Kevin Barry - City of Bohane

The Fancy boss Hartnett turned down a particular alleyway, flicked the cut of a glance over his shoulder – so careful – then slipped into a particular doorway. He pressed three times on a brass bell, paused, and pressed on it twice more. He noted a spider abseil from the top of the door’s frame, enjoyed its measured, shelving fall, thought it was late enough in the year for that fella, being October, the city all brown-mooded. There was a scurry of movement within, the peephole’s cover was slid and filled with the bead of a pupil, the brief startle of it, the lock clacked, unclicked, and the red metal door was slid creaking – kaaarrrink! – along its runners. They’d want greasing, thought Logan, as Tommie the Keep was revealed: a wee hairy-chested turnip of a man. He bowed once and whispered his reverence.

‘Thought it’d be yourself, Mr Hartnett. Goin’ be the hour, like.’

‘They say routine is a next-door neighbour of madness, Tommie.’

‘They say lots o’ things, Mr Hartnett.’

He lit his pale smile for the Keep. He stepped inside, pushed the door firmly back along its runners, it clacked shut behind – kraaank! – and the men trailed down a narrow passageway; its vivid red walls sweated like disco walls, and the building was indeed once just that but had long since been converted.

Long gone in Bohane the days of the discos.

‘And how’s your lady wife keepin’, Mr H?’

‘She’s extremely well, Tommie, and why shouldn’t she be?’

A tautness at once had gripped the ’bino’s smile and terrified the Keep. Made him wonder, too.

‘I was only askin’, Mr H.’

‘Well, thank you so much for asking, Tommie. I’ll be sure to remember you to her.’

Odd, distorted, the glaze that descended for a moment over his eyes, and the passage hooked, turned, and opened to a dimly lit den woozy with low night-time voices.

This was Tommie’s Supper Room.

This was the Bohane power haunt.

The edges of the room were lined with red velvet banquettes. The banquettes seated heavy, jowled lads who were thankful for the low lights of the place. These were the merchants of the city, men with a taste for hair lacquer, hard booze and saturated fats.

‘Inebriates and hoor-lickers to a man,’ said Logan, and it was loud enough for those who might want to hear.

Across the fine parquet waited an elegant brass-railed bar. Princely Logan marched towards it, and the obsessive polishing of the floor’s French blocks was evident in the hump of Tommie the Keep’s back as he raced ahead and ducked under his bar hatch. He took his cloth and hurried a fresh shine into the section of the counter where Logan each night sat.

‘You’ve grooves worn into it, Tommie.’

Logan shucked loose from the sleeves of his Crombie and he hung it on a peg set beneath the bar’s rail. The handle of his shkelper was visible to all – a mother-of-pearl with markings of Naples blue – and it was tucked into his belt just so, with his jacket hitched on the blade the better for its display. He smoothed down the mohair of the Eyetie suit. He picked at a loose thread. Ran dreamily the tip of a thumb along a superstar cheekbone.

‘So is there e’er a bit strange, Tommie?’

There was a startle in the Keep for sure.

‘Strange, Mr H?’

Logan with a feint of innocence smiled.

‘I said is there e’er a bit of goss around the place, Tommie, no?’

‘Ah, just the usual aul’ talk, Mr Hartnett.’

‘Oh?’

‘Who’s out for who. Who’s fleadhin’ who. Who’s got what comin’.’

Logan leaned across the counter and dropped his voice a note.

‘And is there any old talk from outside on Big Nothin’, Tommie?’

The Keep knew well what Logan spoke of – the word already was abroad.

‘I s’pose you know ’bout that aul’ talk?’

‘What talk, Tommie, precisely?’

‘’Bout a certain… someone what been seen out there.’

‘Say the name, Tommie.’

‘Is just talk, Mr Hartnett.’

‘Say it.’

‘Is just a name, Mr Hartnett.’

‘Say it, Tom.’

Keep swivelled a look around the room; his nerves were ripped.

‘The Gant Broderick,’ he said.

Logan trembled, girlishly, to mock the name, and he drummed his fingertips a fast-snare beat on the countertop.

‘First the Cusacks, now the Gant,’ he said. ‘I must have done something seriously fucking foul in a past life, Tom?’

Tommie the Keep smiled as he sighed.

‘Maybe even in this one, Mr H?’

‘Oh brave, Tommie. Well done.’

The Keep lightened it as best as he could.

‘Is the aul’ fear up in yuh, sir?’

‘Oh the fear’s up in me alright, Tommie.’

The Keep hung his bar cloth on its nail. He whistled a poor attempt at nonchalance. Tommie could not hide from his face the feeling that was current in the room, the leanings and nuance of the talk that swirled there. Logan used him always as a gauge for the city’s mood. Bohane could be a tricky read. It has the name of an insular and contrary place, and certainly, we are given to bouts of rage and hilarity, which makes us unpredictable. The Keep tip-tapped on the parquet a nervy set of toes, and he played it jaunty.

‘What’d take the cares off yuh, Mr Hartnett?’

Logan considered a moment. He let his eyes ascend to the stoically turning ceiling fan as it chopped the blue smoke of the room.

‘Send me out a dozen of your oysters,’ he said, ‘and an honest measure of the John Jameson.’

The Keep nodded his approval as he set to.

‘There ain’t no point livin’ it small, Mr Hartnett.’

‘No, Tommie. We might as well elevate ourselves from the beasts of the fields.’

That hot defiant screech was the Bohane El train as it took the last turn onto De Valera Street. The El ran the snakebend of the street, its boxcar windows a blurring yellow on the downtown charge. The main drag was deserted this windless a.m. and it was quiet also in the car the Gant was sat in. There was just a pair of weeping hoors across the aisle – Norrie girls, by the feline cut of their cheekbones – and a drunk in greasy Authority overalls down the way. The El train was customarily sad in this last stretch before dawn – that much had not changed. The screech of it was a soul’s screech. If you were lying there in the bed, lonesome, and succumbed to poetical thoughts, that screech would go through you. It happens that we are often just so in Bohane. No better men for the poetical thoughts.

The Gant took a slick of sweat off his brow with the back of a big hand. He had a pair of hands on him the size of Belfast sinks. The sweat was after coming out on him sudden. It was hot on the El train – its elderly heaters juddered like halfwits beneath the slat benches – and the flush of heat brought to him a charge of feeling, also; the Gant was in a fever spell this season. The tang of stolen youth seeped up in his throat with the rasping burn of nausea and on the El train in yellow light the Gant trembled. But the familiar streets rushed past as the El train charged, and the pain of memory without warning gave way to joy – he was back! – and the Gant beamed then, ecstatically, as he sucked at the clammy air, and he listened to the hoors.

‘Fuckin’ loved dat blatherin’ cun’ big time!’ wailed one.

‘Fucker was filth, girl, s’the bone truth of it,’ consoled the other. ‘Fucker was castin’ off all o’er the town, y’check me? Took ya for a gommie lackeen.’

He was back among the city’s voices, and it was the rhythm of them that slowed the rush of his thoughts. He had walked in off Big Nothin’ through the bogside dark. He had been glad to hop the El train up on the Rises and take the weight off his bones. The Gant was living out on Nothin’ again. The Gant was back at last in the Bohane creation.