And then that summer came along. The time after the incident with the schoolgirl in the chipper and he announced that he was going on his holidays and she thought fine, let him go, he might enjoy a bit of fun in some nice sunny climate with a few of his teacher friends. But then he said the word. Cornagore. Sacred Heart of Jesus, what did he say? Yes. Cornagore. He was off to Cornagore. For what? For a holiday.

A lot of blather then about getting some personal space for himself and relaxing and finding himself. And he was only staying the night with Birdie. And he was off to Cornagore in the morning. She didn’t take her eye off the television for an hour. She glued herself to rubbish. Stupid comedy programmes just to avoid what she might say to him if she looked at him.

At ten o’clock he said he’d go into town for a pint.

‘Don’t take the car,’ she said. ‘You never know when the guards are on the road with that breathalyzer thing. And the walk might do you good.’

Yeah. Well it didn’t. He had four solitary pints in the hotel. He was slouched against the edge of the bar as the young nurses and teachers assembled at the beginning of their Friday night out. And with each pint he grew more agitated. More conscious of his solitude haunting their happy company. Eventually he walked back to his mother’s house in a state of despair and gave her an account of his evening out. She was still watching the end of The Late Late Show.

He slept over and in the middle of the night he heard the lowing of cattle, so close that he thought they were downstairs. In fact they were out in the garden, and his mother was on the landing, the track of a hairnet as deep as a tyre-burn across her forehead, and wearing a pink dressing gown all the way down to her white ankles.

‘The rose bushes, the rose bushes, your father’s good rose bushes.’

‘Jesus Christ, Mother, they’re only fucken rose bushes,’ he screamed, ‘but whenever anything comes under attack from cattle breaking into the garden, you invoke Daddy’s name in a trance like a saint invoking the name of the fucken unknowable God.’

That was a quare speech. He was raging and he was in his pyjamas. No. In his pyjama tops, and Birdie, having no time to discuss other options, was exposed to the sight of his white rump flying across the landing and down the stairs, reducing her to a rare state of silence.

He ran around the rose beds with his pyjama top flying, in a desperate effort to get the cattle out the gate. But that so frightened one particular cow, who became as nimble on her pins as a ballerina, that she pranced and leaped everywhere to get away from him, including onto the bonnet of his new Ford Escort. And Gussie in a blistering rage, and without his trousers, was vulnerable in the brutal world. The outcome was that he came through an unseen bramble of rose bush in the dark and almost destroyed himself. Birdie waited until he was halfway up the stairs before addressing him.