Tommy was a recovered alcoholic who came from Cavan to study something at the university years ago, until the booze and the Galway air sank him without a trace. Then, as if in another life, he re-emerged as a taxi driver in Crosshill. Always happy to oblige Hughie.

Hughie, for some reason, was his favourite customer. He was half the height of Hughie. And half his age. A little potbelly on him, and a black moustache and a bush of black hair. Birdie reckoned that he must have been using the wrong shampoo. There was far too much body in his thatch, so that it looked like a helmet. But men can be told nothing, so Birdie sang dumb.

He was Hughie’s friend. He’d collect Hughie from the cottage.

‘Is it Galway you’re heading for?’ he’d inquire through the rear-view mirror. The same question was posed every day.

‘That’s correct,’ Hughie would say.

And that was the end of conversation until they passed Mountbellew.

‘Not a bad morning,’ Hughie conjectured.

‘It’s not,’ agreed Tommy. ‘But will it fucken last?’

Through Menlough and Monivea Hughie knew where he was, but coming into the city, he could hardly recognize the roads, and the motorways that had been rolled through hills and valleys and swamps and woodlands, flattening all before them.

The fields were dotted with mansions. Two-storey buildings with double oak doors like castles, and ten windows to each façade, with garages as big as small cottages, and long, tarred driveways through green lapis-lazuli lawns. All landscaped with the same Norwegian maples and Himalayan birches.

‘Not a sign of a cow,’ Hughie said to the taxi man.

‘No fucken loss,’ says Tommy.

‘And those gardens. You could play billiards on them.’

‘Aye, but where’s the fucken money to pay for them. That’s the point.’

‘I mind a time,’ Hughie said, ‘when those little fields were nothing but daisies.’

‘Ah but look, it’s a quare fucken road now, eh?’

Then Tommy put his foot down, pressing the pedal to the floor like a man for whom bypasses and four-lane motorways and roundabouts were second nature. Hughie slipped him a twenty-euro note at the hospice door, and Tommy manoeuvred his torso like a sack of potatoes to face Hughie in the back seat.

‘Now I know what’s going on in there, Hughie. Right? And I want you to know I’m here, Hubert. D’ya understand me now? For you and the lady. Right? I’m fucken here, Hubert. OK? Day or night, Hubert. Day or night!’

GUSSIE

1

YOU COULD SAY he was famous for a day. Just after the crash. He was discussed on the radio and the television. The mangled Vectra was plastered all over the following morning’s newspaper. A photograph of Gussie on the basketball court in Kinnegad, smiling innocently at the camera with a sports whistle hanging on a string around his neck, and teenage girls in sports gear hopping the ball and making funny faces to the camera. He was a school teacher. That’s what the papers said. Nothing about the fact that he had been off work for over a year.