Читать книгу Dancing in Limbo - Edward Toman - Страница 7

Prologue

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.

Then her eye lighted on the recumbent figure of Father F. X. Feely (Mister TV himself!) lying concussed on the ground with Noreen Moran kneeling solicitously over him, and her features hardened. Involuntarily her hand slipped under her habit and felt the reassuring contour of the semi-automatic pistol lying snugly against her thigh.

A thin trickle of blood dripped from Frank’s temple on to the crumpled grass. He was only half aware of the crowd milling around him, only dimly aware of Noreen bending over him. A hundred vignettes of his past flashed before him. He thought he was in service again, forced to skivvy in Schnozzle’s kitchen for the scraps from the Archbishop’s table. Then he was suddenly a schoolboy again, wincing from the blow to the head that Brother Murphy had dealt him and that had left him speechless for a decade. Another memory flickered into his mind’s eye. He saw himself and Noreen kneeling in supplication at the feet of the Dancing Madonna. In his delirium he tried to reach out to her. She had cured him once, made him whole again, back in the days before she had disappeared. But as her features grew more distinct he began to tremble. He saw in her eyes, not pity, not compassion, but cold, remorseless anger.

As he groped into semi-consciousness, Frank became aware of the throbbing in his head, and with it he had new terrors to confront. Memories of the past which he had hoped were suppressed for ever began to crowd inexorably into his jangled brain, each more awful than the last. A catalogue of atrocities and betrayals rose before his eyes. Men and women slaughtered as casually as beasts in a shambles. Hypocrisy dressed up as piety, and brutality masquerading as love. Echoing and re-echoing through the recesses of his mind were the words of the poem his father was for ever quoting, shouting it to the empty hedgerows above the noise of the tractor. Some rough beast, its hour come at last, was slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.

His head began to clear. He stumbled to his knees and vomited, spewing out on the grass the gorge rising from deep within him. Noreen cradled his head between her breasts, staunching with her mantilla the flow of blood from his wound. But his mind was clearer now. He staggered to his feet and seized her by the hand. He had detected a new restlessness sweeping through the crowd. Something unexpected, unplanned was happening. The massed choirs on the Tannoy faltered in their rendition of ‘Deep in the Panting Heart of Rome’. The multitude was beginning to move with a new urgency, pushing towards the gates of the park where the top of the papal transporter was still visible, moving hesitantly in the direction of the exit. Frank heard the crack of wood splintering as the crush barriers that corralled them began to collapse. There were wild men with fanatical eyes running through the throng now, urging them onward with garbled snatches of news, screaming the name McCoy. The helicopter was low overhead, and above the clatter of the rotors he could hear O’Malley on the megaphone frantically ordering the Guards to shoot.

And then he heard again that most chilling of sounds from his childhood in the North. The discordant jangle of McCoy’s bells. And he knew that what he had seen approaching over the Black Pig’s Dyke had not been a mirage.

He and Noreen were clutching each other tightly now, struggling against the tide of the crowd, hunched against their thrust, trying desperately to stay upright against the stampede. He opened his mouth to shout to them, to warn them. Something malevolent had come among them, something more powerful and more ancient than their petty sectarianism or their puny religiosity. There had been a time when they might have listened. But Frank Feely had wasted those years, years when he had them in the palm of his hand, wasted his opportunity with jazz bands and futile chatter. Now he wanted to shout a warning to the great mass of humanity rolling past him. But no words would come to him. Again and again he tried to warn them. But his voice had deserted him as surely as it had in his youth, condemning him for ever to a silent scream of rage and impotence and despair.