An Irish Country Christmas (12 page)

Barry had parked Brunhilde by the kerb of Comber Gardens in the housing estate. He’d found an empty space between other parked, older-model cars. One he reckoned had to be twenty years old if it was a day.

He grabbed his medical bag, got out, closed the car door, and turned his coat collar to the bitter blast. The wind behind him whipped the tails of his raincoat past his legs, and the material was chilly against the backs of his calves. He was outside Number 19, and with the system of odd-numbered houses on one side of the narrow street, even numbers on the other, there were only five narrow terrace houses between Numbers 19 and 31, his next port of call.

He strode rapidly but not rapidly enough. He was overtaken by dead leaves and fish-and-chip wrappers being bustled across the footpath’s badly laid paving stones. He almost tripped where one concrete slab had ridden up like some urban tectonic plate over its neighbour. Typical, he thought, of the shoddy workmanship of Councillor Bertie Bishop, whose work crews had built the estate.

Barry stopped in front of Number 19, where Kieran and Ethel O’Hagan lived. He lifted the cast iron knocker and let it fall. One sharp knock was all it took to get Ethel to the door. The couple would have been waiting for his arrival, and although she was more than eighty, Ethel had the quick, bustling movements of a much younger woman. “Come on in, Doctor, out of that. It would founder you, so it would.”

“Thanks, Ethel.” Barry stepped into a narrow hall, and as the front door was closed behind him he shivered. It wasn’t much warmer in
here than it was on the street. That would account for why Ethel O’Hagan was wearing a heavy sweater, a knitted bonnet, and woolen gloves with the fingers cut off. Not only did Bishop’s workmen lay bloody awful footpaths, they hadn’t a clue about proper insulation of brick walls or such niceties as double glazing. Finding central heating in a Bishop-built house would be as likely as finding an orangutan perched on top of the Ballybucklebo maypole.

“Kieran’s in the kitchen.”

Barry followed Ethel. The last time he’d been in this house, poor old Kieran, who was suffering from benign prostatic hypertrophy, had been experiencing an episode of acute urinary retention. He’d had his surgery in September and had made a complete recovery. Kinky had said today’s call was something to do with the man’s finger, and Ethel didn’t want to take her elderly husband out in the gale.

The kitchen was small and snugly heated by a wall-mounted gas fire that popped and spluttered and threw out a cheering warmth. Kieran sat on a simple wooden chair beside a cleanly scrubbed pine table. A saucepan simmered on the stove. The window in the back wall was covered with chintz curtains.

Ethel loosened the strings of her bonnet, took off her gloves, and filled a kettle from a single tap over the porcelain sink. “Would you like a wee cup of tea in your hand, Doctor?”

Barry smiled. The cup of tea. It had to be offered, but no offence would be taken if it were to be declined. God, if he accepted a cuppa in every house where he called, his tonsils would be as well afloat as Noah’s ark. “No thanks, Ethel, but you go right ahead.” Barry took off his raincoat and folded it over a chair back. Then he asked, “So Kieran, how’re the waterworks?”

The man’s old, lined face split into a huge grin. “You know the waterfall at the head of the Bucklebo River, sir?”

Barry nodded. “I hear there’s big trout in the pool under it,” he said with a grin.

Kieran chuckled. “Ever since my operation, Doctor, I’ll give that pool a run for its money. I’m pissing like a stallion. I could fill a lake for a whale.”

“I’m delighted,” Barry said, now openly laughing. “Now, what’s the bother today? Kinky said it was your finger.”

“My thumb.” Kieran held out the offending digit. “Herself wanted a hook driven for to hang some Christmas decorations. Would you look at that?” He stuck his left thumb under Barry’s nose.

Barry could see purple discolouration of at least half of the nail bed.

“I hit it a right dunder with the hammer, so I did.”

“I can see that.” Barry held the thumb gently and inspected it. The joints were knobby with the arthritis of age, but they did not seem to be displaced. “Can you bend it, Kieran?” He did without great difficulty. “I don’t think any bones are broken,” Barry said.

“That’s a mercy . . . but it’s throbbing away like a Lambeg drum, so it is.”

“It’s the blood under the nail. It’s a huge bruise, Kieran. I’ll let it out for you, and it’ll feel much better.” He turned to Ethel. “Have you a soup plate?”

“Aye.” She left the kettle on the stove and went to a cupboard.

While Ethel was fetching the plate, Barry opened his bag and took out a bottle of Dettol disinfectant, some cotton swabs, a prepacked sterile scalpel, and a roll of Sellotape.

“Can I wash my hands in the sink?”

“Aye, certainly,” Kieran said, eyeing the scalpel blade, which was clearly visible through the transparent packaging.

Barry washed his hands and shook most of the water off. He didn’t bother drying them. He didn’t need dry hands, and he didn’t want to waste the prewrapped sterile towel in the bag.

“Can you give me a wee hand, Ethel?”

“Yes, sir, and here’s your nice clean soup plate,” she said, crossing the linoleum-covered floor.

“Just set it on the table beside Kieran.” Barry noticed how the plate’s glaze glistened in the rays from the single overhead sixty-watt bulb. When Ethel said “clean,” she meant thoroughly scrubbed. Her housing might be verging on being a slum, but it would not stop Ethel O’Hagan being a tidy housekeeper. “Kieran, hold your hand over the
bowl, and Ethel, unscrew the top of that bottle . . .” He nodded to indicate the Dettol. “Now pour some over Kieran’s thumb.”

She did, and Barry’s eyes were stung by the strong fumes of the disinfectant. “Right, Ethel, one last job. Can you open the package the scalpel’s in?”

She looked puzzled.

“Take each side between your one finger and thumb, and pull.”

She followed his instructions, and Barry had no difficulty removing the surgical knife. “Now, Kieran,” he said, “I’m going to cut a wee window in the nail.” Before Kieran could object, Barry seized the thumb in the ring of his own left thumb and index finger and used the pointed scalpel blade to cut a small rectangle in the nail over the bruise. In a second the piece of now free nail was lifted and dropped in the bowl, and the dark old blood beneath welled up and dripped over the side of Kieran’s thumb.

Kieran whistled, then said, “Boys-a-boys, that’s powerful. The throbbing’s stopped already.”

“It’s because the pressure’s been relieved.”

“Just like a safety valve on an engine,” Kieran said wide-eyed, and whistled on the intake of breath. “Modern science is a wonderful . . . a wonderful . . . thing.”

“Hold your thumb there.” Barry wrapped it in a cotton swab and used the adhesive Sellotape to bind the swab in place. “A week or so and it’ll be good as gold . . . but you’ll probably eventually lose the nail, and it’ll be a while before a new one grows back.”

“Och, well,” said Kieran, “sure I’ll just ask Santa for a new one for Christmas.” And he laughed.

“I’ll wash the soup plate,” Ethel said, as the kettle started to whistle on the stove. “Are you sure, Doctor, you’ll not have a wee cup?”

Barry shook his head. “I’ll just wash my hands again and be running along. I’ve another call to make.”

“No rest for the wicked, eh, Doc?” Kieran asked.

“None,” Barry said, drying his hands on the towel Ethel offered. Then he shrugged into his coat. “Can you bring him in tomorrow, Ethel, if the weather’s warmer, and I’ll change the dressing?”

“Aye.”

“Good. Now you two enjoy your tea. I’ll see myself out.” And so saying, Barry left the cosy kitchen and walked down the chill hall and out through the front door into the teeth of a blast that must have started its life somewhere north of Spitsbergen.

His next call was six doors down, and on a warmer day he would have enjoyed the chance to stretch his legs and take in the atmosphere of the neighbourhood. Today, though, he hurried, the wind pushing at his back. The narrow street usually echoed with the high-pitched cries of children at play: boys in short pants swinging on ropes tied to the lamppost; boys noisily trundling old, tyreless bicycle wheels along the road, guiding them with bent pieces of wire and rolling along with roller skates clamped to the soles of their boots; girls skipping rope, chanting, “One potato, two potato, three potato, four . . .”; others hopping over the hopscotch squares that were chalked on the paving stones. But not today. It was far too cold.

Barry stopped at Number 31, knocked, and waited, stamping his feet, his shoulders turned to the wind.

O’Reilly had made the first call here ten days ago to see the tenant’s nine-year-old son. The little lad had been one of the many cases of upper respiratory infection in the village. Barry had visited four days ago, and young Sammy had seemed to be well on the mend. But today Kinky said the mother felt he’d had some kind of relapse.

The door was eventually opened by a woman he knew to be twenty-eight. But the dark rings under her eyes, her complete lack of any makeup, and her barely combed, lank brown hair made her look at least forty. It was a shame, because Eileen Lindsay was usually a pretty young woman, and, O’Reilly had told Barry, she had shown courage and independence when her husband scarpered to England two years ago. “Come in, Doctor Laverty.” Her voice was listless, and she stifled a yawn, brushing back a few strands of hair with the same hand she’d used to cover her mouth.

Barry followed Eileen into the hall, where his nostrils were assailed by the smell of boiled cabbage.

“Thanks for coming, Doctor Laverty.” She stepped aside to let him
into a hall that was an identical twin of the one he had just left—and equally chilly. “Sorry to drag you out on a day like today.” She closed the front door. “Sammy’s upstairs. I don’t like this rash he took last night.”

Barry looked at the bags under her eyes. “And were you up with him all night, Eileen?”

She nodded.

“Why didn’t you send for me?”

“Och, sure, but it was only a wee rash. No need for the pair of us to lose a night’s sleep, and you might have had something important to do, like delivering a baby or something.”

Barry shook his head. Countryfolk. “That was considerate of you, Eileen, but if you are worried about anything you should call.”

“Go on, Doctor, sure I told you it’s only a wee rash.”

It was the wrong time of the year for most of the diseases of childhood that were usually accompanied by rashes, but with the history of an earlier chest infection Barry was already halfway to formulating a diagnosis.

“Let’s go and have a look at him,” he said, “but next time call. Please.”

“I will,” she said, but he knew by the tone of her voice that she would not.

Barry followed her up a narrow uncarpeted staircase onto a landing and into a small bedroom where there was barely room to move between a single bed and a set of bunk beds. “The tribe usually all sleep in here, but I’ve Mary and Willy in with me while Sammy’s sick,” she said.

Barry knew that Eileen had three children, and that she did a remarkable job rearing her little family on her pay as a shifter at the Belfast linen mills. It was hard physical work, running up and down between the thundering looms replacing empty bobbins with full ones. A lot of millworkers developed hearing loss from the constant assault of the thunder of the machinery on their unprotected ears.

Sammy lay in the single bed. He was a tousled-haired boy, and Barry could see at first glance how his head lay on the pillow, hardly moving, and how the lad’s blue eyes were dull. “How are you, Sammy?”

His voice was soft and slow. “My knees and ankles is achy, Doctor, and I’ve bumps all over me like a seed potato.”

“Is that so?” Barry smiled at the image. “Seedy spuddy knees? Is that what I’ve to call you? Like your other fella, ‘Skinnymalink melodeon legs, big banana feet’?” Barry tossed his head from side to side as he chanted the words of a favourite children’s taunt for someone with long thin legs.

“Away on, Doctor Laverty. Away on and feel your head.” Sammy managed a weak smile. “My legs isn’t that skinny.”

“I’m only pulling your leg,” Barry said, admiring the child’s spunk. He sat on the edge of the bed and took the boy’s pulse, noting also that the skin was cool and dry and that the pulse rate was normal. He turned to Eileen. “How’s Sammy’s chest been, Eileen?”

“Grand for the last two or three days, so it has. I was going to let him go back to school, but . . .” He saw her shrug and the way her lips pursed.

It didn’t take a genius to know what she was thinking. She had had to stay at home to nurse him. The effect on the family finances would be noticeable. At the first visit O’Reilly had given her a certificate, which Barry had renewed and would again renew today, but the pittance paid by the state was a great deal less than her wages would have been. Barry sighed. It was frustrating; maybe, after he’d got on with the technical doctoring, he could try to think of a way to help out a bit. That’s what O’Reilly would do. “Let’s have a listen. Sit up, Sam,” he said.

The boy sat, with a bit of help from Barry supporting his shoulders. Barry lifted his pyjama jacket. There was no sign of a rash on the boy’s skin. Another clue. The chest was moving easily; the respiratory rate was normal. “Deep breaths.” Barry listened through his stethoscope, moving it from lung base to lung base. No rustling, no cracklings, just the gentle sounds of air moving in and out of the lungs. Good. “Now,” said Barry, “lie down, Sammy, and roll over onto your tummy.”

The boy did as he was told. He smiled at Eileen and nodded his head toward the door. Little lads could get embarrassed when their pants were pulled down, even in front of their own mothers.

Her eyes widened but she withdrew.

Barry eased the pants of the boy’s pyjamas down, and as he expected saw the hives of what his textbook referred to as an “urticarial rash” on the buttocks and backs of the thighs and calves. In a day or two, if his diagnosis was right, the hives would have been replaced by dark, flat purplish areas, the classical “petechial rash.”