And now if there’s any letters, Birdie, any letters, that you could read for him. Did you hear that, Birdie?

Oh yes you did. And you staggering from room to room, trying to recall his life, or find something that you could bring with you to show him. But there was nothing at all. The letter from America still lying on the bedroom dressing table. And the television in the drawing room downstairs still quietly shrinking.

LOUISE

1

BIRDIE THOUGHT it was lovely the way Louise appeared. Because someone like that is needed in a tragedy. Someone who is bright and cheerful, and who can take everybody’s mind off the sad bits. And that’s the way it was. There’s no explaining it. These things just happen.

One moment Birdie is alone in the house trying to endure each day’s new burden, and the next moment, behold, there’s Louise, sitting across from her on the other armchair, large as life, organizing taxis, and phoning the hospital, and checking the fridge, and talking away about her life in America. She might as well have come from the moon. It would have made more sense to Birdie.

But at least Louise went out and had a life. No grass growing under that lady’s feet. No locking herself in the wardrobe for fifteen years, or pacing beaches in the west of Ireland. Louise had been dancing in the American prairie. Isn’t that what she said? Dancing with the wolf. A snow queen enfolded in dreams of the buffalo. Whatever that meant.

She had gone out for a summer fifteen years earlier, and then hung on for the winter to do an MA on Kit Carson and the Navajos of Arizona. And finally she stayed on in the university as a tutor and a minor lecturer in a place so cold and white that it was difficult to attract staff.

Where did she say it was? Somewhere in Minnesota? Or was it Montana? Anyway, wherever it was, they were delighted to have her.

They flew her in through snowstorms. Through Chicago. Through Minneapolis. And over long flat fields. A criss-cross of roads in the white wilderness. Granaries and cattle houses, and human dwellings in tiny clusters beneath the plane’s wing. Their shining aluminium roofs glistening in the sunlight. And then she met a Chinaman.

No. She met a Colombian man in a Chinese restaurant. That was it. Someone called Charlie. Younger than her. And smaller too, no doubt. From Bogotá. But Louise asked no questions.

‘I’d be the same in your position,’ says Birdie. ‘Ask no questions. It wasn’t any of your business how he ended up in America. But go on anyway,’ says Birdie.

And on Louise went, giving Birdie chapter and verse on her adventures since she had said goodbye to Ireland’s shamrock shores fifteen years earlier. It was a distraction for Birdie. It cheered her up. It gave her some relief from that terrible hospice.

Louise condemned to scrubbing pots if you don’t mind. Mopping floors. Gutting chickens. Clipping Chinese cabbages. Well, that was a long way from home.