An Irish Country Village

by Patrick Taylor

  O’Reilly clapped Barry on the shoulder. “We’ll see,” he said. “And on the credit side, at least Bishop’s getting on with his job at Sonny’s. We should be grateful for small mercies.”

  Barry heard the hall telephone ringing, Kinky’s voice, and the ting as she replaced the receiver. He watched as the surgery door opened.

  “Yes, Kinky?” O’Reilly asked.

  “It was Myrtle MacVeigh. She says she’s up and running round like a bee on a hot brick, so. She’s better, not to bother calling, and thank Doctor Laverty for them nighties-fer-aunties.” She frowned. “Whatever in the name of the wee man they might be.” She turned to Barry and tutted, “And you, Doctor Laverty, you forgot to collect your corduroys after lunch, so I’ve stuck them upstairs in your room.”

  “Sorry, Kinky.” Barry smiled. “And thanks.” He turned to O’Reilly. “Should we not maybe pop in on Myrtle anyway? Just to be sure?”

  “And so you can revel in another of your triumphs in the healing arts?” O’Reilly asked, but he was grinning widely. “I don’t think so,” he said. “If we don’t go, we’ll have lots of time now before supper . . .” He glanced at Kinky.

  “I’ve crab cakes on the go,” she said, “and if you like I’ll deep-fry some chips.”

  “That,” said O’Reilly, as his stomach rumbled, “would hit the spot.”

  “And you’d have plenty of time to see your rugby, Fingal,” Barry said, quite looking forward to a lazy afternoon.

  “And,” said O’Reilly, “for all the time it would take, we could pay that visit to Maggie you were talking about on Monday, Barry. See how the old girl’s doing, and ask if she has any notions about where Sonny could go until his house is ready.”

  “Why not?” Barry had developed a soft spot for Maggie MacCorkle. He’d enjoy visiting her, and he was curious to see if she could help O’Reilly keep his promise about getting Sonny out of the convalescent home. It was hardly practising medicine but O’Reilly was right. Ballybucklebo did get under your skin, but then so did a certain civil engineering student. He started to the door. “Your car or mine, Fingal?”

  Barry hesitated at the kitchen door. He’d let O’Reilly go first, so if Arthur made his usual sex-crazed charge perhaps his master could stop the animal. He heard O’Reilly yelling, “Come on, Barry. We’ve not got all day.” He could not hear barking.

  Barry stepped out into the back garden. An insistent sun was forcing its light through a thin layer of cirrus clouds, casting the back garden in dappled light and shade. The big chestnut tree, spiky conkers thick in its branches, threw a long shadow. The apple trees bent under the weight of their ripening fruit. Someone had mowed the lawn, and he could smell the subtle scent of grass clippings. No sign of Arthur. Good.

  O’Reilly stood at the open back gate. “Arthur?” he yelled. “Arthur Guinness? Where the hell’s that bloody dog?”

  Barry looked into the kennel. Empty.

  “I’ll kill Donal Donnelly’s brother, Turlough. Kill him dead.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s the one that cuts the grass. If I’ve told him once, I’ve told him a thousand times, ‘Shut the bloody gate behind you.’ Arthur’s got out, and the Lord knows what he’ll get up to.”

  Barry silently hoped that somewhere the big Labrador might find a bitch in heat and, for a change, have a go at her instead of his trouser leg.

  “Can’t be helped,” said O’Reilly. “He’ll be home when he gets hungry. Come on.”

  Barry waited until O’Reilly reversed out of the garage; then he climbed in and resigned himself to another kamikaze mission in the Rover. Something on the dashboard caught his eye. “Er, Fingal?”

  “What?”

  “Should the petrol gauge be reading empty?”

  “Is it?” O’Reilly pulled onto Main Street and headed in the direction of Maggie’s. “Pay it no heed. It’s broken.”

  “Oh,” said Barry, “do you have a reserve tank like Brunhilde?” His Volkswagen had a little lever that, if turned, allowed a gallon of petrol to run from a reserve tank.

  “Not at all,” said O’Reilly. “I never run out of petrol, and if I did I can fix it.”

  “Oh,” said Barry, and he let the matter drop. He sat silently as O’Reilly hurled the car along, finally screeching to a halt outside Maggie’s cottage.

  As Barry got out, he was greeted by five assorted dogs, yelping, wagging their tails, and vying for his attention. He saw Maggie sitting on her front porch in a canvas deck chair. He’d seen her hat before, a straw boater, but today she had sea pinks in the hatband. She rose, toothless mouth open in a wide grin, her weathered face creased by laugh lines.

  “Can you call off the dogs, Maggie?”

  “Och, sure they’re only friendly beasts. Sonny wouldn’t have them otherwise.” Still, she called to the animals and shooed them through a gate into her fenced back garden. “And what brings you gentlemen here today?” She held her hand two inches above her hat. “Them—what do you muh call ’em—eccentric headaches is all gone.”

  “Glad to hear it, Maggie. We were just passing,” said O’Reilly. “We wanted to be sure you were all right.”

  “As rain.” She grinned her toothless grin and asked, “Would you like a wee cup of tea and a piece?”

  “Not today, thanks, Maggie,” said O’Reilly. “We’re in a bit of a rush. Maybe next time.”

  Barry was heartily relieved. Maggie stewed her tea until it was strong enough to strip rust from a cast-iron boiler, and the last thing he wanted was a slice of bread and jam.

  O’Reilly leant against the bonnet of the Rover and fired up his briar. “Actually, we came to ask your advice.”

  “Is it about that wee moggie Lady Macbeth again, Doctor?”

  O’Reilly shook his head. “No. It’s about Sonny.”

  Barry had not thought it possible, but her grin grew even wider. “Sonny? Sure he’s grand. I saw him yesterday. He says to thank you. They’re taking better care of him now.”

  Because O’Reilly asked them to, Barry thought. Asked with all the gentle persuasiveness of a battering ram against a castle’s portcullis.

  “Good,” said O’Reilly. “He’s making a grand recovery, but I think he’d get his strength back quicker if we could get him out of that place.”

  Maggie simpered like a girl. “He’d better. Buggerlugs Bertie Bishop’s fixing Sonny’s roof, and him and me’s getting wed next Saturday. You’ll be there, Doctors?”

  “Oh, indeed,” said O’Reilly, “but the repairs won’t be finished by then.”

  Maggie shook her head. “That doesn’t matter. As long as they will be soon, that’s all that matters. Sure he can move in here for a while, so he can. Even with his dogs and my pussycat, there’s room enough for the pair of us.”

  “I know,” said O’Reilly, “but I’d like to get him out even sooner.”

  Maggie frowned. “I’d take the old goat in tomorrow—haven’t I got his dogs?—but what would people say?”

  “Nothing too charitable,” said O’Reilly. “That’s why I was wondering if you had any suggestions?”

  Maggie pushed back her straw hat and scratched her head. “Maybe Aggie? No. She’s just taken in a lodger. Then there’s Willy McCoubrey, a bachelor man, him with the wooden leg. Farms out fornenst Paddy MacVeigh . . . I hear Myrtle’s on the mend . . . but Willy’s so contentious he could start a fight if he was the only one in a deserted house. Sonny’d go Harpic trying to live with that one.”

  Harpic, Barry smiled. It was a toilet cleanser with the slogan “Clean round the bend.”

  “Do you know, Doctor O’Reilly? I can’t think of a single one.” She frowned. “I hear Willy Dunleavy’s wee girl Mary wants to go and work in Belfast. Get away from that Miss Moloney . . .”

  “I doubt she could be out by Monday,” said O’Reilly.

  Maggie cackled. “I hear if Bishop has his way, Willy and Mary’ll both be out very soon anyway.”

  Barry stood with his mouth slig
htly open. Were there no secrets in Ballybucklebo?

  “So we’re both stumped, Maggie?” O’Reilly knocked the dottle out of his pipe. “I’ll just have to think some more on it. Are you seeing Sonny tomorrow?”

  “In soul, I am.” Maggie smiled. “Will I tell him you were asking for him?”

  “Please, and Doctor Laverty too.”

  “I will, so I will,” she said, “and I’ll tell him you’re doing your best for him. Sure you can do no more.” She hugged herself. “And anyway next Saturday’ll be here quicker than two shakes of a duck’s tail, and then I’ll be Mrs. Sonny, so I will, and you needn’t worry your head anymore about where he’ll be living.”

  O’Reilly opened the driver’s door. “And Doctor Laverty and I will be there to dance at your wedding, Maggie, but we’ll not make it if we don’t get home now.” He nodded at Barry. “Get in.”

  As Barry climbed in, he heard O’Reilly muttering to himself, “Bloody useless. I can’t sway Bishop. I can’t find a place for Sonny . . .”

  “And I can’t get Miss Moloney to let up on Helen,” Barry said gently, and as he spoke, his own worries seemed to fade and he ached for the big man in the driver’s seat.

  All Beer and Skittles

  The Rover’s engine coughed, caught, spluttered, and expired. The car jerked spasmodically forward, and Barry was thrown back and forth in his seat.

  “Holy thundering mother of Jesus Christ Al-bloody-mighty.” O’Reilly wrestled the car into a convenient seaside lay-by.

  Barry heard the tyres crunch over gravel and the squeak when O’Reilly put on the hand-brake. He tapped the petrol gauge and scowled at it. Barry could see it read Empty, and the needle refused to budge.

  “Useless bloody thing,” growled O’Reilly.

  Barry decided it would be less than tactful to remind O’Reilly he’d been warned when they set out for Maggie’s. The corollary to O’Reilly’s first law for patients was equally applicable to junior doctors. “Out of petrol are we, Fingal?”

  “Of course we’re bloody well out. Get out yourself.” O’Reilly dismounted.

  Barry got out and waited. He’d seen O’Reilly in a hurry to see a rugby game before, but never a famished, craving his-dinner, wanting-to-see-a-rugby-game O’Reilly. “Oh, dear,” Barry said. “Never mind. You said you could fix it.”

  He expected O’Reilly to pull a can of petrol from the boot, but instead he walked to the back of the car and unscrewed the cap of the filling port. “You watch this,” he said, unbuttoning the fly of his tweed trousers and standing close to the car. “I’m in a rush.”

  “Be serious, Fingal. Even you can’t change piddle into petrol.”

  “No,” said O’Reilly, “but I’ll let you in on the secret. I had to pull this stunt a year ago on my way to a delivery, and it worked like a charm.”

  “What does?”

  “In this model of Rover the feed pipe to the engine is an inch above the bottom of the petrol tank, so any old muck lies at the bottom and can’t get into the carburettor.”

  “I still don’t . . . ,” Barry gasped. After glancing up and down the road, O’Reilly moved even closer to the car. He grunted, and then Barry heard a hollow, metallic plashing as fluid from above hit the petrol below.

  O’Reilly, one hand in front of him below waist level, said, “The petrol floats on the pish, and enough fuel gets into the engine to give me another ten miles. Plenty to get us to the nearest garage, and once I’ve filled her up, it’s easy to bleed the petrol tank and get the widdle out.”

  Barry’s laughter was drowned out by a rapidly approaching engine noise. He turned from O’Reilly to see a coach turn into the lay-by and stop. Several people piled out to admire the view across Belfast Lough. Over ceramic blue waters stippled with the white of distant sailboats, the lowering battlements of Carrickfergus Castle on the far shore crouched beneath the soft green roundness of the Antrim Hills.

  Most of the tourists were looking out over the lough, some oohing and aaahing. But one, a large, older gentleman wearing a ten gallon hat, garishly checked sports jacket, and mustard-coloured pants, strolled over and stood beside O’Reilly. “Watcha doin’, buddy?” His accent was definitely transatlantic.

  Barry cringed for O’Reilly, who seemed not one whit abashed.

  “Topping up the petrol.”

  “Petrol?”

  “I believe in your country you call it gasoline.”

  “Sure do.” He offered a large hand. “Bud Weismueller. I’m from Texas. That’s oil country.”

  “Indeed,” said O’Reilly, shoving himself back into his pants, doing up the buttons, and accepting the handshake. “Fingal O’Reilly. From Ireland . . . and this is Guinness country.” He screwed the filler cap back in place. “Now if you’ll excuse us . . . ?” He beckoned to Barry, who got in. O’Reilly turned the key, and the engine immediately caught.

  Before O’Reilly could drive off, the Texan rapped on O’Reilly’s window. O’Reilly wound it down. “Yes?”

  “Shoot. I ain’t never seen nothin’ like that in all my born days. Wait ’til I tell Mamie.” Barry thought Weismueller could not have looked more surprised if O’Reilly had simply stared at the Rover and by force of will made it levitate four feet above the ground. “Jeez Louise, you said it’s Guinness, sir?”

  “One of its many by-products,” O’Reilly said with a straight face.

  Bud Weismueller frowned and rubbed the web of one hand across his mouth. Barry thought that he was probably thinking of the money he could make taking bets. “Do you think Budweiser would work?” Weismueller asked.

  “Oh, Indubitably,” said O’Reilly, his face expressionless. “Now if you’ll excuse us?” He put the car in gear and drove away.

  “Work with Budweiser?” Barry snorted. “I doubt it. He should put it directly into the tank.”

  “Why?”

  “Sure it’s nothing but piss anyway.”

  Barry had the satisfaction of seeing O’Reilly wrestle with the steering wheel because he was laughing so hard. They were both still chuckling when O’Reilly filled the tank at the nearest garage and then drove on. Barry had managed to compose himself by the time O’Reilly stopped the Rover in the lane behind his house.

  Barry climbed out and let himself into the back garden. Immediately he was greeted by Arthur Guinness, who, barking joyously, tried to cock a leg on Barry’s trousers. Barry stepped aside. “You could have used your bloody dog back there, Fingal.”

  “Bloody’s the right word. Where the hell have you been, sir?” O’Reilly glowered at Arthur, who instead of cowering, trotted proudly to his kennel and returned with a green Wellington boot. He sat and deposited it at O’Reilly’s feet, the picture, Barry thought, of a gundog making the perfect retrieve.

  “Christ,” said O’Reilly, picking up the boot. “Where in the hell did you get this?”

  “Arf,” said a smiling Arthur, and wagged his tail.

  “Idiot,” said O’Reilly. “Now I’ll have to go out after supper and drive around until I find the other one.” He glowered at the dog. “Into your kennel, sir.”

  Looking suitably abashed, the dog slunk, tail dragging, into his doghouse. The animal had quite a list of distinctly uncanine character traits, Barry thought: satyriasis, dipsomania, and now kleptomania.

  The last didn’t seemed to bother O’Reilly. Grinning, he marched to the back door, calling over his shoulder, “Come on, Barry. I’m famished.”

  Mrs. Kincaid was on her hands and knees scrubbing the tiled kitchen floor, her ample backside higher than her head. She did not turn from her work but remarked, “We’ve had a little accident, so.”

  “Not my crab cakes?” O’Reilly asked. “No.” She straightened up and shoved a wisp of hair from her face with the back of her forearm. “But that cat . . .”

  “What about her, Kinky?”

  She blew out her cheeks. “I told you she loved anything from the dairy.”

  “Yes. The day she tried to get at the butter,�
� Barry said.

  “Well,” said Mrs. Kincaid, “she didn’t try this time. She ate a whole half pound off the kitchen counter, and then . . .” Kinky’s black eyes narrowed. “Then she started to make a noise like a cement mixer, gave one almighty yowl, and sicked the whole lot up over my clean floor, so.” She stood slowly, put one hand in the small of her back. “I didn’t know whether to comfort her or kill her dead, the gadai.”

  “Thief,” said O’Reilly, for Barry’s benefit. “Och, sure, Kinky, she’s only wee.”

  “So,” said Kinky, “are leprechauns, and look at the mischief the little people can get up to, souring milk, stealing babies. I yelled at her and off she ran like a liltie. I haven’t seen her since.”

  Barry could see Kinky was serious about leprechauns. Despite having left her native Cork before the war, she still held on to her country superstitions.

  “As long,” said O’Reilly, “as she didn’t steal the crab cakes.”

  Kinky shook her head. “No. They’re in the oven. Run along now, and I’ll have them and the chips along in no time. And if you see that wee creature, tell her, dul chun an diabhail.”

  “Right, Kinky,” O’Reilly said. “I’ll do that.”

  As they walked along the hall, Barry asked, “What have you to tell Lady Macbeth, Fingal?”

  O’Reilly laughed and turned into the dining room. “To go to the devil.” He picked up the hatbox from where Barry had left it hours earlier. “I think,” he said, handing the box to Barry, “what with you and your cracks about Jesus, me and my scowling at her salad, and Her Ladyship losing her lunch all over Kinky’s floor, our timing in the peace-offering stakes couldn’t be better.”

  “I hope so. I much prefer to see Kinky cheerful.”

  “Do you, so?” Kinky brought in two plates, each with four crab cakes and a pile of chips. “Here,” she said, setting a plate before Barry and another in front of O’Reilly. Rather than dig straight in, Barry rose.

  “And is there something the matter with your supper?” Mrs. Kincaid stood, arms folded.