Dancing in Limbo. Edward Toman
his progress with the same apparent ease as Chief Inspector O’Malley in the hired helicopter overhead. ‘This beats Bannagher!’ he told himself, going higher. Beyond the park the whole of Dublin city opened itself to him, lying strangely peaceful and deserted in the pale sunshine.
But as he looked north to the blue haze of the far off Ulster hills he was aware of something moving in the distance and he heard, above the cacophony below him, the faint jangling of discordant bells. Fighting back a sudden rush of terror and vertigo he fell like a stone to the ground.
One spectator alone stood aloof. Sister Maria Goretta was making a poor fist of hiding her disgust at the turn events were taking. Cynically she let her gaze wander over the hysterical crowd, now embarked on a bacchanalia of groping, French kissing, and wild, ecstatic, abandoned dancing. She noted the Canon in their midst. She noted too the wrinkled features of the native speaker, sweeled in plaid rugs and propped up in his bathchair, with Snotters MacBride dancing attendance on him. She lit a Sweet Afton and turned away from their obscenities. She would let events take their course, there would be no need for direct intervention this time, she decided reluctantly. The time to break heads would come later.
Then her eye lighted on the recumbent figure of Father F. X. Feely (Mister TV himself!) lying concussed on the ground with Noreen Moran kneeling solicitously over him, and her features hardened. Involuntarily her hand slipped under her habit and felt the reassuring contour of the semi-automatic pistol lying snugly against her thigh.
A thin trickle of blood dripped from Frank’s temple on to the crumpled grass. He was only half aware of the crowd milling around him, only dimly aware of Noreen bending over him. A hundred vignettes of his past flashed before him. He thought he was in service again, forced to skivvy in Schnozzle’s kitchen for the scraps from the Archbishop’s table. Then he was suddenly a schoolboy again, wincing from the blow to the head that Brother Murphy had dealt him and that had left him speechless for a decade. Another memory flickered into his mind’s eye. He saw himself and Noreen kneeling in supplication at the feet of the Dancing Madonna. In his delirium he tried to reach out to her. She had cured him once, made him whole again, back in the days before she had disappeared. But as her features grew more distinct he began to tremble. He saw in her eyes, not pity, not compassion, but cold, remorseless anger.
As he groped into semi-consciousness, Frank became aware of the throbbing in his head, and with it he had new terrors to confront. Memories of the past which he had hoped were suppressed for ever began to crowd inexorably into his jangled brain, each more awful than the last. A catalogue of atrocities and betrayals rose before his eyes. Men and women slaughtered as casually as beasts in a shambles. Hypocrisy dressed up as piety, and brutality masquerading as love. Echoing and re-echoing through the recesses of his mind were the words of the poem his father was for ever quoting, shouting it to the empty hedgerows above the noise of the tractor. Some rough beast, its hour come at last, was slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.
His head began to clear. He stumbled to his knees and vomited, spewing out on the grass the gorge rising from deep within him. Noreen cradled his head between her breasts, staunching with her mantilla the flow of blood from his wound. But his mind was clearer now. He staggered to his feet and seized her by the hand. He had detected a new restlessness sweeping through the crowd. Something unexpected, unplanned was happening. The massed choirs on the Tannoy faltered in their rendition of ‘Deep in the Panting Heart of Rome’. The multitude was beginning to move with a new urgency, pushing towards the gates of the park where the top of the papal transporter was still visible, moving hesitantly in the direction of the exit. Frank heard the crack of wood splintering as the crush barriers that corralled them began to collapse. There were wild men with fanatical eyes running through the throng now, urging them onward with garbled snatches of news, screaming the name McCoy. The helicopter was low overhead, and above the clatter of the rotors he could hear O’Malley on the megaphone frantically ordering the Guards to shoot.
And then he heard again that most chilling of sounds from his childhood in the North. The discordant jangle of McCoy’s bells. And he knew that what he had seen approaching over the Black Pig’s Dyke had not been a mirage.
He and Noreen were clutching each other tightly now, struggling against the tide of the crowd, hunched against their thrust, trying desperately to stay upright against the stampede. He opened his mouth to shout to them, to warn them. Something malevolent had come among them, something more powerful and more ancient than their petty sectarianism or their puny religiosity. There had been a time when they might have listened. But Frank Feely had wasted those years, years when he had them in the palm of his hand, wasted his opportunity with jazz bands and futile chatter. Now he wanted to shout a warning to the great mass of humanity rolling past him. But no words would come to him. Again and again he tried to warn them. But his voice had deserted him as surely as it had in his youth, condemning him for ever to a silent scream of rage and impotence and despair.
Sammy Magee’s sausages were never going to win any prizes from the true epicurean, but though fatty and flaccid they had one remarkable feature that brought him customers from as far away as Tandragee. They were faintly marbled throughout their full length — red, white and blue — the colours running through them like a stick of Portrush rock. ‘I’ll take a pound of thon Protestant sauce-dogs!’ the farmers would demand in their mountain accents, sidling into the butcher’s after conducting their bits of business in the town of a Saturday. And though the gristle content was enough to make even the farmyard dogs think twice before tackling them, Magee’s sausages sold like hot cakes, especially coming up to the Twelfth of July.
The farmers sidling into the shop had another motive too, one they didn’t dare remark on to the butcher’s face. They wanted to get an eyeful of Lily. For it was a curious fact that, like the chameleon, Lily Magee never seemed to be the same colour two weeks running.
It was with the arrival of the Marching Season proper, when for a brief few weeks Portadown bedecked itself in patriotic livery, that the mystery was solved. Magee was spotted at midnight, trundling a handcart of bunting into the back of the Orange Hall and the cat was out of the bag. By morning the whole town knew that the butcher had a secret sideline supplying loyalist flags and favours, and the coloured sausages and the coloured wife were revealed as the side-effects of this cottage industry. Week in and week out, early on the Sabbath morning, he and Lily had been scouring the dustbins at the back of the linen mill for discarded remnants. They dragged these home through the silent streets and stored them in the shed behind the house.
During the weeks ahead Lily cut and snipped while Magee himself trundled away on the old Singer, seaming each triangle at the base to accommodate the twine on which he would later thread them. Once a month, on a Saturday night, he shut up the shop early. The rest of the town, by way of entertainment, would be out on the streets, busily preaching the word of the Risen Lord and prophesying His imminent return. But Magee and Lily would forgo the delights of the soap box, for there was work to do. He would hose out the big copper he used for boiling up the black puddings, drag it out into the backyard and begin to brew up the colour of the month. He had three large barrels of industrial strength dye, purloined from a factory in Antrim, which he kept in the coal-hole, the smell of them acting as deterrent enough to anyone who might be tempted to sample them in alcoholic desperation. He collected up the month’s output and bundled it into the pot while Lily stirred with a stick.
As she walked to the Meeting House next morning, Lily’s complexion reflected the labours of the night before. The dye permeated her hair, it clung to her clothes, it lurked in the cuticles of her fingernails, resistant to all exertions with the Sunlight soap. If it were a red month then Lily would glow with the deep red of the blood of martyrs spilt in the defence of her heritage, the red of the Red Hand of Ulster itself. ‘Little