An Irish Country Doctor (12 page)

Barry wished the young woman would shut up. She had a voice that would cut tin.

The other chuckled. Her laugh was contralto, deep and resonant. Barry glanced at her. She had black hair with a sheen like a healthy animal's pelt. Her face was strong, with a firm chin and full lips that bore the merest hint of pale pink lipstick. Slavic cheekbones. Dark eyes with an upward tilt. They had a deep, unfathomable glow, like the warmth in well-polished mahogany. Her skin was smooth and tanned, and a small dimple showed in her left cheek as she laughed. But for that dimple, she could have been Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady.

Her laughter died, and Barry found himself wishing that she would laugh again. He didn't want her to see him staring, so he looked away, but soon he found his gaze drawn back. She was looking out the window. He saw her in profile. She wore an unbuttoned white gabardine raincoat.

"Anyway, Patricia," her friend rattled on, "I says to Eileen, says I. . ."

Would she never stop prattling? He glanced down and then stole another look. Patricia, that was her name; Patricia turned, caught him staring, and held his gaze. His hand flew to his head, and he smoothed the damn tuft. "Excuse me," he said, knowing that he was blushing. "I'm awfully sorry. . . ."

She laughed again, warm and throaty. "A cat can look at a king . . . if it doesn't think the king's a mouse."

"I'm sorry."

The train slowed. He saw the sign for Belfast Station glide past the window. The train stopped. They left. Barry closed his eyes and sat back against the cushions. Why in hell had he not had the courage to find out more about Patricia? In the movies she would have left something on the train, something he could use as an excuse to run after her. No such luck. Ships that pass, he thought, and yet, and yet. . .

He left the compartment not expecting to see any sign of Patricia and her chatty friend, but there they were up ahead, Patricia leaning on the noisy one's arm and limping slowly. Must have hurt herself playing hockey, he thought. She certainly looked the athletic type. He took a deep breath, smoothed his hair, and lengthened his stride until he drew level.

"Excuse me," he said, "excuse me."

Patricia stopped and faced him.

"Come away on out of that, Patricia." The friend tugged at Patricia's sleeve and scowled at Barry.

Words tumbled out. "Look. My name's Barry Laverty. I want. . . that is . . . I'd like--"

"Away off and chase yourself." More tugging at the coat sleeve. 

"Will you have dinner with me tonight? Please?"

Patricia gave him an appraising look, head-to-toe like a roué undressing a woman with his eyes.

"You've a right brass neck, so you have." The friend glared at Barry. "Anyway, we're busy the night."

Patricia smiled. "That's right. We are."

"Oh." Barry felt that his being able to catch up with the pair had been like a last-minute stay of execution, but by her words Patricia had told him that the warden's midnight call had not come and wasn't going to. His shoulders sagged.

"But I'm taking the ten o'clock train back to the Kinnegar."

He saw the laugh in her dark eyes, and his breath caught in his throat.

Barry sat in a plastic-covered chair at a Formica-topped table in the window alcove of the upstairs room of O'Kane's Bar, the nearest watering hole to the Royal Victoria Hospital. At his feet a pair of Wellington boots lay in a brown paper bag. He glanced at his watch. Jack Mills was late, and that wasn't like Jack. The curtains behind Barry swayed in the draught coming in through the window. He tried to see out through the smut and drizzle streaks. He leant back and peered up Grosvenor Road to the casualty department, outside which, regal and dignified, the bronze statue of Her Royal Majesty Victoria, Regina, Dei Gratia, Rid. Def., Ind., Imp., sat enthroned. Her sceptre, covered in bird shite, made a convenient perch for a pair of pigeons.

A shadow fell over the table top, and Barry turned to see Jack Mills wearing a long white coat, his usual grin pasted to a country face that would not have been out of place on a farmer from Cullybackey--which was where Jack's folks ran a dairy herd. 

"Sorry I'm late." Jack sat. "I'd a bugger of a night on call and this morning was murder." He pulled out a packet of cigarettes. "Fag?" 

Barry shook his head. "I quit last year. Remember?" 

"Right." Jack lit up. "I'm knackered." He stretched out his legs. 

"Pint?" Barry asked, looking forward to spending the afternoon with his old friend. "Can't. Sorry." Jack inhaled deeply and shook his head.

"Oh?"

"Yeah. The registrar in Sick Kids is sick himself, and they need a hand on a surgical case in about an hour. I got the short straw, damn it." Jack's smile belied his words. "I wouldn't mind a quick bite to eat though."

Barry swallowed his disappointment. It was going to be a long day before the ten o'clock train. He imagined dark eyes and hoped the wait would be worth it.

"Grub," said Jack. He turned and called to the barman, "Brendan, could you manage a steak-and-mushroom pie, chips, and an orange squash?"

"Right, Doctor Mills." Brendan put down the glass he was polishing. "What about you, Doctor Laverty?"

"That would be good." Barry never ceased to be amazed by how Brendan, owner and barman, a man of indeterminate age with a face like a bilious heifer, remembered the names of the generations of students and junior doctors who used his establishment. "So," Jack asked, "how's the world abusing you?" 

"Can't complain."

"And if you did, no one would listen." Jack ground out his cigarette. "So, go on," he said. "How's general practice?" 

"It's different. I'm working with a Doctor O'Reilly in Ballybucklebo." 

"O'Reilly?

Not by any chance Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly? Man of about fifty, fifty-five?"

"That's right."

"Good Lord. Before the war he was one of the best forwards to play rugby for Ireland."

"I didn't know that." Barry was impressed.

"You, brother Laverty, wouldn't know an Irish rugby player from a penny bap." He winked at Barry. "But you saved my bacon in anatomy class, so I'll forgive you."

"Rubbish." Barry remembered the trouble Jack had had when they were students. His Latin was poor, and learning the names of the body's structures, an easy task for Barry, had been a struggle for his friend. Jack's likelihood of progressing through medical school had been in doubt, but with Barry's coaching he'd managed to squeak a pass in the third-year anatomy examinations. 

"Here y'are." Brendan set two plates on the table. "I'll get your drinks in a minute."

"Dig in," said Jack, picking up his knife and fork. "Come on, I want to hear about what you're up to."

Barry did his best to describe his first week as O'Reilly's assistant, and the older doctor's habit of riding roughshod over anyone who stood in his way. Jack made sympathetic noises. He chuckled when Barry described O'Reilly's eccentricities. "But you are enjoying it?"

Brendan reappeared and silently left their drinks. "I asked you, are you enjoying working in the country?" 

"I think so. Mind you, there's an awful lot of routine stuff." 

"That's easy," said Jack. "Remember what that plummy English registrar told you when you complained about all the boring things we had to do when we were students?"

"What?"

Jack, always the consummate mimic, declared in the tones of one of the upper class, "Old boy, in this life there will always be a certain amount of shit to be shovelled. I really would urge you to buy a long-handled spade and simply get on with it." 

"Right." Barry laughed. "And I have seen some interesting cases." He told Jack how O'Reilly had driven the Kennedy girl to Belfast in his own car. Jack nodded, mouth full, when Barry mentioned that O'Reilly's knowledge of every patient seemed encyclopaedic. 

"Now there's a difference," he said. "I never get to know anybody. We're too damn busy. Get 'em in, cut 'em, and get 'em out. Mind you, I really enjoy the cutting bit."

"You would. You always were a bloody sadist." 

"Away off and feel your head. It's what Jim Hardy used to say in that TV programme."

"Tales of'Wells Fargo?"

"That's it, partner." Jack adopted a heavy Texan drawl. " 'Sometimes a man's got to do what a man's got to do.'" He reverted to his own voice. "Speaking of which . . . ," he looked up at the clock over the bar, stood, reached into his pocket, and tossed a pound note on the table. "My half. Sorry, mate, but I'd better run on. Sir Donald Cromie is like the wrath of God if his assistant's late." 

"Sir Donald who?" Was he the man O'Reilly had consulted on Tuesday?

"Sir Donald Cromie, paediatric surgeon with nimble fingers and a temper like Mount Etna on a bad day. He did an appendix the other night. Now the patient's blown up a pelvic abscess. Sick as a dog." 

"You wouldn't happen to know the patient's name?"

Jack laughed. "No. I don't even know if it's a wee boy or a wee girl."

"Oh."

Jack moved toward the staircase. "I'm off. Good to see you, mate. I'll give you a bell next time I'm free. Maybe we could sink a decent pint or two."

"I'd like that."

"And about O'Reilly: Noli illegitimi carborundum.'' 

"I won't," Barry said to his friend's departing back, then took a drink. The Cantrell and Cochrane orange juice was sickly sweet. Barry stood, picked up his parcelled boots, and walked over to the bar. "What's the damage, Brendan?"

"Hang on." Brendan, with great moving of lips and counting on fingers, scribbled with the stub of a yellow pencil on a piece of paper.

As Barry waited, he wondered about the patient with the appendix abscess. Could it be Jeannie Kennedy? No way to tell; still the coincidence was a bit worrying.

"Here you are, Doctor Laverty."

Barry paid the bill. "Take care of yourself, Brendan." 

"I will, sir."

Barry made his way down the narrow staircase, treads worn concave by the feet of countless patrons. When he stepped out onto Grosvenor Road, the drizzle had stopped. He decided to walk into Belfast. He'd lots of time to kill until the ten o'clock train. He walked in a world filled with the stink of car exhaust, the constant grumble of traffic, gutters clogged with soggy newspapers. On the pavement, people hurried by, men in Dexter raincoats, one exercising three racing greyhounds, and women in head scarves, their pink and white hair curlers scarcely hidden, their faces pinched and thin-lipped, shopping bags over their arms. He passed pubs and turf accountants, busy with the comings and goings of men in elbow-patched tweed jackets, cigarettes glued to their lower lips, and then fish-and-chips shops reeking of lard and battered cod, greasy wrappers flung on the pavement to lie among squashed smears of dog turd.

The streets he passed all had familiar names: Roden Street, Distillery Street, Cullingtree Road. They were cramped terraces, sunless and smog-ridden. In his student years he'd seen their inhabitants with chronic bronchitis, rheumatic fever, rickets, head lice, and scabies--all the diseases of poverty and damp, cramped living. He'd delivered babies in tiny bedrooms of "two up, two down" terrace houses, where the bedclothes had been newspapers, the mattress urine-stained and dank, and the woman in the bed, twenty-two going on fifty with her reddened hands, shrunken cheeks, and hair like the strands of a greasy floor mop. He'd felt so bloody useless. No matter what advances medicine might make, he'd learned the hard way that doctors occupied the last line of trenches in a battle that should have been won at the front. No amount of oxygen for ravaged lungs, vitamins for scrawny kids, or DDT for head lice could have half the effects of a decent diet and a clean, warm home.

Barry lengthened his stride and hurried across the railway bridge to Sandy Row, bastion of Loyalist supremacy. In preparation for next week's great Orange celebration, the Twelfth of July, the kerbstones were freshly painted in red, white, and blue. Union Jacks drooped from every upper window, and street urchins raced about in torn short trousers and half-unravelled Fair Isle pullovers, snail tracks of mucus on their upper lips. 

Their cries were shrill, harsh: "Hey, silver sleeves? Away on home and wipe your dirty snotters." 

"Sammy McCandless, yer mammy wants ye." 

"See you, Bertie? Quit your colloguing, and give us a hand with this here fuckin' tree." This last remark was from a child of eight dragging a dead branch, from God only knew where, to add to one of the bonfires that would rage on the night of the eleventh. The flames would paint the clouds with a glow like that of the blazes that Henry VIII's reforming Protestants set under the flesh of nonrecanting Catholics. The hearty warmth of next week's fires would bring cheer to the drab existence of the inhabitants of Sandy Row, and serve to remind the Fenians in their ghettos on Falls Road and Divis Street, not half a mile away, of their place in the Unionist province of Ulster.

Belfast, he thought, dirty old harridan of a city, and one that I don't miss one bit. There's a lot to be said for Ballybucklebo. He stopped where Grosvenor Road met the junction of College Square and Great Victoria Street. Two cinemas sat, one on each corner: one marquee read, Dr. Strangelove; the other, The Pink Panther. Both starred Peter Sellers. Barry looked at his watch. He'd have time to nip over to the bookstore on Donegall Square and come back to the Ritz for the start of The Pink Panther. He'd grab a quick bite after the showing. Perhaps, he thought, he'd try the Chinese place on Church Street, and that wouldn't leave him much more than an hour to kill before ten o'clock.

Maybe she wasn't coming. Why would she? Maybe she'd said she'd be on the ten o'clock just to get rid of him.

The train would leave in five minutes, and by arriving too early Barry had given his impatience time to build and his doubts time to grow. For God's sake, why would a young woman who didn't know him from a hole in the ground say she'd meet him on a train--at night? He took one last long look along the Queen's Quay. It was deserted. The cranes on the coal dock stood gaunt and skeletal against a dimming sky. Oh, well. Barry hefted his parcel of boots, turned, and made his way toward the platform. He waited for his turn to surrender his ticket.