you’re still a pup! I see you’ve no more manners now than you had in Book Three!’ Eugene didn’t interfere. The bar was as good as empty anyway, even the Tyrone man having taken his custom elsewhere. A Christian Brother on the premises was always bad for business. He poured another rum, knowing the Brother would need it when he’d finished with the greengrocer. He made it a double. With God’s help Brother Murphy would pass out on the floor before long. He could see the foundlings standing outside in the rain, waiting to wheel him home.
When he realized the extent of the Romanists’ preparations McCoy grew worried. It was one thing to sell the Fenians flags for special occasions. It was another thing altogether to have them turn the Shambles into the Papal States. This was a challenge that could not go unanswered. He sent for Magee post haste.
‘Suddenly we’re on all fours with the papists,’ Lily protested when she saw him parcelling up a jumbo-sized order of the red, white and blue. ‘You expect me to run the shop singlehanded while you gallivant off at McCoy’s beck and call!’ But she knew him too well to say any more. The Portadown soul loves to show the flag. The only thing that brightens the drab grey streets of his environment are the primary colours of the polyester triangles. But even Magee was unprepared for the show of Fenian defiance that greeted him when he hit Armagh. He stood at the door of the Martyrs Memorial Chapel and gazed with anger and incredulity over at the papist quarter. The Brothers’ boys had returned and were adding the finishing touches to their handiwork, fixing cardboard shields to the lampposts, portraying the emblems of the four provinces.
Magee spat into the gutter. ‘A man of my age has more to do than running up and down ladders. Is there still no sign of that girl of yours?’
‘Another postcard. The Little Princess, Margaret Rose.’
Magee turned his attention to the ice-cream van that was parked on the pavement behind them. Underneath it, up against the rusting exhaust pipe, Patrick Pearse McGuffin had fashioned a makeshift nest. Cardboard cartons had been torn in strips in an effort to keep the rain out, and there was a soggy mattress stuffed with discarded newspapers where the renegade now cowered. ‘Why keep a dog and bark yourself?’ Magee growled, striding towards the van.
Patrick Pearse McGuffin too had been looking out on the sea of papal splendour and dreaming of happier times. He had been dreaming of Saint Matt Talbot’s, the parish on the Falls which he would never see again, and the people of the ghetto he could never meet again. He knew in his heart of hearts that he belonged on the Falls, among the warmth of his own people squabbling in the ladder of backstreets that led down to the no man’s land round the abandoned peace line. But there would be no going home for McGuffin. Not this year, not next, not ever! They had their own ways for dealing with touts and informers where he came from. And if they needed any reminding of his perfidy, Father Alphonsus was still there, still condemned to eke out his days in Matt Talbot’s; and as long as Father Alphonsus was there, McGuffin would never see the Falls Road again.
But how much longer could he survive like this, away from his natural habitat? The Shambles was as foreign to him as Timbuctoo. It would never feel like home. These were not his streets. They had a different smell, a different sound. These were not his people either. Nor ever would be. He knew he was living on borrowed time, despite his insistence to any who would lend him an ear that he was now as good a Protestant as they, any day of the week. They could smell the Fenian on him still. He suffered daily ignominies, especially from the farmers when they had drink taken, or from the children in the gutters when he ventured out. He had learned to suffer their jibes and insults. He had learned too to live with his fear of the GPs who had left him alone so far. But he didn’t need McCoy’s reminder that they would eliminate him at the first hint of backsliding. The Protestants of Scotch Street might be accustomed to the sight of McGuffin running messages for McCoy, but one of these days he would be murdered before he’d reached the end of the road, and no one would raise a finger in his defence.
He was gazing at the riot of papal flags with tears in his eyes when his reverie was rudely interrupted by the butcher Magee’s boot demolishing his cardboard home and ordering him to get off his arse and start earning his keep.
Though he had to work far into the night, by morning the job was done. The red, white and blue fluttered the full length of English Street, down to Scotch Street, round the Mall and back up by way of College Street. The entire town was now decorated. Like isobars on a weather map, the interweaving colours of the flags delineated precisely the political affiliations of every street. In the Shambles itself the loyalist bunting zigzagged into the square, interfacing with the green and yellow over the latrine at the centre. Everything now stood in readiness for the epiphany of Chastity McCoy.
Forty miles to the east, in Saint Matt’s vestry at the foot of the Falls Road, Father Alphonsus McLoughlin knelt at the dying embers of the fire praying like a man condemned. You wouldn’t have known it to look at him now, for he was a gaunt figure, wasted to skin and bone, but luck had once smiled on Alphonsus McLoughlin. He had won the most coveted prize a Belfast priest can hope for, the sabbatical to California, to spread the faith among the beautiful people. Alphonsus had briefly felt the sun on his back and the warm Pacific breeze playing through his hair. He had gambolled chastely with the gilded youth in the surf off Big Sur, and had ridden the ferryboat daily to Sausalito. But the sun and the surf and the laughter of innocent voices was now only a distant memory. His tan and his accent had faded and the pallor and the harshness of the ghetto had returned to his face and his voice.
He looked up at the stern features of the Sacred Heart on the wall and redoubled his efforts, screwing his knuckles into his eyesockets and howling aloud the words of the De Profundis. Alphonsus had been praying without a break since Ash Wednesday. He had persevered in his Lenten vigil, fasting for forty days and forty nights, not a morsel of food passing his lips, a hunger strike to draw heaven’s attention to his plight. And now it was Holy Saturday night, the eve of Easter, the last day of Lent, and it was clear that the Sacred Heart was determined to let his suffering continue. In a few hours it would be dawn. There would be no reprieve, no escape. He rose from the lino, spat on the fire and cursed, as he did day and night, the name of Patrick Pearse McGuffin.
Alphonsus felt there was a jinx on him that no penance could lift. He was haunted by a guilt he could neither understand nor explain. What latent malignant force had he unwittingly unleashed that day he had gone into the mountains beyond Tijuana and brought back the figurine of the little Virgin? Had he been seduced by a graven image of idolatry? Had he become a catalyst for the slow blight that was spreading over the land and its people? And how could he atone for what he had started?
A faded tricolour hung from the gable of Saint Matthew’s vestry in deference to the season. But there was nothing but despair in Alphonsus’s heart. He crossed himself one last time. The features of the Sacred Heart above the mantelpiece stayed as stern as ever. If only he could be given a sign, just one, no matter how small, that he would not have to see out his days in this dreadful place among the McGuffins and their bastards, scraping for a living among the fetid backstreets of the shanty town. But the Sacred Heart, as so often, was keeping the cards close to His chest. Alphonsus started his last, desperate rosary unaware that back in Ara Coeli, the powerhouse of the organization to which he had devoted his life, Schnozzle had called a meeting to brief his senior staff, and that his own name was prominent on the agenda.
Major-domo MacBride was run off his feet. In all his days he had never known anything like it. There were bishops and archbishops from the four provinces, the papal legate in person, monsignors and administrators, all crowded into the boardroom upstairs with their personal staff. The back parlour was overcrowded with lesser clergy and selected laity, awaiting their orders. Sam O’Dowd of the Irish News was there, waiting patiently on the stairs for Schnozzle to check his spelling before he gave him the Imprimatur. Sister Immaculata McGillicuddy guarded the front door, showing each of the
