The Tay Is Wet by Ben Ryan Page B

apply for training in England where she was readily accepted and had trained and qualified to the highest level.
    She had a romance going at the time with a young neigh-bour, Piro Callanan. She promised him faithfully that as soon as her training was finished she would come home to him and to Ireland. However, she had only been gone a few months when we heard that she had got married to a young Englishman but this had broken up after two years. They had no children and the young man had left Queenie and gone off with another woman. This was never spoken about by her brothers who were great friends with Piro.
    As regards lifting heavy male patients this was no bother to Queenie, who was actually as tough as nails and was a great favourite of the male patients with whom she always exchanged lively banter, and they loved to see her in action as she reprimanded any of her fellow nurses who did not meet her high standards.
    Unfortunately for Andy and Oilly she had a habit of coming back home to stay with them for a couple of weeks every year. She never gave them any prior warning of her visits and they dreaded her coming because she always did a blitzkrieg of cleaning, decorating and rearranging in the house. On a previous visit Timmy Deery had been at the bus station when she arrived and he was drafted in to carry some of her five or six pieces of luggage.
    ‘It’s like the arrival of a queen with all this bloomin’ luggage,’ Oilly complained.
    ‘Maybe she is a queen.’ Timmy said.
    ‘Yeah, she’s the queen of Sheba.’
    From then onwards Oilly, Andy and Timmy referred to Queenie (when she was out of earshot) as the queen of Sheba.
    The relaxed and lackadaisical atmosphere enjoyed by the Maloony household for eleven months of the year was suddenly shattered. She would shake their hands and hug each one at the gate, and then she would say, ‘Oliver and Andrew take two cases each and deposit in my room.’
    Then, sweeping into the house, she would stand with arms folded in the middle of Oilly’s kitchen and give a shrill whistle through her teeth.
    ‘What a bloomin hovel, we have an enormous task ahead of us getting this dump cleaned up. Now, will someone wet the tay?’
    On this occasion she followed her usual procedure. She arrived wearing a bright red costume with tight skirt and high heeled shoes and with a figure which women half her age would die for. Timmy helped with the luggage. When they got into the kitchen Andy moved the kettle on the range to over the firebox.
    Oilly said, ‘I’ll cut a few clipes of bread.’
    ‘Stop, stop, the pair of you.’ Queenie’s voice rose to a crescendo.
    ‘I don’t believe what I’m seeing, what on God’s earth is that?’
    She pointed a shaking finger at a large pitchfork which she remembered being used in the cow-byre for bedding the cows with straw. It rested in a corner of the kitchen with prongs upward. Stuck on the prongs was what looked like a loaf of bread.
    ‘Tell me I’m hallucinating.’
    ‘What are you on about?’ said Oilly. ‘That’s a fresh loaf I got this morning.’
    ‘Why, oh why is it sitting up there on a blooming pitchfork?’
    ‘Well, I just hadn’t time to take it off.’
    Queenie held her hands up to her head in astonishment.
    ‘Let me get this straight, are you telling me that you carried a loaf of bread home from the shop on a pitchfork?’
    ‘Of course, why not? Sure I had the fork with me.’
    ‘I give up, for the moment. Come on, put on that kettle, Andy, and wet the tay, I’m famished for a cuppa.’
    The kettle, which had been sitting on top of the range, was already blowing out steam and when Andy stoked the fire the extra heat soon had it boiling.
    ‘Just give it a few minutes to draw. Oilly, will you get out the sugar and the butter and cut a few clipes of that oul loaf.
    Queenie winced as Oilly wrenched the loaf off the pitchfork.
    ‘There you are sis, a pitchfork of bread for the “lads” or a pitchfork of straw for the