by Kevin Barry
‘Oh I am a weak, weak man,’ the Dom sighed.
The pouty tush weltered him and muttered the count:
‘Seven’y-sic’… seven’y-se’en… se’eny-ate…’
And Big Dom between soft moans and sucks on the bobba’s tit pondered the weird, precise whirring of the night-bird, and he made it as a blow-in from an ocean storm – it was the season for them. He groaned, in happiness and in shame, and he enjoyed as always the slow turning of the season, the opening out of the Bohane year.
‘Se’eny-noine… atey… atey-wan…’
Oh, this one had a wrist on her! And as he succumbed – once more! – to his weakness, and as he – oh snivelling, oh putrid Dom! – relished the…
‘Atey-foe… atey-fi…”
…measure of pain the tushie extracted from his sinful bones, he started to think about supper, too – would I ate a lump o’ halibut? – and the way the whirring of the strange bird had the sound of the hunchback Grimes’s old Leica – didn’t it? – and also his proposed editorial comment…
‘Noin’ey… noin’ey-wan…’
…for the following evening’s Vindicator. A succession ruck was brewing in the Fancy – no question. This marked a difficult moment in the city.
The boy Stanners.
The galoot Burke.
The slanty-eye Ching.
They were all making shapes. They were all manoeuvring. Even in victory, Logan Hartnett had shown a weakness – he’d gone beyond the Fancy’s colours for back-up. Such a plain display of weakness was in Bohane oftentimes fatal. But Dom’s editorial, he decided, would plead for patience, for the Long Fella to be left in place for a time yet, for the status quo…
‘Noin’ey-sic… noin’ey-se’en…’
…to be maintained. After all, you could say what you liked about the Long Fella, but at least he had class.
‘Noin’ey-noine…’
And there was the fact that he made a very fine picture. A tall man, thin, a clothes horse. Strange, but he’d be missed. Dom braced himself for the last stroke of the brush, for which she always retained a special venom, and indeed she raised the arm high for it, and a whack of pleasure with great fury was landed.
‘A hundert even, Mr Gleeson!’
Moaned loudly, the Dom – shamed, yet again! – and his fat-man moan carried through the window, and floated downwards, softly, until a lick of the hardwind caught it and threw it above the rooftops of Smoketown, sent it across the blackwaters of the Bohane, and it faded as it carried, and it reduced, and it was succeeded on the Trace front by the sound of the meat wagons as they crossed the cobbles, the iron rut and clanking of them.
As they sketched the wagons roll out from the arcade market and head for the slaughterhouse – the night shift already was in swing – Ol’ Boy Mannion and the Gant Broderick leaned back against the stained brickwork of an old warehouse, and they spoke crankily against the din.
‘You been soundin’ kinda bitter this weather, G. If you don’t mind me sayin’, like?’
‘It’s bred into me, Benni.’
‘Ah, stop, will you? The fuckin’ martyrdom!’
Gant sourly shrugged.
‘It’s this place, you know?’
Ol’ Boy’s read: the way the Gant trained his stare on the black surge of the river was a worry. Mesmerised, he seemed. And not in a good way. Ol’ Boy trickled some beads of soft talk from his velvet bag.
‘A place ain’t gonna be the cause of all your woes ever, Gant. Y’hearin’ me sense now? And a place ain’t gonna solve your woes neither. You been puttin’ too much faith in–’
‘A dream is what you’re sayin’.’
‘We all dream of being young again, Gant! Dancin’ in the pale moonlight and claspin’ a pawful of fresh fuckin’ arse! Fact it ain’t gonna happen makes it all the sweeter! But don’t let yourself drown in that old stuff, boy. Get over it! I mean to say, Gant, you were with the bint three fuckin’ weeks! But you’ve come sluggin’ down the Boreen with a fixed notion on you and the mad little eyes all lit up inside your head–’
‘She jus’ didn’t want to know, Ol’ Boy.’
‘Ah, Gant, what did you expect?’
‘But that ain’t the cruellest of it.’
‘Oh?’
‘The cruellest of it? I didn’t even want her.’
‘Coz it’s been twenty-five fuckin’ years! Ya plum fuckin’ ape! A lot happens, Gant. A life happens. A girl don’t stay girl in Bohane for long. An’ then, you know, we gotta make… arrangements with ourselves? Else how can we put up with the things we done, choices we made? Likes a fuckin’ Bohane… ah look… this is a hard town… it’s a place… an’ okay, okay, I know. Here I am sayin’ just the fuckin’ same…’
The Gant slyly winked for Ol’ Boy then.
‘You think I came back o’ me own volition?’
Silence played a long beat as Ol’ Boy weighed this.
‘Sayin’ what to me, G?’
‘You think I’d ha’ been given the pass?’
A chill of recognition for Ol’ Boy.
‘What you’re sayin’…’
The Gant shoved off from the warehouse and aimed his toots for the Trace-deep night.
‘Sayin’ I got work to do, Benni.’
Looked back with an evil smile.
‘But don’t worry, Mr Mannion, sir – things to occupy me… I’m workin’ a plan, y’sketch?’
Ol’ Boy smiled at the very notion of a plan – as if the Mad-Town of Bohane was amenable to design.
‘You wanna make me laugh, G?’ he said. ‘Then just go ahead an’ tell me those plans o’ yours.’
Watched him go:
A big unit, with the splay-footed gaatch of an old slugger, and he turning down a Trace wynd… the carry, the burliness, the country shoulders rolling. But even a creature as canny and brave as the Gant could not make Bohane concede to his wishes, and Ol’ Boy felt a darkness imminent.
Sadness was the breeze that came off the river and warmed his face.
And then, despite himself, he fingerclicked a snare beat, for the clanking of the meat wagons worked nicely as percussion to the shimmer of a calypso rhythm that travelled from De Valera Street.
A pack of wannabe Fancy boys – fourteenish, hormonal, all bumfluff ’taches and suicide eyes, with the wantaway croak of bravado in their breaking voices – traced the hip-sway of the rhythm outside the calypso joint, drew circles in the air with the winkled tips of their patent booties, passed along a coochie – eight of ’em drawin’ on it – and they kept watch – so shyly – on the Café Aliados down the way.
You might see Wolfie Stanners pass through those doors, or Fucker Burke with his prize Alsatian bitch, Angelina, or – swoon of swoons – the killer-gal Ching from the Ho Pee.
These were the legend names on the lips of the young ones in Bohane as the spring of ’54 came through.
And the spirit of the humid night at a particular moment caught the boys, and the badness (the taint) was passed down, and they broke into an old tune that worked off a doo-wop chorus – it fit nicely up top of the calypso beat – and they sang so hoarsely, so sweetly, and their young faces were menacingly tranquil.
Yes and the song carried to the old dears hanging out washing on the rooftops of the Trace, and they paused a mo’, and smiled sadly, and sang croakily the words also: ‘It’s a bomp it’s a stomp it’s a doo-wop dit-eee… it’s comin’ from the boys down in Bohane cit-eee…’
And a whisper of change travelled on the April air with the song, it went deeper and on and into the Trace, and the ancient wynds came alive with the season.
Dogs inched their snouts out of tenement hallways and onto the warming stoops.
Upon the stoical civic trees in the Trace squares a strange and smoke-streaked blossom appeared, its flowers a journey from sea grey to soot black, and the blossom was held to work as a charm against our many evils.
Beyond the city, the sea eased after the viciousness of springtide and
softly, now, it drew on its cables – its rhythms a soft throb beneath the skin of the Bohane people.
Night in the Back Trace shimmered with dark glamour.
The Gant passed through the Trace, and he turned down a particular wynd, and he entered there a grog pit. He met in its shadows, by prior arrangement, the galoot Burke, who was hunched traitorously over a bottle of Wrassler stout.
Sidled in beside.
Eyed the kid.
‘Been havin’ a little think about what I said to you, boy?’
Fucker nodded.
‘We can go a long way together,’ the Gant said, ‘if you got things to tell me?’
It came at a great surge then the Judas testimony of Fucker Burke:
‘Long Fella, he come ’roun’ the dockside evenins, late on, I mean you be talkin’ pas’ the twelve bells at least when he come creepin’ the wharf, an’ that’s when you’d catch him cuttin’ Trace-deep, an’ he walk alone, sketch? An’ it’s like maybe he head for Tommie’s – you know ’bout the supper room, sir? I can make a map for ya – or if mood take him maybe he haul his bones ’cross the footbridge, stop in at the Ho Pee, that’s the Ching place, he might suck on a dream-pipe, coz Long Fella a martyr to the dream since the wall-eye missus took a scoot on him, and the Chings is known for the top dream, like, but o’ course you mus’ know ’bout the Ching gal, Jenni, the slant bint that been workin’ her own game, if you askin’ me? An’ she got my boy Wolfie in a love muddle ’n’ all, and that ain’t like Wolfie, no sir it jus’ fuckin’ ain’t, like, and the way I been seein’ it, Gant, what’s goin’ down with the Back Trace Fancy, or I mean say what’s on the soon-come with the Fancy, if it all plays out the way I’m expectin’…’
Mercy, the Gant thought, there’s no shutting the kid up.
26
The Burden
Logan Hartnett on an April morning walked the stony rut of his one-track mind:
Where does she sleep now?
The shadow of his disease was beneath every inch of his skin. Since she left him, in the winter, he had realised the true extent of it. She had left him when he tested her, and maybe he had designed it just so. Maybe he wanted his sourest fictions to come to life.
Where does she sleep?
He crossed the S’town footbridge. He walked the Bohane front. He was dream-sick in the morning, and his nausea fed on the squalling of the gulls, the slaughterhouse roar, the clanking of the meat wagons. He turned onto De Valera Street. Blur of the street life, the faces indistinct and greenish. He aimed for the Bohane Arms Hotel. The street people still dropped their eyes as he passed but a questioning note combined now with the fear.
His jealousy had weakened him.
A night of fever-dreams and half-sleep was behind him at his berth above the Ho Pee Ching Oh-Kay Koffee Shoppe. He didn’t climb the Beauvista bluff any more – he couldn’t face those lonesome walls. He just sent Jenni now and then to fetch some fresh clothes.
Logan wore:
A pale green suit, slim-cut, of thin spring cotton, a pair of burnt-orange arsekickers with a pronounced, bulbous toe, a ruffle-fronted silver shirt open at the neck, a purple neckscarf, a pallor of magnificently wasted elegance, and his hair this season swept back from the forehead and worn just slightly longer, so that it trailed past the ruff of his jacket. Also, a three-day stubble.
Was the Long Fella’s opinion that, if anything, his suffering made him even more gauntly beautiful. He had all the handsome poignancy of heartbreak.
He hoicked a mouthful of green phlegm at the gutter – the pipe was affecting his lungs. XXX-rated images came at him randomly as he walked – they showed Macu in hot-mouthed abandon with a phantom sequence of young lovers – and he relished these pictures as does the tip of the tongue the gumboil. A burning sensation in his throat, a hollowness.
Where does she sleep?
Through the warm caffeine waft and dust-moted quiet of the shaded hotel foyer he passed, and he was watched by an Authority tout from an old suede lobby couch. They were waiting on his fall. Tout’s excited eyes jerked up from behind a conspicuously raised Vindicator, and Logan blew a thin-lipped kiss for the gombeen fool.
He ascended – hear now the dreary clank and groaning of the age-old elevator as it works its frayed ropes; Logan heard the workings slowed down, drawn out, dreamily – and he came along the corridor and knocked his particular knock on the suite’s numberless door.
‘Get in t’me, ya long fuckin’ ape!’
Girly was propped on a dozen pillows in the honey-mooners’ bed. She was apparently well fuelled: she had the weird crimson colour about the cheeks. When she was sixty, he had worried that the colour spelt her imminent death. She had lately turned ninety. Logan took the bedside seat, and she watched him, and she held the glance, and she puffed her cheeks then in exasperation.
‘Night I’m after puttin’ down?’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t put a fuckin’ dog through it.’
‘A bad one, Girl?’
She let her eyes roll tragically in her head.
‘I’m between sleep an’ wakin’ all the night – y’know that kind o’ way? The dreams is gone halfways fuckin’ alive on me. Four o’clock this mornin’, I was convinced Yul Brynner was on top o’ the bedspread tryin’ to claw in at me and have his way. In the days of the hair.’
Logan, impatient – he had heard it all so many times – rose again, and he went to the velvet drapes, and he shifted their weight a fraction, and he moved a little on the balls of his feet, shifted from one to the other, and he looked out to the rooftops of the Trace wynds.
Was she Trace-deep somewhere? The city was big enough, but only just, to get lost in.
‘Things ain’t looking so tasty away yonder,’ he said.
‘An’ the nex’ thing your father appears. In all his glory. Fuckin’ Patcho! Las’ toss-bucket I wanna set me peepers on. An’ he’s above on that wall there on top o’ the light switch playin’ his little trumpet? About the size of a stood-up rat. Dreams! An’ me eyes wide fuckin’ open, like?’
‘I’m being squeezed,’ Logan said. ‘I got the sand-pikes getting ambitious in Smoketown. Same time, I got the Norries working up a sour fucking brood for vengeance.’
‘Mind you, he could make that trumpet talk, yer aul’ fella.’
‘Never met him,’ Logan said. ‘And of course every swivel-eyed runt in the Fancy with a shkelp to his name and a nobber the size of a peanut is weighing his chances.’
‘Well, you’re hittin’ fifty, aintcha?’ she said. ‘Then I had the sensation, this was about half five, I’d say? Sensation that I was bein’ sucked into a bog-hole. Me! Ousside on fuckin’ Nothin’! Being swallied by a mound o’ wet turf! Me what ain’t left Bohane city since back in the lost-time. Sweet Baba! How many yella moons gone since I saw the Nothin’ plain, Log? Not since one o’ the times you went missin’ out there, I’d say.’
A lonesome kid, he would walk out the Boreen – he ghosted about the rez, the massif villages, the backlanes, the haunted cottages, their roofs all caved in. See him in a field of reeds – at ten years old – his pale face above the burning gold of the reeds caught in drenching sun, and the reeds ride slowly the sway of the wind.
‘I haven’t been able to find Macu,’ he said. ‘There’s no word from her even.’
‘She ain’t slidin’ a pole in S’town, no?’
Out on Nothin’, as a kid, he would listen to the old dudes at the rez fires, and in the shebeens, and he would watch the way they held themselves, and the way they carried themselves. That stuff didn’t get taught in the schoolhouse.
‘If I don’t find her, I don’t know that I can go on.’
Girly made a fist and bit down weakly on its bunched knuckles. For patience.
‘Comin’ along about seven bells?’ she said. ‘Gettin’ light out, the gulls havin’ a yap, the early El clankin’ a beat? And I came up outta mesel’ again.’
Logan winced at the bleach of morning sky over the Trace.
&n
bsp; ‘I don’t know what to do, Girly.’
‘Lay off the fuckin’ pipe for a start,’ she said. ‘Anyways I came outta mesel’, and I floated out that same window you’re stood at with a gommie fuckin’ puss on ya. Saw the rooftops. Saw the mornin’ get itsel’ all worked up. Saw the rush in S’town, saw the suits on Endeavour at their little cups o’ joe, their pinkies stuck out, and I saw the Rises women build their fires in the tower circles. An’ I saw a way to work it all yet, y’check me?’
He turned to her, and smiled. Girly in her floating visions so often spied a new course. He came back to the bedside chair, and folded his bones into it, and he crossed his legs neatly. He wasn’t the world’s most masculine man. He leaned forward. Weighed his chin in a cupped palm.
‘Tell me, you old witch,’ he said.
She reached across and slapped his knee, and the move had a playful note, and playfully he slapped her hand away. But the slap and parry – they both knew – had a deeper meaning in freight: it was for the consolation of touch.
27
The Ancient & Historical Bohane Film Society
It is not often that I get a good-looking woman in here. It is more usually men who are my patrons. The women can keep their feelings tamped a little more. But the men get to a certain age and it becomes too much for them. They must reach again for the whimsical days of their youth, and for the city as it was back then.
Mine is a small premises of the Back Trace. You will discover it down a dead-end wynd, with an unprosperous old draper to one side, his hands shaky now on the measuring tape, and a rotisserie the other, the charred smell of chicken skin wafting from ten in the morning. It is a glass-fronted shop, but the glass is a smoked grey, opaque, and on the door there is just a small title on a piece of white card, with the lettering of the Ancient & Historical picked out in gold ink. I do not need to advertise.
