Shambles Corner

by Edward Toman

  He waited a month and more, finalizing in his mind the details. He wrote to Dublin and waited impatiently for a reply. Another month passed. On the feast of Saint Matt Talbot he celebrated Mass for a sparse congregation and offered up a prayer to the patron saint for the success of his plan. A reply from Dublin was waiting for him when he got back to the parochial house. He read it and laughed, then knelt to offer thanks to Saint Matt for this small miracle. He locked up the vestry, hung a NOT TODAY sign over the plaque inviting the heretic to mend his ways, and headed for Dublin on the first bus. The time had come to engage the professional services of Immaculata McGillicuddy and her comrades.

  She had impressed him the first time they met. Here was a woman who knew what she wanted and was prepared to go to any lengths to achieve those aims. She was a big woman of indeterminate age and background, a lay sister of sorts, whose band of acolytes went under the self-styled title of Little Sisters of the One True Church. But if their pedigree was unorthodox there was no denying the efficacy of their actions. They had served their apprenticeship in the campaigns against abortion and contraception and divorce and mixed marriage and pornography and the thousand other manifestations of the new morality that were menacing the island from across the water. The Little Sisters of the One True Church were immune to criticism from whatever quarter. Though they might ruffle a few feathers in high places, they went about their business with single-minded determination.

  During his time in Maynooth the appearance of the Sisters on the streets had been a recurring topic of discussion. Some of the men, from the more backward areas of the country, were enthusiastic in their defence. ‘Direct action is the only answer!’ they would argue. Others saw them only as vulgarians, lowering the whole tone of the country. Among their supporters, no one was as enthusiastic as Schnozzle. And among their detractors, no one as scathing as the head boy, Tom Cronin. ‘Tell me,’ he would sneer, as Schnozzle knocked on the door to clear away his dishes or polish his riding boots, ‘what’s your assessment of these self-styled vigilantes, these Vestal Virgins guarding the virtues of the True Church?’ Tom Cronin, or ‘Canon’ Tom, as they all called him already, had been voted the man most likely to succeed, a man clearly destined for high places, and to fag for him, as Schnozzle did, ought to have been an honour.

  Canon Tom didn’t wait to hear Schnozzle’s lowly opinion. ‘They’re a bunch of fascists, and strident ones at that! I have to say I prefer my women to look like women if you know what I mean. Take my advice, Schnozzle, and stay well clear of them. Nothing but trouble!’ Schnozzle didn’t argue with the Canon. It was odds on favourite that the man whose boots he now polished would one day wear the red hat; like the rest of the clergy he would queue to kneel and kiss his ring. But though he didn’t argue, he didn’t agree. They might as yet be nothing more than a disorganized rabble, but he saw their potential. He prayed for guidance to the Immaculate Conception and decided that supporting them would be worth the risk. He contacted Immaculata in his final year and offered his services. It raised a few eyebrows at the seminary, the sight of Schnozzle sitting stiffly on the platform in the Mansion House as the hall echoed to their rhetoric and the windows rattled with their chanting. But Schnozzle knew he was home at last. The Sisters preached a return to a time when values were simple and duties were clear. Their words were music to his ears.

  As the bus bearing Schnozzle to his rendezvous lumbered across the Black Pig’s Dyke and down into the plains, he read his breviary and made his plans. The time had come to tighten things up. The Sisters had always lacked structure. They had yet to gain the wholehearted approval of the hierarchy. All that was about to change. He would take them north. He would offer them a home in Saint Matthew’s. A base from which they would grow and prosper. He would became their official chaplain and protector. From now on things in Saint Matthew’s would become very different indeed.

  The bus turned off the coast road and started a slow crawl through the slums of the inner city. He stared through the grimy window at the desolation of Dublin, at the ragged children chasing after them begging for coppers, at the feral dogs running through the desolate tenements, at the despair in every face he passed. Some day, he vowed, he would come back here, no longer a humble curate but a mighty pillar of the Church, a man who could command respect. He would knock this place into shape! If ever a city needed a boot up the backside it was Dublin. Talking and drinking was all they were good for. Public houses everywhere you looked! The cocktail hour no doubt, he sneered to himself, returning his eyes to the breviary.

  At that precise moment, high on the fragrant hill above the city, oblivious to the impending momentous meeting between his old fag and Immaculata McGillicuddy, Canon Tom, cocktail in hand, was relaxing in the jacuzzi and giving thanks for his good fortune.

  He had slipped into the life of Adam and Eve’s as easily as a well-manicured hand into a kid glove. The parochial house was everything he had been led to expect – modest enough on the outside, but inside all clean-lined Scandinavian luxury. The cellar, as His Eminence predicted, had been thoughtfully laid down, and in the larder the shelves groaned under the weight of exotic cheeses and bottled delicacies donated by parishioners returning from foreign parts. A few of the ladies of the parish, within a week of his arrival, announced it their life’s ambition to fatten him up. ‘Go away out of that, Canon,’ they cajoled when he attempted token resistance. ‘Sure there’s hardly a pick on you.’ He wanted for nothing. The company car was the latest model, smelling of eau de cologne and soft leather. He was a regular at the Abbey Theatre where his opinions were solicited by actors and producers as a man with his finger on the pulse of the nation; he was a regular on racing days at the Curragh where, it was rumoured by the wags in Tattersalls, the parish had half shares in a number of geldings running under different colours. His picture often graced the Social and Personal column of the Sunday paper, opening this event or attending that, as often as not in the company of bright, beautiful, brittle women. But it wasn’t all play. There was business to be done on these occasions. Deals were discussed on the golf course and closed in the clubhouse later. There were useful contacts to be made at the races, clients to be entertained at the Yacht Club. Adam and Eve’s was a thriving community, and under his careful tutelage it was continuing to turn a healthy dividend. There were contractors to sweeten, architects to consult, consultants to meet; every day saw a succession of visitors to the parochial house, selling something, buying something, offering services of one sort or another. It was the life he was born to, and he loved every minute of it; he had time enough for the minutiae of business life when it concerned money of his own, and despite his conviviality he drove a hard bargain. Every one of his directorships and consultancies was carefully chosen and lucrative.

  He had everything a young priest could want. Why was it, then, that a small inner voice kept telling him that it couldn’t last?

  Despite the confident facade, there was a malaise deep within the parish that he knew he would eventually have to confront. Despite all their wealth, all the foreign holidays, all the barbecues on the back patios, his flock was deeply unhappy. They had grown to see the Church as an encumbrance, an irritating restriction on their freedom. It was old-fashioned, out of touch with the new ways. It restricted their self-expression, their individuality and their uniqueness with its dogma and outmoded strictures. They chafed against the bit, resenting more and more its cumbersome and irrelevant ritual. Of course these rebellious fears were not voiced openly; no one was brave enough to step forward and defy established authority, but the Canon could feel it. He could feel it in their over-solicitousness for his welfare, he could sense it in their over-generosity towards the collections. And above all he knew it from the confessional, the weekly ritual where all sins and secrets are whispered, and some secrets and sins are withheld.

  It went without saying that the trouble was sex. The people of the parish wanted the four, maybe five, youngsters. Fair enough. They also
wanted what they called a full sex life. Not fair enough. It was his job to reconcile the traditional teaching of Holy Mother Church with the new bedroom etiquette that had seeped in from abroad. But under the existing rules it was impossible. Unlike the rest of the country, they found it irreconcilable with their consciences to resort to unnatural practices. They refused to cheat. And, unlike the rest of the country, where such things were rarely mentioned, they had few inhibitions about bringing the bedroom into the confession box. Or into mixed company. Not even a childhood of summers spent on his uncle’s stud farm had prepared him for the details that now bombarded him. Over the petits fours the talk was of orgasms and one’s right to them, alternative sexuality and the respect due to its practitioners, and the need for personal satisfaction to override the prejudices of outmoded moral codes. Nothing in his Maynooth training had prepared him for this. He found himself without arguments, answering them without conviction. The Cardinal was right, the Church was going to lose these people unless he could come up with some formula that would keep them happy. Somehow he had to show them that self-fulfilment could be found in the arms of the Church, that the faith of their fathers could be a liberating and invigorating philosophy. But his year of grace was fast running out, and the man on the hill wanted results.

  Canon Tom poured himself another whiskey sour. He was due in the chapel in half an hour to preach on the Sixth and Ninth Commandments: thou shalt not commit adultery; thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his ox nor his ass. They would be expecting him to come up with something new, something they could relate to. But what? How could he trot out the same old tired strictures to these people? Maybe he could work in a reference to old Matt Talbot whose feast day he happened to notice it was. Would they appreciate the irony of it? He thought not. Adam and Eve’s deserved something better.

  He had almost given up hope when a strange thing happened.

  He had just added a capful of bubblebath (jojoba nut, he later told them, anxious for every detail) and was sinking back once more into the turbulence when he realized that something miraculous was afoot. The room seemed suffused with a soft but penetrating light, filled with a fragrance more exotic and elusive even than jojoba, resonating to a soft voice in a strange and beautiful language that was calling him by name. He cried out, aware that he was in the presence of some great and joyful force. The light lingered, then slowly dimmed; the voice faded away; only the fragrance remained. He lay back in the whirlpool unable to move, aware that he had been in the presence of something great. And then, in what he could only describe as a blinding flash, it came to him – the answer to his prayers! The problem was a problem no more. With a cry of ‘Eureka’ he leapt from the bubbles and into the pulpit to share his good news with his brothers and sisters, praising the Lord and giving thanks in a hundred exotic tongues. The Charismatic Children of Love were born.

  Seven

  ‘Quare goings-on in Belfast …’ said Joe, spitting in the sawdust. He tossed the Irish News across the bar to Eugene. ‘Even a hard man like yourself would think twice about walking up the Falls Road this weather.’

  ‘Not to mention Dublin,’ said Peadar. ‘I hear they’re dancing in the aisles and that’s only the start of it.’

  ‘Big Mac will not put up with that carry-on for too long,’ said the man from Tyrone. ‘His spies will have reported it all back to the hill by now. Canon Tom would need to get a grip on things. From what I hear they’re behaving no better than Protestants.’

  ‘What would a country cunt like you know about it anyhow?’ Peadar argued. ‘Sweet fuck all! That’s what! I’ll tell you this. If I got half a chance I’d be down there joining in. If you ask me that’s the religion of the future. That’s the way it’ll be in a few years everywhere.’

  ‘An excuse for groping each other and nothing more if you want my opinion,’ the Tyrone man persisted. ‘Maybe Father Schnozzle has the right idea after all.’

  ‘It says here that the gates into the ghetto are locked, with the Sisters on guard duty day and night,’ Eugene said.

  ‘I hear that they’re stopping you every twenty yards to examine your papers and ask you when you last went to confession,’ Peadar added slyly, looking over in Joe’s direction, hoping to raise a row.

  ‘Fuck up the pair of you,’ Eugene demanded. ‘I don’t want the Patriot upset.’

  A precarious balcony ran round three sides of the Adam and Eve Hall. Because of the danger of collapse it was normally unused.

  It was here, over the past months since the formation of the Children of Love, that Canon Tom had made a nest for himself, preferring the possibility of danger above to the very real danger to be found below. When the meeting got under way he would flee aloft, locking the door behind him. Occasionally one of the Charismatics would discover the power of levitation and come hovering up to threaten his security. But such manifestations of the power of prayer were so far rare. At the big do they were planning in the grounds of the RDS or an outdoor Mass with all the trimmings it might be a different story. It was then you’d have to keep a lookout for falling bodies. But on this particular Sunday, the last before Lent, all thoughts were on Lough Derg. They had negotiated an early opening for the season on the island. Canon Tom, to whom the rigours of the purgatory had never appealed, had pleaded urgent business of a personal nature when they tried to rope him in.

  Gingerly he slipped down the stairs and joined the congregation gathering in the hall below. The service was only getting started but the form it would take was already all too predictable. The opening would be restrained – a communal sign of peace, a formal hug or embrace. Traditional prayers would follow, with the congregation sitting cross-legged on the floor, Eastern fashion. Many favoured the palm-up lotus posture of intercession as, swaying slowly, they pleaded with the Holy Ghost to enter them. Then the hymns would start. Quietly at first, dirges that combined all that was dire in folk with all that was trite in pop. After an hour or so of this baneful drivel, a raunchier sound would begin to emerge. One of the group might produce his home-made synthesizer (nicknamed the Holy Ghost Invoker). With eighty watts per channel and two hundred decibels it had never yet failed to call down the Lord. Over the dirges they would try to improvise a polyphony of Oriental chromaticism, to the accompaniment of hand-drums, bodhráns, nose flutes and finger bells. With whoops of encouragement they would embark on riffs; they embellished, they modulated, they syncopated.

  And then the Sacred Dancing would begin. Slowly at first, little more than a rhythmical swaying of the upper body by those at the periphery of the hall; gradually it would be taken up by the rest; the swaying would become more agitated, the limbs begin to twitch, the smiles of concentration turn to fixed grimaces of ecstasy. It was time for the professionals to make their entrance.

  Three things differentiate Sacred Dance from traditional Irish dancing. It is slower than the old-style jigs, reels and hornpipes, allowing the performer more time for personal interpretation and improvisation. For another thing, the fixed frown that denotes modesty and concentration, insisted on by feis adjudicators, is replaced by a beatific smile of piety and inner peace. The third difference, and the one that does the damage, is the enhanced opportunity it affords for looking up women’s skirts.

  Other cultures have learned to live with these things. Swirling dervishes, flamenco stompers, even the morris men, have all offered a glimpse of thigh or more and left their audiences intact. But in Ireland this was something new. No sooner had the McAvinchey School of Irish and Sacred taken to the floor to express their oneness with the Spirit by exposing ample white knees and firm buttocks than the congregation began to grow restless. Events from there on would be sadly predictable. The sign of peace would pass among them again, but this time the discreet peck giving way to the exploring French kiss. Clothes would be discarded. Moaning and wailing figures would intertwine with their neighbours and the noise rise in a crescendo.

  Then the tongues would start. At first indistingu
ishable from the general background cacophony, then clearer as they paused to listen. Was it Hebrew or old creole? Forgotten Norse? ChiNyanja or Chippewa? Whatever it was, the recipients of these messages would babble forth effusively, urged on by the grunts and cries of the others, eyes closed tightly, the light of heaven shining from their upturned faces. The message would end as suddenly as it had begun and the partholocutor would fall into the outstretched arms of those nearest.

  ‘Do we have a translation?’ the Canon would shout. On cue, the Holy Spirit would enter another, and the exotic message would come pouring forth again, in platitudes more familiar to all.

  At this point Canon Tom would flee, avoiding where possible the eager arms everywhere grasping for him, dodging as far as he could the kissing, hugging, groping and squeezing. He would flee up the narrow staircase to the balcony and hide behind the tea chests. Things, he knew, would get a lot worse. Speaking in tongues would go on for hours. There would be some primal screaming, some heavy rolfing, a spot of rebirthing. Normally repressed sections of the congregation, schoolteachers, bank tellers, would bare their souls and their bodies to anyone who would listen or look. Fights, God help us!, would erupt, smoulder and flare up again. Someone would overdose; someone else would be sick over the floor; someone would get pregnant; very possibly one of the older members would pass on to his eternal reward. It would go on all day, maybe until after dark, and then they would pour out on to the streets and begin marching down the hill in the direction of Dublin, till the guards broke them up with the water cannon, a few broken heads and a canister or two of CS gas.