Not that the fame lasted long. His catatonic state in the hospice was of no interest to the nation. Not much of a story there. Even by the time Louise appeared on the scene, the national interest had moved elsewhere.

At that time Gussie was still in the regional hospital. And she arrived one day out of the blue, and she was told that the doctors were still doing their rounds in the ICU, and so she strolled across the foyer and bought a copy of The Irish Times in the kiosk that sold flowers and chocolates and she sat at the window to read it. But what she didn’t realize at the time was that the tall man sitting beside her, flicking through the Connaught Tribune, was the legendary flute player Dattledo Donoghue.

There they were, the pair of them, for the first time, sitting beside each other, engrossed in their respective papers.

And there was lots of news for both of them. Consternation in Limerick, apparently, at the mysterious death of a cow. And special provision being made by the Department of Education for children who were diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder, which the paper described as a new phenomenon in Ireland.

Louise tried to push herself through it. Page after page. Soaking up the local stories, with the ravenous curiosity of someone just off the plane. And there was a story about wine drinkers. Another new phenomenon. And suntan lotions that might be toxic. And promises of a vaccine for HIV.

– There was a time and it wasn’t too far back, she read, when the plain people of Ireland had crude and unrefined palates. –

Really?

– But all that has changed. There is now official confirmation that the country has transmogrified into a snazzy and urbane land chock-full of Chardonnay-quaffing sophisticates. –

Well, aren’t we just wonderful?

In short, there wasn’t much happening in Ireland in the week that Gussie hit the wall. Now if he had hit the Spar shop on the same day as a bomb in Belfast maybe, or a rocket attack on Manhattan, or an earthquake in Asia, or a building falling down in South America, he might not have made it to the front page. No. He might have been stuffed into the middle bits.

So if Gussie was looking for fame, then he picked the right week to hit the wall, and he had achieved his goal. Not that Gussie was looking to be famous. That’s about the last thing in the world poor Gussie wanted. Drawing attention to himself. But he certainly managed to draw attention to himself in the end.

Louise was too jet-lagged for the amount of anxiety that was in the daily newspaper, so she went to find a coffee machine. Hughie, on the other hand, was chuckling his way through the regional paper, like a scooter eating up a motorway. A tonic he called it. A cure for all melancholies and depressions.

‘Just read the court cases in the local paper and you’d fall around laughing.’