Gina stretched her face, as if limbering up to speak, but the words that came out of her were scarcely intelligible. Cushla soaked a facecloth in the bathwater and squeezed it as tightly as she could, holding it to her mother’s brow. Gina began listing forward, and Cushla shook her shoulder and placed her hands on the cloth. Keep it there, she said.

You left me … all by myself, Gina said.

Cushla got a couple of towels from the hot press and draped one around her mother’s shoulders. The wash-hand basin was flecked with sick. She put on gloves and began to pick the detritus from the plughole and drop it in the toilet bowl. A lurch of nausea shot from her own stomach, and she dry-heaved, her elbow pumping awkwardly at the flusher.

When it was all cleaned up she filled the basin with warm soapy water and dragged Gina upright and out of the bath. She was swooning, so Cushla put her sitting on the closed lid of the toilet bowl. The blood had not soaked through the cloth and Cushla told Gina to keep pressing. She daubed at her mother’s body with the other towel; that Gina let her was testament to how pissed she was.

Cushla found a plaster big enough to cover the cut and dropped a nightdress over her mother’s head, Gina holding her arms up like an infant. She led her into her room and flopped her on to the mattress, turning her on her side and pulling the blankets up around her. As she looked back from the doorway, something glinted under the bed. She knelt on the floor and pulled out a Gordon’s gin bottle. She began opening drawers, rummaging among knickers and camisoles. There were two empty half-bottles among her mother’s tights. In the wardrobe, she picked up a large handbag. It clinked. She opened the smaller bags and found a quarter-bottle in each: it gave a literal meaning to handbag-sized. They were even hidden among her father’s jumpers. She checked the spare room and found more. Cushla thought of her mother walking down the street to the off-licence in town. How humiliating it must have been for her.

Gina slept, unaware of the evidence Cushla was gathering in her arms. Downstairs, she lined the bottles on the hall table, behind the telephone. She went to the kitchen and ferreted through the cupboards. In the fish kettle in which she had cooked the spaghetti just a few weeks earlier there were five. Three behind the pipe under the sink. Cushla paused, remembering how she’d had to pump at the flusher of the toilet, and ran upstairs to lift the cover of the cistern. A green bottle was bobbing against the ballcock. She removed it and stood at the end of her mother’s bed. A hurstle was coming from Gina’s chest, an almost-snore, heavy with dolour.