The Miracle Man (12 page)

Quickly he ran over in his mind the little speech he had prepared and then he stepped up to the door and clenched his fist ready to knock. This close, the squiggly marks on the paint of the door that were supposed to look like wood grain made
a funny pattern in his eyes. He stepped back, blinking. It had been so long, so very long. Oh, he had talked briefly to Cissy the other day at the sea wall but that had been a casual meeting, albeit the first one where she had been alone. This time it was entirely his responsibility and was therefore up to him to justify. His clenched hand fell to his side. What if yesteryear was just that, yesteryear? What if she thought he was a joke and laughingly wondered how she had ever had anything to do with a person like him? Limpy looked down at his dirty cracked boots his baggy trousers and his worn jacket. As he nervously thumbed a lapel, he saw as with her eyes the stubby hands with the dirty fingernails. He’d been kidding himself. What lady in her right mind would want to take up with the likes of him?

He didn’t hear a thing, not a footfall on the stairs, not a creaking floorboard, until the voice bellowed into his ear,

“What business have you got here?”

Limpy gave a jump, pitched forwards and thumped his forehead on the door. Now he really was seeing funny patterns. Then he felt the index finger poking into his shoulder. Just like her father.

“I asked you what your business was here.”

Limpy turned to face Margaret Garrison, to see the brows drawn together, the mouth in an angry pout.

“I just came – to have a word with Miss Cissy. But I wouldn’t want to disturb her if she was having a visitor or anything.”

Margaret’s voice rose to the higher pitch which she reserved for addressing the locals. It was the verbal equivalent of a poke in the leg with a walking stick.

“My sister’s social arrangements are none of your concern. But I can tell you that she has no wish whatsoever to converse with you.”

“But I was only going to ask her if . . . ”

“I have made the position clear,” Margaret interrupted, “now if you please,” she waved her hand, “move on.”

Watched by Margaret, Limpy gave a last forlorn glance at Cissy’s bedroom door and walked towards the stairs. Why did he think there might still be something there after all those years. It was true what they said, there’s no fool like an old fool. He started down the stairs with heavy tread. Maybe two miracles had been too much to expect.

On the Sunday, almost a week after Limpy McGhee had received his celestial transplant at the Mass Rock, there was a hurling match at Inisbreen. The game against the visiting team of Culteerim was to be held in the hurling field by the beach, at the far end of the bay from the village, and in the warm spring sunshine of the afternoon the perimeter of the field began to fill with cars and spectators on foot. Malachy McAteer, who said his brother in London was making a fortune in the commodities market – or had the brother said Camden Market, Malachy was never quite sure – had at the entrance to the field a ramshackle ice-cream van that now and then broke into laryngitic chimes and had drawn a good crowd around it, a gathering which might not have been so keen to sample his wares if they had seen how he had made the ice-cream.

Around the pitch was a wire fence against which people took up positions, couples, groups of friends, whole families together in a clutter of bicycles and prams and dogs fretting on unaccustomed leads. Yet others sought a better vantage point on the higher ground at the side of the field away from the sea. While the majority of spectators were aware of the main rules and conduct of the game and simply wanted their team to win,
the aficionados, who were mostly middle-aged and older men who had played the game in their youth, gathered here and there in small groups and argued the finer points of form, stamina and gamesmanship. A small number of spectators, who neither knew nor cared about the outcome of the match, had simply turned up in the hope of seeing a fight between the players and possibly a contribution from some of the more partisan spectators. Mass pitch invasions followed by widespread fighting were not unknown.

From the sidelines, spectators would exhort individual players to greater efforts, only to curse them later for their mistakes, pointing out how obvious the correct course of action had been and wondering at the tops of their voices whether the player in question was blind as well as useless. They would bang their fists on fence posts, throw their arms wide in delight when Inisbreen was given a free, or pull their caps down over their faces in frustration at a missed opportunity, so that at the end of the game they would leave the field as exhausted as the players. When the Culteerim team came out first onto the pitch for a warm-up, practised eyes from the sidelines narrowed in scrutiny before pronouncements were made as to the capabilities of the opposition. And it did not pass unnoticed that the referee was the self same one who had robbed Inisbreen of a match-winning point the previous season, and if he was rash enough to resort once again to bloody crookery, he would be lucky to leave the field, as one spectator put it, “with his arse facing backwards”.

Pig Cully wore his cap pulled down so low over his eyes that he had to hold his head back to see under the skip and alongside him Dan Ahearn, who kneaded one hand in the other while shrugging and shuffling in a fever of anticipation, stood at the section of fencing nearest the Inisbreen goal. Now and then quarter-bottles of whiskey would be drawn from
inside pockets and a few mouthfuls taken to join what had already been consumed in the lounge bar of the Glens Hotel. A few yards away the two Moore boys, along with Johnny Spade and John Breen stood together and argued about Inisbreen’s chances of winning the Intermediate Cup later in the year. Peggy May, standing a little apart from them and with a huge muffler in the team’s colours of yellow and brown obscuring half her face, had already set up a shout for a player who was not even in the team that day. With a friend in whom he was trying to arouse an interest in medical conditions – specifically his own – Dippy Burns stood at the corner of the field nearest the gate and divided his attention between the match and the skin on the back of his hands, where he expected to see the first signs of yellowing presaged by his reaching the “Jaundice” section of his “Home Doctor” manual.

Dan Ahearn was nudged by Pig Cully who nodded towards a tall young man with wire-framed glasses and a brush of red hair who was leaning against the fence, a notebook and pen in his hands. He was showing a singular lack of interest in the preparations for the forthcoming match which were taking place on the pitch but was looking around the crowd as though expecting to see a friend. Ahearn looked past Cully to the young man and said,

“Looks like he’s taking orders for something. D’ye think maybe he’s from one of them burger vans? What d’ye reckon?”

“For feck’s sake, Ahearn, are ye blind or stupid or both. He’s one of them buckos from the newspapers.”

“Jeez-o,” Ahearn declared, “I think ye’ve got her spot on, Cully! Good man yerself!” And so saying he gave his companion a slap on the back that might have felled a lesser mortal.

“Well now, let’s go and find out what’s in the news,” Pig Cully said and walked towards the young man, cautiously
followed by Dan Ahearn who eyed their target warily, as though expecting him to turn on them and bite.

Pig Cully tilted his head back and looked out from under the skip of his cap, giving the object of his gaze a fine view of his nostrils and thus confirming the appropriateness of his nickname.

“You’ll be one of them reporter boys, I suppose.”

Fergus Keane had been with the Northern Reporter for less than a month – his first proper job since scraping a pass in his finals at university the previous year – during which time he had covered funerals, local council meetings, minor sports events and little else. At the advanced age of twenty-three, he was beginning to wonder if he would ever realise his ambition to become an ace reporter whose incisive questioning and investigative skills would lay bare the cankers at the heart of society and rock the very Establishment to its foundations. Perhaps he had already missed his chance. Now he had been sent on some wild goose chase – even his editor, Harry Martyn thought that – following an anonymous telephone call to the newspaper about somebody that claimed to have been the subject of a miracle. It just showed how desperate the paper was for material.

“Yes, sir.” Always better to be extra polite until you knew who they were. He stuck out his hand. “Fergus Keane, from the Northern Reporter.”

Pig Cully was a little taken aback by this familiarity but had automatically responded in kind and so felt obliged to shake the reporter’s hand. Dan Ahearn kept his hands firmly in his pockets. Handshakes were for weddings, wakes and funerals and when you had concluded the sale or purchase of sheep or cattle, not something to be dished out like they meant nothing. The usual toss of the head and, “How y’doin’?” would suffice. So saying, he took half a step backwards. The fella might have extra-long arms.

Further words from the young reporter were drowned out by the shout that went up from the crowd as the Inisbreen team ran onto the field and began to spread out, hurley sticks swinging and chopping the air, chests expanded and contracted, muscles stretched and kneaded. Then the crowd began to get into the spirit of the occasion.

“Did you forget your drawers, short-arse?” John Breen shouted at Tim Sullivan, a diminutive left half-back whose shirt was three sizes too big and came to just above his knees. A series of whoops and shouts came from around the perimeter fencing – “C’mon Inisbreen, show them how it’s done!”, “Run them off the bloody field, boys!”, or “Watch that wee baldy-headed get or he’ll hit ye with his pension book!”

Pig Cully took out his quarter bottle of whiskey and amidst the general excitement forgot the habit of a lifetime and offered the reporter a drink.

“Here, get some of that down ye and ye can shout for the right side. I tell ye, this could be history in the making here.”

“Ah, ye’re right there, Cully,” Dan Ahearn said, slapping his thigh. “History in the bloody making right enough.”

“And I hope ye’re going to report this match fair and square, young fella. We don’t want any – ”

“I’m not here to report the game,” Fergus Walsh said, but his reply was drowned out by the shout that went up as the game started. He shrugged, looked at the whiskey bottle and then took a long swig from it. His subsequent smile of thanks as he handed back the bottle quickly changed to a grimace.

After a few minutes of play an angry shout went up from the spectators as Culteerim were awarded a free. The face of Pig Cully grew redder as he threw a string of abuse at the referee and line judges, each of his remarks echoed by Dan Ahearn at his side. Pig Cully rapped the virgin page of the reporter’s notebook.

“Get that down, boy. Get her down. `Biased referee gave
unfair free to a bunch of foulin’ gets from Culteerim.’ Chapter and verse.” Then he looked more closely at the page. “Bejasus ye haven’t even put pen to paper yet. What hell kind of reporter are ye?”

“I tried to tell you, I’m not here for this match. I’ve come to talk to a man called – “ he turned over a page in his notebook, “ – John McGhee? They told me in the village he’d almost certainly be here. Could you point him out to me?”

“Ye want to talk to Limpy McGhee? What the hell for? Even people that know him don’t want to talk to him.”

“Especially people that know him,” Dan Ahearn threw in.

“Well, somebody phoned the paper and said John McGhee was supposed to have had some kind of miraculous cure.”

Dan Ahearn looked at Pig Cully.

“Jeez-o.”

“Oh, it’s the Miracle Man ye want, is it?” Pig Cully scoffed. “Knowing that wee hoor, it was probably him that ‘phoned ye.”

“Well, I – Is he here?” Fergus Keane asked. This was going to be more difficult than he had anticipated, and all for what? Some cock-and-bull story about a miracle, no witnesses, no corroboration. From beneath the skip of his cap, Pig Cully carried out what appeared to be a comprehensive survey of the crowd.

“Oh, he’ll be here somewhere,” was his conclusion, “only I can’t just see him right now.” He turned his attention to the game once more, and after watching it for a minute or so, said,

“If this match doesn’t end in a barney, I’m a feckin’ Dutchman.”

He uncorked his whiskey bottle again and sucked noisily at it. Dan Ahearn also took a bottle out, drank from it and after wiping the top with the sleeve of his jumper, stuck the bottle under the nose of Fergus Keane.

“Here.” The young fella would probably need another
drink if he was going to have any dealings with the wee man.

To the young reporter the taste of the whiskey might have been horrid but the warm glow from it was strangely attractive and comforting.

“Thanks,” he said and took a pull from the bottle, remembering to wipe the neck of it with his sleeve before returning the whiskey to Ahearn, who took another drink.

“Yes sir!” Dan Ahearn clapped his hands together and rubbed them in anticipation. “A barney’s what it’ll end up in. Ye have her off to a tee, Cully.”

A bad shot from the Culteerim free-taker brought a cheer from the crowd and then the game settled to a series of poor tackles, missed catches and runs that got nowhere. At half-time the score was two goals and two points to Culteerim and seven points to Inisbreen, who were still grumbling about the unfair free that had resulted in their opponents going one point ahead. As the two teams lay back on the grass or sat drinking from bottles of water, Pig Cully, Dan Ahearn and the man from the Northern Reporter finished the last of the whiskey from both bottles.

“Never fear, my friend,” Pig Cully told Fergus Keane, who was beginning to look a little unsteady on his feet, “Never fear. There’s another one not too far away.”

“Damn right,” Dan Ahearn said, gently swaying back and forth.

From behind them a voice said,

“Well now, boys, how are we doin’this fine day? Enjoying the game’ eh?” It was Limpy that stood there, his chest stuck out like a bantam cock. He was wearing an ancient double-breasted suit that, many years before, he had been asked by a member of the charity, the Saint Vincent de Paul Society, to convey to an old man up the glen. On the road, a neighbour had told him that the old man had died in the night and so Limpy had, as he had put it, “diverted” the suit to his own
abode, and now wore it on major occasions, regardless of the fact that it had been made to fit a man a stone or more heavier than himself. Now, of course, every day was a major occasion. He had religious standards to maintain.