Authors: Brendan Nolan
Ever afterwards, Charley suffered from seizures which made him fall down and thrash about in a very disturbing
manner. At least it was disturbing to onlookers, for Charley blanked out when it happened and was unperturbed by the experience, though he was always sore in places afterwards. Bertie was distressed by Charley’s fits on a human level, but also, from a business point of view, he could hardly have a jiggling Charley rolling around the floor when he was taking an order for a birthday cake from a client who might not know Charley and the cause of the damage to the side of his brain. One day, Bertie asked Charley to stay inside while he closed the shop at the end of trading. He asked Charley to tell him what the doctors had said, whether there was any sign of a complete recovery and whether Charley had any advance notice of one of these seizures. The doctors were still working on it, Charley informed Bertie, but seeing a chance of enriching himself he said that sometimes he was able to know when an episode was likely to come along. There was a kind of a tingling in his head and a sense of having seen everything that was going to happen before. He wondered sometimes if he was a little psychic.
Did Bertie think he was psychic? Not with his record of backing losing horses with Bertie’s money the baker almost replied, but he kept his counsel, for there is no wit in besting a slow mind. He came to an arrangement with Charley that if he felt he was going to have a seizure, he would tell Bertie and he would make sure that someone kept an eye on Charley and that medical aid arrived as soon as possible. A short time afterwards, Charley came into the shop and told Bertie he was going to collapse any moment now. True to his word, Bertie closed up shop and brought Charley to the hospital where doctors agreed that Charley should be in their care. Still and all, Charley was discharged not so long after that and life returned to normal in the bakery where the early-morning smell of fresh bread continued to lend its enticing aroma to the street. It was a while before Charley wandered in again with the same premonition. This time, he asked if he could empty his pockets into a tin beneath
the counter for safekeeping while he was away. Bertie reluctantly agreed to this strange request. When Charley was gone to sit in the hospital’s interminable accident and emergency queue, Bertie looked in the tin. All it contained was a small amount of money, a very old and small penknife and an unlikely picture of a glamorous woman who was most definitely not related to Charley. This then, was Charley’s treasure.
Bertie was ashamed of himself for having breached the confidence of an afflicted man. He thought about this in the days that followed. Then, before Charley arrived back in to claim his goods, Bertie counted up the money in the tin. He made a quick calculation and added another third to the total from his own cash drawer. Charley collected his property but returned the following day in puzzlement. How had his money grown? Why was there more there than he had left? Bertie said he had put a little extra in as a bonus for all the good work Charley had done for the bakery and its clients. This pleased Charley and when next he went off to the hospital, he made a point of telling Bertie that he had placed his remaining cash in the tin and he would be back in a few days to collect it. When he collected it there was always that little bit extra there for him again. Charley was not that much of a fool that he could not count the windfall that appeared each time in his tin. Bertie noticed the frequency of Charley’s seizure forecasts increased shortly after this. They stepped up until hardly a week went past without at least three warnings being given by the stricken Charley. Bertie also noticed that the amount on deposit increased each time which in due course also increased the sum total due on reclamation. After a while, it rose to the point where Bertie was contributing half a week’s wages to Charley’s recuperation fund.
If Charley was in fact suffering such a regular number of seizures then he would hardly have the strength to stand up, never mind time to recover between bouts. Matters
deteriorated somewhat in the week when Charley declared the approach of an episode twice in the one day. The first was about 11 o’clock in the morning. Charley duly took himself off to the hospital where he was immediately discharged upon admittance. He came back, collected his tin and his little divvy, and left. He returned at three o’clock in the afternoon and repeated the exercise. Bertie considered cancelling the top-up, but since he had started it of his own free will, he did not like to do so. He considered removing some of the capital in the first place so the end calculation would be different, but thought better of that in turn.
It was while he was contemplating such matters that his mind was made up for him by two callers. The first man asked to buy some brown bread. Bertie had bagged it for him when the man said he thought he felt faint and was like to fall down in a seizure. While Bertie said nothing the man asked the baker if he would go through his pockets before the ambulance arrived and remove the money he had in his pocket. All Bertie had to do was mind it for the patient until he returned in a day or two. Bertie refused and the man slammed out the door, setting the bell above it jangling with crossness. Next, a middle-aged woman called in that afternoon to enquire if Bertie was the kind-hearted baker that kept care of valuables for people while they were inside and gave them money when they came back. It was after she was sent packing that Charley arrived in to say he was not feeling at all well and could he leave his few bob in the tin as usual. Bertie said of course he could but he wanted to put matters on a sensible and fair footing between them. Charley was not sure what that meant but he agreed anyway. Bertie said he wanted to give Charley a little more dough than he had been able to do in the recent past. Charley agreed.
Imagine Charley’s surprise then when he arrived back into the shop and Bertie presented him with the tin, sealed and wrapped in splendid Christmas paper though it was mid-summer and not mid-winter. Bertie made Charley promise
to take the tin home with him and not to open it until he was alone. A very excited Charley hurried home and tore off the wrapping paper to reveal his familiar tin box. His fingers could hardly prise the lid open quickly enough. The tin felt deliciously heavy. There must be lots in it. Inside, he found all the money he had placed in there, he found his pen-knife and the picture of a forgotten film star and he found a small fruit scone. He searched in vain for Bertie’s bonus money but there was none. The only dough he had received was this scone, which when he squeezed was approaching staleness. He set it aside in disappointment.
It only goes to show that you can try the patience of even the most patient baker once too often. And that when it comes to getting rid of chancers and hangers-on, you cannot beat a nice stale fruit scone, freshly baked a week ago when everyone was a lot younger and had a lot more sense.
In Dublin, halfway through the last century, people were so poor that they didn’t even know they were poor. For if you never had anything, you never feel the want of it. There was no central heating; you just retired for the night with the overcoat thrown over you in the bed. It was the same coat you wore during the day. You tried to keep the big buttons from taking your eye out if you had a nightmare. The pockets were generally emptied to show the difference between the waking and the sleeping state. An empty coat was fine for a blanket substitute whereas bulging pockets were not quite safe, for who knew what might be squashed in the turmoil of the night. Many is the man afflicted by demons that went to bed hale and hearty and woke up the following morning with a pair of black eyes after a poor night’s sleep. Few people noticed, however, for most were buried in their own heavy coats in an attempt to keep the chill from their bones until the warm days returned.
A domestic fire doubled as a cooking fire when pots or kettles were warmed by the rising heat from the burning coals. Not everyone could afford real coal, however. Many was the house that got by without internal wooden doors at all, as they had been taken down and used for firewood. The local coalman did the best he could to find inexpensive coal that would burn for his customers. The problem
was that cheap coal produced more smoke than heat and so a balance had to be struck between economy and utility. So he was happy when his buying skills on behalf of his customers was recognised by charity groups who contracted him to deliver free winter fuel to their clients on their behalf. Since these were local residents, Jemmy the coalman knew them all.
These included two unmarried sisters, who lived in one room in a tenement with a window so small that a mouse would be hard set to see out of it. There was very little light in the room. It had a fireplace with a small range, where they cooked whatever they had to eat. They always had sufficient food for their needs, given that they were highly skilled in accessing whatever relief was available to the needy. A table, two chairs and a pair of single beds against opposite walls was the rest of it. In the corner, at the foot of Betty the eldest’s bed, was a tea chest to hold whatever fuel they had to burn on the day, be it coal, a bit of a door, a few logs dropped in by a neighbour, or just coiled up day-old newspaper obtained from Frank the newsagent on the corner.
They qualified for charitable assistance since Molly, the youngest, with the coiled long hair, had taken to the bed, with ten Woodbines a day, years before. She was not in the habit of getting out of it overmuch and especially not if the local priest or anyone associated with charitable causes was about to see her. She stayed in the nest on this cold winter’s morning when white frost glistened on everything, hair crackled in the cold and those that had jobs to go to slid down the road to work. Those with bicycles tried to walk beside them with some dignity until they came to a dry patch that they could try cycling along.
Deliveries were made on old wheezing lorries that were often reluctant to start in the morning, especially if there had been freezing temperatures the night before. Jemmy’s coal lorry wanted to take the day off, on this day, but Jemmy needed to be about his work. He especially needed to deliver
fuel to the list of charity clients so he could present a bill for goods supplied.
An awkward class of a man called Fitzer lived nearby, who had set his mind on becoming the coalman’s apprentice and who hung about in case he would be hired by the coalman. Fitzer thought it would be a fine thing to sit high up in the coal lorry and wave at people as they passed by on the streets of the town. When asked by Jemmy, Fitzer agreed to give the lorry a push to start it rolling down an adjacent hill on this freezing cold morning. A few more people passing by put their shoulder to the tail end of the malachite green lorry and away she went down the gradient, without the benefit of any combustive power at all. She was powered by gravity alone and steered by a calm Jemmy in a straight line, to get the benefit of the fall of the ground on the way to the lower street below.
Jemmy gently dropped the hurtling lorry into gear halfway down. She started up with a shudder and a great cloud of smoke. The swirling smoke covered Mrs Burke’s cat who, quite coincidentally, had been run over and killed by the lorry in the excitement of the morning. The cat was called Larry after her late husband. It had been sleeping on the chassis of the lorry as close as it could get to the warmth of the cooling engine through the cold night. Larry, the man that is, had brought home a cat long ago and after the original Larry the cat died, and the cat that replaced that one died, all of its replacements were named Larry in honour of the first cat who was sorely missed by Mrs Burke.
Given that the morning had long since started and that he was now late, Jemmy made the further error of hiring Fitzer for the day to deliver the coal with him. The first stop was at the tenement where the two sisters resided. By then, Mrs Burke was caterwauling over the body of the defunct Larry. She asked Jeremiah, the town fool, if he would fetch a priest to say a prayer for the dead cat, it being one of God’s creatures. She reasoned that nobody could prove if a man
had a soul or not and therefore, equally, you could not say that a cat did not have a soul to be prayed for.
Jeremiah duly called to the priest’s house and told the man of the cloth, who was new to the area, that Larry Burke had been run over and requested that he go and say a few prayers. The priest, whose own car would not start as a result of the heavy frost, hurried off determinedly down the road, wishing to please his new flock. It would make a good impression on a new community, if he arrived promptly when called.
By then, Fitzer had managed to mis-hear Jemmy’s precise instructions on delivering coal to the sisters’ first-floor back flat where they awaited their ten stone of free coal, enough for a frugal week’s burning. Fitzer was to turn right when he went in the door of the sisters’ room. He was to empty the open bag of black tumbling coal in the wooden tea chest before him. He would know in the dark where this was by bumping his knees gently against the plywood side of the box. These were the careful instructions given by the master coalman to the apprentice.
Fitzer turned left, not right; he walked until he met resistance on his legs, as instructed; he then emptied the bag of coal down on top of Molly, who was sleeping in her bed and certainly not anticipating a pummelling on high delivered by a strange man. She rose up with a strangled cry and a selection of curses that would take the scales off a silver salmon freshly poached from the river. In her fist was a fine shaped lump of black coal. Her other fist held the same. Knowing instantly what he had done wrong, Fitzer took off for his life towards the daylight at the other end of the long hall. He was followed by flying lumps of coal as Molly rose to her full wrath. A lust for vengeance overtook her; the kind that could only consume a somnolent woman roused to painful wakefulness by a flying idiot.
Fitzer reached the street just as the perspiring priest was passing by on his way to bless a dead cat. He was soon
confronted by a dancing Molly who, he had been told, had been bedridden for the past ten years, a hopeless case. Molly stopped dead realising the awful truth that was now revealed. She could walk. She could also curse, swear, run, and throw coal after a fleeing coalman’s apprentice. A silence crept though the frozen street as Molly tried to smile. Jemmy came around from the back of the lorry where he had taken shelter. The priest wondered how long a dead soul generally waits around for the Last Rites to be performed over it.