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dudgeon and perspiring, overwhelming confusion (indubitably a consequence of the self-hatred and malignant shame that were themselves the results of his pitiful inaction) that his entire surroundings began to assume a startling, sharp-edged clarity, unsettlingly closer to the states of distorted hallucination familiar to habitual drug users than any feasible notion of tangible, empirical reality. Which explains, no doubt, why, when later that—again moon-washed—night, whilst in Mrs. Tubridy’s bed (for her instructions now extended to include his sleeping arrangements), he awoke to find himself staring directly into what could not possibly have been—but to all intents and purposes, clearly now was—the face of his own mother!
    An enormous wave of sorrow swept through him as he touched his cheek and felt the moonlight play upon it. His mother’s smile too was sad.
    “I know she did a lot of things, Tubridy. But this. This makes me sad, Pat.”
    He repeated each word after her and every syllable that passed his lips was as a rusted fishhook drawn painfully and indulgently from his throat.
    “Sad, Mammy?” he said then.
    “Her lying there. Telling you lies. Because that’s what she’s doing, Pat.”
    His throat dried up hopelessly.
    “Mammy?”
    It was a struggle to utter the word.
    “Telling lies. Once, you know, a half-crown went missing on me. I asked her did she see it. And do you know where I found it?”
    Pat was close to the edge of hysteria now.
    “Where, Mammy?”
    “In her handbag. Hidden inside her handbag behind her prayer-book. What do you think of that, Pat?”
    Pat found himself instinctively grinding his teeth.
    “It’s terrible!” he heard himself say.
    “Not terrible compared to some of the other things she’s done. Did you know she put her husband Mattie in the mental hospital?”
    “Mental hospital?”
    “Poor Mattie Tubridy that was one of the handsomest men ever walked the streets of the town. Couldn’t let him be himself, you see. Why if you didn’t like him the way he was, you didn’t have to marry him, I said to her. And she did not like it! Because it was the truth! What harm if Mattie took a drink, God rest him. The only reason he took it was to get away from her. Just because she couldn’t have a wain, she didn’t have to take it out on him!”
    Pat swallowed and did his level best to formulate the words he feared would elude him.
    “Couldn’t have a wain?”
    He felt—although it wasn’t, or to a casual observer would not have appeared so—as though the skin on his face had been drawn unreasonably tightly against his bones.
    “Barren as Rogey Rock,” his mother informed him. “That’s what the doctor said, although not in those words.”
    Thoughts appeared as randomly intersecting lights in the murkier corners of Pat’s mind.
    “Mammy!” he said. “But are you sure? Are you sure all this is true?”
    There was no mistaking the pain on his mother’s face.
    “And now, worst of all—she’s turned my own son against me. My own son that would not have doubted me in his life. She’s turned him against me too!”
    Something leaped inside Pat when he heard his mother say that, as certain as if a pebble or stone had been cast from a catapult. He clasped her right shoulder firmly with his hand.
    “No, Mammy!” he cried aloud. “She hasn’t!”
    It was hard for Pat to bear the sight of the salt tear that now gleamedin the corner of his mother’s eye. But even harder to bear on opening his own to their optimum width and finding himself gazing no longer upon the mother who had carried him for nine months and cared and nurtured him for so long, but— Mrs. Tubridy! Upon her lips the words, “Paudgeen! What are you doing? It’s five o’clock in the morning!”
    Pat felt the back of his throat contract until it was the size of a small seed.
    “My name’s not Paudgeen!” he retorted angrily.
    “Go back to sleep and no more lip out of you or it will be down to