by Kevin Barry
Strike that – a derelict mansion.
No panes in the windows and no fire in the grate and crows in the attic but there was grandeur yet, even so. A stately ruin was Girly. She settled again on the sad, squalling music of the melodeon below, a wintersong for foul December in the Bohane creation.
She was determined, and one quivering foot she put in front of the other, and she made for a view of the place. The great tragic armies of history had made it over storm-whipped mountain ranges quicker than Girly made it across that carpet but she persevered, and she reached, after an epic struggle, the drapes. She clutched, wheezing, at their long folds of blue velvet – dizzying, the flow of the fabric – and Girly whited out for a moment – the lightness! – and then regathered. She dragged the drapes apart the inch or two she had the strength for and aimed a hard squint down onto De Valera Street.
A December Tuesday. As miserable as hell’s scullery beneath a soot-black sky. The nerves of the city were ripped. Bohane was looking at a total of eight young fellas reefed since the October bank holiday. Five of them belonged to the Cusack mob, three to the Hartnett Fancy, and the city simmered now with bitterness, rage, threat. Girly smiled. To keep Bohane at a rolling boil you just had to turn the heat up on the burner.
There were nightly rumbles in the Back Trace. There were skirmishes on the 98 Steps. There were random attacks in Smoketown hoorshops. Bottles and insults were being flung across the rooftops of the city. Fellas’ sisters were being insulted. And mothers. It had drawn short, just yet, of an outright Feud, but the Hartnett Fancy and the families of the Northside Rises were close to it now.
Girly’s reckon: a good Feud was just what the place needed.
In the high distance, she heard the Norries drone their ritual battle chants. She saw above the rooftops the flicker of their bonnas blazing. The Norries were letting it be known they were Feud-ready. Their chants were rhythmical, bass-toned, and punctuated by sombre handclaps. This was the music of taunt and resolve in Bohane.
Polis were everywhere on parade, with their riot sticks swinging, and the fear of the SBJ lighting their bog-crawler eyes. Poor goms of boys fresh off the bog and they were going to be duckin’ shkelps and sweepin’ innards to the far side of the year’s turn.
The Vindicator’s evening edition was being hollered by the corner sellers – Big Dom Gleeson was scraping his violin and weeping hot prose for the maintenance of a Yuletide Calm.
Headline:
STOP THE MADNESS!
But the families of the Rises were united in a way they had not been for years and hard-prepped for a move against the Fancy.
Wistfully Girly looked on De Valera Street – ah, that she might have the strength for a good ruck yet herself – and the box windows of the El train zipped past then, the flick and yellow flashing of them, and the street blurred, and her mind went with it – the lightness – and Girly travelled to the Bohane lost-time.
The Gant Broderick she saw as a ten-year-old gypo child. A good-looking kid, blue-eyed and mournful. He was always scouring Dev Street for the main chance. A careful boy. Mind a mouse for you on a tramline. His father was a no-good Nothin’ quaffer. His father was half his life nose-deep in a bowl of Wrassler stout and sentimental as a sackful of ballads. The family was in and out from the bog plain: half their time in Trace tenements and half in Big Nothin’ trailer homes. The Gant kid was the oldest of them and soon enough he was running wild in the Trace. He took to knocking along with the sharps of the Fancy. Like a mascot he became. Went on errands for them. Was getting busy early on. Was getting into scraps with grown men on the wharfside stones. Oh, and watch the moves on it – you’d put your tuppence on the mannish boy in off the Nothin’ rez. A gentle-spoken kid, but proud. Don’t speak no pavee put-down if the Gant boy is around – he’d flatten your snout for you. Took to growing in spurts. Took to working a rep. Girly on a stoop one day in the Back Trace saw him come peltin’ by on a badness errand and she stuck out a foot and tripped him up.
‘Headed for, gypy-kid?’
Stood up slowly, the Gant child, and eyed her carefully as he backed away. He held the gaze on her all the same, he had the confidence for that, and not many could have said the same. Girly knew from one close look where this Gant boy was headed.
‘Careful where you place your feet, son.’
Girly returned; she left old Bohane to itself, at least for the time being, but the past, she knew, was never still in this city, it continued to seethe and brew back there, and it gave taint to the present. How would the Gant’s return play out? Now there was an intrigue.
She weakened, just for a moment, and she dug her claws into the velvet of the drapes. She took down a hard breath. She opened her eyes and strained for a view to the Aliados and she brought it into focus at just the moment she had waited for.
Wolfie Stanners and Fucker Burke marched out of the place. Girly kept an eye, always, on the young ’uns coming through. It was the young who shaped the city’s moment. She watched the short, densely packed ginge – knew his mother – and smiled at the way he always walked with his wee fists bunched. You don’t step in that boy’s way, and the stringy galoot was beside, the boy of the Burkes, he’d put the heart sideways in you with that razor grin, and Girly thought:
There’s little fear of the Fancy if we can keep this pair vertical.
Watched as the boys headed into the Trace and went northering. They were bound, she knew, for the 98 Steps. The Feud was to be officially declared.
In Bohane, at this time, if a Feud was to be engaged, it must be offered in writing, and accepted – acceptance, on behalf of the party challenged, was known always as ‘the receipt’. There was an etiquette to the thing; we weren’t savages. The Fancy’s offering was in Girly’s mannish hand.
She felt the strength come back into her. She straightened in her bearing. And as she looked down to the streets below she saw that Bohane had taken to the winter like an old dog to its blanket.
Bohane was thrun down, as we say, with winter.
Oh give us a grim Tuesday of December, with the hardwind taking schleps at our heads, and the rain coming slantways off that hideous fucking ocean, and the grapes nearly frozen off us, and dirty ice caked up top of the puddles, and we are not happy, exactly, but satisfied in our despair.
It is as though we can say…
Now!
D’ye see, now, what it is we are dealing with?
14
The 98 Steps
Fucker Burke and Wolfie Stanners set their faces against the hardwind as they climbed the bluffs. Wolfie was zipped neck-deep into a velveteen puffa, and all to be seen was the vicious little head, with his eyes swivelling left and right to check out the sideways for lurking aggravators. Fucker was in a stripey dress shirt made out of a fine yellow cheesecloth – he was the sort of young fella who didn’t feel the cold when a ruck was brewing; a strange fire burned inside. They clipped through the Trace and aimed for the 98 Steps. Eerie was the call of the hardwind in winter and the wynds of the Trace were deadhouse sombre.
Feel the chill moistness of the air – Bohane would be a hoor of a town for a lung infection now.
And of course feeling settles into the bones of a place – we know this – and the Trace had an odd, nervous shimmer to it this evening. It’ll get this nauseous air when a Feud is on the short fuse.
Fucker and Wolfie made it to the 98 Steps. Ol’ Boy Mannion had brokered an unmolested passage to the Rises for the pair but it was for this one evening only, and for this lone purpose.
The 98 is a steep, high-walled climb, and as they ascended, the Back Trace gave way by degrees to the Northside Rises.
From the broad and derelict avenues above the Norrie voices scraped at the dank sky and the chanters droned an age-old warsong and the flames of the bonnas licked and spat.
Fucker and Wolfie neared the crest of the 98 and the voices faded a note and gave away now to a sequence of long, tuneful whistles.
Clear enoug
h that the Watches of the Rises were marking the ascent.
Fucker Burke said a silent prayer to the Sweet Baba Jay that Mannion’s word was good and that the passage was secure, and if it was not, and if he never saw or held his sweet Angelina again – never drowned again in the pools of her eyes – that she would find a happy berth, somewhere, and maybe after a time forget him.
Wolfie Stanners had recourse to no gods but to the even beating of his own fierce Back Trace heart and he stared hard and fearlessly about the Rises avenues as they cleared now the last of the 98.
The avenues of the Rises were broad, treeless, broken, and laid out to a vaguely Soviet pattern. The cement facades of the flatblocks were cracked from decades of freeze-and-thaw. Mean dogs patrolled the gutters, and still the slow whistles sounded, and a sharp voice cut out at them from the shadows of evening.
‘Cunty fuckin’ scum up outta da Trace!’
Wolfie smiled.
‘That the best they got?’
High-rise blocks loomed either side of the broad avenue they walked along. There was a shimmering at the edges as they stared dead ahead – movement there – and yes, there were skangs all around then, evil little scuts of whistling Norrie young fellas, but they stayed back a way as the Fancy pair stepped along.
They hissed from behind and hoicked a few gobbers but they kept their distance true enough.
The melody of the whistles changed and took on an urgency and this told the boys they were coming in close on Cusack ground.
‘Looks like we’s gettin’ a folly awrigh’,’ said Fucker, and there was a quake to his tone.
Wolfie, shrugging, remained entirely quakeless.
Behind them, the pack of skangs was growing in number by the minute and it was the way the melody of their whistles was so sweet was Fucker’s worry.
From a roadside bonfire a rogue dog came at them, it hissed and lurched and bared its fangs, but Wolfie took a swift wee lep into the air and he landed a kick plumb on the cur’s nose and it scurried away again.
‘Norrie grapes on that crittur,’ said Wolfie.
Taunts and threats sniped from the following pack but Wolfie turned daintily on his heel, a single swivel of a movement to grace any dancefloor, and he walked backwards, jauntily, and he smiled at the following pack, and they kept their distance despite the taunts.
Was said in Bohane this winter we’re talking about there was no one quite so feared lately as Logan Hartnett’s roaming lieutenant, Wolfie Stanners, the short-arse little dude with the ginger top and that evil motherfucker of a leer.
Wolfie and Fucker headed direct for Croppy Boy Heights.
This was the circle of flatblocks that was home ground to the Cusack mob. It was announced by an expanse of rough, untarred ground where barrel fires blazed and wild-eyed flatblock bairns were doing cats-tumbles off ancient pylons and there were severe gusts of Nothin’ hardwind from the gaps between the blocks. A tang of menace sat heavily hereabouts.
From the basement of one of the blocks came the heavy throb of a Trojan dub bassline. They lamped it at once as the shebeen block and aimed for it: Fucker breathing shallow, Wolfie breathing deep.
On the Northside Rises, it was at this time the custom for each circle of flatblocks to have its own shebeen. This would be located in one of the flatblock basements, and there, the circle’s young gents would drink beer, smoke herb, listen to dub plates, talk tush and practise knife tricks.
Wolfie and Fucker approached the Cusack shebeen.
A pair of goons were arranged in violent lethargy by its stairwell entrance. They carried tyre-chains, wore cross-slung dirks, and tugged idly at their pants. Fucker and Wolfie trained their eyes against the hard stares of the goons, there was a heavy beat of silence, and the goons parted, sure enough, but took their sweet time about it.
Now the basement shebeen opened out.
It was a low dive alright and wall-to-wall with Cusack filth. The family’s allegiancers stood about with their bottles of Phoenix ale and their herb pipes on the sweet burn and a sinuous bassline thrummed on the air: feel it in the marrow of your spine.
Wolfie and Fucker did not need to be announced.
Quickly the dub plates were cut. The shebeen mob turned as one on this apparition in the doorway. Dark murmurs, hissed whistles, but the Hartnett Fancy was known always for its brazenness, its insouciance, and these boyos mounted it good:
Wolfie, hunched, beadily staring, with the little paws tightened into hard nuts of fists.
Fucker, hanging loose and limber, and wearing his trademark glaze of vast unpredictability.
The Cusack filth cawed like street birds – starlings were their symbol – but the mob did not step forward; it allowed itself to part.
The lights were turned up to a harsh, striplit glare.
A mighty bark sounded from the rear of the mob then and it was answered, ritually, by a mad volley of barks from all around the freaky shebeen.
In the cruel light the pocked skin of the Cusacks was all the worse for the badly inked starling tats it was covered with. (Complexions generally on the Northside Rises are nothing to write home about.)
Wolfie and Fucker looked around the enemy’s lair:
Markings on the walls depicted the sacred symbols of the Rises: pit bulls in bout and the strange winged daemon-sluts of the flatblocks and there were memorials also to the dead knifemen of Northside lore.
Wolfie and Fucker looked massively unimpressed as they took a lamp on the Cusack mob:
Cusacks had settled this season on high-rolled denims and armless geansais and they had starling feathers – glossily iridescent, a greenish black – tucked into the bands of their pork-pie hats. Low brows were uniform and gave that vaguely puzzled look that is associated always with Northside knuckle-draggers.
The bark sounded again, was met by a volley of barks, and now it was Eyes Cusack himself, the king barker, who made his way through the mob.
Topless but for his gold chains, stoutly built, as near enough wide as he was long, with a mouthful of gold caps, he grinned malevolently as he approached the boys.
Stopped a couple feet from them.
Eyeballed Wolfie and took measure of the kid.
Nodded appreciatively.
‘So the boy-chil’ step up,’ he said.
Rubbed his chin, thoughtfully. Came closer.
‘So the boy-chil’ workin’ his own plan or he keepin’ Fancy’s affairs in nick?’
Sadly let his shoulders fall.
‘Coz, boy-chil’, it gotta be said, like? We got a rake o’ Cusacks wearin’ scars an’ welts offa ye lot this las’ while, y’check?’
Wolfie agreed.
‘Been lively aroun’ the place awrigh’, Cuse,’ he said. ‘But there weren’t no one got what weren’t comin’.’
Hisses, caws, growls sounded – Eyes Cusack raised a hand to stop them.
‘Boy-chil’… Reefins aside, like? There been floaters on the Bohane river down the years and them floaters got bruds and cuzzes in this place, y’heed?’
Wolfie bowed his head, briefly, and then turned his glance sombrely around the shebeen.
‘I’m sorry for yere troubles,’ he said.
The mob shook free of itself and came hissing forward but Eyes Cusack raised again his mottled hand, and he cried:
‘Hup! Hup now!’
The mob eased up, despite itself, despite its awful compacted energy, and Eyes Cusack was admiring.
‘The boy-chil’ got grapes,’ he said. ‘Sure y’ain’t got Norrie juice in ya someplace?’
Wolfie winced.
‘Oney yella in me’s what I piss in the mornins,’ he said.
Eyes pursed his lips and raked a sconce on Fucker then.
‘An’ the galoot got a lash o’ the pike in him, yep? Sketch the green eyes on it.’
Fucker spat, and flexed, and glared hard at Cusask.
‘Business wan’ doin’,’ he said. ‘So don’ min’ the aul’ bitchtalk, Cusey-gal.’
> Eyes turned to his hissing mob and smiled and danced a wee skank.
‘Oh the Long Fella don’t rear no blouses for lieutenants,’ he said. ‘Sends me up a prize pair o’ comanches. Don’t do the walk hissel’, though, do he? No, sir. Long Fella stayin’ close to home, yep? Watchin’ his yard. Am I right or wrong, ginge?’
‘Mr Hartnett is indisposed,’ said Wolfie.
‘Oh aye?’ said Cusack. ‘What’s he at? Straightenin’ the eyes in his bint’s head, s’he? Or he workin’ a little plan with his mammy, like? He mammy’s lil’ boy yet, like? O’ course the Hartnetts all for doin’ business down the New Town these times, ain’t they? Herb and hoors not good enough for the Fancy no more. No, sir. Now it’s all trams and manses, ain’t it?’
Wolfie raised a hand to signal the talk was at an end.
‘We gots somethin’ to put t’ye,’ he said.
He reached inside his puffa and removed an envelope of silver vellum. It was embossed with the Hartnett Fancy’s mark – a puck goat’s head. Inside was the Feud’s declaration.
Wolfie Stanners offered the envelope to Eyes Cusack.
Beat – a weird pause.
The pause suggested to Wolfie that confidence might not be all it should be among the ranks of the Cusack mob. But Eyes reached for the envelope then, and stuffed it in the waistband of his kecks, and from the arse pocket of same he took out a filthy scrap of paper that had been folded over twice, and he passed it to Wolfie.
Wolfie opened it out to find a drawing so crude as to be done by a child’s hand. It showed a skinny stick-man in crayoned colours with a cock-and-balls attached to his forehead.
‘The receipt,’ said Eyes Cusack. ‘See if yer man spot a likeness.’
Wolfie nodded most politely and with Fucker in tandem he turned to go.
‘I’ll let him know Feud’s accepted,’ he said.
‘Do that, boy-chil’,’ said Eyes Cusack. ‘An’ we’ll see ye down there, check?’
