by Kevin Barry
‘Understand,’ he said, ‘that the man from the paper put word to you?’
‘Mr Gleeson, he did.’
‘Know why we’re here so?’ said Fucker.
‘It’s about a bead wants drawin’.’
‘You the man to draw it for us, cove?’
‘The man ye’re lookin’ for been seen awrigh’, like.’
‘Seen when and where?’
‘Would it mean somethin’ t’ye if I said, like? Ye know Big Nothin’, ye do?’
‘Said when and where?’
‘He oney comes out on night walks.’
‘Comes out where, cove?’
‘Comes out. Walks abroad.’
Fucker snapped.
‘Fuck’s walks a-fuckin-broad mean, fuckface?’
‘He walks Nothin’.’
‘There’s a whole wealth,’ said Wolfie, ‘o’ Big fuckin’ Nothin’ out here, in’t there?’
‘Where’s it he’s kippin’, cove?’
‘That ain’t known.’
The boys threw their hands up. Consulted each other quietly. They were tempted already towards a spilling of blood but wary of the report that needed making to Logan Hartnett. The spud-ater knew this well. Spud-aters – they can be as cute as shithouse slugs.
Fucker sat on his hands and bit his bottom lip. Wolfie, more the diplomat of the pair, changed tack.
‘You’d be a fella who’d take a turn ’round Smoketown the odd time, sir?’
‘Now,’ said the spud-ater, ‘we are talkin’ decen’ cuts o’ turkey.’
‘An’ what’d have an interest for you ’cross the footbridge, sir?’
The old-timer’s eyes sparkled.
‘I’d lick a dream off the belly of a skinny hoor as quick as you’d look at me.’
Wolfie nodded soberly, as though appreciative of the spudater’s delicate tastes.
‘Draw a bead and you’ll have your pick o’ the skinnies,’ he said. ‘Could have a season o’ picks.’
‘A season?’
‘Cozy aul’ winter for ya,’ said Fucker. ‘Buried to the maker’s name in skinnies and far gone off the suck of a dream-pipe, y’check me?’
The old tout sighed as temptation hovered.
‘Oh man an’ boy I been a martyr to the poppy dream …’
‘An’ soon as you done with the dream-pipe,’ Fucker teased some more, ‘there’d be as much herb as you can lung an’ ale to folly.’
‘All dependin’,’ said Wolfie, ‘on you drawin’ a bead on the man’s berth for us, check?’
Spud-ater considered the dregs of his brandy.
Swirled it.
Drained it.
Wolfie nodded for the bar wench to bring him another. She did so. The spud-ater swallowed a fresh nip and savoured it and wrinkled with some delicacy his nostrils. Said:
‘That man we’re talkin’ about? That’s a man with a wealth o’ respect behind him out here on Nothin’. Lot o’ friends here still.’
‘Hear ya, cove.’
‘A man like that? A man that go waaaay the fuck back on Big Nothin’? Man like that get a bead drawn on him for a pair o’ Fancy headjobs … I mean no offence.’
Wolfie held up a forgiving palm.
‘None taken, sir.’
‘All I’m sayin’? It mightn’t auger so well for the fella that draws a bead on Gant Broderick, y’get me?’
‘Don’t say the name,’ said Wolfie.
The tout massaged then slowly with one the other his Judas palms. Niggled at the decision.
‘You gonna draw the fuckin’ bead for us?’ said Fucker. ‘Or we passin’ the time o’ fuckin’ day, like?’
The old-timer put his face in his hands. Looked sadly at the boys then, nodded, and bit down hard on his lip. Jerked a thumb outside.
‘Meet me under that bridge a week t’moro,’ he said. ‘Three bells in the a.m. An’ boys? It’s gonna be moonless.’
7
The Lost-Time: A Romance
Quick as a switchblade’s flick the years had passed and she was forty-three years old. She walked each evening in the Bohane New Town, as if every step might bring her further from the life she had made. But always she circled towards home again.
Macu wore:
A silk wrap, in a rich plum tone, with her dark hair stacked high and shellacked, and her bearing was regal, and a jewelled collar-belt was clasped about her throat; the dullness of its gleam was in the evening light a soft green burn.
By custom, this was the hour of the paseo for the Bohane Dacency – the hour when a parade of the New Town was decorously made. Here was Macu among the delicate ladies as they gently wafted along the pretty greystone crescents.
The paseo whirl:
One might trouble one’s dainty snout with a whiff of the taleggio displayed in an artisanal cheese shop, or run one’s nails along the grain of a silvery hose shipped in from Old Lisbon (if the route was open), or take a saucer of jasmine tea and a knuckle of fennel-scented snuff at a counter of buffed Big Nothin’ granite.
But there was a want in these ladies yet, and it was for the rude life of youth. These old girls had Rises blood in them or they had Back Trace bones, one or the other. Most of the money in Bohane was new money, and it was a question merely of a lady’s luck if she was to be headed for a Beauvista manse or for the Smoketown footbridge.
Macu in the reminiscent evening walked the New Town and she traced a mapline to her lost-time.
It was one of those summers you’re nostalgic for even before it passes. Pale, bled skies. Thunderstorms in the night. Sour-smelling dawns. It brought temptation, and yearning, and ache – these are the summer things. And sweet calypso sounded always from the Back Trace shebeens. Fancy boys sucked on herb-pipes in the laneway outside the Café Aliados. Aggravators were on the prowl from the flatblock circles of the Rises and the ozone of danger was a sexy tang on the air.
Skirmishes.
Blood spilling.
Hormones raging.
And the Trace Fancy had the Gant Broderick’s name to it then. That would have been the day in Bohane – she smiled now as she recalled it – a Fancy boy would wear clicker’d clogs with crimson sox pulled to the top of the calf and worn beneath three-quarter-length trackie cut-offs, with a tweed cap set back to front, a stevedore donkey jacket with hi-viz piping, the hair greased back and quiffed – oh we must have looked like proper fucking rodericks – and a little silver herb-pipe on a leather lace around the neck.
Her mother was gone by then and her father was weakening. There was a greenish tint to his skin in the low light of the Aliados. Always wincing, always reaching for his lower back. Macu was taking on the upkeep of the caff, and she was quick-tongued with the Fancy boys who lounged there. They hung off the Aliados’s tapped-brass counter and were dreamy-eyed for her. She was skinny and seventeen and working it on wedge heels. A darting glance from under the lashes that’d slice a boy’s soul open. A bullwhip lash of the tongue and they’d whimper, swoon, let their eyes roll. Macu was the first-prize squaw that summer back deep in the Bohane lost-time.
The Gant was a slugger of a young dude and smart as a hatful of snakes. Sentimental, also. He had washed in off the Big Nothin’ wastes, the Gant, and it was known in Bohane there was a good mix of pikey juice in him. A rez boy – campfire blood.
See him back there:
A big unit with deep-set eyes and a squared-off chin. Dark-haired, and sallow, and wry. The kind of kid who wore his bruises nicely. A cow lick that fell onto his high forehead.
Her father warned her off – pikeys is differen’, he said – and the warning lent its own spice; fathers never learn.
The Gant jawed a mouthful o’ baccy barside of the Aliados one night, and he winked at her, and he said what’s it they call yez anyway, girl-chil’? Macu, s’it?
‘Back off, pike,’ she said. ‘Y’foulin’ me air, sketch?’
The Gant down the Aliados vibed it like he was an older dude. Summer nights in Bohane, with tempers
coming untamped, and tangles in the wynds, and he was losing some of his boys to the dirks of the uptown aggravators. That put its heaviness on him.
He loaded the sad glare on Macu.
She turned it straight back to him.
Oh these were good-looking young people, in a hard town by the sea, and the days bled into the sweet nights, and it was as if the summer would never end.
‘Macu, you get time off ever, girl?’
A shyness on him she could hardly believe. The runnings of the town under his shkelp belt already and he was blushing for her.
‘Me aul’ dude ain’t the hottest.’
‘I see that, girl.’
‘Busy, yunno …’
‘Get to get an aul’ walk in sometime, though? A turn down the river, Macu?’
He showed no front when he talked to her. She liked the rez spiel that came from him. She liked those spun-out Big Nothin’ yarns. Of the old weirds who roamed out there and of the paths that opened to the Bohane underworld. Of the cures and the curses. Of the messages writ in starsign on the night sky. The Gant had the weight of Nothin’ in his step. It felt grown-up to walk the Bohane Trace with the Gant by her side. They took it slowly.
‘I ain’t lookin’ for no easy lackeen,’ he said.
‘Y’ain’t found one,’ she said.
He spoke of the taint that was on the town. He spoke often of premonition. He said it came to him as a cold quiver at the base of the spine. He said that it came in the hour before dawn. He said if he stayed in the creation, he’d come to a bad end sure enough. He said there was no gainsaying that. He said he had the feeling – he said it was in the blood.
‘Sounds to me like a rez boy gettin’ spooked,’ she said, and she traced the tips of her fingers along the creases of his hunched neck.
‘I got a feel for these things,’ he said.
The Bohane river blackly ran. They fell into its spell. It became official in the Trace that summer that Macu from the Aliados was the Gant Broderick’s clutch. He told her that he loved her and that his love caused the fear inside to amplify.
‘Before was like I ain’t had so much to lose,’ he said.
‘Y’breakin’ me fuckin’ heart, pike,’ she said.
‘Don’t want to miss seein’ what you turn into,’ he said.
He said that already they were conspiring against him in the Fancy. He said he was watchful of more than one.
‘Like who?’
‘Like the skinny boy. You know who.’
He talked about leaving the peninsula behind. He asked her to come with him.
‘But go where, G?’
‘Maybe … Go across over?’
‘That fuckin’ scudhole?’
‘I won’t go without you, girl.’
‘I dunno, G …’
‘I could set us up, girl. You could follow me over …’
In the New Town, at the hour of the paseo, she looked carefully over her shoulder – sketch? – and it was clear: she had not been followed by a Fancy scout today. She turned into the quietest of the Endeavour Avenue cafes. Ol’ Boy Mannion waited for her there on a high stool. He smiled but she did not answer the smile.
‘What’s this about, Ol’ Boy?’
‘I’d say you know or you wouldn’t be here.’
‘I won’t see him, Ol’ Boy.’
He passed across the letter.
‘Just read what he’s written to you, Macu.’
8
Night on Nothin’
Midnight.
Big Nothin’.
A trailer home.
And Jenni Ching was butt-naked on the sofa bed.
The trailer was a double-wide aluminium, twenty-two-foot long, and it contained the fold-out bed, a pot-belly stove, an odour of intense sadness, a set of creaking floorboards, and the Gant Broderick. The Gant also was naked, and he was straining, with his eyes tightly shut, to recall the darkest of all his dark times – this so as not to come.
Hardwind was up, and it raged across the bog outside, and it made speeches in the stove’s flue; threats, it sounded like, in a spooky, hollowed-out voice: an eerie song for the Gant as he grimly thrusted.
Jenni Ching was on her hands and knees, with her slender rump in the air, and a brass herb-pipe clamped in her gob. She cast over her shoulder a bored glance at the Gant. He looked as if his heart might at any moment explode. His face was purpled, blotched, sweaty.
‘If y’wanna take five,’ she said, ‘jus’ holler.’
The mocking tone was too much for him, was too delicious, and the Gant spent himself. He fell onto his back and was ashamed then. His heart was a rabid pit bull loose inside his chest.
Jenni Ching consulted the wall clock.
‘Three minutes even,’ she said. ‘You’re comin’ on, kid.’
She turned and sat back against the sofa bed’s headrest. She drew her legs up about her. She relit her herb-pipe, sucked on it deep, and blew a greenish smoke. The Gant risked an eye at her. She smiled at him, so feline.
‘This what it feel like?’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Love.’
‘Sarky for your age, girl.’
She placed her tiny feet on his wheezing chest. He laid his hand across her feet and it covered them entirely. She wriggled her toes, the ten, taunting tips of them. Sighed.
‘So what’s the script with Ganty-boy?’ she said. ‘An’ no more bollick-talk about settlin’ in the countryside an’ growin’ cabbages.’
‘Why shouldn’t I settle, Jenni? Rest me old bones.’
She drew a hard suck on the pipe, held the smoke, and then reached and pulled his face to hers, laid her mouth on his, and sent with a sharp hiss the blowback.
He glazed.
Coughed.
‘Don’t always agree with me,’ he said, his chest heaving, his humours all twisted.
She reached again and held with her tiny iron hand his chin.
Locked a glance.
‘An’ you’d be doin’ the fuck what out here, Gant, ’xactly?’
‘I’m supposed to be askin’ the questions, Jenni.’
‘You havin’ an’ aul’ chat with the stoats, G? Goin’ fishin’?’
‘You doin’ a little fishin’ yourself, Jenni?’
‘All I’m doin’ is talkin’ to ya. All I’m doin’ is passin’ the lonesome aul’ night, y’check me?’
‘You got the gift for talk, girleen.’
She was tiny. She lifted her feet from his chest. She swung her legs from the sofa bed. She padded to the door of the trailer and unclasped the catch and pushed out the door agin the hardwind. She looked out to the night. A swirl of stars made cheap glamour of the sky above the bog plain.
Without looking at him:
‘Y’plannin’ damage for the ’bino, Gant?’
‘Would I confide as much?’
‘The ’bino’s had wall-bangers come lookin’ for him before, Gant. Same boyos down the boneyard since. An’ it’s a spooky aul’ spill o’ moonlight y’gets down that place, y’sketchin’?’
The Gant with a cheeky grin:
‘Time does he come along S’town in the evenings, Jenni? Usually?’
She spat the same grin back over her shoulder.
‘This look like a tout’s can to you?’ she said.
‘Are you fuckin’ him, Jenni?’
‘You jealous, G?’
‘Or does he mess with the Fancy tush at all?’
‘Happens that the Long Fella don’t mess with no tush.’
‘Oh?’
‘Looked after in his marriage is Mr H. He’s takin’ about as much as he can handle up Beauvista way off the skaw-eye bint.’
A sly one. Knew where to aim; knew where to bite.
‘Oh? Happy, are they? The Hartnetts?’
She shook her head, and shaped a curious snarl and somehow he read truth here.
‘Happy? Who’s happy in fuckin’ Bohane? Ya’d be a long time scoutin’ for happy in this place.�
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She gathered up her clothes and began to dress in the oily candlelight of the trailer. The girl was close to unreadable in the Gant’s view. She had told him nothing about the Fancy, nor about the S’town operations, nor about the movements of Logan Hartnett. Even so, she was keeping close, she was calling on him, and consenting to his bed. It was said this Ching girl had a count to her name already and the Gant was inclined to believe it from the taste of her.
‘You can’t stay a while?’
She didn’t dignify that with an answer.
And it was a moody Gant she left on the sofa bed as she took off into the night again. Cat’s eyes on her. As easy in her stride out on Nothin’ as she was in S’town or the Back Trace.
Watch her close, Gant.
But he relished her, despite himself, and he asked then for forgiveness as the trailer’s siding creaked ominously in the night. Awful thing to still have a taste for young ’un and you up to the view from fifty.
He lay among the stew of his thoughts a while. Now that was a murky old soup. He rose wearily after a time and dressed. He felt bone-ache and sad bliss. He went outside for a taste of the wind. His mind for a brief stretch ran clear. He closed his eyes and tried to bring himself to the lost-time, but it could never be regained. He would never take back the true taste. He had known it just once and it was Macu’s.
The Gant walked a keen edge always across the territories of the mind. At any moment he might trip to either side and fall into the blackness. Of course, it is a husky race of people we’re talking about outside in the Bohane creation, generally. Cursed and blessed with hot feeling.
Images from the lost-time now came to him in quick assault. When she was eighteen. When she walked with him. The way that she spoke to him. The way that her lips shaped to form his name.
He walked on into the night and he shook his great, bearish head against memory, and he briefly wept, and he chortled at himself then for the weeping. Oh this is a nice package you’re presenting, Gant. Oh this is a nice game you’ve got yourself involved with. And nice people to play it with.
