‘Well, I was gobsmacked, Birdie,’ says Louise. ‘Gobsmacked.’

Charlie said he might go ice-fishing on the Sunday morning, and she said sure, because they lived sort of separate lives anyway, when it all came down to brass tacks.

After a while he paid attention only to the television. And during the day, while she was at the university, he would be down in the basement smoking dope.

That night they went to another dinner party, and Louise was sitting beside a woman called Mary, who had curly hair and talked to Charlie all the time if you don’t mind, and said her grandparents were from Ballywhooly. So then Louise said to Charlie that she wasn’t in good form. And maybe she still had the hangover. And so she decided to go home in a taxi and leave Charlie at the mercy of the Rose of Ballywhooly with the twinkling eyes.

To be fair to Charlie, he offered to go with her, but she wouldn’t dream of taking him away from his new friend. Maybe Louise was thinking of Gussie. He was in the back of her mind. So she left the party. But not before kissing Charlie on the mouth. That might induce the curly girl whose mammy came from Ballywhooly as a war bride, to pause for thought, before leaping on someone else’s property.

‘Of course!’

And on the way home that night she kept thinking of the sky and looking up into it. It was so full of stars now. And sometimes in Montana, or Milwaukee, or wherever it was, sometimes the sky there can be bigger than anything else.

3

WELL, THERE WAS ONLY ONE message on her answering machine. It was from her brother in Tuam. He wanted to know what was the name of her boyfriend when she was at college, because, says he, he heard some name on the television that sounded fierce like him. She clicked the machine off and went in to the loo and she was there thinking of Gussie, and would you believe, she fell asleep on the loo seat. Ah now, isn’t that awful! But anyway. There was no sign of her Colombian lover-boy returning the following morning, or even all day Sunday.

So that evening she went out again. This time on her own. What a social life! There was a dinner for members of the faculty club. Harry was there from the Art Department. The dandruff man who had known Rolf Harris years ago. And the boss of the department, a small, frightened man, grey-haired, with a knack of concentrating too hard on everything she was saying, so that she knew he was always thinking filthy thoughts. There was a novelist from Belgium who was teaching a creative writing programme. There was Walter, the old actor with the cravat. And a Californian specialist on Focault with two new hips.

Two! Not just one? No, two.

Fuko?

Pardon!

Fuko?

A philosopher.

Oh.

And apparently Louise got drunk and played the pan pipes very badly. The actor did too many party pieces from Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry, and Louise was so knackered that she hardly remembered going home in the taxi. But she couldn’t sleep.