by Kevin Barry
Maybe he would never walk himself clear of … Macu … Macu … Immaculata.
*
Girly Hartnett, on the occasion of her nintieth Fair, stood before a full-length mirror in her suite at the Bohane Arms Hotel. She wore stockings, a suspender belt, a bodice and a scowl. Mysterious injections from a whizz-kid Chinkee sawbones were keeping her upright. She laid a frail hand across her belly and sucked in deeply. She eyed herself dispassionately. She made a plain and honest read of the situation, and it was this:
She wasn’t in bad fuckin’ nick at all.
A particular knock sounded. She cried an answer to it. Jenni Ching entered. She wore a white leather catsuit up top of silver bovvers, and this outfit Girly now considered.
‘Choice,’ she said.
Jenni raised a moscato bottle, found it empty, and instead poured herself a slug of John Jameson from the bottle on the bedside table.
Downed it in one, and lit a cigar.
‘Who breaks the news to him?’ Jenni said.
‘That ain’t your worry, child. Now c’mon an’ get me dressed.’
Jenni went and slid the door of the mirrored wardrobe and flicked through the frocks that were piled there – many of them dated back as far as the lost-time.
‘You decided, Girly?’
Girly sighed.
‘I’m wondering if I shouldn’t go with a class of an ankle-length?’ she said. ‘Maybe the ermine trim? Kinda, like … Lana Turner-style?’
Jenni fetched it and unzipped it. As she offered it, she asked of her mentor quietly:
‘What do I do later, Girly?’
‘You jus’ got to show yerself.’ Girly took the old frock and sniffed it. She passed it back. She raised her feeble arms above her head.
‘Now strap me in,’ she said, ‘and alert the authorities.’
*
A line of hoss polis came along the cobbles towards the S’town footbridge.
Sand-pikey taunts sounded cross-river.
From the Merries, dockside, Logan watched and listened.
He lingered a while by the dog fights.
Winked at the old bookmaker there – an Afghan off the Rises.
A pair of bull terriers went at it, their great muscled necks hunched, their hackles heaped and muzzles locked, the blood coming in spurts.
‘Who’d ya fancy, Mr H?’
Logan carefully regarded the dogs – he let a cupped palm take the weight of his chin.
‘I’d put tuppence on meself yet,’ he said.
*
The alleyway of the Smoketown dune end:
Clicker’d heels on smooth cobbles.
Two young men circled but slowly.
Each handled a shkelp and moved warily, slowly.
Tip-tap, the heelclicks … tip … tap … tip … but slowly.
Seeping of bile and poison.
Jealousy’s bile.
Fear’s poison.
They circled.
Then a lunge …
A feint …
A stumbling …
A righting.
They circled.
A lunge.
A feint.
Shkelp blades gleamed as moonlight pierced the Murk.
They circled.
Wolfie kid and the Far-Eye.
They circled.
No taunts, no foulspeak, no curses.
Just a lunge.
A feint.
A stumbling.
A righting.
They circled.
They lunged.
Their blades ripped the air.
*
There came a time always on the night of August Fair when the badness took over.
Clock outside the Yella Hall sounded nine bells, and then ten, and then eleven, and nastiness cut the air – it was as high-pitched and mean as the homicide cry of the gulls.
The surfeit of moscato soured in the belly.
The herb took on a darker waft.
The dream-pipe twisted more than it mellowed.
And the fists of all the young fiends balled into hard tight knots, and the tushies egged ’em on …
‘Said y’takin’ that, like?’
… and scraps broke out all over the wynds, on the front, along the snakebend roll of De Valera Street, and on either side of the footbridge.
The decent and the cowardly fled along the escape routes offered by the New Town streets.
Rest of us piled in like savages.
And this year the badness was set to follow a particular design – an S’town riot was orchestrated.
It took quickly.
Big Dom Gleeson and Ol’ Boy Mannion had a vantage view of the riot from the hot tub on the roof of Ed ‘The Gypo’ Lenihan’s joint.
They had bottles of the Beast to hand, their herb-pipes also, and an amount of hoors on stand-by.
It was quickly a general bloodbath and the two men sighed in despair and happiness both.
On the main drag a line of sand-pikeys faced up to a massed assault of hoss polis.
Hoss polis were straining to make it to the S’town dune end to raid the premises there but the pikeys were keeping a firm line.
Smoketown revellers traded their frolics for violence, and the polis/sand-pikey face-off as the night progressed took in random participators. Eyes were being taken out down there, and ears were bitten off, and gobs were twisted open.
‘Is it any wonder, really,’ said Ol’ Boy, ‘that this place has the bad name it has?’
Yes and the hardwind was making speeches agin the August night and fresh hordes of sand-pikey back-up came in off the dunes and fell in by their brethren and wore hare-skin pelts and had branded themselves with hot irons from the forge – abstract symbols of the sand-pikey cult were engraved on every chest – and they waved dirks and tyre-irons and then a quare shake of polis back-up trudged over the Smoketown footbridge and it was noted that they were guzzling whiskey and moscato from carry-sacks as they came, and taking nips of the Beast, and howling the ritual chants of the polis frats, and they aimed headlong for the sand-pikeys who were about an equal to them in number and certainly in terms of derangement.
‘Tell you one thing,’ said Ol’ Boy, ‘this shower will keep goin’ a while yet.’
Big Dom, meantime, had arranged a tushie on his lap and he was gently brushing her hair with a pearl-encrusted brush and the girl’s eyes glazed with dream-sent romance.
‘They’ll take quare damage on both sides, Mr Mannion.’
‘Much,’ said Ol’ Boy, ‘to the Hartnett plan.’
*
The Gant saw her pass through the 98er Square.
He followed.
She took the turn of a wynd, and then another, and she looked back, and she saw that it was him, but she did not stop.
‘Macu!’
He watched her go. He allowed her to disappear into the darkness of a sudden turn. He said beneath his breath:
‘Don’t ever go back to him.’
*
‘It would sweeten my bliss in this ci-ty of gold,
Should there be any stars in my-yy crooown …’
*
Prince Tubby the Far-Eye’s death journey was a beautiful voyage. He sailed over the clouds and across his dune-side terrain and the great spectacle once more was enacted for him.
Here was a place of wind and rain and violent starburst, where the throw of light is ever-changing, is constantly shifting, and he saw the great expanse of the bog plain, and the lamps of Bohane city, too, as they burned against the night of August Fair.
*
Wolfie Stanners sat on the stone steps cut into the river wall and he held both hands tightly against a gut wound and he closed his eyes and a fever sweat broke on his forehead as the S’town riot raged nearby.
Heard the black surge of the Bohane as it called to him.
*
Big Dom topped a fresh bottle of Beast and torched a whackload of primo Big Nothin’ bushweed sourced from the pikey rez.
He squinted to bring into focus the progress of the riot:
The beak of the law was blunted by the sand-pikey assault; the pikey ferocity was dulled by polis resolve.
And lives went under, it has to be said, but as quickly as their vitals dimmed they came to again, out beneath the Nothin’ plain, in the ruts and tunnels of the Bohane underworld, where the strange ferns rustle and the black dogs roam.
Meantime:
Ol’ Boy Mannion nodded in the direction of the Smoketown footbridge.
‘Y’watchin’?’ he said.
Big Dom clocked it.
‘The killer gal,’ he said.
Jenni Ching surveyed the riot serenely from the high arch of the footbridge – bopped smoke rings from her pouted lips.
*
Logan knew that the boy had circled to follow him.
He could sense movement behind on the wharf.
He sighed in long-suffering.
He turned into the stockyards and slipped into the shadows to wait.
The boy Cantillon appeared.
Logan stepped out, noiselessly, and he was quick as a stoat as he took the boy’s throat in a forearm lock, and he took from the boy’s belt his shkelp and he drove it into his heart, and whispered to him – unrepeatable words – as the young life began to drain.
Felt the tip of that life as it tilted towards the dark but he took no savour from the moment.
He let the Cantillon boy fall and he considered for an incredulous moment, there in the foul stockyards, the advanced stupidity of the dead kid’s frozen features.
The Long Fella would not stain his dress-shkelp with such frivolous blood.
He walked on. There was a tiredness now on Logan. He knew his own line would end soon enough and, with it, his renown. The succession had been decided beyond him when he was lost to an April dream. All that was left, maybe, was the consolation of Macu’s touch.
He aimed his boots for the Café Aliados.
*
‘How would you imagine all this might play out, Mr Mannion?’
‘Not prettily, Dom.’
*
At Blind Nora’s low-rent bordello the Gant cued an old seven-incher on the turntable, and as the tune came through he felt it in the balls of his feet, and he skanked alone on the floor, and the toothless hoors on the ratty old couches grinned and hoarsely sang along, and Nora handclapped the beat, and the Gant danced slowly, and his bearing was quiet, and proud, and sane.
*
The Café Aliados was deserted but for the bar girl as Logan waited on a high stool there.
He sipped at a John Jameson.
On the cusp of midnight he slipped off the stool and went to the jukebox and he selected a slow-burner of an old calypso tune from the lost-time.
She’d know this one.
He sat again by the barside as the old music played and with an unsure hand he fixed his hair.
And at midnight precisely, on this the night of August Fair, the cut yellow flowers in a vase on the Aliados countertop trembled as the sideway door opened, and stilled again as it closed, and he turned a quiet swivel on his stool.
‘Well,’ she said.
A set of ninety Bohane Fairs were graven in the hard sketch lines of her face, and already he was resigned.
‘Girly,’ he said.
*
The night aged, and the city quietened along its length, and the young were drawn by the hard pull of their blood to the river. We throbbed with the pulse of August in Bohane.
At intervals along the wharf, on the stone steps of the river wall, the young lazed in pairs and held each other. Their lips made words – promises, devotions – and the words carried on the river’s air and mingled with the words of its murmurous dead. A single voice was made in the mingling, and this voice had in mysterious ways the quality of silence, for it blocked out all else; it mesmerised.
The taint came off the water as a delicious mist.
A green lizard crept between a crack in a fall of steps and climbed across a mound of flesh and fed on the blood that caked around the gut wound of a dead boy with a blackbird’s stare.
The hardwind rose and shifted the cloudbank and the rooftops emerged from the Murk – the city’s shape reasserting – and now the lamplight of the city was fleet on the water. The water played its motion on the green wrack and stone of the river wall. We listened – rapt – as it carried through the city of Bohane, as it ran to the hidden sea, as the sea dragged on its cables.
Summer’s reach was shortening; we would face soon what the autumn might bring, and what the winter. But the city was content on this one night for time to slow, for a while at least, and it sent its young down to the river.
*
First ache of light was inaugural:
Jenni Ching rode bareback a Big Nothin’ palomino along the Bohane front.
On either side of her mount – as its flanks worked smoothly, slowly in the ochre dawn – a half-dozen wilding girls marched in ceremonial guard – they wore cross-slung dirk-belts, groin-kicker boots, white vinyl zip-ups, black satin gym shorts – and the native gulls in the early morning were raucous above the river.
A mad-eyed black-back dived at the killer-gal Ching but she raised a glance and eyed it as madly for an answer and the gull swerved and turned and wheeled away downriver.
Jenni cried a taunt after it:
‘Mmwwaaoork!’
And all the girls laughed.
The procession moved, and the chained dogs in the merchant yards along the front cowered in the cold shadows of morning, their own thin flanks rippling with fright.
Hung upon the livid air a sequence of whinnies and pleadings, the dogs, and the first taste of the new life came to Jenni
as she rode out the measured beat of her ascension and a bump of fear, too, y’check me
as she searched already the eyes of her own ranks for that yellow light, ambition’s pale gleam
as she saw in the brightening sky at a slow fade the lost-time’s shimmer pass.
