Kevin Barry - City of Bohane

‘Manners on ’em yet out there, Jenni-chil’?’

‘Oh aye, Girly. Manners o’ pigs an’ dogs.’

Girly squinted then, and she made out the bite marks rearside of Jenni’s neck.

‘S’it the Wolfie kid been havin’ an aul’ jaw on ya, girl?’

Jenni took a stogie from the tit pocket of her white vinyl zip-up. Torched the motherfucker.

‘For me to know,’ she said. ‘Now c’mere till ya hear the latest.’

She would tell the old bint as much as she needed and no more.

On Beauvista, Macu and Logan lay in the bed their long marriage had made and they held each other grimly against the coming of the winter. He sniffed hard at her as he sought a telltale smell – the taint of another – but he found no deceit.

‘Don’t you ever fucking leave me,’ he said.

Fucker Burke and Wolfie Stanners walked the Big Nothin’ plain in the great vault of dark. They came to the particular turn from the High Boreen and took it and it led to the ridge path that skirted the granite knoll and soon the Eight Mile Bridge loomed, and it was a moonless night surely as the tout said it would be, and they went by the water’s edge and climbed down the bank and came underneath the arches of the bridge.

Tout waited for them sure enough.

He was tied by his ankles to a girder of the bridge, and his hands were tied also, and much of his skin had been taken off, and his throat was reefed plain open, and he was bled like a pig, with a pool of it congealing blackly beneath him, and the eyes were gouged from the sockets for badness’ sake – draw a bead now! – and what was left of the skin hung in white rags and shreds from him.

On the stone of the bridge’s arch where the tout was hung two words were daubed in blood:

Fucker looked at Wolfie.

Wolfie looked at Fucker.

They headed at pace for the High Boreen.

The night always on Nothin’ brought dread with it and gusts of hardwind swayed the walls of the Gant’s aluminium trailer. The bassoon call of a bittern sounded – that forlorn bird – and there were mystery rustlings and creakings outside, and the nerves were not a hundred per cent on the Gant just yet.

Pulse still up.

Head unsettled.

A roar of hot wind in his ears.

He shivered and tensed at every sound. He asked the night for forgiveness. His legs blazed with the cold aches of age and as he rose from his stool he moaned the same moan that had chorused his poor father to the grave. Even the moans get passed down. He heard the shrieks of the night critturs outside and droning voices among the reeds.

He wrapped himself in a buckskin and blew out the candles. He went to the darkness. He knew it was better to be among it and to be an agent of it than to sit and tremble with guilt in the trailer. He closed his eyes as he walked and he tried to attune himself to her proximity, her frequency.

He walked to a high vantage and across the bog plain the lights of Bohane city burned – was a Babylon on fire in the October dark.

Here was Girly, after the picture show, drugged on schmaltz, in equatorial heat beneath the piled eiderdowns, a little whiskey-glazed and pill-zapped, in her ninetieth – Sweet Baba help us – Bohane winter, and she found herself with the oddest inclination: Girly had a notion to get out of the bed. It was afternoon yet below on De Valera Street and she was determined to have a good old lamp at the place. Some fucker was playing a melodeon down there despite it all.

She shifted with a lung-quaking sigh the eiderdowns and the effort caused a dose of pins-and-needles across her shoulder blades that would put down a good-sized horse. The pins-and-needles, another of her daily trials, were symptomatic of thirty-odd years buzzing on off-script tablets, hard liquor and Hedy Lamarr pictures.

‘Hell,’ she said, but stoically.

She swung her legs out over the side of the honeymooners’ special. She sat a moment, for breath, and regarded her legs carefully. It was Girly’s opinion that she still had a fine pair of pins on her, all told, but it took a massive effort to plant the bastaring things on the floor and raise herself to an uncertain stand. This move in turn seemed to unseat a kidney. A dart of pain squirmed up through the small of her back on a zigzag course and it was as though the devil himself was jabbing at her with a pared stick. She sat back down again.

‘Mother o’ fuckin’ Jay,’ she said.

A frail arm she swung onto the bedside table and it upended a family-sized tub of tranquillisers. She fished a couple from the spill and aimed them at her gob. There was no great dignity here, of course. The pills that landed on her tongue – and she had a tongue like sandpaper today, whatever was after going skaw-ways in that department – she washed down with a swallow of John Jameson taken direct from the neck of the bottle.

So long, elegance.

Bravely she raised herself to a stand again and she endured a mighty assault of vertigo. She clamped her lips meanly against it. Then came a massive volt of lightness through her head. Girly had for many decades been suffering from attacks of what she called ‘the lightness’. Also, there was shame. When you could not even get the whiskey into the tumbler, it was nearly time, in Girly Hartnett’s opinion, to go and fuck yourself into the Bohane river altogether.

Of course the next thing was the walking.

Girly considered the vast Sahara of the beige-tone carpet that opened out between herself and the far window overlooking the Dev Street drag. She tested a step, tentatively, with her spider-veined feet. If the pins were holding well enough, the dancers were letting the side down rotten – Girly would not lie to herself. She moved a foot forward and tried her weight. If the one hip held out it would be a result, the two a Baba-sent mystery. She breathed as deeply as she could after ninety winters of damp peninsular air. Her step was unsure and she tragically wavered. It was as if the Big Nothin’ hardwind was inside in the room with her. She heard the whistling of the air as it went through her scoured cavities – Girly felt like a derelict house.

Strike that – a derelict mansion.

No panes in the windows and no fire in the grate and crows in the attic but there was grandeur yet, even so. A stately ruin was Girly. She settled again on the sad, squalling music of the melodeon below, a wintersong for foul December in the Bohane creation.

She was determined, and one quivering foot she put in front of the other, and she made for a view of the place. The great tragic armies of history had made it over storm-whipped mountain ranges quicker than Girly made it across that carpet but she persevered, and she reached, after an epic struggle, the drapes. She clutched, wheezing, at their long folds of blue velvet – dizzying, the flow of the fabric – and Girly whited out for a moment – the lightness! – and then regathered. She dragged the drapes apart the inch or two she had the strength for and aimed a hard squint down onto De Valera Street.

A December Tuesday. As miserable as hell’s scullery beneath a soot-black sky. The nerves of the city were ripped. Bohane was looking at a total of eight young fellas reefed since the October bank holiday. Five of them belonged to the Cusack mob, three to the Hartnett Fancy, and the city simmered now with bitterness, rage, threat. Girly smiled. To keep Bohane at a rolling boil you just had to turn the heat up on the burner.

There were nightly rumbles in the Back Trace. There were skirmishes on the 98 Steps. There were random attacks in Smoketown hoorshops. Bottles and insults were being flung across the rooftops of the city. Fellas’ sisters were being insulted. And mothers. It had drawn short, just yet, of an outright Feud, but the Hartnett Fancy and the families of the Northside Rises were close to it now.