Shambles Corner

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.