Shambles Corner. Edward Toman
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Название: Shambles Corner
Автор: Edward Toman
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Зарубежный юмор
isbn: 9780008226916
isbn:
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 СКАЧАТЬ