by Kevin Barry
‘As loooong as dat black river flow…’
But even such a girl was poor distraction for the jowly merchants in the banquette booths. Those old boys quivered, almost – they could barely lift the tankards to their lips. Their eyes were drawn to a pair of men seated on high stools at the far end of the Supper Room’s bar. One was broad and densely packed, the other tall and slender.
Double-take:
It was Logan Hartnett and the Gant Broderick.
A tight huddle they had settled to, and they were whispering there. And in a hoarse whisper also the girl’s song came through.
‘As long as dem stars still shiiine / As long as our twined love grow…’
Tommie the Keep occupied himself with chipping ice from a ten-pound block into splinters for the cooler buckets. Almost lost a pair of fingers to the chisel, Tommie, as his scared glance shot along the counter to the men. Hartnett with a raised hand signalled now for another bottle of moscato, and Tommie fetched one and brought it. The men paused in their talk as he nestled the bottle among the ice chips in their cooler. Each wistfully smiled for him.
‘Mr Hartnett,’ said Tommie. ‘Mr Broderick.’
Tommie was not brave enough to linger and he scuttled again down the length of the bar. The girl singer finger-clicked still as her drummer whittled a high thin beat on the snare. In the booths, the heavy lads nervously swayed. Temperatures were yet in the thirties, even after midnight, and the city’s mood was edgy.
Logan Hartnett and the Gant Broderick both rested their forearms on the bar counter, and they both stared straight ahead, and they both rotated their glasses slowly with the tips of their fingers – each unconsciously mimicked the other.
The Gant lifted his glass then and sipped at his moscato.
‘Fuckin’ breakfast wine,’ he said.
‘Have a Jameson so.’
‘Swore off the whiskey over.’
Like a kid, Logan thought, like a surly little kid.
‘Wasn’t agreeing with you, G?’
The Gant shrugged, drained off the glass, and poured another. Held the bottle for Logan, raised an eyebrow; Logan demurely placed a hand to cover his glass. Like an old bint, the Gant thought.
‘Like an ol’ bint,’ he said.
‘Don’t be bitter, Martin,’ Logan said.
The girl singer held a slow note to its fade; it brought up the blue veins of her slender neck, and she let the note die, and she stepped from the stage then for an interval break, pinching carefully at the thighs of the silver dress so as not to trip.
Barely a scatter of applause came for the room was preoccupied: Dominick Gleeson, the fat newsman, slithered an oyster into his gob from the half-shell but barely registered the shiver of its sea tang as he worried about the Hartnett–Broderick clinch. Big Dom scowled tubbily in puzzlement, and it was a puzzlement shared, two booths over, by Edmund ‘The Gypo’ Lenihan, the old-school S’town hoor-master. Ed sipped sourly at a measure of moscato and laid a hand on his belly, the wine interfering lately with his ulcers. At a booth adjacent was a gentleman of the Bohane Authority, poured into a thin flannel suit and licking the salt off a pretzel, and he tried as best as he could to secrete himself in the Supper Room’s shadows.
All watched the two men at the bar.
A great rip of trembling took hold of the Gant just then – he was laughing? – and Logan placed a brotherly hand on his back, as though to steady him.
Shudders in the booths, and nervous tabs were lit in a rolling relay around the room – the sparking of one inclined the sparking of the next.
Logan Hartnett took a handkerchief from an inside pocket to wipe away a morbid, a dream-sent tear.
‘That day in August,’ he said, ‘I wasn’t sure I’d know you right off.’
‘You’re actually weepin’?’ the Gant said.
‘Something in my eye,’ he said. ‘Twenty-five years, you know…’
‘You’re one strange animal, Hartnett.’
‘As people never seem to tire of telling me.’
Again they mimicked without knowing it each the other’s posture – each of them was a little slumped now, and they sat bluesily, sad-eyed; it was past midnite at Tommie’s.
‘If you were askin’ me to place a bet,’ the Gant said, ‘I’d say she’ll come back to you.’
‘If she doesn’t, I’m done for.’
‘I wouldn’t worry too much. A nice berth you made for her atop the hill, ain’t it? And she always was a shallow bitch.’
‘Did you really think she’d choose you, Gant?’
On a morning in August, in the grey dim of a deserted bar room, in the village of Ten Light, in the foothills of the Nothin’ massif, they had sat with each other. The rendezvous was discreet and polite. Logan carefully laid out his terms. To test Macu’s loyalty, and to test the Fancy’s – this was the Gant’s role, and in return for playing it, he was allowed safe passage again to Bohane, to his home and to his lost-time. He could return and he could stay – it was what he had pleaded for in the letters that he had sent to Logan. They spat and shook on it in the grey room. Even to shake hands had caused a wince of pain in the Gant – he’d returned with a last wound from the world beyond; his shoulder reefed in Whitechapel.
‘When you told her about the arrangement,’ Logan said, admiringly, at the barside in Tommie’s, ‘I thought, that’s sly… to turn it back at me like so. Put me in an evil light in my own house, didn’t it? Of course it did for your chances an’ all.’
‘Didn’t want her,’ the Gant said. ‘Soon’s as I saw her close up, y’check?’
‘Tell yourself that often enough, Martin, and you might start to believe it.’
Maybe there was a want in the Gant to hurt him yet but was he capable of it? Brave as the dream he each night blew, Logan believed not – the Gant was sold to the past; the Gant was done for. But if the dream-smoke brought courage, it brought a harsh truth, also: Logan knew that he may not himself be far behind.
The girl singer downed a fast whiskey and returned to the stage, and she finger-snapped a double-quick beat, and she swung out her hips, she tried to get things moving at a jauntier pace, she tried to lift the tension, but the hot old boys in the booths shifted uncomfortably and dropped their piggy little eyes, and she sighed, and she let it slow again to ballad pace, began to croon one, and the merchants again sulkily swayed.
Logan and the Gant sat for a time in the selfsame brood; both rejected, it was an odd bond they shared, and sweetly painful.
‘S’pose you done for the galoot lad?’
‘Poor Fucker,’ Logan sighed.
‘Couldn’t have let him go the High Boreen, nah? A boy o’ what, fifteen?’
‘He was seventeen.’
‘Didn’t look it.’
Anxiety spun a web across the room. Those who had passed word and information to the Gant Broderick over the winter and springtime feared now the consequences. They knew they had been tested.
‘You’re all shoulders, ain’t you, Gant?’ Logan smiled as he turned on his stool, a half-swivel, and took a slow reck of his old acquaintance. ‘A big ham-faced lunk off the bog plain. Of course even as a kid you were a fucking unit. Even when you were in off the rez first, Martin Broderick, eight years of age, and putting the fear of the SB into grown men. Of course a brain would have been useful also.’
‘A brain not so hot if it got maggots wrigglin’ about it.’
‘Ah what did she ever see in you?’
Logan sipped delicately at his moscato. Made a face – the wine had warmed in the night’s humidity. Snapped fingers and pointed, simultaneously, at the optics, and Tommie the Keep scuttled for the John Jameson. One measure was brought, a second offered, but the Gant again refused it.
‘Tell me more about your days over, G. Fun times?’
He joined his long thin hands, the fingers interlocking, about his middle. The Gant ignored the question, and presented his own.
‘What do you really want, Logan?’
An intake of breath, and there was no front to the ’bino here.
‘I want to go on for a while yet.’
‘Then go an’ hold a pillow over yer mother’s face.’
‘Leave my mother out of this.’
The Gant smiled at the advantage he’d found, and he knew it would niggle all the more if he did not play it.
And the girl singer swayed, and she sang, with a smokiness to her voice, and she ran her fingers along her slim hips, and the room went with her to a lost-time melody, the air rearranging as the night tensely progressed.
‘S’the Ching gal I’d watch,’ the Gant teased.
‘You been whispering to her, Gant. You been encouraging her. You been saying pretty things in the paper about the young gals comin’ through.’
‘Hardly needs my word, that gal.’
‘And what about Wolfie?’
‘Well, the Wolfie-boy’s got a prob, don’t he? Wolfie’s in love.’
‘That is a problem.’
The coolers full, the shaved ice glistening, Tommie the Keep took them around to the booths, and he replaced the used ones, and he shared heavy glances with the merchants; who knew what strange course Bohane might be set to now?
The girl singer called her sweet laments, and the fat merchants went soppy in the booths, and the sleepy-eyed drummer teased a sad, slow rhythm with the brushes.
‘Who’s allowin’ who to live?’ the Gant said, and they both laughed at that.
Tommie the Keep ducked under his bar hatch again and took his cloth and hurried a shine into the counter. He strained to hear but he could not hear.
‘When you told me that she talked about me still,’ the Gant said. ‘That she called out my name at night… Do you know I near enough believed it?’
‘Poor fool,’ Logan said.
It was early a.m. at the Supper Room, in the humid soup of a Trace night, and the high-quiffed drummer rode a bushweed drift, and he gazed at the hindquarters of the svelte girl singer, and he floated a while on the rivers of the moon.
Dom Gleeson, in his booth, was defeated by the situation, could not by glance alone untangle its nuance, its news, and he thought, fuck it anyway, I’m away to S’town for the slap of a hairbrush.
The Authority man tried to get straight in his noggin the report that needed making for the members.
‘The Gypo’ Lenihan thought he had seen quareness in his time but nowt so quare as the pairing at the bar.
Tommie the Keep polished madly still the bar counter.
The Gant drained what was left of his moscato.
‘That’s me for the road,’ he said.
He rose from his stool – yes, a big unit still – and politely Logan rose with him. They spoke just a few words more. The Gant turned to leave the Supper Room then but he hesitated, and he turned back again to Logan.
Briefly, oddly, they embraced.
IV
ON THE NIGHT OF AUGUST FAIR
We came through the green hollows of June, and through slow lascivious July, and then the August Murk descended: it was late summer in the city, and our world was so densely made and intricate about us.
The Murk is a thick seafog that settles each year on the creation and just about smothers us alive. It is a curiously localised event that affects this peninsula alone of the western seaboard. The meteorologists, long puzzled, term it ‘The Murk of Bohane’, and leave it at that. The Murk comes down as a greyish, impenetrable mist and it lays a great torridness on the city, a swamp heat.
This is the weather of August Fair.
* * *
This is by tradition the time of betrothal in Bohane, and for the week leading up to Fair Day, all the young tush paraded the Murky streets in their glitter and swank.
Oh and the tushies worked it like only the Bohane tush can – their hair was pineappled and freshly streaked, the warpaint was laid on with shovels, and their navels gleamed with tuppenny jewels that shone as their eyes shone with badness and delight. All the young fiends followed at close quarters, with their tongues hanging out for the sheer want of it – sheer, the cliff face of adolescent desire – and festive mode for a fiend was to be barechested beneath a straw hat with a rash of sunburn and freckles across the nose and jaws. They fell into love as though to a precipice.
As the Fair’s build-up progressed, Bohane Free Radio broadcast from the back of a herring boat and blasted righteous samba cuts across the dockside, and the young things danced on the cobbles with fervent desperation:
They did the Grind, and the Three-B (Bohane-Bum-Buster), and the S’town Shuffle.
Mothers and fathers sat nervously in the tenements and rotated slowly their thumbs one around the other – this was also, by tradition, a time of mass impregnation in Bohane.
Sure how many of us are mid-May babies, born of a Fair Day grapple down a Back Trace wynd? How many of us sucked at life for the first time beneath a taurine moon?
Indeed a quare shake of us.
* * *
Big Nothin’ for weeks in advance worked itself up for the Fair’s great release.
The seasonal lakes of the hillsides filled with Murky precipitation and the young lay about by these swimming holes, and they rolled into one another’s arms, and they whispered of Fair Day on the soon-come.
Of course, many a stout-hipped daughter or big-arsed son of the plain would lose the run of themselves at the Fair. Was common enough for a Nothin’ child to hit down the High Boreen for the Fair, innocent as a three-legged lamb, and be discovered, weeks later, haggard and dream-addicted down the wrong end of a Smoketown salon, and all set to be signed for a trick-pony ranch or hauled off to a lurcher cage.
But if there wasn’t such danger, there’d be no such spice.
Expectation travelled the hill-country smallholdings, and along the poppy fields that extend east of Ten Light village – see the dream fields undulate in the tropic heat of August – and through the pikey rez, and the day at last came, and every stony acre of the plain tossed out a choice of spudaters, and legions of them were led on the morning of August 13th by their livestock through the dawn gloom along the length of the High Boreen. They had calves for the slaughter and piebalds for to sell.
‘Name t’me a price for yon palomino, kid?’
Fair Day of ’54 had a grey and ominous sky: the usual Murksky.
Rain came in bad-minded spats.
An eerie wind taunted.
And the city of Bohane spread itself for all comers.
* * *
Smoketown geared up for the busiest day of its calendar. Half the creation would be over the footbridge for the suck of a dream-pipe, a hand shandy and a bowl of noodles.
Hoors waxed themselves.
Mortars of dream-bulb paste were expertly grinded.
Chillis were chopped, seeds and all, and fecked into vast tureens of mackerel chowder that were hauled around S’town and gave fine nutrition for the sweaty labours ahead.
Nervous hoors were adrift in the rustle of nylons and the fixing of garter-belts and lost in the misty valleys of their own cheap scent.
Oh the loneliness of it all.
* * *
It was the city’s habit to drink hard for the week leading up to August Fair, and De Valera Street, by the morning of the 13th, looked as if a riot had already passed through.
Emptied wine sacks filled every gutter and diamonds of broken glass – Bohane gemstones – sparkled on the sidewalks. There was hardly a set of eyes in the town that weren’t already at the far end of their stalks. Fair Day was a time of massive hilarity, and sentimental music, and it was a most useful pressure valve, for these were hard times in the city, in this hard town by the sea.
Along the dockside, the Merries were set up: the swing-bucket whirligigs were tested, the dog-fight rings marked out with hay bales, the test-your-strength meter raised on its platform. Impromptu stages made of ale barrels, ship’s rope and lengths of four-be-two were erected for the barek-nuckle fistfights. Ti
ered seating was arranged around a rodeo ring and sawdust was thickly strewn. The dark-eyed carnies who set up these attractions were from the same families as always brought the Merries to Bohane. Powerful smokers, the carnies. And of course many a carnie was sprung from the peninsula originally. We would be the sort, outside in Bohane, who’d run away with the Merries as quick as you’d look at us.
Hoss polis were a heavy presence. Even at daybreak, they were at every Back Trace entry that led off from the docks. The brethren of the St John’s Ambulance Brigade – Here come the good guys! In their little jackets! – were preparing to stretcher the wounded towards the medicine tents. Back Trace old dears threw back their shutters and from the high windows hung out their bosoms and were wistful for their own remembered Fair Days.
Fair Day, as we always say in Bohane, is a day for the youth.
And they lace into it like pagans.
August Fair…
August the 13th…
We whisper of it for months in advance, and we are as long again recovering.
* * *
Logan Hartnett stepped over stuporous bodies on the Bohane front. He heard the cry of the auction down the yards: all the old taunts and threats of the horse trading, which was the main business of Fair Day. He swivelled a reck along De Valera and the ’bino’s glance was clear-eyed and sharp this weather as he reckoned the polis numbers. He moved for the Trace. He was barechested. He wore three-quarter-length black strides in a narrow-leg cut over a pair of Spanish Harlem arsekickers. The scars on his chest were faded and wattled, like folds of chickenskin, and were reminders of the reefings he’d walked away from in his day. He had a dress-shkelp in his belt, ivory-handled.
As he turned into the Trace, the air changed, as it always did, and he asked how many times in his life he had swung into these dank, narrow streets for some whispering rendezvous.
Herb and sick and tawny wine were on the air.
Each turn of the Trace that he took signified – there he’d had a knee-trembler, there he’d bled a foe. He took a particular turn and the broken glass on an alleyway’s surface amped his footfall to a noirish crunch. The yellow light of an early-doors caff gleamed from the back of the alley.
