Ryan O’Riley has stayed reluctantly sober for the entire evening at the dinner party. Siobhan watches him like a hawk, and although he enjoyed the company it was hard for him to still the tremor in his hands and the internal ache that intensified as the hours wore on. He was relieved when Flynn rose and offered Astarte, who was too tipsy to refuse, a lift to her guest house. Ryan feels like a child being finally allowed to leave the table and go out to play.
He drives carefully to a silent home and a dying fire, and pours a generous tumbler of whiskey before adding some turf to the embers and switching on the television. Sitting heavily in the ancient fireside chair, he takes a large mouthful, rolling the fiery liquid around on his tongue before swallowing. Siobhan means well, but it irritates him that she takes it upon herself to try and keep him in line. In a life turned sour, whiskey is his comfort and escape.
The rumour in the area is that his wife, Cathy, left him because of the drink. And as it was Cathy who started that rumour, there is no reason for this to be disbelieved. The truth, known only to Ryan, Cathy, and Dermott O’Hara, is rather different but not something that he would want to be publicly known. The temptation of oblivion that the amber liquid offered Ryan O’Riley only became appealing when Ryan first discovered that not only had Cathy and Dermott been having an affair since early in the marriage, but also that his beloved son Mark, the pride of his life, is Dermott’s son and not his own. Mark had left home by then, to make his way in Limerick, and is still blissfully in the dark about his parentage. Ryan has no intention of telling him, and he lives in fear that Cathy may do that one day.
When Cathy finally confessed, Ryan shouted, wept, and smashed most of the crockery in the kitchen. He had never imagined that his outspoken, volatile wife of twenty-five years could be capable of such deception. When his rage was spent he sank to his knees in the mess of broken china and grasped her around her ample hips, pleading with Cathy to stay with him.
The two months that followed were a living nightmare for both of them. Cathy was like a caged, vicious bird, resenting him for clipping her wings in the name of propriety. And Ryan, who always enjoyed a single tot of whiskey at bedtime, filled his glass a little earlier each evening and refilled it before the last drop was drunk.
When Ryan came home from evening surgery to find the house bare of furniture except for the tattered fireside chair that Cathy always hated, the television, and their marriage bed, which greeted him each night with recriminations, Ryan gave up. The bottle was opened at breakfast time each day, to fuel him with the courage to face his patients.
He was always a good doctor. His patients trusted him, but Ryan could no longer trust himself, although he cared deeply for the people who had known him all their lives, many of whom he had coaxed from the womb and held while they took their first breath. He was known for being gentle and thorough, given to calling in to hold a hand or speak a few words of reassurance, and ‘forgetting’ to bill his poorer patients.
But with Cathy gone he sank into depression. Each person who came to his surgery to pour out their troubles added a little more weight to his increasingly fragile shoulders. Some days he felt his back as well as his heart would break from the strain of carrying so many woes, and his confidence in his ability to be of any help or use deteriorated and finally dissolved altogether. The only course of action he could think of was to declare an early retirement and wait out what time he had left, hoping that it would be brief. Ryan doesn’t realise how much his patients miss his gentle concern. He has no idea that their loyalty is to him, and not to Cathy, who tended to trumpet her superior position as doctor’s wife and was never well-liked.
Most of his patients have transferred to a doctor in Ennis; a young man, fresh from training, who is bright and keen and teetotal. The older ones go to see Mairie Hennessy for the potions and brews that they still swear by. But some of his patients refuse to see anyone but Ryan, and those he always does his best for. He knows he has only himself to blame for his declining health but, trapped in a cycle of despair, he no longer cares. The past is gone, putrid as maggot-ridden fruit. The future is unthinkable. The present, hidden in the oblivion provided by a bottle of golden liquid, is all that concerns him now.
The bottle empties, the fire burns to embers, and Ryan’s fingers relax. He rests his head against the back of the chair, for Ryan cannot sleep in the bed that he and Cathy shared, and the glass drops to the floor and rolls against the hearth with a tinkling sound. Slumped in the threadbare chair, oblivious to the cold draft that seeps beneath the door, and the white noise of the television screen, the doctor sleeps the deep slumber of a miniature death.