by Kevin Barry
This particular April morning, the bell announced a customer, and I came forth, sighing, from behind the curtain, expecting the usual sad-eyed gent, the usual droop-of-mouth, the usual plea.
It was natural, then, that my breath should catch a little at the fine lady who appeared on the bell’s tingle. She was tall, Iberian, green-eyed, one of the eyes turned slightly in – but the quirk an emphasis, somehow, to her attractiveness – and her lips parted just a fraction, and I inclined my head patiently for her words, but she hesitated.
She wore:
A light, silken, springtime wrap of pistachio green turned just so across her shoulder, a scoop-neck top, French-striped, a pair of three-quarter-length buckskin hiphuggers that accentuated her tallness, and wooden clogs with a wedge-rise that lengthened the ankle beautifully.
Upon the right ankle, I noted at a glance – I don’t miss much – there was a small tattoo, in Indian ink, of a Bohane dirk.
‘How does it work?’ she said.
I merely nodded, and smiled, and I raised the hatch on the counter, and with a gesture (priestly, I fancy) bid her enter.
She came through, and I parted the curtains, and I led her into the back room. It is a silvery, mica tone of darkness that persists there, and the room contains just the drawn-down screen, and an easy chair, and to one side a hatch that leads to my projection room.
‘When?’ I asked. ‘Roughly.’
She sat in the easy chair, and removed the wrap, and the bareskin of her shoulders had a glisten in the silver of the gloom, and she crossed her legs, and she named the era that she longed for.
Anxiously, then:
‘Can you do this?’
I nodded.
‘The footage goes into the Thirties,’ I said.
Discreetly, I withdrew to the projection room. I flicked through the cans of reels. I had transferred onto these reels what had been rescued from the street cameras. I called to her, softly, through the hatch:
‘De Valera Street? The Trace?’
‘Dev,’ she said. ‘Maybe there by the Aliados?’
‘Where it gives onto the Trace,’ I whispered, soulfully.
I picked a favourite compendium; a really lovely reel. It shows the snakebend roll of Dev Street, deep in the bustle and glare of the lost-time, at night, with the darting of the traffic as it rolled then – ah, the white-tyred slouch-backs, the fat Chaparelles, the S’town cruisers – and the crowds milling outside the bars, the stags and the hens, and it was a different world, so glaringly lit.
Of course, it is a silent footage always in the back room’s replay, and so I cued up an old 78 on the turntable I keep by the projector, and I played it as accompaniment. It was a slow-moving calypso burner that gave a lovely sadness, I felt, to the scenes it worked with.
Discreetly, through the hatch, I watched the lady as she watched the screen. She was mesmerised.
And though I have watched this reel thousands of times myself, I was as always drawn into it, I was put under a spell by the roll and carry of the Dev Street habituees. If all had changed in Bohane, the people had not, and would never:
That certain hip-swing.
That especially haughty turn-of-snout.
That belligerence.
28
The View from Fifty
An old Bohane proverb:
The beginning of wisdom is first you get you a roof.
Of course, the Gant knew that a rez-born long-tooth can escape his wandering nature about as easily as outrun the length of his shadow, but he was willing to try. Big Nothin’ had over the winter months become too much, too lonesome. He had felt like he was losing the sense of himself again – the old darknesses were seeping once more through the cracks of his life. And so, quietly, he had taken a room in the Back Trace. It was a place to breathe in the city and see what feeling he could take from it. The room was the attic of a tenement; it was maybe fifteen feet along by ten feet wide, with a sloped ceiling. It contained a single bed and a sink and damp-warped old floorboards that creaked and sang as he paced them. The bed was an insomniac’s heroically rumpled nest, the sink for pissing in. A small window set in the roof gave a view over the Trace: the up-and-down of it, the rise-and-fall, the skewed calligraphy of the Bohane skyline, the dead pylons and dead cables, the half-dead birds with their spooked eyes, the strange dark blossom that trailed over the rickety zees of the fire escapes and the deep green voids of the wynds. The sense of being high above things gave to the Gant a feeling of breathlessness and abyss.
He had put the hard word on Jenni – Jenni had not turned.
He had put the hard word on Wolfie – Wolfie had not turned.
He had put the hard word on Fucker – Fucker said, what’s in it for me, like?
The Gant shook his head at the kid’s foolishness. He hoped that he would leave the place now. Take to the Boreen and head due east and never look back over the shoulder, not even once.
That’s the mistake, boy: the looking back.
The day persisted, outside; the world persisted. The gulls belligerently called – mmwwaaoork! – and morning sounds rose up from the Trace. The bustle and pep of the arcade market. The old dears as they milled and chirruped. The veg prices hollered, the stony-voiced haggling. The old dudes out on their stoops with wind-up transistors tuned to Bohane Free Radio – where it was always yesteryear. The old love songs, the slow calypso rhythms that triggered the sense memory of dance steps that were still wired into his bones, and that he tried out, now and then, laughing, on the warped floorboards.
The snatches of song opened him up. The streets below were for the Gant a memory hoard. Every kiss, every reefing – it all came back to him. The detail was close up, hallucinatory, blood-warm.
It was just three weeks they had been together. The night she left him he remembered in a visceral way. He could summon it at will. The colours of the lonely street that night; the nausea of defeat. He knew where she was and who she was with. He experienced again every moment of it. He saw it so clearly. The facts were plain:
She was eighteen, and Logan was cooler.
There in the attic room the Gant came back to the moment and he seethed again with youth’s intensity. The shallow fucking bitch. In the glare of spring, he was seeing things plain. He feared now he had come back to extract a revenge from Macu as much as from Logan. He had wanted to make her fall for him again, to make her sway, to make her world come loose. But on the longest night of the winter, on Beauvista, he saw that time had already from Macu taken its revenge.
He glared out over the rooftops.
Shallow fuckin’ town.
He watched now the young ones in the April morning as they roamed down there. You could pick out the blowins so easily: the arrivistes, the hard-eyed adventurers. They would by long tradition head for the city of Bohane in springtime – they brought their shkelps, their herb-pipes, their dreams. See the way they tried out a walk – getting the roll of the hips just right, and the loose carry of the shoulders, and the glide of the feet; you didn’t want to arrive Trace-deep on the stride of a cow-hand. He smiled but knew in his own way he was still trying out a walk. Still trying to fit into his own skin. At fifty! Oh hapless G, oh neurotic Broderick, oh the comical shame of this never growing old.
And still the lost-time music rose to him, remorselessly.
The Fancy boys had packed away their Crombies and wore sleeveless tanktops in bright pastel colours. The tattoo shops worked overtime – he could hear the zit-zing-zinging of their needles. And see the girls down there – the young stuff – in their wedge heels, their vinyl zip-ups, their spray-on catsuits; all trying to work it like Jenni Ching. Yes a shallow fucking town.
Now, critically, something shifted, a new pool of clarity opened, and the Gant as he watched the girls go by saw his revenge tack to a richer course.
He saw a slow way to hurt Logan.
29
The Intrigue in Smoketown
Jenni Ching whipped from the tit pocket a f
resh cigarillo, clipped it and lit it, and she winced against the glare as a dose of filthy sunlight filled the Smoketown wharf. She looked yonder to the Trace across the Bohane’s charismatic waters. She leaned back against the old cinnamon warehouse – it was lately got up as a grindbar – and she closed her eyes in long-suffering. Bit her pretty lip. Then she opened her eyes again, and blinked hard, and she turned to the sand-pikey bossman who was slouched beside her. This was an arranged meet, and his dreadlock brethren from the near distance warily kept guard. They fingered nervously their dirk sheaths. They kept careful sconce on the slanty bint. She scraped at the scummy cobblestones with a six-inch spike heel. She sucked from the lung-blackener what patience its tars might give. She said:
‘Tubby, I wan’ ya to hear this now. I don’ care what fuckin’ savagery ye practise out on them fuckin’ dunes, y’check me? Ye can chant yere fuckin’ pikey curses and ye can skin yere fuckin’ hares for the stewpot and ye can build yere little sixbar fuckin’ gates for the Big Nothin’ fermoiri an’ ye can hang yere fuckin’ scalps and paint yere bollix blue an’ have a read o’ the fuckin’ stars. Ye can train yere lurchers and hose out their minty fuckin’ cages. Fine! Coz I don’ have to fuckin’ well look at ye while ye’re at it. But lissen up, fatboy, and lissen good, coz yer in the fuckin’ city now, right? I said look around you, Tubs! Them’s buildings, them’s streets, them’s human fuckin’ peoples! I’m tryin’ to keep things a bit fuckin’ civilise aroun’ this joint, ya hear what I’m sayin’ t’ya? So let’s keep it all fit for biz, lardy-boy! Heed?’
The killer-gal glare she trained on him would put the scrotum hairs standing on a lesser gent but Prince Tubby just smiled serenely. He reached for the herb-bag that hung from his neck – fashioned, in the pikey way, from the skin of a goat’s testicle sac – and he took out a bud, and he crumbled it expertly into the bowl of his pipe, and he pulled the drawstring on the herb-bag to secure his supply, and he lit the bud with his Zippo – the lighter of choice, always, for the Bohane smoker, no other providing sufficient protection against the hardwind’s abrupt gusts – and he drew on the pipe. He glazed beautifully. He eyed Jenni Ching. He said:
‘I-and-I’s de Far-Eye, Jennie-sweet, y’check-back? I needs oney state dis one and true belief – de woman must not serve de man when she seein’ de moon.’
Way it was in S’town, this weather, Prince Tubby had his sand-pikey goons doing the rounds of every grogpit and shothouse and dream salon, and they were questioning the women who worked in these places about their menstrual cycles. Sand-pikeys held the belief that women were unclean when in flow.
‘It’s us way, Jen-chick, y’get me?’
Jenni Ching, defender of womankind, spat her cigarillo.
‘Y’ain’t nothin’ but a pikey fuckin’ throwback!’ she cried. ‘People’s got their fuckin’ privacy, check?’
Tubby displayed his palms.
‘Said it’s de sand-pike way, Jen,’ he said. ‘An’ what’s our way is de Smoketown way dese times, heed?’
She let a scowl devour him.
‘Oh we’ll see about that,’ she said. ‘Now g’on down the dune end an’ watch yer fuckin’ back, y’check me?’
She pushed off from the grindbar’s wall. Prince Tubby watched her go, and he glazed again on his draw, and he nodded slowly, appreciatively, at the clip of her spike heels, and the way she carried that high ’n’ tight slanty-chick can.
Jenni felt his glare and turned to it over her shoulder.
‘An’ don’ even fuckin’ dream it,’ she said.
Jenni wore:
Black nylon ski pants, a sheer black nylon top, a silver dirk belt, and a pork-pie crownsitter perched jauntily up top.
She aimed for the Ho Pee Ching Oh-Kay Koffee Shoppe. April sweltered, and there was a glisten of sweat on her forehead. The burn of his eyes on her rear end had planted a notion. In springtime, the city was opened to the elements like a wound and the sky bled its rude light on her as she walked. Manic birds hovered and cawed. The Ching gal plotted.
This seeing-the-moon caper was the least of it. That the sand-pikeys were opening credit lines for repeat customers was an even greater taunt. Not to mention their specials on brew and bushweed and particular methods of fornication. They were also, in Jenni Ching’s opinion, spreading all manner of superstition among the hoors, the dream sellers and the trick-pony boys. Then there was their general demeanour. They were fire-eating in the sideways and blowing perpetually on their horrible didgeridoos. Jenni reached the Ho Pee. She stormed through the swing doors of the place. She found Wolfie Stanners settled in a booth over a plate of gingered cuttlefish. He raised a moony look to her.
‘Stow the love-eyes,’ she said. ‘I gots enough on me fuckin’ noodle, check?’
‘S’up with ya, girl-a-mine?’
He laid down his chopsticks and pushed back his plate. Attentive, husbandly, lost to first love – it gets even the Wolfies among us – he reached for a cup and poured her a fill of jasmine tea from the bamboo-handled pot.
‘Sand-pikeys!’ she cried. ‘They ain’t got no fuckin’ class, Wolf!’
He sighed. He thought for a moment, and then he winked slyly. He placed on the table a small, scarred hand, the palm down, its fingers splayed, and with his other hand he drew a four-inch dirk from the inside pocket of his Crombie. He jabbed the dirk first slowly into the wooden tabletop between his splayed fingers, and then more quickly, and then at a furious pace until the knife became a blur. Knife tricks rarely failed to distract his girl from her troubles, but today she could raise only a wan smile. She laid a hand on his to still the blur. She spoke in a low voice.
‘Pikeys sendin’ Smoketown straight to fuckin’ hell, Wolf. An’ I’m suppose to stand around and look at the fuckheads while they’s at it?’
Jenni lit another cigarillo. She bopped smoke rings from her pouted lips. Wolfie became aroused beneath his gaberdine peg pants. He replaced with trembling hand the dirk in his inside pocket.
‘I think I know what you’re goin’ to say to me next,’ he said.
‘Where’s the change we wan’ to see comin’?’ she said.
‘That’s what I knew you’d say to me,’ he said.
She had been laying it on since the year-turn. Every day and every night. Jenni would lean in a little closer to him, and she would bring her lips to his ear, and she’d lick the lobe briefly, just once, with a single dart of her tongue, and then whisper to him:
‘The change, Wolf? Where’s the change we been wantin’?’
Now in the Ho Pee afternoon she saw there was too much loyalty in the boy. He was not ready to move. And Jenni made a decision. The sand-pikes without a leader would be headless and fatally degenerate. The Fancy without her boy-clutch, Wolfie, would be still riper for the taking. One or the other, Tubby or Wolfie, would not survive a collision. If her luck was in, both might fall.
‘What I wanted to talk t’ya about, Wolf…’
She turned her glance from him, and assumed a tragic aspect, as though too wounded for speech.
‘What’s it, girl?’
‘This Tubby, y’know? He ain’t got no fuckin’ respec’, like.’
‘How’d ya mean, Jen?’
She jerked a thumb over her shoulder to indicate the S’town beyond.
‘Not five minute since?’ she said. ‘He oney goes and drops the hand on me, don’t he?’
Homicidal rage at once travelled the short length of Wolfie Stanners. It forced him to a stand. His freckle-puss crimsoned. He gripped the booth’s tables with his tiny, scarred fingers.
‘He did… fuckin’… what?’
30
The Beak of the Law
See a busted-nose smirk from a Bohane polis. See his great slabs of ham-bone arms crossed on the station’s high counter and inked with tats showing the symbols of the polis fraternities:
A truncheon with a snake’s head.
A length of coiled chain.
A Judas coin.
Was a
bottle of Phoenix ale on the counter and he raised it and sucked deep on it and burped a cloud of kebab breath (mutton flavour) and he placed the bottle down again, wiped his mouth and smacked his greasy lips and a wee lizardy tongue emerged and tickled the air; see the searching tip of it.
Logan Hartnett was stood up on the other side of the counter and he winced, delicately – his gut was already unsure from the dream-pipe – as the cloud of polis breath meatily lingered.
‘You’ve got the fucking rot in you, friend,’ he said. ‘Not long for the beat would be my call.’
Polis smirked even more slyly – the arrogant chops of the fucker creased to a fold there beneath the bleached glare of the stationhouse strip lights.
The station walls were painted an institutional green and old bloodstains were dark inkblobs against the green. Polis reached beneath the desk and brought up a bottle of state whiskey; he showed it. Logan shook his head – he wouldn’t shame his throat with that tangerine-coloured pisswater. The polis fathead nodded politely – no offence taken – blew another damp, liverish breath, and lightly, he said:
‘Mr Hartnett, why’s it you’re here again, sir?’
Was the thinnest of smiles Logan allowed the fat polis.
‘I think you might have someone I need to see.’
Long Fella was working the latest plan from Girly’s play-book. Goal: the immediate pacification of the Norrie kind. The Norries in humid springtime were restless, wounded and brooding, and a play was urgently needed.
‘We picked her up,’ the polis confirmed, ‘but that’s a dangerous game on the Rises, y’understand? When tis a Cusack kid we’s talkin’?’
