No, she heard herself say.

– Well, I ordered him to put it on. And I declare to gawd it was only the beginning. But you know as well as I do, Birdie, he’s like a man with no eyes. He got it hard to find anything in the latter end. Poking around one night between me legs with his finger, and he couldn’t find the hole. Can ye credit that? I says to him, will we put on the light and I’ll give you a map.

– But d’ye know what I am going to tell ye, Birdie girl? I was stretched one night over an Indonesian coffee table, like I am stretched now over your ten wee toes, and he starts poking, and there’s this elephant in the corner, a dancing elephant, and there’s this big bowl of butter, butter if you don’t mind on the floor, and between one thing and the other, between the elephant and the butter and the poking, we broke the glass and I cut me bum and he had to run downstairs to wash the wound, for you could get terrible infections from an Indonesian coffee table. –

What’s an Indonesian coffee table? Birdie heard herself ask.

– Well, – says the long-legged spirit, – sure if you don’t know, how would I know! –

And she laughed. Gorgeous, young, healthy laugh. Body shaking on Birdie’s bed. Touchable milk-white breasts inside the lace bodice. And she turned her head sideways on the bedspread to look up at Birdie. Laughing. Laughing like a wee girl.

– Ah Mammy, – says she, lancing poor Birdie with such a beguiling smile that Birdie had to scream. And she tried to scream. Struggled to scream. And then she did. She screamed.

No she didn’t. She heard herself scream. And then she was awake. And the room was empty.

Oh Jesus Christ, if only the Vet was with her now. He’d mind her. He’d look after her. Lying awake all night. Waiting to bury her only son. And then falling asleep and finding invisible men lurking behind the fucken curtain, and a fucken whore lying on the bed laughing at her. She didn’t need to be told anything about what Gussie did or didn’t do with Louise. She had her own life. Jesus Christ, she had the Vet. He wasn’t always bewildered in a hospital bed with cot sides to protect him from falling out and a tube stuck up his mickey to let the piss out of his bladder without him knowing it. He wasn’t always like that. He was the Vet.

Didn’t she dance tangos and foxtrots and quicksteps around the golf club while Mrs Hannigan was being carried to the car by Vincent Goldsmith, for rumpy-pumpy or whatever they call it nowadays, in the back of his Zephyr?

For Christ’s sake, the Vet was a man of the world. As he used to say himself, just because the photographs are in black and white, doesn’t mean we didn’t live in Technicolour.