An Irish Country Doctor (7 page)

Barry took a deep breath and hoped that the queasy feeling in the pit of his stomach would pass. At least, he tried to comfort himself, they'd soon come to the end of The Straight, and O'Reilly would have to slow down.

And he did, slightly. The car rocked as it headed into the next curve.

"Exhilarating," remarked O'Reilly. "Bloody marvellous. I love that bit of road."

"Poop, poop," Barry muttered under his breath, as he had a sudden vision of Mr. Toad of Toad Hall roaring through the English countryside, in a stolen car.

"Not far now," said O'Reilly, turning into a lane. "Over the Ballybucklebo Hills and home." He glanced at his watch. "Ten minutes to the second half."

He drove steadily, under elms with leaf-laden boughs that blocked the sun and gave the lane the sombre dignity of an old church, past drystone walls that bordered the lane and set the boundaries of little fields where sheep and cattle grazed and yellow flowered whin bushes stood bold against green grass. The car crested a rise. Below, Barry saw Ballybucklebo, where the edges of the village straggled up the hillside and the railway line--he would take the train to Belfast as soon as he was free--and the houses and terraces of the centre of the village clustered round the maypole. He noted the single traffic light and the road past it that O'Reilly said led to the seashore. Above the dunes and silver scutch grass, a flock of white birds wheeled and dipped, then flew out over the whitecapped waters of the lough.

A single freighter butted through the chop, making its way to the port of Belfast, and past its bow he could make out the gantries of the Harland and Wolff shipyard. They stood proud against the backcloth of industrial haze that hung over the city and stained the sky as it drifted to the Knockagh Memorial obelisk, a granite finger on the crest of Cave Hill.

He wound down his window and breathed the clean country air. 

From overhead he heard a skylark, and from a field nearby the rattle of a corncrake; the classical music and the rock and roll of the bird world, he thought. The car passed the first outlying cottage.

"Nearly home," said O'Reilly.

"Home?" For you all right, Doctor O'Reilly, Barry thought, and yet will it be for me?

O'Reilly stole a sideways glance at his passenger. "Aye," he said quietly, "it is. Just around this bend and past the light." He turned the corner onto Ballybucklebo's main street and braked behind a red tractor waiting for the light to change. Barry thought there was something familiar about the tractor's driver. He'd seen that angular form and shock of ginger hair somewhere.

The light turned to green, and presumably to encourage the driver ahead, O'Reilly blew his horn. The tractor driver turned in his seat. Barry recognized the cyclist who had given directions at Six Road Ends and who, at the mention of Doctor O'Reilly, had fled. Now the bucktoothed youth stared through the car's windscreen, shuddered, turned back--and stalled the tractor's engine. The light flashed back to red.

"Bugger it," said O'Reilly. "Get a move on."

The tractor's starter made a nurgley-nurgley-nurgley sound, but the engine didn't catch.

Green went the light.

Nurgley-nurgley-phut went the starter.

"Damnation," went O'Reilly.

Red went the light.

The starter's note rose two full octaves, nurgling and phutting to no avail.

Green went the light. Barry looked behind. A line of cars and lorries stretched up the main street. More horns started to blow.

O'Reilly got out as the light changed back to red. He strode up to the tractor. As green once more appeared ahead, Barry heard O'Reilly's bellow over the rumbling of engines and the honking of horns.

"Tell me, Donal Donnelly, you miserable apology for a human being, tell me so I'll understand . . . was there a particular shade of green you were waiting for?"

Barry changed out of his muddy best pants and shoes as soon as they arrived at O'Reilly's house, and then joined him in the upstairs lounge to watch television. The Ireland under-twenty-three rugby football squad had beaten the Scots.

He finished the last of Mrs. Kincaid's cold lobster salad and put the plate on a coffee table beside his armchair.

O'Reilly belched contentedly, stared through the bay window, and said, "She's a dab hand in the kitchen is Kinky." 

"Agreed." The cold meal had been delicious.

"Don't know what I'd do without her." O'Reilly wandered over to the sideboard. "Sherry?"

"Please."

Barry waited as O'Reilly poured a small sherry for him and a gargantuan Irish whiskey for himself. "Here." He gave the sherry to Barry. "Seems like she's been with me forever." He sat in his armchair. "I'd not have the practice if it hadn't been for Kinky." 

"Oh?"

"I came here in nineteen thirty-eight, assistant to Doctor Flanagan. Crusty old bugger. I was just out of school, reckoned I was no goat's toe, and he was pretty out of date, and I'll tell you, some of the things he did were very unorthodox, even for back then." 

"Really?" Barry hoped that his smile would go unnoticed.

"His big concern . . . he warned me about it. . . was a strange condition that he'd only ever seen in Ballybucklebo. Cold groin abscesses."

 "What?"

"Cold groin abscesses. He said he saw a lot of them in labouring men. He always lanced them."

 "He did surgery here, in the village?"

"GPs did before the war. That's all changed now. We have to refer surgical cases to the hospital. Maybe it's for the best. . . the last time I took out an appendix was on the old Warspite." He took a long pull on his drink. "Anyway, 'Cold groin abscesses,' says Flanagan to me, 'when you lance them, you never get pus. Just wind or shit. . . and the patient dies about four days later." 

Barry sat bolt upright. "He thought inguinal hernias were abscesses?" 

"He did. And when he sliced into the rupture he always cut into--" 

"The bowel. Good God. What did you do?"

"Tried to suggest to him that maybe he didn't have it quite right."

 "And?"

"I only ever tried to correct Doctor Flanagan that once. You've no idea how cantankerous some old country GPs could be, and I needed the money. Jobs were hard to come by back then." 

"Not like today," Barry said, holding his glass to his lips to hide his expression. "I'm surprised you stayed." 

"I didn't. I volunteered for the navy as soon as war broke out."

 "What brought you back?"

"When the war was over I'd had enough of the navy, so I wrote to Doctor Flanagan. I got a letter back from his housekeeper, Mrs. Kincaid, to say that he'd died and the practice was up for sale." 

"You bought it?"

"You had to in those days, and I had my gratuity as an ex serviceman. That, and a bank loan, bought me the house and the goodwill of the practice and Mrs. Kincaid agreed to stay on. We've been here since nineteen forty-six." O'Reilly looked at his now empty glass, grabbed Barry's, and announced, "A bird can't fly on one wing."

"I really shouldn't. . . ."

"Here," said O'Reilly, handing over a refilled glass. "Sit down." Barry sat.

O'Reilly followed suit. "Where was I?"

"You bought the practice."

O'Reilly held his glass in both big hands. "And damn nearly lost it in the first year."

"What happened?"

"Country folk," he said. "You've got to get used to them. My mistake was to try and change things too quickly. One of my first patients was a farmer with the biggest hernia you ever saw." 

"A cold groin abscess." Barry laughed. "Did you lance it like Doctor Flanagan?"

O'Reilly did not laugh. "Maybe I should have. When I refused to, the man spread the word that I was a young pup who didn't know his business. The customers stopped coming." He took a long drink. "The mortgage payments didn't."

"You must have been worried."

"Worried sick. I told you I'd have gone under if Kinky hadn't saved my bacon. She's a Presbyterian, you know."

"From County Cork?"

"They're not all Catholics in Cork."

"I know."

"She made me go to church with her. Let the locals see that I was a good Christian man."

"That's important here?"

"Back then it was."

"You mean even in this wee village they still fight the old sectarian wars?"

"Not at all," said O'Reilly. "They just liked to think that their doctor was a churchgoer. Didn't much matter if he went to church or chapel as long as he went."

 "That's a relief. I spent enough time sorting out the casualities of the Protestant-Catholic street battles when the Divis Street riots hit Belfast. It was pretty ugly."

"You'll not see any of that here," said O'Reilly. "Father O'Toole and the Reverend Robinson play golf together every Monday." He hauled out his pipe and started to stuff the bowl with Erinmore Flake tobacco from a tin lying on the table in front of him. "On the Twelfth of July . . . that's next Thursday . . . the Orange Lodge has its parade, and half the Catholics in Ballybucklebo'll be lined up, waving Union Jacks. They've even let Seamus Galvin . . . mind you, he's what you'd call a lapsed Catholic . . . into the pipe band." He struck a match. "Anyway," he said, "I was telling you about Kinky." 

"Right."

"Off to church the pair of us trotted, Kinky in her best hat and gloves, me in my only suit." Barry thought ruefully of his own mud-spattered corduroys. "Turned a few heads when we took our pew. I'd no doubt who the congregation were muttering about. I heard someone say that I was the young doctor who didn't know his arse from his elbow. Some of them kept turning round to stare at me during the sermon. Very uncomfortable." 

"I can imagine."

"Do you believe in Divine Providence?"

Barry looked at O'Reilly to see if he was joking. By the way the big man held his eyes, he clearly was not.  "Well, I didn't. Not until that particular Sunday. In the middle of the last hymn a big fellow in the front row let a wail out of him like a banshee, grabbed at his chest, and fell over with a hell of a clatter. The singing stopped, and the minister said, 'I believe there's a doctor here.' Kinky gave me a ferocious nudge. 'Go and do something.'" 

"What did you do?"

"I grabbed my stethoscope out of my bag . . . back then you never went anywhere without it. . . and rushed down the aisle. Your man was blue as a bloater. No pulse, no heartbeat. He'd popped his clogs."

"Was CPR invented back then?"

"Not at all. We hardly even had any antibiotics except the sulphonamides."

"So you were stuck?"

O'Reilly chuckled. "Well, yes and no. I reckoned it was my one chance to make my reputation. 'Someone get my bag,' says I, unbuttoning your man's shirt. Kinky arrived and gave me the bag. I grabbed whatever injection was handy, filled a syringe, and stuck the victim in the chest. I clapped my stethoscope on. 'He's back,' says I. You could have heard the gasps of the congregation all the way to Donaghadee. I waited for a couple of minutes. 'He's gone.' I stuck him again. More gasps all round. 'He's back.'"

"Was he?"

"Not at all. He was stiff as a stunned mullet, but I gave him one more injection."

"I don't see how losing a patient in church in front of half the village saved your practice."

"Kinky did that for me. I heard someone sniff that the demise of the recently departed just went to show what a useless doctor I was. I thought I was as dead as your man in the aisle."

"I'm not surprised."

" 'Just a small, little minute,' says Kinky. She stared at the minister. 'You have to agree, your reverence, that our Saviour brought Lazarus back from the dead.' The minister agreed. There was a hush in the place like at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. That's when Kinky said, 'And Jesus only did it once, so. Our doctor, our Doctor O'Reilly, himself here, did it twice.'" O'Reilly finished his drink. "I've been run off my feet since." 

"You wily old--"

The doorbell clanged in the hall.

"See what I mean?" said O'Reilly. "Be a good lad, and nip down and see who that is."

Barry opened the front door. He was confronted by a man standing on the step, legs astraddle, arms folded. He was short and sufficientjy rotund to warrant being described as spherical. He wore a Mack three-piece suit, a bowler hat, and a scowl that Barry reckoned would have served Ivan the Terrible on a bad day.

"Where the hell's O'Reilly?" The visitor forced his way into the hall. "O'Reilly, come 'ere; I want ye," he bellowed, like the master on his quarterdeck hailing the masthead lookout in a force-ten gale. "O'Reilly, get down here. Now." Barry could hear movement overhead. Perhaps the newcomer didn't recognize that yelling at O'Reilly would have the same effect as poking a stick into the eye of a rabid Doberman pinscher. "Perhaps I can--"

"I've heard about you, Laverty." The newcomer half turned to face Barry, who was thinking, I'm only one day in the place. News travels fast.

"I want himself."

Barry stiffened. Here was a patient who was well on the way to breaching Doctor F.F. O'Reilly's first rule of medical practice.  Barry glanced up to see O'Reilly approaching; he knew that O'Reilly would sort this man out, but Barry was quite willing to fight his own battles. "It's Doctor Laverty, and if you have something wrong--"

"Doctor, is it? Huh!" The little round man's eyes flashed. "Do you know who I am?"

Barry decided that replying, "Why? Can't you remember?" would not go down well.

"I'm Councillor Bishop, worshipful master of the Ballybucklebo Orange Lodge, so I am." 

"Good evening, Councillor," said O'Reilly from behind the man. "What can I do for you? I do hope it's not a cold groin abscess." His tone was solicitous; his wink at Barry demonic. Councillor Bishop spun to face O'Reilly, who towered over the rotund man. O'Reilly was smiling, but Barry recognized the telltale paleness in his bent nose.

"My finger's beelin', O'Reilly." He thrust his right index finger under O'Reilly's nose. Barry could see the skin, red and shiny round the nail bed, the yellow pus beneath.

"Beelin' sore, so it is."

"Tut," said O'Reilly, donning his half-moon spectacles.