Kevin Barry - City of Bohane

‘You gonna draw the fuckin’ bead for us?’ said Fucker. ‘Or we passin’ the time o’ fuckin’ day, like?’

The old-timer put his face in his hands. Looked sadly at the boys then, nodded, and bit down hard on his lip. Jerked a thumb outside.

‘Meet me under that bridge a week t’moro,’ he said. ‘Three bells in the a.m. An’ boys? It’s gonna be moonless.’

Quick as a switchblade’s flick the years had passed and she was forty-three years old. She walked each evening in the Bohane New Town, as if every step might bring her further from the life she had made. But always she circled towards home again.

Macu wore:

A silk wrap, in a rich plum tone, with her dark hair stacked high and shellacked, and her bearing was regal, and a jewelled collar-belt was clasped about her throat; the dullness of its gleam was in the evening light a soft green burn.

By custom, this was the hour of the paseo for the Bohane Dacency – the hour when a parade of the New Town was decorously made. Here was Macu among the delicate ladies as they gently wafted along the pretty greystone crescents.

The paseo whirl:

One might trouble one’s dainty snout with a whiff of the taleggio displayed in an artisanal cheese shop, or run one’s nails along the grain of a silvery hose shipped in from Old Lisbon (if the route was open), or take a saucer of jasmine tea and a knuckle of fennel-scented snuff at a counter of buffed Big Nothin’ granite.

But there was a want in these ladies yet, and it was for the rude life of youth. These old girls had Rises blood in them or they had Back Trace bones, one or the other. Most of the money in Bohane was new money, and it was a question merely of a lady’s luck if she was to be headed for a Beauvista manse or for the Smoketown footbridge.

Macu in the reminiscent evening walked the New Town and she traced a mapline to her lost-time.

It was one of those summers you’re nostalgic for even before it passes. Pale, bled skies. Thunderstorms in the night. Sour-smelling dawns. It brought temptation, and yearning, and ache – these are the summer things. And sweet calypso sounded always from the Back Trace shebeens. Fancy boys sucked on herb-pipes in the laneway outside the Café Aliados. Aggravators were on the prowl from the flatblock circles of the Rises and the ozone of danger was a sexy tang on the air.

Skirmishes.

Blood spilling.

Hormones raging.

And the Trace Fancy had the Gant Broderick’s name to it then. That would have been the day in Bohane – she smiled now as she recalled it – a Fancy boy would wear clicker’d clogs with crimson sox pulled to the top of the calf and worn beneath three-quarter-length trackie cut-offs, with a tweed cap set back to front, a stevedore donkey jacket with hi-viz piping, the hair greased back and quiffed – oh we must have looked like proper fucking rodericks – and a little silver herb-pipe on a leather lace around the neck.

Her mother was gone by then and her father was weakening. There was a greenish tint to his skin in the low light of the Aliados. Always wincing, always reaching for his lower back. Macu was taking on the upkeep of the caff, and she was quick-tongued with the Fancy boys who lounged there. They hung off the Aliados’s tapped-brass counter and were dreamy-eyed for her. She was skinny and seventeen and working it on wedge heels. A darting glance from under the lashes that’d slice a boy’s soul open. A bullwhip lash of the tongue and they’d whimper, swoon, let their eyes roll. Macu was the first-prize squaw that summer back deep in the Bohane lost-time.

The Gant was a slugger of a young dude and smart as a hatful of snakes. Sentimental, also. He had washed in off the Big Nothin’ wastes, the Gant, and it was known in Bohane there was a good mix of pikey juice in him. A rez boy – campfire blood.

See him back there:

A big unit with deep-set eyes and a squared-off chin. Dark-haired, and sallow, and wry. The kind of kid who wore his bruises nicely. A cow lick that fell onto his high forehead.

Her father warned her off – pikeys is differen’, he said – and the warning lent its own spice; fathers never learn.

The Gant jawed a mouthful o’ baccy barside of the Aliados one night, and he winked at her, and he said what’s it they call yez anyway, girl-chil’? Macu, s’it?

‘Back off, pike,’ she said. ‘Y’foulin’ me air, sketch?’

The Gant down the Aliados vibed it like he was an older dude. Summer nights in Bohane, with tempers coming untamped, and tangles in the wynds, and he was losing some of his boys to the dirks of the uptown aggravators. That put its heaviness on him.

He loaded the sad glare on Macu.

She turned it straight back to him.

Oh these were good-looking young people, in a hard town by the sea, and the days bled into the sweet nights, and it was as if the summer would never end.

‘Macu, you get time off ever, girl?’

A shyness on him she could hardly believe. The runnings of the town under his shkelp belt already and he was blushing for her.

‘Me aul’ dude ain’t the hottest.’

‘I see that, girl.’

‘Busy, yunno…’

‘Get to get an aul’ walk in sometime, though? A turn down the river, Macu?’

He showed no front when he talked to her. She liked the rez spiel that came from him. She liked those spun-out Big Nothin’ yarns. Of the old weirds who roamed out there and of the paths that opened to the Bohane underworld. Of the cures and the curses. Of the messages writ in starsign on the night sky. The Gant had the weight of Nothin’ in his step. It felt grown-up to walk the Bohane Trace with the Gant by her side. They took it slowly.

‘I ain’t lookin’ for no easy lackeen,’ he said.

‘Y’ain’t found one,’ she said.

He spoke of the taint that was on the town. He spoke often of premonition. He said it came to him as a cold quiver at the base of the spine. He said that it came in the hour before dawn. He said if he stayed in the creation, he’d come to a bad end sure enough. He said there was no gainsaying that. He said he had the feeling – he said it was in the blood.

‘Sounds to me like a rez boy gettin’ spooked,’ she said, and she traced the tips of her fingers along the creases of his hunched neck.

‘I got a feel for these things,’ he said.

The Bohane river blackly ran. They fell into its spell. It became official in the Trace that summer that Macu from the Aliados was the Gant Broderick’s clutch. He told her that he loved her and that his love caused the fear inside to amplify.

‘Before was like I ain’t had so much to lose,’ he said.

‘Y’breakin’ me fuckin’ heart, pike,’ she said.

‘Don’t want to miss seein’ what you turn into,’ he said.

He said that already they were conspiring against him in the Fancy. He said he was watchful of more than one.

‘Like who?’

‘Like the skinny boy. You know who.’

He talked about leaving the peninsula behind. He asked her to come with him.

‘But go where , G?’

‘Maybe… Go across over?’

‘That fuckin’ scudhole?’

‘I won’t go without you, girl.’

‘I dunno, G…’

‘I could set us up, girl. You could follow me over…’

In the New Town, at the hour of the paseo, she looked carefully over her shoulder – sketch? – and it was clear: she had not been followed by a Fancy scout today. She turned into the quietest of the Endeavour Avenue cafes. Ol’ Boy Mannion waited for her there on a high stool. He smiled but she did not answer the smile.

‘What’s this about, Ol’ Boy?’

‘I’d say you know or you wouldn’t be here.’