‘I only hope nobody saw you,’ she said. And she withdrew like a queen from the scene of a slaughter, and closed her door with a gentleness that wouldn’t disturb a mouse. Gussie bathed his cuts and then went to his bedroom to lie on his bed in agony and shame. She was trying not to think of his white rump on the landing. Trying not to think of Cornagore. That terrible kiss, still as fresh as recently baked bread. And she knew Gussie still sustained himself on that. Always digesting it with a garnish of savage nostalgia. Someone might as well have locked his penis in a box and hung it on a tree, where he could never get at it again.

Birdie too lay awake in her room, listening to the BBC World Service at maximum volume. With maternal clarity she could hear him breathe and she supposed that she could hear him think. But what she couldn’t do was go into his room and put her arms around him ever again. And she certainly can’t do it now. Because he’s dead.

THE VET

1

BERNADETTE. That was Birdie’s name. And her daddy brought her to Dublin on the steam train. And from that day, and ever since, she loved the flutter of a bird’s wing. And that first magical encounter with birds, on a street outside the railway station, orchestrated by a beggar woman, became a bond between herself and Daddy. It was a sign of his ultimate fidelity. It excused everything. Because he was doing his best for her, in those years after her mother died. And every winter she fed the same little robin with crumbs and lard from the kitchen table.

What a day! Standing there at eleven years of age, with ten or twenty white pigeons flitting about her head. And afterwards on the train home Daddy whispered in her ear. ‘They were like angels from heaven,’ he said.

She could see he was enchanted. She could see that he too was thinking about Birdie’s mammy. Birdie can remember how he held her up on the platform. The great iron skirts of the engine dripping wet and the clouds of steam enveloping everyone on the platform in Ballinasloe.

Daddy always lifted her up like that. He was a big man. And he moved slowly, like a lion in the forest. He played poker and had carrot-coloured whiskers and drank only on rare occasions, but when he did he could put the house upside down. He never smiled after his wife died.

It was Daddy who first called her Birdie. She’d be sitting up in bed. Nervous of the dark. Her fragile body as straight as an ash sapling. Her limbs as taut as the strings of a fiddle. Her head cocked. Her eyes searching the edge of the room for anything that might be moving in the shadows.

‘My little Birdie,’ he’d whisper.

And since she had no brothers or sisters, she was eventually left minding this big whale of a man with a bad chest who could hardly breathe for the last four years of his life as he went blue in the face and wheezed in the kitchen of the little cottage on St Martin’s Terrace.