Kevin Barry - City of Bohane

‘I won’t see him, Ol’ Boy.’

He passed across the letter.

‘Just read what he’s written to you, Macu.’

Midnight.

Big Nothin’.

A trailer home.

And Jenni Ching was butt-naked on the sofa bed.

The trailer was a double-wide aluminium, twenty-two-foot long, and it contained the fold-out bed, a pot-belly stove, an odour of intense sadness, a set of creaking floorboards, and the Gant Broderick. The Gant also was naked, and he was straining, with his eyes tightly shut, to recall the darkest of all his dark times – this so as not to come.

Hardwind was up, and it raged across the bog outside, and it made speeches in the stove’s flue; threats, it sounded like, in a spooky, hollowed-out voice: an eerie song for the Gant as he grimly thrusted.

Jenni Ching was on her hands and knees, with her slender rump in the air, and a brass herb-pipe clamped in her gob. She cast over her shoulder a bored glance at the Gant. He looked as if his heart might at any moment explode. His face was purpled, blotched, sweaty.

‘If y’wanna take five,’ she said, ‘jus’ holler.’

The mocking tone was too much for him, was too delicious, and the Gant spent himself. He fell onto his back and was ashamed then. His heart was a rabid pit bull loose inside his chest.

Jenni Ching consulted the wall clock.

‘Three minutes even,’ she said. ‘You’re comin’ on, kid.’

She turned and sat back against the sofa bed’s headrest. She drew her legs up about her. She relit her herb-pipe, sucked on it deep, and blew a greenish smoke. The Gant risked an eye at her. She smiled at him, so feline.

‘This what it feel like?’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Love.’

‘Sarky for your age, girl.’

She placed her tiny feet on his wheezing chest. He laid his hand across her feet and it covered them entirely. She wriggled her toes, the ten, taunting tips of them. Sighed.

‘So what’s the script with Ganty-boy?’ she said. ‘An’ no more bollick-talk about settlin’ in the countryside an’ growin’ cabbages.’

‘Why shouldn’t I settle, Jenni? Rest me old bones.’

She drew a hard suck on the pipe, held the smoke, and then reached and pulled his face to hers, laid her mouth on his, and sent with a sharp hiss the blowback.

He glazed.

Coughed.

‘Don’t always agree with me,’ he said, his chest heaving, his humours all twisted.

She reached again and held with her tiny iron hand his chin.

Locked a glance.

‘An’ you’d be doin’ the fuck what out here, Gant, ’xactly?’

‘I’m supposed to be askin’ the questions, Jenni.’

‘You havin’ an’ aul’ chat with the stoats, G? Goin’ fishin’?’

‘You doin’ a little fishin’ yourself, Jenni?’

‘All I’m doin’ is talkin’ to ya. All I’m doin’ is passin’ the lonesome aul’ night, y’check me?’

‘You got the gift for talk, girleen.’

She was tiny. She lifted her feet from his chest. She swung her legs from the sofa bed. She padded to the door of the trailer and unclasped the catch and pushed out the door agin the hardwind. She looked out to the night. A swirl of stars made cheap glamour of the sky above the bog plain.

Without looking at him:

‘Y’plannin’ damage for the ’bino, Gant?’

‘Would I confide as much?’

‘The ’bino’s had wall-bangers come lookin’ for him before, Gant. Same boyos down the boneyard since. An’ it’s a spooky aul’ spill o’ moonlight y’gets down that place, y’sketchin’?’

The Gant with a cheeky grin:

‘Time does he come along S’town in the evenings, Jenni? Usually?’

She spat the same grin back over her shoulder.

‘This look like a tout’s can to you?’ she said.

‘Are you fuckin’ him, Jenni?’

‘You jealous, G?’

‘Or does he mess with the Fancy tush at all?’

‘Happens that the Long Fella don’t mess with no tush.’

‘Oh?’

‘Looked after in his marriage is Mr H. He’s takin’ about as much as he can handle up Beauvista way off the skaw-eye bint.’

A sly one. Knew where to aim; knew where to bite.

‘Oh? Happy, are they? The Hartnetts?’

She shook her head, and shaped a curious snarl and somehow he read truth here.

‘Happy? Who’s happy in fuckin’ Bohane? Ya’d be a long time scoutin’ for happy in this place.’

She gathered up her clothes and began to dress in the oily candlelight of the trailer. The girl was close to unreadable in the Gant’s view. She had told him nothing about the Fancy, nor about the S’town operations, nor about the movements of Logan Hartnett. Even so, she was keeping close, she was calling on him, and consenting to his bed. It was said this Ching girl had a count to her name already and the Gant was inclined to believe it from the taste of her.

‘You can’t stay a while?’

She didn’t dignify that with an answer.

And it was a moody Gant she left on the sofa bed as she took off into the night again. Cat’s eyes on her. As easy in her stride out on Nothin’ as she was in S’town or the Back Trace.

Watch her close, Gant.

But he relished her, despite himself, and he asked then for forgiveness as the trailer’s siding creaked ominously in the night. Awful thing to still have a taste for young ’un and you up to the view from fifty.

He lay among the stew of his thoughts a while. Now that was a murky old soup. He rose wearily after a time and dressed. He felt bone-ache and sad bliss. He went outside for a taste of the wind. His mind for a brief stretch ran clear. He closed his eyes and tried to bring himself to the lost-time, but it could never be regained. He would never take back the true taste. He had known it just once and it was Macu’s.

The Gant walked a keen edge always across the territories of the mind. At any moment he might trip to either side and fall into the blackness. Of course, it is a husky race of people we’re talking about outside in the Bohane creation, generally. Cursed and blessed with hot feeling.

Images from the lost-time now came to him in quick assault. When she was eighteen. When she walked with him. The way that she spoke to him. The way that her lips shaped to form his name.

He walked on into the night and he shook his great, bearish head against memory, and he briefly wept, and he chortled at himself then for the weeping. Oh this is a nice package you’re presenting, Gant. Oh this is a nice game you’ve got yourself involved with. And nice people to play it with.

Careful, Gant.

He walked the Nothin’ plain. The hardwind by ’n’ by walloped a little sense into him. A feral goat watched from a high vantage, its eyes a glaring yellow. The Gant willed himself to straight thinking. He felt the tread of their shared past underfoot. Your step there, he thought, and my step here. That’s your step there, and my step here, on the days that we walked out, Macu, in the noonday of the lost-time.

Nostalgia, on the peninsula, was a many-hooked lure.

The Gant had come back early in August. At once, he had fallen victim to our native reminiscence. In the Bohane creation, time comes loose, there is a curious fluidity, the past seeps into the future, and the moment itself as it passes is the hardest to grasp. The Gant came back with a couple of hundred in his pocket and a pair of busted boots on his feet and a reefed shoulder gone halfways septic – that was as much as he had to show for twenty-five years gone. A hot summer day with the bare lick of a breeze to it and the breeze among the long grasses whispered the old Nothin’ mysteries. The bog was dried out and above it a shifting black gauze of midge-clouds palpitated and the turloughs had drained off and there was that strange air of peace in the hills: never-changing, sea-tanged, western. The horizon wavered in hard sun over the poppy fields as the workers toiled in silhouette at the crop. Bleached light on the plain of Nothin’ and a fado lament wailed distant from somewhere on the pikey rez. His feet were blistered.