of the beech trees that surrounded the house. He opened the wrought-iron gate, at the foot of the long avenue, and when he got back into the car he said, ‘You’ll be glad to leave this place.’

She didn’t speak. She opened the front door and went down the hallway, and he followed, and she boiled the kettle in the kitchen, and he was still blathering away, and she made an instant soup in a cup. He refused to have any.

‘Oh,’ she exclaimed, ‘that’s going down to me toes.’ As if it wasn’t package soup at all. As if the most wonderful thing in the world was being in her own house making her own soup.

‘You could make soup there as well,’ he said.

She didn’t hear him. There was a half-empty porridge package beside the microwave in the kitchen, a walking stick lying on the floor inside the hall door. He went upstairs to the toilet. Through the half-open door of her bedroom he would see the unmade bed, the holy-water bottle, the Virgin Mary on top of the portable television, and the Sunday papers on the floor. It might dawn on him that this was her home.

While he was upstairs in the toilet, she made her decision. The nursing home was a prison. They were all old people in it. What would she be doing with a gang of old people? She was only eighty-one. And the place smelled of lavender. She’d never be able to get rid of that. The perfumes of Arabia couldn’t hide what it was: a glorified henhouse for old birds. And what about the grief of walking in and out of each room in her own house for the last time and choosing what to bring with her? She couldn’t bear that. They might as well give her the shovel and tell her to dig her own grave. That’s what she said. That’s what she thought. And Birdie vowed to herself the last big vow of her life. They’ll carry me out of here in a box, she whispered at the Sacred Heart of Jesus on the wall.