Well, it was seen again. A day came for the scratch card to re-emerge. And what a day for it to come again!

But then you did sit down at the table in the kitchen and you scratched it with the end of a spoon and sure enough there were no matching numbers or signs. Worthless! Fucken worthless! says you.

And it was in that state of anxiety that you answered the hall door to a young guard, and a lady doctor who asked could they come in and sit down, and you didn’t have to think for an instant. You didn’t have to wonder for a second. No. You had been robbed again.

‘It’s Gussie, isn’t it?’ says you.

The policeman looked at the ground, but the young lady doctor with rusty hair, all knitted into curls with some fancy shampoo, eyeballed you and said, ‘Yes, Mrs Delaney, it’s Gussie.’

Half an hour later you were sitting on the couch in the drawing room staring at the blank screen of the shrinking television and the lady doctor was pouring tea that the policeman had made.

Tea? Would you call it tea? It was tar you could paint the fence with! But say nothing. The poor young guard was happier in the kitchen and he was out of the way. The doctor did the talking. And you were saying how you had put up with a lot in life.

‘Nobody knows the half of it,’ says you.

You wept and the doctor looked at the ground, or her watch, and the policeman opened the door with a tray of rattling cups in his hands. Men can be so awkward sometimes. You stared at him, and for a minute you didn’t know who he was or what he was doing there. And then you said, ‘Guard, would you please for God’s sake take off your hat when you’re in the house!’

In the weeks that followed, you even enjoyed a measure of celebrity. Wasn’t that nice? You were a person again. People spoke to you in the town when you took a taxi in to buy your yoghurt and bread and apples and oranges, and your few bits of meat in the supermarket. People phoned you. And they rang the bell every half-hour of the day. The house was never empty. You were losing a fortune on tea and biscuits. You were so exhausted, you had to ask people to leave.

But then after three weeks the doctors said that the tube was coming out. The machine was going off or something. The swelling in the face had gone down. You could recognize it as a human being. But not Gussie. Nobody could really tell who it was. A white porcelain face. He was in repose. Sleeping. And the doctors required her consent before turning him off. It would be a matter of a few days after that. A few weeks at the most.

Time to gather everybody, they said, but who was there to gather? And as you said to them, it would hardly matter to Gussie who was there. Yes, but it might matter to you, the man with the dicky bow said. You hadn’t thought of that.