That’s how he earned his first money. Wheeling the dead through the black wind of the mortuary yard.

Standing under the bare bulb of the mortuary fridge.

He’d be there alone with the cold skulls and the wax faces. And the small white eyelids of children and the yellow cheeks of fresh women whose livers had been eaten by cancer. Not a pretty sight. Serenity perhaps. When all the suffering and anxiety of dying was over. Maybe that’s what attracted him. The serenity.

It was a hot summer. And he slept in the daytime, with the window wide open and the curtains closed. Big bluebottles buzzing like demented helicopters, and bouncing off the ceiling as if they were trying to kill themselves. A breeze shaking the curtain and the sound of tractors filling the room. But Gussie slept. And then at seven each evening, when girls on bicycles were coming from swimming at the lake, and the young lads his own age were togging out for football matches in the Chapel meadow, all sunburnt and thirsty, Gussie was putting on a brown porter’s coat, with green lining on the collar and dreaming of God knows what or whom.

‘Mammy,’ he used to say sometimes, in the middle of the night when he was only nine or ten years old, ‘I’m nervous.’

Oh indeed, we’re all nervous.

When the Vet was away in Galway, or Cork, Birdie would let him into her bed sometimes and she’d lie awake as he burrowed under the blankets and glued himself to her. Oh yes, she’d whisper, we’re all nervous.

4

BIRDIE NEVER FORGOT a certain warm summer night long ago, when she was a child and everything was still and moonlit, and she could hear all the insects, and she lay stretched on the bed with the windows wide open. The air was warm and the night was so utterly still and silent that even the cat creeping over the tin roof of the backyard shed would waken the dead. That was a long time ago. Birdie was only a child, when Ireland was still licking its wounds after the Civil War, and Europe was an architectural and financial ruin after the Great War. Not that Birdie knew anything about that at the time.

The children of Ireland were barely aware that the continent of Europe was any closer than Mars. They were already enveloped in the damp and musty embrace of a New Ireland. The State of Secrets. Eamon de Valera’s long coat throwing its shadow everywhere. And in her bedroom there was an invisible man behind the curtain. He was always there. From the beginning. Behind the curtain. No wonder Birdie was nervous.

One night Daddy was spinning the knob of the wireless in search of English voices. Birdie was thinking of the invisible man. She knew he was there, somewhere, in the darkest corners of the house. Sometimes he had a moustache and he shouted and crackled in the wireless. Sometimes he had green slitty eyes. Like the alligator in her picture book about life in the jungle.