Fingal O'Reilly, Irish Doctor

  Colin ducked, narrowly missing the man’s grasp, and with Buttercup/Bluebird cantering by his side charged for where his father had parked the van and was opening the back doors.

  “Go on,” O’Reilly yelled. “Run.”

  The steward was in pursuit and gaining. He was shaking his fist and yelling, “Come back here, you little bugger. Come back.”

  He’d have collared Colin if a small, grey-bearded man in a Homburg hadn’t managed to stick out a leg and send the steward on a slithering belly flop into the mud. Donal jumped over the man and raced after Colin and the dog.

  “Go on, you-boy-yuh,” O’Reilly said in encouragement, noticing that three more stewards had joined in the pursuit, a rotund one lagging behind his fellows. One of the spectators who had turned to watch yelled, “Two to one on the wee lad.”

  O’Reilly watched as Colin, the greyhound, and Donal charged through the open gate and piled into the van one after the other. Lenny Brown slammed the doors and rushed to the driver’s seat. The van’s engine started with a roar and a blast of blue exhaust smoke, and the vehicle sped fishtailing away toward the main road. O’Reilly noticed that the rear number plate had been covered in mud.

  The stewards’ posse reined in, clearly admitting defeat, the fat one wheezing like a set of clogged bellows, and O’Reilly heard one say, “Crafty buggers. I wonder who the hell it was?” and another reply, “No idea, and we’ve about as much chance of finding out as hearing a fart in a tornado.”

  Twenty minutes later, O’Reilly, Kitty, and Lars were in the Mermaid pub in Kircubbin. Mrs. MacDowell had lit the fire and each was holding a hot whiskey in still chilled hands, having a good belly laugh at the notion that for once the biter—arch-schemer Donal Donnelly—had been well and truly bitten.

  “Och well, no harm done,” said O’Reilly, taking a sip. “The punters who put their cash on number three backed a disqualified dog. They were unlucky, but it happens. It’s just the same as if their dog hadn’t placed.”

  “Seems to me Donal was probably the biggest loser of the day. Didn’t you see him betting five pounds?” asked Kitty. “He’ll have a bit of explaining to do to Julie. I’ll bet she keeps a pretty tight rein on the Donnellys’ finances.”

  “I’m out a fiver, but I can afford it, and I’ll just tell Kinky I decided not to bet so she can have her ten shillings back.”

  “It might teach young Colin Brown that the power of positive thinking is no match for the power of an Irish cloudburst,” said Lars, taking a sip of his drink.

  “It might,” said O’Reilly, “but I doubt it.”

  22

  To Put Up with Rough Poverty

  Fingal fiddled with the tuning knob of the radio. The console, with its highly polished walnut veneer, stood waist-high against a wall in the lounge where he and Ma had gone for their after-breakfast tea. She sat in one of the armchairs, teacup in hand. It had become a little ritual, listening to the BBC morning news together before he left for work.

  Crackles and hisses came from the Philco’s pair of moving coil speakers. Father had insisted on getting the best when he’d bought it for eight pounds, a considerable sum of money. He’d wanted a set that could receive broadcasts not only from the local state-run Radio Éireann based here in Dublin, but also from the BBC.

  The crackles faded and were succeeded by a series of high-pitched short pips. The BBC time signal.

  “Got it,” Fingal said, adjusted the volume, lifted his cup, and settled into the other armchair.

  A man’s precise, clipped, Oxbridge voice coming from the speaker said, “This is the BBC Home Service. Here is the news for Monday, October the fifth. Yesterday after fierce fighting, the government troops in Spain recaptured Maqueda, a town between Toledo and Madrid which fell to Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s troops on September the seventeenth. This is a setback for his Nationalist armies, which have been trying to capture the capital city since August…”

  Fingal wondered if Kitty had heard. She was still deeply concerned about events in Spain. “Lord Halifax, in a speech in the House of Lords, affirmed Great Britain’s position that in company with France they would continue their policy of non-intervention.”

  “It is truly horrible,” Ma said. “I’ll never forget the Great War. I hate war.” And Fingal heard vehemence in her voice he’d rarely heard before. “The British Prime Minister, Mister Baldwin, supports the League of Nations,” she said, “but they seem powerless to stop the trouble in Spain. All those young people.” She sighed and shook her head. “And Irish people volunteering—for both sides. Mister Eoin O’Duffy is organising an Irish Brigade to fight for Franco. Completely idiotic. You’d think there’d have been enough Irishmen killed in the War of Independence and the Civil War here at home.” She shook her head.

  The calm English voice continued, “In England later this morning two hundred unemployed men and their Member of Parliament Miss ‘Red’ Ellen Wilkinson, bearing a casket with more than eleven thousand signatures, will leave Jarrow on Tyneside to walk the three hundred miles to the Palace of Westminster in London in protest against unemployment in the shipyards. The diminutive, red-haired Miss Wilkinson and the men will be carrying banners with the slogan ‘Jarrow Crusade’ and will be accompanied by a harmonica band. They will stop for their first night in the town of Chester-le-Street on the River Weir…”

  “Poor men,” Ma said. “I believe eighty percent of them are out of work in Jarrow.”

  “Terrible,” Fingal said, and their plight pricked his conscience about someone else who had lost a job. “I know you’d no luck back in September trying to help my unemployed cooper to get a job here, but I don’t suppose there’s anyone else you could ask, Ma?”

  She frowned. “It’s important to you, isn’t it, Fingal?”

  “It is.”

  She sighed. “I do have one or two contacts in manufacturing. I thought they were forlorn hopes then, but I’ll make some more enquiries.”

  “Thanks, Ma.” Fingal rose, finished his tea, and said, “I’d better be trotting on. I’m doing home visits and I’m on call tonight so I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Take care, son.”

  As he left, he heard, “And now the weather. A deep depression over the Irish Sea will drift slowly southeast, bringing clearing skies to Northern Ireland.”

  * * *

  “Well, did you hear w’at happened to Jingles Murphy on Saturday night?” The woman looked middle-aged but Fingal knew she was probably younger. She stood beside her friend pegging a shirt to a line hanging like a loose bowstring on a pole. It stuck nearly vertically from a ground-floor window in a row of houses where similarly festooned poles jutted from most windows.

  “Go on, Enya. I’m all ears. Wa’t?” Her companion smoked a dudeen, a short clay pipe, as she hung socks on her own pole.

  Monday was universally washing day in the tenements, and this was a good drying day with the October sun doing its best. The depression in the Irish Sea must have moved quickly. Fingal had stopped his bicycle. He stood easily, one foot on the cobbles, the other on the far pedal. He wanted to ask directions but couldn’t help delaying for a minute or two to hear the women talk.

  “The feckin’ bowsey got himself paralytic on red biddy in Swift’s Pub on Francis Street. Refused to go at nine thirty, chuckin’-out time as you well know, on a Saturday. He started effin’ and blinding, offered to fight any man in the bar. Jingles? Dat bugger’d fight with his own toenails when he’s drink taken. The publican gets hold of Garda Jim Brannigan, the biggest feckin’ Peeler in the Liberties. ‘Jasus,’ roars Brannigan, ‘I know you, you feckin’ bollicks. Behave yourself.’ Comin’ from Brannigan, dat’s usually enough to cool a scuttered gurrier down, but wa’t do yis t’ink Jingles does?” She stooped and picked up a pair of patched, but well-washed knickers.

  “Go on.” The pipe smoker bent backward and put a hand to the small of her back.

  “He swings at Jim’s head.”

  “He never?”
Her mouth opened so wide she nearly lost her pipe. “Buck eejit. Did Jim destroy him utterly?”

  “Not at all, and it’s true because my oul’ one was there and seen it wit’ his own eyes. Jim ducks, drops his paw on Jingles’s shoulder, clamps on—and lifts your man about a foot off the floor. One-handed. Lifts him. Says Jim, ‘I could charge you with drunk and disorderly, you bollicks…’ My Fintan seen Brannigan’s knuckles whiten as he squeezed your man’s shoulder. ‘I could beat the livin’ feckin’ tar out of you, but, Jingles?’ ‘Ah Jasus, put me down, sir.’ He’s wriggling like an eel on dry land. ‘I’ll be good, honest til God. Put me down. You’re breakin’ me bones.’

  “‘You’d better be good, Jingles Murphy,’ says Jim and sets him down. Oul Jingles was out of the door like a whippet with its arse on fire. W’at do yiz t’ink of dat?”

  “Och, he’s a sound skin, Jim Brannigan. One of the best Peelers in the Liberties. Never summons nobody unless he really has to. Settles most t’ings wit’ a clip round the ears. He’s a well-respected man.” The pipe smoker noticed Fingal. Her eyes narrowed. “Yes? Can we help you?”

  “Excuse me—” he said.

  “Are you a gombeen man?”

  Fingal had expected to be greeted with suspicion if not open hostility on a street in the Liberties he’d never visited before. Strangers didn’t venture in here unless they were gombeen men—Irish moneylenders looking for unpaid debts.

  “I’m not,” he said. “I’m a doctor.”

  “Oh,” she said, clearly relaxing. “Well, all right.”

  Fingal already knew that priests in their cassocks were recognised and tolerated, as were the occasional dog-collared ministers “Protestantising,” that is, looking for converts from Catholicism in exchange for money. The men who worked for the Saint Vincent de Paul charity would be known and welcomed, but that was about it until the tenement dwellers got to know you.

  “I’m looking for a Mrs. Dempsey. She lives here on Back Lane.”

  “Mrs. Dempsey? Dympna Dempsey?”

  “Dympna. That’s right.”

  Two doors up the possessions of a family—chairs, tables, pots and pans—were piled higgledy-piggledy on the street where a woman surrounded by children wept as two brawny men carried a sofa. An eviction. He realised he was fiercely clutching the grips on the handlebars, but there was absolutely nothing he could do. He made his hands relax.

  “You’re the Big Fellah,” the woman said, taking the pipe from between her lips and pointing at him with the stem. She put a hand on her hip, grinned at him, and said, “Sure, don’t our friends like Roisín Kilmartin over on Swift’s Alley talk about you—you on your oul’ bike working day and night? You know him, don’t you, Enya?”

  “Only of him, Clodah. It’s the first time I’ve had the pleasure,” said Enya from under a straw boater adorned with a tri-colour ribbon, “and begod there is a size til you, boy. You could likely get a job as Goliat’ at Duffy’s travellin’ circus. Or take on Jim Brannigan in a fair fight.” She and the pipe smoker roared with laughter.

  “Is it Jack you’ve come about?” Enya said when she’d collected herself. “Dympna said you was quare and nice about him, getting him artificial sunshine and all. Maybe you could get a couple of days in the Sout’ of France for Clodagh here and meself?”

  “France’s not on prescription,” Fingal said. Not here in the tenements, but the wealthy were forever rushing off to European spas and taking sea cruises for their health. “Sorry.” He hesitated. He wasn’t meant to breach patient confidentiality, but it seemed that these two and probably the whole street knew everything about the boy’s condition. “I am looking for Jack, though,” he said, and blushed with pleasure at the compliment.

  “I’ll tell you, Doctor,” said Enya with a grin, “you’d better get a bit tougher. If you’ll blush because a body said something nice, w’at the hell’ll you do if you comes to see a patient and catch the likes of Clodagh in her bath on a Saturday night?”

  He could feel his face getting even warmer but was saved from having to answer by two little boys emerging from an open doorway and tearing along the lane, one yelling in a birdlike shriek after the other, “Come back here, Skinny Flynn, you wee gurrier. I’m goin’ to feckin’ marmalize you.”

  “Jasus Murphy,” said Clodagh, shaking her head. “The language of the feckin’ young wans dese days.” She turned back to Fingal, who was trying hard not to laugh. “It’s six doors down on your left. First landing on your left.”

  “Thank you.” He hesitated, then pointed to where the bailiffs were setting the sofa on the pavement. “Can nothing be done for those folks?”

  “Ach,” Clodagh said, “not anudder t’ing. The street’s taken up collections in the pubs to pay her rent—twice—but her oul’ one? Feckin’ bowsey. He spent the lot on the drink—twice—and us folks here aren’t made of money, you know.”

  He did know, and he knew of the customs of either passing the hat in the pubs for neighbours in trouble or passing a black sugar bag around to raise money for the wake before a funeral in the poor people’s graveyard in Glasnevin.

  “Aye, but Clodagh,” Enya said, “dat one’s got family in Wexford. Dey’re going to take her and hers in. Dey’ll be here later. It’s what she told me, anyroad.”

  It was a relief to Fingal. “I’m glad to hear it, and thanks for the directions.” He dismounted and wheeled his bike to the door of Dympna Dempsey’s building.

  He’d come from seeing a little boy with tonsillitis over in Ross Road, just around the corner. This could have been his last call, but as he’d cycled over to Aungier Street from home this morning the plight of the Jarrow marchers had made him resolve to go and see John-Joe Finnegan today after the home visits were done. Find out how he was managing. And it had been a month since Fingal’d promised to pop in on Dympna Dempsey. She and John-Joe lived no distance from each other.

  23

  He Wept Full Well

  Fingal propped his bike against the crumbling, whitewashed wall of a terrace house. Moss grew in the cracks in the mortar and great flakes of whitening had peeled off to reveal the grimy, yellow, two-hundred-year-old bricks beneath. He was reminded of a colour photograph he’d seen of a leprosy case. He took his doctor’s bag from a wicker basket attached to the handlebars, went through an open doorway into a dimly lit hall, and climbed a creaking, carpetless staircase. He had to step round a raggedy man sleeping on the landing. He probably had nowhere else to go. The landings and hallways of the tenements were full of what were locally called “dossers” and “knockabouts.”

  Fingal rapped on the door, which was immediately answered.

  “Doctor, dear.” Dympna Dempsey was all smiles. Her chestnut hair hung to her waist, and she carried a nappy-wearing Jack in her arms. A floppy-brimmed hat was perched on his head. “It’s lovely til see you.” She opened the door wide. “Come in. Would you like a cup of tea?”

  Fingal shook his head as he followed her inside. “Not today, but thanks. I’m in a bit of a hurry. How’s Jack?”

  “Look at him,” she said, holding him out for Fingal’s inspection. “The cod liver oil and calcium, and the sunlamps at the Children’s Hospital? You’re a feckin’ miracle worker, sir.”

  “Hardly, but he certainly seems much brighter,” Fingal said, noting the boy’s tan, lifting the hat, and putting a hand on Jack’s head. He wasn’t sweating. Good. When Fingal grasped the front sides of the head and squeezed, the bone resisted. Better. There was no evidence of the previous craniotabes, so the bones were starting to calcify properly. Fingal put the hat back.

  Jack, perhaps resenting having his head squeezed, frowned and said crossly, “Da da da da da da…”

  Fingal could see upper teeth in a mouth that a month before had been toothless.

  “And watch,” Dympna said. “You remember I said if I set him down all he’d do was sit?” She put Jack down on her shawl, which she’d spread like a rug on the otherwise bare, but well-scrubbed wooden fl
oor. “He goes like a liltie now.”

  He took off crawling at high speed until he came to a scarred dresser that stood against a wall. Above was a framed picture of Jesus holding a shining red heart, the Sacred Heart, in his left hand. Jack grabbed the side of the dresser, hauled himself upright, turned, grinned at his mother, and, looking determined, took two steps into the room. The boy then stopped, wobbled, grabbed the brim of his hat with both hands—and sat down forcibly on his bottom. His mouth opened, assumed a square shape, and he howled.

  Dympna rushed to him, gathered him up, and rocked him, all the while crooning softly.

  The little lad’s tears stopped and after a few curt indrawings of breath, he nodded off. She kept rocking and whispered, “T’anks, Doctor O’Reilly. T’anks very very much.” She dropped a kiss on Jack’s forehead.

  “My pleasure. You just keep giving him his medicine, Dympna, and you know where to find us if you’re worried about anything.” Fingal said the words softly, bending to look at the little face, the rosebud mouth, the thin black hair. Seeing the love in Dympna’s eyes for her son, rendered, for that moment at least, the bareness of the room, the man sleeping on the landing, and the all-pervasive tenement smells unimportant. Suddenly it didn’t seem to matter. “Take good care of him.” Fingal turned. “I’ll see myself out.”

  He stuck the bag back in the basket and cycled off whistling “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” a big hit last year. And why shouldn’t he be cheerful? He’d been working full time here for only three months and already was recognised and treated with affection by the people he served. Seeing Dympna and Jack was simply good for the soul. Sure, there were a lot of things like TB, syphilis, and many other infections that he and his profession were virtually powerless to help. But how lovely it was to effect a complete cure, assure a child a life free from bandy legs, a hunchback, and in the case of little girls a pelvis so misformed that when they grew up, normal deliveries were impossible. And to do it with things as simple as fish liver oil, calcium, and artificial sunshine. It was like a miracle, but a miracle based on painstaking research. He pictured Bob Beresford, a lit Gold Flake cigarette in one hand, the other adjusting the focus of a microscope, and wondered how his inquiries into the effects of red prontosil on Streptococci were going. He’d be seeing Bob on Saturday and would ask him then.