• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 425 0

red blood of LSD. You know, that is why rich people were made and why we should never envy or insult them. They are people brought into the world armed with the weapons for helping others. Contrast them with Collopy, who spends all his time obstructing and annoying others, poking about to find bad things in order to make them worse, interfering, bickering, and fomenting ill will and fights among friends. More than once I have thought of getting; together a course entitled Your Own Business and the Minding of It. I would put Collopy down for free tuition. I’m in digs with another man, an elderly bachelor who owns a tobacco shop and spends his spare time reading Greek. How do I like such company? Very well, for I don’t have to buy cigarettes, and the landlady is so old that she occasionally forgets to ask for the rent.

‘Keep anything I’ve said in this note or any other I send under your hat, and don’t give anybody in Dublin the firm’s address. I’ll write soon again. Pass on to me any news that arises. Slip the enclosed pound note with my compliments to Annie. The best of luck.’

I sighed and put the letter in my pocket. There was not much in it really.

13

IN the months that followed the weather was particularly vile: it was a season of downpours and high wind, and the temperature at night was such as to compel me to heap two overcoats on top of my bed. But Mr Collopy ignored the nightly tempest. He left the house frequently about eight and people told me that he was a familiar figure, sheltering under a sodden umbrella, on the fringe of the small crowds attending street-corner meetings in Foster Place or the corner of Abbey Street. He was not in any way concerned with the purpose or message of those meetings. He was there to heckle, and solely from the angle of his own mysterious preoccupation. His main demand was that first things should come first. If the meeting advocated a strike in protest against low wages on the railways, he would counter by roaring that the inertia of the Corporation was more scandalous and a far more urgent matter for the country.

One night he came home very thoroughly drenched, and instead of going straight to bed, he sat at the range taking solace from his crock.

–For heaven’s sake go to bed, Father, Annie said. You are drownded. Go to bed and I will make you punch.

–Ah no, he said brightly. In such situations my early training as a hurler will stand to me.

Sure enough, he had a roaring cold the following morning and did stay in bed for a few days by command of Annie, who did not lack his own martinet quality. Gradually the cold ebbed but when he was about the house again his movements were very awkward and he complained loudly of pains in his bones. Luckily he was saved the excruciation of trying to go upstairs, for he had himself built a lavatory in the bedroom in Mrs Crottys’ time. But his plight was genuine enough, and I suggested that on my way to school I should drop in a note summoning Dr Blennerhassett.

–I am afraid, he said, that that good man is day tros. He means well but damn the thing he knows about medicine.

–But he might know something about those pains of yours.

–Oh, all right.

Dr Blennerhassett did call and said Mr Collopy had severe rheumatism. He prescribed a medicament which Annie got from the chemist—red pills in a round white box labelled ‘The Tablets’. He also said, I believe, that the patient’s intake of sugar should be drastically reduced, that alcohol should not in any circumstances be consumed, that an endeavour should be made to take mild exercise, and to have hot baths as often as possible. Whether or not Mr Collopy met those four conditions or any of them, he grew steadily worse as the weeks went by. He took to using a stick but I actually had to assist him in the short distance between his armchair and his bed. He was a cripple, and a very irascible one.

I had arranged one night to attend a session of Jack Mulloy’s poker school, but a crafty idea had crept into my head. A late start for 8.30 p.m. had been fixed, apparently because Jack had to go somewhere