An Irish Country Village

by Patrick Taylor

  Barry took another swallow. O’Reilly said nothing. Arthur peered out at O’Reilly, as if to ask, Where’s my second pint? but O’Reilly ignored the dog. “Jesus Christ, Barry,” he said. “As if looking after the sick and suffering wasn’t enough, now we’ve to find a place for Sonny.”

  Barry had temporarily forgotten O’Reilly’s promise in the Bangor Convalescent Home.

  “And see if we can help Helen find a different job. And do something about Bishop and the Duck.”

  “And I suppose you’ll have us both walking on water as an encore?”

  It was O’Reilly’s turn to laugh. “Hardly.” He rose. “Now,” he said, “before I started to get carried away, you said you wanted to ask me something.”

  “Yes. One of those chaps over there said someone feagues his horse. What the hell’s ‘feague’?”

  O’Reilly’s sides heaved. “Feague? You’d know it as a different expression, but it’s a trick unscrupulous horse dealers use to make a horse look better than it is. You can judge a horse’s spirit by the way it carries its tail.”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “So,” said O’Reilly, “just before the buyer comes to look at the beast, the dealer sticks a clove of ginger up its rectum. Feagues the poor creature.”

  The thought made Barry wince.

  “If you’d a tail and something as hot as that in your behind, wouldn’t you lift your tail up?”

  “I would indeed.”

  “It would ‘ginger you up’ no end?”

  “No doubt,” said Barry. Right. That was the expression O’Reilly said he’d know.

  “Now,” said O’Reilly, heading for the door. “What we have to do is work out a way to feague Bertie Bishop.” He stopped and called, “Heel, Arthur.”

  Barry let the dog pass. Having seen Bishop in action for more than a month, he thought perhaps O’Reilly was setting an impossible goal for them. But then, if anybody could feague Councillor Bertie Bishop, bring the man to heel as readily as Arthur obeying his master’s command, it was Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly.

  Respectable Professor of the Dismal Science

  Barry stopped his elderly Volkswagen Beetle, waited for a gap in the heavy traffic, and turned left across the Grosvenor Road to enter the grounds of the Royal Victoria Hospital. He drove slowly past the Clinical Sciences Building and round a bend, and started hunting for somewhere to park. There seemed to be more cars in the lots than there were houses in Ballybucklebo, where at this moment O’Reilly was running the surgery.

  It had been agreed the day before that he’d see to the patients, while Barry would come here to consult with Professor Faulkner about Mrs. Flo Bishop’s suspected myasthenia gravis. Last night after supper, Barry had suggested to O’Reilly that he’d not only see the prof but would also take the opportunity to try to meet his old school friend Jack Mills. O’Reilly had a soft spot for Mills because they were both devotees of rugby football. O’Reilly had been capped for Ireland, Jack for Ulster.

  It was odd, Barry thought, that in the politically divided country the only thing that represented the whole island was the national rugby team with players selected from the North and the South. It was a pity Ireland’s citizens couldn’t play together as well. He knew it was Jack’s ambition to gain an Irish cap, but Barry doubted if the pressures of his friend’s career would give him enough time.

  It would be great to see Jack again and O’Reilly had made no demur; presumably he’d been in an expansive mood because Kinky had made up for the light lunch with poached Shimna River salmon for supper. Seizing the opportunity, Barry had also asked for the evening off. It had been granted.

  He saw a Vauxhall start to back out of a place, so he pulled in nearby and waited.

  He’d phoned Jack and he’d agreed to meet Barry for lunch in the hospital cafeteria. He’d also called Patricia. To his delight, although she had classes until five, she would be happy to meet him for a Chinese meal and then be driven back to the Kinnegar. She’d said it was economy of effort. The time she’d save not having to wait for a train would more than make up for the hour or so she’d lose by having dinner with him. She’d laughed when she said it, and he’d forgiven her at once.

  The Vauxhall left and Barry pulled into the vacated spot, got out, and started to walk to the back entrance of the Royal, the teaching hospital where he had spent three and a half years as a student and one as a houseman.

  He left the road and crossed the lawn separating the red brick Royal Maternity Hospital from the buildings of the Royal proper. After the quiet of Ballybucklebo, the constant noise of traffic on Grosvenor and Falls roads, which ran on two sides of the hospital complex, was loud and intrusive. Flocks of starlings and feral pigeons cluttered the grass.

  He walked past the old concrete reservoir. Although it held water for firefighting, in the summer it served as a swimming pool for nurses and junior medical staff. He could picture Jack Mills, arms full of a squirming nurse, leaping into the pool with his burden and surfacing with her bikini bra held triumphantly aloft.

  Barry crossed the cloisters beneath the ward units and went in by the basement entrance, past the door to the cafeteria, up a winding flight of stairs, and onto the main corridor.

  He saw a crowd of blue-uniformed nurses, red-uniformed sisters, white-coated lab techs, chequer-uniformed floor cleaners, and browncoated porters going about their business. Housemen and registrars in long white coats and medical students in short, white bum-freezer jackets strode purposefully. Lost-looking civilians, some carrying bunches of flowers, wandered nervously, peering at numbers outside wards or trying to read overhead signs giving directions. The precise place of everyone in the hospital caste system was identifiable by their clothes.

  He heard the noise: an out-of-tune symphony of squeaking trolley wheels, the slapping of plastic ward doors closing, the clattering of shoe leather on the marble floor, the humming of electrical floor polishers, voices, beepers.

  He inhaled the familiar hospital smells: floor polish, patients’ meals, acrid disinfectant, vomit.

  Barry stood for a moment getting his bearings. The staircase came out at Ward 3. There were twenty wards along the corridor; then a short passageway connected the main units to Wards 21 and 22. Ward 21 was neurosurgery, where—he swallowed—Major Fotheringham had been operated on. Barry’s destination was Ward 22.

  He started to walk, pausing to acknowledge greetings from staff members who recognized him. None it seemed had a moment to pass the time of day. He remembered it being the same last year. Barry had always been on some errand of mercy, always full of his own importance, failing to recognize that a junior house officer in the great hierarchy was probably less important than a bacterium. At least the specialists in microbiology spent a considerable amount of time with their microscopic charges.

  Perhaps, he thought, as he passed Wards 17 and 18, the orthopaedic units, it was one of the attractions of general practice. People in the village took him seriously, even if it was only to wonder about his competence. Perhaps, he thought, one of the things that had made him study medicine in the first place, was the need to be taken seriously, to feel he was somebody, that he belonged somewhere.

  He popped into Ward 19, urology, and had a quick word with the ward clerk. She promised she’d try to hurry up Kieran O’Hagan’s prostatectomy, see if he could be moved up the waiting list.

  Barry left the main corridor and quickly crossed the passageway. He let himself onto Ward 22. The nurses’ desk was deserted except for the unit clerk, a petite brunette whose hair, lustrous as a piece of deeply polished mahogany, fell to her midback. She sat with her legs crossed, her skirt at midthigh. Barry remembered her great legs.

  She looked up, smiled broadly, and said, “Look what the cat’s dragged in. What brings you here, Barry?”

  “How are you, Mandy?” He remembered her well. He should. He’d dated her a few times before he’d met the nurse with the green eyes. The one who was now going to marr
y a young surgeon.

  “All the better for seeing yourself,” she said, smiling. Clearly she bore no grudge about their parting.

  “I need to see the prof.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Do you know about camels and needles?”

  Barry laughed. “It’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle—”

  “Than for anyone to see the great man.” She gestured along the ward to where Barry could see a group of people clustered round the foot of a bed.

  It was the classic “cast of thousands” that was regularly assembled to pay homage to a senior professor and, at least on the surface, hang on his every word.

  The medical profession was represented by senior medical students and junior doctors whose ranks ascended from the lowly house officer, fresh from medical school, and on upwards through the grades of senior house officer, registrar, and senior registrar. These were the great man’s myrmidons.

  The nursing staff, equally sensitive to seniority, descended from the ward sister, junior sister, and staff nurse to the terrified-looking student nurse. Nurses in charge of a ward were called ‘sister’ as a throwback to the days when they had been in holy orders. These were the acolytes.

  All the medical and nursing personnel danced attendance on the high priest, a diminutive man, bald as a billiard ball, sporting a polka-dot bow tie and wearing a long white coat, a patella hammer prominently sticking from one pocket, a tuning fork in the breast pocket. The high priest of neurology, Professor Malcolm Faulkner, M.D., F.R.C.P. (London), F.R.C.P. (Dublin), F.R.C.P. (Edinburgh). Regius Professor of Neurology at the Queens University of Belfast.

  If a feeling of self-importance was vital to doctors, the prof’s tank would be full to overflowing. How different from O’Reilly, Barry thought. That man doesn’t give a hoot about those sorts of trivial embellishments. He gets his satisfaction from doing his job. And yet, Barry recognized that even O’Reilly relished his position at the top of the Ballybucklebo pecking order—and used it to his advantage.

  “Don’t worry,” Mandy said. “He’s in a good mood this morning. I’ll grab him for you before he leaves.”

  “Thanks, Mandy. I’ll only take a minute or two.” He remembered the promise he’d made to Councillor Bishop. “I don’t suppose you could speed up an appointment with the prof for one of my patients?”

  “I could try. How urgent is it?”

  Barry thought for a moment. “It’s for the woman I want to ask Professor Faulkner about this morning. She may not need to be seen here if I’m right about her and can fix her up back at home. But if I’m wrong . . .”

  “Tell you what,” she said. “See how you get on with your patient. If she doesn’t need an appointment, you’ll not need to worry. If she does, give me a ring and I’ll find her a cancellation.”

  “Thanks, Mandy.”

  “All part of the service. Now have a pew while you’re waiting. Do you fancy a cup of coffee?”

  “Still making that chicory stuff?” Barry remembered the countless cups of ersatz coffee he’d drunk.

  She laughed. “The wondrous concoction made by the Camp Company? ’Fraid so.”

  He shook his head.

  “Suit yourself. Go on into the ward office,” she said. “I’ll tell him you’re waiting.”

  “Thanks, Mandy. I owe you.”

  He was ill prepared for the way she raised one eyebrow, pouted, and said, “Dinner some night would be nice.”

  He felt the blush start as he let himself into the small room and closed the door. Why was he always so clumsy around women? Jack Mills would have had an instant comeback, made her laugh, and probably taken her up on the offer even if he was dating someone else. But then Jack wasn’t seeing Patricia.

  Barry waited until the door opened. Professor Faulkner, accompanied by his senior registrar, Doctor Bereen, entered. “Laverty. Mandy says you’re a GP somewhere in the bogs. You want a word.” The prof’s accents were clipped, very upper-class English. He’d come to Belfast from a senior position at Saint Bartholomew’s in London.

  “I’ll . . . I’ll . . . only take a minute, sir,” Barry stammered. He was always uncomfortable in the presence of such an exalted figure.

  “It’s all you’ll get. I’ve a very important meeting with the dean.”

  “Thank you, sir. It’s about a patient.”

  “No doubt.” The prof consulted his watch. “Get on with it.”

  Barry rapidly described Mrs. Bishop’s symptoms and the physical findings. He felt like a student again, front and centre at the great man’s ward rounds. “I think she’s got myasthenia gravis.”

  “And you’re sure it’s not due to an underlying cancer or thyroid disease?”

  “We’ve been able to exclude cancer pretty well, and we’ll be measuring her thyroid hormone levels when she comes back to see us, sir.”

  “You seem to have remembered something I taught you.” Professor Faulkner frowned, then drawled, “Mmmmm. Yes. Could be primary myasthenia, I suppose.” He turned to the registrar. “Bereen?”

  Bereen, standing ramrod stiff, began to pontificate, rattling off facts like the well-trained automaton Barry knew the prof would expect a junior member of his team to be. “Disease of the nervous system. Pathway still not fully understood. May be due to abnormal behaviour of acetylcholine at the neuromuscular junction. Symptoms and signs as Doctor Laverty has described and may include diplopia, dysphagia, dysarthria, and difficulty in chewing. On examination there is no wasting or fasciculation . . .”

  He knew his stuff all right, but Barry wondered how Mrs. Bishop would respond to that mouthful of arcane medical mumbo jumbo.

  “I think we know that, Bereen.” The prof looked bored.

  “Sorry, sir.”

  “Laverty?”

  “Yes, sir?” Barry said.

  “You’d a question? Ask.”

  For a moment Barry wondered if he should look for a large ring on the man’s finger to kiss. “When I was a student you taught us about a simple test that would confirm the diagnosis, sir.”

  “Indeed. I’m glad something else I said got through.” He spoke to Bereen. “One is forever casting pearls.”

  Barry almost gave up, but damn it, he wasn’t here on his own behalf. Mrs. Bishop was in trouble. O’Reilly wouldn’t have let himself be patronized. Why should he? “I’d appreciate it if you’d tell me about it.” He deliberately neglected to add “sir.”

  “Forgotten, have you?” The prof’s expression was closer to a sneer than a smile.

  “Obviously or I’d not be wasting your time asking. And I’ve a sick woman to deal with.”

  “Tell him, Bereen.”

  “You give an intramuscular injection of neostigmine, two-point-five milligrams, along with atropine, one-point-oh milligrams, to prevent abdominal colic. The increase in power is quite striking in about twenty to thirty minutes.”

  “Thank you, Doctor Bereen,” Barry said. “Thank you very much.”

  “Will that be all, Laverty?” The prof began to open the door.

  “Yes. I can remember the treatment,” he said formally.

  “I should hope so.” With that, the prof swept out, saying as he went, “I’ll be busy with the dean, Bereen. Take care of my outpatients.” He didn’t wait for a reply.

  “Christ,” said Doctor Bereen, finally relaxing. “Thank God I’ve only another month to go on this service. I’d rather work for Adolf Hitler.”

  “You have my sympathy,” Barry said. “My boss isn’t a bit like that.” Odd O’Reilly might be, unpredictable, given to storms and tempests, but never once had Barry seen him condescend to any living creature, and that included Arthur Guinness and Lady Macbeth. “I appreciate the help, and I’d appreciate it even more if you’d tell me how to treat myasthenia.”

  Bereen laughed. “I thought you said you knew.”

  “I did, but actually I don’t. I’d had enough. He’s not the Almighty.”

  “Christ, don’t tell him that.”
Bereen flopped into a chair, pulled out a sheet of paper, and began to scribble. He handed the sheet to Barry. “There you are, mate. The details of the test and the treatment. Good luck with your patient.”

  “Thanks, and good luck to you with the prof.”

  Bereen stretched. “It’s only another month, but I’ve been training for four years. Sometimes I envy you blokes who had the good sense to opt for general practice.”

  “You may be right,” said Barry, thinking that perhaps applying for a training post in the Cambridge teaching hospital to be near Patricia might not be such a good idea. He knew he’d find it difficult to become some great chief’s minion. “I’ve been enjoying general practice,” he continued. It wasn’t entirely true, not with the way things seemed to be in Ballybucklebo, but they were going to improve. Of course they were. And if the information he had now about how to deal with Mrs. Bishop did the trick. O’Reilly’s promise to make sure the word of her cure got out would work wonders for Barry’s reputation.

  “Right,” said Bereen rising, “I’ve to go and do the prof’s clinic.”

  “Still in the basement?” Barry asked.

  “The salt mines,” said Bereen. “Yes.”

  “I’ll walk down with you. I’m meeting an old pal for lunch in the cafeteria. Jack Mills.”

  “Good for you. Come on.”

  Barry followed Bereen out of the ward, and as they walked along the corridor a thought struck him. If he was successful in treating Mrs. Bishop, would O’Reilly be able to use that as a bargaining piece in the coming struggle with Councillor Bishop and his plans to take over the Duck?

  Happy the Physician Who Is Called

  at the End of the Illness

  The queue at the cafeteria counter was short. Barry had to wait for only a few minutes to pick up a cheese sandwich and a cup of coffee, and pay the cashier. “Hiya, Barry. How’s about you?” she asked.

  “I’m grand thanks, Connie.”

  Connie was, as ever, wearing enormous hoop earrings and sporting a beehive hairdo. She was as much a fixture in the underground cavern as the formica-topped tables scattered in the recesses between the arches supporting the roof. The place made Barry think of the catacombs under a mediaeval cathedral.