He was a long time upstairs. When he returned, she said it.

‘You were a long time upstairs.’

‘I was washing my hands,’ he said.

5

SO WHAT WAS wrong with him, as the neighbours would say? That was the question, wasn’t it? She suspected something the year he didn’t come home for Christmas. Out in Cornagore swinging from the rafters. And even though Birdie stayed in the house all through January, because of the snow, he never rang. Never rang. Not even a phone call. That’s how attached he was to Sooty the cat!

And that winter, Birdie never went out; she was desperately afraid of slipping on the steps of the church, but instead she fell down the stairs one night and sprained her ankle. After that they X-rayed every bone in her body and said that she was a lucky woman. How could it be lucky to fall down the stairs? she wondered.

That was the day the doctor gave her advice on the hip. And she said she’d consider it. So the replacement job was scheduled for the following September. And all through those months, from the sprained ankle in February, right up to the end of August, she never heard from him. How little he thinks of his mother, she thought! He’s gone off with a brown cow from Connemara and has no more time for his mammy.

And there was no end to her misery. It never stopped raining. It was windy and cold. She never saw the sun once in July. And for the first time in her life she couldn’t even be bothered cooking a little lump of bacon or even a few vegetables for herself. So keen was her sense of foreboding that she agreed to have the last rites before she underwent the hip operation in Galway. But when she woke up and realized that she could walk without a stick or without much pain, her temper improved enormously. She felt young again. And she spoke about her long-dead husband in every second sentence. He’d come into her mind. He’d come like a shadow to the chair beside her hospital bed. He’d come like a ghost into the ward and sit down on the seat across from her. A handsome figure, she told the nurse.

‘Hard to make out his features,’ she said. ‘But it’s him.’

The nurses pleaded with her again to consider a nursing home. Especially since her son had been lured into a psychiatric ward. But it was no good. A few days later Birdie headed home to Ballinasloe in the back of a taxi, where she took up residence again on the outskirts of the town, defying old age and infirmity. She paid the driver in coins from her purse. He was a little man from Clare, hardly more than forty, but already grey and puffed in the face, and he whistled all the way as he drove.

‘You’ll come in and have a cup of tea,’ Birdie declared. ‘You must be tired from the driving.’