Bogmail

by Patrick McGinley

  ‘I suggest we do something at once painless and outrageous,’ said Cor Mogaill. ‘Like threatening to stop paying in collections and withholding our voluntary labour. That’s what would hurt the Canon most, and show the bishop that he has lost all control of his flock.’

  ‘No,’ said Rory Rua, holding up a freckled hand. ‘We must be seen to be reasonable. The farthest I’d go is to paint slogans on walls and hang banners across the village street. Once we’ve organised public support, we’ll present a signed petition to the Canon with a carbon copy to the bishop.’

  ‘A picture of banners with slogans is certain of publication in the Dispatch,’ said Gillespie. ‘I propose the slogan “We Want Wood” because in headlines it could be abbreviated to “WWW” or “W3”.’

  ‘You’re obsessed with what you call subbing,’ said Cor Mogaill.

  ‘I suggest “Wood v. Limestone: Where Do You Stand?”’ said Rory Rua.

  ‘A slogan is a splendid idea,’ said Potter. ‘But it must be more than a slogan! It must be a battle-cry, which thanks to our friend Gillespie will soon be known from one end of the county to the other. We’ll paint it on walls and display it on stickers in the rear windows of our cars. We’ll even place a prominent ad in the Dispatch.’

  ‘It all sounds highly promising but you haven’t told us the battle-cry,’ said Cor Mogaill.

  ‘HOOA! HOOA! HOOA!’ said Potter, raising a clenched fist.

  ‘And what does it mean?’

  ‘Hands Off Our Altar!’

  ‘I don’t like the sound of it,’ said Cor Mogaill. ‘It’s neither Irish nor English. It’s like a battle-cry from one of the emergent countries of Africa.’

  ‘Get stuffed or stewed, whichever is the less convenient,’ Potter said urbanely.

  ‘I think Potter’s idea an excellent one,’ said Roarty. ‘We’ll make banners and stickers. HOOA! I can see it becoming a national watchword.’

  ‘I know something of lettering,’ said Potter. ‘I’ll set to work at the weekend.’

  ‘We’ll put up the banners in the middle of the night,’ Roarty said. ‘That way they’ll have the maximum effect on Loftus when he sees them on the way to say Mass in the morning.’

  ‘No,’ Potter advised. ‘We must not come like a thief in the night. We must act in the blaze of noon and let everyone know who we are.’

  They talked for another hour until Cor Mogaill, assuming the role of chairman, rebuked them for repeating themselves. As the clock struck two, Roarty went outside to make sure the coast was clear, and one after the other they left by the back door, Potter last.

  ‘What about a wee deoch a’ dorais?’ Roarty asked, gripping him by the elbow.

  ‘A what?’

  ‘One for the Strasse.’

  ‘If it were any other night, I would. I’ve had three late nights in a row, and I’m absolutely knackered. I really must get my head down.’

  ‘I think we can be pleased with the night’s work,’ Roarty said, still hoping to detain him.

  ‘It was a very Irish night, no offence.’

  ‘And you were the most Irish of all.’ Roarty smiled encouragingly.

  ‘Hibernicis ipsis Hibernior. Is that what you’re hinting at?’

  ‘You’re not the first, and you won’t be the last. I think I should tell you the precedents have not been all that happy.’

  ‘Thank you for the thought. It’s something I’ll bear in mind.’

  Potter vanished into the night, an elusive, chameleon-like figure, yet undeniably effective among men. He had declined to be president but he influenced the discussion more than anyone else by appearing so detached that his opinion unfailingly commanded attention. It was a pity that he did not stay for a drink because a chat when the mind is weary might cast a shaft of light on so much that was dark.

  ‘A difficult man to corner,’ he thought, climbing the stairs. ‘I’ll just have to run him out into the open, I suppose.’

  His mind was too active for sleep. Still, he went to bed and lay on his back with his eyes closed. After half an hour he put Fünf Stücke im Volkston on the gramophone and looked up the article on Aqueducts in Britannica. Pablo Casals’s cello playing and the drily technical language of the encyclopedist brought him a sense of comfort that was new. It seemed to him that the most subtle luxuries of life were his, that his greatest temptations were intellectual.

  13

  Roarty could see the parochial house from the west window of his bedroom. Nora Hession closed the front door behind her and tripped lightly down the avenue between the trees. She had a sprightly walk, so light-stepping that you felt she might at any moment take wing. She was tall and slender, the kind of girl with whom the young Yeats might have lingered in the Salley Gardens. Potter didn’t know his luck. It was such a pity that she was only a baby when he himself was young.

  Canon Loftus, who was on retreat in Letterkenny, wouldn’t be back until Saturday, and in his absence Nora slept at her sister’s or possibly with the smitten Potter. The parochial house would now be empty till morning, leaving him ample time to do what must be done. He bore the Canon no personal ill-will. Tonight conditions would be perfect. He knew what to do, and how to do it.

  His only objective was to give McGing something to think about other than the murder, which he now talked about tediously every day. For some inexplicable reason he had become obsessed with Allegro, as if Eales’s cat were the guilty party. He kept tickling him behind the ears to make him purr, but Allegro remained indifferent to all his attempts at blandishment.

  ‘It’s unnatural for a cat not to purr,’ McGing said. ‘He looks depressed, as if there was something terrible on his mind. Either that or he’s seen something evil that’s preying on his mind.’

  Roarty stroked Allegro’s head with his palm and ran his forefinger down the back of his neck. Allegro closed his eyes and began to purr.

  ‘It’s the smell of stout from your hand that does it,’ McGing said. ‘If you don’t mind, I’ll take him back with me to the barracks. I’d like to conduct a little experiment.’

  ‘He’s yours as long as he’ll stay with you. I must warn you, though. He’s very particular. With me he’s had nothing but the best.’

  He smiled as McGing vanished out the door with the cat. His sense of relief lasted only until he began wondering about the nature of McGing’s ‘little experiment’. All through September he’d felt harried as a hare, as if every wisp of his every thought was known to McGing. His discomfiting sense of self-exposure was accompanied by a psychological impotence that paralysed his will and kept him from doing anything to the purpose. Though Cecily had written to say that she wished to remain with her aunt in London, and that she would not be taking up her scholarship, he was so self-absorbed that he scarcely gave her future a thought. Far from going to London to bring her back, he pondered with indifference how he could have strayed so far from his former self. There seemed to be no escape from the tangle of his anguished preoccupations.

  He was the rope in a tug o’ war between two equal forces, pulled this way and that without hope of resolution. Thoughts of Potter and McGing pinioned him on an altar of stone, as if he were a victim to be sacrificed in a ritual he could not begin to understand. His health had deteriorated; he had begun to fear for his sanity. Even with the help of a bottle of whiskey a day, he could hardly get one hour’s untroubled sleep at night. He would toss between dreams of criminal investigation, complex cross-questioning, and ghoulish meals with Potter where the entrée was a thick brawn made from a severed head that bore no resemblance to Eales’s. So whose was it then? That was the conundrum that kept him from sleeping. In the grey of early morning he would stagger wearily to the bathroom while black memories of the night clung to him like suffocating cobwebs. Awake or asleep, there was no respite. He would drink three hot toddies before the tremor left his hand and it was safe to shave with a razor. Going to the loo was another nightmare, as he noted with hypochondriac horror that his stool was streaked
with blood, conjuring up visions of vulturine surgeons in white bent on a colostomy. Again and again he would recite to himself lines he had once found amusing:

  I noticed I was passing blood

  (Only a few drops, not a flood)

  So pausing on my homeward way

  From Tallahassee to Bombay

  I asked a doctor, now my friend,

  To peer into my hinder end,

  To prove or to disprove the rumour

  That I had a malignant tumour.

  How anyone could make fun of cancer surpassed understanding. His mind had become a kaleidoscope of revolting images. He was so worried that he made an appointment with Dr McGarrigle, who lived in Glenroe and held a clinic in Glenkeel on Wednesdays.

  McGarrigle was a large, likable man, an indefatigable womaniser who fancied his chances with young and old, provided they washed regularly and appreciated the needs of a man of his social standing. His fine sense of discrimination was the secret of his success with women. None of them ever complained of an unwanted advance, for to be the object of a pass from him was seen as a cachet of respectability, and to be ‘cured’ by him was a pleasure not unknown to several widows in the Glen whose complaints had been proof against the ministrations of more orthodox doctors.

  In spite of his readiness to indulge the fantasies of his more imaginative patients on occasion, he took his duties as a doctor seriously. A dedicated drinker in the evenings, he would often go up to one of his patients in a pub and advise him to think carefully before finishing his whiskey. ‘If you drink it, you may be shortening your life by as much as a year,’ he would say. ‘I’m not telling you to put it down. I am merely ensuring that you’ll enjoy it all the more by drinking it in the full knowledge of the consequences.’ Not surprisingly, he was well liked, even by husbands whose wives had been cured of what he called menopausal melancholia by one or two visits to his clinic.

  Curiously, the quality that endeared him most of all to his regular patients was his tendency to treat many of them for the same condition no matter what their symptoms, which encouraged a general sense of fellowship in the chaotic shipwreck that is old age. A few winters ago, when he was treating most of those who came to see him for septicaemia of the foot, Old Crubog went to him about rheumatism in the left shoulder only to be told that it was a referred pain originating in his big toe, simply a question of ‘metastasis’, or metathesis as Crubog reported. This year by all accounts he was treating most people for gout, yet no one seemed to mind. In fact, patients suffering from ‘septicaemia of the foot’, ‘gout’, or whatever disease was most prevalent in his clinic that winter were rather proud of their status, convinced as they were that they need not worry. It had long ago been observed that only patients who were treated for more prosaic conditions actually died.

  Gimp Gillespie, who liked to think he had taken Dr McGarrigle’s measure, evolved the theory that McGarrigle had what few doctors can be accused of—a professional sense of humour. Quite simply, he treated all patients suffering from imaginary ailments for the same condition on the principle that a placebo for septicaemia of the foot was as good as a placebo for rheumatism. Roarty could not help wondering if one of the good doctor’s placebos might cure him of all his ills.

  ‘Now what can be ailing a fine big fellow like you?’ McGarrigle asked. He did not smile, which Roarty took to be significant.

  ‘Blood in the rectum,’ he said, pleased that unlike most of the doctor’s patients he knew the word ‘rectum’.

  ‘Rectal bleeding,’ said McGarrigle. ‘Not as uncommon as you might think. Let’s have a quick look at the seat of the trouble, no pun intended.’

  ‘You’re not going to poke something up my arse?’ Roarty enquired, so alarmed that he forgot the word ‘anus’.

  ‘Unfortunately, that may be necessary.’

  ‘Would you mind warming it in your hand first. I’m rather sensitive behind.’

  ‘It isn’t what you think,’ the doctor said, pulling on a light rubber sheath over his index finger, which for some obscure reason reminded Roary of Eales’s fabled lust finger.

  ‘Now try to touch your toes with your fingertips.’

  Roarty bent forward with his trousers round his ankles, and thought of Edward II, King of England from 1307 to 1327.

  ‘Mm!’ said McGarrigle.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I just said “Mm!” a sound that doctors make to assist diagnosis.’

  ‘Well, what can it be? Gout?’ Roarty asked hopefully.

  ‘Why do you think it may be gout?’

  ‘I eat a lot and drink a lot. I burn the candle at both ends.’

  ‘It isn’t gout,’ McGarrigle said firmly.

  ‘You think it may be a prostate problem?’ Roarty ventured in desperation.

  ‘Hold out both hands in front of you.’

  Roarty watched his hands tremble though he tried to keep them still.

  ‘How much do you drink in a day?’

  ‘No more than a bottle.’

  ‘Stout or whiskey?’ McGarrigle asked humourlessly.

  ‘Whiskey.’

  ‘A bottle is probably enough.’

  McGarrigle gave him such a thorough going-over that at the end Roarty felt as bruised and pummelled as a lump of plasticene. The doctor sat down at his desk as if suddenly weary of life and death.

  ‘What’s the verdict?’ asked Roarty. ‘Haemorrhoids?’

  ‘No, it isn’t piles. It’s something more shadowy, lurking in the no man’s land between the psyche and the soma.’

  ‘And what does that mean?’

  ‘I think it’s a symptom of stress, mental stress.’

  Roary laughed out of sheer relief. ‘You’re sure it isn’t the Bucko?’ he asked.

  ‘The Bucko?’ McGarrigle gave him the kind of look that one condemned man might give another.

  ‘I don’t like saying it because I’m a bit superstitious. It’s the Latin for crab.’

  ‘I can’t be sure, and I don’t want to alarm you unnecessarily. All I’ll say is that we must leave no stone unturned. I’m going to have you admitted to Sligo Hospital for tests. It’s probably nothing to worry about, but the modern GP is usually tempted to leave the verdict to a higher court. Could you drink less without putting yourself out?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘You could try.’

  ‘If I tried, I wouldn’t be myself.’

  McGarrigle wrote a prescription for sleeping tablets, while Roarty wondered if it was a psychiatrist he needed, not a doctor. What would McGarrigle say if he had told him of his more alarming symptoms: the enfeebling dreams of macabre feasts with Potter or Sisyphean struggles with an eagle in red knickers? In many ways the latter was the more harrowing because he invariably woke up from it limp from exhaustion. Helplessly, he would watch a downy eaglet in an eyrie grow before his eyes into a golden eagle of fearsome strength and majesty that stared at him with predatory curiosity. He would fling a spear at the great bird’s breast, which the bird would catch with its wing in mid-air and fling it back at him. The single combat between man and bird would go on through the small hours until Roarty in desperation would make straight for the bird and drive the spear through its furcula. Undeterred, the eagle would pluck it from its breast and drive it back in again with a laugh of aquiline contempt. Finally it would turn double somersault, revealing a pair of red knickers under its thigh feathers.

  ‘I’m wearing red knickers, can’t you see?’ the great bird would crow. ‘I’m utterly impregnable, you impotent half-wit.’

  He would wake up sweating with exertion, as if he had undergone a real struggle with a real eagle. Though the red knickers probably referred to Florence’s preference in night wear, he reasoned that the dream must symbolise his daily torture by Potter and McGing, which was nothing short of Promethean in its inexorable continuity. Perhaps McGarrigle had unwittingly stumbled on the root of his troubles, of which rectal bleeding was only a symptom. Quite possibly, the doc
tor had special insight into that mental fragility affecting seasoned drinkers, and the darkness within that threatens to overcome the light of reason.

  He took McGarrigle’s sleeping tablets for a week, and concluded that bad dreams were preferable to a thick head in the morning. The rectal bleeding concentrated his mind with every visit to the lavatory, after which the only relief was a walk in the garden for a moment’s communion with the withered conifer. No longer dying, it was now dead. Still, he continued to feed the roots before facing breakfast in the morning. He would carry bucket after bucket of water to the bottom of the garden and feel the dust-dry needles crumble between his fingers, brown as snuff. Yet in the deepening twilights of September the conical silhouette of the dead tree gave it the very outline of life. ‘What seems alive is alive, but only to an eye that is dead,’ he told himself. ‘I hope I’m not going mad. With every day that passes I make less and less sense, even to myself. Perhaps I should talk more to Susan. She’s a big, healthy girl who thinks only healthy thoughts. She is fond of me, and generous of her time and body, if only I could avail more frequently of her generosity.’

  He thought of Cecily in a foreign country, naïve and vulnerable, a prey to a kind of soft talk for which her sheltered upbringing and education had not prepared her. Life as he used to know it had come to an end. All that was now left was the outline, days of going through the motions for the benefit of onlookers, while his inner life lay frozen in paralysis. He had undergone a form of lignification; he had become an article of furniture in other men’s worlds. They came to him for a drink, shook his hand, and whispered the latest joke in his ear; and he smiled, pulled pints, and took their money with as much conviction as a puppet in a sideshow. Where would it end? Imprisonment? Suicide? Further murder and a life not worth living? In destroying Eales, he had destroyed himself. Yet his instinct was still for life, and it burgeoned within him as he watched Nora Hession’s carefree step on the fenceless road that led to her sister’s cottage, or possibly Potter’s.