Kevin Barry - City of Bohane

‘Watch me fuckin’ eiderdown,’ she said.

She tasted and savoured the whiskey. Colour rose up in her – a purplish rush to chase the greyness.

‘Yunno I’d a dream there a while ago,’ she sighed, ‘and who arrives into it only Fernando Lamas above on a horse?’

‘Girly, listen to me! Eyes Cusack is about to make a move down the 98 Steps.’

‘Of course in my mother’s day? In Peggy’s time? There would have been sixteen picturehouses in Bohane at that time. Is there just the one now still?’

‘Just the one.’

‘And all it’s showin’ is maggots lickin’ the melt off each other.’

‘Girly?’

‘Shut up, I’m thinkin’.’

She closed her eyes. She was an unspeakable age as Bohane lives go. She blinked hard.

‘Cusacks been hustlin’ in the Trace?’

‘Not in the Trace but in Smoketown. And making plenty of noise up on the Rises, up in the shebeens. Putting new skins on their lambeg drums, is the word, and they got their chanters tuning up.’

‘Norrie fuckin’ nonsense!’

‘But how’ll I go at it, Mam?’

She shook her head to dismiss his fear.

‘Catnip to Wolfie and the boys,’ she said.

He nodded.

‘That’s the way I’m hoping. But if we hadn’t enough of a head count…’

‘Who’ve we to call in, child?’

He regarded her dolefully.

‘Most of the bridges are fairly well burned at this stage.’

‘Who’re you tellin. But we’ve no one at all?’

‘Unless I hit out the dunes and try talk to–’

‘Arra fuckin’ Jay!’

They let the matter quieten before them. Both teased through it in the silence. No decision was ever made quickly or rashly by a Hartnett. At length, Girly spoke up.

‘D’ya find me anythin’ with a young Yul Brynner, nah? From the days o’ the hair?’

‘No, Girly. I found you The Wanderers alright?’

He raised the case to her.

‘I see that,’ she said.

These evening times together were brief but an unbreakable custom. Each of them eased in the company of the other. She eyed him carefully, and he drew back just a fraction from the examination – this was evident in a slight tensing of the shoulders, which she noted. Also, the way he had taken up the reel cases from the eiderdown, and the way he turned them nervously in his hands.

‘That’s a quare weight you’re carryin’,’ she said, ‘on account of a few Norrie wall-bangers?’

Girly let that sit a moment, then:

‘So how’s herself keepin’?’

Logan allowed his feint, yellow smile.

‘Marvellously,’ he said.

Girly nodded, as though greatly satisfied.

‘From what I’m hearin’,’ she said, ‘the Gant Broderick is still a han’some cut of a man.’

He flung the reel cases onto her bed and rose to go.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘Go watch your aul’ films.’

She snorted a laugh as he went. She listened carefully for the precise heft of the slam he gave the door, and she laughed again when it loudly came. Served the pale fucker right for marryin’ boat trash.

De Valera Street down below thrummed with the slow build of night: its rude energies were gathering. Yes and October was ending, the last of it falling from our diseased civic trees, and there was Trouble with a Big T on the Bohane soon-come.

Girly in the vast bed wriggled with delight.

Dark came on Smoketown. Was a hell of a place in the black night – a sad-dream world across the footbridge. On the skinny streets the old town houses leaned in to each other: how-we-now? As though the old houses they was holding one another up, like. This Smoketown you take one brick from the pile and the whole heap’d come tumbledown. Smoketown it don’t even make a square mile in size: a tight, small, squashed-up place, hard-pressed its airways, its troubled lungs, and the air had an oily feel in the night. Smoketown generators chugged like good things. Mark this: if there was juice nowhere in Bohane, there’d be a bit left all the same for the S’town operations.

The madwoman of Smoketown paraded in her white cowgirl suit, sequins aglitter, and directed the sky traffic of angry gulls.

A toothless she-man hoor with painted-on eyebrows tossed shouts to the sky from the footbridge.

A violently unpredictable Alsatian bitch name of Angelina dragged along on a leash the Fancy lieutenant Fucker Burke.

Fucker and Angie were in and out of the Chalk ’n’ Cue.

Fucker and Angie were in and out of the Land o’ Baize.

Fucker and Angie were in and out of the 147.

The fuck was Wolfie was what Fucker and Angie wanted to know.

Chiefly spud-aters on the S’town streets at this hour – they’d be in need of a knee-trembler and the suck of a dream-pipe before hitting the Boreen and dragging their woeful souls across the Nothin’ wastes.

Edmund ‘The Gypo’ Lenihan came ’cross the footbridge with a honey-blonde sixteen-year-old in tow – fresh tush recruited off the Rises, with a big brazen puss on: there’d be no fear of her.

Low throb of the grindbars as they was gearing up – sinuous basslines rumbled as the early-shift gals shinned the bars and spun there, and slid again, their dead eyes lurid.

Fish wagons (Hartnett-owned) unloaded to the Chinkee troughs – fins and spines and bones for the chowder, oh it is some quare-lookin’ craturs you get swimming the Bohane river.

A blur of booze-pasted faces moved along the streets.

Chinkee dives, hopper bars, dream salons.

And here at last came Wolfie Stanners out of the Ho Pee Ching Oh-Kay Koffee Shoppe – five foot two inches of pure man in a velveteen puffa and a pair of stormtrooper lace-ups.

His ginger bonce swivelled and searched as he marched the Smoketown streets.

He fell in with Fucker Burke and Angelina outside the Land o’ Baize.

Narky look off the Wolfie-boy, Fucker reckoned, and rightly.

‘Was lookin’ for ya, Wolf.’

‘I been lookin’ for Jenni, ain’t I? You seen fuckin’ Jenni, yuh?’

‘Ain’t, Wolf.’

‘Said y’seen Jenni anywhere about, Fuck?’

Mad eyes swivellin’ in the Wolfie-boy puss.

‘Said I ain’t seen her, Wolf.’

‘Fuck she at ’n’ all, like?’

Taint of badness on the Bohane air had its various strands and jealousy was not the least among them.

‘Dunno, Wolf. Ain’t seen–’

Wolfie turned and without breaking stride took a flying kick at the door of a dream salon, and issued a raspin’ grunt, and the effort seemed to calm him some, and he set to the S’town prowl and the night’s business.

‘Word off the ’bino?’

‘Word is – Cantillon.’

‘Tonight?’

‘Word.’

‘Let’s do it then. There any sign o’ the fishmonger, Fuck?’

Oh and indeed the unfortunate Deccie Cantillon had chosen the wrong evening for an S’town crawl. Not bad enough he was doing jigger with the missus of his own cuz – misfortunate Ger Reid, master butcher – but he was bothering Smoketown tush too.

‘On a fanny crawl, is he?’ Wolfie said.

‘He be at the pay-for tush an’ all,’ Fucker confirmed.

Angelina dragged on the leash, and the boys followed, and soon enough Cantillon was made out in the S’town haze.

A whippety cratur, Cantillon, with mackerel scales all over his hands, in his forties, sharp-featured, a card player, looked after hissel’, a sculpted Frenchie-looking nose just built for a tush-chaser, the thick hair slathered back with a pawload of perfumed gunk, top five buttons of a purple dress shirt open to the night even though it was deep end of October in Bohane, the west’s evil winter looming.

Deccie followed his pecker around the narrow streets.