Now look at her. Sitting up in bed. Struggling to find the light switch. Gawking at photographs in the big leather-bound album. Her little boy smiling out at her from the bathtub, his head all lathered with soap.

Oh he was a great child for the bath. And afterwards he would stand on the rug, dripping wet, his bum to the open fire, and a towel tied around his skinny waist, at the hips. She would chastise him playfully for not putting on his pyjamas, and later she’d come in with a smaller towel to dry his hair, and there were moments in that ritual that felt like hugs, when faltering laughter rippled from both of them and seemed like a faint intimacy. But that was before the electric hairdryer came into the house. The hairdryer spoiled everything.

When he was at college doing his Arts degree, he missed his baths, and he never mastered the craft of washing in those tiny, plastic shower units that were fashionable in apartments of the seventies, with green plastic curtains that clung to his legs like cold fish, and made him shiver, and hoses of water that were either too hot or too cold, and had as little pressure as an old man pissing.

Even while teaching in Kinnegad, he insisted on renting a flat in Mullingar, a larger town forty minutes up the road, because he wanted a spacious bathroom. He was so happy with his Mullingar flat that he often stood in front of the electric heater, naked, playing an old, black penny whistle that had survived since his childhood. He didn’t drink. He didn’t smoke. He never went out. So maybe it was harmless enough to sit in front of the television for almost two decades. That’s what she told herself. She was his mother for goodness sake. She wasn’t going to construe anything nasty about her broken boy. But the incident in the chipper was a turning point. There was no happiness after that.

The following summer he brought up the subject of Cornagore; he announced his intention to go back there, for a holiday. Birdie nearly went through the roof. Cornagore, in Connemara? On his own? That godforsaken windswept bog! After all that happened there in the past! Was he right in the head? Don’t answer that!

Anyway, he went. And he went alone because, as he told her, he needed some space.

Some what? Some space. Some solitude, says he. Some privacy. Birdie didn’t see it like that. It’s not solitude he needed. The last thing in the world he needed was more solitude. Wasn’t that what was wrong with him? Indulging himself in far too much solitude for fifteen years and stuck inside that fucken flat in Mullingar.

But private space is what he got. Buckets of it! Because Cornagore, in the far end of Connemara, may have been a holiday resort, but it was nothing remotely like the holiday resorts advertised on television, with brown young girls in G-strings sauntering along golden beaches. There were very few brown naked bodies outside Cornagore, where he booked himself into a bed and breakfast. And not a G-string or a bikini in sight. Just barbed wire and fence posts. And cows grazing in the sand dunes. That’s the brown naked bodies that were waiting for him. And him a teacher that could have passed the entire summer in Benidorm or Majorca with all the other teachers. All summer long if he so wanted, in his shorts, with pina coladas and ice creams, at bamboo beach bars. Isn’t that where he should have gone? To the Costa del Sex.