Dancing in Limbo. Edward Toman
telling them not to worry. Inside Magee’s gut an icy finger of doubt began to stir.
He outlined his scheme to meet the Fenians’ demands to Lily that night as she was scrubbing herself down at the scullery sink.
‘Do you want your head examined?’ she asked.
‘There’s no harm in trying,’ he insisted.
‘And get the pair of us lynched! It’s bad enough you have me walking round like a Union Jack! How in the name of God can I put my face out that door and me green, white and yellow!’
‘If anybody’s bothering you, you refer them to me.’
‘They’re already complaining about the black pudding.’
‘I’ll get it cleared at the highest level. I’ll take a wee run over to the doctor’s next week.’
‘You’ll do no such thing! Do you want us killed in our beds?’
‘You’re afraid of your own shadow! What harm is there in putting it to them as a business proposition!’
‘Those are the same boys who’d drop you in the shite if anything goes wrong. Take my advice and stay well away from that crowd. I don’t see your buddy McCoy getting too closely involved.’
‘McCoy would only balls it up. Besides what use is he with the daughter gone?’
‘I never liked that wee bitch,’ Lily said with sudden vehemence. ‘She had her mother’s snotty looks. Too good for the Shambles. He’s well rid of her.’
‘She’s run off before,’ Magee said uneasily, ‘but never for as long as this.’
‘If the pair of you had taken my advice you’d have put her out to service years ago,’ she grumbled. They were offering a fair price on the Antrim plateau for girls willing to work. Not that the bold Chastity was ever any use except for giving cheek and eating him out of house and home.’
‘The same lady will be back, mark my words. To embarrass the lot of us unless I’m very wrong.’
‘If McCoy had wanted a woman that bad,’ she said, remembering the Señora, ‘why couldn’t he have stuck to his own sort instead of running after darkies? What was wrong with a decent Ulster Protestant?’ She turned her rump towards Magee by way of invitation. Lily’s was a solid arse, an arse bred of generations of Protestants, now faintly stained in variegated patriotic hues. It was an arse as solid, reliable and unexciting as the plains of Antrim or the farming land of North Armagh. Magee closed his eyes and conjured up a memory of the Mexican, her sultry looks, her voluptuous body, her dark hair cascading in wanton profusion. Señora McCoy was dead and buried a decade ago, but an old, guilty lust began to stir somewhere deep in him. He pulled Lily roughly towards him and began to fumble inexpertly at the strings of her pinny.
Round Armagh there were other omens that springtime, foretelling imminent changes. The uneasy equilibrium of the town was about to tilt again. The tinkers with their gift of second sight were the first to grow suspicious. In old Cardinal Mac’s day tinkers would be for ever round the back door of the Palace of Ara Coeli, squatting stoically in the lee of the limestone wall, knowing there’d be either a handout or a bollocking before the end of the day, for you took the old man as you found him. And even after Big Mac had taken to his bed, which he did in the last years, they could rely on Major-domo MacBride to see them right. But all that had suddenly changed. Those who trekked up the hill now from the Shambles to Ara Coeli, found Schnozzle Durante O’Shea in residence and every door and window bolted against them. The place was sealed as tight as a drum. Tighter than the Sistine Chapel during a contested consistory. Every window shuttered, every door fastened. Not a sign of Major-domo Mac-Bride nor the staff of skivvies who worked under him.
And strangest of all, not a sighting of Schnozzle himself since Christmas. Curious and mysterious behaviour for a party who had been, until his recent elevation to the Primacy, so keen to keep poking his nose in the public’s business.
The tinkers cursed the new man on the hill when they returned to the Shambles, cursed him and his new ways more openly than any local would have dared, for tinkers are a law unto themselves, beyond even the reaches of the Sisters. There was a notice on the saloon door expressly barring travellers from the Patriot Arms, but Eugene served them through the window, letting them squabble and spit in the entry till their money was through. Tinkers were the prime source of information in the countryside; there was little they didn’t know. He listened to their complaints and forebodings without a word. And when they had gone he sent next door for Peadar the vegetable man, ordered him to close up the stall forthwith, to proceed to the cathedral on the hill above, to recce the territory and to report on what was going on.
‘The whole place is locked and barred,’ Peadar told the company when he returned, pale and terrified that evening. ‘There’s definitely something up! No one allowed in or out, Schnozzle’s orders.’
‘Holy God! That sounds ominous.’
‘You’d think he’d be out and about, making a name for himself, instead of closeted away,’ the Tyrone man ventured. ‘Now that you mention it, we haven’t seen hilt nor hair of the major-domo.’
‘Aren’t I telling you, they’re all confined to barracks,’ Peadar said. ‘The breadman is stopped at the gate. The milkman too. With the Little Sisters sniffing every bottle before they take it inside. The grounds are sealed off. The Sisters patrolling the gardens with walkie-talkies and some class of an Alsatian they’ve got their hands on. A fucker that would take the leg off you quick enough!’ He had been forced to make an ignominious retreat in the face of the dog when he had stumbled on a posse of Sisters, their faces blackened, bivouacked near the tomb of old Cardinal Mac.
‘A special retreat or something?’ speculated the man from Tyrone. ‘Praying for the soul of poor old Ireland? I’d have said myself it’s a bit late for that.’
‘I was wondering why young Frank hadn’t shown his face. When he first got the job he’d be in here every morning,’ Eugene said.
‘The lad hasn’t been home since Christmas,’ the Tyrone man told him. ‘He’s cooped up with the rest of them. All leave cancelled till further notice. His poor mother’s half out of her mind.’
‘You’re still interested in that quarter, I see,’ said Peadar bitterly. ‘Tell us, which gives you the bigger hard-on, dreaming about the widow or dreaming about her ten acres?’
‘Fuck off with your dirty talk!’ the Tyrone man told him. ‘The farm is nothing but a liability.’
‘The young pup left his bicycle in the passage. I’m never done tripping over it.’
‘They’re saying you can see strange lights playing round the tomb of Cardinal Mac at night. Great devotion is getting up already, and him hardly cold in the grave.’
‘And now I hear there’s a big order out for papal flags. Where’s Snotters MacBride now that we need him to give us the lowdown?’
‘Someone somewhere has a treat in store for us,’ said Eugene dubiously, catching perfectly the mood of the occasion.
Mister MacBride, they all acknowledged, was a martyr to the lumbago. And though it was somewhat infra dig for a man in his position to be found drinking on the Shambles, hardly a night would pass that Snotters didn’t slip down to the Patriot’s for a medicinal rum and black. Though he wore the Pioneer Pin proudly, he would allow Eugene to urge a second or a third glass on him to ease the ache in his joints, and with his tongue thus loosened he could be pressed discreetly for details of the comings and goings on the hill.
‘It’s not like Snotters to desert us in our hour of need,’ the Tyrone man said again. ‘It must be a three line whip. If you ask me it’s the thin end of the wedge. If somebody doesn’t get a grip, the head-the-balls from Fermanagh will be up to their tricks again.’ And at the mention of