Bird in the Snow

For Cathy

Contents

Dedication
Title Page
GUSSIE
THE VET
GUSSIE
BIRDIE
HUGHIE
GUSSIE
LOUISE
COMPANIONS
GUSSIE
BIRDIE
Copyright

GUSSIE

1

SNOW IS FALLING like tufts of cotton. Snow beyond measure. Covering the mountains and touching the sky. Falling through the bushes and weighing down the trees. The mountains white and the lakes frozen over. And Birdie, standing in her pale-blue dressing gown and her red tattered slippers, as the snow spirals around her in grainy flecks, like the cosmos coming into existence.

She crumbles the bread as quickly as she can. And before long there are two little robins and a wagtail and three fat blackbirds around her feet. Landing and taking off. Hovering and diving and strutting around her red slippers in the snow. It’s panic stations. The snow is covering the bread as fast as she drops the crumbs. And eventually the little robin, who knows her well, who knows her like a mother in winter, comes and lands on her fingers as she works a crust. And his bravery earns him great rewards. For he can pick enormous chunks from the feast in her hand as he perches on her thumb.

She loves her birds. The grip of their tiny claws on her fingers. The breath of wind as the wings flutter near her cheeks. The peck of a beak on the back of her hand. The cawing and twittering in her ears.

It’s a long time since she had first felt the tickle of their feathers on her nose. That was in Dublin, just outside the train station. She was a little girl. Her father was beside her; they had come up for the day. And as she stepped down onto the platform, she saw dozens of white pigeons making a feathery halo around the silver head of an old lady who was standing in the middle of the platform, her two arms outstretched like Christ on Easter morning blessing the world. A poor old woman, wearing a man’s black coat and laced boots, and smiling a toothless smile at the astonished child.

The old lady asked her if she would like to give the birds some bread, and Birdie pleaded with her father, and her father agreed to a limited experiment. He was a whiskered man from east Galway.

And that was the first time Birdie squealed with delight as the birds landed on her arms and fingers, and dug their tiny claws into her skin. Now she’s over eighty and herself an old woman.

But she can’t delay in the garden. No, she must get back to the house immediately. Not just because the snow is seeping into her bones with alarming speed, but also because today it is her lonely duty to attend the burial of her only son.

There’s always talk at a wake. Everybody gossips about what the corpse looks like and what he died of. Everybody is sorry. And everybody says, what if … As if somewhere in the dark folds of the universe there might be other possibilities. A parallel world where things happen differently.

What if Gussie had stayed at the teaching? Maybe all this might never have happened. What if he had married the long, lanky girl he was doing a line with years ago when he got his first job. What was her name? Louise. That’s right. Louise. And how many years is it since Louise walked out on him? She dropped him like a hot potato. The mourners could talk the hind legs off a donkey. And Louise had lovely legs. Twenty years later, everyone still remembered her legs. They were like a horse’s hinds. They were towers of ivory. And she had long, blonde hair down to her waist.

If only he had signed himself into the hospital earlier. If only he hadn’t signed himself in at all. People seem to love dead bodies, tragedies and smelly things in the wardrobe or under the floorboards. And then they’d say, sure, it’s all for the best. And it could have been worse, they said. He didn’t die in pain. He didn’t know what was happening. And thank God it’s all over.

On they went for hours, as the corpse lay far away in a cold chapel, and Birdie wished she could go out under the dark night sky and dig the grave herself, and throw him into the watery hole of starlight. Just to get it over with. She would tumble her own little baby into the black earth with her own bare hands.

So many people came to shake hands with her. The teachers who worked alongside him for years arrived. The nurses who knew him in the hospital appeared. Father Lee, who kept an eye on him when he went missing, slithered in. Even Louise flew across the ocean. And Birdie was glad to see her standing at the front door, after all those years.

For fifteen years, Gussie suffered from an irritable bowel as they call it now. He taught in St Angela’s Secondary School in Kinnegad and lived in a flat in Mullingar, which deteriorated over the years. The central heating broke down. The curtains fell from the windows. The floor sagged and squeaked. And the toilet was what Birdie described as the Black Hole of Calcutta.

But it was the irritable bowel that held Gussie in a state of emotional paralysis. He lost his only girlfriend before he was twenty-five, and remained frozen in a timeless bubble of sorrow for the next fifteen years. Birdie didn’t know why. At first she thought there would be a cure. An end. A point where surgery or tablets would rectify everything and he would return to the person he once was. He would take up life again. But he didn’t. Nothing changed from year to year. And eventually she accepted that nothing was ever going to change. And she would never really know who her son was.

The irritable bowel can be a hard taskmaster. He never had any comfort. In the supermarket or the post office, or maybe at a filling station, or buying oranges at the newsagents, it was all the same. Even on the few occasions that he went for a walk in the flat countryside of east Galway, or on the plains of Westmeath, where there were neither hills nor ditches for the unfortunate man to hide his shivering bottom. Birdie pitied him. Crowded spaces brought him out in a cold sweat. The classroom wasn’t too bad because he was always able to dash down the corridor to the staffroom, though there was no telling what states of hysterical laughter those young girls reached, on such occasions.

Parent–teacher meetings were a disaster. They were a ritual humiliation. Squirming in front of the local court clerk, Trevor Higgins, with his neat, black moustache, and black wool coat, and his trousers creased like razor blades. Higgins, a posh little peasant with a good job, who spent his summers in the south of France and got his clean, white underpants in a twist of rage and irritation when he had to confront Mr Mediocrity, as he described Gussie.

Gussie never made much progress at teaching Alicia Higgins her irregular verbs. And it was all dragged up at the parent–teacher meetings. Alicia was lanky and as tall as himself, and she was all blushes and shy in front of Daddy, as if butter itself wouldn’t melt in her mouth. As Daddy began tearing strips off the teacher for his inadequacy in the French tongue, Gussie would go beetroot and invariably fart like an officer’s horse, so that eventually Alicia would come close to wetting herself in the effort it took to avoid laughing.

Then there was the school principal, Mr Crosby. He was some tulip. And down on Gussie like a ton of bricks when he got the chance. He used to play rugby. Not blessed with a sense of humour. Enormous lips the colour and texture of dough, which were always squeezed into a zero as tight as a duck’s hole when he was displeased with a student’s behaviour. That was his nickname. Duck’s-arse. Didn’t Birdie have to listen to her son whingeing one night that Duck’s-arse was always picking on him? And what do you mean picking on you, his mother wanted to know. Sure you’re not a student. Aren’t you supposed to be one of the teachers?

Crosby’s face was flat. Something like a lump of dough that someone had fisted. His nose was broken and had never been fixed right. His ears were chewed to their stumps. If you met him in a bar, with a pint of beer and his head shaved to the roots of his follicles, you’d be hard got to figure out was he a policeman or a criminal. But anyone would guess that he was one or the other.

It was certainly difficult to think of him as principal of St Angela’s Secondary School, on the outskirts of Kinnegad.

He could barely squeeze himself in between his glass-topped desk and his black plastic swivel chair. Such weight!

Gussie cringed for fear the seat would collapse.

Then Crosby stared at his keys. He had a lot of keys. Forty or more dangling from a large steel ring. He was like a prison officer. His head lowered. His big fat paws on the keys. On the desk. Tapping with his sausage fingers.

‘I’m a little concerned about some of your days off last year, Mr Delaney.’

‘It’s a medical condition, Mr Crosby.’

‘Arah for fuck’s sake, I know that Gussie. For Jaysus sake, I know. You tell me that every fucken year for as long as I’ve known you. The question is … have you ever seen a doctor?’

‘No.’

Gussie often practised holding on. Tensing up his face muscles. His jaws clenched and his teeth hurting his eyeballs. His legs starting to shiver, as he tried to hold the muscles of his arse closed against that sudden quake and mighty force of his own personal waste. He stopped the car at every turn of the road and did it up against wooden gates that opened on to fields of barley and sugar beet in the middle of nowhere. He evacuated behind ditches of bramble and in forests of spruce trees, in rain and wind, in summer heatwaves, and in the middle of the night at the roadside, with the headlamps of passing cars blinding his eyeballs.

You’re lucky you weren’t arrested, Birdie said to him once. If anyone saw you doing that, they’d probably phone the police.

He even managed it one time in the car park of Dunnes Stores in Roscommon.

‘Ah Gussie. Could you not go into a bar or a hotel or somewhere? Did you not notice that you were in the middle of the town?’

Then there was the food. That didn’t help. About once a year she would chastise him about the debris lying around his flat in Mullingar. The old cardboard containers for frozen pizzas and the tins of processed rice scattered on the worktop. The empty snack boxes from the local chipper stuffed in plastic bags under the sink. There was no end to it.

‘You need a maid,’ she said. ‘And you need to eat vegetables,’ she told him. ‘This place is disgusting.’ He gazed at her in confusion and without comprehension. He was like a beast lost in a fog of solitude, not knowing where the cliff was any more. She often saw that look in him and there was no denying it. He was bewildered. She knew he’d be swallowed up eventually. The fog of his own confusion would win and he’d go off some deep end, like a calf wandering over the side of a mountain. Birdie is in the kitchen. It’s the middle of the night. She’s boiling the kettle. She’s thinking about everything.

Birdie didn’t come down the river on a bicycle. Nor was she born yesterday. And though she always saw the sun and moon shining on the ground where her son walked, there were some odd moments, as the years went by, when her unconditional love could not mask an unbearable revulsion. Especially when she heard about the trouble with the schoolgirl. That was the kind of incident that Birdie could not gloss over. It was not a good sign.

Loitering. No other word for it. Loitering around teenagers. In the quiet corner of a chip shop in Kinnegad, skulking for hours like an unwanted dog, at his age. And he would gaze at all the pretty little schoolgirls, munching their dinners, as his hands trembled on the tabletop. His ears so finely tuned that he could move them with the flexibility of a rabbit as he eavesdropped on their girlie gossip. His breath no louder than the whisper of a sleeping cat, and his heart pounding in his ribcage like a stag in the forest of love. To be so close!

And then one day there was just a single little doe-eyed student sitting there, with freckles and long, sandy hair entwined in a single pleat, and dressed in the neat green uniform of the school where he taught. And she was crying at the table in the far corner. Gussie opened the Daily Mirror in front of his face and then stole a sly peep over the top. Her head had already crashed into the bottles of vinegar and the red plastic container of tomato sauce. There was no one else in the shop. So he went over to her. He always looked like a goose that had gone round the wrong corner in life. Didn’t Birdie often say that to herself?

And in the chip shop the little cherub was trembling, as if some invisible devil had wrenched the tears one by one from her breast with a long hot tongs. Yet despite that distress, she couldn’t but notice the teacher staring into her eyes as if he had seen a fairy dance at the bottom of a well. Her French teacher standing above her, open-mouthed and drooling. That’s what she saw. Or so she said. That’s what the schoolgirl said. Drool.

And gossip travels faster than electricity. I hear your boy is in trouble with the school, her neighbours bleated, when Birdie met them in the church porch. Little women full of mock compassion. The parish as vigilant as a cobra’s eyeball. The streets whispering, Tut tut!

But he was lucky. For weeks the school authorities negotiated with the parents’ solicitors. Birdie never quite got to the bottom of a recurring phrase in the legal correspondence: ‘disputed facts’. She heard Gussie’s version. That sounded innocent enough. But what part of the child’s anatomy did he touch, as he towered over her? Birdie never knew. Whatever the young girl claimed about her encounter in that desolate chip shop, it never reached Birdie’s ears. The parents agreed that an apology from the teacher would settle the matter without further recourse to the law. And that was the end of it. Although in a way it was only the beginning.

2

BIRDIE SITS UP in bed. She’s still awake. She has joined the legion of sleepless old mothers who sit up for hours in armchairs and sofas, on pillowed bed-rests and on toilet seats, in the middle of the night. Mothers staring into the black night at the end of it all, and all of them thinking the same terrible thoughts. Birdie had sacrificed everything for him. She had done her very best to rear him properly. And then when he went out into the world, as broken as a bird with a dead wing, she crucified herself wondering where she had gone wrong.

Sometimes in his childhood years there were long periods when she couldn’t even touch him. If he was upset from arguments in the schoolyard, or lonely because his playmates had gone off fishing without him, she would always tell him to go upstairs and have a bath. That was his little treat. The bathroom was a menagerie of plastic shampoo bottles and bubble bath in the shapes of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, and his bedroom was chock-full of teddies, and furry creatures from every cartoon under the sun because she thought that giving him teddies to hug was the same as hugging him herself.