Shambles Corner. Edward Toman
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Название: Shambles Corner
Автор: Edward Toman
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Зарубежный юмор
isbn: 9780008226916
isbn:
But, by way of introduction, where better to start than with the story of the ice-cream van itself?
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 СКАЧАТЬ