Читать книгу Notes from a Coma - Mike McCormack - Страница 8

FRANK LALLY

My heart went out to Anthony that day, that’s no lie. Nearly twenty years ago now but I remember it like it was last week.

It was about two o’clock in the afternoon when the cars and the cattle truck came up the road. I followed them up and when I got to the yard the truck had reversed into the barn door and the vet and the bailiffs were already loading up the herd. Anthony was standing at the back of the house with the collar pulled up around his ears. I went over and stood beside him and said nothing. What could I say?¹

A dirty day it was too, pissing rain all morning and a wind blowing through the yard that would shave you. No one said anything but it didn’t take them more than twenty minutes to load up the whole herd—eight Friesian cows, a couple of yearlings and two calves. One by one they marched up that ramp without a bit of bother and I remember thinking we’d often had more trouble loading up two or three beasts of a Monday morning for the mart.

They pinned up the tailgate and moved off and I saw the sergeant, Jimmy Nevin, coming over to Anthony. But whatever was on his mind he thought better of it and stood off holding the gate for the truck. Anthony turned into the house without a word. I watched the truck down the bottom of the hill and saw it turn out on to the main road. Jimmy Nevin closed the gate and walked over to me.

“Before you go,” he said, “give him this.”

He handed me a brown envelope.

“It’s the quarantine order. Six months.”

Anthony got barred from Thornton’s that night and it was years afterwards before he could have a drink in it.

There was a time when Anthony had a reputation for being able to start a fight in an empty room: a short temper and tidy with his fists. I’d seen him in action a few times, London and elsewhere, and he wasn’t a man you wanted to do battle with. But that was all in the past—or so I thought. It all came back to him that night in Thornton’s.

He’d been drinking since mid-afternoon and by eleven he was well on it. Ger, behind the bar—he was only young at the time—wouldn’t serve him any more. He came outside the bar and tried to lead Anthony to the door. Anthony of course was having none of it. He’d come in under his own steam, he’d go out the same way. And he did too a few minutes later when he saw he was getting no more drink. But that wasn’t the end of it. You’d want to get Eileen Flynn to tell you this story, she was there that night and she has a better telling of it than I have. She laughed about it afterwards but she was lucky she wasn’t killed the same night. Bang! The big window inside the door bursts in and this yellow gas bottle hops off her table and skids along the floor to the counter. Anthony is outside in the pissing rain, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up and the jacket down beside him in the channel. Any man, he was roaring, any fucking man!

He spent that night in the barracks and he was lucky he didn’t spend a lot longer. Thornton’s didn’t press charges. They knew the craic and they settled for the price of a table and a new window but they told Anthony he’d have to do his drinking somewhere else. I got a call from Jimmy Nevin the next morning and went down to the barracks to bring him home. Of course by then the whole town was talking about him. Driving home with him that day I never thought that three months down the road he’d be giving them a whole lot more to talk about. That’s when he docked up with JJ.

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¹ In January of that year one of the first cases of BSE in the republic broke out on the farm of Anthony O’Malley in Louisburgh, west Mayo.

After two days watching a Friesian cow with two permanent teeth stagger through the yard, unable to keep her balance and obviously disorientated, the beast was isolated and the vet summoned. Simon Conway’s provisional diagnosis was for an incurable neurological disorder. The animal was destroyed, blood and brain tissue samples were taken—sealed, dated, numbered and referred to the national laboratories in Dublin for analysis. Six days later a case of BSE was confirmed and in accordance with control measures brought in the previous year Anthony O’Malley’s entire herd was taken away to be destroyed.

The destruction of entire herds containing infected animals would only become compulsory nine years later in the UK and other EU countries. Coming on the back of agreed measures drawn up in the Florence Agreement, it represented a further expansion of the offspring cull, a measure referred to unofficially as the Herod Option.