It was quite amusing when they were leaving the bar and Tom fell across one of the high stools. ‘O, now, Tom!’ Shamey gently chided him. ‘You’ll have to mind yourself now, you and them auld brandy chasers!’ Tom pawed the air and smiled bashfully as his new companion helped him up. ‘Thank you, Mandy!’ he said and felt himself melting as she mischievously whispered: ‘You great big thing you, Tom Gully!’
Tom was a little bit ashamed to be bringing her back to his crumbly old house but she assured him it didn’t matter. In fact he had spent so long apologizing in advance that he was somewhat amazed she hadn’t turned around and left him already. Which was why he kept repeating: ‘I love you, Mandy,’ as he went and stumbled across the step. Having to be assisted by her once again! ‘O, you silly!’ she said and chuckled. ‘I love the way you say that,’ he said. And he did! He could have listened to her saying it all night long! ‘O, you silly, O you silly,’ he said, and they both laughed as they went inside.
Napper was pleased to see them home, jumping up on his master’s chest and licking him all over his face. Not knowing, of course, what to make of this new visitor. But not complaining either, because he could see it was perfectly plain she was being kind to his master. Kind? It was as if she had known him for years, for Heaven’s sake! Even longer than Napper himself!
What Tom could not for the life of him understand was – why was she so interested in him? Why on earth would a woman so beautiful want to know a thing about Tom Gully? Those were the thoughts running through his mind as Tom lay spreadeagled in the chair, like a gigantic soft toy. How many times had he thus reclined, he asked himself, in that damp and mouldy kitchen, listening to the radio just as they were doing now, and dreaming this very scene, except never in a million years expecting it to be so close and tender? He felt perhaps he was losing his reason. Yes! That was it! He was going exquisitely, beautifully, mad in the head!
‘So tell me then, Tom,’ her voice whispered, ‘do you like me? Do you like your little Mandy?’
Tom wanted to press his fingers to his eyes. He wanted to hide as he tried to find the courage to say to her: ‘Miss – Miss! Please ask me that again,’ because the white nylon blouse with the ruffles on the cuffs she was dangling on the end of her shiny crimson fingernail was distracting him.
Look out, Tom! White flesh! White flesh! flashed a sign inside his mind.
But flesh there wasn’t – not as yet. Nothing, only an elegantly sculpted hand that languidly traced its way across the mesh of a brassière’s blackest lace.
‘O, I feel so hot!’ she sighed.
Tom tried frantically to think of news. Any news as she began to sway to the rhythm of the music. The music that was made by Margo and the Country Flavour. Except that somehow now it has been transmuted into a primeval, untamed drumbeat in Tom Gully’s mind! As she effortlessly slides onto his lap!
O, naughty boy! O, wicked Tom Toms! Who sobs in his night-time lady’s arms as out across the fields his cows and sheep go moo and baa. Crimson nails stroking his cheek as Tom Gully shivers with a fear that is so sweet he wants to die of it. Die of it right now as he puts his arms around her neck to kiss her alabaster skin.
‘I love you, Mandy!’ he says. ‘You didn’t even remark on my boil.’
‘Go away,’ she coos, ‘naughty boil!’
Tom is quivering like a reed in the breeze. ‘Marry me, Mandy!’ he says. ‘Marry me and I’ll give you all my money!’
Already, Tom Toms’ peepers are aglow! For she really is considering!
‘All the money in the house and all the land I own!’ he cries, curling one plump finger around a thumb.
‘O, Tom Toms! I couldn’t! I really couldn’t!’ flutters Mandy.
‘Here!’ cries Tom as a shoal of five-pound notes from a drawer to the ground goes floating.
‘Oo! You are serious after all!’ coos Mandy.
As ruffly blouse to ceiling it goes sailing and sparkly pants at once come swooshing down!
*
Now Tom Gully had never been in a situation before where his head it kept banging off the chair and his voice became so high-pitched that you would have easily been confused as to the nature of his gender. Neither had he ever felt, as he did some hours later, as if some enormous vacuum cleaner had come along and sucked from within him all the enzymes and juices and male fluids he had in his life possessed. For the very first time, his cheeks had become so flushed that it was actually impossible to determine where exactly his boil began and his face ended. Why, he was in such a state that it was a miracle he was able to speak at all! Uttering the words: ‘Oh my God! What a beautiful woman you are, Mandy! Mandy, God love you!’ in the voice of a valiant athlete who has just, against all odds, completed the decathlon. Not that it made any difference, however, for his declarations, sadly, fell on deaf ears, if cold stone floors can be described as having ears. There is a sensation which will be familiar to readers of urban myths and similar tales of travellers in foreign parts who awake in discomfiting surroundings to experience a feeling of mortal dread in the lower regions of the abdomen. Who will discover, to their horror, some time later, that their innermost organs – their kidneys as a rule – have been removed whilst they slept, in the most treacherous of backstreet larcenies. A not dissimilar feeling now overcame Tom Gully, as he repeatedly called out Mandy’s name – but in vain, to be answered only by the thin Barntrosna breeze rattling the bolt on the swinging back door of his kitchen. As his weather-beaten hand sank itself deep into the penumbral regions of his trouser pocket, the cold realization dawned on him that they were indeed missing – not his kidneys, but the innumerable five-pound notes which had been, he thought, safely and securely deposited there. He felt like weeping.
‘Come back! Come back, you! That money belongs to me!’ he cried helplessly as he waved his fist at the night, his only response that provided by the reluctantly turned head of a sleepy-eyed Charolais bull.
*
Tom Gully was now beside himself. There is no other way of describing it. For three solid hours, he wept copious amounts of tears into the firegrate. ‘You idiot, Tom Gully!’ he reproached himself remorselessly. ‘You stupid silly idiot! For that’s all you are! You should have known she was only taking you for a ride! Now look at you! A disgrace! A disgrace to the name Gully, nothing more! Are you surprised you’re devastated?’
Which he was – devastated, that is – but not half as much as he was when, only some days later, he stretched before the mirror after a hard day’s work, and to his amazement, divined once more upon the flush expanse of his forehead, a shining, almost gloatingly triumphant – boil! A pink-red sphere of flesh that seemed to lean towards him like some eerie red eye and wink: ‘Hello there, Tom!’
That was but the beginning. In the days that followed, such lesions were to become commonplace and soon it was as if Tom Gully was similar to some horrible mutation that had – ludicrous as it seems, in a place not noted for covert government research or comparable activity – somehow managed to come into contact with radioactive materials. And, had it not been for the efforts of his physician, Dr Joe McCaffrey, would almost certainly have taken his own life.
‘No,’ Dr Joe counselled, folding his stethoscope, ‘the cause of your ailment is not mysterious radiation or anything like it – as you well know, Tom Gully!’
Dr Joe fixed his patient with a firm but benevolent gaze.
‘She stole your money, didn’t she?’
It was as if all the unbearable, pent-up fury that had been bottled up inside Tom Gully for weeks came roaring out in a huge tidal wave.
‘Yes, doctor!’ he cried as he sank his meaty fist into the heart of his palm. ‘Every penny! Every last penny I ever earned, she took it off me! It’s true! Every word you’ve spoken is true!’
This was to be the beginning of the healing process for Tom Gully and, years later, whenever he would reflect on his ordeal, that evening in Dr Joe’s surgery always featured as the very first point on the journe
y it had fallen to him to make – the ‘long march towards recovery’, as it were.
And whenever he would speak of it, to his neighbours, or while having a stout with Shamey in the bar, he would always smile wistfully – but not without a tinge of regret, for what might have been, perhaps – abstractedly fingering his last remaining boil beneath his shirt as he mused: ‘Yes! She made a cod of me, and it’s been a long road – but it’s all over now! And it’ll be a long time before she does it again, let me tell you!’ before yet again taking his zinc buckets – a regular ritual now! – and heading off down the open road, swinging them gaily as he approached the dairy, meticulously positioning them as he stroked the flanks of the gentle heifer, who went ‘moo’ in eager anticipation, a contentment the like of which he’d never known settling at last upon Tom Gully as he adjusted his cap and, licking his lips, once more felt a broad proprietorial smile beginning to unwind across his bright, weather-beaten cheeks.
The Valley of the Flying Jennets
I expect, now that Ireland has become such a changed place over the past few years, with European flags and coffee shops and contemporary artworks in the vanguard of this admittedly extraordinary cultural metamorphosis (not to mention the omnipresent chirp of portable phones and the industrious purr of facsimile machines), that there are many people – in particular those of the younger generation – who would find it very difficult to accept – in these new, empirical times – the story of the Valley of the Flying Jennets and who would most likely form the opinion that you fabricated the entire scenario, to further your own sadly egotistical ends. Were that to be the reaction I would not be in the least surprised, for even now, when I cast my mind back on those days, I have to occasionally reprimand myself lest I fall victim to the tendency of embellishing what was an otherwise unremarkable period of my life. For, in all honesty, it is not every day you hear of mythic creatures the like of which are to be encountered within the pages of this story, and indeed figure most prominently within it. As a matter of fact, it is well I recall the first occasion on which I broke my silence and related the tale to a few of my closest friends in the Georgian Room of the Barntrosna Arms Hotel one winter night in 1963. The expressions upon their collective countenances were far from what you might describe as ‘transfixed’. I recall one of the less animated responses on that occasion being that of Barney Rafters, a farmer who has been in the livestock trade for generations, who was heard to cry: ‘Aye! And my prize Aberdeen Angus has just given birth to a fucking monkey, Dr John Joe Parkes!’
But laugh as he might – and indeed his colleagues! – the more he attended to my tale, the more intrigued he found himself becoming – with the result that by the time we broke up in the deserted bar on that freezing November night there were very few of my companions who made their way home in their heavy topcoats and scarves believing that what I had spoken was anything other than the truth.
*
It all began some months after I had completed my final examinations – after some tedious three years of ‘repeats’ – in Trinity College, Dublin. I was residing with my parents in the family home, biding my time until an opportunity presented itself for me to begin a full-time practice and devote myself and whatever talents I might possess to the care of the community which I hoped would value them, and provide me with sufficient remuneration to keep body and soul together in the process. It was an innocent time in our little country, with nothing much happening from one day to the next bar the sound of asses and carts as they clip-clopped merrily past our window where I sat poring over my lexicons and medical charts, whilst my mother busied herself with her hot, steaming soda cakes, my father sonorously declaiming Yeats from his recumbent position in the chimney corner. Work there was certainly for me to do in my home place, but rarely did it extend beyond the world of superficial skin grazes or the preparation of poultices, for the more specific and complicated needs of the citizens of Barntrosna were already taken care of by Dr Heber O’Grady, not someone whom I myself would employ to attend to my needs, preferring indeed, if veracity is to be paramount here, to be attended to by a mentally deficient orang-utan. An appraisal which is not – I assure you, for I am above the tedious spite and petty back-biting which is a feature of village life, the medical profession being no more immune than any other – in any way connected with his repeated, would-be humorous asides, the moment I had my back turned, to the effect of: ‘Yes, chaps! There he goes! Barntrosna’s answer to Dr Christiaan Barnard, I don’t think – ha ha ha! Good man, John Joe, you boy you! Did you get your exams yet?’
A lesser practitioner than I might have taken issue with him but I am not such a man. It has been suggested on occasion that the gentle disposition with which I am blessed is attributable to my predilection for opiates, which I feel is inaccurate, much as I may be partial to them ever since my days in Trinity, for the fact is that from my earliest years I have been, I feel, uncommonly slow to anger. I realize that there are those who, given such a degree of unwarranted provocation, would undoubtedly have reacted by hurling him to the pavement and raining bitter blows upon his superior tweeds. But such a course of action would not be that preferred by JJ Parkes, MD. If my character is anything, it is rational, even-tempered, sensible. Which makes what happened next all the stranger.
*
I was reclining in my study perusing some of the pages of Dr Freud and partaking of my little afternoon indulgence, which consisted of barely a fraction of the samples I had brought with me from my alma mater upon the termination of my studies there, when my father burst in with a sheet of paper in his hand, crying: ‘JJ! You have been offered a position! Why, this is wonderful! At last someone in the house has got a job!’
My father (it was said of him that he considered himself above such mundane pursuits – had not worked in thirty years, devoting himself entirely to the declamation of verse in public places since his own graduation from that same aforementioned august institution) continued, perching his pince-nez on the bridge of his nose: ‘But the oddest thing is – it’s in a place I’ve never heard of!’
Such was my excitement I did not care a jot if I had been offered a position in Kathmandu or the Outer Hebrides. I leaped from my chair and, gripping the sheet of paper, read furiously in a trembling voice: ‘On behalf of the community of Labashaca, I would like to take this opportunity to offer you the position of General Practitioner, to take effect immediately. Signed yours sincerely, Fr Tom Bannie.’
I could not believe my eyes. I landed my father a rough punch on his right shoulder and cried: ‘I got it, Daddy! Do you realize what this means? Do you?’ I could see that he was delighted for me and resolved to repair to my room and pack at once.
The saddest part of all was bidding farewell to my mother. I have always harboured a special affection for her, both of us consequently finding ourselves in floods of tears at the garden gate as the jarvey waited patiently for me. ‘Please write to me, son! Write and tell me all about the people of Labashaca and your new-found friends!’ she said. I assured her that I would. Then I said goodbye to my father and we were off. Johnnie Colcannon was the jarvey and he had been driving our family for generations so I felt I was in safe hands. That was my first mistake.
*
The last thing I remember before I fell asleep was a beautiful rose-red sky with the sun a shimmering orange ball hanging like a lamp between the sharp peaks of the distant Slieve Took mountains. But when I awoke both it and they had vanished and in their place were clouds of the oddest ink-blue hue that somehow seemed to possess just the slightest touch of menace, filling me throughout with a sense of the deepest foreboding. Which, I realized at once, was fanciful nonsense, and wholly due to the fact that our journey had already taken us some hours and that I had been overcome by a debilitating lassitude. I suppose it is fair to say that by my very rationality – upon which I pride myself, and always have – I effectively demolished my irrationality. And was about to observe as much to my good friend the jarv
ey, except that when he slowly turned to hear my words, I saw that it was not him but a smaller man who, whilst bearing a superficial resemblance to Johnnie Colcannon, my driver of some hours earlier, had within his skull set two bead-like eyes of such glassy emptiness that it could mean only one thing – the driver of my jaunting car and custodian of Ernest, our trusty trotting steed, had been spirited somehow away, and in his place installed – a changeling!