Dancing in Limbo. Edward Toman
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This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Fourth Estate
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London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by Flamingo 1995
Copyright © Edward Toman 1995
Edward Toman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN 9780006479840
Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2016 ISBN: 9780008228422
Version: 2016-11-08
For Geraldine
tá an Teamhair ’na féar
is féach an Traoi mar tá
Tara is under grass
and what now remains of Troy?
Contents
At the very moment that the Popemobile passed closest to him, Father Frank realized he was speaking in tongues. Though he had never been much of a one for the languages, it crossed his mind that he might be speaking in fluent Irish at last, and that fifteen years’ effort by the priests and the Christian Brothers might be paying a dividend. But this was something different from the plodding ‘tá mé go maith’ of his schooldays. Different too from the cursory acquaintance with Latin and Greek that his years in Derry and Maynooth had given him. There on the grass of the Phoenix Park the talk just flowed from him in great fluent gushes.
His first reaction was embarrassment. He looked round surreptitiously, but the great tumult that had gathered for the occasion had more to do than pay attention to one loquacious curate. Everyone was as bad as himself, gibbering away, each in his own tongue, their voices drowned out by the roaring and chanting and singing and praying that echoed from the four corners of the vast park. ‘So far so good,’ he thought to himself. He was beginning to enjoy his new talent when another strange sensation came creeping through his body. Frank knew he was sober, or at least as sober as was decent for Ireland’s favourite priest to be on this great day. But an unaccustomed detachment was stealing over his limbs, a feeling of lightness creeping up from his feet to his head. He felt that he was leaving his body and floating above it. Then his limbs began to move involuntarily, and seconds later he found himself floating up into the air above the cheering crowds.
He wasn’t the only one. The air was suddenly thick with flying bodies, cartwheeling, dive-bombing, looping the loop. In the compound directly below him, from which these aerobatics had originated, the ground was now alive with writhing and twitching limbs. Some foamed at the mouth, some declaimed loudly in incomprehensible tongues, others lay intertwined in lewd, unseemly rites. He didn’t need telling that Canon Tom would be in the middle of them.
Experimentally flicking his left foot as a rudder, Frank found he could flip himself over like a helium balloon. The multitude filled the entire park and stretched as far as the eye could see, the whole of Ireland gathered in the one spot, cheering with one voice. His Holiness was now moving on to the next corral