‘No.’

Gussie often practised holding on. Tensing up his face muscles. His jaws clenched and his teeth hurting his eyeballs. His legs starting to shiver, as he tried to hold the muscles of his arse closed against that sudden quake and mighty force of his own personal waste. He stopped the car at every turn of the road and did it up against wooden gates that opened on to fields of barley and sugar beet in the middle of nowhere. He evacuated behind ditches of bramble and in forests of spruce trees, in rain and wind, in summer heatwaves, and in the middle of the night at the roadside, with the headlamps of passing cars blinding his eyeballs.

You’re lucky you weren’t arrested, Birdie said to him once. If anyone saw you doing that, they’d probably phone the police.

He even managed it one time in the car park of Dunnes Stores in Roscommon.

‘Ah Gussie. Could you not go into a bar or a hotel or somewhere? Did you not notice that you were in the middle of the town?’

Then there was the food. That didn’t help. About once a year she would chastise him about the debris lying around his flat in Mullingar. The old cardboard containers for frozen pizzas and the tins of processed rice scattered on the worktop. The empty snack boxes from the local chipper stuffed in plastic bags under the sink. There was no end to it.

‘You need a maid,’ she said. ‘And you need to eat vegetables,’ she told him. ‘This place is disgusting.’ He gazed at her in confusion and without comprehension. He was like a beast lost in a fog of solitude, not knowing where the cliff was any more. She often saw that look in him and there was no denying it. He was bewildered. She knew he’d be swallowed up eventually. The fog of his own confusion would win and he’d go off some deep end, like a calf wandering over the side of a mountain. Birdie is in the kitchen. It’s the middle of the night. She’s boiling the kettle. She’s thinking about everything.

Birdie didn’t come down the river on a bicycle. Nor was she born yesterday. And though she always saw the sun and moon shining on the ground where her son walked, there were some odd moments, as the years went by, when her unconditional love could not mask an unbearable revulsion. Especially when she heard about the trouble with the schoolgirl. That was the kind of incident that Birdie could not gloss over. It was not a good sign.

Loitering. No other word for it. Loitering around teenagers. In the quiet corner of a chip shop in Kinnegad, skulking for hours like an unwanted dog, at his age. And he would gaze at all the pretty little schoolgirls, munching their dinners, as his hands trembled on the tabletop. His ears so finely tuned that he could move them with the flexibility of a rabbit as he eavesdropped on their girlie gossip. His breath no louder than the whisper of a sleeping cat, and his heart pounding in his ribcage like a stag in the forest of love. To be so close!