by Kevin Barry
There was a handful of customers already at the caff: lads who had been late at the bottle, and were now haggardly hunched over Bohane Specials, and wondering how long it would be before their lungs could chance the first tab of the day.
At a rear table, nursing a short black joe and puffing a stogie, was Jenni Ching.
Logan took the seat opposite.
‘You wouldn’t chance a fry, Jenni, no?’
The girl laid a hand on her ribcage.
‘Me body’s a fuckin’ temple, like.’
‘I suppose if you can’t look out for yourself, Jen?’
‘Then there ain’t nobody gonna do it for you, Mr Hartnett.’
The serving girl came, and Logan asked for coffee only, and he winked at Jenni, who nodded sombrely, as if that was the best decision a grown man could make. The shocking yellow of the egg-yolk stains on the Special plates would not anyway betray a man to gluttony.
‘Polis is bought,’ Jenni said.
‘The price?’
‘Fuckin’ savage.’
‘I’d imagine.’
‘But at least they’s gonna face off the sand-pikes.’
‘Saves us doing it, Jen-gal.’
‘O’ course Prince T is born canny. He’s gonna be keepin’ to the rear end o’ things when the polis fucks arrive.’
‘A leader’s prerogative,’ Logan said.
‘If you say so, H.’
‘Maybe time you learned such things?’
Jenni scowled.
‘Way it’s pannin’,’ she said. ‘Ed Lenihan reckons it’s the night to clear Wolfie a path to the Far-Eye.’
‘Tremendous.’
They drank joe; they smoked tabs. They were wary of each other but fond, too. He knew she had watched out on all sides – the swivelling glance an S’town apprenticeship will teach – but she had betrayed no Fancy confidence; she had given nothing to the Gant.
‘Ain’t been seein’ ya at the Ho Pee these nights,’ she said.
‘Keeping my snout clean, Jenni,’ he said. ‘Got to stay on top of things.’
‘Plenty happenin’ ’bout the place awrigh’, H.’
‘Speaking of, Jenni. I’m to understand you’ve got these Trace girls at your beck lately?’
‘It’s said.’
She bopped in high innocence a smoke ring.
‘And you got the Gant naming you to all and sundry as the soon-come kid.’
‘A sloppy aul’ dude wanna spout bollick-talk an’ he down the boozer, it ain’t my lookout to stop him.’
‘Of course my darling mother is lending the weight an’ all, ain’t she, Jen?’
‘Girly and me is close.’
‘Oh, more than that, I think. Not a hand to be laid on the Jen-chick ever, is there? That’s my instruction.’
‘You wanna try a hand, ’bino?’
He smiled.
‘It’s hard not to love you, Jenni.’
She pulled down her coldest glaze, gave him a blast of it, briefly, and then let her eyes scan the morning wynd beyond.
‘Those Fancy boys don’t stand a chance against you, do they, Jenni?’
Logan raised the joe to his lips and savoured its bitterness. Old photographs on the cafe walls were of Bohane faces – hard-set stares in hard-chaw faces – and he looked at them a moment.
‘See this gang?’ he said.
Jennie surveyed the faces.
‘You’d notice a type. Their noses in the air, watch? Haughty! Even if they ain’t got the arse of their kecks. What we are in this town is an arrogant fucking breed. We think it’s all been thrown down to our particular design.’
All the old faces were in their own time fabled in the Back Trace universe, he said. The Trace was a world within a world, he said, and each of these dead souls had a power in the world once, was known for his swiftness with the shkelp, or his knack with the tush, or his canniness with a buck. Each was in the boneyard now, he said; Logan Hartnett, reality instructor.
‘You have to remember, Jenni, that all we’re trying to do is keep the place someways fucking civilised.’
‘Y’spoutin’ me own creed, H.’
‘We get a stretch of Calm in place and we get the S’town trade flowing in the right direction again and then we can decide on what comes next, yes?’
‘I’m listenin’.’
‘Oh I know you are, Jenni. I know it too well.’
* * *
The Alsatian cur Angelina sloped low to the ground across the Big Nothin’ plain. She aimed contrary to the Bohane river as it surged through the August Murk. Great swathes of rhododendron along the bank filled and shimmied with gusts of a hardwind and the knotweed swayed on its copper-red canes all along the malevolent river. Angelina shivered her bones to loose the ’skeetos that fed hungrily on her blood and she keened; the sharp of the yellow fangs showed.
Angelina went upriver.
And she passed along the way a mute child bound for the city as he steered with the tip of a whitethorn switch to its rump a feral mountain goat.
The puck goat’s hard grey eyes pierced the Murk.
Angelina threw a hungry glance at the pair but she walked on, and she kept low to the ground, and she searched everywhere with snout and hooded eye.
Mute child and the puck goat moved west, and away; they went with the river’s flow.
By ’n’ by the rooftops of the high bluffs loomed through the Murk.
River followed its drag through the backswathe of the city, its hinterland – that vague terrain.
Mute’s busy snout rose to snag on the salt tang:
And the wash of the ocean air on this morning of August 13th brought all the colours of the North Atlantic drift.
Bohane was green and grey and brown:
The bluish green of wrack and lichen.
The grey of flint and rockpool.
The moist brown of dulse and intertidal sand.
* * *
A slouch of old lads hunkered in the late morning over breakfast pints at the Capricorn Bar on the Bohane front. Weather-bleached skulls of Big Nothin’ goats were mounted behind the bar atop the optics and stacks of tin tankards. Beyond the dusty windows, August Fair shrieked and writhed into rude life; the horse trading busied, the Merries sparked. The old lads wistfully watched it all as they met the day with Wrassler stout, sausage sandwiches, and wistful memories.
The Gant was among them, and having been gone so long, he was himself a relic of the lost-time, and they prompted him, and he succumbed.
‘Do you not remember, G?’
‘Oh, I do, I suppose. I do.’
‘You’d have come out of that place one arm longer than the other.’
‘It was roughish. It sure was. An’ was it Thursday nights it was on there?’
‘Tuesdays and Thursdays but the Tuesdays were quiet. Tuesdays only if you were stuck with a fairly severe lack of it.’
‘Ah yeah, Tuesdays was for plain girls…’
Laughs.
‘And of course it was a place you’d want a twist of blackcurrant in the stout to ease the taste?’
‘Ferocious taps. Though nothing at all to what they were serving below in Filthy Dick’s.’
‘Stop!’
‘Do you remember, Gant, the way all the pony-and-traps would be lined up outside Dick’s?’
‘Of a Sunday. Every fuckin’ latchiko in the town would be out there.’
‘If you came home out of it with the two eyes still in your head, you’d be thinking: result.’
‘Was it Dick had the daughter married the fella of the Delaceys?’
‘Indeed. The daughter married up. Delaceys the bakers.’
‘Where was it they were again, Gant? Top end of Dev?’
‘Just so – opening onto Eamonn Ceannt Street off the New Town side.’
‘Ah… yeah… there was a sideway in?’
‘Of course there was – you’d be knocking in for an apple slice. Through the hatch.’
‘Oh Sweet Ba
ba they were something!’
‘Stop the lights. The finest apple slice that was ever slid across a counter in this town.’
The apples stewed since early morning in the ten-gallon pot. The apples all stirred about by the big, sweating, ignorant-looking Delacey father. The crumble for a topping that was made always with prime Big Nothin’ butter, and the crumble baked till it was golden, and the way the sour note of the cooking apples hung in the air for two blocks at least.
‘Delaceys, yes… Would have been alongside… Alo Finnerty the jeweller?’
‘Alo. A lightin’ crook.’
‘Was said. Then what would you come to, Gant?’
‘Jerry Kycek the weeping Polack butcher.’
‘Of course you would. Poor Jerry!’
‘That man went through the fucking wringer.’
‘Always, with the wife he had. Of course, he was known for his black pudding?’
‘He was. Wrapped in the pages of a Vindicator you’d get it, with the blood still dripping.’
‘Drippin’!’
* * *
So happened that not all of our knocking shops in Bohane were on the S’town side of the footbridge. The infamous Blind Nora’s, for example, drew its clientele down a hard-to-find sideway of the Back Trace, and Ol’ Boy Mannion, as Fair Day built to a noontime roar, turned a dainty toe towards the place.
By midday an air of happy derangement had settled on the Trace. You could barely walk the wynds for the large and ragged crew that bounced off the tenement walls. There were big lunks of hill-country sluggers, and pipe-mad pikeys on the loose from the rez, and syphilitic freaks with lost-time dreams in their eyes, and washed-up auld hoors, and one-legged trick-ponies (the gout often a danger to the lads of that trade), and sand-pikey watches roved the city with a strange, unnameable fear about them, and the Fancy boys blithely prowled, and the polis beaks, and scar-faced Norrie mendicants with wooden bowls for alms, and wilding packs of feral teenage sluts, and tormented preachers hollering the wages of sin from the tops of stoops, and any one of this crowd could turn a shkelp in your lung as quick as they’d look at you, but as he walked through it all, with his snout held high and a wryness even in his carriage, even in his footfall, Ol’ Boy Mannion was notably immune to the madness, and he felt no fear.
Ol’ Boy wore:
A three-piece skinny-dude suit in the classic mottled-green shade, a pair of silver-painted jackboots (square-toed) on the dancers, and a dove-grey stovepipe hat up top, leaning westerly, with a delicate length of crimson scarf tied around it.
Snazzy, no?
Slugged from a hip flask of the Beast, did Ol’ Boy, and took the occasional draw on a herb-pipe.
Wasn’t high so much as maintaining.
The wynds of the Trace were mud and shite and puke underfoot and he placed the step carefully, with an eye to his boots, because they hadn’t cost him tuppence ha’penny, no, sir.
He went down a sideway, and then another, and took the twist of a turn once more, and the Trace quietened some as he went deeper into it, and he came at last to Blind Nora’s.
It was a low joint. It was patronised only by the very desperate. If you were turfed out of every place else in the city, there’d be a roost for you yet at Nora’s. They even let the Haitians in. And the Tipperary men. Ol’ Boy entered past the doorkeep, a big simian brute smoking the butt of a stogie – ‘Howya, Dimitri?’ – and he could not but wince against the smell of the place.
Troubled ladies in tragic fishnets were slung down on ancient couches. They clutched pipes and drinks and SBJ medals. A mulatto inebriate put an old rocksteady seven-incher on a wind-up turntable and danced uncertainly as the tune grainily kicked in.
Stumbled against Ol’ Boy.
‘Watch yerself, kid,’ said Ol’ Boy, gently.
A wretched hoor laughed and showed her toothless maw. Now there was a dangerous-looking tunnel for you. The bordello shades were drawn against even the Murky daylight and the place was lit by table lamps on upturned crates and coloured silks were drawn over these – for mood, no less – and the silks were singed by the heat of the lamps and the burning smell met with others in the air: pipe, Beast, baccy and seed.
Ol’ Boy smiled for each of the ladies in turn but he was not here to have his needs satisfied. It wouldn’t be Nora’s he’d be hitting if that was the cause. Ol’ Boy was here to see the woman herself.
‘Is it you?’ she said.
‘You know it is,’ he said.
Nora was an enormous cheese-coloured old blind lady with ringlets of black curls, like a doll’s. She was perched on a divan down back of the room. She drank psychoactive mushroom tea, delicately, from a Chinkee pot. She was magnificently fat. She beamed for Ol’ Boy and shuffled along the divan, haunch by ample haunch, and he moved in beside her, crossed his legs, laid a hand on her knee.
‘Another one ’round to us, Nora?’
‘Fair Day come ’round so quick, Mr Mannion.’
Together they smiled, and they were comfortably silent for a time. Savoured the day and their moment together. Then Ol’ Boy said:
‘You’ve that lady well hid for me yet?’
‘I have, sir.’
‘You’re to keep her well hid today, Nora, if you can at all.’
‘Oh?’
‘It’s just sometimes I get a black feeling…’
‘She’s well hid, sir.’
‘Where have you her, Nora?’
‘I wouldn’t even tell you that, Mr Mannion.’
‘Trace-side anyway, I s’pose?’
‘She’s well hid, sir.’
They sat a while. And then he turned to her again, and squeezed her hand, and he said:
‘Will you sing one for me, Nora?’
She loosed a hard laugh that rippled her fleshy shoulders. She took a nip of the Beast from the flask he offered. She leaned back, and a lovely gentleness spread over her features, and it was from the heart that she sang:
‘I was thinking to-day of that beauti-ful laaand…
That we’ll see when the sun go-eth down…’
* * *
Jenni Ching had the polis palm crossed with Judas coin and them polis fucks they was hard-prepped for a swipe at the sand-pikey ranks, y’sketchin’?
Jenni Ching had her lovelorn beau Wolfie-boy Stanners hard-prepped to wield a shkelp in the direction of the Far-Eye maniac Prince Tubby, y’heed?
Jenni Ching had a pack of feral teenage sluts at her beck ’n’ call in the Bohane Trace, y’check me?
* * *
Every time Logan closed his eyes he saw Fucker again. He saw the pain, the way it twisted as the shkelp was moved neatly from side to side, and then the quick deadening of the features. He felt over and again the moment, the way he had leaned in, sadly, and the feeling of the dead boy’s brow as it fell onto his.
It was the first of his killings that had lingered so. He knew it now for a mistake. He’d seen only the need for vengeance. He hadn’t played the long game. He hadn’t reckoned on the loyalty a reprieve might have bred in the Fancy’s ranks. Gant had been right – he should have just sent the galoot out the High Boreen.
Logan Hartnett was the most sober man on De Valera Street. He walked a tread of memory and regret. The street in the hot afternoon roiled, thrashed, simmered; August Fair was remorseless.
* * *
From her divan, at the sad bordello, Blind Nora yet sang:
‘That bri-ight stars may be mine in the glor-ious day,
When His praise like the sea billow ro-olls…’
* * *
At the Capricorn Bar, as the crowds thronged outside on the Bohane front, as the Merries got into swing, the old-timers worked a whiskey-fed reminiscence, and the Gant was its conductor:
‘Of course the Vindicator itself was at that time on De Valera Street?’
‘It was. This would have been before Big Dom Gleeson’s time. Before Dom came in and got notions about the New Town.’
‘Notions in Boh
ane’d be nothin’ new.’
‘No, Gant.’
‘What was the bar the Vindicator lads would drink in? The printers?’
‘You mean the place…’
‘Down off…’
‘Off…’
‘Half Moon Street?’
‘Precisely so… You’re talking about the Llama, aren’t you?’
‘No I am not. I remember the Llama. A filthy place.’
‘Filthy. A honk out of it.’
‘A honk that’d knock you. But that wasn’t the printers’ bar… Was it Corbett’s I’m thinkin’ of?’
‘Corbett’s was polis always… The polis frats all drank there, goin’ way, waaay back…’
Yes. A dim-lit saloon with pictures of old sergeants on the walls. Touts sneaking out of it late on – looking left, then right, a swivel of their Judas eyes. A jukebox loaded with sentimental Irish ballads (‘Mother McCree’, ‘Four Green Fields’, ‘The Goat Broke Loose’) and in the lounge section a few sanctioned hoors peddling herb and dream up top of their tricks.
‘Corbett’s was polis, you’re right.’
‘Polis had more to them at that time.’
‘They did. And were rotten on account o’ the heft they had.’
‘Rotten… And do you remember at all Silly Herbert the loolah?’
‘Ah poor Silly! I do.’
The Gant all but weeping then.
‘A desperate masturbator!’
‘Will anyone ever forgot the time he hauled it out in the middle of the 98er Square?’
‘Of a Christmas Eve?’
‘An’ he chokin’ the squirrel?’
Christmas Eve, and poor Silly, the lunatic, smashed on sherry given as a present by the Devotional Brigade, with his hideously long member in his hand, and he lying in the middle of the square, with his kecks around his ankles, and the old Trace crones blessing themselves as they passed by, with fresh-plucked fowl and bags of Brussels sprouts under their oxters, and trying to keep straight faces on them, and failing.
‘Silly came to a bad end. Of course they do, up in that place they had him.’
