Shambles Corner. Edward Toman
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and taxes and yield per acre. But when a fight broke out you could rest assured that the cause was money or misunderstanding, and that the old problems of the city had been left at the door. It was a convention upheld by all. A man might be gunned down at his place of work, or beaten to pulp at his fireside; he could be maimed as he knelt in worship or kneecapped as he stood at the bar. But not here, never here. Here was sanctuary, mutually agreed. No hooded figure would ever enter the damp interior of the bogs to pump hot lead into some enemy sitting at stool.
‘It’s never too early to learn how to pass yourself in mixed company,’ said Joe, steering Frank towards the narrow entrance. The boy hesitated. The stench from inside was overpowering. Joe laughed and lit a cigarette, fanning himself with the smoke. ‘I’ll not disagree with you, there’s a quare hogo. That’ll be your Tyrone men. As full of dung as a donkey. Have a few pulls of this,’ he said, offering the cigarette. Frank took it and drew on it hungrily.
It was a roofless building of grey pebbledash. The thin drizzle which had started up added to the dampness underfoot. Three of the walls served as urinals. In the middle of the floor was a hole which acted as a drain, already half blocked with the butts of cigarettes. ‘Wait till you see the state of the place in a few hours,’ Joe assured him, ‘they’ll be up to their knees in it.’ Under the fourth wall ran an open sewer, above which was fixed a thick wooden plank supported by bricks at both ends and with a dozen holes cut out of it. And although it was still early in the day most of the places on the plank were already taken by a line of grunting countrymen, their trousers round their ankles, reading the local papers and shitting noisily. The descendants of the dispossessed, down from the high ground to barter, sat side by side with the descendants of the planters, easing their engorged bowels together, all for the moment equal.
Father and son pissed at length against the wall, Joe whistling a non-sectarian tune. He discarded his cigarette into the drain with a flick of the wrist. ‘By jing, but I needed that,’ he remarked to the company at large as he buttoned his flies. No one answered, but the eyes of the Tyrone men never left him. ‘Come outside now,’ he instructed Frank, ‘and we’ll have a bottle of stout, just one, before we get rid of the pigs and see the sights. We’ll nip over to Hughes’s.’ As he spoke, the great carillon of the cathedral began its slow chime, tolling out the signal for the half hour. Frank looked round, startled, and his father laughed. ‘You heard that all right. Didn’t I tell your poor mother that a trip to Armagh would do you a power of good?’
The Shambles was filling up. The tinkers had emerged from their trailers and were setting up stalls on the waste ground. Joe and Frank sauntered across to the tractor, taking in the wonders of the city – the windmill on Windmill Hill, Laager Hill, where the army of King Billy had encamped on their way to the Boyne, the track of the old Keady railway which ran under the convent walls off to their left. Then they turned their attention to the bottom of Scotch Street where the Glorious Martyrs Memorial Chapel stood sentinel. ‘That’s McCoy’s place,’ Joe said. ‘A fucking eyesore and no mistake. Would you look at the state of it! Your mother was right. The bastard has had no luck since he pulled that stunt with the Mexicans. He went too far entirely that time.’
It was a low structure of corrugated iron, backing on to the square, its entrance among the withered flags of Scotch Street. It had once been painted with red-lead, but since the decline in McCoy’s fortunes, rust had eaten through the rivets and the crumbling girders were beginning to show like ribs where the stove chimney pierced the roof. The gable wall was covered with tattered posters, urging the passerby to repent of his sins and to flee the wrath to come. ‘Turn ye therefore unto Jesus, which is the Christ,’ exhorted a hand-painted sign on the roof. There were other reminders that the wages of sin are death and that man is saved only through faith, each carefully annotated with chapter and verse, and other announcements lay half buried underneath, notices advertising monster evangelical rallies, prayer meetings and healing ministries. Smiling young men with sleeked-back hair, their grins of fellowship distorted to grimaces by the corrugations of the walls, assured one and all of a warm welcome in Jesus. A neon sign, announcing that herein was preached only the Crucified Christ, had fallen askew, but still flickered intermittently across towards Irish Street.
‘I don’t see the ice-cream van at any rate,’ said Joe. ‘The hoor must be on the road again. Trying to drum up the price of a few pints.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Do you see that chapel. It was a goldmine in his father’s day. And look at it now. If it wasn’t for Magee he’d be in the workhouse long ago. Magee’s a bucko from Portadown I need hardly add. He might have been a bigot but he knew how to run a business. The pair of them fell out over that Mexican. Magee did a few months in the Crumlin after the body was washed up in Belfast Lough, but they never proved anything. Without him, McCoy’s nothing but a bollocks.’ Joe looked at his son, detecting a flicker of interest in what he was telling him. ‘Some time I must tell you the whole story of that pair of hoors, or at least as much of it as our side of the house will ever know. But now I must go and pay my respects to the Patriot.’
They checked on the pigs. ‘As right as rain,’ Joe declared, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth. All the talking had put him in the humour for a drink. From the Patriot’s came the subdued murmur of early-morning supping. ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do,’ he said, lifting the boy up into the tractor seat, ‘I’ll just pop in here for a moment to conduct a bit of business. Be a good man and keep an eye on the beasts. If anybody comes along showing an interest you’ll know where to find me. And don’t for the love of Jesus let any cowboy go prodding them.’ He swung open the doors of the Patriot Bar and disappeared into the noise. Frank was listening to the bells booming out the hour over the city when he became aware of another voice calling him from the pavement below: ‘What the fuck’s wrong with you? Are you deaf?’ The man was short and thick-set, with arms and shoulders overdeveloped for the rest of his short frame, and dark, suspicious eyes. ‘I’m asking are yiz selling these pigs?’ Frank looked down but made no answer. The man’s face reddened and he shouted angrily, ‘Where’s your da?’ For a moment Frank made no move. Then his head turned in the direction of the public house. The man stood back and looked carefully at the building. ‘Are you sure it’s in there he is?’ He reached up and roughly pulled the boy down from his perch and dropped him on to the ground. ‘Take a run in there and tell your father that Mister Magee is outside and taking an interest in these beasts.’
The door of the pub was stiff but Magee made no attempt to help him with it. Frank pushed it open and fell inside. It was warm and smoky, smelling of porter and whiskey and sweat. A pair of men near the door grabbed hold of him and began to fool about with him roughly, reaching for his balls and prodding him, but something told them they wouldn’t get much of a rise out of him the way they would with a proper half-wit who had wandered in off the street, or a woman in after her husband. He saw his father standing at the end of the bar and he broke away from their grasp and ran to him, tugging at his sleeve to get his attention. Joe reached down and picked him up and sat him on the bar and gave him a sip of his porter, all the while carrying on a one-sided conversation with a fat Tyrone man who was standing with his back to him. The fat man turned to look at the boy, tousled his hair roughly and asked what was the matter with him. ‘Need you ask?’ said Joe. ‘Or need I say any more than that he is a past pupil of our very own Christian Brothers?’
‘All the same,’ said his companion, ‘where would the country be without them? Tell me that.’
‘True,’ said Joe, buying the man another chaser. Frank tugged at his arm. He raised the glass to his mouth and drank slowly. ‘Sure whoever he is, can’t he wait?’ He lifted the whiskey glass and drank it in one swallow, following it with another swig of the black porter. ‘Now tell me this,’ he said to Frank, ‘why couldn’t he come in and fetch me out himself like a Christian? Why did he send the boy in?’ He addressed this last remark to his companion.
‘Never send a boy on a man’s errand,’ the other agreed.
‘There’s only one answer to that question,’ said Joe, once more turning to the boy on the bar. ‘I fear our friend outside digs with the other foot.’
‘There’s a lot of their side of the house that don’t take a drink at all,’ reasoned the