During that week Birdie often marvelled at all that therapy they do with people in those hospitals. She wondered was there any sense to it. Poking at the past. Pulling things from under stones that would better be left where they were.

When Gussie was six, he used to catch bees in a jam jar. He loved that game. He thought the bees were beautiful. The black and yellow fur. And at seven she often saw him sitting in the old shed where the Vet kept his animal medicines, listening to the young swallows in nests under the eaves squealing for their mother to bring food. And then there was the cat. Jesus. That’s the kind of story Gogarty would pick fucken holes in.

Birdie got him the cat. A tiny ball of black fluff, with two little eyes, that came in an orange box. When they let it out on the kitchen floor, it was so frightened that it tried to go out the window immediately. It jumped onto the table, and then fell back onto a red-hot ring on the cooker. It was only for a second, but the cat let out a scream of pain that sounded like a soul roasting in hell. Eventually it went behind the washing machine and refused to come out. They could smell the burning flesh and fur. Gussie got into a terrible state. He tried desperately to get the cat out, to see how badly she was hurt. But the space between the washing machine and the cupboards was too narrow for him to get his hand in and grip her. He could only see her eyes staring out from the dark. All day in school he cried his eyes out thinking about the cat. Even Birdie supposed that the hot ring had done mortal damage.

But there was no need in the wide world to be bothered. Birdie had the cat on her lap when he came home. She was drinking milk from a saucer on the table. Not a need in the world for the poor boy to be upset.

Nobody asked questions in those days. Things weren’t analysed. People didn’t get counselling just because they saw a few dead cats. When bad things happened you tried to get over them, forget them and move on. And a mother was a mother. Her job was simple.

Birdie just tried to make things right. She took away nightmares. She left him in bed when he had a temperature and brought comics home to him. She made him hot drinks. Hot drinking chocolate, and sometimes punch with real whiskey.

‘It will put hairs on your chest,’ she used to say.

She knitted jumpers. Bought him buckled sandals in the summertime, and gave him clean underwear every Saturday night, and fixed his tie, and rubbed his cheeks with a damp towel like a mother cat. She made apple dumplings and potato cakes, and stews with lashings of gravy and she always had juicy necks of lamb in the oven. She made pear tarts and flans and soufflés with real cream and she made soups from real chickens and vegetables. She made all sorts of buns in trays with different jams in the bottoms, and even buns out of Rice Krispies mixed with chocolate. She made thick pancakes coated with butter, and dusted with sugar, one on top of the other. A mountain of them on a plate in the oven. So there wasn’t much in that for the psychiatric team to get their teeth into.