Читать книгу: «Dancing in Limbo»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

One

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Two

Six

Three

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Epilogue

Keep Reading

About the Author

Other Books By

About the Publisher

Prologue

At the very moment that the Popemobile passed closest to him, Father Frank realized he was speaking in tongues. Though he had never been much of a one for the languages, it crossed his mind that he might be speaking in fluent Irish at last, and that fifteen years’ effort by the priests and the Christian Brothers might be paying a dividend. But this was something different from the plodding ‘tá mé go maith’ of his schooldays. Different too from the cursory acquaintance with Latin and Greek that his years in Derry and Maynooth had given him. There on the grass of the Phoenix Park the talk just flowed from him in great fluent gushes.

His first reaction was embarrassment. He looked round surreptitiously, but the great tumult that had gathered for the occasion had more to do than pay attention to one loquacious curate. Everyone was as bad as himself, gibbering away, each in his own tongue, their voices drowned out by the roaring and chanting and singing and praying that echoed from the four corners of the vast park. ‘So far so good,’ he thought to himself. He was beginning to enjoy his new talent when another strange sensation came creeping through his body. Frank knew he was sober, or at least as sober as was decent for Ireland’s favourite priest to be on this great day. But an unaccustomed detachment was stealing over his limbs, a feeling of lightness creeping up from his feet to his head. He felt that he was leaving his body and floating above it. Then his limbs began to move involuntarily, and seconds later he found himself floating up into the air above the cheering crowds.

He wasn’t the only one. The air was suddenly thick with flying bodies, cartwheeling, dive-bombing, looping the loop. In the compound directly below him, from which these aerobatics had originated, the ground was now alive with writhing and twitching limbs. Some foamed at the mouth, some declaimed loudly in incomprehensible tongues, others lay intertwined in lewd, unseemly rites. He didn’t need telling that Canon Tom would be in the middle of them.

Experimentally flicking his left foot as a rudder, Frank found he could flip himself over like a helium balloon. The multitude filled the entire park and stretched as far as the eye could see, the whole of Ireland gathered in the one spot, cheering with one voice. His Holiness was now moving on to the next corral of flag-waving faithful, yet Frank could follow his progress with the same apparent ease as Chief Inspector O’Malley in the hired helicopter overhead. ‘This beats Bannagher!’ he told himself, going higher. Beyond the park the whole of Dublin city opened itself to him, lying strangely peaceful and deserted in the pale sunshine.

But as he looked north to the blue haze of the far off Ulster hills he was aware of something moving in the distance and he heard, above the cacophony below him, the faint jangling of discordant bells. Fighting back a sudden rush of terror and vertigo he fell like a stone to the ground.

One spectator alone stood aloof. Sister Maria Goretta was making a poor fist of hiding her disgust at the turn events were taking. Cynically she let her gaze wander over the hysterical crowd, now embarked on a bacchanalia of groping, French kissing, and wild, ecstatic, abandoned dancing. She noted the Canon in their midst. She noted too the wrinkled features of the native speaker, sweeled in plaid rugs and propped up in his bathchair, with Snotters MacBride dancing attendance on him. She lit a Sweet Afton and turned away from their obscenities. She would let events take their course, there would be no need for direct intervention this time, she decided reluctantly. The time to break heads would come later.

Then her eye lighted on the recumbent figure of Father F. X. Feely (Mister TV himself!) lying concussed on the ground with Noreen Moran kneeling solicitously over him, and her features hardened. Involuntarily her hand slipped under her habit and felt the reassuring contour of the semi-automatic pistol lying snugly against her thigh.

A thin trickle of blood dripped from Frank’s temple on to the crumpled grass. He was only half aware of the crowd milling around him, only dimly aware of Noreen bending over him. A hundred vignettes of his past flashed before him. He thought he was in service again, forced to skivvy in Schnozzle’s kitchen for the scraps from the Archbishop’s table. Then he was suddenly a schoolboy again, wincing from the blow to the head that Brother Murphy had dealt him and that had left him speechless for a decade. Another memory flickered into his mind’s eye. He saw himself and Noreen kneeling in supplication at the feet of the Dancing Madonna. In his delirium he tried to reach out to her. She had cured him once, made him whole again, back in the days before she had disappeared. But as her features grew more distinct he began to tremble. He saw in her eyes, not pity, not compassion, but cold, remorseless anger.

As he groped into semi-consciousness, Frank became aware of the throbbing in his head, and with it he had new terrors to confront. Memories of the past which he had hoped were suppressed for ever began to crowd inexorably into his jangled brain, each more awful than the last. A catalogue of atrocities and betrayals rose before his eyes. Men and women slaughtered as casually as beasts in a shambles. Hypocrisy dressed up as piety, and brutality masquerading as love. Echoing and re-echoing through the recesses of his mind were the words of the poem his father was for ever quoting, shouting it to the empty hedgerows above the noise of the tractor. Some rough beast, its hour come at last, was slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.

His head began to clear. He stumbled to his knees and vomited, spewing out on the grass the gorge rising from deep within him. Noreen cradled his head between her breasts, staunching with her mantilla the flow of blood from his wound. But his mind was clearer now. He staggered to his feet and seized her by the hand. He had detected a new restlessness sweeping through the crowd. Something unexpected, unplanned was happening. The massed choirs on the Tannoy faltered in their rendition of ‘Deep in the Panting Heart of Rome’. The multitude was beginning to move with a new urgency, pushing towards the gates of the park where the top of the papal transporter was still visible, moving hesitantly in the direction of the exit. Frank heard the crack of wood splintering as the crush barriers that corralled them began to collapse. There were wild men with fanatical eyes running through the throng now, urging them onward with garbled snatches of news, screaming the name McCoy. The helicopter was low overhead, and above the clatter of the rotors he could hear O’Malley on the megaphone frantically ordering the Guards to shoot.

And then he heard again that most chilling of sounds from his childhood in the North. The discordant jangle of McCoy’s bells. And he knew that what he had seen approaching over the Black Pig’s Dyke had not been a mirage.

He and Noreen were clutching each other tightly now, struggling against the tide of the crowd, hunched against their thrust, trying desperately to stay upright against the stampede. He opened his mouth to shout to them, to warn them. Something malevolent had come among them, something more powerful and more ancient than their petty sectarianism or their puny religiosity. There had been a time when they might have listened. But Frank Feely had wasted those years, years when he had them in the palm of his hand, wasted his opportunity with jazz bands and futile chatter. Now he wanted to shout a warning to the great mass of humanity rolling past him. But no words would come to him. Again and again he tried to warn them. But his voice had deserted him as surely as it had in his youth, condemning him for ever to a silent scream of rage and impotence and despair.

ONE

One

Sammy Magee’s sausages were never going to win any prizes from the true epicurean, but though fatty and flaccid they had one remarkable feature that brought him customers from as far away as Tandragee. They were faintly marbled throughout their full length — red, white and blue — the colours running through them like a stick of Portrush rock. ‘I’ll take a pound of thon Protestant sauce-dogs!’ the farmers would demand in their mountain accents, sidling into the butcher’s after conducting their bits of business in the town of a Saturday. And though the gristle content was enough to make even the farmyard dogs think twice before tackling them, Magee’s sausages sold like hot cakes, especially coming up to the Twelfth of July.

The farmers sidling into the shop had another motive too, one they didn’t dare remark on to the butcher’s face. They wanted to get an eyeful of Lily. For it was a curious fact that, like the chameleon, Lily Magee never seemed to be the same colour two weeks running.

It was with the arrival of the Marching Season proper, when for a brief few weeks Portadown bedecked itself in patriotic livery, that the mystery was solved. Magee was spotted at midnight, trundling a handcart of bunting into the back of the Orange Hall and the cat was out of the bag. By morning the whole town knew that the butcher had a secret sideline supplying loyalist flags and favours, and the coloured sausages and the coloured wife were revealed as the side-effects of this cottage industry. Week in and week out, early on the Sabbath morning, he and Lily had been scouring the dustbins at the back of the linen mill for discarded remnants. They dragged these home through the silent streets and stored them in the shed behind the house.

During the weeks ahead Lily cut and snipped while Magee himself trundled away on the old Singer, seaming each triangle at the base to accommodate the twine on which he would later thread them. Once a month, on a Saturday night, he shut up the shop early. The rest of the town, by way of entertainment, would be out on the streets, busily preaching the word of the Risen Lord and prophesying His imminent return. But Magee and Lily would forgo the delights of the soap box, for there was work to do. He would hose out the big copper he used for boiling up the black puddings, drag it out into the backyard and begin to brew up the colour of the month. He had three large barrels of industrial strength dye, purloined from a factory in Antrim, which he kept in the coal-hole, the smell of them acting as deterrent enough to anyone who might be tempted to sample them in alcoholic desperation. He collected up the month’s output and bundled it into the pot while Lily stirred with a stick.

As she walked to the Meeting House next morning, Lily’s complexion reflected the labours of the night before. The dye permeated her hair, it clung to her clothes, it lurked in the cuticles of her fingernails, resistant to all exertions with the Sunlight soap. If it were a red month then Lily would glow with the deep red of the blood of martyrs spilt in the defence of her heritage, the red of the Red Hand of Ulster itself. ‘Little Plum, your Redskin Chum,’ a corner boy might quip as herself and the butcher passed on the street, but sotto voce, for you didn’t get on the wrong side of Magee. Or a month later, seeing her approaching from the mill, her natural pallor bleached to a spectral white, the same corner boy might snigger about the ghost of Christmas Past. Or whistle ‘Blue Moon’, what he knew of it, if the colour of the month were blue. During the cheerless winter Lily’s changing appearance provided a measure of much needed entertainment round the town.

But in the new year the people of Portadown, to their consternation, began to discern the colours of the republican tricolour running faintly through their breakfast offal, and noticed that Lily was now exuding a faint but unmistakable glow of papist infamy. It was clear that once more things were getting out of hand.

Though the Protestant, with his complex calendar of memorials and marches, is a great consumer of red, white and blue bunting, Magee had realized long ago that he would never become Portadown’s first millionaire by trading with his own side of the house alone. His kinsmen, for one thing, retrieved their bunting from the lampposts when the patriotic moment had passed, drying it and storing it carefully for another day. Furthermore, the Loyalist marching season lasted only for the summer months. They commemorated the Somme in the spring, and remembered 1690 in July. But after they had marched round Derry’s walls and honoured the Apprentice Boys in August, they were ready to put away their banners and their trombones for another year. Magee faced six long fallow months till the lambeg drums summoned them to arms once more.

But with the Fenians it was a year-round business, and Magee wasn’t long in spotting the market gap. He knew enough about the habits of the Romanists; if it wasn’t the Ancient Order of Hibernians who were celebrating, it would be some Holy Day or other. What was more, they alternated their need for the green, white and gold of the Republic with the yellow and white of the Papal States. And what he’d seen round their side of the Shambles appalled him. Tattered and torn green and yellow banners, badly made from old vests and knickers, crudely stitched, the colours running in the rain. Home-made efforts, of uncertain size and design. The papists, it went without saying, showed nothing of the parsimony or foresight of the Protestant when it came to retrieving their bunting after the bands had passed, leaving theirs to rot in the rain till it fell down. If Magee could expand his enterprise and start selling bunting to the Fenians he knew he could be on to a winner. But it was a mad thought and he knew it! To turn out the green and yellow of papist treachery in the heart of loyalist Portadown! Through his butchering business he had occasional contact with the Fenians, bartering with them through the rituals of fair days, necessary if distasteful intercourse. He knew how untrustworthy they could be in financial matters. But that wasn’t the only snag. Before he could even consider such a scheme he would have to obtain the blessing of the big boys. The ‘GPs’ as they liked to call themselves! Had he the nerve to approach them, offering them a percentage, come rain or shine, in exchange for their approval? Or was he mad altogether, getting himself mixed up with the men in black glasses? He was still wavering when McCoy’s message arrived, summoning him to the Shambles.

Every since the débâcle with the dancing statue, he had been giving the Reverend Oliver Cromwell McCoy a wide berth. McCoy might be a true blue bigot, but he had an uncanny knack of ballsing up everything he touched. And since his daughter’s disappearance, Magee knew he had forsaken the preaching and was reduced to scrounging drink round the back of the Boyne bar. But when the boy appeared from Armagh with the news that Brother Murphy was in urgent need of papal flags, that he was buying only the best, and that (unheard of for a Christian Brother) he was paying cash on the nail, Magee swallowed his principles and set off for the town to check things out for himself.

‘Where’s that girl of yours now that we need her?’ he demanded. ‘I could have done with an extra pair of hands.’

‘She’ll be back in her own good time, never fret,’ her father said. ‘When she tires of the bright lights of London.’

Chastity McCoy, the preacher’s daughter, had walked out on him on Christmas Eve, disappearing from the Martyrs Memorial Chapel like a thief in the night without as much as goodbye. Her desertion of him hadn’t come as a total surprise to her father, for the pair of them had been fighting like cat and dog for the best part of a year. But she had packed her bags this time, taking with her what scanty possessions she could call her own, and it was beginning to look as if she had gone for good.

‘London!’ Magee spat on the hearth at the mention of the place. ‘You should have married her off the day she turned fourteen. Many’s a farmer would have been glad of her, and there’d have been less lip out of the same lady.’

‘I’m only relieved she’s safe,’ McCoy said. Since she had flown the nest he had discovered a soft spot for Chastity. He regretted now that he hadn’t treated her better. ‘There was a card from her this morning. Old King George, no less.’ He reached up to the mantelpiece and took down a tattered postcard. King George the Sixth, looking ill at ease, stared back at them, framed by his family and the household dogs. ‘I swear I was having nightmares she’d been kidnapped and I’d have to fork out good money to rescue her.’ He turned the card over and read once more the message on the back. ‘She sends you her best at any rate,’ he said. ‘“Greetings from the heart of the Empire. Give Mister Magee my regards.” There you are! Mentioned in dispatches.’

‘No doubt the same lady will be back when it suits her, eating you out of house and home.’

‘And she’ll be welcome. There is more joy in heaven over one who is lost …’

Magee cut him short. ‘About these flags … ?’

‘I heard it from that scut from Tyrone.’

‘The bucko who’s never out of the Patriot’s across the way?’

‘As tight as an arsehole, like the whole shooting gallery of them. But it appears half Tyrone has been cutting up sheets this past month and they still can’t meet the demand.’

‘The Fenians must have something special planned,’ Magee said with suspicion.

‘What concern is that of you or me, Mister Magee! Let the Romanists damn themselves in whatever way they want. You, Sir, are an entrepreneur.’

Magee pondered this news for a while. Then he came to a decision. If the Fenians needed flags badly enough to be paying for them he was their man!

‘I’ll need all the rags I can get my hands on,’ he demanded.

‘If you think I’m going round the doors collecting hand-me-down drawers …’

‘Send McGuffin! What else is he good for?’

‘Fuck all else and that’s the truth,’ McCoy said. ‘But I can hardly have him put down after all the trouble he’s put me to.’

Outside the window, cowering on his mattress under the ice-cream van, they could make out the shadow of the renegade. Patrick Pearse McGuffin cut a pathetic figure, a Belfast man, a native of the Falls Road, who had turned his back on his faith and his people, to embrace the dubious pleasures preached by McCoy. It had been the action of a desperate man to desert Father Alphonsus on his pilgrimage to Lough Derg, an action that had left him friendless in a bitter land. It had been the action of an even more desperate man to convert to McCoy. If the truth were to be told, his conversion to the loyalist lifestyle had not been totally voluntary. But beggars can’t be choosers and as a runaway his hopes for the good life were sorely curtailed. When he had taken the soup Patrick Pearse had dropped the Republican forenames in an effort to integrate into his new surroundings, but changing your name was an old McGuffin trick that fooled no one; and since the day he had embraced the Lord as his personal saviour, McGuffin had been lucky to eke out a precarious existence round the Martyrs Memorial.

‘Did the girl leave on account of him? Was he bothering her?’ Magee demanded.

McCoy shook his head. ‘Chastity was always headstrong. Like her mother.’

‘I’ll wring that wee bitch’s neck when I see her next!’ Magee declared. ‘Just when she could have been some use.’ There was something about Chastity’s disappearance that made him uneasy. He lifted the postcard down from the mantelpiece and scrutinized it again. The postmark was smudged. It could have been from anywhere. The lassie was giving nothing away either. No address, no details. Just a message in her neatest handwriting telling them not to worry. Inside Magee’s gut an icy finger of doubt began to stir.

He outlined his scheme to meet the Fenians’ demands to Lily that night as she was scrubbing herself down at the scullery sink.

‘Do you want your head examined?’ she asked.

‘There’s no harm in trying,’ he insisted.

‘And get the pair of us lynched! It’s bad enough you have me walking round like a Union Jack! How in the name of God can I put my face out that door and me green, white and yellow!’

‘If anybody’s bothering you, you refer them to me.’

‘They’re already complaining about the black pudding.’

‘I’ll get it cleared at the highest level. I’ll take a wee run over to the doctor’s next week.’

‘You’ll do no such thing! Do you want us killed in our beds?’

‘You’re afraid of your own shadow! What harm is there in putting it to them as a business proposition!’

‘Those are the same boys who’d drop you in the shite if anything goes wrong. Take my advice and stay well away from that crowd. I don’t see your buddy McCoy getting too closely involved.’

‘McCoy would only balls it up. Besides what use is he with the daughter gone?’

‘I never liked that wee bitch,’ Lily said with sudden vehemence. ‘She had her mother’s snotty looks. Too good for the Shambles. He’s well rid of her.’

‘She’s run off before,’ Magee said uneasily, ‘but never for as long as this.’

‘If the pair of you had taken my advice you’d have put her out to service years ago,’ she grumbled. They were offering a fair price on the Antrim plateau for girls willing to work. Not that the bold Chastity was ever any use except for giving cheek and eating him out of house and home.’

‘The same lady will be back, mark my words. To embarrass the lot of us unless I’m very wrong.’

‘If McCoy had wanted a woman that bad,’ she said, remembering the Señora, ‘why couldn’t he have stuck to his own sort instead of running after darkies? What was wrong with a decent Ulster Protestant?’ She turned her rump towards Magee by way of invitation. Lily’s was a solid arse, an arse bred of generations of Protestants, now faintly stained in variegated patriotic hues. It was an arse as solid, reliable and unexciting as the plains of Antrim or the farming land of North Armagh. Magee closed his eyes and conjured up a memory of the Mexican, her sultry looks, her voluptuous body, her dark hair cascading in wanton profusion. Señora McCoy was dead and buried a decade ago, but an old, guilty lust began to stir somewhere deep in him. He pulled Lily roughly towards him and began to fumble inexpertly at the strings of her pinny.

Round Armagh there were other omens that springtime, foretelling imminent changes. The uneasy equilibrium of the town was about to tilt again. The tinkers with their gift of second sight were the first to grow suspicious. In old Cardinal Mac’s day tinkers would be for ever round the back door of the Palace of Ara Coeli, squatting stoically in the lee of the limestone wall, knowing there’d be either a handout or a bollocking before the end of the day, for you took the old man as you found him. And even after Big Mac had taken to his bed, which he did in the last years, they could rely on Major-domo MacBride to see them right. But all that had suddenly changed. Those who trekked up the hill now from the Shambles to Ara Coeli, found Schnozzle Durante O’Shea in residence and every door and window bolted against them. The place was sealed as tight as a drum. Tighter than the Sistine Chapel during a contested consistory. Every window shuttered, every door fastened. Not a sign of Major-domo Mac-Bride nor the staff of skivvies who worked under him.

And strangest of all, not a sighting of Schnozzle himself since Christmas. Curious and mysterious behaviour for a party who had been, until his recent elevation to the Primacy, so keen to keep poking his nose in the public’s business.

The tinkers cursed the new man on the hill when they returned to the Shambles, cursed him and his new ways more openly than any local would have dared, for tinkers are a law unto themselves, beyond even the reaches of the Sisters. There was a notice on the saloon door expressly barring travellers from the Patriot Arms, but Eugene served them through the window, letting them squabble and spit in the entry till their money was through. Tinkers were the prime source of information in the countryside; there was little they didn’t know. He listened to their complaints and forebodings without a word. And when they had gone he sent next door for Peadar the vegetable man, ordered him to close up the stall forthwith, to proceed to the cathedral on the hill above, to recce the territory and to report on what was going on.

‘The whole place is locked and barred,’ Peadar told the company when he returned, pale and terrified that evening. ‘There’s definitely something up! No one allowed in or out, Schnozzle’s orders.’

‘Holy God! That sounds ominous.’

‘You’d think he’d be out and about, making a name for himself, instead of closeted away,’ the Tyrone man ventured. ‘Now that you mention it, we haven’t seen hilt nor hair of the major-domo.’

‘Aren’t I telling you, they’re all confined to barracks,’ Peadar said. ‘The breadman is stopped at the gate. The milkman too. With the Little Sisters sniffing every bottle before they take it inside. The grounds are sealed off. The Sisters patrolling the gardens with walkie-talkies and some class of an Alsatian they’ve got their hands on. A fucker that would take the leg off you quick enough!’ He had been forced to make an ignominious retreat in the face of the dog when he had stumbled on a posse of Sisters, their faces blackened, bivouacked near the tomb of old Cardinal Mac.

‘A special retreat or something?’ speculated the man from Tyrone. ‘Praying for the soul of poor old Ireland? I’d have said myself it’s a bit late for that.’

‘I was wondering why young Frank hadn’t shown his face. When he first got the job he’d be in here every morning,’ Eugene said.

‘The lad hasn’t been home since Christmas,’ the Tyrone man told him. ‘He’s cooped up with the rest of them. All leave cancelled till further notice. His poor mother’s half out of her mind.’

‘You’re still interested in that quarter, I see,’ said Peadar bitterly. ‘Tell us, which gives you the bigger hard-on, dreaming about the widow or dreaming about her ten acres?’

‘Fuck off with your dirty talk!’ the Tyrone man told him. ‘The farm is nothing but a liability.’

‘The young pup left his bicycle in the passage. I’m never done tripping over it.’

‘They’re saying you can see strange lights playing round the tomb of Cardinal Mac at night. Great devotion is getting up already, and him hardly cold in the grave.’

‘And now I hear there’s a big order out for papal flags. Where’s Snotters MacBride now that we need him to give us the lowdown?’

‘Someone somewhere has a treat in store for us,’ said Eugene dubiously, catching perfectly the mood of the occasion.

Mister MacBride, they all acknowledged, was a martyr to the lumbago. And though it was somewhat infra dig for a man in his position to be found drinking on the Shambles, hardly a night would pass that Snotters didn’t slip down to the Patriot’s for a medicinal rum and black. Though he wore the Pioneer Pin proudly, he would allow Eugene to urge a second or a third glass on him to ease the ache in his joints, and with his tongue thus loosened he could be pressed discreetly for details of the comings and goings on the hill.