What if Gussie had stayed at the teaching? Maybe all this might never have happened. What if he had married the long, lanky girl he was doing a line with years ago when he got his first job. What was her name? Louise. That’s right. Louise. And how many years is it since Louise walked out on him? She dropped him like a hot potato. The mourners could talk the hind legs off a donkey. And Louise had lovely legs. Twenty years later, everyone still remembered her legs. They were like a horse’s hinds. They were towers of ivory. And she had long, blonde hair down to her waist.

If only he had signed himself into the hospital earlier. If only he hadn’t signed himself in at all. People seem to love dead bodies, tragedies and smelly things in the wardrobe or under the floorboards. And then they’d say, sure, it’s all for the best. And it could have been worse, they said. He didn’t die in pain. He didn’t know what was happening. And thank God it’s all over.

On they went for hours, as the corpse lay far away in a cold chapel, and Birdie wished she could go out under the dark night sky and dig the grave herself, and throw him into the watery hole of starlight. Just to get it over with. She would tumble her own little baby into the black earth with her own bare hands.

So many people came to shake hands with her. The teachers who worked alongside him for years arrived. The nurses who knew him in the hospital appeared. Father Lee, who kept an eye on him when he went missing, slithered in. Even Louise flew across the ocean. And Birdie was glad to see her standing at the front door, after all those years.

For fifteen years, Gussie suffered from an irritable bowel as they call it now. He taught in St Angela’s Secondary School in Kinnegad and lived in a flat in Mullingar, which deteriorated over the years. The central heating broke down. The curtains fell from the windows. The floor sagged and squeaked. And the toilet was what Birdie described as the Black Hole of Calcutta.

But it was the irritable bowel that held Gussie in a state of emotional paralysis. He lost his only girlfriend before he was twenty-five, and remained frozen in a timeless bubble of sorrow for the next fifteen years. Birdie didn’t know why. At first she thought there would be a cure. An end. A point where surgery or tablets would rectify everything and he would return to the person he once was. He would take up life again. But he didn’t. Nothing changed from year to year. And eventually she accepted that nothing was ever going to change. And she would never really know who her son was.

The irritable bowel can be a hard taskmaster. He never had any comfort. In the supermarket or the post office, or maybe at a filling station, or buying oranges at the newsagents, it was all the same. Even on the few occasions that he went for a walk in the flat countryside of east Galway, or on the plains of Westmeath, where there were neither hills nor ditches for the unfortunate man to hide his shivering bottom. Birdie pitied him. Crowded spaces brought him out in a cold sweat. The classroom wasn’t too bad because he was always able to dash down the corridor to the staffroom, though there was no telling what states of hysterical laughter those young girls reached, on such occasions.