Kevin Barry - City of Bohane

When we walked the Back Trace and we were kids in Bohane I thought my heart was going to escape my mouth. Lay my hand on the small of your back and it was like stepping off a roof. Big soft grin on my face and I was suppose to be the hard boy in town. You were so slight. And the way that you talked to me low in a whisper almost and that it was so many weeks before you’d kiss me even.

We used to walk on those nights in the Trace and go down to the river. I can hear again the river on the summer nights and the way we’d sit on the stone steps and you would lean your head back onto my chest and rest it there. I thought that nothing that nobody could ever come between us Macu.

I tell myself that to come back here might be a way to break the hold on me you have still. The touch that I have felt on me these years in my dark times always it is your touch. I see you at seventeen, eighteen so perfectly clear every detail the tiny bones under the skin of your brow when you worried for me if there was trouble times in the Bohane Trace. I believe they were the wrong paths we took and what I have seen of your life here with Hartnett does not change that belief.

My days are quiet now. There are places that you would remember I’m sure from our own time when sometimes we’d walk out here. We would lie in the long grass do you remember Macu? As much as things change in Bohane things stay the same on Big Nothin’. The place I am living is no palace but comfort enough I sit like a true auld fella off the Nothin’ bogs in front of my pot belly stove. I’d have laughed back then to see what I would turn into later. Though I will say again the same years I could hardly see on you on Dev Street the other day it took the breath from me you were so familiar. The way that you moved was just as I remembered. Do not think I was spying on you but when I saw you I could hardly be expected to look away.

I am back on Nothin’ to stay and I wish to see you Macu. Even if it kills me I want to see you. What I ask is for a single meeting. The time and the place could be arranged as you see fit. If there are things I should say to you now after all this time then I could say them much better in person. Let me know through Mr Mannion if such a meeting can be arranged. All I can plead is that it would be heaven to see your lips form my name again.

That I may hear from you soon, girl,

Dom Gleeson, the lardarse newsman, was on De Valera Street, fresh-shaven, his face still blotchy from the razor. He wore a baby-blue zoot suit and a pair of clicker’d heels that he danced in excitement against the pavement. He was nifty on the hoof for a fat lad and he gazed soulfully in the direction of Big Nothin’. He slowed his moves then and stilled himself. He looked down and regarded his small, sinister feet. He raised his fingertips to his lips. Nibbled them.

‘The Gant’s up top o’ fifty, Mr Mannion,’ he whispered. ‘He’s hardly gonna try and lay a snakey mickey into her at this stage, is he?’

Ol’ Boy in a Crombie against the night chill, wearing a jaunty pork-pie hat, was sat up on the Dev Street railings, moocher-style, and he raised his eyebrows.

‘Love can be so strange and enduring, Dom.’

‘Then Hartnett is gonna have to be seen to act, Mr Mannion.’

‘You ain’t sellin’ a spoof, Big D. He’s got to throw down some class of a welcome for the Gant sure enough. The city’s watchin’. The Authority’s watchin’. And his missus is watchin’ an’ all, y’check me?’

The city’s mood was a blend of fear and titillation. There was going to be an almighty collision, and a small world shudders when giants collide.

‘He’s been wantin’ a bead on the Gant outside on Nothin’, Mr Mannion. An’ I could hardly be seen not to oblige…’

‘I wouldn’t worry about the G out on Nothin’, Dom.’

Ol’ Boy smiled his reassurance, and there beneath the Dev Street lights the Dom, amped on the city’s intrigue, tiptoed a dance step again. Shimmied his hips. Swivelled them. Made gasping little fishmouths. Winked then, and whispered:

‘They say the missus’ eyes straighten in her head when she gets fleadhed, Mr Mannion?’

‘They do so that, Dom.’

The Dom gurgled, and gazed to the stars, and he swirled with them. Went kind of woozy and glad.

‘Oh we got us a love mess on our paws!’ he shrieked.

‘We certainly have, Dom.’

The newsman swivelled his peepers over a shoulder as though he might be watched from back there, and he leaned closer then to Ol’ Boy.

‘An’ o’ course we got other problems, Gant aside.’

‘Don’t talk to me about the Cusacks, Dominick, please.’

Dom clutched himself tragically about the chest. Made as though to drop and hit the stones.

‘Oh my angina!’ he wheezed.

Ol’ Boy regarded him soberly.

‘If the Calm breaks,’ he said, ‘we can all go an’ whistle for a Beauvista tram, Dom. And every last site for a manse beside it, y’hear me?’

‘Cathedral bells, Mr Mannion. Last thing Bohane needs is a winter o’ blood, like.’

Ol’ Boy climbed down from the railings, and together the men made aim for the S’town footbridge: it was the hour in Bohane when gents would be inclined towards recreation.

‘What we gotta be askin’?’ said the newsman. ‘Who’s it truly gots the Bohane runnings right now?’

‘Oh that’s the question, Dom,’ said Ol’ Boy. ‘I said that’s the capital Q, y’check me?’

Big lunks of polis made a cordon at the entrance to a Smoketown alleyway.

Rubberneckers piled down the dune end and stalked out their eyes to see past.

‘Back away to fuck’ll ye!’ yelped a polis. ‘We need a stretcher backin’ in here, like!’

Wisecracker in the crowd didn’t miss a beat:

‘More’n a stretcher that fella’s needin’!’

A low round of chuckles ribboned out and even the polis good-naturedly joined in. Bohane was (and is) a perpetual source of amusement to itself.

Down the alleyway, a polis ’spector knelt by the bloody remains and peered closely at the bootmarks on blue flesh.

‘Fancy,’ he whispered.

He gestured to a raw polis, a mouth-breather not long off the Nothin’ plain, and the young ’un crouched beside him.

‘See this?’ said the ’spector.

He showed in the pool of blood the particular shape of the clicker’d boot heels that had made their marks there.

‘If this tells us it’s an F-boy caper,’ he asked the young polis, ‘what else does it tell us?’

Mouth-breather was a quick learner, and he rose, and he faced the crowd at the alley’s maw, and he addressed them loudly.

‘S’lookin’ like another suicide, lads.’

‘Good boy,’ the ’spector whispered.

Up from the river an assault of wind came knifing and it had a bone-deep chill in it for a sharpener.

That would be the winter in on top of us.

Girly Hartnett cued up a Mario Lanza flick from 1952 – Peg would have been eighteen; she dated the flicks always to her mother’s age. Because You’re Mine it was, the one where he sang ‘Granada’, a powerful set of lungs on the boy. She took a sip of John Jameson from her tumbler and she recapped the pill bottle. She relaxed her old bones to enjoy the rush of tranquilliser and the soaring of the young tenor’s voice.

Girly was downtown.

Girly was seeing the lights.

Girly startled as a particular knock sounded on her door, the knock that always came late on, and she answered it with a single, sharp whistle.

Jenni Ching entered, and sat by the bedside, and poured herself a whiskey. She kicked her tiny lethal feet up onto the bed and Girly fondly laid a hand across them.