Shambles Corner. Edward Toman

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ