A man who died from carelessness and neglect. No point in glossing over the facts. Birdie called a spade a spade when she needed to. Alex went into hospital with a slight pain in his left hip. But by the time they were finished poking him, and testing him, and making a dog’s dinner of lumbar punctures, his body was so exhausted that they moved him to the County Home where he got bedsores the size of golf balls on his hips and died the year after.

She sat at his side every day until the end. And she brought him tea and home-made buns because they had shared buns and tea from the moment they had met on the dancehall floor. And he always loved the cup of tea. He’d raise it in the air and say it was the cup that cheered but did not inebriate. And on the day he died she gave him the tea, and a coconut bun, and he enjoyed them both. He patted her head as he often did and he said, ‘Oh, Birdie, you’re a great woman.’ Then he closed his eyes and died.

He could have lasted another decade. And Birdie felt robbed by the neglect of the doctors. She would have nobody to talk with now. Nobody to tell her secrets to any more. No one to nurse in the king-size bed that had come all the way from Athlone. She would have nobody to make buns for. And she didn’t. She never made another bun in her life.

But the thing that enraged her most of all was that she had not expected him to die in that moment, so she had not told him how Sister Bernard had upset her, or why she had upset her, or what she had said to upset her.

The Vet with his arse to the fire and his bottle of stout, and his gramophone box playing new recordings of Puccini. Birdie at the cooker concocting a feast. Soup from the gizzards of chickens. Soufflés of pineapple and cream. Gussie sitting in the dark on the bottom step of the stairs, listening to her whisking the cream and waiting for her to call him into the kitchen and lick the spoon. Waiting for his life to begin. But it never did.

Whoosh!

Why is that? Who knows? But isn’t it funny that sometimes only Eugene remains. Yes. Eugene is still there. That’s funny. That someone so unexpected would be the last one to leave. But for certain, she’s lying there in the bed, and there’s a great softness in the dawn light and a lovely sweet smell in the room, and as true as God’s in heaven, she can hear the soft notes of the harmonium.

Eugene is still playing in the attic and under the stairs and beneath the floorboards of every room in the house.

That’s a sign if ever there was one. Alex.

GUSSIE

1

SO THAT WAS IT. Alex in the open fields chasing bulls. Birdie in the kitchen making apple dumpling in the new pressure cooker. Gussie sitting on the stairs, listening for a heartbeat that was not his own. Whoosh.