Shambles Corner

‘Say what you like about him,’ his mother said, ‘he’s the only one who had the nerve to stand up to the likes of McCoy. They had a perpetual novena and a torchlit procession down the Falls Road every night.’

At the mention of Belfast his father spat, as he always did, ceremonially into the dying embers of the fire.

‘And there’s more scandal tonight,’ she said, lowering her voice. ‘One of the McGuffin crowd has spoiled a priest; they’ve run away together and him with only weeks to go. It was on the radio.’

‘Holy Jesus!’ Joe said. ‘Schnozzle won’t take that lying down.’

‘It’s well past that boy’s bedtime,’ she interrupted. ‘And say no more about the priests to him. There’ll be time enough for talk like that when he’s older.’

Four (#ulink_56579d84-06f6-5269-9198-fa53d1cc9501)

As it happened, Frank didn’t have to wait that long to hear the story of Schnozzle Durante and his struggle with the heretics, or to meet him in the flesh either. He had gone with his father the length of Benburb, chasing a rumour that the monastery there had set up a round-the-clock call-out service for emergency absolution. Joe didn’t think much of the idea. Call out a monk in the small hours, after a party or a domestic row or other occasion of sin, and the neighbours’ tongues would be wagging for a year. As a man with a need for circumspection in that area he didn’t intend to have the blue light flashing outside his door too often. In any event the rumour had proved groundless, and after a frustrating hour or so they had hitched a ride back to the town.

He wasn’t the only one in need of a relaxer that evening.

With Frank at his heels he was hardly through the door and out of the rain when he knew that something was amiss. ‘You’ve got company,’ Eugene informed him, indicating the snug under the stairs. Joe turned to run. Whoever wanted him had intimidated the Patriot Arms into unaccustomed silence. He tripped over Frank, sending the child sprawling in the sawdust. The man in the snug rapped loudly on the frosted glass partition; Joe looked round to see Schnozzle’s gaunt silhouette ordering him over.

‘Sit down, Feely! Don’t make a bigger eejit of yourself than you have to.’

‘Is it yourself, Father?’ Joe said, trying to stifle the tremor in his voice. ‘I heard just now you wanted a wee word.’

‘Shut up and listen! I’ve wasted enough time in this hovel. And so have you! There’s work to be done, Feely, while bucks like yourself sit drinking and yarning. Our Holy Mother the Church is daily under attack!’

‘I’ll just get myself something to wet my whistle …’ Joe suggested. Schnozzle silenced him with a curt wave of his hand.

‘You’ve heard the latest scandal from Belfast. Don’t try pretending you haven’t.’

Joe spat on the floor. ‘You mean that business with Cornelius Moran? Terrible altogether.’

‘Everywhere the priesthood is under attack. From within and without. First it was Ramirez treating the Holy Mass as a circus act, now this.’

‘I’m with you there, Father,’ Joe agreed. We all did our bit. The missus was out every night throwing stones.’

Throwing stones is all some are fit for! But you, Mister Feely, are fit for more …’ As he spoke he moved his face closer, daring Joe to pull away from him.

‘What can I do? Sure I’m only a bit of a farmer!’

‘Don’t play games with me! Do you think for a moment I don’t know the dirty business you’re part of? Do you think I don’t know about your little trips here, there and everywhere, and what you’re trafficking across the border every day of the week! You’re a lad who likes to sail close to the wind. Some day, maybe too close!’

‘A few cigarettes! Maybe a crate of spirits …’ Joe protested.

‘Cut the cabaret act! Don’t treat me like a fool! Rubber goods are getting through to the twenty-six counties under the noses of the Guards. Half of Dublin is flooded with filth!’

Joe blanched. Hearing a priest talk of rubber goods could only lead to trouble.

Eugene silently entered the snug and placed, unbidden, a ball of malt at his elbow and a drop of best brandy for the priest, before sidling offsides again. Joe took a sip and prayed for guidance.

‘How can I be of assistance to you, Father?’ he asked.

‘You can keep your eyes open and your mouth shut! I want to know the whereabouts of Cornelius Moran and the McGuffin woman. I want to know the whereabouts of anyone else who is hiding from the Church authorities. I want to know what McCoy is planning. I want to know what happens on the Shambles before it happens! When I need you, I know where I can find you.’

Schnozzle lifted the brandy and downed it in a single gulp. ‘And get that boy of yours home out of here. This is no place for a lad of his age.’ He rose to go and every eye in the bar was on him.

‘This very minute, Father,’ Joe said, signalling to Eugene his urgent need for a refill.

‘There’s a boy has just been to see Big Mac above in the Palace,’ Peadar the vegetable man ventured when the coast was clear. ‘And by the look of him I’d say the old man tore him a new arsehole before he let him go.’

‘By all accounts things aren’t going too well on the Falls Road,’ Eugene said.

‘A terrible business, all the same,’ opined the Tyrone man. That lad chucking God’s vocation back in His face over the head of some woman or other.’

‘If you feel so strongly about it, maybe you should have offered him your condolences in person!’ Eugene said, not liking to hear a buck from Tyrone get too sanctimonious.

‘Fuck off! Do you want to get me killed!’

‘What is Schnozzle Durante anyway but a Shambles man like the rest of us?’ the vegetable man said, emboldened by his fourth pint. ‘Didn’t I know him when he was running round with no arse in his trousers?’

‘That’s enough of that sort of talk, now,’ Eugene ordered, hearing the Patriot’s heavy footsteps in the room above.

Like his doppelganger McCoy, Schnozzle O’Shea was a Shambles man, the pair of them born within hours of each other in the draughty nursing home above the square. Had they been inadvertently switched at birth, who can say if things might have turned out differently? But no gin-befuddled midwife had exchanged this pair while their mothers lay in post-parturient exhaustion. In the Shambles Infirmary the persuasions were kept apart. The baby McCoy bawled lustily on the top floor while the infant Schnozzle whimpered and mewled in the basement. On this occasion the segregation was hardly necessary. For no one, drunk or sober, could for a moment have mistaken the red-necked youngster with the fog-horn cry for anything other than a true-blue Protestant, nor allocated the cranny wain with (God bless the mark!) the facial deformity anywhere but to the Fenian ward.

Where the other children of the Shambles ran ragged and carefree, Schnozzle’s was a boyhood of enforced solitude, peering out from behind the shutters at his contemporaries playing and fighting and shrieking in the gutters. But he could never fully escape their curiosity. No one on the Shambles had ever seen such a nose on a baby. It was a remarkable organ. It made your eyes water just thinking about it. It began in the furrow between the eyes as a thin and bony protrusion, with all the makings of a hooked beak. But halfway down the shaft, just where you could reasonably have expected it to begin its aquiline outward curve, something altered its progress. It seemed to lose its way. Just as even development in nature is sometimes radically altered by unforeseen disaster, so too had some great change come over the evolution of Schnozzle’s nose. It broadened and flattened. As a consequence his upper face had the dry predatory appearance of a bird of prey, while his lower face and jaw had a slackness and permanent moistness more suited to an aquatic lifestyle, perhaps even to a bottom feeder. One look at that nose and you were overcome with a strong impulse to pull out your handkerchief and check your own.

At the age of seven he had taken stock of his features in the mirror in the back scullery and, seeing reflected there a lifetime’s enforced chastity, opted for the clerical life. And though his widowed mother could barely keep them out of the workhouse, she accepted the boy’s vocation as the hand of God. She scraped and saved till she could send him to the seminary on the hill above, and once there he threw himself into his studies with singular determination. His appearance and his breeding were against him and he knew it, but the more adversity life threw at him the more he was determined to rise above it. Nothing, he vowed to himself, would stand between himself and the very top.

The very top was Ara Coeli, the Mansion of Heaven. It was a grey-stone palace of modest enough proportions, standing between the seminary and the great cathedral on top of the hill overlooking the Shambles. It was here that old Cardinal Maguire lived; it was here that the great decisions of Church and State were taken; for this was the headquarters and nerve centre of the Church in Ireland. The youthful Schnozzle, poring over his books in the study hall would sometimes lift his eyes to the spires beyond the windows, or to Ara Coeli itself, and dream how one day he would enter its hallway as Primate of All Ireland.

Boys, even those destined for the highest calling, can be cruel. They focus with unerring accuracy on the slightest physical flaw – a barely noticeable facial tic, the hint of a turn in one eye – and a nickname once given will stick for life if it has the ring of truth about it. In the case of Augustus O’Shea (the name he had been given at the font), the deformity cried out for derision. They ignored his eyes which were close set, his hair which was already thin and receding, his ears which stuck out like the handles on a shilling jug; in the years to come these features might mellow. But even the thickest country boarder couldn’t ignore the nose.

There was in the college at the time a doting old priest whom God and the drink had afflicted with a nose like a cancerous banana. He was known to one and all as Schnozzle Durante. The old man had died within a month of Augustus’s arrival and by a process of transference the name had been bestowed on the new boy. Through school he had been Schnozzle to his classmates. In Maynooth he was Schnozzle to his professors. After ordination he became Father Schnozzle to his first parishioners. The name stuck to him like tar.

It came as little surprise then when he was posted to Saint Matthew’s in the heart of the Belfast ghetto.

The parish took its name from Matt Talbot, a one-time loser and down-and-out who had frequented the back doors of the Dublin rich in the hope of handouts. The hirsute Matt had later gone on to forswear the drink entirely and devote himself to acts of public piety. To remind himself of his former life of degradation in the gutter he took to wearing chains round his waist and sackcloth on his back while standing on street corners warning of the evils of drink and the need for repentance. When they canonized him, the Falls Road parish had been alone in espousing the cause of the former hobo, hopeful of a miracle of transformation. But with the passing years the saint’s ability to deliver the goods had waned. Saint Matt’s Mission was a bum rap, the bummest rap in the diocese if not in the whole of Ireland; it was the Slough of Despond, it was the pits, it was a cul de sac from which no man of ambition would ever return.

Yet Father Snozzle had ambition aplenty, an ambition so strong that he would allow nothing, neither the poverty of his birth nor his physical affliction, to deter him from it. He knew, of course, why he had been landed with Saint Matt’s. But, once landed with it, he set about getting himself out of it with his customary tenacity.

The forlorn aim of Saint Matt’s Mission, declared in peeling letters above the vestry door, was ‘TO RE-CONVERT THE PERVERT’. The latter term implied no sexual slur, but applied to those who had deserted the religion of their forefathers to embrace the heresies of the planters. While it is acknowledged that no crown in heaven is more glorious than that which is reserved for the convert, it is likewise acknowledged that no corner of hell is hotter than that earmarked for the pervert and his offspring. Down the ages, during the great hungers of our dreadful past, the English had set up their soup kitchens amid the dead and the dying, tempting the faithful at their hour of despair with the smell of oxtail and lentils. The Irish had been steadfast in the face of temptation. But there were some around Antrim who had succumbed, turning their backs forever on salvation in exchange for the bowl of broth. Their children’s children now walked the streets of Belfast, dimly aware of their secret shame.

Many years before, when he was still a young man, Cardinal Mac, or plain Father Mac as he was then, had served a brief apprenticeship in the parish. It was a time of triumphalism throughout Europe, and even the drab back-to-backs of Belfast were temporarily caught up in the heady enthusiasm of the times. Coming home from the Eucharistic Congress in Dublin, the voice of Count John McCormack still ringing in his ears, Big Mac had fallen asleep on the train and dreamed a wondrous dream. It was a dream of the Irish people united at last, all bending the knee to the one true pontiff, the Bishop of Rome. A voice was calling to him in his dream, the voice of Saint Patrick himself, ordering him to establish a mission for the re-conversion of the Protestants. When the train reached Great Victoria Street, Big Mac had taken a trolley bus to the Irish News and shared his vision with the editor, who cleared the front page. For a week or two the Mission was the talk of the town. But the Shankill Road remained unimpressed. There was an outbreak of rioting as they made clear yet again their low opinion of the Pope and all his minions. Father Mac’s dream faded away as quickly as it had come. Trying to convert Protestants was a lost cause. If he wasn’t careful he could spend his life in frustration and futility, with not as much as one convert to show for his troubles. He was no fool, he could see the writing on the wall. When promotion to more salubrious surroundings had been offered, Father Mac had not dallied a day longer than necessary on the Falls Road.

His legacy to the ghetto remained. At the bottom of the Falls, a part of town that no separated brother with any wit would ever venture near, there stood a mouldering parochial hall attached to a mouldering parochial house. This was the nerve centre of the project. Previous incumbents, since Big Mac’s time, had been content to keep their heads down, recognizing that their careers were over. Every Saturday they would gather a crowd from the Legion of Mary and distribute their literature outside the Bank Buildings in the centre of the town. Every Sunday night they held a Holy Hour and prayed that the Sacred Heart might open the eyes and hearts of the Orangemen before it was too late. As a strategy for the conversion of the Protestant hordes that occupied the neighbouring Shankill and its tributaries it was fairly low key, for the truth was that no one expected any miracles in this direction any more, even from the Sacred Heart.

Sometimes a stranger, braving the hazards of the Falls would wander into the mission and announce himself a lost sheep come home to the one and only fold. Experience had taught those who laboured in this particular vineyard not to get too excited. It could be guaranteed that by nightfall your man would have discovered that he was the Risen Christ Himself, come to save the world, and it would be time to ring the Mater Hospital for the men in white coats.

Father Schnozzle’s first task, on taking over his new duties, was to scrutinize the books; it came as no great surprise to him that there hadn’t been one true conversion since the records began. Further research uncovered a depressing picture. The parish map revealed great swathes of backstreets where never a penny was contributed for the upkeep of their pastor. He knew his rights. He should start paying house calls, hammering on doors and demanding the dues, as the rule book states. But Father Schnozzle knew that even an ordained priest would be taking his life in his hands venturing down these backstreets. He offered up a prayer to the Infant of Prague for inspiration and waited, knowing that sooner or later something would turn up.