The Wily O'Reilly: Irish Country Stories (Irish Country Books)

by Taylor, Patrick

  “Bluebird’s at one hundred to one,” he remarked. “Take my advice, Pat, put a couple of quid on her.” He muttered this as he proffered five pounds to Honest Joe.

  “Bluebird on the nose,” O’Reilly said.

  Honest Joe hesitated. Perhaps, I thought, even a bookie has a sense of decency. Taking O’Reilly’s money seemed about as ethical as selling London Bridge to an unsuspecting antipodean.

  “Bluebird,” said O’Reilly. “To win.”

  The bookie shrugged, took the note, and gave O’Reilly a ticket.

  “Well?” O’Reilly said, looking straight at me.

  I shook my head. Given Bluebird’s dismal record, I’d decided it would have been less painful simply to tear up one of my hard-earned pounds.

  “You’ll be sorry,” O’Reilly growled.

  I won’t weary you with the details of the race. I’ll simply remark that Bluebird, the slowest dog in all Ballybucklebo, obeying Einstein’s laws of relativity, actually lengthened by a good two inches, so close did she come to the speed of light. If I’d taken O’Reilly’s advice I’d have been a hundred pounds better off.

  He chuckled all the way home and made me wait until we were safely ensconced in his upstairs sitting room before he deigned to explain the day’s proceedings.

  “You see, Pat,” he said, “Bluebird really did run on water.”

  I was mystified.

  “Look, the dog fancy aren’t above helping their animals along.”

  “I don’t…”

  “They give the poor things stimulants.”

  “Never.”

  “Oh, aye. That’s why all winners have a dope test.”

  “But if Donal gave Bluebird something, that’ll show up—and you’ll have to give back the money.”

  The aspidistra that adorned the corner of the room grew a good two inches before he stopped laughing.

  “They’ll not find a thing,” he said when he’d finally collected himself. “Donal’s been stopping the dog.”

  “How?”

  “Water,” said O’Reilly. “Good old H2O. Donal’s been keeping the animal dry for a day before every race and then he’s given her a bucket of water just before the start. Slows the dog down—and no one ever tests the losers. Dog finishes last time after time, up go the odds, and then…”

  “Lord,” I said, “that’s what Donal meant by ‘It’s a dry day.’ He didn’t give her the water today.”

  “Bingo,” said O’Reilly. “They can test the wee bitch ’til hell freezes over.”

  “Dry day,” I muttered, thinking of the hundred quid I hadn’t collected.

  “Never mind,” said O’Reilly smugly, heading for the decanter on the sideboard, “we can always have our own wee wet.”

  SEPTEMBER 2000

  A Meeting of the Minds

  The first lesson of general practice

  “Old men forget.” For the life of me I can’t remember the originator of that quotation, but I can recall my first meeting with Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly—classical scholar, bagpiper, poacher, hard drinker, and foul-mouthed country GP—as if it were yesterday.

  Parenthetically, I also do know that loss of short-term memory and clarity of long-term recall characterize dementia, but with regards to dumuntia—I reckon if I can still spell it I ain’t got it.

  Nor had Doctor Fingal Flahertie O. When I met him, and in subsequent years when I returned to Ulster to visit him, his cortical processes would have made the workings of a Pentium chip look like the slow grinding of an unwound grandfather clock. He coupled his mental acuity with an unshakable belief that actions spoke louder than words—which was often just as well. While his actions could be precipitate, his words, when he was riled, could be as cutting as the obsidian knives so beloved by the ancient Aztecs for slicing the hearts out of living victims. Add to that his propensity for salting his vituperations with a lexicon of blasphemy that would have made a sailor blush, and you can understand why Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly was as much a force to be reckoned with as a supercharged bulldozer.

  And yet his patients loved him, and I suppose in time, so did I—although when I first met him, love at first sight seemed about as likely as the survival of a woodlouse under the front cylinder of a steamroller.

  I’d just graduated from the Queen’s University of Belfast. The ink on my diploma where the dean, one Hippocrates of Kos, had made his mark, had barely had time to dry. I was young, idealistic, determined to carry healing to darkest Ulster, wet behind the ears, sanctimonious—in short an inexperienced, opinionated pain in the arse. I had more rough edges than a piece of Precambrian rock. O’Reilly was responsible for smoothing the more jagged bits to something that more closely resembled a piece of emery paper. I will forever be in his debt—but had I followed my instincts when we first met, I would have fled from his village of Ballybucklebo with the single-mindedness of the Israelites on their package trip out of Egypt.

  I’d driven down from Belfast, parked my elderly Volkswagen, and walked along a gravel path flanked by rosebushes to the front door of an imposing three-storey granite block house. I stood on the front doorstep, brand-new black bag clutched in one hand, and read the brass plate affixed to the door frame: “Doctor F. F. O’Reilly, MB, BCh, BAO, Physician and Surgeon.”

  Two bell pushes resided in their recesses in the plate. One was labelled “Day Bell,” the other, “Night Bell.” Above the plate, the mouthpiece of a speaking tube glistened dully in the summer sunlight. As I later learned, O’Reilly had been in practice since before the telephone had reached Ballybucklebo. Patients needing to consult the great man were expected to whisper their complaints along the tube as Pyramus and Thisbe spoke to each other through the crack in the wall in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  I was wondering whether to apply my own mouth to the orifice when the front door opened, much as I imagine the jaws of hell gape for an unregenerate sinner. I took a step backward.

  A large man, a man who stood about six foot thirteen and had the shoulders of Atlas, stood on the front steps. His face was as wrinkled as dried-out chamois leather, his cheeks florid, and his nose tip an alabaster white. His right hand grasped the coat collar and his left the seat of a pair of moleskin trousers on a much smaller man. I noticed that the grabee’s left foot was bare and not altogether clean. The victim wriggled and whimpered, “Ah, Jesus, no, Doctor…”

  Whatever the rest of his sentiments might have been, they were cut off by a high-pitched keening as he was hurled bodily into one of the rosebushes.

  The ogre bent, picked up a shoe and a sock, and hurled the footwear after the now-crash-landed chap. I’ll never forget Doctor O’Reilly’s words, delivered in a voice that would have made old Stentor sound like a sufferer from laryngitis.

  “Next time, Donal Donnelly, next time you want me to look at a sore ankle … wash your bloody feet!”

  He spun on me. “Who are you and what the hell do you want?”

  Immediate transportation to a place of sanctuary seemed like a good idea, but I was so numbed, all I could think of was to hold my black bag in front of me. I suppose I thought it might have offered some protection. The captain of H.M.S. Hood probably felt the same way about his ship’s armour plating—before the Bismark let go.

  “I said,” he roared, “what the hell do you want?” As he spoke he advanced toward me.

  “Doctor O’Reilly?”

  “No. John—bloody—Wayne.”

  I wondered why I didn’t simply mutter, “My mistake,” and make tracks. Instead I swallowed, took my black bag and my courage in both hands, and said, “I’m Taylor. Your locum.”

  He guffawed. “Then why didn’t you say so?”

  Because I’d been feeling like a rabbit confronted by a boa constrictor. Because it wasn’t the cat that had got my tongue, it was a pride of rabid lions. Because …

  “Never mind,” he said, “come on in.”

  His handshake would have done justice to a gravel crusher. Before turning
to go into the house, he pointed an admonitory finger at the heap of human wreckage that was still struggling to disentangle itself from a mass of floribunda. “Go on home now, Donal, do what I said.” Doctor O’Reilly consulted his watch. “Surgery hours are over but if you’re back within an hour I’ll wait for you and Doctor—what did you say your name was?”

  “Taylor.”

  “Doctor Taylor and I will have a look at your hind leg.” He didn’t wait for a reply, but turned and went in. I followed, closing the door behind me. He stood in a spacious hall, beaming from ear to ear, the tip of his nose now the colour of the rest of his face. “Let that be your first lesson, Taylor. If you want to succeed in practice, never—never, never, never—let the customers get the upper hand.”

  OCTOBER 2000

  It’s in the Can

  O’Reilly takes the bait

  My loyal reader stopped me in the corridor of the hospital yesterday and remarked that he still enjoyed his monthly dose of O’Reilly. He asked how I’d developed the ability to conjure up such farfetched pieces of fiction. I could have explained to him too, poor chap, if he hadn’t been running late for his appointment with his psychiatrist.

  My answer would have been that many lower species—and no, I don’t mean Donal Donnelly—have developed remarkable survival strategies. Certain sea slugs, when threatened, eviscerate themselves. In my case, rather than performing repeated seppuku—the Samurai warrior’s do-it-yourself total colectomy—I’d learned to be pretty quick off the mark with plausible excuses when in the company of Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly.

  The need to do so was never more pressing than when Admiral Lord Horatio O’Reilly tried to inveigle me into accompanying him for a day’s outing on the briny deep. You’ll remember that he was the proud owner of a twenty-six-foot sloop. I believe he’d bought the wretched vessel after she’d failed the admittedly low entrance standards to qualify her as a coffin ship during the great Irish potato challenge of the 1840s.

  Once O’Reilly had taken the helm, he seemed to think he was a direct descendant of Vasco da Gama, Christopher Columbus, and James Cook. In fact, his navigational skills were such that if Noah had signed O’Reilly on as navigator, given the reproductive rates among animals, the old patriarch would have been skipper of a pretty crowded Ark and might be looking for Mount Ararat to this very day.

  Since the day when Fingal had piled his craft up on a reef—a reef that was clearly marked by a lighthouse—it had been my avowed intent never again to set foot on his decks. I often amazed myself with my rapid creativity when there was the slightest hint of an oceangoing jaunt. O’Reilly more often amazed me with his uncanny ability to beat me to the punch.

  “What,” he asked, one sunny August Saturday, “do you know about crabs?”

  My mind was elsewhere—probably on a permanent leave of absence. “Not much,” I said. “They walk sideways, have dirty great claws, and live on the bottom of the sea.” The mention of the crustaceans’ natural habitat should have set my alarm bells ringing, but you already know that I wasn’t concentrating properly.

  “Very tasty,” he observed with a faraway look on his face. “Fancy some for tea?”

  I nodded.

  “Come on, then,” he said, heading for the door.

  I followed, neglecting to pay attention to the fact that he was wearing a Guernsey sweater and a pair of corduroy trousers—his favoured seagoing rig.

  It was a short walk to the shops. He surprised me by turning into the grocery store instead of the fishmonger’s.

  “Cat food,” he announced, paying for a can. “Nothing like it.”

  “For supper for us—or for the cat?”

  He shook his head. “No. For the crabs.”

  Somewhere deep in the recesses of my mind a tiny red light glowed weakly.

  “Cat food for crabs?”

  “Bait, my boy. They love it.”

  My cortical red light flashed on and off like the Eddystone Lighthouse. Sirens howled. “Er, Fingal, did I mention I had plans to…”

  “Nonsense, my boy. We’ll have a wonderful time.”

  My heart plummeted like a U-boat in a crash dive.

  “Not on your boat, Fingal?” My hopes were about as valid as those of an early Christian martyr who has tried to persuade himself that the lions in the Coliseum were of a peculiarly vegetarian breed.

  He draped an avuncular arm round my shoulder and, with the gentility of a hydraulic ram, propelled me toward the door. “Where else, my boy? Where else?”

  To have suggested that the innermost circle of Dante’s Inferno held a certain appeal would have been churlish. Besides, his hand gripped my arm the way Godzilla caressed one of his foes.

  * * *

  For once, the seagoing day turned out to be more pleasant than I’d anticipated. I suffered only a minor concussion when the boom and my head came into immediate juxtaposition during a manouevre he referred to as a gibe. When we dropped anchor in the lee of a small island, I was comforted by the thought that the ground tackle’s ability to hold us in position was no doubt augmented by the extra weight it was carrying from the pounds of flesh the chain had ripped from my hands.

  “Marvellous,” said O’Reilly. “Absolutely marvellous. Now. Crabs.”

  He opened a locker and hauled out a Heath-Robinson device of netting and metal struts.

  “Cat food,” he demanded.

  I handed him the tin. He wrestled it into the infernal machine, lifted the thing, and tossed it over the side.

  “Er, Fingal…”

  “Not now, boy. I’m busy.” He was. He was paying out fathoms of rope that I assumed were attached to the crab pot.

  I waited until he’d made the rope fast to the taffrail.

  “Er, Fingal…”

  “Not now, boy. Beer,” he ordered.

  I’d noticed something about the tinned cat food that was surely going to spoil his afternoon, but in the confusion of falling down the companionway, dropping the lid of the ice chest on my fingers, and hitting my head on the hatch cover as I returned to the deck, whatever it was must have slipped my mind—or perhaps I decided to let it slip. I handed him his beer and sat beside him.

  “If you listen carefully,” he said, “you’ll hear the scrabbling of crustacean claws as the little darlins fight to get at the bait. They do love it, you know.”

  I remembered what had bothered me, but said nothing.

  “Mrs. Kincaid will do them a treat. Boiled. Melted butter.” O’Reilly was salivating so heavily at the thought of his upcoming feast that if he hadn’t been consuming beer at his usual rate he would probably have suffered dehydration.

  For one hour he extolled the virtues of boiled crab. I would have been bored by the monologue had I not been given periodic respite by being sent below for more beer.

  “Right,” he finally announced, “let’s get at ’em.” He rose and began hauling in the rope. The bay must have been on the edge of the Marianas Trench. I watched as coils of manila filled the cockpit. O’Reilly’s fluid deprivation was mightily increased by the rivulets of sweat pouring from his brow.

  Finally the crab pot broke the surface.

  “Gotcha,” he roared in triumph, hauling it into the boat.

  The device was as empty as Donal Donnelly’s mind. Not a single crab, not even a shrimp. The cat food can sparkled in the sunlight.

  “Can’t understand it,” said O’Reilly. “Cat food usually works a treat.”

  “I’m sure it does, Fingal,” I observed as gently as I could, “but I think you’re meant to open the can.”

  “What?” he roared, reaching into the trap and pulling out the can, pristine in all its unpunctured glory. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  “Never mind,” I said, probably less than tactfully, “I’m sure Mrs. Kincaid can work wonders with cat food.”

  NOVEMBER 2000

  A Very Pheasant Evening …

  … and another pain in the arse for his lordship

  �
�Thank you, Fingal,” said the only denizen of Ballybucklebo—other than myself—to be accorded the privilege of addressing Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly, MB, BCh, BAO, without using the great healer’s title.

  The patient buttoned up his tweed trousers.

  “My pleasure, John,” O’Reilly said, dropping a rubber glove into a disposal bin.

  O’Reilly had just finished examining the fat, feudal fundament of John Fitzgurgle, DSO, MC, and bar, Viscount Ballybucklebo. Under the circumstances, Doctor O. was in the position to call the great man just about anything he chose.

  “Haemorrhoids, I’m afraid. Sorry, John,” O’Reilly said, his half-hidden smile giving the lie to his spoken regrets. “Here.” O’Reilly sat at his desk and scribbled out a prescription. “Twice a day. Should clear them up in about a week.”

  “Damn,” said his lordship, “today’s Tuesday. Had rather hoped they’d be gone by Saturday. I’m having a shoot. Won’t possibly be able to walk the coverts.”

  “Lots of birds this year, John?” asked O’Reilly with the innocence of a choirboy inquiring after the health of a beloved choirmaster.

  “Rather,” said his lordship. “Mostly in the Leprechauns’ Wood.”

  I saw O’Reilly smile. Mata Hari must have had the same look on her face after she’d extracted some juicy tidbit from a member of the French high command.

  “Lots of time in the season left for you to get a shot or two, John,” O’Reilly said helpfully as he showed his lordship to the door.

  “Isn’t that interesting, Pat?” O’Reilly asked, after the pathetically piles-pained peer had perambulated through the portal.

  “Oh, yes,” I said, trying frantically to guess which night O’Reilly had in mind for using his recently acquired intelligence. I knew I had to have an ironclad excuse for being somewhere else—anywhere else.

  Perhaps the reason for my panic-stricken preemptive planning requires a word of elaboration. For those unfamiliar with sporting life in Ulster or with one of Doctor F. F. O’Reilly’s eccentricities, let me offer an explanatory note.