Shambles Corner

A year before he had found himself on a roll. A persistent voice in his conscience told him it was all too good to last, but with each passing month his spirits rose. Could he dare hope that the Nine Fridays could be his at last? Six months, seven months, eight months came and went, with the same old curate nodding off in the box, his hand raised, even before Joe started whispering, in an automatic gesture of absolution.

But the Sacred Heart is nobody’s fool. The gilt-edged guarantee of heaven is not earned through trickery. The ninth month came round and Joe cycled into Armagh in a state of heady anticipation. One more confession and he was home and dry! He had a drink and then another to steady his nerves. He crept into the darkened cathedral as the sexton was closing the door. Only a few penitents were left. He slipped in at the end of the queue, prepared himself as he had been taught, and shuffled forward in the line till it was his turn to enter the box. The shutter slid across. But instead of the dozing figure he had been anticipating, Cardinal Mac himself stared out at him from behind the grille, alert as a whippet. Joe had returned home that night with the Cardinal’s interrogation ringing in his ears. He knew now that if ever he got to heaven, it would be by the hard road.

Though they never discussed anything so intimate, Teresa half guessed his guilty secret and the shame it was bringing on the house. She didn’t give him a minute’s peace till he promised he would try again. Driven out every Saturday night by her tongue, he would be seen parking his bike outside the Patriot Bar and popping in for a relaxer before the rigours of the sacrament. One would lead to another, and he would wobble home at midnight, querulous and unshriven.

‘You never went, you louse!’ she would shout.

‘What call have I to run telling my private affairs to a bunch of gobshites?’ he would call back, emboldened by the drink. Frank, feigning sleep in the settle bed by the fire, would hear them at it intermittently till dawn.

At Mass, too, he was always among the latecorners, standing in the porch out of the rain or in the graveyard if the weather was fair, technically present as it was Church property, but fooling nobody, least of all the Man Above. With his cronies from the adjacent townland he would slouch there, rolling cigarettes and guffawing about the price of pigfeed. They smoked and joked and argued and commented on the women’s legs with the practised eyes of farmers judging livestock. They didn’t need telling when the congregation indoors rose to its feet for the Last Gospel and the rush for the back doors began. Before the crowd inside had straightened their rheumatic knees, dusted down their trousers and adjusted their caps, Joe and company were already across the Shambles. Positioned strategically outside the Patriot’s, they would comment on the emerging churchgoers as they rubbed their backsides against the window, rapping occasionally on the glass and requesting Eugene to open up for the love of fuck before they all died of thirst.

‘You’ve no respect,’ she would tell him when she got him home. ‘You haven’t heard Mass properly this year. Mark my words I’m not the only one talking about you. Didn’t Cardinal Maguire himself say as much from the altar last Sunday? Not that one of you lot would have heard him. Is it Christians or heathens the lot of you are? If the Brothers were half the men they used to be they’d soon wipe that smirk off your face and no mistake.’ Joe let her go on. He knew she was right to take an interest in his spiritual welfare. He saw it as essential women’s work, a ritualized nagging that, like all rituals, had its place in the complicated scheme of things.

But when it came to the folklore of the faith, Joe Feely’s enthusiasm was second to none. His acquaintance with the holy places of Ireland was legendary. He knew who had the cure for a plethora of ailments both human and animal. As a travelling man, with a range of goods and services that skated round the edge of the civil and canon law, his business had given him occasion to visit most of the shrines in the country. His was a deep if unconventional spirituality. He knew that when the wheel of our fortunes turned at last and the great change came, when the dark times came to an end, when a new leader emerged to redeem the people of Ireland, it would be through the old places that we would first learn of it. The rituals of the established Church he bore with equanimity, reserving his soul for the fringes where older, more magical forces sometimes stirred. ‘You’ll hardly get up off your arse to go to Holy Mass,’ Teresa would accuse him, ‘but you’ll run the length of the land after some statue or other.’ To Joe it was no more than the truth.

So when it became clear as the years went by that the boy was making no progress, that his schooling days were over, and that the rosaries were getting them nowhere, his father decided that something stronger was called for. They tried a novena to the Sacred Heart and another to Saint Jude, but there was no appreciable change in his condition, and he still stared at the world through mute, impassive eyes.

‘The lad can knock around with me till he’s fit to fend for himself,’ Joe volunteered. ‘I’ll take him to the Shambles market tomorrow.’

‘He’ll get a real education and no mistake on the Shambles Corner,’ Teresa answered sharply. ‘Sitting all day in the Patriot Bar with eejits every bit as bad as yourself!’

‘He’s never too young to learn the ropes.’

‘You’ll fill his head with your foolish stories till he doesn’t know whether he’s coming or going!’

‘Those are the stories he’ll need to know if he’s going to survive around these parts,’ Joe argued.

‘He’ll learn nothing but bigotry; that and dirty language. I swear if Jesus Christ himself walked across the Shambles tomorrow they’d tear him apart.’

‘I’ve the pigs to sell. He’ll be able to give me a hand.’

‘Do you want him to get his death? Have you no wit?’

‘He’ll be as right as rain. We could maybe say a wee prayer in the cathedral when we’re at it.’

‘You’ll say more than your prayers, I don’t doubt. Take him with you if you want. Maybe he’ll be able to get you home when they throw you out of the Patriot’s.’

The pigs had been smuggled across the border half a dozen times in the previous month but they looked none the worse for their travels. They snuffled contentedly in the mud outside the house while Teresa eyed them suspiciously. She was used to the necessary merchandise of the smuggler – the butter and the cigarettes, the petrol and the contraceptives, the rifles and the Christmas turkeys – but the regular re-appearance of the pigs was beginning to wear her patience down.

‘See those French letters –’ she began.

‘The real article,’ he assured her.

‘More than can be said for these pigs,’ she added sourly. She stretched over the sow and rubbed its fat rump with distaste. ‘Boot polish!’

‘Of course it’s boot polish. Don’t they change colour every time they’re carted over the border?’

‘Anyway, I’m not having them another day round the house, subsidies or no. They have my stomach turned, the smell of them.’

‘What harm is there in the smell of a pig? Any road they’ll not be under your feet for much longer. These lads’ travelling days are nearly over. This time tomorrow they’ll be rasher sandwiches.’

Frank’s first sight of the holy city was from the Navan Fort. His father was shaking him awake from a cold and fitful sleep. The tractor engine was idling and the pigs were lying quietly in the trailer. He rubbed his eyes and shivered in the morning light. They were off the road, in the middle of a circle of low, grassy mounds, the contours of the ancient earthworks barely discernible. ‘If only this place could speak,’ Joe said, ‘it could tell a tale or two. The seat of the High Kings of Ireland or so they tell me. You wouldn’t think it to look at the state of it now, but in its time this place was fairly humming with royalty of one class or another. King Conor Mac Neasa, Deirdre of the Sorrows, Finn MacCool and his mate Cuchulainn and that whole crowd. Before Saint Patrick came along and converted the country. I can’t rightly remember the details of the lot of them, but I’ll say this for the Christian Brothers, they teach you your Irish history and they give you a pride in it. Robert Emmet and Patrick Sarsfield and young Setanta and the whole shooting match of them, all great men who gave their lives for Ireland. Maybe some day when you’re recovered, we’ll get ourselves a book and we’ll study it in more detail.’ And despite the early hour he began to sing quietly to the boy:

‘Let Erin remember the days of old

Ere her faithless sons betrayed her.

When Malachai wore the collar of gold

Which he won from her proud invader.

‘Saint Malachy! Another Armagh man, born on the Shambles a thousand years ago.

‘When kings with their standards of green unfurled

Led the Red Branch knights into danger

Ere the emerald gem of the western world

Was set in the crown of a stranger.

‘I need hardly tell you who the stranger was; you were nearly long enough at the Brothers’ to work that one out for yourself.’ But the boy’s attention was elsewhere. For Frank had turned to the east where the sun was rising and there in the far distance on its seven hills stood the primatial city. The twin spires of the cathedral had appeared, floating on a pillow of cloud. Joe looked too. The limestone pillars were tinged with the pink of the new sun, and their gilded crosses sparkled in the pale sky.

He drove the tractor sedately through the narrow, thronged streets and parked it outside the Patriot’s. He climbed down and lifted Frank out of the cart. ‘Here we are, the city of Armagh. Built like Rome on seven hills. And this is the Shambles Corner, where we’ll conduct our business before the day is out.’ He gestured grandiosely as if he owned the place, encompassing with the sweep of his arm the low line of bars and shops that formed one side of the square, the cabins and houses on the far side, the caravans of the tinkers huddled in a laager in one corner, the rusty corrugated-iron chapel that dominated another corner, and the crowd that had already gathered round the edges of the area to buy and to sell.

The Shambles was neither corner nor square. It stood where the three main streets of the city nervously approached each other. Some distance before they reached the Shambles they seemed to give up, as if reluctant to confront one another directly. The result was a confusion of unaligned buildings and open space. From the foot of the town Irish Street approached haltingly, broadening into a shapeless 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 that Mexican. Magee did a few months in the Crumlin after the body was washed up in Belfast Lough, but they never proved anything. Without him, McCoy’s nothing but a bollocks.’ Joe looked at his son, detecting a flicker of interest in what he was telling him. ‘Some time I must tell you the whole story of that pair of hoors, or at least as much of it as our side of the house will ever know. But now I must go and pay my respects to the Patriot.’

They checked on the pigs. ‘As right as rain,’ Joe declared, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth. All the talking had put him in the humour for a drink. From the Patriot’s came the subdued murmur of early-morning supping. ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do,’ he said, lifting the boy up into the tractor seat, ‘I’ll just pop in here for a moment to conduct a bit of business. Be a good man and keep an eye on the beasts. If anybody comes along showing an interest you’ll know where to find me. And don’t for the love of Jesus let any cowboy go prodding them.’ He swung open the doors of the Patriot Bar and disappeared into the noise. Frank was listening to the bells booming out the hour over the city when he became aware of another voice calling him from the pavement below: ‘What the fuck’s wrong with you? Are you deaf?’ The man was short and thick-set, with arms and shoulders overdeveloped for the rest of his short frame, and dark, suspicious eyes. ‘I’m asking are yiz selling these pigs?’ Frank looked down but made no answer. The man’s face reddened and he shouted angrily, ‘Where’s your da?’ For a moment Frank made no move. Then his head turned in the direction of the public house. The man stood back and looked carefully at the building. ‘Are you sure it’s in there he is?’ He reached up and roughly pulled the boy down from his perch and dropped him on to the ground. ‘Take a run in there and tell your father that Mister Magee is outside and taking an interest in these beasts.’

The door of the pub was stiff but Magee made no attempt to help him with it. Frank pushed it open and fell inside. It was warm and smoky, smelling of porter and whiskey and sweat. A pair of men near the door grabbed hold of him and began to fool about with him roughly, reaching for his balls and prodding him, but something told them they wouldn’t get much of a rise out of him the way they would with a proper half-wit who had wandered in off the street, or a woman in after her husband. He saw his father standing at the end of the bar and he broke away from their grasp and ran to him, tugging at his sleeve to get his attention. Joe reached down and picked him up and sat him on the bar and gave him a sip of his porter, all the while carrying on a one-sided conversation with a fat Tyrone man who was standing with his back to him. The fat man turned to look at the boy, tousled his hair roughly and asked what was the matter with him. ‘Need you ask?’ said Joe. ‘Or need I say any more than that he is a past pupil of our very own Christian Brothers?’

‘All the same,’ said his companion, ‘where would the country be without them? Tell me that.’