Shambles Corner

by Edward Toman

  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 sp
at 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 t
he 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.