The Miracle Man

by James Skivington

  “I knew it!” she said at last in a loud whisper. “There she goes now, and him up two minutes ahead of her.” She quickly untied the strings of her apron, sweeping it from her waist and onto the table. “I’m going to put a knot in her knickers once and for all,” the Winter Cook asserted. “You just see if I don’t.” She began to tiptoe towards the door.

  No more than five minutes later, Mrs Megarrity came rushing back into the room and closed the door behind her, leaning against it and breathing heavily. There was a look of triumph on her face as she said,

  “They’re at it in number twenty-seven, hammer and tongs. The very same room they had to send for Doctor Walsh for them honeymooners last year. I told him a bucket of cold water round them would’ve done the job just as well, but no, it had to be injections. Now, Wee Henry,” she said, grasping his arm and hauling him to his feet, “you’re going to make a ‘phone call.”

  “Me, Mrs Megarrity? Why me?” In his sudden ejection from

  his chair he had bent his roll-up, which now hung dejectedly from his mouth.

  “Because McAllister would recognise my voice. Ye’re going to be the man next door to them, wanting something done about the din they’re making. Come over here.”

  By the shoulder she dragged him trotting behind her as she stalked across the room to where the old telephone was mounted on the wall. “Now, when McAllister answers in the bar, you tell him ye’re in room twenty-five and there’s a racket next door in twenty-seven and he’d better come up right now and do something about it. Have ye got that?”

  “Yes but, Mrs Megarrity, he’ll recognise my voice.”

  “Not if ye put on an English accent, he won’t.”

  “I – don’t think I want to do this, Mrs Megarrity. I mean, I’ve never – ”

  “Look,” she said, catching the little man by the collar and propelling him towards the telephone, “either you ‘phone McAllister right now or ye’ve slapped yer last haddock on my slab!”

  For a man who had never been further than Dublin, Wee Henry’s imitation of an English accent was surprisingly good. Dermot tried to explain that he could not leave the bar unattended, but Wee Henry was very insistent, saying that his headache was being made ten times worse by “the devil of a noise coming from next door”, and he demanded that Dermot do something about it “forthwith”. Wearily, Dermot said that he would come up immediately and put a stop to it, and yes, he agreed that a decent hotel wouldn’t tolerate such behaviour for a single moment.

  When the shouting began, Mrs Megarrity was listening at the kitchen door, with Wee Henry half crouched behind her, as if suddenly overcome by the immensity of what he had done. As it was a warm day and some of the bedroom windows were open, three people strolling past the hotel at that moment also heard the commotion, and much to the entertainment of its occupants, the noise also came echoing down the back stairs to the bar below.

  “You little bitch!” they heard Dermot shout. “I turn my back for five minutes and you’re jumping into bed with somebody!”

  “No, Dermot, listen, it’s not like that.”

  “It’s not like what? You’re standing here in your underwear and he’s just legged it down the corridor!”

  “He never laid a finger on me!”

  “It wasn’t his finger I was on about.”

  There was a pause before Nancy was heard to retort,

  “Well, we know why you could mistake it for a finger, don’t we?”

  There was a chorus of “Ooohs” from the crowd in the bar and gestures of knives being stuck between ribs.

  “Is it any wonder, looking at you. You’re like a beached whale!”

  “Oh, you pig! You told me you adored puppy fat!”

  “Puppy fat, darlin’, not a sack of mongrels!”

  The people in the street and in the bar below and even the Winter Cook and her vassal at the kitchen door, heard the sound of the ensuing slap. “Bitch!” “Bastard!” “Randy little whore!”

  “Oh!”

  In total silence the listeners waited for the rejoinder. “Bloody – impotent old lecher!”

  Breath was drawn in sharply. Someone remarked that the teacher was now ahead by a good length, and in view of the previous remarks, the metaphor was generally taken to be a horse-racing one.

  “Right, get your fat arse the hell out of here. I don’t ever want to see you in this hotel again.”

  “Listen, I wouldn’t come anywhere near you again even if your arse was studded with diamonds – which would be it’s only attraction!”

  Then came the sound of protest from Nancy and two sets of feet walking quickly. Everyone in the bar glanced up at the ceiling as they followed the progress of the pair. Along the corridor, down the flight of stairs to the half-landing, back through the short passageway, shouting at each other as they went. They were heading for the front door of the hotel. Without a word of co-ordination, the occupants of the bar rose as one and moved swiftly and silently towards the two windows of the lounge, those behind standing on chairs or kneeling on tables in order to see over the heads of those in front. Some went to the doorway and lounged against it, trying to look as if they had been there all day. In the kitchen, the Winter Cook and Wee Henry drew back a little from their observation point as the shouting and the thundering of feet on the stairs grew closer.

  Nancy came out of the front door of the hotel and bent over to adjust one of her red high-heeled shoes, which John Breen said later should have told Dermot that she was up to no good. The men in the doorway and at the window of the lounge bar craned forward the better to see this rear elevation, and it might have been thought by some that she lingered just a little longer than was strictly necessary over this adjustment. Then, having taken her keys from her handbag, she turned and walked slowly past the glens Hotel lounge towards her car, exaggerating her hip movements and tossing her long red hair. On reaching the car, the ex-teacher at the Catholic primary school who as a pupil herself had once been one of Sister Monica’s Little Saint Brenda’s in the Legion of Mary, half turned and gave a v-sign to the men inside, who smiled and gave a rousing cheer.

  In the kitchen, Mrs Megarrity gently closed the door and said,

  “There’s a good job well done. That little trollop. Isn’t it well seen what they say? ‘Them that live by the sordid, die by the sordid.’ I think this calls for a wee celebration, eh?” From beneath her apron she drew out a quarter bottle of whiskey, removed the cap and held up the bottle.

  “Yer good health, Wee Henry. And ye can be sure of one thing.” She gave a wicked smile. “Yer secret’s safe with me.”

  Father Burke stared out of the window as he contemplated his future, not only as newly-appointed parish priest at Inisbreen, but as any kind of priest anywhere. The thought of his mother’s reaction to his inevitable disgrace he thrust firmly into the deepest recess of his mind. It was too awful to contemplate. It was now all too clear that this man McGhee was a fraud who had tricked everyone into believing that he had been the subject of a miracle, and this for the worst possible motives – money and self-aggrandisement. That a bunch of gullible natives had fallen for it, he could understand, but that he himself with his trained, analytical mind should have succumbed to this fakery was beyond comprehension. When McGhee admitted that the miracle was a fake, as he surely would, the disaster would be complete. Mrs McKay had managed to persuade him to delay his decision to leave the priesthood, but it was only a matter of time before Bishop Tooley would be on the telephone asking for his resignation. Then his only honourable course of action would be to seek refuge with a silent order of monks, where even the most inquisitive of men would not be able to ask him any awkward questions. Father Burke had a momentary picture of himself with a suitcase, trudging along the road out of Inisbreen in the rain and vainly trying to thumb a lift, with cars swishing past, people laughing behind fogged-up windows. Such a promising future, and now all turned to ashes in his mouth. He moaned and held his head between his hands.

/>   Mrs McKay startled him by coming into the room without knocking.

  “More prayers, Father?” she said briskly. “You might leave a little of the Lord’s attention for the rest of us who’d maybe need it a bit more than yourself.” She set a tray down on his desk. “I’ve brought you a nice wee cup of tea – and a piece of your favourite cake.”

  “Oh – yes, thank you, Mrs McKay.”

  For a few moments the housekeeper looked at the young parish priest.

  “Father Burke, you can’t keep anything from me. I’ve been in this trade too long. You’re still worrying yourself sick over this miracle business, aren’t you?”

  He glanced quickly up at her and then away. It was almost like being in the presence of Mother, and at some of those times he had felt that his mind was an open book to her. Father Burke’s shoulders sagged and he lifted both hands in an attitude of despair.

  “Mrs McKay – there’s no getting away from it, I’ve been a fool. Now there’s nothing else for it. I’ll just have to pack my bags and go – after I confess to the Bishop that the man’s a fake.” He looked up at his housekeeper and smiled ruefully. “I do believe you might just have suggested that possibility to me at the outset.”

  Mrs McKay placed the tea and cake before the priest and then sat down on the chair at the side of his desk.

  “Well, you might be right, Father, you might be right. Who knows. But, did you ever think – maybe it doesn’t matter all that much whether it was a miracle or not?”

  The young priest turned and spoke round a mouthful of cake.

  “What d’you mean, it doesn’t matter? Of course it matters.”

  “Begging your pardon, Father, but the Canon used to say ‘The Good Lord works in mysterious ways’. And if this has strengthened some people in their religion and brought others back to it – not to mention putting a bit of extra money in the plate – well, maybe that’s not such a bad thing – whatever it was.”

  “But – Mrs McKay, you were dead against the whole thing from the beginning.”

  “Oh, I know I was, Father, I know. But I’ve been giving it some thought. And anyway, that was then. This is now. The Canon would say you’ve got to go from where you’re at.”

  “The Canon was obviously full of handy little sayings. Mrs McKay, what are you suggesting? That we turn a blind eye to fraud?”

  “Not exactly, Father. Not exactly. And of course, we don’t know that for sure. I mean, you could go ahead and denounce the whole thing as a fake and that you’d made a terrible mistake, been taken in by an old eejit like Limpy McGhee. You could do that, Father. Tell the parishioners – tell the Bishop – let all the newspapers and television know. But, whatever you or anybody else says, at the end of the day the people’ll make up their own minds, and there’s nothing any of us can do about that. Because there’s people out there, Father, who are getting some kind of – well – comfort out of this. They maybe need to believe in it, you know?”

  Mrs McKay shrugged and looked into the soft brown eyes that were now regarding her with rapt attention. Father Burke sighed and said,

  “There is a certain logic in what you say, Mrs McKay. I can’t deny that. If people want to believe in it – if it strengthens their faith – then no doubt they will, regardless of what the Church says.”

  “And then, Father – wouldn’t that be a kind of miracle itself?”

  Father Burke slowly nodded.

  “I daresay anything that gave the people of Inisbreen a greater faith in God and made them attend Mass more regularly could be described as verging on the miraculous, yes.”

  “And you wouldn’t want to be the one standing up and saying they were all wrong, Father, now would you? Especially if there was no evidence to the contrary.” Mrs McKay shifted her gaze to the window and through it to the sunlit field where some cattle clustered around a drinking trough. “And the Bishop had given it his approval.”

  “The Bishop, given his approval? I hardly think in the circumstances – ”

  “If he did, Father. I mean, if he – visited the Mass Rock site, for instance. That sort of thing.”

  “Mrs McKay,” the priest said with a smug little smile, “I do believe I have some powers of persuasion – otherwise I would hardly have followed this vocation – but at this juncture, given what has unfolded, I don’t think that even I could persuade the Bishop of Down and Connor to come and visit the Mass Rock, far less give it his official approval as a possible miracle site.”

  Again the housekeeper looked away from Father Burke and out through the window her eyes following the road between the hills that led to Ballymane and eventually to Belfast.

  “Maybe not, Father,” she said slowly. “Maybe not. But there might be somebody else that could.”

  chapter eighteen

  Mr Pointerly had been walking up the village street early on Friday afternoon when, much to his surprise, the little fat fellow with the cap pulled down over his eyes swaggered – or perhaps it was staggered – over to him and said that there was going to be a party at his house on Saturday night “with a few of the boys”, and he was welcome to come along. Of course, he had accepted with alacrity, imagining all sorts of delights awaiting him when he got there, and for the rest of that day and most of the Saturday, he could think of little else. When had he last been to a party with “a few of the boys”? Probably not since that time in London, years ago, when someone had recommended that he go to a bar near Covent Garden – the “Gay Hussar” was it? – and he had met a nice young man who had invited him to a party in a house nearby. But it had been a dreadful affair, all dim pink lights, cheap wine and people dressed in the most outlandish clothes imaginable. What with the lipstick, the rouge and the coloured hair, the whole thing had reminded him of nothing so much as a circus. One of them, who must have been all of sixty and was wearing a sequinned dress and a pearl choker, had said, “Irish, darling? I didn’t know there were any of us left over there. I thought Saint Patrick had banished all of us with the snakes.” Now Mr Pointerly was striding out along the road to Pig Cully’s house, in the expectation that this party would be a more gentlemanly affair than the last one and conducted with suitable decorum.

  If Limpy was feeling any sadness at the absence of Cissy Garrison, then he was certainly keeping it well hidden. In Pig Cully’s house, hastily cleaned for the occasion, Limpy and his two joint hosts had worked their way through a crate of stout and the best part of a bottle of Bushmills by the time the first guests arrived. In the large living-room where the event was being held, the sideboard was covered with bottles containing alcohol of every imaginable type, whilst the table beside it attested to the fact that the Inisbreen Stores had been cleaned out of cakes, buns and pastries. Frank Kilbride had seldom had such an opportunity to get rid of old stock. In the corner, Cully had set himself up to play a selection of records, ranging from old seventy-eights of Dame Nelly Melba and Count John McCormack to a whining Country and Western singer who sounded, Limpy declared, “as if he had his bollicks caught in a gin-trap”.

  After an elderly couple, whose idea of a good night was mugs of cocoa and a few hands of gin rummy at home, there arrived the two saturnine Burns brothers with their tanned leather faces and white bald heads. They merely nodded in reply to Limpy’s greeting, took a whiskey each and found places near the corner, where they sat in silence, staring and sipping. Pig Cully looked around the room, shook his head and said,

  “A real humdinger of a party.”

  Suddenly the record on the radiogram struck up with “After The Ball Was Over”. Ignoring the irony in this, Limpy marched over to Dan Ahearn, bowed deeply and said in a tone of exaggerated politeness,

  “Would you care for to dance, Mr Ahearn. I kept this one specially for you.”

  “Well jeez-o, Mr McGhee, very nice of you to ask, I’m sure,” Dan Ahearn replied in kind. “I don’t mind if I do.”

  And so the two men, grasping each other like wrestlers, stumbled off around the floor, more
or less in time to the music. Pig Cully poured himself another drink, shook his head and pulled his cap further down over his eyes.

  “D’ye come here often?” Dan Ahearn asked.

  “Naw, only in the mating season.”

  “And what d’you think of the band?”

  “Oh, they’re awfully good. Yer man there playing the scratches is marvellous.”

  “Excuse me.”

  “Why, what’ve ye done?”

  “No, excuse me,” the voice said, and a hand tapped Dan Ahearn’s shoulder. It was Mr Pointerly, who had just arrived. “This is an excuse me, isn’t it?” He beamed at Limpy. “I thought you and I might have a little – “ He made a walking movement with his fingers.

  “Ah – Mr Pointerly. How did ye – know about the party?”

  “Oh, your friend over there – Mr – Tully, is it? He told me I’d be very welcome. ‘A few of the boys’, he said.” Mr Pointerly gave a smile and a little wave to Pig Cully across the room, while behind Mr Pointerly’s back, Limpy shook a fist at Pig Cully.

  “My dear Mr McPhee,” Mr Pointerly said in a confidential whisper, “I really must apologise for what happened the other evening – in the hotel. I believe I interpreted your note a little too literally.”

  “My – note? Oh – yes. Well, don’t you worry about it, Mr Pointerly. At least now ye know I’m not a horse’s hoof, like yerself.”

  “Oh. I – well, I thought when I saw you dancing with – “ He indicated Dan Ahearn, who stood looking at them vacantly.

  “Ah no,” Limpy chuckled, “that was only a wee joke to make Mr Cully there jealous. I’m straight as a die myself.” Limpy leant close to Mr Pointerly and was subjected to the full force of his after-shave lotion, which Dermot said retailed in the Inisbreen Stores at a quid a gallon, ten percent discount if you brought your own bucket. Limpy appeared to gasp with excitement. “Mr Cully over there, he’s yer man, Mr Pointerly. Keen as mustard, he is. But shy, Mr Pointerly, shy. Needs the experienced touch, if you get my meaning.”