Green went the light. O’Reilly, presumably wishing to encourage young Donal, blew his horn.
Donal may have been suffering from grand mal, the battery of the tractor may have shorted and hurled a shock through his scrawny body, or it may just have been abject terror brought on by peering astern to discover that the horn blower was Doctor O. Whatever the cause, he began to tremble uncontrollably and stalled the engine of the tractor.
Red went the light.
“#@$~#!” went O’Reilly.
Green went the light.
“Nurgley-nurgley-nurgley,” went the tractor’s engine, but failed to start.
Red went the light.
White went the tip of O’Reilly’s nose.
Green went the light.
“Nurgley-nurgley-phtang!” went the tractor’s engine as the exhaust billowed clouds of fumes as dense as the rock dust fallout from the explosion of Krakatoa.
Light red, O’Reilly’s nose ivory, smoke black, Donal’s face puce. Colourful. Very colourful. O’Reilly swore once more, opened the door of the Rover, and dismounted. I followed. Just as the light turned green for the fourth time, I distinctly heard him say to Donal Donnelly, “Was there a particular shade of green you were waiting for?”
I did not hear Donal’s reply.
DECEMBER 1997
A G(h)astly Mistake
O’Reilly christens his propane barbecue
I believe I may have mentioned that Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly was an ex-naval man. He hadn’t been personally responsible for sinking the Bismark or winning the Battle of the Atlantic single-handed, but he claimed to have seen more cases of crab lice than Pharaoh after one of the plagues of Egypt.
He’d maintained his contact with the sea as the owner of a twenty-six-foot sloop. Apart from washing, this was as close as he was prepared to let H20 come to his body. I once had the temerity to ask for a glass of water and was soundly chastised with the admonishment that if I knew what the stuff did to the outsides of boats, I’d never let it past my lips.
From time to time he’d invite me to act as his crew. Perhaps “invite” would be rendered better as “shanghai.” Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast described a pleasure cruise compared to a nautical outing with O’Reilly. His style of skippering, taken straight from Captain Bligh’s manual of how to win friends and influence people, left a certain amount to be desired.
“I need a hand on the boat today,” he said.
I flinched and sought around for an excuse to run. I imagine French aristocrats had the same impulse when invited to try Doctor Guillotine’s new invention—and with about as much success.
“Come on,” he said.
My spirits rose when we reached the dock. He didn’t intend to put to sea. Instead he wanted my help to install a propane barbecue on the taffrail.
“Propane?” I inquired.
“Marvellous stuff,” he said, unpacking the grill from a cardboard box. “Clean-burning, safe as houses, and these new barbecues are idiot-proof. I’ve had propane in the galley for years.”
The propane that fuels a boat’s stove is isolated from belowdecks by a series of solenoids, cut-off valves, and taps. NASA’s rockets have similar arrangements. Both systems are designed to prevent the payload, which may be a multimillion-dollar satellite or a small sailboat, from leaving the confines of Earth’s gravitational pull prematurely.
Clever things, these safety devices. Teams of highly skilled engineers, bomb-disposal experts, and, for all I know, pardoned arsonists have toiled long to ensure the safety of seagoing propane, and O’Reilly was right: the system was idiot-proof. There was no guarantee it was O’Reilly-proof.
It was a warm day and it took us several hours of fiddling, screwing, unscrewing, rescrewing, bolting, unbolting, rebolting, massaging skinned knuckles, and misplacing screwdrivers and wrenches before the barbecue was fixed in place. I’d thought my vocabulary was fairly complete in the scatological department. O’Reilly would have been an instant nominee for a Nobel if the inventor of dynamite had seen fit to award a prize for blasphemy.
“That’s it,” he said, sweat streaming down his face with the volume and velocity of the Horseshoe Falls. “Fixed the @~&**# thing.”
“Mmm.”
“Now, let’s give it a try.”
He lifted a locker lid and extracted a squat metal bottle of liquefied gas.
“Gimme that hose.”
I handed him a black rubber pipe and watched as he fitted screw couplings to the grill and the bottle. “Perfect,” he announced. “Hang on.”
He disappeared below for a moment, only to reappear in the hatchway clutching two bottles of beer. “Time to christen it.” He handed me one bottle.
“I think I’ll just go up on the foredeck,” I said, sidling away as he produced a box of matches. I believe that the men who dispose of unexploded bombs are supposed to keep a distance of four hundred metres between themselves and the device. O’Reilly’s twenty-six-foot boat fell a little short, but I had no intention of standing right beside the infernal machine when O’Reilly struck the match.
He joined me for’ard a minute later. “It’s going like a bomb,” he said, grinning from ear to ear.
I thought he might have used a different simile.
“What the hell’s that?” O’Reilly inquired.
From aft came a roaring like Mount Vesuvius on one of its more active afternoons. A jet of flame tore across the cockpit and scared the daylights out of a passing gull. It looked as though a leftover storm-trooper from WWII was firing a flammenwerfer (flame thrower for those of you too young to remember).
“Jasus,” said O’Reilly.
“Abandon ship?” I asked, having no wish to emulate the boy standing on the burning deck.
“Holy thundering Jasus,” O’Reilly said, heading aft.
Call me boastful if you wish. Feeble-minded is probably a better description. I actually followed him, feeling horribly like one of the “Noble Six Hundred.” Into the jaws of death and all that.
As soon as we reached the boat’s cockpit, the source of the conflagration became apparent. When O’Reilly had hooked up the hose he’d managed to let it lie against the barbecue. The flames from the grill had melted the rubber and ignited the escaping propane, which even then howled and flared like something only Red Adair should be asked to tackle.
I watched in awe as O’Reilly bent and turned off the valve on the propane tank. The roaring subsided. The flames died. The only sounds that broke the stillness were the chattering of my teeth and the rattling of my knees.
And I stifled my desire to remind O’Reilly of his earlier remarks that propane was as safe as houses and that gas barbecues were idiot-proof.
JANUARY 1998
Blessed Are the Meek
The O’Reillys, alas, are not among them
“It’s not fair, Uncle Fingal.” Thus spake a tear-stained William Butler Yeats O’Reilly, Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly’s nephew. Willy, aged ten, was the son of O’Reilly’s brother, Lars Porsena Fabius Cunctator O’Reilly, the one who lived in Portaferry. That’s the place, you’ll remember, where Doctor O. tried to emulate Steve McQueen and nearly sank the ferry when he hurled his motorcar at the incoming vessel.
On this occasion, O’Reilly had been invited to his brother’s for the pre-Christmas festivities and had dragged me along.
“Cheer up, Willy. It’s not as bad as that,” said O’Reilly at his avuncular best.
“It is.” Willy sniffed and O’Reilly handed him a handkerchief.
“Blow,” said O’Reilly.
Willy honked. He was an unprepossessing child, snub-nosed, freckled, and with a shock of ginger hair that stood up from his crown like the crest of an indignant cockatoo. His damp eyes were full of the unspoiled innocence of childhood. I didn’t know then that beneath this apparent gentility lurked the O’Reilly propensity for bearing a grudge and that Willy, like his uncle, wasn’t one to let a wrong go unpunished. I didn’t know that then?
??but I was going to find out.
“It’s not fair,” he repeated. “I’ve been Joseph twice. I know all the lines.”
“And you were a grand Joseph,” O’Reilly said, retrieving his hanky. “You’ll be a great innkeeper.”
“Don’t wanna be an innkeeper. Wanna be Joseph.”
I stood there, both legs the same length, in a state of utter confusion. This was my usual condition when in the company of Doctor O.
He must have noticed my dazed look. “Willy was Joseph for the last two years,” he said.
I’d already grasped that piece of intelligence. “I see.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“See.”
“True.”
“Then why did you say you did?”
“I wanna be Joseph,” quoth Willy.
“Doctor Taylor doesn’t see,” said O’Reilly.
“Don’t care,” said Willy. “It’s not fair.”
I was beginning to feel a vague pounding at the temples. “Would somebody please explain,” I asked.
“Willy wants to be Joseph,” O’Reilly said. “See?”
“I see.” The pounding intensified. I had an overwhelming urge to go and lie down.
“No, you bloody well don’t,” said O’Reilly.
“Wanna be Joseph.”
“Willy’s to be the innkeeper this year,” O’Reilly explained.
“I…” I strangled the word “see” in mid-utterance and waited.
“In the school Christmas pageant,” O’Reilly said.
The pieces were beginning to come together. “You mean Willy played Joseph in the pageant for the last two years?”
“Now you see,” said O’Reilly, and indeed I did.
“And Johnny Fagan gets to be Joseph this year and I’ve to be the innkeeper.” Willy had added the last piece to the puzzle. “He’s a little s*#*! I’ll get him.”
There was a fire in Willy’s eyes that made me look closely at his nose tip to see if like his uncle’s in moments of great passion it too paled. It did.
* * *
Picture now the parish hall. Serried rows of parents, teachers, older and younger brothers and sisters, half a dozen nuns, itinerant rubberneckers with no attachment to the school but who have nowhere else to go until the pubs open, the O’Reilly clan, and myself. The stage is divided by a wall so the audience can see the courtyard on one side and the interior of the inn, stable, and manger on the other. The innkeeper, known to his friends and family as William Butler Yeats O’Reilly, waits in the inn with sundry shepherds, wise men, angels, cherubim, and seraphim.
Enter stage left Mary, dressed in one of her mother’s cut-down dresses. Mary is astride a small, moth-eaten donkey. Joseph, a.k.a. Johnny Fagan, wearing a nightshirt, head wrapped in a tea towel held in place with a piece of rope, leads the donkey. The gum arabic holding his flowing beard has given way and the beard straggles down his chest.
Mary. “Is this the inn, Joseph?”
Joseph. “It is. I’ll knock and see if the innkeeper’s in.”
Joseph knocks.
The innkeeper opens the door. (Perhaps I’m the only one in the audience who notices the pallor of his nose.)
Innkeeper. “Is that you, Mary and Joseph?”
Joseph. “It is, innkeeper.” He gives a sneering inflection to the word “innkeeper.”
Joseph. “All right. Come on in, Mary.”
Mary dismounts and enters.
Innkeeper, glowering at Joseph. “And you, Joseph”—the innkeeper pushes Joseph in the chest—“Joseph, you can just feck off.”
I swear two nuns fainted.
FEBRUARY 1998
A Matter of Tact
Or lack of it
“Tactless,” Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly remarked. “Utterly bloody tactless.”
This observation was not so much a question of the pot calling the kettle black as referring to it as stygian. O’Reilly could be described as possessing many attributes, indeed he has been, but, and feel free to correct me if you think I err, tact was not among his own most sterling qualities. In most social and professional encounters, O’Reilly was as tactful as a regimental sergeant major discussing the inadvisability of a new recruit’s recent unfortunate dropping of his rifle in the middle of a ceremonial parade.
I was puzzled. I’d said nothing. I couldn’t have. I’d just entered his surgery as his last patient of the morning left. Nevertheless I automatically assumed a defensive crouch and wondered what sin of social ineptness I was about to be accused of committing.
“Sorry,” I said. I believe in criminal circles this is known as “copping a plea.”
“Why?” asked O’Reilly.
“Why what?”
“Why are you sorry?”
“For being tactless.”
“You weren’t.”
“Sorry?” I asked.
“No, you idiot, tactless.”
“Oh,” I said. “Sorry.”
“Stop apologizing.” Just a hint of paleness brightened the tip of his nose.
I decided it was time to beat a retreat. “I’m sor … so glad I wasn’t.”
“Yes, you were.”
“Tactless?”
“No. Apologizing.”
“Sorry.”
“Do not say ‘Sorry’ again. Sometimes I wonder about you, Taylor,” said O’Reilly, staring into the distance and clearly letting his mind wander. “I really wonder.”
He was not alone. Sometimes, in fact frequently since I had fallen into his clutches, I wondered about myself.
I thought it was probably time to give a slight course correction to the conversation—the kind lunar astronauts make to ensure a safe return to Earth rather than a trip to the Oort Cloud.
“You were saying something about ‘tactless,’” I remarked.
His gaze focused and he turned to face me. “Sorry?” he asked.
I think in cardiovascular circles this is known as a reversal of shunt. I ignored the temptation to tell him there was no need to apologize, and gave the lateral thrusters a little more liquid oxygen: “You said someone was ‘bloody tactless.’”
“I did, didn’t I?”
“Yes, Fingal.”
“Sean Millington O’Casey,” he said.
I knew that Doctor O. had been named for Oscar Wilde, had a nephew yclept William Butler Yeats O’Reilly, but who the blue blazes had been given a combination of Synge and O’Casey?
“Man’s totally lacking in social graces,” said O’Reilly. “O’Casey’s the bloke that left as you came in.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Just had a hell of a row with his wife. He wanted some marital counselling.” O’Reilly rummaged in his pocket and produced his briar. “More like martial counselling the way the pair of them go at it.”
I remembered Mrs. O’Casey. I’d seen her last week for an antenatal visit.
“They must talk to each other occasionally,” I observed. “His wife’s pregnant with their fourth.”
“Um,” said O’Reilly, lighting up. “And that’s another miracle. He’s a travelling salesman. Away from home a lot.”
“Perhaps he writes passionate letters.”
“He does more than that. He makes stupid remarks on the telephone. Tactless remarks.” O’Reilly paused to tamp the tobacco more firmly into his portable blast furnace. “‘What’ll I say, Doctor?’ says he to me.
“‘What did you say?’ says I.
“‘Well,’ says he, ‘I was in England last week. Staying in a hotel. The phone rings and I picks it up. A woman’s voice says, “You bastard.” I knew it was the wife.’
“I told him to go on.” O’Reilly exhaled. I confidently expected to see Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson appear from the pea-soup fog that poured from O’Reilly’s pipe.
“‘I said nothing,’ says O’Casey.” O’Reilly exhaled again. The miasma was thick enough to conceal a hansom cab.
“Tactful of him,”
I remarked, “to say nothing.”
“He should have kept his mouth shut,” said O’Reilly. “Apparently the next thing his wife said was, ‘You’ve gone on the road and you’ve left me pregnant,’ and the daft eejit, quick as a flash, replies, ‘And who is this I’m speaking to?’”
“Definitely not tactful,” I observed.
“So,” asked O’Reilly, “if you were advising O’Casey, what would you tell him to say to his wife?”
It slipped out before I could help myself. “Sorry?”
MARCH 1998
The Cat’s Meow
One way of dealing with feline friends
I sucked my lacerated finger. In the fullness of time you’ll find out what had caused the trauma. Suffice it to say for the moment, finger notwithstanding, on the day in question O’Reilly and I had finished our house calls, tending to the bedridden, the bewildered, and those too bloody bolshie to come to the surgery.
“Maggie’s next,” he said. “I need her advice about the new kitten.”
I felt the throbbing in my wounded digit and thought unkindly of cats and with some affection of Maggie, spinster of this parish, one of nature’s unclaimed treasures, the old duck with, as we say in the mind-healing trade, a bolt loose. Maggie was definitely one stook short of a stack, but she was a gentle soul and O’Reilly had a soft spot for her.
“I’m sure she’ll know what to do.” He fired up his briar inside the car, the clouds of smoke giving me a fair impression of the last minutes of the poor benighted in one of the humanitarian American states that still favour the gas chamber. I opened the window and as the sulphurous fumes escaped, hauled in a lungful of clean air. I swear rows of barley withered.
“Haven’t seen her for a few weeks,” he remarked cheerfully, accelerating and paying no attention to a cycling peasant taking refuge in the ditch.
I should tell you that about once a month, if we’d had an easy afternoon making house calls, Doctor O. would drop by to see how Maggie was getting on. The vitamin pills that he’d told her to swallow ten minutes before the start of the headaches two inches above the top of her head had cured that particular problem.