Birdie could cry no more. She was an empty mask. A false face. An existential uncertainty that wobbled along the corridor and impelled doctors to ask the ward sisters who might that person be who was passing amongst them.

She reached the bed, and there, leaning on her stick, she trembled and tried to take a hankie from her coat pocket, which would not come out and she became completely involved in the attempt until Louise pulled it out for her and gave it to her so that she could blow her nose. Birdie had nothing left.

‘Gussie,’ she said. Leaning on her stick at the foot of the bed. ‘Gussie.’

Then she moved to the side of the bed and sat down, and her face looked up at the ceiling and it contorted in a grotesque and silent screech.

Other extraordinary things happened in the days and weeks that followed. Louise read him the letter. That was a moment that took Birdie’s breath away. They were all listening. Birdie and Hughie and some woman in a dressing gown who used to wander in from the female ward every so often to see if there was anything she could do.

And later that night in a fancy hotel on the outskirts of the town, Louise, throwing caution to the wind, and having nowhere to go with the emotion which that letter had released in her, permitted Hughie to unzip her jeans and loosen the clips of her bra and slobber all over her. A man with old withered hands. A man with white, wrinkled flesh as cold as marble. Sweet Divine Jesus, the fucken hussy! His rotten breath already smelling of the grave.

The next day Birdie asked her. Straight out. ‘In the name of Christ,’ says Birdie, as if for a moment she was Louise’s mother, ‘what did you think you were doing last night?’

5

THERE WAS A SMELL of sausages and rashers in the hospice on the evening Gussie was admitted. It was teatime and the whole place felt cozy and homely. Gussie was in a ward, but it didn’t feel like a ward. Each bed was curtained on three sides. They were more like cubicles. And there was plenty of distance between one bed and the next. There were pretty little lamps in different pastel colours on the pedestals beside each bed.

On one side of Gussie’s bed, there was a beautiful young woman, wasted to a skeleton by the ravages of cancer. It was her last few days on earth. She was waiting for the inevitable, she said. And because her daughter was out having chips in McDonald’s and Gussie wasn’t talking to anyone, Birdie found herself chatting to this beautiful woman, who told her she wasn’t afraid to die, with eyes so intense and wide that Birdie knew she was scared out of her wits, but just couldn’t admit it.

She was a bright and cheerful woman who had no bitterness in her heart. She made Birdie laugh when she started asking was her lipstick looking well, and was her hair looking OK. No. Her lips were terrible. They were a fright. They were like something out of a circus. And the few wisps of hair on her bald head were like ragged wisps of sheep’s wool that hang off barbed-wire fences in the country.