Shambles Corner. Edward Toman

      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,