‘Jesus,’ he said.
‘And here we are,’ she said.
‘Daniel and Alicia,’ he said. ‘Long time since those names been seen in consort.’
‘Consort!’ she said. ‘There you go with your words.’
‘Well this is it,’ he said.
‘You’re skinny,’ she said. ‘Are you looking after yourself?’
‘Ah I am.’
‘Where are you living?’
‘Place called Matcham Road. Grand, just around the corner. Sharing a house there. It’s grand.’
‘Who’re you sharing with?’
‘Lads from Connemara,’ he said.
‘Uh-oh,’ she said.
‘Ah they’re grand. They like their Excelsior.’
‘Their what?’
‘It’s a hard lager. Super-strength. Come out of the can it’s the colour of honey.’
‘And you’re working?’
‘IT.’
‘Good money?’
‘Grand.’
‘Are you okay, Daniel?’
‘Why do you keep asking me am I fucken okay?’
‘What, I’m sorry, it’s just …’
‘Just what, Lish?’
‘You look sad.’
‘Would you not be,’ he said, ‘when I’m seeing you every day?’
He hadn’t sobered.
‘When I see you come walking the street towards me and below in Stratford station and I see you in all the offices?’
‘Daniel?’ she said. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘I’ve seen you in the park,’ he said. ‘And I can’t come home because I’ll see you there for sure and I know you don’t want me.’
‘Ah Daniel.’
‘And I don’t want to put you out,’ he said.
He leaned forward and sipped from his Magners. She wasn’t getting up from that in a hurry.
‘I’ve to go,’ she said.
‘Ah yeah.’
‘We’re going to a disco in Essex someplace.’
‘Party bus,’ he said. ‘Massive.’
‘Don’t want to really, it’s just my cousins.’
‘Party bus,’ he said, ‘and the uncle still warm in the ground.’
‘Daniel,’ she said, ‘you’re so funny.’
She moved in and she kissed his cheek again and he closed his eyes.
‘I’ll see you around home sometime,’ she said. ‘Be careful!’
‘Right so,’ he said.
He drank his cider. The vision doubled on him again. Let them all off to their party bus. The bell rang for one more and he opened his eyes and stood uncertainly and he walked towards the bar. He didn’t know how many Magners he was after.
The barman sucked his lips as though in warning as Daniel approached.
‘You sure?’
‘Listen,’ Daniel said. ‘Will you tell me something straight up please. Was I just talking to a girl there?’
‘The black-haired piece?’ the barman winced. ‘Ooh. She was a sort. How’s it you know her? She work community Outreach?’
‘Okay,’ said Daniel. ‘Magners.’
‘What about half a lager?’
‘Better plan,’ Daniel said.
He walked home a while later. What had earlier been clear sky had clouded over and now it was unseasonably mild. There was no gainsaying the past. With all else that had happened, he had held her too, and that could not be taken away. He turned in the gate of number 126 to see what way they were getting on inside with the Excelsior.
DOCTOR SOT
LATE IN JANUARY, Doctor Sot felt the bad headaches come on again and he drank John Jameson whiskey against them. The naggins slipped pleasingly into a compartment of his leather satchel but they needed frequent replacing and he thought it best not to replace them always from the same off-licence in town. He aimed the car for the 24-hour Tesco on the outskirts of town. A cold morning was coloured iron-grey on the hills above town – brittle and hard the winter had been, and it was such clear, piercing weather that brought on the headaches. The heater in his eleven-year-old Megane juddered bravely against the cold but inadequately and his fingers on the wheel had the look of a corpse’s. Steady nips of the Jameson, he found, kept in check the visions of which these headaches were often the presage.
The Megane had a personality. It was companionable and long-suffering and he had named it Elizabeth for his mother. Car and mother had in common a martyr’s perseverance and a lack of natural advantages.
‘Small devil loose inside my head, Liz,’ said Doctor Sot, ‘and it’s like he’s scraping a blade in there, the little bastard.’
As he crossed the hump-back bridge over the White Lady’s River he whistled the usual three-note sequence for luck, a bare melody, and he sucked in his cheeks against the pain. He groped inside the satchel for a naggin. He wedged the naggin between his thin thighs. He unscrewed the top and fate dug a pothole and the pothole caused the Megane to jolt. The jolt splashed whiskey onto the trousers of his Harris tweed.
‘Oh thank you very much,’ said Doctor Sot.
He checked the mirrors before raising the naggin. Clear. And it was just his own eyes in there, which was a relief. Mirrors, typically, were more troublesome for Doctor Sot earlier in the morning. He drained what was left of the whiskey and great vitality raged through him and he tossed the empty naggin in back.
‘Another dead soldier, Liz,’ he said, and with his grey lips he bugled a funeral death march.
The Tesco at eleven this weekday morning was quiet and the quietness for Doctor Sot had an eerie quality. As he walked the deserted aisles, wincing against the bright colours of the products, he felt like the lone survivor in the wake of an apocalypse. What would you do with yourself? All the fig rolls on earth wouldn’t be a consolation. So taken was he with this grim notion he walked into a display of teabags and sent the boxes flying. He was upset to have knocked them and got down on his hands and knees to remake the stack in a neat triangle. He felt the hot threat of a urine seepage. He summoned his deepest reserves to staunch it – he was wearing, after all, his finest tweeds.
‘Well this is a nice bag of sticks,’ he said.
The seeping was tiny – a mercy – and the boxes of tea were at least in some manner restacked. He proceeded with as much nonchalance as he could muster. From the bakery counter he picked up a chocolate cake for his wife, Sal, who was the happiest woman alive. Also he placed in his basket some mouthwash, a family pack of spearmint gum and eight naggins of the John Jameson. A patient, Tim Lambert, appeared gormlessly around an aisle’s turn with a duck-shaped toilet freshener in his hand.
‘Tricks with you, Doctor O’Connor?’ he enquired.
Doctor Sot put his basket on the floor and went into a boxer’s swaying crouch. He jabbed playfully at the air around the old man’s head.
‘You’re goin’ down and you’re stayin’ down, Lambert!’ he cried.
Tim Lambert laughed, and then he eyed, for the full of his mouth, the contents of the doctor’s basket. Sot picked up the basket and primly moved on, the humour gone from him. The consolation was that Lambert’s lungs wouldn’t see out the winter – he had told no lie. Oh and he knew full well what they all called him behind his back. He knew it because another of his elderly patients, Rita Cryan, was gone in the head and had forgotten that the nickname was slanderous and meant to be secret.
‘That’s not a bad mornin’ at all, Doctor Sot,’ she always croaked when he paid a house call now. He tended with Rita to strap on the blood pressure monitor a little too tightly. There was temptation to open one of the naggins before he got it to the counter but he denied himself and bore the small devil’s caper.
‘You’d want a good class of a pelt on you,’ he said to the girl at the till. ‘Brass monkeys weather.’
But she was an eastern and as she blankly scanned his items he realised that pelt was perhaps a little rich for her vocabulary, not to mind brass monkeys.
‘Pelt like a bear,’
he said. ‘For the cold, I mean? Look it! Here’s Papa Bear in his lovely warm pelt!’
He flapped his arms delightedly against his sides to indicate Papa Bear’s cosiness.
‘Is fifty-three euro eighty-nine cent,’ she said.
In the Megane, he opened a naggin and he took a good nip for its dulling power. He saw a distressed van come coughing and spluttering into the car park. The rainbow colours it was painted in could not disguise the distress. It was driven by a young man with braided hair. Many small children, all shaven-headed, wriggled and crawled along the dashboard and against the windscreen. The man climbed down from the van and slid back the side door. More shaven-headed children poured out and more braided adults. These, Doctor Sot realised, must be the new-age travellers the paper had been on about. They were camped in the hills above town. On Slieve Bo, if he recalled. They were colourful and unclean and wore enormous military boots. There were bits of metal in their faces. They made a motley parade as they went across the car park. The driver remained at the side door of the van and spoke loudly to someone inside. A young woman poked her head out and spoke back to him. He huffed and he gestured and he followed the rest of the travellers across the car park. She remained. She stepped out and leaned against the van and rolled a cigarette from a pouch. Her hair also was in braids and piled high and she wore striped leggings tucked into her boots. Doctor Sot’s breath caught as he watched her. She was remarkably beautiful and vital but there was something else that drew him, too. She felt his stare and returned it. She smiled and waved at him. Sot slugged hard on the naggin and took off.
There are wolves in our valley – this is what Doctor Sot knew. We do not know when they will attack us but attack us they surely will, with their hackles heaped and drool sheering from between their yellow teeth. The careful study of sickness had taken a great toll and weakened him but just a moment’s view of the young woman had lifted him again to his calling, and Doctor Sot wasn’t back across the White Lady’s River before he had a plan formed.
The tinkers, those older travellers, held that the river’s crossing was here auspicious because on the bank by the hump-back bridge was a may tree hundreds of years old and Doctor Sot, who would take all the luck from the world that he could get, whistled again his three notes as he crossed back into the town. His home and practice was on a neat terrace of greystone. It had been bought cheaply in the long-gone heyday of his practice. Having come from less – his persevering mother had put him in the university out of a council house – Doctor Sot enjoyed still the mild grandeur of his address. The three stone steps that led up to his door, the nine-panel fanlight above it, the fine parquet blocking of his hallway’s floor, the blocks faded by the length of the years they had lived here; these were details that he greatly enjoyed. There was a bright, clean patch on the wall where a large gilt-edged mirror had lately been removed.
‘Oh adieu! Yes adieu! Oh adieu all my false-hearted looooves!’ sang Doctor Sot as he tap-danced through to the back kitchen, one hand flapping a minstrel’s wave, the other clasping the satchel. Sal, in her gown, flushed and chortled at the sight of him – the only illusion of permanence is that which is finagled by love. She threw down her serial killer novel and bounced up from the small pink sofa by the stove.
‘You’ll never guess!’ she cried. ‘He’s only taken the head and buried it in the desert!’
‘This is the prostitute he met at the truckstop?’
‘One and the same,’ she whispered. ‘Had the head in his fridge but it started to stink.’
‘Neighbours might be alerted, Sal.’
‘He’s making a move to be on the safe side,’ she said. ‘He’s headed for Tulsa. Ham sandwich, lovie?’
‘It would fill a hole, Sal.’
‘Your glass of beer with it?’
‘Might take the fear of God off me.’
They embraced. Sot was stick and bone, Sally was hot and pink and fleshy.
‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘I’ve a bit of a rush on. I need to make a call before surgery.’
‘Oh?’ she said. ‘A call?’
She was already slicing the batch loaf. There weren’t many calls these days.
‘Health Board,’ he said.
She opened the fridge for the ham, the butter, the can of Smithwick’s. Happy as a duck she was, unshakable from her good humour, and of the opinion that her husband, if anything, grew more marvellous with every passing year.
‘They’re giving you gip again, dear-heart?’
‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘It’s just I’ve had a think about this Outreach programme.’
He sipped from the glass of beer she handed to him. He rubbed nervously a frayed tweed elbow.
‘But they can’t force you, Carl?’
‘Of course not, my light. It’s just I’ve thought maybe I was a little quick to rule it out … Maybe I should, you know, give something back?’
With his bloodshot eyes and his hammering heart! Doctor Sot hurried the beer, and he would leave the sandwich uneaten on the plate. He needed five minutes before surgery for the business with the mouthwash and the gum. His hurry would carve out another five for the call to the Health Board. As he downed the last of his beer, pain ripped the back of his skull. He went to the sink to block the wince from her. He squinted out and up to the white sky. The usual great wingéd creatures were taking shape for him up there. He turned quickly again to Sal.
‘Service!’ he cried. ‘What ever happened to the notion of serving the people?’
‘You know what, sweetness?’
Sal’s mouth shaped with awe as she grasped the brilliance of his idea.
‘It could be just the thing for you! Take you out of yourself!’
Whatever this heroically complicated husband came up with was fine with Sally. She quickly forgot the details of his frequent and disastrous adventures. Before he had even reached the phone in the hallway’s nook, she was deep in the pink sofa and in the tale of her Tulsa-bound maniac: he was snacking on innards as he zoomed along the blacktop.
‘Obviously, Carl, we’re delighted you’d volunteer.’
‘I’m sensing a but,’ said Doctor Sot.
This Mahoney fellow at the Health Board was easy enough to read. All he wanted for Outreach was the young guns with the big grins and the surfer hair. Sot raged:
‘Thirty-five years of experience! And I offer it up to you! I am offering, Mr Mahoney, to take part in your bloody Outreach programme. Just like you asked!’
‘Carl, it was only a circular. Just a general call for volunteers. This was three months ago and really we’ve got it sorted now? All the halting sites are serviced. The seminars for the community centre are looked after. I’ve a couple of lads who’ve …’
‘And our new-age travellers?’ said Doctor Sot. ‘Who’s providing Outreach there?’
‘You mean the crowd above on … Slieve Bo?’
That had him. Mahoney had to admit that the new-age travellers had not, in fact, been added to the Outreach list.
‘Animals, are they, Mr Mahoney?’
‘Oh I mean they’d qualify, I suppose, at least if they’re receiving benefits but …’
‘But but but, Mr Mahoney!’
It was agreed by sighing Mahoney that the new-age travellers would be assessed to see if they qualified for Outreach.
‘In the meantime,’ said Doctor Sot, ‘it’d be no harm, surely, to go up there and show a friendly face? Just to introduce oneself? Maybe a few leaflets about nutrition? About chlamydia, that type of thing?’
‘Whatever you think, Carl,’ said Mahoney.
It was Doctor Sot’s experience that the longer he stayed on the phone to people, the more he got what he wanted.
His surgery ran from noon until two. It was as slow as it always was now. Only the old and fatalistic still patronised the O’Connor practice. The lady of the Knotts whose twin had died in the winter was in about the voices again but the voices had turned benevolent and she was less disturbed than
she had been. Ellie Troy had that grey, heart-sick look but she was seventy-two now and she’d had the grey, heart-sick look since she was forty: it was a slow death for poor Ellie. It was the weather for sore throats, Doctor Sot told Bird Magahy. His own headaches weren’t so bad during surgery and he was careful not to gaze out towards the white sky. Skies and mirrors – these were the fields of his visions, and oh, the strangenesses that he saw; hallucinations, yes, but no easier to handle for that. Last into surgery was Tom Feeney, the crane driver.
‘It’s the man below, Doctor O’Connor.’
‘Do you mean, Tom …’
‘I do.’
‘He mightn’t be doing all you’d require of him?’
‘It’s not that.’
‘No?’
‘It’s the opposite of that.’
‘Oh?’
‘I’m in a state,’ the sixty-year-old crane man said, ‘of constant excitement.’
Doctor Sot prescribed a week’s Valium and the taking up of a new hobby. He was in the back kitchen by five past two, kissing Sal, and telling her he was away on a mission.
‘Outreach, Sal!’
‘Bloody hell they’ve snapped you up quick enough!’
‘I’ll be back for the tea surely.’
‘Careful how you go, honeybob!’
Over the bridge, a three-note whistle, and the main road he turned off for a side road. The side road became a boreen. The boreen as he climbed became track. Track became narrower track, and it turned onto a rutted half-track. It was like a path animals had trampled down. Suddenly space opened out on all sides and Doctor Sot steered his Megane through the air but she laboured, Elizabeth. The high country had its own feeling. Ascending into the iron-grey of its colours as the afternoon light fatted up, Doctor Sot was alerted to the different intensities of these greys and shale tones. Austere from below, they were radiant when you were up and among them. The higher reaches of the mountain were now everywhere open to him, the turloughs glistened coldly in the valley below, the gorse was seared to its winter bronze. The half-track hairpinned, and the travellers’ camp was announced by a sudden assault of skinny dogs.
‘Easy, Liz,’ said Doctor Sot, as he steered the old girl through the dogs.