‘What made Milwaukee famous has made a loser out of me! Sure I had no money, Birdie. Not a penny, when I went out first.’

Birdie didn’t know what made Milwaukee famous, and she couldn’t understand why Louise kept repeating the same sentence. Some class of a joke over there, she supposed.

Charlie sometimes eyed her from the door of the kitchen, where he cooked large pots of soup in the afternoon, and prepared the meat for the stir-fry dishes. But he found time to help her out. Charlie could cut a dozen cabbages for her, and scrub ten pots. He was a salmon caught in her net.

It was difficult for Birdie to understand how she could claim to be happy in America. With all that skivvy work, as Birdie described it. And her with such a good education. To end up scrubbing pots! Couldn’t get her head round that at all.

‘Oh but, Birdie,’ says she, ‘the great thing was to be away from Ireland. To be sharing boiled rice in the back of the kitchen with a gorgeous boy from Colombia. To be away from Galway and Mullingar, and everywhere else.’

‘I suppose,’ said Birdie.

‘I couldn’t breathe in Ireland. I told him that.’

I suppose.

‘Do you know what I’m going to tell you, Birdie girl? Do you know the history of Ireland is the history of transport?’

Now how did she make that out?

‘Well,’ says she, ‘in the beginning was the horse. Am I right?’

OK.

‘And then there was the bicycle. And then there was the cars. Cortinas. Austin 1100s. Ford Anglias. Datsun Cherrys. And eventually they invented the Airbus, and the green card, and the European passport, and the world was our oyster.’

‘Some of us,’ Birdie said with a grin. ‘Some of us.’

Charlie from Colombia had two jobs. He cooked in the restaurant during the day, and at night he was an electrician in the local radio station. And Louise had two lives as well. Studying in the university library half the week, and cutting cabbages in a restaurant for the other half. With her lovely man. From China. Or Colombia.

And what was he like, Louise?

‘Well, he was a little wiry fellow, Birdie. Would you believe that? With beautiful dark eyes. But not tall. No. When we were standing beside each other, he only came up to me chest. Me breastbone! And he’d say – Dizz eez crazee!” ’

Goodness!

Charlie had a big broad smile and he spoke in little gusts of breath because he was shy about his poor English.

When they finished cutting chickens and chopping cabbages for the weekend, Charlie and Louise would sit on high stools, flicking dollars on the counter, drinking beer and reflecting on the fact that booze was the curse of the Irish.

‘Oh now, that’s the truth,’ says Birdie.

‘Because people had nothing better to do,’ says Louise, ‘and because they didn’t get off this little island, and most Irish people don’t have a clue what is going on in the big world. They don’t open the door and look outside. Do they, Birdie?’