‘I’ll get a tissue,’ says she and she went away, just for a second towards the door. She was going to get a tissue from the communal kitchen and gather up the crumbs from the bedclothes, but she heard the slightest little noise behind her as she walked away from the bed. The noise he sometimes made when they were making love. The sleepiest of songs that his heart sometimes sang, to say he was happy, and she knew even before she turned around that there was only a scattering of bones left on the clinical bed, and that she was alone in the room and in the world.

She missed her last hug. And there she was again in the same position when Gussie came from the mental place, like he used to come to her when he fell out of a tree, or hurt his knee, or ran his bicycle under the wheels of Father Finnegan’s motorcar. And the urge inside her to hold him was monstrous. To smother him with kisses like a thousand petals falling off the wild rose bushes on the avenue. It was making the knuckles of her little white claws burn with pain as she clenched the edge of the kitchen table. But Gussie just sucked his cigarette to the last poisonous breath of smoke. Deep into his lungs.

And then he left. And she saw him to the door and let him peck her on the cheek. The nurse was asleep in the car. A black shining Nissan Primera. Or was it a Volkswagen Golf?

Something anyway.

‘It’s great jobs they have,’ Birdie says. ‘They can afford such lovely cars.’

3

GUSSIE LOVED FLOWERS. He plucked them from the Vet’s rose bushes. Roses as big as oranges. He took as many as he could hold and brought them to Birdie with a smile on his face. She was polishing the tiles outside the front door, with Cardinal polish.

‘Mammy,’ says he, shielding his eyes from the sun and stretching out his hands with the roses.

‘Your father will have your guts for garters, Gussie, for stealing his roses,’ she said. His hands were bleeding. Not a good sign.

Gussie got a summer job as a night porter in the hospital when he was a teenager. Fetching glasses of water in the middle of the night for old men with lung diseases. He was getting morbid. Emptying aluminium night jars from under the beds in the male ward every morning and checking the amount of fluid and writing the amount of ounces on each chart. When people died, he wheeled their bodies to the mortuary on a steel trolley. A grim voyage, through the maternity unit and out into the backyard. All in the middle of the night, so that the young mothers wouldn’t know the dead were passing by where their little babies were sleeping. Though they must have been suspicious. They must have sniffed the air occasionally as they queued for their morning showers.