And He does. Christ, indeed, helps in a kind of a way.

Because that’s when she begins to hear the organ playing.

Oh that’s lovely! That’s a relief! That’s a good sign. The organ is a good sign.

She hears it often as she lies in bed. After sleepless nights when she has been tortured by the things she told nobody in a lifetime. Bombarded by hurtful things her memory stored up over the decades. Sometimes she reaches dawn in a lather of sweat, breathless and exhausted from the struggle. But she is always relieved when the music returns.

And with the first light of day now filtering through the curtain, she begins to hear the organ, playing again, as she floats in a bed that has been the safest and most beautiful place in the world she has ever known.

It’s the bed the Vet bought in a furniture store in Athlone. And she complained at the time. Protested. Said it was too much money. But he wouldn’t hear of it. He kept saying it was worth every penny. And maybe she was inclined to agree, the day the lorry arrived from Athlone, causing a stir behind the lace-curtained windows on the main street as it drove through town with that big bed sticking out of the rear end. The delivery lorry processed slowly up the avenue to the Vet’s hall door. Birdie stood there with a dishcloth in her hand. In those days she was rarely seen answering the front door without a dishcloth in her hand.

Her heart was palpitating. A mixture of excitement and fear.

First off the lorry were the table and four chairs for the dining room. Then a dark mahogany sideboard. They were impressive. But it was the carved lattices and curves of the bed boards, and the sheer size of the Odearest mattress that gave Birdie goosebumps. She had to sit down on one of the chairs in a fluster of anxiety, as the two men with Roscommon accents, assisted by the Vet and his one-time boarding house companion Eugene Devine, negotiated the bed and mattress in the door and up the stairs. Assembled it in that very room where it has lasted, just as the glossy magazine had promised, for a lifetime.

Eugene Devine was small, bald and pot-bellied, and he had fat little fingers, and he had to stretch his feet to hit the organ pedals, and nobody ever believed he was an organist, until they heard the bellows roar. Eugene, like a commander-in-chief, making great emotions burst forth from the pipes in the organ loft with the squeeze of his plump little fingers. That was Eugene. And then the church fashions changed, and the organ fell silent, and Eugene went off down a labyrinth of the town’s little side streets walking his dog for an unbearable amount of years.

Then the dog disappeared, and Eugene continued for a while, with sunken red eyes that constantly streamed water, and required him to hold a white handkerchief in his left hand forever.