Being a pheasant was no bed of roses. Lord Fitzgurgle’s guests, poltroons who paid for the privilege of joining in the awful avicide, weren’t the only ones the birds should have feared. Several of Ballybucklebo’s citizens, in the spirit of Danton, Marat, Robespierre, and the rest of the French revolutionaries, saw no reason not to indulge in a bit of egalitarian free enterprise.
Lesser mortals had practised poaching for years. This activity was mightily frowned upon by the upper crust. In days of yore they spent considerable resources to ensure that vast tracts of Australia were populated by platoons of penurious peasants who’d purloined or pilfered privately purchased pheasants.
And I hope you’ll remember that when I first introduced you to my mentor, I described him as, among other things, an unregenerate poacher. Well, he might fancy a night in the woods. I did not.
As usual, my wishes and my fate were on widely divergent courses.
“Whiskey,” said O’Reilly. “Whiskey and oatmeal.”
“Yes, indeed.” I wondered what on Earth he was talking about, and quite lost track of my search for a self-preserving alibi.
“Come on,” said O’Reilly, leaving the surgery and heading for the kitchen. I followed.
He opened a cupboard and removed a bottle of a well-known Scotch brand’s Red Label, not one of his favoured Irish whiskeys.
“Cooking whisky’s good enough,” he remarked, producing a bag of oatmeal.
A bucket came next, the oatmeal was dumped into the bucket, and the spirits poured in. O’Reilly left just enough in the bottom of the bottle to allow him to take a healthy swallow as he stirred the soggy mess. “No need to let it all go to waste,” he remarked, and burped.
I was lost. Oatmeal was used to make porridge. If Mrs. Kincaid decided to boil some up from the contents of the bucket, my performance at morning surgery would certainly not be up to scratch. “What…?”
“You’ll see, my boy. You’ll see.” And so I did—but not until Friday night.
We were sitting in the upstairs room. The curtains were open and I was admiring the effects of the full moon on the waters of Belfast Lough. In the distance, the Hills of Antrim stood dark against a darker sky. A single coal boat ploughed a dark furrow through a sea like burnished silver. From somewhere inland, the liquid call of a barn owl was the only sound to disturb the velvet silence. The evening was idyllic, peaceful …
“Right,” said O’Reilly, “go and put on some dark clothes.”
“What?”
“Get a move on. I’ll get the oatmeal and I’ll meet you at the car.”
The oatmeal. I’d forgotten about it and was curious to know its purpose. Utterly forgetting the catastrophic consequences of curiosity to the cat—who became a cadaver with a certain degree of celerity—I went and changed.
It was a short drive through the darkened countryside. I wondered why O’Reilly switched off the engine and let the car glide silently for the last part of our journey—until I realized that we’d stopped by a large copse. A copse that I instantly recognized as Leprechauns’ Wood.
“Oh no, Fingal…”
“Oh yes,” he said. “Out, and keep very quiet.”
Together we wriggled through a barbed-wire fence and went on our way. O’Reilly carried the bucket of whisky-soaked oatmeal. I merely bore a two-inch laceration of my left hand. He made his way through the dimly lit undergrowth as silently as Daniel Boone might have approached a hostile Indian encampment. I trailed behind, making only the occasional acquaintance with briars’ thorns.
When we arrived in a small clearing, he stopped, held an extended finger to his lips, and began to peer intently up into the trees. My gaze followed his. There, silhouetted against the night sky, I saw the rotund shapes of roosting birds.
O’Reilly grinned at me and silently scattered the oatmeal on the forest floor. He rejoined me and guided me back into the undergrowth. He lay down. I lay down. Among a stand of broad-leafed plants. Pity they were nettles.
O’Reilly cupped his hands to his mouth and produced a most peculiar sound. I clapped my stung hands to my mouth and tried not to whimper.
Something stirred in the branches. One after another the sleeping birds sat bolt upright. One after another they fluttered to the ground. They bent and pecked at the oatmeal with the enthusiasm of a set of small pile-drivers. Sated at last, they fluttered back up to their perches, tucked their heads under their wings and, like a row of dominoes, one after another they lost their grips and tumbled to the ground.
They were a party of profoundly pissed pheasants, beautifically blotto birds, drunk as a lord—to whom, lest we forget, they actually belonged.
O’Reilly rose, walked into the clearing, grabbed two birds, and rapidly dispatched them. At least, I thought, they died happy. I wondered if the birds he left behind would awaken with horrible hangovers.
It struck me quite forcibly as we made our way back to the car that for Lord Fitzgurgle, haemorrhoids were not the only pains in the arse.
DECEMBER 2000
’Tis the Season to Be Jolly
O’Reilly and the turkey
Sir Stamford Raffles was an empire builder. He gave his name to a magnificent hotel in Singapore where, if the works of W. Somerset Maugham are to be believed, the tuans and memsa’bs would sit at tiffin sipping their chota pegs—and a good thing too. There’s quinine in tonic water, without which gin and tonic would be merely gin, the despised tot of the “other ranks” of His Majesty’s armed nitwits. Without the quinine, G&T would have absolutely no antimalarial powers whatsoever. It would be like Christmas without the presents.
And what, you may be wondering, does this have to do with the Machiavellian machinations of one Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly, MB, BCh, BAO? Those who have come to know and love the old reprobate would immediately assume there might be some connection with alcoholic consumption. A logical, almost Holmesian piece of deductive reasoning, but of course putting logic and O’Reilly in the same sentence is about as sensible as mixing water and sodium and chucking in a dose of gasoline for good measure. No, the link is rather more obscure. I’ll explain.
Please picture his surgery. It was mid-December. As I entered, his last patient of the day—Finnula Finucane, widowed mother of three—pushed past me. I could see the swelling beneath her usually lively green eyes and the silver tracks on her cheeks that spoke sadly of recent tears. “Finnula…” I began, but she hustled by without speaking. O’Reilly sat in his swivel chair staring over his half-moons at her departing back. I don’t think he even knew I was there. “Bugger it,” he muttered to himself, then, looking up, scowled at me.
“What’s wrong with her?” I asked, knowing full well that for all his bluster O’Reilly could care deeply for his patients.
“Bloody Santa Claus.”
“What?” For the life of me I failed to see how old Saint Nick could be the cause of Finnula’s grief.
He ignored me, hunched forward, clearly lost in his thoughts, then straightened, pointed one finger at me, and said, “We’ll just have to fix it. It’ll be Christmas in a week.”
“Yes. Right,” I said, utterly at sea, but it seemed simpler to agree.
He rose, strode to the door, and roared, “Mrs. Kincaid!”
I heard her coming along the corridor.
“Yes, Doctor O’Reilly?”
“Kinky, have you bought our turkey yet?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, buy two.”
She nodded.
I was trying to make sense of all of this. Finnula in tears. O’Reilly’s strange outbursts: “Bloody Santa Claus,” “It’ll be Christmas in a week,” “Buy two turkeys.” Good Lord, was O’Reilly going to cast himself as the reformed Ebenezer Scrooge, somehow hoping that Finnula or one of her youngsters would greet his gift of a turkey with a “God bless us each and every one”? I couldn’t quite see Finnula’s youngest—a carrot-haired six-year-old whose mischief was legend in Ballybucklebo—as a latter-day Tiny Tim.
O’Reilly grunted, then scratched his bent nose and continued, “Do you have any of those tickets you used for the parish dance left?”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“Get them, please.”
She left.
“Fingal, I…”
“Not now, Taylor. I need to think.”
Mrs. Kincaid reappeared and handed O’Reilly a roll of paper tickets.
“Thanks, Kinky.” O’Reilly ripped one free.
“I want you, Taylor, to buy a raffle ticket.”
“What for?” I think he detected the hint of suspicion in my voice. My tones were ones I imagined were used by flies following an invitation to visit a spider’s domicile.
“What for? A pound.”
“No, Fingal. I mean…”
“You might win a turkey.”
“No, Fingal. I mean what’s the draw in aid of?”
His face split into a grin of heroic proportions. “Santa Claus,” he muttered conspiratorially. “Now give.” He held out his hand.
I surrendered a note with all the enthusiasm of a Chicago South Side speakeasy owner who has just assured a large gentleman in a trench coat and a bulge under one armpit that nothing would be more gratifying than to buy beer from Mister Alphonsus Capone’s brewery—and, yes, an assurance that nothing nasty would go “bang” on the premises would be appreciated.
“Here.” He gave me my ticket. “It’s for a good cause.”
The departure of some of my hard-earned cash drove away any charitable thoughts I might have been harbouring about O’Reilly giving a turkey to Finnula Finucane. I had a horrible suspicion that I’d just contributed to the F. F. O’Reilly Christmas festivities fund. As P. G. Wodehouse remarked, I was suffering from a distinct lack of gruntle.
“Come on,” he bellowed, heading for the door, “the Mucky Duck’s open.”
I swallowed. Could he actually have the temerity to take my money and immediately go and spend it?
I followed in his wake like a very small dinghy being dragged along by a very large motorboat.
The Duck was packed. O’Reilly accosted the usual suspects. All, including Arthur Osbaldiston, Donal Donnelly, and even the notoriously tight-fisted Angus MacKay, were given a ticket and relieved of their pounds with a skill and apparent ease of a London pickpocket divesting his prey of their wallets and fob-watches. The rapine and pillage was over before it had sunk in to the befuddled mob that they’d been fleeced. I noticed that Angus MacKay looked as though he might be going to object. O’Reilly must have read the signs.
“Home,” he roared before any of the recently shorn could object.
And he hadn’t even stopped for a drink.
* * *
When we were once more ensconced in his surgery, O’Reilly pulled out a wad of notes and counted them with a well-licked thumb.
“Sixty-four quid,” he remarked, “less one for the cost of the prize.” He shoved a note into his trousers pocket. “Leaves sixty-three. That should do it.” His smile was like a morning sunrise.
“Fingal…?”
“Yes, my boy.”
“What exactly was that all about?”
He stuffed the notes into an envelope.
“Finnula,” he said, “and bloody Santa Claus. Didn’t I explain?”
It was my turn to grunt.
It must have been the imminence of the “season to be jolly.” His next words were ones I’d never—not in a month of Sundays—expected to hear pass O’Reilly’s lips: “Sorry about that, but it would have been a catastrophe of the first magnitude. We had to do something.”
I tried to ignore the “we.” My contribution had been a grudgingly given pound. And I was no closer to getting an explanation.
“Fingal…”
“You see, Pat,” his voice softened, “Finnula has been having a hard time making a go of it since her husband died. But she wanted her kids to enjoy Christmas. Do you know, she saved her egg money every week to buy them little treats.”
“Was she robbed?”
He shook his head. “Worse. Remember when you were a kid you’d write a letter to Santa, tell him what you wanted, and send it up the chimney?”
“Yes.”
“Her wee ones did—but the things they asked for were away beyond her budget. She did her best to explain to them that Santa was a bit hard up this year.”
“Sensible.”
“You’d have thought so, but she hadn’t counted on the wee redheaded one. She told me today that she’d gone out and when she’d come home she’d just been in time to see the lad send the last of her hard-saved pounds up the chimney because, ‘Santa could use a bit of help.’ She hadn’t the heart to chastise him.”
“So that’s what the money’s for.”
“Aye,” he said. “We just have to work out how to get her to accept it. She’s a very proud woman.”
“You’ll think of something, Fingal,” I said, and I meant it.
“I will,” he fixed me with a steely glare, “and you’ll keep your mouth shut about it—or I’ll kill you.”
And what has all this to do with one of the Founders of Empire? I believe the selling of tickets to a group of unwilling punters in the hope that one will win a prize—and somehow the turkey found its way to the table of Angus MacKay—is called a raffle.
And with that, nothing remains but for me to wish my reader—I can’t believe that there’s actually more than one—a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
JANUARY 2001
Just a Wee Deoch an’ Dorris
With apologies to Sir Harry Lauder
O’Reilly paused, shook the water from his tweed coat, and shouldered his way to the bar of the Mucky Duck. His words would have been audible from the quarterdeck to the main-top-gallant mast of HMS Victory in a Force 10 gale, and indeed, given the state of the weather that night, with the rain pelting off the roof like bursts of Maxim gunfire and the wind rattling the pub’s shutters, there was some justification for his raising his voice. Of course he had another, more pressing reason to make himself heard. “I believe your estate can sue the landlord if you die of thirst in a public house,” he roared.
Patience, you’ll recall, was not in his catalogue of virtues, particularly when the thirst was on him.
I watched as other patrons sidled away along the bar, studiously avoided his gaze, found fascinating areas of exploration under their fingernails, and otherwise tried, like a child who pulls a blanket over his head in the belief that he’s now invisible to the outside world, to avoid attracting the attention of Ballybucklebo’s resident ogre. O’Reilly in need of a drink was like a bear with a sore head—a sore head that had been brought on by repeated applications of a heavy blunt instrument to the top of the ursine skull.
Only Angus MacKay, piper, shepherd, Highland gentleman, a man held in enormous esteem by the locals for once daring to point out to O’Reilly that his bagpipe playing needed as much work to clean up his grace notes as the Earth did following Noah’s boat trip—only Angus held his ground. I noticed he had no drink in front of him but stood quietly at the bar, apparently waiting for something to arrive.
Arthur Osbaldiston trundled along behind the counter, bowing as much as his three hundred pounds allowed and sweating like a jaunting-car pony after a trip to the summit of Ballybucklebo Hills with Osbaldiston in the trap. He shoved something out of sight under the bar counter and asked, “Large whiskey and a small sherry, Doctor, sir?”
“Jasus, Arthur,” O’Reilly rumbled, “if you ever get out of the pub business you can always get a job in the circus as a mind reader.”
“Or as Art the Human Whale,” called a voice I didn’t recognize, from somewhere in a darker corner of the establishment.
O’Reilly spun like a principal dancer in mid-pirouette, pointed an admonitory finger and, keeping his quarterdeck voice at full decibels, announced, “That was uncalled-for, Paddy Finnegan. Arthur can’t help his weight. It’s in his genes, and for those who don’t know what
genes are, they’re little small thingies in the cells.”
A respectful muttering filled the room. In one sentence O’Reilly had established his sympathy for Arthur Osbaldiston’s obesity and his own intellectual preeminence in the Ballybucklebo pecking order.
And I’d recognized an edge creep into his voice—the one that appeared when he was about to cut someone down to size with the finality of a chain saw.
“Cells,” he pronounced. “Cells, Paddy—but then you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you now?”
Laughter swept the company as a breaker roars over a shingle beach. Every man there knew that Paddy Finnegan had just returned from six months as a guest of Her Majesty Elizabeth II Regina, Dei Gratia, Fid. Def. A small matter of four salmon from Lord Fitzgurgle’s river, as I now recalled.
“Here you are, Doctors,” said Osbaldiston, setting the drinks on the counter. “Five shillings, please.”
“Thank you,” said O’Reilly, ignoring mundane things like money and the look of supplication on the landlord’s face. “Better,” he said, taking a hefty pull, “much better.”
I slipped Arthur the necessary coins, sipped my sherry, and waited.
O’Reilly, placated now by the success of his repartée and the taste of his John Jameson’s, turned his attention to his immediate neighbour.
“How are you, Angus?” he asked.
The little Scot pondered his reply with all the gravity of a High Court judge prior to donning the black cap and handing down the death penalty. Finally he vouchsafed, “I am well.”