Benjamin Black - Holy Orders

Quirke sat back on the chair and folded his arms. He had time left; Frankie boy would be next. But he was wrong. The receptionist was looking at him, smiling her polite, frigid smile. She nodded. “Mr. Philbin will see you now, Dr. Quirke,” she said. Mister. Doctor. She knew the hierarchical niceties.

He rose and stepped forward, leaden-footed, and as he did so he saw in his mind yet again that path by the canal, and the darkness, and the darkly attendant trees, and someone walking towards him, out of the night.

Cant, or Shelta in the United States, is the secret language of Irish travelers, who in the 1950s were known universally, and unpejoratively, as tinkers. The origins of this colorful patois are obscure, and travelers are still reluctant, understandably, to reveal a full vocabulary. The word “Cant” probably comes from the Irish word caint, meaning “talk.” “Shelta” may be a corruption of siulta, the Irish word for “walking,” as in Na Daoine Siulta, the “Walking People.”

Two authoritative sources on Cant are The Secret Languages of Ireland , by R.A.S. Macalister (1937), and Irish Tinkers or “Travellers”: Some Notes on Their Manners and Customs and Their Secret Language or “Cant,” by Pádraig Mac Gréine (Béaloideas, 1931).

Glossary of Cant words used in the text:

aras : soft in the head

cuinne : priest

gatrin : child

granen : pregnant

grit : sick

mugathawn : fool

mull : woman

nyaark : rascal

Palantus : England

shade : policeman

shako : sin

sharog : redhead

sramala : robber

sreentul : friend

sringan : drink (alcoholic)

spurk : fornicate

My thanks to Olivia O’Leary and, as ever, to Dr. Gregory Page, who knows everything there is to be known about injury, dying, and death.

BENJAMIN BLACK is the pen name of the Man Booker Prize — winning novelist John Banville. The author of the bestselling and critically acclaimed series of Quirke novels — including Christine Falls, A Death in Summer, and Vengeance — he lives in Dublin.