Dancing in Limbo
Oliver Cromwell McCoy, God’s man in Ulster, has stumbled into the radio age. With a crumbling transmitter left over from the Titanic he has taken to blasting the countryside with his inimitable brand of mendacious evangelism.His old adversary across the Shambles, Cardinal Schnozzle O’Shea, is determined to go one better. He needs a good-looking priest to anchor the great TV chat show he believes will get Ireland back on its knees. When his eye lights on young Frank Feely, authoritarianism and bigotry duly lock horns.But more elemental forces are at work too. Emboldened by a dimly recalled vision they once shared, the vision of an enigmatic Madonna who danced for them and for them alone, three young people began a movement to challenge the straitjacket of their destinies. But is theirs a dream of hope? Or are they about to unleash a nightmare of new and as yet unimagined terror?By turns deeply thought-provoking and wildly funny, Dancing in Limbo plunges the reader into the modern-medieval world created by the author in his hugely acclaimed first novel, Shambles Corner.
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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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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
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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 of flag-waving faithful, yet Frank could follow his progress with the same apparent ease as Chief Inspector O’Malley in the hired helicopter overhead. ‘This beats Bannagher!’ he told himself, going higher. Beyond the park the whole of Dublin city opened itself to him, lying strangely peaceful and deserted in the pale sunshine.
But as he looked north to the blue haze of the far off Ulster hills he was aware of something moving in the distance and he heard, above the cacophony below him, the faint jangling of discordant bells. Fighting back a sudden rush of terror and vertigo he fell like a stone to the ground.
One spectator alone stood aloof. Sister Maria Goretta was making a poor fist of hiding her disgust at the turn events were taking. Cynically she let her gaze wander over the hysterical crowd, now embarked on a bacchanalia of groping, French kissing, and wild, ecstatic, abandoned dancing. She noted the Canon in their midst. She noted too the wrinkled features of the native speaker, sweeled in plaid rugs and propped up in his bathchair, with Snotters MacBride dancing attendance on him. She lit a Sweet Afton and turned away from their obscenities. She would let events take their course, there would be no need for direct intervention this time, she decided reluctantly. The time to break heads would come later.
