‘Of course not.’

So an hour later she was stumbling around the kitchen, drinking hot chocolate, and singing Christy Moore songs, because in that hungover condition she always felt fragile. Walking around the kitchen, sipping hot drinks and singing the Planxty songs from years ago was, usually, the solution. It filled a gap. But she felt silly. And it was four in the morning, and there was no sign of the man who was supposed to have gone ice-fishing for the weekend. She was thinking to herself that it was more like an ass hole than an ice hole he’d be fishing in, at that hour of a Sunday night or Monday morning.

‘Sorry, Birdie! Sorry! It just came out.’

And that’s when she wrote the letter.

‘Oh yes,’ says Birdie, ‘the letter.’

That is when she sat down at the coffee table in the living room and folded open an A4 jotter that she used for making all sorts of notes and doodles on, and she took a pen from the notepad beside the phone, and she wrote that letter to Gussie.

And the things that poured out!

‘I read over it immediately and I couldn’t believe it, Birdie. I couldn’t believe it.’

I suppose.

‘I mean it was a love letter. You know that, Birdie. Things I never realized were inside me. It was a love letter, Birdie.’

‘Oh. I see.’

The more she wrote, the more the pen shook in her hand. She was shivering, even though all the central heating was on and the stove was lit, and she was wearing her pyjamas, and a big jumper, underneath a fleece dressing gown.

‘I was astonished,’ says Louise. ‘I knew I had to come home and see him.’

Astonished! Birdie was astonished as well, thinking of the letter lying unopened, upstairs on the dressing table.

COMPANIONS

1

THERE WERE TIMES during those weeks when Birdie thought of only one person. Of nothing else and nobody else. But it wasn’t Gussie. Birdie went to sleep at night whispering his name. And she woke sometimes smiling at the thought of him. Hughie Donoghue. Hubert. Mr Donoghue. Dattledo. Not that many would remember his nickname now.

And during those weeks when Gussie was sleeping his big coma in the hospice, Birdie’s heart was as unfamiliar to her as a land on which snow had fallen. She was so confused that she left everything to Hughie.

Hughie formed all her opinions for her; he made all her decisions. Birdie just listened to him. Soaked him in. She was like blotting paper. She would have been an imbecile without him. He was her staff.

And in her mind she was assembling a detailed picture of her Hughie. Assembling his life from every random detail she could pick up. From all the queries she had for him, about what he ate for breakfast and had he ever fixed up the old cottage with the galvanized roof. Knitting together all the accidental details that dropped from his mouth, until at last, there it was – a perfect tapestry. Her very own private Hughie.