Shambles Corner. Edward Toman

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СКАЧАТЬ delta of bars and butchers’ shops; Scotch Street ran arrogantly down from the Protestant quarter, only losing its nerve at the last moment when it passed the Glorious Martyrs Memorial Assembly Hall and Tea Rooms. English Street, cutting up from the Mall trailing relics of the town’s glorious past, expired in a tangle of barricades and hucksters’ stalls. Across the wide amorphous expanse of the square the communities sized each other up, coming forward at mutually acknowledged times to barter in the no-man’s-land between their territories. Above the Shambles rose two of the city’s hills. One hundred steps led up to the Catholic cathedral to the left, revealing itself now to Frank as a massive, ill-formed structure of grey limestone, its spires dark against the greying sky. Beside it on the hilltop, shielded from the gaze of those below by a screen of trees, stood the Cardinal’s Palace, Ara Coeli, the Altar of Heaven. Across the valley of the Shambles rose the ancient hill that had once been the heart of the town, its summit topped by the sandstone cathedral of the Protestants, a squat unyielding profile shunning the brash upstart challenging it from across the square. Around the Protestant building huddled the remnants of some ancient buildings, an old library and chapterhouse, the relics of a medieval stone cross destroyed in a burst of iconoclasm, and at the base of its tower, barely visible from where Frank and his father stood, the tomb of the last great king of Ireland, Brian Boru.

      But there was one building in the town more important than the others, and Joe pointed it out first. Marooned in the middle of the Shambles, equidistant from the Patriot Bar on the lower side and the Martyrs Memorial on the far side stood the public lavatory. It had been built originally as a convenience for the slaughtermen, but the abattoir was long gone and now it served the community, welcoming both sides equally. ‘Do you know what I’m going to tell you,’ whispered Joe, taking the boy into his confidence, ‘if it’s trouble you’re after there’s plenty to be had around here. I’m the boy should know, for I’ve started enough of it in my day. But listen till I tell you this. Do you see that shitehouse? Any man, whatever his persuasion, can walk in there and attend to a call of nature without the necessity of always looking over his shoulder for fear of who might have followed him in. Isn’t it a wonderful thing all the same? Mind you,’ he added, fearing that his enthusiasm for the communal latrine might be carrying ecumenism a bit too far, ‘I’m talking now about the general run of things. I’m not saying it would be the same around the Twelfth when feelings are running a bit high, or when McCoy has their heads turned after a week of hellfire preaching. It might be a different matter then all right. It’s not a theory I’d care to put to the test if the Shambles was full of Orangemen in their sashes all bursting for a slash; but in the general run of things, that’s as safe a spot as you’ll find. And that goes for both sides of the house. I’ll tell you what we’ll do first thing,’ he said, taking Frank firmly by the hand, ‘we’ll go across and let you see for yourself.’

      There are few places in this land where both sides of the house can meet on equal terms. They are born apart, live apart, worship apart, are schooled apart, drink apart, die apart and are buried apart. But sometimes, through a freak of demography, there will emerge an area where neither side holds complete sway. And there, protected by elaborate protocol, a limited commercial intercourse will evolve. The bogs on Shambles Corner was one such place. The graffiti on its walls testified to its shared ownership. Like an officers’ mess or gentleman’s club, all controversy was left outside, all talk of killing and ambushes, all Bible prophecy and general fighting talk. There would be arguments galore, the air thick with deals and bargains, the talk of livestock and spare parts and pigfeed and subsidies and taxes and yield per acre. But when a fight broke out you could rest assured that the cause was money or misunderstanding, and that the old problems of the city had been left at the door. It was a convention upheld by all. A man might be gunned down at his place of work, or beaten to pulp at his fireside; he could be maimed as he knelt in worship or kneecapped as he stood at the bar. But not here, never here. Here was sanctuary, mutually agreed. No hooded figure would ever enter the damp interior of the bogs to pump hot lead into some enemy sitting at stool.

      ‘It’s never too early to learn how to pass yourself in mixed company,’ said Joe, steering Frank towards the narrow entrance. The boy hesitated. The stench from inside was overpowering. Joe laughed and lit a cigarette, fanning himself with the smoke. ‘I’ll not disagree with you, there’s a quare hogo. That’ll be your Tyrone men. As full of dung as a donkey. Have a few pulls of this,’ he said, offering the cigarette. Frank took it and drew on it hungrily.

      It was a roofless building of grey pebbledash. The thin drizzle which had started up added to the dampness underfoot. Three of the walls served as urinals. In the middle of the floor was a hole which acted as a drain, already half blocked with the butts of cigarettes. ‘Wait till you see the state of the place in a few hours,’ Joe assured him, ‘they’ll be up to their knees in it.’ Under the fourth wall ran an open sewer, above which was fixed a thick wooden plank supported by bricks at both ends and with a dozen holes cut out of it. And although it was still early in the day most of the places on the plank were already taken by a line of grunting countrymen, their trousers round their ankles, reading the local papers and shitting noisily. The descendants of the dispossessed, down from the high ground to barter, sat side by side with the descendants of the planters, easing their engorged bowels together, all for the moment equal.

      Father and son pissed at length against the wall, Joe whistling a non-sectarian tune. He discarded his cigarette into the drain with a flick of the wrist. ‘By jing, but I needed that,’ he remarked to the company at large as he buttoned his flies. No one answered, but the eyes of the Tyrone men never left him. ‘Come outside now,’ he instructed Frank, ‘and we’ll have a bottle of stout, just one, before we get rid of the pigs and see the sights. We’ll nip over to Hughes’s.’ As he spoke, the great carillon of the cathedral began its slow chime, tolling out the signal for the half hour. Frank looked round, startled, and his father laughed. ‘You heard that all right. Didn’t I tell your poor mother that a trip to Armagh would do you a power of good?’

      The Shambles was filling up. The tinkers had emerged from their trailers and were setting up stalls on the waste ground. Joe and Frank sauntered across to the tractor, taking in the wonders of the city – the windmill on Windmill Hill, Laager Hill, where the army of King Billy had encamped on their way to the Boyne, the track of the old Keady railway which ran under the convent walls off to their left. Then they turned their attention to the bottom of Scotch Street where the Glorious Martyrs Memorial Chapel stood sentinel. ‘That’s McCoy’s place,’ Joe said. ‘A fucking eyesore and no mistake. Would you look at the state of it! Your mother was right. The bastard has had no luck since he pulled that stunt with the Mexicans. He went too far entirely that time.’

      It was a low structure of corrugated iron, backing on to the square, its entrance among the withered flags of Scotch Street. It had once been painted with red-lead, but since the decline in McCoy’s fortunes, rust had eaten through the rivets and the crumbling girders were beginning to show like ribs where the stove chimney pierced the roof. The gable wall was covered with tattered posters, urging the passerby to repent of his sins and to flee the wrath to come. ‘Turn ye therefore unto Jesus, which is the Christ,’ exhorted a hand-painted sign on the roof. There were other reminders that the wages of sin are death and that man is saved only through faith, each carefully annotated with chapter and verse, and other announcements lay half buried underneath, notices advertising monster evangelical rallies, prayer meetings and healing ministries. Smiling young men with sleeked-back hair, their grins of fellowship distorted to grimaces by the corrugations of the walls, assured one and all of a warm welcome in Jesus. A neon sign, announcing that herein was preached only the Crucified Christ, had fallen askew, but still flickered intermittently across towards Irish Street.

      ‘I don’t see the ice-cream van at any rate,’ said Joe. ‘The hoor must be on the road again. Trying to drum up the price of a few pints.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Do you see that chapel. It was a goldmine in his father’s day. And look at it now. If it wasn’t for Magee he’d be in the workhouse long ago. Magee’s a bucko from Portadown I need hardly add. He might have been a bigot but he knew how to run a business. The pair of them fell out over СКАЧАТЬ