Then they had breakfast in Hayden’s Hotel, with all the family. And that’s when Hughie Donoghue turned up. Hughie was the Vet’s first friend in town. A chain smoker with the soft Mayo accent and hair like Elvis Presley, a long, angular face, with enormous hands and long ivory fingers. That was the important thing. The fingers. He used to joke that he had them insured, on account of the flute.

He was a flute player at a time when musicians were barely tolerated, rarely allowed to play, and considered as hardly more than a step above tinkers, criminals and imbeciles. So that was Hughie. And that was the picture of Hughie that Gussie saw when it fell out on the floor. Hughie Donoghue. Dattledo Donoghue.

It was the day on which Gussie first suggested to his mother that she should be thrown into a nursing home. A dustbin. She glared at him and then just walked out of the kitchen and went upstairs without uttering a word.

He heard her crying. She was whimpering. Softly. Like a child. So he went upstairs after her, and she was on the landing, holding the door handle of her room, as if she feared someone might be about to drag her physically away forever. When she calmed down, she went into the bedroom and rummaged in the wardrobe until she found the wedding album. She sat on the bed leafing through it for consolation, tears streaming down the white blotting-paper skin of her cheeks. Gussie tried to reason with her but she told him to go away. And then a photo of the flute player fell out of the album and Gussie picked it up.

‘Who’s this?’

Well he knew bloody well who it was. He knew Hughie Donoghue. Everyone in Galway knew Hughie. Hughie was one of those public characters, like a landmark or a bend on the road that everyone connects with eventually. Everyone had their own Hughie Donoghue story.

Birdie just said Hughie was his father’s friend. And she snapped the picture from him, and returned it carefully to its place behind the cellophane. Then she leafed over another few pages until she found pictures of Gussie when he was a baby in huge woollen cardigans and woollen hats, as if they all lived in Iceland.

That got rid of him. One glance at those and he was gone from the bedroom, and down the stairs. Couldn’t bear those images of himself as a baby.

Who is he? says Gussie. For Jesus’ sake! Did he think Birdie was a half-wit or what? Or maybe he thought Birdie was losing her mind at the time. Yes. That’s it. He thought Birdie was going gaga, and gawking at photos of her marriage without remembering what her own name was. And then he’d have her all wrapped up for the dustbin in a jiffy. Boys oh boys, but he was barking up the wrong windmill that day, if that’s what he thought.