Shambles Corner
First published in 1993 and now available as an ebook.Hilarious and poignant, Shambles Corner is a novel that takes an uncompromising look at the elaborate ideologies and rituals of religious bigotry in Ulster.Frank Feely is a young innocent growing up in the hills of Armagh. From his father Joe he learns about the goings-on in the city, where the two sides confront each other across the Shambles and the fortunes of an extraordinary cast of characters ebb and flow, until news comes from the far west of a discovery that will change them all.Though set in modern times, Shambles Corner portrays a quasi-medieval world where materialism and magic run hand in hand. A world of ghettos and pilgrimages and banishments, peppered with wit and violence, inhabited by farmers and smugglers, boatmen and butchers, clerics and publicans, gunmen, fugitives, patriots and saints; a world whose morals and mores are policed by a sinister band of fanatical, female vigilantes. A world anticipating the future and invoking the past as it lurches towards the millennium.
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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 1993
Copyright © Edward Toman 1993
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: 9780006545736
Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2016 ISBN: 9780008226916
Version: 2016-11-08
For Siobhán and Declan
ÓM SCEOL AR ARDMHAGH FÁIL NÍ CHODLAIM OÍCHE
I hear news from the high plains of Ireland and I cannot sleep at night
Contents
Alphonsus McLoughlin’s Spanish wasn’t all that hot, so it took him a minute or two to appreciate what the guide was telling him. The only way the mule could be persuaded to climb any higher, it seemed, was to offer it a shot of his tequila. ‘I can see its point,’ Alphonsus said, handing the bottle over without demur. He’d had quite a few shots himself that morning. He intended having quite a few more if God spared him. Only his faith and the cactus juice were keeping him going as, perched precariously on the swaying back of the bad-tempered beast and sweating like a proverbial pig under his dog collar, he stumbled upwards on a precipitous bridleway towards the lost city in the mountains.
On either side of the narrow trail the thorny cacti sprouted promiscuously. When Alphonsus was a boy, he had taken a brief interest in cacti. His aunt had kept a small one in the window of their house on the Falls Road, issuing orders to all who darkened her door that it was never to be watered. One Saint Patrick’s Day it flowered, to the amazement of the neighbours. They sent for the Irish News. In those days there was less trouble on the Falls, and the Irish News was grateful for any story with a human interest angle. A reporter arrived who made Alphonsus spell out his name and took a snapshot of him standing beside the miraculous succulent. Alphonsus didn’t dare tell him the truth, that Maud Gonne McGuffin, the backstreet girl who came in on a Saturday to do his aunt’s washing, had secretly watered the plant on compassionate grounds one night when the aunt was at confession. It was never a good idea to get on the wrong side of the McGuffin clan.
Before Easter, in spite of all the attention it was attracting, the cactus shrivelled and died. The Irish News spiked the story, Maud Gonne McGuffin was given her cards, and Alphonsus’s interests turned back to his impending vocation. His aunt had had to wait twenty years, until his ordination day, to see her smudged likeness on the front page of the paper.
Even now, swaying through an endless vista of stunted spiky growths, Father Alphonsus recalled the incident with a pang of residual guilt.
The guide, who had talked him into the trip the previous evening, had sworn to him on his mother’s grave that he would not be disappointed. But when they finally reached their destination at noon it needed only one glance at the scruffy Indian village for Alphonsus to know that he’d been sold a pup. But then what did he expect? he asked himself. The treasures of Teotihuacán? Half a dozen adobe huts were scattered round a makeshift square. Chickens and a goat scratched unconvincingly in the dust. A few children detached themselves from a lethargic game and tried to sell him knick-knacks. The guide ordered him to take photographs, then ushered him into the souvenir emporium. His heart sank. A boyhood on the Falls Road hadn’t taught him much about the glories of the Teoamoxtli, but he knew he could have spared himself the discomfort of the journey, could have stayed in the motel in Tijuana with a cold beer and a copy of Newsweek, enjoying impure thoughts by the poolside, instead of trekking all the way up to this God-abandoned spot. There was nothing here he couldn’t pick up in the town. He bought a few items out of politeness and was about to go when his eye was caught by the figurine nailed to the wall high above the cash register.
