The Miracle Man (16 page)

“Bloody hell’s teeth,” he said under his breath, and longed
for the sweet excess of a warm clean bed in the over-priced Glens Hotel.

Limpy swept some debris from a wooden chair and with the magnanimity of a maharajah welcoming a stranger to his palace, said,

“Make yerself comfortable, now. There’s no rules nor regulations about this establishment. I’ll just put the kettle on for a drop of tea.”

Fergus sat gingerly on the chair and gathered himself to avoid touching anything else, lest he should come into contact with the virulent microbes that undoubtedly seethed unseen on every surface and in each crack and crevice. Could he possibly make an excuse and leave? Sleep in the car, perhaps, or rouse them at the hotel and demand medical asylum? But if he did that he would upset the old bugger and he wouldn’t get his story. In the midst of his thoughts, the smell came to him. It was a mixture of dampness, stale sweat, turf smoke and – dog excrement. Fergus’s stomach heaved and he wished that he was still drunk.

When he and his host had taken their tea – with Fergus searching in vain for somewhere to tip the contents of the cracked cup – Limpy went to a cupboard and pulled out two blankets.

“I’ll make up the bed for ye,” he said, and slammed the blankets against the wall, producing a cloud of dust that temporarily obscured him from sight. He fell into a paroxysm of coughing and came staggering into view like someone who had just survived an explosion. “Christ knows – “ he gave a great sneeze, “ – when these were last used. But, they’ll do the job, so they will. Gets a bit cool in here sometimes.”

Fergus turned away, his shoulders sagging and his head drooping almost to his chest. This wasn’t the breathless adventure of the ace reporter that he had imagined. Still, he had to stick with it.

“Mr McGhee.” The old man was spreading the blankets on a wooden couch affair across the room from his own bed. “I’d like to do a series of articles on you and your miracle. You know, something about your past life, about growing up in this community, and then building up to how the miracle actually happened. Talk to the priest and the doctor, that sort of thing. And I’ll get a photographer down to take some pictures.” He cleared his throat. “An exclusive, Mr McGhee, all right? That means you don’t talk to any other papers.”

“Oh, I know fine what an exclusive is, son.” A maid at the Ritz could not have patted the blankets into place with more tenderness. “It means ye’re going to pay me some money.”

“Well – I – it’s not usually our policy to – ”

“Ah now, policies are no good to me, young Fergus. I can’t spend a policy. What a man in my position needs is hard cash. For the necessities of life. Otherwise one of these winter nights – without so much as a fire in the grate – I’ll be found in the morning, stiff as a board. And all for the want of a few pounds for my – entirely exclusive – miracle story. A bargain, young Fergus, at – five hundred quid.”

“Five – hundred?” Was that a lot of money for this kind of story? It didn’t matter. If he told his editor that he’d paid that kind of cash, Harry Martyn would make it sound like a king’s ransom. But surely part of an ace reporter’s job was to make decisions – whether or not to follow up a story, how to get his copy back in difficult circumstances, where to get receipts so that he didn’t lose out on expenses. He was out in the field and operating on his own. It was all up to him. Decision time.

“Done!” he heard himself saying. “Five hundred pounds.” And then reluctantly he put out his hand to shake the grubby one of Limpy’s that had shot out to meet his.

“Good man, Fergus!” Limpy said. “I knew we could do business.”

Without removing an article of clothing, Limpy got into his
bed and pulled the old blankets over him. With less enthusiasm than if it had been a coffin, Fergus stood looking down at the resting place that had been prepared for him. But then, something like this was all in a day’s work for the man who was going to get the story of the year for the Northern Reporter. What would he do if he ever had to live rough with a tribe on the plains of Africa in the furtherance of his journalistic career? Brushing aside the thought that a pride of lions would smell sweeter and a mud hut be less noxious than the McGhee redoubt, he boldly threw back the covers, lay down on the wooden seat and wrapped himself in the blankets, being careful not to let them touch his face. Death would smell fresher.

“I can see you and I are going to hit it off just fine, young Fergus. Ye’re a man after my own heart. What for would you be wanting to spend fancy money on sheets, when all they do is make washing,” Limpy said, and then blew out the lamp to throw the room into total darkness.

Fergus lay uncomfortably on the hard wooden bench, his face contorted by a swarm of imaginary agonies, from cholera to swine fever, and by the very real ones of Limpy McGhee’s snores and muffled farts from the other side of the fireplace. At least, Fergus consoled himself, he had the man’s agreement for an exclusive story, and cheap at five hundred pounds, he hoped. No doubt when the other papers read it in the Northern Reporter – he managed a little smile – they would be round the old man like vultures in no time. But he, Fergus Keane, had beaten them all to it. After a few more of these happy thoughts, the excitement of the day and the effects of the drink began again to crowd in on him, and despite his unpalatable surroundings, the ace reporter slowly drifted into sleep.

Fergus was reaching out to accept the Pulitzer prize for journalism when he felt the hand on his back. Before the
admiring audience, his smile became a little strained, and he wondered what Limpy McGhee was doing up there on the stage and touching him. The smiling presenter seemed to fade before him as the upturned faces of the spectators became blurred and he couldn’t hear their clapping any more. The hand at his back slowly moved downwards. Casually, he attempted to move away but it was still there, down near his waist now. With difficulty he kept smiling, fearful that the presenter would not give him the prize if he created a scene. And after he had worked so hard to get it. Then he felt the warm breath on the back of his neck, the body moving closer to him, and heard the gasp of the crowd as they realised what was happening. Suddenly there was total darkness as everything disappeared – the stage, the presenter, the audience and the bright lights – everything, that is except the warm breath in his ear and the hand on his backside. No longer was he in the wide auditorium but huddled on the hard wooden bed with the musty blankets over him. For a moment he lay rigid and awake, checking his senses to be sure of what they were telling him. Then he was scrambling to his knees and lashing out in the darkness.

“Get off, you filthy old bugger! No wonder you offered me a bed!”

Fergus retreated against the wall. There was the sound of a match being struck, then a curse from Limpy, followed by another scrape before the guttering match was applied to the lamp wick. Fergus had two surprises. A bleary-eyed McGhee looked out from his bed on the far side of the room and said,

“What’s the matter, son?”

Both of them saw the elderly man by Fergus’s bed at the same time. He was tall and slim, with a long, pale face that showed more surprise than either of theirs. His hands he held up before him as though he had just snatched them from the jaws of a trap.

“Jasus. Mr Pointerly,” Limpy said softly.

“Ah – Mr McPhee. There you are.” Mr Pointerly was finding it hard to keep his eyes off Fergus. “I was – passing, and – I thought why don’t I call in and see my friend Mr McPhee. But – “ he nodded towards Fergus and winked at Limpy, “ – I can see you’re – entertaining. So I’ll bid you a good night. No doubt we can meet soon and – have a little confidential chat.”

The tall figure gave a little bow. Considering the debris on which he had to tread, Mr Pointerly made rather an elegant retreat through the door and pulled it shut behind him. As Limpy and Fergus turned to look at each other in surprise, there was the sound of growling from outside and Mr Pointerly’s raised voice, which rapidly grew fainter.

“Jasus, he’s a bugger that dog. If he doesn’t get ye coming in he’ll get ye going out. I knew by the look in his eye that his teeth would be in somebody’s arse this night.”

After the light had been blown out again and both of them had settled down, Fergus said,

“Mr McGhee, did you mean what you said about that exclusive interview?”

“Well of course I did, son. Of course I did. There’s one thing about a McGhee you can count on. His word is his bond, every time.”

“Thank you, Mr McGhee,” Fergus said, smiling in the dark and snuggling down on his wooden bed which, now padded with good prospects for its occupant, seemed surprisingly comfortable.

In the following days, news of Mary McCartney’s vision spread fast around the village and into the surrounding countryside, the story gradually growing in the telling, so that by the evening there was a version that had Wee Mary offering the Blessed Virgin one of her sweets and the Virgin eating the whole bagful. In the Inisbreen Stores and the post office, around the bars of O’Neill’s and the Glens Hotel, and from behind cupped hands in the chapel pews, the word was spread that the woman in white had once more been seen floating above the Mass Rock, as a consequence of which something miraculous would surely happen soon to Mary McCartney, like her husband giving up betting on three-legged horses. Old Mrs Gallaher, a daily communicant and normally a woman of the most moderate language, shocked her neighbour by saying that that McGhee one had always been a cocky little bastard and it would’ve suited him better to have stopped drinking rather than limping. “Now that would’ve been a miracle, and no mistake,” the neighbour had replied.

Mrs McKay commented on the news which had been conveyed to her early in the morning by the milkman, with the usual snort of disapproval that she reserved for any sign of
religious fervour amongst the local population, like when the chapel was crowded every night in Mission Week. She had said that most of the congregation only came because they felt so much better in the pub afterwards. “You tell those Redemptorists, Canon,” she had once said, “to give it to them hot and strong – and not to finish till after the pubs are closed. It’s only the contrast they’re after.” And now she noted with a weary countenance and a sinking heart how Father Burke’s eyes lit up when he heard about Mary McCartney and Wee Mary and said triumphantly,

“Well now, Mrs McKay, perhaps there’s more to this miracle business than meets the eye after all, hm?”

“Piece of nonsense if you ask me, Father,” she said as she served him his breakfast of porridge and black tea. If she had had a tendency to irritableness before, the plainness of the diet of what Father Burke called “good basic food” made her much more so, and as she scraped at carrots or hacked the bad bits out of big, woody turnips she often longed for coq au vin or some mussels in garlic and a white wine sauce to lift the gloom of a dark evening. But that was all gone now, and rather than being a pleasure to eat, every meal was like a kind of purgatory to her.

“Oh ye of little faith,” he chided her, in one of his rare attempts at humour. “I have a feeling about this, Mrs McKay. A feeling deep down in my bones.” The bones to which he referred were primarily his knees, given the hours he had spent on them praying for guidance, for some clear signal on the matter from the Almighty. And now here it was. Not conclusive, of course, but was anything ever in life, or – he shied away from the thought but it assailed his consciousness nevertheless – in faith? But this errant thought only served to make him fight back the stronger. Was it not typical of the low tactics of the Devil that he should seek to undermine this simple priest at the very moment of his triumph of faith? And faith he had in abundance, dinned into him firstly by his
mother, with love, and later by the Christian Brothers, with determination and ruthlessness. Thus they had passed on a precious gift to him and he would cherish and protect it – his soul the Ark of the Covenant – and hand it on to others, and that faith would be with him all the days of his life, sustaining him in the grind of daily life, bearing him up in times of particular trial, like the present.

“Indeed, I’m going this very afternoon to discuss it with the Bishop,” he said to his housekeeper. “As I told you, he wasn’t all that receptive when I first broached the subject, but this time when I ‘phoned him he seemed, well, quite amenable. Ah, the Lord works in mysterious ways, Mrs McKay,” he said, “and of course, a little prayer now and then doesn’t go amiss.”

Mrs McKay stabbed at a lump of porridge with her spoon, more out of spite than necessity.

“Are you sure the Bishop knows what you’re going for, Father? You know, he’s quite often away in a wee world of his own, God love him. The Canon used to say he was already halfway to heaven. But then, the Canon is a particular friend of Bishop Tooley. They were always very close.”

“Mrs McKay,” Father Burke said with a patience worthy of a holy martyr, “I am perfectly capable of making my intentions clear, even to an elderly man who is, shall we say, slightly hard of hearing,” but her question had rekindled the tiny doubt that had been lurking in his mind ever since he had made the telephone call.

When Mrs McKay sat down to her afternoon cup of tea and cast an eye over the front page of the Northern reporter, she saw in the bottom left-hand corner the headline which said, “Glensman Claims Miracle Cure”. Slowly raising her eyes to heaven she said,

“God Almighty save us,” and then began to read the small article underneath the headline.

‘In the Glens of Antrim village of Inisbreen, John Henry McGhee, a single man in his sixties’ – “That’s a lie for a start,” she interjected – ‘has claimed that he has undergone a miraculous cure to a severe and lifelong disability – a “devastated leg”. The cure happened, Mr McGhee said, at the site of an ancient Mass Rock about a mile outside the village, where Roman Catholics used to worship in secret during the days of the Penal Laws of the eighteenth century. Mr McGhee claims that a woman in white, possibly the Virgin Mary herself, appeared to him at the time and said that people should lead good lives and look after each other. Since the incident last week, a small stream has appeared at the base of the rock, which some local people are declaring is a miraculous stream of holy water. Local parish priest Father Ignatius Loyola Burke, 36, one of the youngest parish priests in Ireland, a member of the prestigious Burkes of Mountjoy family, and a graduate of Dublin University who trained for the priesthood at Maynooth’ – “Well, I wonder who gave them that information” – ‘said yesterday, “It is of course too early to make a final judgement on this, but there can be little doubt that it is not simply the fevered imaginings of religious people. I believe that in our little village something very significant has happened that may grow to have world-wide importance. There is every likelihood that the Good Lord has now rewarded this corner of Ireland for all the love and devotion it has shown to Him over so many centuries.” The Bishop of Down and Connor, Bishop Desmond Tooley, was not available for comment, and neither was the local physician, Doctor Walsh, who has given Mr McGhee a clean bill of health after the incident.’