A Pregnant Silence
April 2, 2012
First published in In Stitches Magazine, July/August 1996
Another lesson by Doctor O’Reilly, practical psychologist
Some therapeutic interventions simply do not appear in the textbooks.
Regular readers will remember Maggie, she of the incessant complaints, the headache two inches above her head, the chronic backache. In her early fifties, she was what the ministers of the time when reading the banns would have referred to as a “spinster of this parish,” except that for Maggie the banns had never been called. She remained what the locals charitably described as “one of nature’s unclaimed treasures.”
Her trials and tribulations, and the way O’Reilly handled them, let him teach me a lesson in practical psychology, a lesson that I’ll be happy to pass on to anyone who has the fortitude to stick with this story to the bitter end.
(As an aside, “the bitter end” is the part of a ship’s anchor cable that’s attached to the vessel. This column isn’t called Taylor’s Twist, another nautical term, for nothing.)
“Pat, that one’s driving me bloody well daft,” said Doctor O’Reilly. We were walking along the main street. O’Reilly stopped and pointed with his blackthorn walking stick through the window of the local grocery store. Naturally, when he stopped, so did I.
“The grocer?” I asked, knowing full well that the source of O’Reilly’s impending descent into raving lunacy was entirely the fault of the other figure, visible through the pane.
“No. Maggie. Maggie MacCorkle.”
“Oh?” I wondered what was coming — Maggie had been visiting Doctor O’Reilly on a weekly basis for the last three months, and absolutely refused to see me.
“She’s convinced she’s pregnant.” As he spoke, O’Reilly tapped his temple with one thick index finger. “Nutty. Nutty as a fruit cake.” He sighed.
I confess her presenting symptoms caught me off-guard. Wishing to demonstrate my encyclopaedic grasp of the physiology of the reproductive process, I immediately wondered aloud, “Would she not have needed a bit of masculine help?”
O’Reilly shook his head ponderously. “She says that it’s another immaculate conception, and the responsibility is more than she can bear.”
I was beginning to see what he meant about Maggie’s resemblance to a filbert-filled Christmas confection. The troubled look on his face rapidly disabused me of any notion of making remarks about wise men and stars in the East.
“She’s a sorry old duck.” O’Reilly leant on his stick with one hand, jamming the knuckles of the other under his nose. “I’m damned if I can figure out how to persuade her she’s just going through the change of life.”
“Have you thought about getting her to see a psychiatrist?” I inquired helpfully.
O’Reilly shook his head. “Sure you know by now what these country folk are like about things like that.”
I did indeed. The last patient to whom I’d made such a suggestion had bristled like an aggrieved porcupine and stormed out of the surgery. I could imagine Maggie’s reaction.
“Anyway,” said O’Reilly, “she’s no danger to anyone or herself.” He produced a large handkerchief from his jacket pocket, buried his battered nose and made a noise like the RMS Queen Elizabeth undocking.
“If she tells one of our headshrinking colleagues that she’s the mother-to-be of the Second Coming, she’d be in the booby hatch as quick as a ferret down a rat hole.” He stuffed his ’kerchief back into his pocket. “She’d really lose her marbles in there. No. It’s just a matter of getting her to see that she’s not up the builder’s.”
Unable to make any useful suggestions, I began to ruminate about the quaint euphemisms of the day for pregnancy: up the spout, in the family way, up the builder’s, bun in the oven, poulticed.
It was clear from the way Fingal kept furrowing his brow that he was also at a loss for a solution and, knowing him as I’d come to, I could tell that he was worried.
Fate intervened.
As we stood there silently, Maggie bustled out of the grocer’s shop. She was carrying a brown paper bag, presumably her purchases. Her face split into a wide grin when she noticed Doctor O’Reilly and she began to hurry towards him. I could see that she’d failed to notice a young lad wheeling a bicycle.
The resultant collision wasn’t quite of the magnitude of the meteor that smacked into planet Earth and, it’s rumoured, put paid to the dinosaurs, but the fallout was dramatic.
The lad picked himself and his cycle up and rode off muttering some less than complimentary epithets about old bats who should watch where they were going. Maggie sat on the pavement, hair askew, legs wide under her voluminous skirt, surrounded by the wreckage of the contents of her parcel. A shattered ketchup bottle lay at the edge of a spreading scarlet puddle of its contents. Right in the middle of the crimson tide, the yolks and whites of two broken eggs peered malevolently upwards.
I saw a look flit across O’Reilly’s face, a look the like of which must have been there when Archimedes spilled his bath water. Fingal didn’t exactly yell, “Eureka,” but he’d clearly thought of something. He stepped over to where Maggie sat, knelt, put one solicitous hand on her shoulder, whipped out his hanky, dried her eyes, peered closely at the crimson clots and their ocular ova, and pronounced in sad, sombre, sonorous sentences, “There, there, Maggie. There, there. No need to grieve.” He looked up at me and winked. “It couldn’t have lived — its eyes were too close together.”
The relief on Maggie’s face could only have been matched by the joy of the old boy scout Baden-Powell when the British Army arrived at the outerworks of Mafeking.
Some therapeutic interventions simply do not appear in the textbooks.
