The burger is ready in a few minutes. She puts it on the plate but she can’t understand why it’s rock-hard. Then she goes to the microwave, only to find that the cabbage and potato are still cold. Maybe something is wrong with the machine.

Onwards to the drawing room, plate in hand, where she sits on the sofa, turns on the television, expecting to see the omnibus edition of Eastenders. She always watches the reruns of her favourite soaps on a Sunday. They’re more enjoyable the second time round, and easier to follow.

Dinner doesn’t satisfy her. It’s just not nice. Too cold. Too hard. And she can’t find anything on the television except news programmes. So she waits for the football matches to begin. That’s how she has spent her Sunday afternoons for two decades. Watching the matches. Doesn’t matter what it is. Soccer. Rugby. Gaelic. She likes those athletes in their prime rising in the air for the balls. But there is no match! It just so happened that on this particular Sunday not one of the eight television stations is showing a football match. Now isn’t that a curious thing?

She watches on, for another half an hour, hoping to see film stars in bikinis, or quizmasters, or the posh lady up to her arse in farmyard muck talking about the value of organic material around a rose bush. But nothing doing! All she can find is the friggin’ news. Breakfast news. Yes. Breakfast news. Because it’s fucken breakfast time.

OK. That doesn’t matter, because in fact, what she really wants is the Oxo box. That’s what she wants. And it’s on the kitchen table. She saw it there when she was heating the cabbage.

You see that’s why she was getting the heebie-jeebies about the house being empty. That’s why she couldn’t sleep all night. The Oxo box lying out where anyone could have gawked into it. She had gone to bed and left the Oxo box on the table. That’s why she was disturbed in her dreams.

She turns off the television and sees her reflection on the screen. An old woman in her dressing gown. Sleepless and frightened at the dawn of a winter’s day, with a frozen burger and stale cabbage lying on the plate in her lap. Still haunted by an invisible man.

There was no more she could do for Gussie. That’s not what troubled her. She had always done her best for Gussie. But it was the Vet she had failed. Because she didn’t tell him everything. In a sense, she didn’t tell him anything.

Birdie staggers down the hall towards the kitchen, her hands outstretched towards the Oxo box.

Momo! she cries. Momo!

2

THE OXO BOX contains the oldest photographs in the history of Birdie Waters. A few dozen frayed images in sepia-brown, black and white, or stubborn negatives, in which an Edwardian gentleman with whiskers stands to attention beside a little girl in a white dress who sits on a chair beside him. There is an image of the little girl in Dublin, outside a shop that sells tobacco, and Birdie can see white pigeons at the girl’s feet. Dozens of them in a line along the back of the bench. Lots and lots of images captured on O’Connell Bridge, and many formal poses by uncles and aunts who are long dead. Whiskers. Wan-faced women. Children in states of attention and fear as they gazed at the camera. And hidden beneath them all, at the bottom of the box, is the only single image that still exists on earth of little Momo. The only record that she ever lived.