Birdie might look a bit strange, sitting up in her big-pillowed bed in the middle of the night, but she’s no daw. She’s not an ostrich. And what young people do now is nothing different from what they did fifty years ago. Or one hundred years ago. Just because she’s old, people think she doesn’t know what young people do on the beach when they’ve had a few drinks. But Birdie knows. The question is did her poor gobdaw of a child know! Or maybe he knew too much? And maybe he saw too much too soon.

Off he went to Connemara, on his own, and though the beach was empty and windswept, he still combed it with a shrill and desperate longing, from morning until nightfall. He walked the long, white strand each day with the stride of a military man alert for enemy ships, his coat flapping in the wind. He continued through June and July. He phoned home a few times but all either of them could say was hello. And then they’d both listen to the crackle of the line and the silence sizzling all the way to Mars and back. She knew that wasn’t good.

He paced that beach like a man demented by atrocities. Like his insides were full of car crashes or burning buildings or mining disasters. Unspoken fatalities. Hidden slaughter. Up and down the beach, as lonely as a cormorant left behind in a storm, and if there were any girls lurking in the region, or within an ass’s roar of that blighted beach, then they certainly made every effort to avoid the long lanky drip of misery in the black coat who paced the shoreline like the ghost of a ship destroyed.

The landlady phoned Birdie at the end of July. She was a young woman with a husky, seductive voice, the soft precise vowels of an uneducated country girl, and a lifelong devotion to Our Lady of Lourdes, and she felt obliged to tell Birdie the truth. And when Gussie was still sitting at the breakfast table in her bright, floral bungalow, two weeks after the phone call, on the Feast of the Assumption, she told him it was time he paid his bill and went away. She just couldn’t bear it any longer.

‘Eight weeks is a long time to be anywhere,’ she said, wiping up cornflakes and spilled milk with her jay cloth. Her that wasn’t anywhere else in her life, except for two weeks’ honeymoon when she was nineteen. In the Canary Islands. And not a nappy or a cot to be seen in her clean little guesthouse five years later. Birdie knew the type. Thousands of babies lost inside her and no permission to mourn, or scream. Just light candles to the Mother of God and keep the house spotless.

‘I mean, what if he had an accident or something? I wouldn’t be able for it.’

A nice way of putting it but Birdie knew what she meant. She meant that if she went into his bedroom one morning and found her floral bedspread stained burgundy red with ten pints of Gussie’s lifeblood, then all the rosaries and novenas she had said in a lifetime wouldn’t protect her from losing her mind with rage. Young woman. Married at nineteen. Two weeks in Tenerife. Doesn’t that say it all?