Dancing in Limbo. Edward Toman
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approaching from the mill, her natural pallor bleached to a spectral white, the same corner boy might snigger about the ghost of Christmas Past. Or whistle ‘Blue Moon’, what he knew of it, if the colour of the month were blue. During the cheerless winter Lily’s changing appearance provided a measure of much needed entertainment round the town.
But in the new year the people of Portadown, to their consternation, began to discern the colours of the republican tricolour running faintly through their breakfast offal, and noticed that Lily was now exuding a faint but unmistakable glow of papist infamy. It was clear that once more things were getting out of hand.
Though the Protestant, with his complex calendar of memorials and marches, is a great consumer of red, white and blue bunting, Magee had realized long ago that he would never become Portadown’s first millionaire by trading with his own side of the house alone. His kinsmen, for one thing, retrieved their bunting from the lampposts when the patriotic moment had passed, drying it and storing it carefully for another day. Furthermore, the Loyalist marching season lasted only for the summer months. They commemorated the Somme in the spring, and remembered 1690 in July. But after they had marched round Derry’s walls and honoured the Apprentice Boys in August, they were ready to put away their banners and their trombones for another year. Magee faced six long fallow months till the lambeg drums summoned them to arms once more.
But with the Fenians it was a year-round business, and Magee wasn’t long in spotting the market gap. He knew enough about the habits of the Romanists; if it wasn’t the Ancient Order of Hibernians who were celebrating, it would be some Holy Day or other. What was more, they alternated their need for the green, white and gold of the Republic with the yellow and white of the Papal States. And what he’d seen round their side of the Shambles appalled him. Tattered and torn green and yellow banners, badly made from old vests and knickers, crudely stitched, the colours running in the rain. Home-made efforts, of uncertain size and design. The papists, it went without saying, showed nothing of the parsimony or foresight of the Protestant when it came to retrieving their bunting after the bands had passed, leaving theirs to rot in the rain till it fell down. If Magee could expand his enterprise and start selling bunting to the Fenians he knew he could be on to a winner. But it was a mad thought and he knew it! To turn out the green and yellow of papist treachery in the heart of loyalist Portadown! Through his butchering business he had occasional contact with the Fenians, bartering with them through the rituals of fair days, necessary if distasteful intercourse. He knew how untrustworthy they could be in financial matters. But that wasn’t the only snag. Before he could even consider such a scheme he would have to obtain the blessing of the big boys. The ‘GPs’ as they liked to call themselves! Had he the nerve to approach them, offering them a percentage, come rain or shine, in exchange for their approval? Or was he mad altogether, getting himself mixed up with the men in black glasses? He was still wavering when McCoy’s message arrived, summoning him to the Shambles.
Every since the débâcle with the dancing statue, he had been giving the Reverend Oliver Cromwell McCoy a wide berth. McCoy might be a true blue bigot, but he had an uncanny knack of ballsing up everything he touched. And since his daughter’s disappearance, Magee knew he had forsaken the preaching and was reduced to scrounging drink round the back of the Boyne bar. But when the boy appeared from Armagh with the news that Brother Murphy was in urgent need of papal flags, that he was buying only the best, and that (unheard of for a Christian Brother) he was paying cash on the nail, Magee swallowed his principles and set off for the town to check things out for himself.
‘Where’s that girl of yours now that we need her?’ he demanded. ‘I could have done with an extra pair of hands.’
‘She’ll be back in her own good time, never fret,’ her father said. ‘When she tires of the bright lights of London.’
Chastity McCoy, the preacher’s daughter, had walked out on him on Christmas Eve, disappearing from the Martyrs Memorial Chapel like a thief in the night without as much as goodbye. Her desertion of him hadn’t come as a total surprise to her father, for the pair of them had been fighting like cat and dog for the best part of a year. But she had packed her bags this time, taking with her what scanty possessions she could call her own, and it was beginning to look as if she had gone for good.
‘London!’ Magee spat on the hearth at the mention of the place. ‘You should have married her off the day she turned fourteen. Many’s a farmer would have been glad of her, and there’d have been less lip out of the same lady.’
‘I’m only relieved she’s safe,’ McCoy said. Since she had flown the nest he had discovered a soft spot for Chastity. He regretted now that he hadn’t treated her better. ‘There was a card from her this morning. Old King George, no less.’ He reached up to the mantelpiece and took down a tattered postcard. King George the Sixth, looking ill at ease, stared back at them, framed by his family and the household dogs. ‘I swear I was having nightmares she’d been kidnapped and I’d have to fork out good money to rescue her.’ He turned the card over and read once more the message on the back. ‘She sends you her best at any rate,’ he said. ‘“Greetings from the heart of the Empire. Give Mister Magee my regards.” There you are! Mentioned in dispatches.’
‘No doubt the same lady will be back when it suits her, eating you out of house and home.’
‘And she’ll be welcome. There is more joy in heaven over one who is lost …’
Magee cut him short. ‘About these flags … ?’
‘I heard it from that scut from Tyrone.’
‘The bucko who’s never out of the Patriot’s across the way?’
‘As tight as an arsehole, like the whole shooting gallery of them. But it appears half Tyrone has been cutting up sheets this past month and they still can’t meet the demand.’
‘The Fenians must have something special planned,’ Magee said with suspicion.
‘What concern is that of you or me, Mister Magee! Let the Romanists damn themselves in whatever way they want. You, Sir, are an entrepreneur.’
Magee pondered this news for a while. Then he came to a decision. If the Fenians needed flags badly enough to be paying for them he was their man!
‘I’ll need all the rags I can get my hands on,’ he demanded.
‘If you think I’m going round the doors collecting hand-me-down drawers …’
‘Send McGuffin! What else is he good for?’
‘Fuck all else and that’s the truth,’ McCoy said. ‘But I can hardly have him put down after all the trouble he’s put me to.’
Outside the window, cowering on his mattress under the ice-cream van, they could make out the shadow of the renegade. Patrick Pearse McGuffin cut a pathetic figure, a Belfast man, a native of the Falls Road, who had turned his back on his faith and his people, to embrace the dubious pleasures preached by McCoy. It had been the action of a desperate man to desert Father Alphonsus on his pilgrimage to Lough Derg, an action that had left him friendless in a bitter land. It had been the action of an even more desperate man to convert to McCoy. If the truth were to be told, his conversion to the loyalist lifestyle had not been totally voluntary. But beggars can’t be choosers and as a runaway his hopes for the good life were sorely curtailed. When he had taken the soup Patrick Pearse had dropped the Republican forenames in an effort to integrate into his new surroundings, but changing your name was an old McGuffin trick that fooled no one; and since the day he had embraced the Lord as his personal saviour, McGuffin had been lucky to eke out a precarious existence round the Martyrs Memorial.
‘Did the girl leave on account of him? Was he bothering her?’ Magee demanded.
McCoy shook his head. ‘Chastity was always headstrong. Like her mother.’
‘I’ll wring that wee bitch’s neck when I see her next!’ Magee declared. ‘Just when she could have been some use.’ There was something about Chastity’s disappearance