“Chust so, your reverence.” Angus tipped his caubeen most civilly.
“Just like the Scots,” said McWheezle, vinegar oozing through the honey of his words. “Pray on their knees on a Sunday—and their neighbours for the rest of the week.”
Angus stopped dead. His kilt shuddered like an electrocuted jellyfish. He turned, faced the reverend gentleman, and said in low but measured tones, “Mister McWheezle, sir?”
“Yes, Angus?”
“It would be a cause of great pleasure to me, sir—with all due deference to your station—it would be a cause of great pleasure to me, sir, if you would kindly bugger off.”
The words were clear, deliberate, and greeted with the kind of stunned silence that would have marked a royal wedding if the answer to the question, “Do you take this prince…” had been “Sod this for a game of soldiers.” Every mouth gaped. Lips pursed. The members of the audience looked like a school of expiring codfish.
“Aye,” said Angus—in fencing circles his original remark had been a parry; now came the riposte—“and as soon and as fast as possible.” He spun on his heel and strode off, cromac clattering on the pavement.
From the look on the Reverend McWheezle’s face he’d been taken off guard as much as a certain King Edward at a spot called Bannockburn. It was a good thing the old church was built of granite, so great was the huffing and puffing of the practically paralyzed Presbyterian.
The only sound that could be heard over the reverend’s respiratory rasping was a gargantuan grumbling—the kind of noise an antiquated steam boiler with a stuck safety valve might make if the internal pressure was reaching a critical point. I turned and realized it was O’Reilly trying to control himself.
* * *
We didn’t see Angus for several weeks, then he resurfaced as the very last patient of a busy morning’s surgery. O’Reilly ushered him in. O’Reilly seated himself at the rolltop desk and, as usual, I parked myself on the examining couch.
“Have a seat, Angus.” O’Reilly gestured toward a chair.
The little Scot shook his head. He stood silently, holding his caubeen in both hands.
I waited. O’Reilly waited. Angus said nothing. The silence stretched like a piece of knicker elastic caught in the spokes of a bicycle wheel.
“Well,” said O’Reilly, at last, “what seems to be the trouble?”
“It is that man,” said Angus. “Himself. The dominie.”
Domino? I thought. Whatever was he on about?
“Mister McWheezle?” asked O’Reilly.
“Chust so. It was a terrible thing.”
“What he said to you?” O’Reilly probed.
“No,” said Angus with a mighty shake of his head. “What I said to him.”
“Come on, Angus. He was asking for it.”
Angus drew himself up—well to half-mast; remember he was less than five feet tall. “It was not a thing to be forgiven. A shentleman”—I realized he meant gentleman—“from the Isles should never lose his temper.” The little Scot was clearly distressed.
“Um,” said O’Reilly, “um, I don’t suppose you’d consider apologizing?”
From the look on the little man’s face I guessed that he would rather have eaten his haggis raw.
“This is upsetting you, Angus, isn’t it?” said O’Reilly.
“Chust so, Doctor. It is what you might call a dilemma.”
Right, I thought. Come on, O’Reilly, let’s see you solve this one.
O’Reilly bent his head over to Angus, whispered something I couldn’t hear, and straightened up. The thunderclouds fled from Angus’s wrinkled face. The sun gleamed on the hills and valleys of his cheeks. His deep blue eyes twinkled.
“Chust so. Sunday then, Doctor … Thank you, sir.” He turned and left.
“What…?” I began.
“The power of authority,” said O’Reilly, and that was all he would say.
After service that Sunday, a larger congregation than usual gathered on the church steps. O’Reilly and I kept our places at the front of the crowd as Angus MacKay approached the Reverend McWheezle.
“It is a word I would like, your reverence.”
“Yes,” said McWheezle with the inflated dignity of a Doge of Venice and all the warmth of an Atlantic northeaster.
“Well,” said Angus mildly, “well, you’ll no’ have forgotten that I telled ye tae bugger off?”
“Indeed,” said McWheezle.
“Aye, and soon.”
McWheezle sniffed.
“Well,” said Angus slowly, “after giving the matter consideration, and after consultation with Doctor O’Reilly, I have come to the conclusion that…”
The reverend’s chest puffed up like the Hindenburg before her final flight. “You must apologize?” he sneered.
“Oh no,” said Angus, “no, it’s chust that Doctor O’Reilly says you need nae bother—but if you must, you’ll no’ be needing tae rush.”
JUNE 2000
The Patient Who Broke the Rules
And why O’Reilly didn’t mind
Devotees of Ray Bradbury, and indeed many students of physics, know that paper bursts into flame at a temperature of 451°F. Devotees of Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly know that his flashpoint was considerably lower. If he’d been a volcano, teams of vulcanologists would have set up permanent encampments in his garden, ever ready to be on hand for his next inevitable eruption. Living in his house, as I did, was akin to dwelling on the lower slopes of Mount Vesuvius.
Ever since the first report of the dangers of secondhand smoke—written, I believe, by one of the Plinys, describing the minor upset that engulfed Pompeii—Neapolitans have developed a kind of early warning system. They rely on the behaviour of animals, their own ability to sense earth tremors, and any release of smoke from the summit of their local planetary safety vent.
Ever since I’d witnessed the ejection of Donal Donnelly by my mentor, I’d developed my own early warning system. I relied on the rapid disappearance of Arthur Guinness, O’Reilly’s cerebrally challenged Labrador, my own ability to see the great man tremble, and any suggestion of pallor in the tip of his nose.
Neapolitans are always prepared to beat hasty retreats at the slightest sign of instability. Removing myself from the great man’s presence wasn’t always possible but at least I’d evolved a pretty acute idea of when to keep my mouth shut and look the other way.
I also kept a mental checklist of people and circumstances likely to provoke one of his outbursts. Councillor Bishop, the Reverend McWheezle, and Doctor “Thorny” Murphy, unkindness to widows or eccentrics who lived in old cars, hypocrisy, and shoddy medical practice … but if we take the list of characters I’ve just mentioned, I repeat myself.
Malingerers with sore backs weren’t high on O’Reilly’s list of preferred patients. Slow historians—you know the type, the ones who in response to the question “Does anyone in your family suffer from anything similar?” will start with the utterly unrelated complaint of a distant ancestor whose name was recorded in the Domesday Book, and ramble glacially through the generations—slow historians would get shrift of such shortness from O’Reilly that it couldn’t have been measured with a micrometer. At least that had been my experience until the day I sat in on a consultation with a local fisherman.
Declan O’Tomelty was a large man. He sat in the chair, boots firmly planted on the floor, knees apart, gnarled hands resting on his thighs. He wore moleskin trousers held up at the knee by those leather thongs that the Scots call knicky-tams.
O’Reilly sat before his rolltop desk, half-moon spectacles perched on the end of his nose, elbow on knee, chin resting on the back of his hand. He looked like a rustic version of Rodin’s Thinker.
I kept a close eye on O’Reilly’s schnozzle. By all the usual indicators, it should have borne an even closer resemblance to old Auguste R.’s lump of bronze on a marble pedestal—glanced at my watch—at least ten minutes ago. The history of O’Tomelty’s sore back
seemed to be going on forever, but O’Reilly simply sat, immobile, only occasionally making a sympathetic grunt.
O’Tomelty’s epic expostulation eventually ended.
O’Reilly rose and gestured to me to get down from my perch on the examining table. He asked O’Tomelty to undress and lie on the table, and once the man had painfully climbed up, O’Reilly examined his patient’s back with a thoroughness and gentleness that surprised me.
“Right,” he said, “hop down, Declan. I’ve just to make a phone call.”
O’Reilly lifted the receiver and dialed. “Hello? Royal Victoria? Orthopaedics, please.” His fingers drummed on the desktop. “Professor Muldoon, please.” Just a hint of nasal pallor. “I don’t give a tinker’s damn who he’s busy with. This is Doctor Fingal O’Reilly. What? I should bloody well think so.”
I wondered if the recipient’s receiver was melting.
“Hello? Monkey Nuts?”
Good Lord, I thought. Professor Michael Muldoon had been the terror of all of us when we were students, and O’Reilly has the temerity to call the old fire-eater “Monkey Nuts”?
“No, sorry, I can’t make it for golf on Saturday. No, I need a favour. Patient of mine. You’ll see him at five? Splendid.” O’Reilly put down the phone and spoke quietly to the now fully dressed O’Tomelty. “Have a pew in the waiting room, Declan. Doctor Taylor here won’t mind finishing the surgery. I’ll run you up to Belfast.”
“Thank you, Doctor, sir,” O’Tomelty said as he left.
My mouth hung open. The man had broken at least two of O’Reilly’s rules—thou shalt not have a sore back nor give a rambling history—as effectively as a murderer and an adulterer would have bent a couple of the Ten Interesting Suggestions that Moses brought down from the Mount, numbers five and ten by the Augustinian method of reckoning if memory serves, and yet O’Reilly had listened patiently and …
“I know what you’re thinking, Taylor,” he said, “so stop it.”
“I promise,” I replied. The Neapolitans, when in doubt, run.
“You don’t know Declan O’Tomelty the way I do.” O’Reilly’s hazel eyes had a faraway look. “Don’t suppose you know much naval history either.”
I was about to remark that I wasn’t entirely ignorant of the fate of the Spanish Armada when I remembered that O’Reilly had had a distinguished career in His Majesty’s floating forces in the last great nastiness. He continued, “I hadn’t been in practice here for long when Declan showed up, quite late at night. His back was sore. I wasn’t too pleased.”
Nor was King Charles I when Olly Cromwell decided that the royal locks needed a bit of a trim—permanently.
“Maybe,” said O’Reilly pensively, “maybe I was a bit easier in those days. I listened to the man.”
You what? I thought.
“Just showed me the value of a well-taken history. ‘All right,’ says I, ‘how did you hurt your back?’ ‘Wasn’t me that hurt it, Doc,’ says he, ‘it was them Germans.’ ‘Pardon,’ says I. ‘Well,’ says he, ‘I was in the navy.’ I suppose because he and I had something in common I paid a bit more attention. ‘Go on,’ says I. ‘I was minding my own business, strapped to my antiaircraft gun. Then there was a bloody great bang and me and the gun is heading up—right up. God knows what happened to the gun, but I headed down, and I’ll tell you, Doc, that water was bloody cold, so it was.’ ‘Right,’ says I, and I’ll tell you, Pat, I was tired and not too pleased with his story. I only asked him one more question.”
“‘Are you going to get out of here?’” I suggested.
O’Reilly shook his head. “No. I asked him, ‘What ship were you on?’ ‘I don’t suppose, Doc,’ says he, ‘that you ever heard of the Hood?’”
“The Hood?” I said, “but there were only three survivors.”
“I know,” said O’Reilly. “Declan really is one of them.”
O’Reilly strode to the door. “His back has given him gip ever since. I think he’s earned a ride to the hospital.”
Author’s note: I usually make up these stories but this is a retelling of an actual episode of my own early years in practice, although the name Declan O’Tomelty and his occupation are fictitious. I had no reason to doubt O’Reilly.
(no column in july 2000)
AUGUST 2000
Going to the Dogs
O’Reilly places a bet
“Good Lord,” said O’Reilly, “I wonder if he’ll paint it the same colours as his bicycle.”
We were strolling along the main, indeed the only, street of the humming metropolis of Ballybucklebo. Approaching us was Donal Donnelly, who was being tailed by something vaguely canine. After closer inspection, as our respective paths converged, I noticed that the beast was attached to Donal by a piece of frayed rope.
Donal, you will remember, wasn’t overly bright—in the way that Mount Everest isn’t overly short—and definitely belonged to the Charles Atlas School of Bodybuilding, Class of ’61—Failures. Anyone who’d ever seen Donal stripped for action was immediately reminded of some poor shipwrecked wretch who’d survived for several months on the boilings of his leather shoes and the smell of a greasy rag. Donal’s visage would have been a geometrician’s dream, pointed as it was both vertically and fore and aft.
I tell you this because the greyhound, for such it was, bore a striking resemblance to its master. There was nothing of the creature but a muzzle like a weasel’s, ribs that only needed little paper chef’s hats to pass muster as a rack of lamb, and a tail that the animal carried between its legs.
The last attribute was Donal’s normal demeanour when addressing Doctor O’Reilly, but on that particular morning Donal was distinctly cocky. “She’s a beauty, isn’t she, Doctor O’Reilly?” Donal wasn’t bursting with pride—he was exploding.
“Mmm,” said O’Reilly noncommittally as he bent to examine the dog.
“You should see her run,” said Donal. “Greased lightning wouldn’t get a look in.”
I thought back to my classes in nutrition and some arcane formula concerning rate of caloric expenditure and weight loss. Looking at Donal’s greyhound, it seemed to me that the mere effort of standing was probably generating a calorific deficit. Running might make the animal disappear completely.
“What do you call her?” O’Reilly inquired, diplomatically.
“Bluebird,” said Donal, smugly.
“Bluebird. Would that be after Sir Malcolm Campbell’s speedboat?” asked O’Reilly.
“Aye, Doctor. Boys-a-dear, you should see that thing go.”
“Donal,” said O’Reilly, “That Bluebird runs on water.”
Donal held one finger alongside his nose. His left upper eyelid drooped like a sagging theatre curtain—the nearest Donal could manage to a wink—and he inclined his head to the dog. “So does she, Doctor.”
For the life of me I couldn’t understand why O’Reilly guffawed, slapped Donal on the shoulder, and said, “You’ll tell me when she runs dry, won’t you, Donal?”
“Indeed, Doctor. Indeed I will.” Donal took his leave, pursued by the faithful Bluebird.
“Smart lad, that Donal,” said O’Reilly. “That dog will bear watching.”
O’Reilly’s attribution of smartness to a man whose thickness was an affront to all short planks so dumbfounded me that I neglected to ask why Bluebird would bear scrutiny. I didn’t find out for several months—and, as usual, I found out to my cost. I found out when O’Reilly and I went to the dogs—literally.
I may have neglected to mention that in the rural Ulster communities, working dogs were the order of the day—haughty police Alsatians, super-intelligent border collies, gentle guide dogs, and, oh yes, the dimwitted, boozing, look-there’s-Taylor’s-trouser-leg-let’s-have-a-go-at-it, so-called gun dog, Arthur Guinness.
Bluebird was nominally a worker. Her task was to charge round an oval track in pursuit of a mechanical hare, beat all the other dogs, and by so doing enrich those who’d seen fit to wager on the outcome.
I’d learned from O’Reilly that those who chanced a flutter on Donal’s dog were forming a line on the left for admittance to the local poorhouse. It was locally supposed that the only chance the animal would ever have of coming in first was to be almost overtaken by the dogs entered in the next race after the one she’d come last in.
The seasons followed their preordained paths in Ballybucklebo. O’Reilly swore at Councillor Bishop, practised his bagpipe grace notes (almost to the satisfaction of Angus MacKay), increased the share values of both the Guinness brewery and John Jameson’s distillery, and allowed the practice of medicine to interfere with his busy schedule as little as possible. He had, after all, acquired the services of a junior assistant—me—and, as he was fond of remarking, “There’s no sense buying a dog and barking yourself.” Perhaps his allusion to dogs was what eventually made me inquire about the celerity of a certain Bluebird, the dog that ran on water.
“Tell you what,” he said, “let’s find out. We’ll go and watch her run on Saturday.”
And so we did.
* * *
On the appointed day, O’Reilly took me to the stadium. You may remember the Loughbrickland horse racing. The greyhound races bore a striking resemblance to their equestrian counterpart. A low fence surrounded the track. Between the fence and the spectators, the “turf accountants” had their stands. Florid-faced men in loud tweeds stood on their daises calling the odds and turning the purses of the punters to penury. Bluebird, it seemed, was to appear in the third race.
Donal materialized like a genie from a bottle. As he passed O’Reilly, his eyelid managed its slow descent and all he murmured was, “Very dry today, Doctor.”
O’Reilly brightened considerably.
“Come on,” he said, pushing his way through the crowd with all the gentility of a Tiger tank. He clattered to a halt before “Honest” Joe Johnston’s stand and examined the odds chalked on a board above the platform.
“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.