After the Lockout by Darran McCann

across the yard with sprightly steps. He put his hand on Johnny’s shoulder, as much to help him as to greet him.
    â€˜Ah, Stanislaus, ’tis great to see you, boy. It must be twenty years.’
    â€˜Neither of us was in purple, at any rate. You haven’t come all the way from Killarney in the motorcar, have you?’
    â€˜God Almighty no, that would have killed me. We were met at the station by that contraption.’
    â€˜Long old journey.’
    â€˜To tell you the truth, Stanislaus, the doctor said I was mad to come at all. But when the boss calls, you have to come running, don’t you? What’s it all about anyway? I felt sure you’d be the man would know.’
    â€˜I haven’t been in the know for a long time now, Johnny.’
    â€˜Oh, of course.’ He paused. ‘It’s fine and well you’re looking now though. You’re well off out of it. Heading up a Diocese, it’s all politics.’
    â€˜It is nice to have time to spend with my books.’
    â€˜That last paper of yours was something else. You always know how to stick it into the liberals.’
    They went in the massive mahogany doors of the Synod Hall. The insistent rumble of talk and chatter tumbled from the Synod chamber down the vast, sweeping staircase, and Stanislaus and Johnny started up the mountain of stairs towards it. ‘Take my arm, Your Grace,’ said Johnny’s young curate. Stanislaus informed Father Daly with a scowl that he needed no help in ascending this staircase that he had ascended a thousand times before, and started to move up, passing beneath the portraits of the archbishops. St Patrick himself. St Malachy half a millennium later. The Penal-era martyrs another half-millennium after that. They stopped on the landing halfway up for a breather, Johnny needed to sit down on the stairs a moment, beneath the bust of Blessed Oliver Plunkett. Stanislaus recalled once tearing strips off a young priest who had joked that it was a funny thing to commemorate someone who had been beheaded with a bust. Below, two men deep in conversation were starting up the stairs. Though he had not met either personally, Stanislaus recognised them as the new Bishop of Clogher, Patrick McKenna, and Edward Mulhern, recently installed as Bishop of Dromore. Theywere impossibly young-looking, neither man looked fifty, and they bounded up the stairs. Johnny greeted them as they arrived on the landing. ‘You know Ned and Pat, don’t you, Stanislaus?’ he said.
    â€˜Bishop Benedict, isn’t it? Pleasure to meet you,’ said Mulhern, offering his hand.
    â€˜Congratulations on your elevation. If you do half as well as Henry O’Neill, Dromore will be in good hands,’ Stanislaus said.
    Dromore was a proper Diocese, not a titular, semi-mythical one. Not like Stanislaus’s well-known Episcopal See of Parthenia. Parthenia. A fifth-century outpost in pre-Islamic Algeria from which Christendom had been driven, not by the Mohammedans but the sands of the Sahara. Mick Logue had recommended it to Stanislaus, and Stanislaus had often wondered if it had been his intention to mock. He wondered if young Mulhern – Ned, apparently – knew that Henry O’Neill had been a surprise appointment to Dromore, that everyone had said Stanislaus’s name was carved on it. He probably did. Stanislaus had a mortifying memory of taking a day trip to Newry Cathedral, just to acquaint himself with his new surroundings. But Henry O’Neill had been given the nod because Henry O’Neill was younger. That was the Cardinal’s explanation. Now young Henry O’Neill was dead.
    â€˜You’ve come a long way, Bishop Mangan,’ said McKenna.
    â€˜Two days. Seven changes, sixty-one stops, and I still don’t know what this is all about,’ Johnny replied.
    â€˜I heard that it might be something to do with …’ Ned began, but stopped when he saw Pat