And then one day there was just a single little doe-eyed student sitting there, with freckles and long, sandy hair entwined in a single pleat, and dressed in the neat green uniform of the school where he taught. And she was crying at the table in the far corner. Gussie opened the Daily Mirror in front of his face and then stole a sly peep over the top. Her head had already crashed into the bottles of vinegar and the red plastic container of tomato sauce. There was no one else in the shop. So he went over to her. He always looked like a goose that had gone round the wrong corner in life. Didn’t Birdie often say that to herself?

And in the chip shop the little cherub was trembling, as if some invisible devil had wrenched the tears one by one from her breast with a long hot tongs. Yet despite that distress, she couldn’t but notice the teacher staring into her eyes as if he had seen a fairy dance at the bottom of a well. Her French teacher standing above her, open-mouthed and drooling. That’s what she saw. Or so she said. That’s what the schoolgirl said. Drool.

And gossip travels faster than electricity. I hear your boy is in trouble with the school, her neighbours bleated, when Birdie met them in the church porch. Little women full of mock compassion. The parish as vigilant as a cobra’s eyeball. The streets whispering, Tut tut!

But he was lucky. For weeks the school authorities negotiated with the parents’ solicitors. Birdie never quite got to the bottom of a recurring phrase in the legal correspondence: ‘disputed facts’. She heard Gussie’s version. That sounded innocent enough. But what part of the child’s anatomy did he touch, as he towered over her? Birdie never knew. Whatever the young girl claimed about her encounter in that desolate chip shop, it never reached Birdie’s ears. The parents agreed that an apology from the teacher would settle the matter without further recourse to the law. And that was the end of it. Although in a way it was only the beginning.

2

BIRDIE SITS UP in bed. She’s still awake. She has joined the legion of sleepless old mothers who sit up for hours in armchairs and sofas, on pillowed bed-rests and on toilet seats, in the middle of the night. Mothers staring into the black night at the end of it all, and all of them thinking the same terrible thoughts. Birdie had sacrificed everything for him. She had done her very best to rear him properly. And then when he went out into the world, as broken as a bird with a dead wing, she crucified herself wondering where she had gone wrong.

Sometimes in his childhood years there were long periods when she couldn’t even touch him. If he was upset from arguments in the schoolyard, or lonely because his playmates had gone off fishing without him, she would always tell him to go upstairs and have a bath. That was his little treat. The bathroom was a menagerie of plastic shampoo bottles and bubble bath in the shapes of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, and his bedroom was chock-full of teddies, and furry creatures from every cartoon under the sun because she thought that giving him teddies to hug was the same as hugging him herself.