Free An Irish Country Wedding by Patrick Taylor

today just to chat about Kinky?” He pointed at her leg.
    She sniffed. “I’ve took an awful pain in my left leg, so I have. I think it’s my very close veins playing up.” She pointed to an elastic support stocking that O’Reilly had prescribed last year before her condition had deteriorated and she had been put on a waiting list for surgery.
    Very close veins. Barry hid a smile. Nothing would persuade Aggie, and indeed many Ulsterfolk, to call varicose veins anything else. And it wasn’t the only renamed condition he’d come across during his ten months of working in rural Ireland. He’d once overheard a woman with uterine fibroids tell her friends that Doctor O’Reilly said she had “fireballs.”
    “When did the pain start?” he asked. Barry knew Aggie was single and worked as a folder in a Belfast shirt factory. He wasn’t exactly clear about what a folder did.
    “I was at my job on Tuesday and a fellah hit the back of my leg a ferocious dunt with a trolley. Since then it’s been hurting something fierce, so it has. I tholed it, but now it’s burning up so I come til see youse, so I did.” She bent to rub her leg.
    “It sounds like you may have a bit of inflammation. Come on over to the couch.”
    He took her arm to help her limp across the familiar room with its Snellen’s eye testing chart on one wall, and examining couch against another, where a mercury-column sphygmomanometer was mounted. “Now,” he said, “off with your stockings and climb up.”
    She started to hoist her skirt.
    “Just a minute,” Barry said, and pulled the screens across. Ul sterwomen were generally modest about such things. “Give me a shout when you’re ready.”
    “You can come in now, Doctor.”
    Aggie lay propped on the pillows. Her skirt hem covered her to her knees. He noticed her extra little toe on each foot.
    “See them?” she said. “Them there’s special, so they are. My mammy when I was wee told me not to be bothered because I was different. Not to take any ould guff from anyone who tried to tease me, she told me, and she was right.” Aggie chuckled. “When them two wee puppet pigs first come on TV in the ’50s I give my spare toes their names. Pinky and Perky.”
    Barry laughed. “Good for you.”
    Aggie said, “Sure they’ve never been any bother, but this here cal f ?” She pointed, bent her knee, and rolled her leg sideways. “See that there? It hurts like the living bejizzis.”
    Barry could see the tortuous blue tracks of distended veins crawling under the patchily discoloured skin of her calf. An area half the size of a saucer was clearly inflamed. He laid the back of his hand there. It was hot. “That where it got bumped?”
    “Aye.”
    Barry palpated the vein. He had no difficulty feeling the hard clot. The diagnosis wasn’t difficult. “You’ve got superficial thrombophlebitis.”
    “Boys-a-boys, that’s a quare mouthful,” she said, and frowned. “If you put an air to it you could sing it.”
    “It means that the thump caused a clot to form in the vein and there is inflammation round the damaged area.”
    “Clot? It was a right clot what done it til me. Thon ‘Sticky’ Maguire’s got two left feet, so he has. If there was a ten-acre field with one tree in it that great glipe would walk into the trunk.”
    Barry smiled. He’d no idea why people with the surname Maguire were always nicknamed “Sticky” in Ireland, just as Murphys were called “Spud.”
    Her frown deepened. “Is it serious, like?”
    “Not really, as long as it’s in the veins under the skin, and I’m pretty sure it is.” Superficial disease was relatively innocuous. A clot in a deep calf vein posed risks that a piece might break off, be carried to the lungs, and cause a pulmonary embolism, a potentially lethal condition. That could happen any time in the first three postoperative weeks, he thought, wondering for the umpteenth time this morning about Kinky, lying in a hospital bed in Belfast. Stop