The Poor Mouth_ A Bad Story About the Hard Life - Flann O'Brien [45]
‘Getting the unfortunate man on the stretcher after the doctor had given him another knock-out injection was an enormous job for the ambulance men, who had to call for assistance from two bystanders. Nobody could understand his prodigious weight. (N.B.—I have changed the label on the Gravid Water bottle to guard strictly against overdosage.) It was fully twenty minutes before Collopy now quite unconscious, could be got from under the stairs, and four men were manning the stretcher. He was driven off to hospital.
‘Father Fahrt and I walked glumly back to the hotel. He told me he was sure the fall would kill Collopy. After an hour or so he got a telephone call from the hospital. A doctor told him that Collopy was dead on admission, from multiple injuries. He, the doctor, would like to see us urgently and would call to the hotel about six.
‘When he arrived, he and Father Fahrt had a long conversation in Italian one word of which, I need hardly say, I did not understand.
‘When he had gone, Father Fahrt told me the facts. Collopy had a fractured skull, a broken arm and leg and severe rupture of the whole stomach region. Even if none of those injuries was individually fatal, no man of Collopy’s age could survive the shock of such an accident. But what had completely puzzled the doctor and his colleagues was the instantaneous onset of decomposition in the body and its extraordinarily rapid development. The hospital has got in touch with the city health authorities, who feared some strange foreign disease and had ordered that the body be buried the next morning. The hospital had arranged for undertakers to attend, at our expense, the following morning at 10 a.m. and a grave had been booked at the cemetery of Campo Verano.
‘I was interested in that mention of premature and rapid decomposition of the body. I am not sure but I would say that here was the Gravid Water again. I said nothing, of course.
‘We were early enough at the hospital. Collopy had already been coffined, and a hearse with horses, and a solitary cab, were waiting. I saw the Director and gave him a cheque to cover everything. Then we started out for the church of San Lorenzo Fuori le Mura, near the cemetery, where Father Fahrt said Requiem Mass. The burial afterwards was indeed a simple affair, for myself and the good priest were the only mourners, and it was he who said the prayers at the graveside.
‘We drove back in the cab to the hotel in silence. Father Fahrt had told me that Collopy had made a will and that it was in possession of a Dublin firm of solicitors named Sproule, Higgins and Fogarty. I will have to see those people. In the cab I made up my mind to go home immediately to Dublin, then to London, giving Father Fahrt some money and letting him fend for himself. You will see me almost as soon as you get this letter.’
Well, that was the brother’s last communique from the Continent. And I did see him, two days later.
21
THE brother walked in unannounced about three-thirty in the afternoon. Thank God Annie was out. He threw his coat and hat on the kitchen table, nodded affably and sat down opposite me at the range in Mr Collopy’s ramshackle old chair.
–Well, he said briskly, and how are we?
He was very well dressed but I concluded he was half drunk.
–We are fair to middling, I said, but that business in Rome has my nerves shattered. You seem to be bearing up pretty well yourself?
–Oh, one has to take these things, he said, making a pouting gesture with his mouth. Nobody will mourn much for us when we go for the long jump and don’t fool yourself that they will.
–I liked the poor old man. He wasn’t the worst.
–All right. His death wasn’t the happiest he could get. In fact it was ridiculous. But look at it this way. In what better place could a man die than in Rome, the Eternal City, by the side of Saint Peter?
–Yes, I said