Years ago when we lived in the tenements in Mountjoy Square, we had neighbours living down in the back parlour, called the Coyles. Danny Coyle was a docker. The work was hard and the money scarce.
One Friday evening he arrived home after a hard week, looking forward to a nice dinner. The wife, Molly, met him at the door with bad news.
"There's no dinner. I only had enough to buy a mackerel," she said.
"WHAT?" he roared. We could hear him even though we were two floor up at the front with the telly blaring.
Molly explained to him what happened.
"I ordered two bags o' coal, bu' when the men were deliverin' it the parrot said: 'Make it ten', an' they put in ten bags, an' I had to pay them, so there was no money left for the dinner. Only for a mackerel."
She managed to tell the story before Danny exploded. He charged over to the parrot's cage, grabbed the bird by the throat and pulled it out. He proceeded to give it a right battering, kicking the poor thing from one end of the room to the other, and back again. Then he opened the window, and threw the parrot out. It landed in the yard, and lay on the ground with not a twitch out of it.
While all this was going on, the cat ate the mackerel.
Danny went ballistic. He grabbed the cat, and gave it an even worse beating than the parrot got, ending up by firing it through the window too. What was left of the animal landed beside the parrot.
After a minute, the parrot stirred, looked over at the cat, and said:
"Jaysus! How many bags o' coal did YOU order?"
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