Doyle's Blood

Doyle's Blood Count.

Doyle's Blood Count

By

Frank Maguire

Something was putting a curdle in my blood. Now blood is not my best commodity, but I felt something anyway, sending ripples down me spine. It wasn't the cottage, that was alright. A bit damp maybe, but set on the end of a long beach in Ballinasomething harbor, you could expect that. Maybe it was me time comin' on, or the sea-air doing things to me. I'm a city girl. From where I was sitting by the fire, I had a view over the whole harbor and the sea seething and twisting like some elemental monster. It was enough to give anybody the shivers on that cold October afternoon, but still that wasn't what disturbed me.

The great lover himself, Gabriel Doyle, was sitting across the room from me. He was reading. A book. Now that disturbed me. I mean him reading and me there all primed and ready for the hot stuff.

"Are you goin' to read all day or what?"

"Only a few more pages Phil."

"Well you can read anywhere. Couldn't you take it back to Dublin."

"Nmmm.....It's me uncle's......very fussy, he is,.....about his books, only a few more pages."

"Yeah! Well I'm fed up with it, if I'd known it was to be a cultural weekend I'd have stayed at home.....Who'd read the sort of stuff on these shelves anyway. What was he, a Satanist?"

Three months I had devoted to the job of getting him to take me away from it all. He always made me heart skip a beat, that good lookin' he was. I mean you only had to look into those burning greeny-gold eyes with their butterfly eyelashes, tight red-gold curls all around his head, to know that this lad had hot pan-god blood in his veins. You looked at those ruby-red lips, white sparkling teeth and instantly visions of Mediterranean lands accosted your inner eye. It was Rome, Paris, Madrid, the Costadelfishanchips even, under a white sun. 

It certainly wasn't the drip drip of the Kerry Gaeltacht and the lend of the loan of his Uncle's cottage while his aunty Mary went on her annual starvation retreat. But a girl can't have everything. Seventy-one days of hoping that he would whirl me off for a weekend of requiting. Well, so far, the only hot stuff I was getting was the sparks out of the fire. He seemed to prefer Dracula, that's what he was reading. I found that rather disquieting but still there was something else. It wasn't anything to do with lover-boy, I thought, but it was a general undefined sense of evil about the whole place.

Well, I could put that down to indigestion. I'd had the feeling before, in fact, I'm a martyr to it, a sort of general queasyness that affects your mental state making you suspect the nicest people of doing the nastiest things. It must have been that meal we had. It was only chicken, but dear Gabriel had loaded it with garlic....Yech! All I could eat was the meat; even the smell was too much for me. Which is why he is sitting behind the desk and I'm at the fire.

Sitting there by the fire, watching the dying sun watch me, through two ominous-looking eyebrows of black cloud; I had the unhappy sinking feeling that the affair wasn't going to work at all. Really it had started to fall apart when we landed at the local pub.

All the way down Gay (he doesn't like being called that), had been telling me about this great pub, the music, the warmth, the hospitality. Yeah.................! It was closed when we got there, due to a death. There was a notice tacked onto the door. The daughter had died suddenly and was being buried that day. Everything was shut and we went on to another village on the headland. Another Ballywotsit, where we met with a bunch of archaeologists drinking in the only pub, a cold dingy hole, which I thought, needed to be scraped out a bit more.