Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Fourth Estate

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First published in Great Britain by Flamingo 1993

Copyright © Edward Toman 1993

Edward Toman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780006545736

Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2016 ISBN: 9780008226916

Version: 2016-11-08

Dedication

For Siobhán and Declan

Epigraph

ÓM SCEOL AR ARDMHAGH FÁIL NÍ CHODLAIM OÍCHE

I hear news from the high plains of Ireland and I cannot sleep at night

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

One

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Two

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Epilogue

Keep Reading

About the Author

Other Books By

About the Publisher

Prologue

Alphonsus McLoughlin’s Spanish wasn’t all that hot, so it took him a minute or two to appreciate what the guide was telling him. The only way the mule could be persuaded to climb any higher, it seemed, was to offer it a shot of his tequila. ‘I can see its point,’ Alphonsus said, handing the bottle over without demur. He’d had quite a few shots himself that morning. He intended having quite a few more if God spared him. Only his faith and the cactus juice were keeping him going as, perched precariously on the swaying back of the bad-tempered beast and sweating like a proverbial pig under his dog collar, he stumbled upwards on a precipitous bridleway towards the lost city in the mountains.

On either side of the narrow trail the thorny cacti sprouted promiscuously. When Alphonsus was a boy, he had taken a brief interest in cacti. His aunt had kept a small one in the window of their house on the Falls Road, issuing orders to all who darkened her door that it was never to be watered. One Saint Patrick’s Day it flowered, to the amazement of the neighbours. They sent for the Irish News. In those days there was less trouble on the Falls, and the Irish News was grateful for any story with a human interest angle. A reporter arrived who made Alphonsus spell out his name and took a snapshot of him standing beside the miraculous succulent. Alphonsus didn’t dare tell him the truth, that Maud Gonne McGuffin, the backstreet girl who came in on a Saturday to do his aunt’s washing, had secretly watered the plant on compassionate grounds one night when the aunt was at confession. It was never a good idea to get on the wrong side of the McGuffin clan.

Before Easter, in spite of all the attention it was attracting, the cactus shrivelled and died. The Irish News spiked the story, Maud Gonne McGuffin was given her cards, and Alphonsus’s interests turned back to his impending vocation. His aunt had had to wait twenty years, until his ordination day, to see her smudged likeness on the front page of the paper.

Even now, swaying through an endless vista of stunted spiky growths, Father Alphonsus recalled the incident with a pang of residual guilt.

The guide, who had talked him into the trip the previous evening, had sworn to him on his mother’s grave that he would not be disappointed. But when they finally reached their destination at noon it needed only one glance at the scruffy Indian village for Alphonsus to know that he’d been sold a pup. But then what did he expect? he asked himself. The treasures of Teotihuacán? Half a dozen adobe huts were scattered round a makeshift square. Chickens and a goat scratched unconvincingly in the dust. A few children detached themselves from a lethargic game and tried to sell him knick-knacks. The guide ordered him to take photographs, then ushered him into the souvenir emporium. His heart sank. A boyhood on the Falls Road hadn’t taught him much about the glories of the Teoamoxtli, but he knew he could have spared himself the discomfort of the journey, could have stayed in the motel in Tijuana with a cold beer and a copy of Newsweek, enjoying impure thoughts by the poolside, instead of trekking all the way up to this God-abandoned spot. There was nothing here he couldn’t pick up in the town. He bought a few items out of politeness and was about to go when his eye was caught by the figurine nailed to the wall high above the cash register.

It was a small female figure, no more than six inches tall, a Madonna perhaps, crudely carved from driftwood. Though the features were roughly executed, they captured an expression of hauteur in the blank stare, the slightly curled full lips and the oval Aztec eyes. He knew at once that he must have it. It certainly wasn’t the sort of thing his aunt would go for, but it had an authentically ethnic look that might impress his new friends back in Sausalito.

‘Esta, ¿quién es?’ he asked.

The proprietor, a wizened little man with the wrinkled face of a dried prune, didn’t answer, didn’t move.

‘¡No es nada, señor! ¡No se vender the guide said. It’s nothing. It’s not for sale.

‘Can I see it anyhow?’ Alphonsus said.

‘¡No es posible!‘the guide answered hurriedly.

‘¿Cuánto cuesta?’ Alphonsus insisted.

‘¡Solamente una réplica!’ the guide assured him. ‘Not bring so good luck.’

If they don’t want me to have it then it must be something rare, Alphonsus started thinking. Then he thought ‘bollocks’, as his Belfast common sense re-asserted itself. It was all a ploy to build up his interest, to sucker the gringo into parting with more greenbacks. The guide was taking mugs like himself up the mountain every day of the week; no doubt the old guy had a cardboard box full of similar carvings under the counter, and a kid out the back whittling away on demand. But the more Alphonsus contemplated it the more he knew he wanted it. He could picture it already on the mantelpiece in his study bedroom.

The old man suddenly reached up and pulled the figurine roughly from the wall and handed it to him, muttering something in an ancient tongue.

‘What is he saying?’ Alphonsus asked.

The guide shrugged his shoulders, suddenly appearing to lose interest in the transaction. ‘Señor Ramirez say you can have! He likes that you are priest; he too once had brother a priest. For you if you want it is present. And maybe you pray for his brother? Okay?’

‘Ask him how much he wants for his present?’ Alphonsus said suspiciously.

‘It is present!’ the guide repeated. ‘You can have! Now we go, pronto, eh?’

He beckoned to him to leave. Alphonsus pocketed the statuette and followed him out into the glare of the noonday sun. He’d have another tequila, he told himself. Then he’d help the guide prise the mules away from the peyote plants.

The same sun that shone on Father Alphonsus had already gone down in the hills above Armagh. It was cold as well as dark, with a wind that would have cut corn. A night, you would have thought, for the fireside or the early bed.

But not this night! For this was a night when none could sleep.

The ice-cream van had stopped at the foot of the lane below the house, and a crowd had gathered. Frank Feely was standing up on a chair to look out of the window. His father was standing cursing inside the front door, his face red with anger, using words the boy had never heard before, and his mother was outside the house screaming back in at his father to come out and fight like a man. ‘You’re a no-good coward, a yellow-livered whore’s get out of hell! Are you just going to stand there and let him get away with it?’ His father went over to the gable wall of the house and began to throw lumps of stone over the potato patch in the direction of the chiming van. ‘For the love of the suffering Jesus,’ she shouted at him, ‘who do you think you are going to hit from that distance?’ She raced into the house, pushed Frank aside and, opening the window, grabbed the stout pole from which the papal flag hung limply. ‘Keep your eye on the child at least,’ she ordered. She ran to the road and he saw her begin to lay about her with the flagpole.

Frank ran to follow her, but his father picked him up and carried him inside. ‘Sometimes there’s not a lot of point getting yourself caught up in that sort of carry-on,’ he said. ‘McCoy’s trailing his coat. He won’t be happy till there’s ructions. We’ll leave it to Father Schnozzle to sort out.’

From the safety of the ice-cream van, Oliver Cromwell McCoy took stock of the developing situation with some satisfaction. The Mexican and his wife cowered on the floor, covering their ears against the noise of the riot building up outside. But the sounds were music to McCoy’s ears. ‘Mucho people! Mucho money! Eh?’ he announced to the couple at his feet. He switched off the chimes and blew into the microphone; the time had come to take control of the situation.

‘Protestant people of Armagh! Once more the lackeys of Rome are trying to stop us! They think they can come between us and our true Bible faith; but let them be warned, they’re dealing with Ulstermen, not some forelock-tugging toady from down the Free State, and it will take more than a few nancy boys from Rome, in their skirts and Italian hats, to stop us. With the help of God, and the Tynan B Specials’ – here a cheer went up from the crowd as these gallant defenders of the Protestant way moved through the crowd and took up their positions – ‘they’ll not stop us tonight either. Ulstermen will be free to travel the roads of their beloved province and exercise their right to religious freedom, won for them through the blood of their forefathers.’

The reason for the hold-up had now become clear. Up ahead at the crossroads a throng of papists, led by a priest, had felled a tree and were gathered behind this barricade, reciting the rosary. Some of them knelt in the road as the thin cleric gave out the Hail Marys through a megaphone. Across the fallen tree stretched their banners and placards:

LEGION OF MARY;

SAINT MATT TALBOT’S MISSION TO THE PERVERT

(Father forgive them for they know not what they do!)

McCoy cautiously opened the sliding window of the van and craned his neck round, the better to survey the scene. He dodged back from the hail of stones which this gesture prompted. But he had seen enough to know that the B-men were massing for a frontal attack on the barricade and he gripped the mike and began to bellow his orders:

‘I see our long-nosed friend is here again. Mister Schnozzle Durante, if I’m not very mistaken. He calls himself “Father”, and has all the girls calling him “Father” too, but plain mister is all he’ll get from me! A lackey of the great harlot herself. But I’ve got news for him tonight. No nancy boy priest of Rome will ever stop a true-blue Protestant from the profession of his faith. No surrender! I now call upon our gallant forces to clear the road ahead and let these peaceful Protestant people through to celebrate their service, and if they don’t clear the road there’s plenty of boys here willing to do it for them. Am I right, boys?’

The roar of support that greeted these sentiments indicated that he had hit the nail on the head. The push began. On the floor of the van the diminutive Mexican rolled into the foetal position and sobbed softly to himself in creole as the rocks bounced off the flimsy roof of the van. He closed his eyes, and heard the thud of wood and leather and metal, on skull and bones and flesh, the screaming of the women, the curses of the men, the wailing of lost children. Then they were moving, the van lurching unevenly as the crowd inched forward and the Fenians and their priest fell back into the fields. McCoy turned on the chimes again and the van began to pick up speed. ‘Give her the wellie, Mister Magee,’ he shouted into the front, where the dour-faced driver was wrestling with the gears. ‘We mustn’t keep the punters waiting.’ He flung open the window and leaned out, giving the priest in the field the two fingers. Then he turned his attention to the Mexicans, prodding them firmly with the steel toecap of his boot. ‘You can get up now, brother and sister. The fun’s over for the moment. Tutti finito, comprende? Pull yourselves together and start getting into your canonicals. Curtain up in ten minutes.’

When Father Alphonsus was unpacking the next night, he remembered his souvenir and placed it carefully on the mantelpiece beside the statue of the Sacred Heart, admiring as he did so the symmetry it gave to the sparse decor of his room. The Sacred Heart had been a present from his aunt on his twenty-first birthday. Over the years her fierce devotion to the icon had paid off. She was convinced that it was the personal intercession of the Sacred Heart that had won him first prize in the lottery in his final year at Maynooth. A three-year secondment to sunny California with an option to renew! ‘Who ever heard of a Belfast boy winning anything, even the turkey in a Christmas raffle, unless they had someone’s prayers?’ she demanded to know, and he couldn’t disagree. She still wrote to him every day, the long letters of a lonely old woman, reminding him of his covenant with the Sacred Heart and keeping him up to date on every atrocity back home.

Only too mindful of his good fortune, Alphonsus had kept his part of the bargain. Every night since his arrival he had faithfully offered up a perpetual novena to the Sacred Heart. He prayed for three things. He prayed for guidance, for the world of the West Coast was still a mystery to him. He prayed for purity, for there were temptations at every turning, even for a man with the rigorous training of Maynooth behind him. But above all he prayed that he might never be recalled to damp Belfast and that he might see out his days in the sun. So far the Sacred Heart had seen him right on all three scores.

Next morning he was up for early Mass. He crossed himself and knelt by the bedside to say his prayers. Automatically he glanced up to the mantelpiece to catch the eye of his protector and dedicate this new day to Him. The Sacred Heart had gone! Where it should have been, in the centre of the shelf, stood the Indian carving, staring at him with cynical composure. The Sacred Heart statue was on the tiles of the hearth, smashed in a thousand fragments.

Father Alphonsus took the ferry across the bay, speeding towards the towered city of San Francisco. He pulled the figurine from his pocket, said an inward act of contrition, and surreptitiously threw it overboard into the choppy waters. The boat moved on. But until they’d passed the forbidding bulk of Alcatraz, he could still see it, bobbing unconcerned on the tide, slowly drifting towards the Golden Gate and the open ocean beyond.

With a pang of guilt he remembered the morning’s letter from his aunt, unopened in his pocket. It would be full as usual of dreadful news from home, snippets from the paper telling of death and mutilation on the Falls Road. He slit the air mail envelope with his nail and studied the front page of the Irish News she had sent him. It spoke of a terrible scandal blighting the countryside, a monstrosity so obscene that there were hardly words to describe it. McCoy was up to his dirty business again. He glanced at the photograph of the preacher, bellowing defiance in some Orange hall. But cowering behind him was a face that Alphonsus thought he recognized. A face like a wrinkled prune. A face like the one he had seen in Mexico, in the lost village in the mountains.

In spite of the sun, which was warm on his face, his blood ran cold. A cloud passed over his world. He knew now that some day the order would come, summoning him back to the unhappy land of his birth.

ONE

One

Frank Feely’s mother had done the Nine Fridays when she was a girl, and though she had fulfilled all the regulations to the letter and now had a cast-iron guarantee of her place in heaven, she remained suspicious of the world, the way people born and bred in South Armagh tend to be. The framed pledge by the Sacred Heart, in fading gilt copperplate, was displayed above the mantelpiece, where the red candle glowed day and night before His picture. It became Frank’s first reading lesson, his father lifting him on his shoulders and helping him decipher the tortuous logic of the contract. Confession and Communion on nine consecutive first Fridays of the month, and the Sacred Heart would reserve for you a heavenly crown. In an uncertain world where sinful temptations could lurk at every turning, even in the hills of Armagh, it was as good as money in the bank.

‘It’s an offer no one could refuse,’ Joe Feely would extol. ‘Who could turn down a bargain like that?’ He said it with some feeling, for like many another before him, he was jinxed when it came to the Nine First Fridays. Somehow he never seemed to fill the run himself. Each winter he’d be going great guns, seven maybe eight months without a hiccup, but always something would intervene to invalidate the contract. Like the other mysteries of life, he accepted it with stoicism and just a hint of relief.

‘Let me tell you this,’ he confided to the infant. ‘The Sacred Heart is not one to go fooling around with unless you’re serious.’

Along with the Sacred Heart Messenger, which she read to him at night, his mother brought home The African Missions from the chapel gates. Frank sat on the floor and stared at page after page of blurred photographs, the white-robed priests flanked by smiling groups of black children. Yet when he heard his mother screaming about McCoy, calling him as black as the ace of spades, he knew this wasn’t what she meant. He had seen photographs of McCoy in the Irish News that his father brought home from the Shambles across the hill. Before he was a year old he could recognize McCoy, the bull neck bulging under the dog collar, the protruding eyes, the fixed stare of the fanatic. His father cut them out carefully and hung them on the nail in the privy behind the house, announcing to the neighbours his imminent intention of wiping his arse on the Orange hoor. ‘Black bastard,’ Frank said, speaking his first words.

There’s a boy won’t be long till he’s putting us all in our place,’ laughed his father, tucking into a fry the better to get his bowels working. And his mother, breaking the habit of a lifetime, allowed herself a smile at his infant precocity.

There were other paradoxes too in the tales his father brought home from the Shambles, paradoxes that puzzled his infant imagination and left him with the uneasy feeling that the world beyond the half door was a treacherous place. Schnozzle Durante was an American he sometimes heard his mother croon to when the wireless was working. But he knew that the Schnozzle Durante they argued about in the evenings was a darker force closer to home at whose every mention his mother crossed herself.

‘You’ll land yourself in the soup, talk like that!’ she insisted. His father would laugh at her when she did that.

‘What harm is there in a bit of a joke? If we can’t take a joke we must be in a bad way.’

‘We’ll see who’s laughing if the clergy hear you making fun of him, God bless the mark!’

‘The clergy never dare up this way. We have our hands full with the Christian Brothers as it is.’

‘Say what you like, but where would we be without them?’

He remembered too the sudden curfews, when the siren atop the Brothers’ would start to wail, sending the women scurrying in from the fields. His father would be fretting indoors for the duration, pacing the floor, unwilling to risk the trip in to the Patriot Bar.

‘The Brothers have lost another one!’ he would repeat.

‘Keep your frigging voice down! And stand away from that window! Do you want us all in trouble?’

‘They’ve no interest in us. It’s the runaway they’re after.’

‘They’ll get him before dark,’ she repeated with tight-lipped satisfaction. ‘He deserves everything that’s coming to him, a young pup that would lift his hand to the Brothers.’

‘He’ll not be lifting much for a while,’ his father added darkly. Through a crack in the doorjamb, Frank could make out another posse of thick-set postulants, their soutanes tucked into Wellington boots, making their way up to the high ground.

‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’ laughed his father, ‘would you look at the cut of the dog they’re taking up with them?’

‘What’s wrong with the dog?’ she snapped. In her book, criticism of even the lesser clergy extended to their dogs.

‘A fucking old Kerry Blue. It couldn’t catch vermin!’

‘The same boy would have the hand off you quick enough,’ she said later, still defending the dog.

Before too long he was reading the deaths and condolences in the Irish News when he visited the lavatory, poring over the long lists of volunteers and victims who were dying daily in the national cause. And when he started to take an equal interest in the dogs and horses on the back pages his father knew that he had taught him all he could and that it was time to hand him over to the Brothers. But Teresa, his mother, was strangely reluctant.

‘He’s company for me at home,’ she said, ‘and you off gallivanting. Besides, the Brothers …’

‘Great men. Where would we be without them?’

‘There’s enough misery in the world without him going looking for it,’ she sighed. ‘Trouble will find him soon enough.’

On his fourth birthday his mother put away the things of childhood, gave his face a lick and marched him over the hill to Brother Murphy.

Seven is the age at which the philosophers deem a child to have reached the use of reason. Thereafter he lives in constant danger of mortal sin and its corollary, hellfire. Brother Murphy took the Fathers of the Church at their word. If Frank was to be saved from eternal damnation he had only three years to knock him into shape.

‘I’ve taught him his prayers, Brother,’ she said defensively.

Brother Murphy picked Frank up by the ears and brought the boy’s face close to his own. ‘Name the First Commandment, boy,’ he ordered. Frank tried to wriggle around, to catch his mother’s eye, but she knew better than to interfere. ‘Well, boy, are you going to answer, or are you a complete amadán?’ Frank began to cry. The Brother dropped him and reached for his hand. He held it out, palm upwards before him. From his pocket he produced the leather strap that all Christian Brothers carry, and gave him three slaps. Then he turned to the boy’s mother. ‘He can stay if he pulls his socks up,’ he growled, dismissing her.

‘Thank you, Brother,’ she said.

Brother Murphy cast a baleful eye round the hushed classroom, slowly choosing the morning’s victim. Up and down each row of desks he gazed, pausing for a few seconds to stare at each boy in turn. ‘We have a new boy with us this morning,’ he announced. ‘Francis Xavier Pacelli Feely! That’s a name and a half for a bucko from the backside of the hills!’ His mother had added the ‘Pacelli’ at the font, the maiden name of old Saint Pius, in the forlorn hope that some of the late pontiff’s good fortune would rub off on him.

Brother Murphy let the syllables roll round his mouth before he spat the name out. ‘Pacelli… Pacelli,’ he mused. Encouraged by the nervous tittering of the class he repeated it. ‘There’s a boy here who calls himself Pacelli.’ He waited for them to snigger dutifully. ‘I suppose an honest-to-God Irish name wasn’t good enough for his parents: Patrick or Michael or Seamus. I suppose we haven’t enough Irish saints! We have to go running after Italian ones!’ The boys began to laugh. Heavy-handed irony was Brother Murphy’s stock in trade and they knew better than to scorn his efforts. With any luck Frank would be up on the podium all morning and they would be off the hook.

‘Let’s hear our Italian friend here say the Ár nAthair,’ demanded Brother Murphy. ‘The words our Saviour taught us, in the language of the Gael.’ The rest of the class began to breathe more easily. Once a week, with much dumb show of disbelief, the Brother discovered a boy who didn’t know the Lord’s Prayer. They might sit up half the night, rehearsing it with their mothers till they were word perfect, but under the third degree not one of them could be relied on to get beyond ‘go dtaga Do ríocht’ without corpsing. And once a week, do chum glóir Dé agus onóra na hEirinn, Brother Murphy would take the sacrificial victim through it syllable by syllable.

‘Here’s a corner boy who doesn’t know his prayers!’ proclaimed the Brother by way of an introit. ‘Hold out your hand, corner boy, and we’ll soon see if our friend here’ – he waved the strap aloft - ‘can’t refresh your memory.’ The strap came down with a crash, the force of the blow almost lifting him off his feet. Frank’s face was contorted with pain and terror, but he tried to hold back the hot tears that the blow forced into his eyes. To cry would be fatal. It would invite further ridicule, further humiliation.

‘Ár nAthair atá ar neamh,’ intoned Brother Murphy, ‘go naofar Do ainm; go dtaga Do ríocht; go ndéantar Do thoil ar an talamh mar a níthear ar neamh. Now let’s see if this young lout can tell us the next bit. Well, Feely, we’re all waiting.’

The class could see Frank’s brow furrowed in fruitless concentration as he searched the confused spaces in his head for the next verse. ‘Ár n-arán laethúil tabhair dúinn inniú,’ give us this day our daily bread. The words deserted him now.

There was silence in the school save for the ominous swishing of the taws against the side of the Brother’s soutane. ‘Well, Mister Feely, we’re still waiting,’ he said after a while. His voice was quiet, almost reasonable. He was in no hurry. What better way was there to spend a morning than teaching the lads the Lord’s Prayer?

‘I don’t know,’ stuttered Frank after another pause.

‘I don’t know what?’ corrected the Brother gently.

‘I don’t know, sir!’

‘That’s better,’ he said, lifting the boy’s hand and giving him three, the statutory punishment for lapses in etiquette. ‘Now what don’t you know, Mister Feely?’

‘What comes next.’

Again Brother Murphy took his hand and tenderly, almost lovingly, stretched out the curled palm till it was straight and flat and ready, and then slowly and methodically began to beat him, punctuating each blow with a verse of the prayer. ‘Now, boy, let’s see if we can remember what comes next.’ He was looking flushed from his exertions, like a man who needed to sit down, but there would be no resting from his labours till the job was done. Word by word the inquisition continued. Together they asked that their trespasses be forgiven (as we forgive those that trespass against us) and begged not to be led into temptation. At every halting, stuttering utterance the slaps rang out. They were winding up the oration with a plea for deliverance from evil when Brother Murphy, by way of climax, threw down the strap, seized from the wall a wooden blackboard compass, and administered a two-handed crack to Frank’s skull that sent him careering across the classroom with bells ringing ‘Papa Piccolino’ in his ears.

His mother took the matter up cautiously with the Brother a week later. Would Brother Murphy maybe like to try beating back into the boy’s head some of the sense he had so successfully beaten out of it? Brother Murphy would have none of it.

‘Take your lad home with you, Missus Feely,’ he boomed. ‘We’ve done all we can for him here.’

‘Would there be no point in keeping him on a bit longer, Brother? Sure what good is he to me at home?’

‘And have him hold the rest of the class back? Have a bit of wit, woman dear!’

‘If you put it like that, Brother, I suppose you’re right.’

‘Of course I’m right. The boy will never make a scholar, Missus Feely. The sooner he gets working with those pigs of your husband’s the better. Fatten him up a bit. Give him plenty of fresh air.’ He squeezed Frank’s puny forearm. That’s what boys need. That and plenty of the strap.’

‘Thank you, Brother,’ she said, retreating. She knew better than to argue the toss with the cloth.

It wasn’t laziness or bad luck alone that kept Joe from completing the Nine Fridays. When it came to the delicate matter of Absolution he had a very real problem. Smuggling was a precarious vocation, liable at any moment to bring the wrath of the civil or clerical authorities down round your ears. A man in his line of trade couldn’t just walk into a confession box bold as brass and expect to conclude his business without the risk of a row. He had to pick his man and his moment with extreme care. The mendicant confessors who came round the doors in the depth of the winter, offering to hear confession in exchange for a free feed and a cup of tea, he avoided like the plague; those were the boys who would give you the third degree over as much as stealing an apple, thick buckoes from the south who knew the people expected a hard time to feel they were getting their money’s worth. He knew too the cathedral priests to avoid, having suffered humiliation at their hands when he first took up the business. But matters weren’t completely hopeless. Joe pinned his faith on the older men who by eleven o’clock at night were falling asleep on their feet. After a hard day, hearing nothing but Armagh people recalling their sins, they could think of only two things: the ball of malt and the warm bed. There were one or two who were half deaf into the bargain, and with luck you could mumble the details of your business as if it was the most natural thing in the world and they wouldn’t turn a hair. After a while Joe had it down to a fine art, slipping into the dark cathedral before closing, choosing his man carefully from the look of the waiting queue.

A year before he had found himself on a roll. A persistent voice in his conscience told him it was all too good to last, but with each passing month his spirits rose. Could he dare hope that the Nine Fridays could be his at last? Six months, seven months, eight months came and went, with the same old curate nodding off in the box, his hand raised, even before Joe started whispering, in an automatic gesture of absolution.

But the Sacred Heart is nobody’s fool. The gilt-edged guarantee of heaven is not earned through trickery. The ninth month came round and Joe cycled into Armagh in a state of heady anticipation. One more confession and he was home and dry! He had a drink and then another to steady his nerves. He crept into the darkened cathedral as the sexton was closing the door. Only a few penitents were left. He slipped in at the end of the queue, prepared himself as he had been taught, and shuffled forward in the line till it was his turn to enter the box. The shutter slid across. But instead of the dozing figure he had been anticipating, Cardinal Mac himself stared out at him from behind the grille, alert as a whippet. Joe had returned home that night with the Cardinal’s interrogation ringing in his ears. He knew now that if ever he got to heaven, it would be by the hard road.

Though they never discussed anything so intimate, Teresa half guessed his guilty secret and the shame it was bringing on the house. She didn’t give him a minute’s peace till he promised he would try again. Driven out every Saturday night by her tongue, he would be seen parking his bike outside the Patriot Bar and popping in for a relaxer before the rigours of the sacrament. One would lead to another, and he would wobble home at midnight, querulous and unshriven.

‘You never went, you louse!’ she would shout.

‘What call have I to run telling my private affairs to a bunch of gobshites?’ he would call back, emboldened by the drink. Frank, feigning sleep in the settle bed by the fire, would hear them at it intermittently till dawn.

At Mass, too, he was always among the latecorners, standing in the porch out of the rain or in the graveyard if the weather was fair, technically present as it was Church property, but fooling nobody, least of all the Man Above. With his cronies from the adjacent townland he would slouch there, rolling cigarettes and guffawing about the price of pigfeed. They smoked and joked and argued and commented on the women’s legs with the practised eyes of farmers judging livestock. They didn’t need telling when the congregation indoors rose to its feet for the Last Gospel and the rush for the back doors began. Before the crowd inside had straightened their rheumatic knees, dusted down their trousers and adjusted their caps, Joe and company were already across the Shambles. Positioned strategically outside the Patriot’s, they would comment on the emerging churchgoers as they rubbed their backsides against the window, rapping occasionally on the glass and requesting Eugene to open up for the love of fuck before they all died of thirst.

‘You’ve no respect,’ she would tell him when she got him home. ‘You haven’t heard Mass properly this year. Mark my words I’m not the only one talking about you. Didn’t Cardinal Maguire himself say as much from the altar last Sunday? Not that one of you lot would have heard him. Is it Christians or heathens the lot of you are? If the Brothers were half the men they used to be they’d soon wipe that smirk off your face and no mistake.’ Joe let her go on. He knew she was right to take an interest in his spiritual welfare. He saw it as essential women’s work, a ritualized nagging that, like all rituals, had its place in the complicated scheme of things.

But when it came to the folklore of the faith, Joe Feely’s enthusiasm was second to none. His acquaintance with the holy places of Ireland was legendary. He knew who had the cure for a plethora of ailments both human and animal. As a travelling man, with a range of goods and services that skated round the edge of the civil and canon law, his business had given him occasion to visit most of the shrines in the country. His was a deep if unconventional spirituality. He knew that when the wheel of our fortunes turned at last and the great change came, when the dark times came to an end, when a new leader emerged to redeem the people of Ireland, it would be through the old places that we would first learn of it. The rituals of the established Church he bore with equanimity, reserving his soul for the fringes where older, more magical forces sometimes stirred. ‘You’ll hardly get up off your arse to go to Holy Mass,’ Teresa would accuse him, ‘but you’ll run the length of the land after some statue or other.’ To Joe it was no more than the truth.

So when it became clear as the years went by that the boy was making no progress, that his schooling days were over, and that the rosaries were getting them nowhere, his father decided that something stronger was called for. They tried a novena to the Sacred Heart and another to Saint Jude, but there was no appreciable change in his condition, and he still stared at the world through mute, impassive eyes.

‘The lad can knock around with me till he’s fit to fend for himself,’ Joe volunteered. ‘I’ll take him to the Shambles market tomorrow.’

‘He’ll get a real education and no mistake on the Shambles Corner,’ Teresa answered sharply. ‘Sitting all day in the Patriot Bar with eejits every bit as bad as yourself!’

‘He’s never too young to learn the ropes.’

‘You’ll fill his head with your foolish stories till he doesn’t know whether he’s coming or going!’

‘Those are the stories he’ll need to know if he’s going to survive around these parts,’ Joe argued.

‘He’ll learn nothing but bigotry; that and dirty language. I swear if Jesus Christ himself walked across the Shambles tomorrow they’d tear him apart.’

‘I’ve the pigs to sell. He’ll be able to give me a hand.’

‘Do you want him to get his death? Have you no wit?’

‘He’ll be as right as rain. We could maybe say a wee prayer in the cathedral when we’re at it.’

‘You’ll say more than your prayers, I don’t doubt. Take him with you if you want. Maybe he’ll be able to get you home when they throw you out of the Patriot’s.’

The pigs had been smuggled across the border half a dozen times in the previous month but they looked none the worse for their travels. They snuffled contentedly in the mud outside the house while Teresa eyed them suspiciously. She was used to the necessary merchandise of the smuggler – the butter and the cigarettes, the petrol and the contraceptives, the rifles and the Christmas turkeys – but the regular re-appearance of the pigs was beginning to wear her patience down.

‘See those French letters –’ she began.

‘The real article,’ he assured her.

‘More than can be said for these pigs,’ she added sourly. She stretched over the sow and rubbed its fat rump with distaste. ‘Boot polish!’

‘Of course it’s boot polish. Don’t they change colour every time they’re carted over the border?’

‘Anyway, I’m not having them another day round the house, subsidies or no. They have my stomach turned, the smell of them.’

‘What harm is there in the smell of a pig? Any road they’ll not be under your feet for much longer. These lads’ travelling days are nearly over. This time tomorrow they’ll be rasher sandwiches.’

Frank’s first sight of the holy city was from the Navan Fort. His father was shaking him awake from a cold and fitful sleep. The tractor engine was idling and the pigs were lying quietly in the trailer. He rubbed his eyes and shivered in the morning light. They were off the road, in the middle of a circle of low, grassy mounds, the contours of the ancient earthworks barely discernible. ‘If only this place could speak,’ Joe said, ‘it could tell a tale or two. The seat of the High Kings of Ireland or so they tell me. You wouldn’t think it to look at the state of it now, but in its time this place was fairly humming with royalty of one class or another. King Conor Mac Neasa, Deirdre of the Sorrows, Finn MacCool and his mate Cuchulainn and that whole crowd. Before Saint Patrick came along and converted the country. I can’t rightly remember the details of the lot of them, but I’ll say this for the Christian Brothers, they teach you your Irish history and they give you a pride in it. Robert Emmet and Patrick Sarsfield and young Setanta and the whole shooting match of them, all great men who gave their lives for Ireland. Maybe some day when you’re recovered, we’ll get ourselves a book and we’ll study it in more detail.’ And despite the early hour he began to sing quietly to the boy:

‘Let Erin remember the days of old

Ere her faithless sons betrayed her.

When Malachai wore the collar of gold

Which he won from her proud invader.

‘Saint Malachy! Another Armagh man, born on the Shambles a thousand years ago.

‘When kings with their standards of green unfurled

Led the Red Branch knights into danger

Ere the emerald gem of the western world

Was set in the crown of a stranger.

‘I need hardly tell you who the stranger was; you were nearly long enough at the Brothers’ to work that one out for yourself.’ But the boy’s attention was elsewhere. For Frank had turned to the east where the sun was rising and there in the far distance on its seven hills stood the primatial city. The twin spires of the cathedral had appeared, floating on a pillow of cloud. Joe looked too. The limestone pillars were tinged with the pink of the new sun, and their gilded crosses sparkled in the pale sky.

He drove the tractor sedately through the narrow, thronged streets and parked it outside the Patriot’s. He climbed down and lifted Frank out of the cart. ‘Here we are, the city of Armagh. Built like Rome on seven hills. And this is the Shambles Corner, where we’ll conduct our business before the day is out.’ He gestured grandiosely as if he owned the place, encompassing with the sweep of his arm the low line of bars and shops that formed one side of the square, the cabins and houses on the far side, the caravans of the tinkers huddled in a laager in one corner, the rusty corrugated-iron chapel that dominated another corner, and the crowd that had already gathered round the edges of the area to buy and to sell.

The Shambles was neither corner nor square. It stood where the three main streets of the city nervously approached each other. Some distance before they reached the Shambles they seemed to give up, as if reluctant to confront one another directly. The result was a confusion of unaligned buildings and open space. From the foot of the town Irish Street approached haltingly, broadening into a shapeless delta of bars and butchers’ shops; Scotch Street ran arrogantly down from the Protestant quarter, only losing its nerve at the last moment when it passed the Glorious Martyrs Memorial Assembly Hall and Tea Rooms. English Street, cutting up from the Mall trailing relics of the town’s glorious past, expired in a tangle of barricades and hucksters’ stalls. Across the wide amorphous expanse of the square the communities sized each other up, coming forward at mutually acknowledged times to barter in the no-man’s-land between their territories. Above the Shambles rose two of the city’s hills. One hundred steps led up to the Catholic cathedral to the left, revealing itself now to Frank as a massive, ill-formed structure of grey limestone, its spires dark against the greying sky. Beside it on the hilltop, shielded from the gaze of those below by a screen of trees, stood the Cardinal’s Palace, Ara Coeli, the Altar of Heaven. Across the valley of the Shambles rose the ancient hill that had once been the heart of the town, its summit topped by the sandstone cathedral of the Protestants, a squat unyielding profile shunning the brash upstart challenging it from across the square. Around the Protestant building huddled the remnants of some ancient buildings, an old library and chapterhouse, the relics of a medieval stone cross destroyed in a burst of iconoclasm, and at the base of its tower, barely visible from where Frank and his father stood, the tomb of the last great king of Ireland, Brian Boru.

But there was one building in the town more important than the others, and Joe pointed it out first. Marooned in the middle of the Shambles, equidistant from the Patriot Bar on the lower side and the Martyrs Memorial on the far side stood the public lavatory. It had been built originally as a convenience for the slaughtermen, but the abattoir was long gone and now it served the community, welcoming both sides equally. ‘Do you know what I’m going to tell you,’ whispered Joe, taking the boy into his confidence, ‘if it’s trouble you’re after there’s plenty to be had around here. I’m the boy should know, for I’ve started enough of it in my day. But listen till I tell you this. Do you see that shitehouse? Any man, whatever his persuasion, can walk in there and attend to a call of nature without the necessity of always looking over his shoulder for fear of who might have followed him in. Isn’t it a wonderful thing all the same? Mind you,’ he added, fearing that his enthusiasm for the communal latrine might be carrying ecumenism a bit too far, ‘I’m talking now about the general run of things. I’m not saying it would be the same around the Twelfth when feelings are running a bit high, or when McCoy has their heads turned after a week of hellfire preaching. It might be a different matter then all right. It’s not a theory I’d care to put to the test if the Shambles was full of Orangemen in their sashes all bursting for a slash; but in the general run of things, that’s as safe a spot as you’ll find. And that goes for both sides of the house. I’ll tell you what we’ll do first thing,’ he said, taking Frank firmly by the hand, ‘we’ll go across and let you see for yourself.’

There are few places in this land where both sides of the house can meet on equal terms. They are born apart, live apart, worship apart, are schooled apart, drink apart, die apart and are buried apart. But sometimes, through a freak of demography, there will emerge an area where neither side holds complete sway. And there, protected by elaborate protocol, a limited commercial intercourse will evolve. The bogs on Shambles Corner was one such place. The graffiti on its walls testified to its shared ownership. Like an officers’ mess or gentleman’s club, all controversy was left outside, all talk of killing and ambushes, all Bible prophecy and general fighting talk. There would be arguments galore, the air thick with deals and bargains, the talk of livestock and spare parts and pigfeed and subsidies and taxes and yield per acre. But when a fight broke out you could rest assured that the cause was money or misunderstanding, and that the old problems of the city had been left at the door. It was a convention upheld by all. A man might be gunned down at his place of work, or beaten to pulp at his fireside; he could be maimed as he knelt in worship or kneecapped as he stood at the bar. But not here, never here. Here was sanctuary, mutually agreed. No hooded figure would ever enter the damp interior of the bogs to pump hot lead into some enemy sitting at stool.

‘It’s never too early to learn how to pass yourself in mixed company,’ said Joe, steering Frank towards the narrow entrance. The boy hesitated. The stench from inside was overpowering. Joe laughed and lit a cigarette, fanning himself with the smoke. ‘I’ll not disagree with you, there’s a quare hogo. That’ll be your Tyrone men. As full of dung as a donkey. Have a few pulls of this,’ he said, offering the cigarette. Frank took it and drew on it hungrily.

It was a roofless building of grey pebbledash. The thin drizzle which had started up added to the dampness underfoot. Three of the walls served as urinals. In the middle of the floor was a hole which acted as a drain, already half blocked with the butts of cigarettes. ‘Wait till you see the state of the place in a few hours,’ Joe assured him, ‘they’ll be up to their knees in it.’ Under the fourth wall ran an open sewer, above which was fixed a thick wooden plank supported by bricks at both ends and with a dozen holes cut out of it. And although it was still early in the day most of the places on the plank were already taken by a line of grunting countrymen, their trousers round their ankles, reading the local papers and shitting noisily. The descendants of the dispossessed, down from the high ground to barter, sat side by side with the descendants of the planters, easing their engorged bowels together, all for the moment equal.

Father and son pissed at length against the wall, Joe whistling a non-sectarian tune. He discarded his cigarette into the drain with a flick of the wrist. ‘By jing, but I needed that,’ he remarked to the company at large as he buttoned his flies. No one answered, but the eyes of the Tyrone men never left him. ‘Come outside now,’ he instructed Frank, ‘and we’ll have a bottle of stout, just one, before we get rid of the pigs and see the sights. We’ll nip over to Hughes’s.’ As he spoke, the great carillon of the cathedral began its slow chime, tolling out the signal for the half hour. Frank looked round, startled, and his father laughed. ‘You heard that all right. Didn’t I tell your poor mother that a trip to Armagh would do you a power of good?’

The Shambles was filling up. The tinkers had emerged from their trailers and were setting up stalls on the waste ground. Joe and Frank sauntered across to the tractor, taking in the wonders of the city – the windmill on Windmill Hill, Laager Hill, where the army of King Billy had encamped on their way to the Boyne, the track of the old Keady railway which ran under the convent walls off to their left. Then they turned their attention to the bottom of Scotch Street where the Glorious Martyrs Memorial Chapel stood sentinel. ‘That’s McCoy’s place,’ Joe said. ‘A fucking eyesore and no mistake. Would you look at the state of it! Your mother was right. The bastard has had no luck since he pulled that stunt with the Mexicans. He went too far entirely that time.’

It was a low structure of corrugated iron, backing on to the square, its entrance among the withered flags of Scotch Street. It had once been painted with red-lead, but since the decline in McCoy’s fortunes, rust had eaten through the rivets and the crumbling girders were beginning to show like ribs where the stove chimney pierced the roof. The gable wall was covered with tattered posters, urging the passerby to repent of his sins and to flee the wrath to come. ‘Turn ye therefore unto Jesus, which is the Christ,’ exhorted a hand-painted sign on the roof. There were other reminders that the wages of sin are death and that man is saved only through faith, each carefully annotated with chapter and verse, and other announcements lay half buried underneath, notices advertising monster evangelical rallies, prayer meetings and healing ministries. Smiling young men with sleeked-back hair, their grins of fellowship distorted to grimaces by the corrugations of the walls, assured one and all of a warm welcome in Jesus. A neon sign, announcing that herein was preached only the Crucified Christ, had fallen askew, but still flickered intermittently across towards Irish Street.

‘I don’t see the ice-cream van at any rate,’ said Joe. ‘The hoor must be on the road again. Trying to drum up the price of a few pints.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Do you see that chapel. It was a goldmine in his father’s day. And look at it now. If it wasn’t for Magee he’d be in the workhouse long ago. Magee’s a bucko from Portadown I need hardly add. He might have been a bigot but he knew how to run a business. The pair of them fell out over that Mexican. Magee did a few months in the Crumlin after the body was washed up in Belfast Lough, but they never proved anything. Without him, McCoy’s nothing but a bollocks.’ Joe looked at his son, detecting a flicker of interest in what he was telling him. ‘Some time I must tell you the whole story of that pair of hoors, or at least as much of it as our side of the house will ever know. But now I must go and pay my respects to the Patriot.’

They checked on the pigs. ‘As right as rain,’ Joe declared, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth. All the talking had put him in the humour for a drink. From the Patriot’s came the subdued murmur of early-morning supping. ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do,’ he said, lifting the boy up into the tractor seat, ‘I’ll just pop in here for a moment to conduct a bit of business. Be a good man and keep an eye on the beasts. If anybody comes along showing an interest you’ll know where to find me. And don’t for the love of Jesus let any cowboy go prodding them.’ He swung open the doors of the Patriot Bar and disappeared into the noise. Frank was listening to the bells booming out the hour over the city when he became aware of another voice calling him from the pavement below: ‘What the fuck’s wrong with you? Are you deaf?’ The man was short and thick-set, with arms and shoulders overdeveloped for the rest of his short frame, and dark, suspicious eyes. ‘I’m asking are yiz selling these pigs?’ Frank looked down but made no answer. The man’s face reddened and he shouted angrily, ‘Where’s your da?’ For a moment Frank made no move. Then his head turned in the direction of the public house. The man stood back and looked carefully at the building. ‘Are you sure it’s in there he is?’ He reached up and roughly pulled the boy down from his perch and dropped him on to the ground. ‘Take a run in there and tell your father that Mister Magee is outside and taking an interest in these beasts.’

The door of the pub was stiff but Magee made no attempt to help him with it. Frank pushed it open and fell inside. It was warm and smoky, smelling of porter and whiskey and sweat. A pair of men near the door grabbed hold of him and began to fool about with him roughly, reaching for his balls and prodding him, but something told them they wouldn’t get much of a rise out of him the way they would with a proper half-wit who had wandered in off the street, or a woman in after her husband. He saw his father standing at the end of the bar and he broke away from their grasp and ran to him, tugging at his sleeve to get his attention. Joe reached down and picked him up and sat him on the bar and gave him a sip of his porter, all the while carrying on a one-sided conversation with a fat Tyrone man who was standing with his back to him. The fat man turned to look at the boy, tousled his hair roughly and asked what was the matter with him. ‘Need you ask?’ said Joe. ‘Or need I say any more than that he is a past pupil of our very own Christian Brothers?’

‘All the same,’ said his companion, ‘where would the country be without them? Tell me that.’

‘True,’ said Joe, buying the man another chaser. Frank tugged at his arm. He raised the glass to his mouth and drank slowly. ‘Sure whoever he is, can’t he wait?’ He lifted the whiskey glass and drank it in one swallow, following it with another swig of the black porter. ‘Now tell me this,’ he said to Frank, ‘why couldn’t he come in and fetch me out himself like a Christian? Why did he send the boy in?’ He addressed this last remark to his companion.

‘Never send a boy on a man’s errand,’ the other agreed.

‘There’s only one answer to that question,’ said Joe, once more turning to the boy on the bar. ‘I fear our friend outside digs with the other foot.’

‘There’s a lot of their side of the house that don’t take a drink at all,’ reasoned the Tyrone man.

‘There’s plenty on our own side you could say that about too. You’d see nothing but Pioneer pins round our way after the mission. But since when did that stop a man walking into a licensed premises and civilly conducting his business. Tell me that! What’s to stop him having a mineral?’

‘They give you fierce wind, minerals,’ said the other, easing his buttocks on the stool at the thought.

‘I’ll tell you what’s to stop him coming in here! The Patriot! Mine host here is a real deterrent. That’s a boy won’t be happy till he’s died for Ireland. And maybe taken a few others along with him for company.’

The Patriot was out of earshot, sitting impassively at the far end of the bar, but the Tyrone man wasn’t taking any chances. ‘Sure isn’t there good and bad in all of us,’ he said, easing himself down from the stool and beginning to edge towards the back of the bar, nervous of the political tone creeping into the conversation.

‘Where the fuck are you off to,’ demanded Joe, ‘when it’s your round?’

‘Why don’t you run outside like a decent man and conduct your bit of business, and I’ll set them up for you the minute you come back in?’

‘You’ll buy a drink now,’ said Joe, his voice rising. ‘Didn’t I tell you there’s no hurry on your man outside!’

‘I’ll not drink with you now, if that’s the tone you’re going to adopt,’ said the other, rising to the occasion.

‘A typical fucking Tyrone man! Armagh men aren’t good enough for you, I suppose!’ He left Frank on the bar and pursued the man across the floor. The other drinkers went suddenly quiet. It was early in the day for this diversion. Before closing, such scenes would be two a penny, hardly worth putting your pint down for; but at this hour of the morning it was a bonus. ‘You’re nothing but a cunt,’ said Joe.

‘Who are you calling a cunt?’

But here the ritual, so promisingly begun, was prematurely interrupted. Behind the bar the Patriot rose to his feet and the drinkers went back to their glasses. What had looked like a certain fixture had just been rained off. Nobody argued with the Patriot.

Packy Hughes, the name by which he was known to the Crown Authorities, or Peacai Mac Aoidh to give him the only title to which he would now answer, or the Patriot, the name by which he was best known to both sides of the house, was a giant of a man, over six foot tall and as broad as he was long. It was not for nothing that he was called the Patriot, for no living man had suffered more for his country. As a boy he had been interned on the ship in Belfast Lough, and as a young man he had seen the inside of every prison in the country. But where others had whiled away the long lonely nights dreaming of hot meals, comforting drinks and the pleasures of the flesh, the Patriot had kept his vision intact. On the rotting hulk he had taken a vow never to cut his hair till Ireland was free. It hung now to his waist, lank, grey and greasy. On formal occasions, as when he led the march out past the cathedral to the cemetery to honour the glorious dead, he would tie it into a ponytail held in place with a rubber band. Not many men in Armagh wore ponytails. But no corner boy jeered after the Patriot as he shuffled to the head of the colour party. When they were sure he was out of earshot, the people of Irish Street would say to each other that he was a right psycho and no mistake, and thank God with a chuckle that at least he was on their side. The people of Scotch Street would say, as his silhouette passed, that he was a right psycho, and, lowering their voices, question why something hadn’t been done. It wasn’t for want of trying. His limbs still bore the scars of a dozen attacks; his barrel chest still showed the wounds where they had taken the bullets out of him. Bullets fired at a range that would have killed a normal man. But the Patriot was no normal man. A month after they had left him for dead at the back of the Martyrs Memorial, he had been back behind the bar. He had been shot, stabbed, garrotted, blown up, drowned and half hanged, and every time the Patriot had pulled through. Martyrdom had eluded him down the years.

He had taken a second great vow when he was in the Crumlin. He had enrolled in an Irish class on the wing; in the first flush of enthusiasm he foresaw Ireland Gaelic again and the forgotten sounds of the language echoing once more through the streets of her towns. The young teacher from the Falls Road would speak nothing but Irish, and after Lesson One, the Patriot took a vow that he would do the same. Sadly the classes hadn’t lasted very long. The Movement split when they were still on Lesson Five (the first declension) and the Falls Road teacher had taken a wrong ideological turning that ended in Milltown cemetery. But an oath is an oath, especially if taken by a soldier of the Republic. Armed with the Christian Brothers’ Grammar, the Patriot spent the next six years struggling with the intricacies of the subjunctive and the complex vocabulary of field and shoreline. His labours were only partially successful. By nature a solitary person, his habits had been reinforced by years on the blanket. But lack of language was no handicap. His truculence and dourness and his reluctance to be drawn too deeply into political debate were useful tools for survival; in due course his long silences and curt utterances gave him an air of authority, an authority reinforced by his stature and reputation as the man they couldn’t kill.

So when the Patriot got to his feet and addressed himself to the problem in hand, even Joe knew that the crack was over and that he might as well see to the pigs outside. The Patriot rose to his full height and ran his fingers through his lank locks. ‘Caidé tá cearr?’ he demanded in a quiet and reasonable voice. What is wrong?

‘Nothing wrong at all,’ answered Joe, likewise adopting a quiet and reasonable tone. ‘In fact I was just this minute hoping to attend to a small business matter that I fear can’t wait any longer.’

‘Time and tide wait for no man,’ agreed his erstwhile companion, edging his way to the door.

But the Patriot roused to speech was reluctant to let the matter drop. He had managed to form a sentence, albeit one that was grammatically suspect, and he didn’t feel like wasting it on one airing. ‘Dúirt me caidé tá cearr?’ he demanded. I said what is wrong? The grammar was even more suspect but the meaning was clear enough. A note of menace had entered his voice. If everyone else could treat his place like a rough-house, it seemed to imply, he was going to have some of the action. He thought for a moment but no new words came to express these thoughts. So he contented himself with a third rehearsal of the original sentence. This time the intonation had been modulated; it was no longer an interrogative or an assertion, it was a threat. A threat directed at the person of Joe Feely, pig farmer. It spoke of blood in the nostrils and ribs in need of splints, of lost front teeth and eyes that wouldn’t open, of pain and humiliation and the mockery of his peers. All this and more, the Patriot conveyed in the same few words. There was only one way out and Joe knew it; only one way to prevent the Patriot, his word store depleted, from vaulting the bar and getting stuck in. Joe summoned all his resources and addressed the giant in the language of his forefathers.

‘Tá muid all okay, ar seise, in fact tá muid’ – he faltered for a second – ‘ag dul abhaile.’ We are, he said, on our way and he indicated the door lest the Patriot have any difficulty with the pronunciation or mistake his intentions. But the effect was instantaneous. The Patriot’s face broke into a smile. He reached across the bar and grasped Joe’s hand in his own huge paddle. Words, not for the first time, failed him. But there was no mistaking the emotion of the moment. The English had come marauding to this ancient spot seven hundred years ago, planting it with their settlers; since then the only language the Shambles had known was rough Béarla, the tongue of the oppressor, unnatural in our mouths. The Patriot and his comrades, and ten thousand more before him, had all but driven the invaders out at last, but they had left their language as a mocking legacy. But when he heard the sweet sounds of spoken Gaelic in his house he felt that our day was at last coming.

Joe knew that there is a time to speak and a time to be silent. He stood silent now, content to have his hand roughly shaken by the Patriot, instead of his body broken by the same party. The fat man from Tyrone, meanwhile, managed to fill the silence. From the depths of his unconscious he dredged up what was left of his Brothers education. Only one sentence came to him but, as luck would have it, it was the one to do the trick. ‘Suigh síos,’ he said. Sit down. The Patriot subsided on to the stool at the bar, a happy man, while Joe and Frank made for the door, resisting the temptation to wink at the corner boys en route to show them he knew how to handle your man. ‘Let’s go outside and have a word with the mystery man,’ he whispered to the lad, ‘before there’s ructions.’

Two

Magee stood in the drizzle gently prodding the sow with a hazel switch, gauging the depth of the fat on her haunches, but careful not to bruise the flesh so soon before slaughter. The animal pivoted her bristled snout away from him, but he prodded her firmly on the other flank till she turned back to him.

From the door of Hughes’s Joe watched him, saying nothing. He reached into his pocket and produced a battered pouch. Carefully he rolled a thin cigarette. He cupped his hands around the match, his back hunched against the wind from the lower end of the town. His full attention seemed to be devoted to English Street where knots of pedlars were eyeing one another suspiciously before the serious business of the day began. He turned his attention down the town, to the bleak curve of Irish Street. There was only one shop on the street, Peadar’s Fruit’n’Veg, whose proprietor had positioned a few crates on the pavement as a concession to market day. Peadar himself hovered uneasily at the door, keeping an eye on the muddy potatoes and long-leafed carrots. Joe nodded to him.

Meanwhile Magee had turned his back on the pigs and was facing up the town. They nonchalantly surveyed their respective quarters for a few minutes more, then turned slowly to check on developments across the Shambles. Magee cleared his throat and spat a ball of gleaming mucus into the gutter. The pigs jostled forward, investigating it with their dripping snouts. He held his nose between forefinger and thumb and blew it, hard and long, snapping the snot from his fingers over the backs of the beasts. Joe cocked his leg and farted loudly. Then, their toilettes completed, each of them settled their caps on the backs of their heads to indicate that they were ready for business, and turned to face the other for the first time.

‘How much are you looking for them?’ demanded Magee.

‘I’m looking plenty. You’ll not find better animals in Armagh today.’

Magee grunted. The preliminaries were over; the ritual of selling could begin in earnest. Both men knew their parts and how they would be expected to play them. They spat on their hands. They offered to shake on it. They turned their backs on derisory offers, took umbrage, swore they’d not take a penny less nor offer a penny more. Then they would grab each other round the neck and whisper loudly into the other’s ear, the meanwhile squeezing the forearm vigorously to convey some hidden nuance. They assured each other they were decent men, and hurled abuse in the next breath. But finally, as both of them knew from the beginning, the deal was struck. There was spitting and the bargain was sealed with a knucklecrushing handshake and a vigorous slap on the back as the wad of notes changed hands.

‘You’ll take a drink with me now,’ demanded Joe, indicating the Patriot’s.

‘I will not,’ said Magee.

‘You’re a God-fearing man, sir, I can see that,’ Joe said with a smirk. ‘Sure something tells me you dig with the other foot. But we’ll not hold that against you.’ They both laughed sparingly. ‘Are you sure now you won’t join me in a pint? You’re not going to stand there and tell me that all you fellows are teetotallers?’

‘You’ll not take offence if I decline,’ Magee grunted.

‘I respect you for that now, sir. If there were more like you, decent men, on both sides, the country wouldn’t be in the state it’s in. Tell me, am I right on that one?’

‘You are,’ Magee said without much conviction. He extricated himself from Joe’s clutches and drove the squealing animals before him across the Shambles to the corner of Scotch Street, without looking back.

When he was out of earshot, his father turned to Frank and laughed uneasily. ‘Did you ever see the beat of that Magee? But hadn’t I got him well taped?’

Peadar the greengrocer, who had been lurking behind the soup vegetables during the negotiations, emerged on to the footpath and allowed himself to agree with Joe that he had the measure of your man and no mistake.

‘Magee’s a hoor all right,’ he volunteered. ‘As black as the ace of spades! If it wasn’t for him, McCoy would have been out of business long ago. A Portadown man, I need hardly add!’

‘Did you see the bastard trying to do me out of the price of the sow at the last minute? Did you note that?’

‘Mind you, he’s smart enough not to venture indoors at any rate. Eugene and the Patriot would eat him alive.’

The post-mortem on the sale was a necessary ritual. All round the Shambles there were men, happy for the price of a pint to listen to every detail of the dispute of the pig-keepers, to slap you on the back and assure you that you got the best of the bargain. The vegetable man was inching closer to the door of the bar, his body language expressing a desire to continue the conversation inside.

‘It’s time I introduced you properly to the proprietor,’ Joe declared, taking Frank by the hand. Then, pausing only to wink at Peadar, he spat loudly and lunged once more at the swinging door.

The Sabbath is taken seriously around Caledon. The houses remain shuttered, no one walks the roads and even the cattle in the fields by the sullen Blackwater seem to adopt a sombre expression. But it is a pretty place despite its people, and it had been Joe’s idea, when he woke the boy at first light and the pair of them slipped out of the side door of the Patriot Bar, that they should take the long way home, seeing a bit of the countryside as they went. Their pleasure trip had come to a sudden halt a mile outside the village, however, when the tractor had died on them. Joe searched out the garage, and threw pebbles at the upstairs window till he raised the owner who grudgingly agreed to serve him. But the voice of his wife ordered him back inside and the diesel pump stayed righteously locked. Father and son made their way back to the abandoned tractor, taking the low road by the river. Despite their predicament, the pale sun, the quietness of the countryside, the afterglow of the feed of drink from the night before, and the few pounds still in his pocket from the sale of the pigs had Joe in high spirits. He drew Frank’s attention to the beauties of the river, for at this point it is wide and sluggish, meandering between shallow banks. And then, turning a corner in the lane, they spotted the ice-cream van.

Joe stopped in his tracks and gripped the boy tightly by the shoulder. He put his finger to his lips in a gesture of caution. They listened. From the flood plain there came the spasmodic sound of singing and shouting. He took Frank by the hand and steered him towards the ditch; then keeping low they made for the safety of a clump of trees which gave a view of the wide river beyond. A small crowd had gathered on the bank and were singing hymns to the beat of a tambourine and the uncertain accompaniment of a piano accordion. They were dressed in their Sunday best, the women in white dresses, the men in suits and bowler hats. In the middle of the river stood a large, red-faced man. His hands were held high in supplication, his eyes closed in concentration. He was dressed in a three-piece suit that had seen better days. The brown water flowed round his bulging midriff and his wet hair straggled down over his ears.

‘It’s McCoy!’ said Joe. ‘I knew it was the old reprobate when I saw the ice-cream van. The Reverend Oliver Cromwell McCoy. Would you look at the stunt he’s pulling!’

As they watched, a couple from the bank detached themselves from the crowd and began to wade slowly out to midstream. One was a burly, purple-faced youth, the other a stout old woman, doing her best to overcome an obvious fear of the water. When they had reached the middle of the swirling river, McCoy clasped the woman firmly to him and, with the purple-faced boy backing him up, began to call down the spirit of the Lord. The woman began to thrash about. ‘Wait till you see the hops of her when he’s done the business,’ whispered Joe into Frank’s ear.

McCoy ducked her suddenly into the river. ‘In the name of God which is the Father,’ they could hear him roar, ‘and God the Son which is Jesus’ – he immersed her a second time – ‘and God the Holy Ghost,’ and down she went again, gasping for breath. But when she came up for the third time a great chorus of hallelujahs rose up from the bank and the tambourine started up again. They burst into song, led by a wee girl who was coaxing a few chords from the squeeze-box. The woman in the river stood stunned for a few seconds as the water drained from her ears, eyes and hair.

‘Like the proverbial drowned rat,’ remarked Joe, ‘but keep an eye on her a minute till you see the leaps of her.’ And right on cue she began to hop. She started whooping and yelling, arching her body back as if trying to immerse herself once more. McCoy and the boy had a strong grip on her, but it took them all their time to hold her. She struggled and kicked, shouting the praises of the Lord. Hands reached out from the bank for her; someone dried her face with a towel, but still she whooped and jumped and pulled away from them. ‘It certainly seems to do the trick,’ Joe admitted grudgingly. ‘You can’t tell me they’re all play-acting.’

McCoy was back in midstream now, arms raised in praise and thanksgiving. The purple youth, his wet shirt clinging to his nipples, was preparing to lead another catechumen to the water, while the dark-skinned girl, little more than a toddler, tried to play ‘Shall We Gather at the River?’ on the bulky accordion.

‘Would you look at what he has the lassie doing!’ said Joe. ‘And her hardly fit to lift the squeeze-box. He wasn’t long putting her to work. And there’s her ladyship as well!’ Señora McCoy was struggling out of the brackish water, tossing her head and wringing the water from her long, black hair. Her thin dress clung to the contours of her body, showing sturdy thighs and voluptuous breasts. Joe studied her carefully. ‘It’s as well I didn’t waste my time looking for confession last night,’ he whispered. ‘One look at that and you’re right back to square one.’

He surveyed the rest of the scene with growing distaste. He disliked the sight of Protestants having a good time any day of the week, but particularly on a Sunday. Sunday was the day his own people played Gaelic football and pitch and toss, threw bullets on the long country roads, or drank illicitly in the back rooms of licensed premises. The Protestant Sunday should be spent indoors, in silent sobriety. He turned to Frank. ‘I’ll leave you to keep dick while I nip back to the tractor. There’s no sign of the butcher boy, Magee; the pair of them must be still fallen out. The rest of them are nothing but a few old women and a couple of old fellows. The boy with the purple face looks like a right animal, but he’ll be slow. And look at the state of McCoy, he’s so full of water he can hardly move. Keep your eye on the girl from Ipanema and don’t let them see you. I don’t need to tell you McCoy’s a dangerous bastard!’

He was back in five minutes with a jerry can and a length of hosepipe. ‘I’d give a pound to see the hoor’s face when he tries to make a getaway! I’ll not leave him a drop.’ He unscrewed the petrol cap, rammed the hosepipe into the tank and began to suck till he was red in the face. There was a gurgle from the innards of the van and the black diesel spurted out on to the road. ‘It’s nothing but shite!’ he spat, filling the can. ‘But with God’s help it’ll get us home in time for Mass.’

He settled Frank into the trailer and they made their way home through the maze of unapproved roads that crossed and recrossed the old border. Joe was still laughing, and he fancied he saw a flicker of interest in the dull eyes of his son. He had made a start, he had introduced him to the world of men’s affairs. If God spared him, there would be other forays into the city, and in due course he would tell the boy the full story of McCoy’s chequered career. He would tell him about the conversion of Sammy Magee, and how the pair of them had got hold of the Mexican priest and paraded him, like a monkey on a rope, round the townlands of South Armagh, bringing a curse on the land. When he was old enough to hear of such things, he would tell him the tale of Señora McCoy and how she came to the Shambles.

But, by way of introduction, where better to start than with the story of the ice-cream van itself?

Three

It had once been a real ice-cream van, selling wafers and slides and pokes, back before McCoy had liberated it for the service of the Lord. The prayer meeting in the Ulster Hall had been a great success, the auditorium so packed that Magee had to rig up loudspeakers halfway round Donegall Square for the crowd who couldn’t get in. At the time the province had been on the crest of a great revivalist wave, and the spirit of the Lord was to be felt everywhere. He took as his text: ‘Come ye therefore out from among them and be ye separate.’ It was a text he loved, for he could tease from it a thousand anti-papist nuances. He allowed himself a fulsome elaboration of the text, exploring every syllable of it. Before their eyes he built up a gruesome picture of the great Antichrist. Carefully he proved, with ample quotations, how the Church of Rome was the great beast of the last days and Old Red Socks her bridegroom. Everywhere the hand of the great whore was to be seen. He delved into Revelations for a list of prophecies coming true in the modern world. Everywhere the Kingdom of the Beast was being established. Only one people stood undefiled. Those people were the Protestants of Ulster. Between them and the rule of darkness stood only a frail border, and even now the enemy was within the gates.

It was a familiar message, and they bayed their approval when he vowed that the people of Ulster would never bow the knee to the harlot of the Tiber. Then he turned on them:

‘You call yourselves Protestants?’ They were voluble in assent.

‘You renounce the Pope of Rome?’ At the mention of him they hissed with palpable hatred.

‘You say you want no truck with the scarlet woman riding on the back of the beast?’ They stamped their feet. McCoy lowered his voice, lowered it to a whisper, lowered it so that the crowd in the street fell silent and inside the hall they scarcely dared to breathe. Then how is it,’ he began slowly, ‘how is it possible?’ and he began to fumble in a back pocket … ‘How is it possible?’ He had a piece of paper now and was holding it up for their inspection. He had thrown back his head in anger and his voice was echoing from the galleries of the hall … ‘How is it in the name of the crucified Christ that half of you can be seen any night of the week sucking ice-cream pokes in a shop owned by Roman papists, papists from the Vatican City itself? I was handed this paper by a Christian man from the Shankill Road tonight. He doesn’t want me to mention him by name for fear of reprisals. On it is written the address of these Eyetie popeheads. They are living openly in a house in Dover Street, a house that used to be a Protestant home! The Protestant people of the Shankill are being driven out by the invading papists. And not just content to steal our land from under us, they are now plotting to poison us with their tutti-fruttis and God knows what else, while the Protestant people stand idly by and let it happen …’ The boys at the back of the hall had burst through the doors and were heading down Royal Avenue before he had finished speaking.

They brought the van back from the smouldering ruins of Cafolla’s Café an hour later, the RUC escorting them through the cheering streets. McCoy had it repainted. Where previously it had tempted the passersby with pokes at one and six, it now exhorted them to ‘Flee the Wrath to Come’. The big Bakelite cone which adorned the roof he had resprayed in the red, white and blue of the Union Jack. Magee spent a Saturday frittering with the chimes, rearranging the spiked metal teeth on the revolving drum that struck the notes, and for a while ‘Papa Piccolino’ was transposed into ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ until they slipped back to their old settings, and Papa Piccolino from sunny Italy re-asserted himself. The redundant fridge was pulled out and a fold-away bed rigged up in its place. The small sink was left where it was. With the addition of a gas ring and a few curtains, McCoy had all his orders.

McCoy came from a long line of preaching men that could be traced back to the plantation. He could dimly recall, as a baby, being brought to the deathbed of his grandfather, ‘Hallelujah’ McCoy, and the old man rising from the pillow to curse the great whore of Babylon with his dying breath. For the first fourteen years of his life he had known only the itinerant life, for his father had worked the northern circuit; throughout the year they would meander from Ballymena through Cullybackey, Irvinestown, Sion Mills, Fivemiletown and Clougher, returning to Ballymena in the spring to start the new season. It was a good life. The marquee was snug on cold nights and if the summer evenings were ever warm they would sleep out in the open. The people were friendly in their God-fearing way. Sometimes there were trips to Scotland, to preach hellfire to the holidaymakers of Ardrossan who would cluster into the tent on the windswept promenade, forsaking the dubious attractions of Mammon outside for the peace which McCoy Senior promised within. For many of them the highlight of the holiday was this annual wash in the blood of the Lamb. Even as a baby, Oliver Cromwell had played his part in the family vocation, appearing with his mother to lisp his Bible passages and later to go round with the collection box. Beside the camp fire at night the talk was constantly of Protestant martyrs and the number of the beast; Bible prophecy was mother’s milk to him. In time he graduated to preaching, his father carefully teaching him the arts of the evangelist. He had learned the tricks of the trade well, first as a boy when his father was still on the road, later when ‘Thumper’ had settled the family in Armagh and was building the Martyrs Memorial Assembly Hall (and Tea Rooms).

But the devil stalketh the world, seeking those whom he may devour, and nowhere is safe from his wiles. As a youth, McCoy had fallen briefly from the grace of the Lord and walked the path of unrighteousness. As the hart panteth after water, so also did Oliver Cromwell McCoy pant after the cream of the barley. He ran away from the Shambles and took a job as short order cook on the Stranraer boat, crossing twice a day to what he liked to call the mainland. For a while he had been barman in a Sandy Row pub, till an acrimonious dispute, never fully explained but involving organizations of a paramilitary nature, caused him to skip the area. He had even done time in the Crumlin Road. The nature of the charge was never clear; the ungodly hinted at young boys and common criminality, though his followers claimed a political and patriotic motive.

Not that any of this was a bar to advancement in his calling. On the contrary, such a misspent youth qualified him uniquely for the role of the prodigal son returned. Word reached him that his father lay dying. He heard the call of the Lord and returned in haste to Armagh. There was a tearful and much publicized deathbed reunion. He inherited from his father the chapel on the Shambles, the marquee, the travelling museum of papist horrors with rights in perpetuity to the Antrim circuit, and enough goodwill to get him started. His early sermons were full of remorse for his wasted days and nights of profligacy. He would ask the congregation to share with him their own experiences of skid row. He spoke openly about his darkest hour in His Majesty’s prison, when boredom and the DTs had driven him to open the Bible, the only reading matter provided by a thoughtful governor. He re-created, in graphic detail, the horror of his days on the booze, dwelling on the dreadful effects it had on his spiritual and physical fibre. Indeed sometimes he dwelt on these flashbacks so long and so lovingly that he would later adjourn, dog collar turned back to front, to the papist side of the square for a whiskey or two to steady his nerves.

On the surface he appeared to have everything going for him. He was tall and sturdy, with neck muscles like a prize bullock, which was the way the women of Ulster liked their preachers; he was boorish and ignorant (‘as thick as poundies’ he would claim proudly), which the menfolk liked. He had a voice like a foghorn, and he could shout at them for hours without repeating himself. And yet it wasn’t all plain sailing. Salvation is a fickle business. There were fat years and there were lean years, following each other in biblical succession. The mission on the Shambles had its ups and downs. There were even times when McCoy took to his bed with the Book of Job and wondered if he would ever work again.

Things didn’t begin to look up till the day he had gone to Portadown and helped the butcher Magee open up his soul to the Lord.

By the time Joe had got round to Magee they were home and he had Teresa to face.

‘You kept him out all night!’ she said. ‘Did you want him to get his death?’

‘He was grand and warm the whole time. We’d have been home hours ago if the tractor hadn’t run out of fuel. It’s no joke trying to get served on a Sunday.’ And he winked at Frank to indicate that least said was soonest mended.

Joe didn’t return to the subject of Magee until a week later when some reference in the paper to a random slaying reminded him of the butcher. So that night, instead of the story of Cinderella or Cuchulainn, he told him the story of the night Magee found the Lord.

For years Sammy Magee had sought a personal relationship with his Saviour, and for years his Saviour had eluded him. Every time Sammy went calling on Him, the Lord was out to lunch. As the years went by, he became more and more worried about his prospects for salvation. Though it left him free to enjoy drinking, playing the flute, kicking Catholics when they ventured too far out of their territory and such other pleasures of the flesh as Portadown offered, Sammy was aware that he had not been put on the earth simply for this. He was willing to exchange his lifestyle for the austerity demanded by the Elect if and when the call came. For it seemed a fair enough bargain, to forswear the good life here and now in exchange for guaranteed eternal happiness in the hereafter. A hereafter that would be peopled by folk like himself and in which the papists would be few and far between.

As his fortieth birthday came and went, Magee grew desperate. What if he had an accident, and was called to the Judgment Throne in the state he was in? Night after night he flung himself on his knees calling on the Lord. Nothing happened. He couldn’t fool himself. He had heard Lily’s brother-in-law testify often enough to know he was nowhere near the experience. There were no blinding lights nor voices in his head welcoming him into the exclusive club, no uncontrollable desire to run into the street and start witnessing. Some are born to be saved and sit forever at the right hand of God. But so too are many destined to damnation in the outer darkness, a fate ordained for them since the beginning of time. But Magee, damn it all, was no popehead or pagan Hindu for whom this fate was good enough. He was an Ulsterman, a Protestant, an Orangeman, an Apprentice Boy and leader of the Temperance Memorial Flute Band. For the Lord to continue to ignore his prayers was decidedly worrying.

Though taciturn and inhospitable by nature – character traits not uncommon in his native town – his door was always open to those who could bring him the Good News, and every day there would be a string of visitors: Jehovah’s Witnesses, Elim Pentecostal Brethren, Plymouth Brethren, Select Brethren, Presbyterians, Free Presbyterians, Wee Free Presbyterians, Baptists, Primitive Baptists, Anabaptists, Moravians, Holy Rollers, Quakers and Shakers and many more, all eager to save Sammy’s soul and claim the credit. The boys would be ordered in from their game of marbles in the gutter and made to kneel with Lily on the flagstones in the kitchen, while Magee and the preaching man sweated away upstairs.

Sometimes it almost worked. He would feel the Spirit move within him. He would begin to shout and praise the Lord, and the visiting preacher would punctuate his shouts with loud hallelujahs; the neighbours would come running to their doors at the commotion. Word would pass down the street that Mister Magee had really got it this time. The kitchen would fill with wellwishers. The boys would rub their knees, red and bruised from the cold floor, thanking Christ the whole thing was over at last. There would be ragged hymn-singing for a while after, though music was never Portadown’s strong point. But Magee would wake the next morning knowing that the security he had experienced the previous evening had faded away and the old uncertainty had returned.

*

One evening coming up to the twelfth, a wee man from the Primitive Brethren called into the shop on spec and had been ushered into the back room where Magee was wrestling with his soul among the strings of sausages. Together they knelt and prayed. Brother Billy could feel, he said, that Brother Samuel was on the verge. What was holding him back? he demanded. Was it pride? Was it covetousness? Or was it lust? He flung open the Good Book at random and began to pore over it, praying that the Lord would guide his hand to a text to fill the bill. Sammy opened the door to the house and ordered his family to kneel with him and pray that he might overcome the sins of pride and lust.

An hour later he was still wavering. The Lord was felt to be hovering somewhere, Brother Billy was sure of it, waiting to be invited into his soul. But these things can’t be forced. He was on the point of calling it a day through exhaustion when Magee began to shiver and then to shake and then to holler in strange tongues. Brother Billy had never known anything like this. The Lord is powerful,’ he shouted. ‘Praise His name!’ He removed his glasses and wiped the sweat from his brow. By now Magee was on the floor in the sawdust, howling like a dog. The Primitive Brother looked down on him with a look of righteous pride.

In no time at all the word had spread. Lily made tea in relays, both pleased and embarrassed to be the cynosure of so many eyes. How would she manage now, one of them asked slyly, and her married to a man who was saved? Someone made a joke about a mixed marriage, for it was acknowledged that she was not ‘as yet’ called to Jesus. She blushed and apologized for the lack of cake in the house. ‘I haven’t a thing to put down,’ she repeated, till the boys were despatched to the corner shop with a note for a sponge sandwich and a packet of fancy biscuits.

Magee moved into the parlour to hold court. He repeated for each newcorner the details of his conversion experience. He stood with his back to the fire, his face flushed, his speech animated with the joy of certain salvation. With each new visitor he fell dramatically to his knees and groaned and thanked the Lord for his deliverance, and the company muttered their praises and jangled their teacups and tried to get a hymn going. Brother Billy, the instrument of God’s goodness, stood beaming beside his prodigy’, calculating the rich harvest of souls that awaited him in the vicinity.

By dark, word had spread across the town, and the Temperance Memorial Band, holding an impromptu rehearsal, made their way to the butcher’s shop to the strains of ‘The Wondrous Cross’. They stood in the rain outside the house and the people began to sing, and Magee came to the door and began to bellow more loudly and more fervently than the rest put together:

‘My richest gain I count but loss

And pour contempt on all my pride.’

A Land Rover, its windscreen encased in wire mesh and skirted like a hovercraft, crept round the corner with its lights out. There was no law against street parties of a Protestant religious nature, the occupants agreed. Like many who live with the possibility of meeting their Maker at any moment, the RUC men aboard hoped they were saved. They drove quietly away, humming the hymn to themselves.

But old habits die hard. As ten o’clock approached, above the hubbub of the crowd and the noise of the band, Magee’s voice could be heard declaring that what was needed now, to put the tin hat on his great good fortune, was a drink. The thought was father to the deed. The protestations of Brother Billy, the look of horror from the teetotallers with the teacups, even Lily’s urgent attempts to mark his card with regard to the role of alcoholic beverages in his new calling were all lost in the general enthusiasm to celebrate the occasion with a few bottles in the Legion Bar.

The man of the moment was handed out from the hearth to the pavement over the heads of the crowd and hoisted on to the shoulders of the bandsmen. Lily followed him out, elbowing her way through the throng, grabbing him by the trouser leg, trying to unseat him. She was screaming now with rage and embarrassment, past caring what the neighbours thought or how they were enjoying the spectacle.

‘Get down out of that, Sammy Magee!’ she ordered him. ‘Are you trying to make a complete fucking eejit out of me?’ They pretended not to be listening, but they were storing it up, word by word for later recall.

‘“Drink no longer water, but use a little wine,”’ shouted Brother Billy in desperation, sensing that he too had been made an eejit of. ‘“It causeth all men to err who drink it.”’ But his pleas fell on stony ground, for the band had struck up a secular tune they could march to, and Magee, still holding Brother Billy’s Bible aloft and testifying to the mysterious ways of the Lord, was led off down the street.

The B Specials brought him home at two o’clock. He had been picked up in Armagh with a crowd as bad as himself. Standing in the middle of the Shambles, the sergeant said, testifying with menaces. He quoted dispassionately from his notes till Lily shut him up. He was apologetic but firm. Seeing it was the religion that had gone to his head, they’d say no more about it, but two-fingered gestures from prod or taig constituted a breach of the peace. If Mister Magee found he was still saved in the morning maybe he’d do them all a favour and keep it to himself.

He got the sharp end of her tongue for the next month but he suffered in silence. He knew he had made a fool of her, showing her up in front of the neighbours. The joy of the night had been shortlived, and he had woken the next morning with a sore head and an empty heart. Whatever service Brother Billy had provided the previous night it hadn’t taken. Life was as empty and as treacherous as it had always been. In his moment of darkness, he began to doubt the Lord and turn away from his Holy Word.

But Lily was a kindly woman in her own way, and she hated seeing him in the state he was in. So when she spotted the advertisement in the Protestant Telegraph for a new Gold Star service from the Reverend Doctor McCoy (‘YOU’VE TRIED THE REST – NOW TRY THE BEST! Full money back guarantee if not completely satisfied’) she clipped out the coupon at once and began to put some of the housekeeping money aside.

It was a cold autumn evening when McCoy strode up to the door. He was dressed from head to toe in black. He wore a woolly Russian hat against the chill wind and a greatcoat that hung almost to his ankles. ‘Where’s himself?’ he demanded. She indicated upstairs. The whole street had turned out in the expectation of more crack, but he silenced them with a single stare. ‘Tell all these people to move away,’ he boomed from the doorway. ‘This isn’t a peepshow. This is the work of the Lord.’

The two men were closeted together for the next hour. Then she heard the footsteps of the preacher heavy on the stairs. She rushed to offer tea but he refused. She slipped the money into his hand and he pocketed it without acknowledgement. ‘You’ll have no more trouble with your man, missus,’ was all he said. ‘The Lord is powerful!’ Without another word he turned on his heel, leaving a faint smell of whiskey lingering in the small kitchen.

But McCoy had been as good as his word. From that day onward Magee lived a life of righteousness and his household with him. They prayed together daily, before and after meals, and testified on the street corner every Saturday. He donned his suit every Sunday and cycled over to Armagh where he assisted McCoy as he laboured in the tin chapel bringing others home to Jesus. He never again visited the Legion or was tempted by the thought of liquor, never again smoked his pipe or laughed at what he read in the paper. And the sound of the Orange flute was heard no more in the house.

No one would willingly befriend a Portadown man, even one that is saved and walks in the way of the Lord. But even the most vocal critic of the place will admit that the Portadown man, though singularly lacking in the social graces, has a rare head for business. And while McCoy had never liked the place, knowing its inhabitants to be parsimonious even when their eternal future was at stake, he wasn’t long in recognizing Magee’s potential as a financial consultant. The Martyrs Memorial, never at the best of times the goldmine its detractors across the square claimed it to be, was now on its uppers. Seven lean years had left the coffers empty. McCoy took the butcher aside one Sunday morning and tried to tap him for a loan. But the Portadown man’s wallet stays buttoned, even to those who have been the agent of his salvation. Magee, instead, volunteered his services at twenty-five per cent, spent the afternoon going over the books, such as they were, drew up an inventory of the goods and chattels, put his finger on some of the more obvious problems and made a few marketing suggestions that were soon put into practice.

‘If you want to get anywhere you’ll have to change that name of yours. Your father did you no favour calling you Oliver,’ stated Magee in his blunt Portadown way.

‘Oliver Cromwell was a Protestant hero; he put the papists in their place once and for all. I’m proud to bear his name!’

‘Oliver’s a Fenian name. It’s been a Fenian name ever since that saint of theirs got the chop.’ It was true of course. Every second one of them seemed to be called Oliver, after Oliver Plunkett whose gruesome, severed head grinned out from the altar in Drogheda.

‘And as for calling yourself Doctor Oliver, it makes you sound like a papist GP. And who do you think you’re fooling with the “Doctor” anyway? Everyone knows you got it for a fiver from the Harvey Wallbanger University of Kentucky! We’ll start calling you Reverend O.C. McCoy. It has a bit of a military ring about it.’ McCoy liked the sound of it and agreed. ‘Next we’ll organize a few Ulster Hall meetings, to get your message through to the people of the Shankill. That’s where the money is. Maybe we’ll fit you up with some transport while we’re at it! And something else. It’s about time you started getting some support from the boys that really matter.’ McCoy knew he meant the groups of hooded men who lurked round the Protestant periphery, demanding protection money. He would leave that end of things to the butcher, for who better than a Portadown man to negotiate such a deal?

The second problem Magee isolated was more fundamental. It had to do with McCoy’s grasp of the sacred texts. McCoy didn’t know his scripture the way a preaching man should. He imagined he had learned enough from listening to the old man, or from his mother when she had taken penny Sunday school, but in later life he had difficulty getting some of the more complicated passages quite right. Worse still, he had difficulty getting any sense out of them. The years he had spent propping up the crew bar on the Stranraer ferry with a variety of companions, some of them very unscriptural indeed, had embedded in his brain a number of quotations and catchphrases of dubious origin. In moments of stress, the Reverend McCoy would attribute these to the Ancients.

‘“The mountain sheep are sweeter but the valley sheep arc fatter,” ‘he would proclaim to the startled citizens of Ballymoney. ‘“We therefore thought it meeter for to carry off the latter.” Proverbs, Chapter two, Verse two.’

‘“Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink!”’ was another favourite. He firmly believed in its inspired origins, and not even Magee’s firmest denials could persuade him to drop it from his repertoire. And while it was undoubtedly good enough for Ballymoney, it cut no ice with the new classes of born-again youngsters that the times were producing. Young smart-arses reared on free school milk, who were hearing the call to their Saviour in their teens and earlier, and who had taken to frequenting the scripture halls and Bible tents, swapping chapter and verse with their elders.

There had been an embarrassing scene one night in the Shambles. McCoy was standing at the serving window of the van, warm as toast from the gas ring at his backside, preaching to a huddled gathering who had braved the elements to hear the Lord’s Word. A smooth-faced young pup had stepped forward, Bible in hand, to accuse him of heresy, shouting to the people to beware, the words they were hearing were not those of Holy Writ but of that papist pomographer and stooge of Rome, William Shakespeare. Magee had been on to him in seconds, and a deft kick in the groin had silenced his warbling. A few of the other men had joined in, dragging him off towards Scotch Street for further attention. But though McCoy had tried to make a joke of it, calling the youth a papist infiltrator from the other side of the Shambles, the incident rattled Magee. He returned to Portadown and the butcher’s shop, swearing he would not return till McCoy had dropped all Hamlet’s soliloquies from his act.

Then he heard of the Mexicans for the first time.

Frank had to wait another month before he heard the end of the story, for the topic of Señora McCoy was banned in the Feely household. But when confession night came round again, Joe took him with him to the Shambles, his mother putting up only token resistance. And though the topic was banned in the bar too, when they were all in the snug, out of the Patriot’s earshot, the conversation edged round to the seductress who lived across the square.

‘It was a bad business and no mistake,’ the Tyrone man said.

‘I don’t like to talk about it yet at home,’ Joe agreed. ‘She took it very badly.’

‘If he’d brought the pair of them round our way the Tyrone people would never have put up with it.’

‘You’d have done shite all, the same as the rest of us!’ Joe assured him, refusing to rise to the bait.

They set out home at midnight. It was a long walk but the night was mild, with only the faintest drizzle. The fresh air will do us both a power of good,’ Joe claimed, ‘and I’ll explain to you what that eejit was on about on the way. To tell you the truth it’s not something you’d want to talk about to anyone and everyone. A lot of people are still up in arms about that stunt. That was taboo behaviour and McCoy knows it.’

Magee was serving in the shop when he first got wind of Ramirez and wife doing the rounds in Scotland. A cousin of Lily’s, an exiled son of the town home for a funeral, had been sent to buy chops and was whiling away a dull afternoon regaling Magee’s customers with tales from the other side. And though he pretended to show no interest one way or the other when the cousin began to describe the priest and the great show he could put on, the butcher was all ears. ‘It would be a sure-fire money-spinner for the likes of Reverend McCoy,’ the exile confided. Magee said nothing, but he had heard enough to know that he had hit the nail on the head. He closed the shop early, told Lily brusquely to mind her own affairs when she started on him, and headed for Armagh.

McCoy heard him out in silence and then told him to fuck off. ‘Do you want to see me crucified? Is that it? Pull a stunt like that in a town like this and there’s no telling where it will end!’

‘You’re afraid of the papists?’

‘McCoy fears no man! But this is a fifty-fifty town. The likes of you, from Portadown, have no conception of what that means.’

‘It means you put the popeheads in their place every chance you get, and with this bucko on the payroll you’ll never get a better chance.’

On that note Magee took his leave. He knew the preacher well enough to know that he would warm to it before long.

But though McCoy hated popery and papists with a righteousness second to none, there was one part of him that still shrank back from this particular venture. Would it not be going too far? he wondered. Would it unleash a backlash from the Fenians, one that would plumb new depths of fury? Armagh, after all, was a city where gratuitous savagery was never far from the surface.

A week later Magee was back, lugging a carrier bag behind him. ‘Say nothing till you see this!’ he ordered, pulling McCoy with him into the box room. He upended the bag and a jumble of gaudy vestments, altar vessels and sacristy bells fell clanging to the floor. Magee pulled an alb clumsily over his head and struggled with the chasuble.

McCoy began to laugh. ‘You’ve been raiding a chapel by the look of things. I hope you remembered the poor box while you were at it.’

‘Look at these fucking things,’ Magee said. ‘The country prods will be going apeshit when the show gets on the road.’

‘I’m still thinking about it,’ McCoy said, but it was clear that it was all systems go. ‘Meanwhile, why don’t you slip over to the Boyne Bar the way you are and give the fellas a laugh!’

‘Fuck off!’ Magee said, putting his foot to the door and struggling out of the vestments. ‘Do you want to get the pair of us killed?’

Next morning he wrote to the cousin in Tillicoultry, enclosing a postal order and a contract for the Mexican and his señora. He hung around the docks at Larne studying the passengers till he spotted his man stumbling down the gangplank. Magee took the bewildered Mexican firmly by the arm leaving the señora to struggle with the baggage as best she could. ‘Welcome to Ulster, hombre!’ he said, marching him towards the Armagh bus.

Before the end of the month they were heading for the hills with Schnozzle in full pursuit.

McCoy, it was agreed, had once again come up with the perfect formula for inflaming the Fenians while simultaneously entertaining the Protestants. Padre José Ramirez was a one-time Catholic priest and now apostate and scourge of Romanism. After a lifetime spent in the service of the harlot of the Tiber, Padre Ramirez had seen the light, heard the call of the living Christ, accepted the same into his heart, forsworn his former blasphemous ways and married a nun. All in the space of a week. He had been drummed out of Latin America, since when he had made a precarious living warning Protestants, wherever they might be found, about the dangers of Romanism. With the help of his new wife he had cobbled together a show and taken it on the road, billing himself as The man who’s heard ten thousand confessions!’ His compañera, the escaped nun, promised to spill the beans on convent life. The couple had enjoyed limited success in the American Midwest and the more remote regions of the Low Countries; thereafter their fortunes began to fade, and their tour of the Scottish borders was heading for bankruptcy. El padre had been on the point of calling it a day and heading back to the pampas when he got the call from Ulster. Reverend McCoy explained to them that the people of the noble province deserved something special. The butcher Magee would act as bodyguard and factotum, and, under McCoy’s tutelage, the show would become a work of art.

Predictable scenes ensued each night of the tour. The Orange halls were packed to the doors with the crowd overflowing outside, and the proceedings relayed to them over the crackling Tannoy. There would be a few rousing hymns to get everybody in the mood, and then McCoy would stride forward to introduce his guests. The lights would dim; every eye was focused on the priest’s wife as she stepped forward to deliver her well-rehearsed testimony. She spoke little English, but, blessed with the gift of tongues, McCoy was on hand to translate for the eager congregation the secret sins of the confessional and the truth of the depravity behind the cloister wall. The Ulster Presbyterian is uniquely preoccupied with the sex life of nuns. As the lady on the podium rattled out her memoirs, the draughty hall was filled instantly with images of dark-skinned nuns and novices, their habits carelessly discarded, in furious copulation; filled with the raw sexuality of Carnival, the winding streets of the barrio alive with carnal temptation; filled with the aftermath of the bacchanal, the leering priests squeezing each lustful detail from the penitents for their titillation.

It was all a long way from life in Portadown.

McCoy knew he was out of his depth. He thought of himself as well travelled, having been an itinerant in the service of the Lord all his days. He felt he knew more about the temptations of the flesh than his congregation. It is a well-known theological fact that the devil will put more of that sort of temptation in the way of a preaching man than he will any other. Nevertheless, as he ran the lady nightly through her reminiscences – bestiality among the celibate monks of the high sierras (something that the sheep farmers of the high ground of Antrim and Armagh could relate to); lesbianism and other unnatural practices among the nuns in Acapulco (relieved by occasional visitations from new chaplains) – McCoy sometimes found it hard to be as specific as he felt the señora demanded.

But it was enough for them. More than enough for these country boys and their womenfolk, half of whom had never been outside their own townland. They would be in a high state of arousal by the time he came to introduce his second guest, the fallen priest himself.

McCoy’s coup de grâce had been to dress Ramirez up in his full canonicals – biretta, surplice and alb – and have him re-enact the ritual of the Mass, that blasphemous parody that stood at the heart of Romanism. Ramirez was a wizened little man, but, dressed up in the full rig-out, he cut an awesome figure as he stood before the Protestant farmers and their wives and began intoning the unfamiliar words: ‘Introibo ad altare Deo; ad Deum qui laetificat juventutum meum.’ He consecrated the wafer and held it before them for their ridicule: ‘Hoc est enim corpus meum.’

McCoy, microphone in hand, kept up a running exegesis on the proceedings. ‘The wee pancake has just had the magic words said over it. The Romanists would have us believe that it is now Our Saviour. If they had their way they would have us bend our knees to that pancake. Bow our heads to it, like the darkies in Africa before their pagan idols. Well, I’ve got news for them tonight. Mister Magee here is a Portydown man, and he doesn’t like to waste anything, so I can assure you that after the show’s over, he’ll be feeding those wee pancakes to his pigs. Waste not, want not!’

Ramirez moved on to the chalice, pouring a good measure of the altar wine into it and slowly enunciating the words of consecration over it. Then, as his wife rang the bell, he held the golden chalice aloft, triumphantly, like a sportsman with a trophy, holding it there for them to admire, to praise, to worship. They rose to their feet in a paroxysm of hatred and fear and righteousness.

‘People of Ulster,’ bellowed McCoy, ‘this is what the priests of Rome want you to believe. That this mockery should take over from the Bible, the only true word of God. This is what the Romanists in our midst do every Sunday, chewing the wee wafer and slurping wine from the same cup, spreading their filth among themselves. And if it wasn’t for the eternal vigilance of the Ulster people and their pastors, this is what they would force us to do too.’ Father Ramirez meanwhile was concentrating on the Communion. When he had seen the light he had given up the cactus juice, but McCoy noticed him lingering longingly over the chalice, like a man in two minds, and hurried him along to wind up the proceedings. The show was almost over, and already Magee was moving among them, bucket in hand. They would be generous. They had had their money’s worth. Nobody, they told themselves, could put on a show to match the Reverend McCoy. For nothing (but nothing) can match the orgiastic frisson that runs through the born-again Presbyterian at the paradox of an ordained priest of Rome (albeit a defrocked one who has come home to Jesus) celebrating the Roman Catholic Mass on the platform of his local Orange hall. It was unanimously agreed that it was a stunt only McCoy could have pulled.

They had paraded the Mexican round for a week or two, pulling in the crowds wherever they went. As anticipated, they had drawn the ire of the papists, and Schnozzle Durante, the long-nosed cleric from the Falls Road, had whipped up a band of followers who pursued them through every townland. Magee loved the ructions. He loved the excitement of the confrontations, the massed ranks of B-men protecting his rights as a Loyalist to practise his religion. Secretly, too, he loved the drama of the thing, the fastidious way the Mexican dressed each evening in the purloined vestments, the incense and the bells and the golden chalice of red wine; he loved the smell of the crowds in the Orange halls and the cheering and baying of those outside. He loved to hear the police sirens and the bark of the loudhailers ordering Schnozzle and his rabble to disperse; he even loved the smell of teargas lingering in the van at the end of the evening. He loved all these things in a way that only a Portadown butcher, in whose veins flows the blood of the Peep O’ Day Boys but whose present existence is circumscribed by the narrow streets and narrow people of his home town, can love them. But more than anything else, he loved the money. McCoy had tried to put him on forty per cent when the project was first mooted, but he had laughed at him and turned his back, the way you would to a papist farmer trying it on over the price of a heifer. McCoy became abusive but Magee held his ground. ‘Why keep a dog and bark yourself?’ demanded the preacher, but Magee knew that there would be no show without himself to take care of the practical details. It would be fifty-fifty or nothing, and in the end he got his way. Every evening, as he elbowed through the crowds, buckets in hand, he knew that his decision to leave Lily and go on the road had been the right one.

But the project, so promisingly begun, had ended badly. Radix malorum est cupiditas. The Mexican’s grasp of the English language was increasing with every passing day. At the end of a fortnight he started to demand union rates and to mutter darkly about overtime. There is something in the Portadown soul that abhors the closed shop; Magee manhandled him round to the back of the van and put him right with a kick to the bollocks. But his performances thereafter grew erratic. He started fluffing his lines and missing his cues. Some nights he was so jarred, despite Magee’s attempts to keep him off the sauce, that he could barely stagger up the steps of the makeshift altar. There were complaints from the paying customers and the collections began to fall off. And when he discovered that McCoy was fooling with his wife it was the last straw.

One afternoon in Aughnacloy he awoke from a stupor to find the van rocking rhythmically, heard above the rusty protests of the suspension the moans of his señora and glimpsed through the serving hatch the preacher’s flaccid backside pumping away on the daybed. That night he refused point-blank to go on stage, and the show was over.

‘You couldn’t bridle your lechery till we’d broken even!’ Magee accused McCoy when he heard that Ramirez had taken to his heels and was trying to flee the country. ‘They’re demanding refunds right, left and centre. When word of this gets out we’ll be the right laughing stock!’

Shortly afterwards they fished the body from the lough at Carrick-fergus, and Magee found himself in Castlereagh Police Station helping with inquiries. Lily made it up to visit him once or twice, but she had no news of McCoy. It wasn’t till a month later, when he was home on bail, that word reached Portadown that his business partner was back in Armagh, a married man, and that the former señorita from Acapulco, whose tales of depravity had occasioned many a wet dream among the brethren, was now living in the ice-cream van on the Shambles Corner, and heavy with child.

‘Have nothing more to do with him, that’s my advice,’ Lily repeated. ‘He’s been nothing but trouble since you took up with him.’

‘Give over, woman,’ he said dourly. ‘The cunt owes me money.’

‘That’s nice talk from a boy who’s supposed to be saved! Money will be a quare lot of good to you if they take you away again.’

‘At least I had peace when I was inside.’

‘I suppose you picked up that sort of language in the jail above. And God knows what else! I’m telling you, Sammy Magee, I rue the day I ever invited that McCoy into the house.’

The RUC let him stew for a while. Then they dropped all charges and closed the file on Ramirez. No good would come of prolonging the agony, dredging up memories that were best left to lie.

They were home by the time Joe had finished telling his story, with the dog sniffing at their feet to welcome them and Teresa’s footsteps on the stairs.

‘So you see he killed the goose that laid the golden egg,’ Joe said with a wink as he helped the boy out of his wet coat. ‘Dipping his wick with the raven-haired señora.’

‘God forgive you, talking like that!’ his mother shouted, running in to shield the boy’s ears from further innuendo.

‘But the damage had been done,’ Joe went on. ‘Wounds don’t heal that easily. The gauntlet had been thrown down. If McCoy got away with a stunt like that, he’d think he could get away with anything. It was up to Father Schnozzle to show him he couldn’t.’

He paused as he lit a cigarette. Frank looked at him expectantly but his father had gone quiet, lost in thought.

‘You’ll not need to worry about Schnozzle for a few years yet,’ he told him.

‘Say what you like about him,’ his mother said, ‘he’s the only one who had the nerve to stand up to the likes of McCoy. They had a perpetual novena and a torchlit procession down the Falls Road every night.’

At the mention of Belfast his father spat, as he always did, ceremonially into the dying embers of the fire.

‘And there’s more scandal tonight,’ she said, lowering her voice. ‘One of the McGuffin crowd has spoiled a priest; they’ve run away together and him with only weeks to go. It was on the radio.’

‘Holy Jesus!’ Joe said. ‘Schnozzle won’t take that lying down.’

‘It’s well past that boy’s bedtime,’ she interrupted. ‘And say no more about the priests to him. There’ll be time enough for talk like that when he’s older.’

Four

As it happened, Frank didn’t have to wait that long to hear the story of Schnozzle Durante and his struggle with the heretics, or to meet him in the flesh either. He had gone with his father the length of Benburb, chasing a rumour that the monastery there had set up a round-the-clock call-out service for emergency absolution. Joe didn’t think much of the idea. Call out a monk in the small hours, after a party or a domestic row or other occasion of sin, and the neighbours’ tongues would be wagging for a year. As a man with a need for circumspection in that area he didn’t intend to have the blue light flashing outside his door too often. In any event the rumour had proved groundless, and after a frustrating hour or so they had hitched a ride back to the town.

He wasn’t the only one in need of a relaxer that evening.

With Frank at his heels he was hardly through the door and out of the rain when he knew that something was amiss. ‘You’ve got company,’ Eugene informed him, indicating the snug under the stairs. Joe turned to run. Whoever wanted him had intimidated the Patriot Arms into unaccustomed silence. He tripped over Frank, sending the child sprawling in the sawdust. The man in the snug rapped loudly on the frosted glass partition; Joe looked round to see Schnozzle’s gaunt silhouette ordering him over.

‘Sit down, Feely! Don’t make a bigger eejit of yourself than you have to.’

‘Is it yourself, Father?’ Joe said, trying to stifle the tremor in his voice. ‘I heard just now you wanted a wee word.’

‘Shut up and listen! I’ve wasted enough time in this hovel. And so have you! There’s work to be done, Feely, while bucks like yourself sit drinking and yarning. Our Holy Mother the Church is daily under attack!’

‘I’ll just get myself something to wet my whistle …’ Joe suggested. Schnozzle silenced him with a curt wave of his hand.

‘You’ve heard the latest scandal from Belfast. Don’t try pretending you haven’t.’

Joe spat on the floor. ‘You mean that business with Cornelius Moran? Terrible altogether.’

‘Everywhere the priesthood is under attack. From within and without. First it was Ramirez treating the Holy Mass as a circus act, now this.’

‘I’m with you there, Father,’ Joe agreed. We all did our bit. The missus was out every night throwing stones.’

Throwing stones is all some are fit for! But you, Mister Feely, are fit for more …’ As he spoke he moved his face closer, daring Joe to pull away from him.

‘What can I do? Sure I’m only a bit of a farmer!’

‘Don’t play games with me! Do you think for a moment I don’t know the dirty business you’re part of? Do you think I don’t know about your little trips here, there and everywhere, and what you’re trafficking across the border every day of the week! You’re a lad who likes to sail close to the wind. Some day, maybe too close!’

‘A few cigarettes! Maybe a crate of spirits …’ Joe protested.

‘Cut the cabaret act! Don’t treat me like a fool! Rubber goods are getting through to the twenty-six counties under the noses of the Guards. Half of Dublin is flooded with filth!’

Joe blanched. Hearing a priest talk of rubber goods could only lead to trouble.

Eugene silently entered the snug and placed, unbidden, a ball of malt at his elbow and a drop of best brandy for the priest, before sidling offsides again. Joe took a sip and prayed for guidance.

‘How can I be of assistance to you, Father?’ he asked.

‘You can keep your eyes open and your mouth shut! I want to know the whereabouts of Cornelius Moran and the McGuffin woman. I want to know the whereabouts of anyone else who is hiding from the Church authorities. I want to know what McCoy is planning. I want to know what happens on the Shambles before it happens! When I need you, I know where I can find you.’

Schnozzle lifted the brandy and downed it in a single gulp. ‘And get that boy of yours home out of here. This is no place for a lad of his age.’ He rose to go and every eye in the bar was on him.

‘This very minute, Father,’ Joe said, signalling to Eugene his urgent need for a refill.

‘There’s a boy has just been to see Big Mac above in the Palace,’ Peadar the vegetable man ventured when the coast was clear. ‘And by the look of him I’d say the old man tore him a new arsehole before he let him go.’

‘By all accounts things aren’t going too well on the Falls Road,’ Eugene said.

‘A terrible business, all the same,’ opined the Tyrone man. That lad chucking God’s vocation back in His face over the head of some woman or other.’

‘If you feel so strongly about it, maybe you should have offered him your condolences in person!’ Eugene said, not liking to hear a buck from Tyrone get too sanctimonious.

‘Fuck off! Do you want to get me killed!’

‘What is Schnozzle Durante anyway but a Shambles man like the rest of us?’ the vegetable man said, emboldened by his fourth pint. ‘Didn’t I know him when he was running round with no arse in his trousers?’

‘That’s enough of that sort of talk, now,’ Eugene ordered, hearing the Patriot’s heavy footsteps in the room above.

Like his doppelganger McCoy, Schnozzle O’Shea was a Shambles man, the pair of them born within hours of each other in the draughty nursing home above the square. Had they been inadvertently switched at birth, who can say if things might have turned out differently? But no gin-befuddled midwife had exchanged this pair while their mothers lay in post-parturient exhaustion. In the Shambles Infirmary the persuasions were kept apart. The baby McCoy bawled lustily on the top floor while the infant Schnozzle whimpered and mewled in the basement. On this occasion the segregation was hardly necessary. For no one, drunk or sober, could for a moment have mistaken the red-necked youngster with the fog-horn cry for anything other than a true-blue Protestant, nor allocated the cranny wain with (God bless the mark!) the facial deformity anywhere but to the Fenian ward.

Where the other children of the Shambles ran ragged and carefree, Schnozzle’s was a boyhood of enforced solitude, peering out from behind the shutters at his contemporaries playing and fighting and shrieking in the gutters. But he could never fully escape their curiosity. No one on the Shambles had ever seen such a nose on a baby. It was a remarkable organ. It made your eyes water just thinking about it. It began in the furrow between the eyes as a thin and bony protrusion, with all the makings of a hooked beak. But halfway down the shaft, just where you could reasonably have expected it to begin its aquiline outward curve, something altered its progress. It seemed to lose its way. Just as even development in nature is sometimes radically altered by unforeseen disaster, so too had some great change come over the evolution of Schnozzle’s nose. It broadened and flattened. As a consequence his upper face had the dry predatory appearance of a bird of prey, while his lower face and jaw had a slackness and permanent moistness more suited to an aquatic lifestyle, perhaps even to a bottom feeder. One look at that nose and you were overcome with a strong impulse to pull out your handkerchief and check your own.

At the age of seven he had taken stock of his features in the mirror in the back scullery and, seeing reflected there a lifetime’s enforced chastity, opted for the clerical life. And though his widowed mother could barely keep them out of the workhouse, she accepted the boy’s vocation as the hand of God. She scraped and saved till she could send him to the seminary on the hill above, and once there he threw himself into his studies with singular determination. His appearance and his breeding were against him and he knew it, but the more adversity life threw at him the more he was determined to rise above it. Nothing, he vowed to himself, would stand between himself and the very top.

The very top was Ara Coeli, the Mansion of Heaven. It was a grey-stone palace of modest enough proportions, standing between the seminary and the great cathedral on top of the hill overlooking the Shambles. It was here that old Cardinal Maguire lived; it was here that the great decisions of Church and State were taken; for this was the headquarters and nerve centre of the Church in Ireland. The youthful Schnozzle, poring over his books in the study hall would sometimes lift his eyes to the spires beyond the windows, or to Ara Coeli itself, and dream how one day he would enter its hallway as Primate of All Ireland.

Boys, even those destined for the highest calling, can be cruel. They focus with unerring accuracy on the slightest physical flaw – a barely noticeable facial tic, the hint of a turn in one eye – and a nickname once given will stick for life if it has the ring of truth about it. In the case of Augustus O’Shea (the name he had been given at the font), the deformity cried out for derision. They ignored his eyes which were close set, his hair which was already thin and receding, his ears which stuck out like the handles on a shilling jug; in the years to come these features might mellow. But even the thickest country boarder couldn’t ignore the nose.

There was in the college at the time a doting old priest whom God and the drink had afflicted with a nose like a cancerous banana. He was known to one and all as Schnozzle Durante. The old man had died within a month of Augustus’s arrival and by a process of transference the name had been bestowed on the new boy. Through school he had been Schnozzle to his classmates. In Maynooth he was Schnozzle to his professors. After ordination he became Father Schnozzle to his first parishioners. The name stuck to him like tar.

It came as little surprise then when he was posted to Saint Matthew’s in the heart of the Belfast ghetto.

The parish took its name from Matt Talbot, a one-time loser and down-and-out who had frequented the back doors of the Dublin rich in the hope of handouts. The hirsute Matt had later gone on to forswear the drink entirely and devote himself to acts of public piety. To remind himself of his former life of degradation in the gutter he took to wearing chains round his waist and sackcloth on his back while standing on street corners warning of the evils of drink and the need for repentance. When they canonized him, the Falls Road parish had been alone in espousing the cause of the former hobo, hopeful of a miracle of transformation. But with the passing years the saint’s ability to deliver the goods had waned. Saint Matt’s Mission was a bum rap, the bummest rap in the diocese if not in the whole of Ireland; it was the Slough of Despond, it was the pits, it was a cul de sac from which no man of ambition would ever return.

Yet Father Snozzle had ambition aplenty, an ambition so strong that he would allow nothing, neither the poverty of his birth nor his physical affliction, to deter him from it. He knew, of course, why he had been landed with Saint Matt’s. But, once landed with it, he set about getting himself out of it with his customary tenacity.

The forlorn aim of Saint Matt’s Mission, declared in peeling letters above the vestry door, was ‘TO RE-CONVERT THE PERVERT’. The latter term implied no sexual slur, but applied to those who had deserted the religion of their forefathers to embrace the heresies of the planters. While it is acknowledged that no crown in heaven is more glorious than that which is reserved for the convert, it is likewise acknowledged that no corner of hell is hotter than that earmarked for the pervert and his offspring. Down the ages, during the great hungers of our dreadful past, the English had set up their soup kitchens amid the dead and the dying, tempting the faithful at their hour of despair with the smell of oxtail and lentils. The Irish had been steadfast in the face of temptation. But there were some around Antrim who had succumbed, turning their backs forever on salvation in exchange for the bowl of broth. Their children’s children now walked the streets of Belfast, dimly aware of their secret shame.

Many years before, when he was still a young man, Cardinal Mac, or plain Father Mac as he was then, had served a brief apprenticeship in the parish. It was a time of triumphalism throughout Europe, and even the drab back-to-backs of Belfast were temporarily caught up in the heady enthusiasm of the times. Coming home from the Eucharistic Congress in Dublin, the voice of Count John McCormack still ringing in his ears, Big Mac had fallen asleep on the train and dreamed a wondrous dream. It was a dream of the Irish people united at last, all bending the knee to the one true pontiff, the Bishop of Rome. A voice was calling to him in his dream, the voice of Saint Patrick himself, ordering him to establish a mission for the re-conversion of the Protestants. When the train reached Great Victoria Street, Big Mac had taken a trolley bus to the Irish News and shared his vision with the editor, who cleared the front page. For a week or two the Mission was the talk of the town. But the Shankill Road remained unimpressed. There was an outbreak of rioting as they made clear yet again their low opinion of the Pope and all his minions. Father Mac’s dream faded away as quickly as it had come. Trying to convert Protestants was a lost cause. If he wasn’t careful he could spend his life in frustration and futility, with not as much as one convert to show for his troubles. He was no fool, he could see the writing on the wall. When promotion to more salubrious surroundings had been offered, Father Mac had not dallied a day longer than necessary on the Falls Road.

His legacy to the ghetto remained. At the bottom of the Falls, a part of town that no separated brother with any wit would ever venture near, there stood a mouldering parochial hall attached to a mouldering parochial house. This was the nerve centre of the project. Previous incumbents, since Big Mac’s time, had been content to keep their heads down, recognizing that their careers were over. Every Saturday they would gather a crowd from the Legion of Mary and distribute their literature outside the Bank Buildings in the centre of the town. Every Sunday night they held a Holy Hour and prayed that the Sacred Heart might open the eyes and hearts of the Orangemen before it was too late. As a strategy for the conversion of the Protestant hordes that occupied the neighbouring Shankill and its tributaries it was fairly low key, for the truth was that no one expected any miracles in this direction any more, even from the Sacred Heart.

Sometimes a stranger, braving the hazards of the Falls would wander into the mission and announce himself a lost sheep come home to the one and only fold. Experience had taught those who laboured in this particular vineyard not to get too excited. It could be guaranteed that by nightfall your man would have discovered that he was the Risen Christ Himself, come to save the world, and it would be time to ring the Mater Hospital for the men in white coats.

Father Schnozzle’s first task, on taking over his new duties, was to scrutinize the books; it came as no great surprise to him that there hadn’t been one true conversion since the records began. Further research uncovered a depressing picture. The parish map revealed great swathes of backstreets where never a penny was contributed for the upkeep of their pastor. He knew his rights. He should start paying house calls, hammering on doors and demanding the dues, as the rule book states. But Father Schnozzle knew that even an ordained priest would be taking his life in his hands venturing down these backstreets. He offered up a prayer to the Infant of Prague for inspiration and waited, knowing that sooner or later something would turn up.

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