She wanted to undo the world after it happened.

To wind back the cosmos. She wanted to make it all squeeze into the zero moment of origination. The dot before time began, when there were no moving curtains or invisible men or asteroids or Milky Ways. When everything was a dot.

Little Momo’s feet had gone purple. Her fingers and nails had gone purple. Her face was as empty as a full moon. Momo was gone away. And only a dead carcass remained in the cot.

There was nobody in the nursery only Birdie. There was no one to see her. And no one to say it to. No one in the kitchen or in the refectory or in the dormitory, because all the nuns and the other girls were at Sunday Mass in the Chapel. There was no one to stop her from standing there, listening, as if the dead could speak a little baby speak. No one who might pull her away from the mirror. The baby was eight weeks old. Birdie was thirteen. She went to the graveyard and got sick all over her coat, after lying on the soil and pushing her face into the mud.

‘Oh,’ said the nun in the infirmary, ‘it’s little Miss Waters! Now what has she done to her face?’

HUGHIE

1

THANK GOD FOR HUGHIE! That’s all Birdie can say sometimes, and she’s said it often enough. That’s what she said as she stood in the middle of the hospital reception area, and it as busy as a bus station, and Birdie with not a notion what she was supposed to do or where to go. Patients escorting their loved ones to the main door. Kissing them goodbye. Visitors who had never been there before, wandering around and staring at arrows on the walls, in a daze, and looking more disturbed than the patients. Children playing with the doors of the lift. Old ladies clustering around the reception desk with useless questions about where to get buns and buses. When Hughie stepped in through the revolving doors with a small brown paper bag under his arm, no one could doubt that he was a great man, and Birdie was totally at ease with him there beside her. He walked with great confidence. He knew the building inside out.

He had been there as a patient. In and out like a yo-yo over the years. Not that Birdie would tell anyone that. Birdie could keep a secret. A confidence.

So Birdie went up and stared at the lady behind the desk.

‘I want to speak to my son,’ says she.

‘Who?’

‘My son,’ says she.

‘What’s his name?’ says Miss Busybody.

Birdie wasn’t going to tell her. What business of hers was that?

But Hughie chirped in.

‘Delaney,’ says he. ‘Gussie Delaney.’

‘Second floor,’ says Miss Busybody. ‘Room 212. NEXT!’

Thank God for Hughie Donoghue.

In the middle of the shining floor, a man in a blue nylon work coat sat on top of a polishing vehicle. And Hughie looked smart. He wore black-laced shoes, which were well polished. He was like a retired policeman. His brown suit was wrinkled and the seat of his pants was as shiny as his shoes. But he stood out nonetheless. He had broad shoulders and the suit hung on his skeletal frame with the graceful lines of a garment well-cut from fine linen. It was his professional suit. The one he had bought in Louis Copeland’s shop on his way to make the only appearance of his life on television thirty-two years earlier. Every dog has its day, as they say.