Kevin Barry - City of Bohane

‘All I’m sayin’, we’ve enough on us plates, like, without puttin’ on the usual circus–’

‘Jenni,’ Logan was stern here, ‘don’t call it a circus.’

‘All I’m sayin’–’

‘Jenni? Just leave it, please?’

‘But Girly says–’

‘Don’t mind fucking Girly! I’m running the fucking Fancy!’

‘That so, H? Then why’s it Girly gots to sign off on the Feud?’

His cold glare would strip a lesser child of its front but not Jenni.

‘A nicety,’ he said. ‘Protocol. Keep her thinking she’s involved still. It keeps her going, you know?’

A silence swelled.

Logan pussed.

Jenni smoked.

And Macu looked out into Smoketown’s greenish night-time haze. It was the early a.m. parade of skinpoppers and inebriates and hoor-botherers. She wondered – against her will – if he was among the streets somewhere. And if she would recognise the gaatch of him. If he still carried in the same way. She had not replied to the letter. There had been no further word. It was sixty days since the letter had been passed to her.

Jenni Ching slithered from her seat and made for the door. As she opened it a great surge of street noise rose.

‘Time you givin’ em till, H?’

‘They won’t need long, if I know Cusacks.’

‘Fancy prepped?’ said Macu.

‘Stop your fretting, girl. Been weeks prepped if I’m right, Jen?’

‘Fancy’d ate a child, H.’

He finished his soup and lay down his spoon and clasped his thin fingers across his middle.

‘Go and make sure anyhow, Jenni-gal.’

‘Feuds!’ Macu cried. ‘An’ we a stretch pas’ fuckin’ forty!’

‘It’s the life, girl,’ Logan said.

‘For how long more, Logan?’

Jenni waved as she stepped outside.

‘Tell Girly I was askin’ for her,’ Macu called.

Jenni mouthed a badness beneath her breath.

‘Say what, girl?’

‘Say nothin’, Mrs Hartnett.’

‘I’ll be fuckin’ dug out o’ you yet, slant, y’hear me?’ Macu said.

‘Ladies, would ye leave it? Please?’ Logan said.

‘But d’ya hear her, Logan? About straightenin’ eyes she’s mutterin’!’

Wolfie Stanners hung by the ruff of his jumper from a coat hook in the schoolhouse cloakroom. He squealed for help.

‘C’mon to fuck will someone!’

But nobody came to free him.

He was ten years old, the tiniest runt in the creation, and the eyes rolled dangerously in his chickpea head as his feet flailed at the air.

‘Please!’ he screamed. ‘Someone!’

Nobody came.

His breaths jabbed hard at the walls of his chest and tasted of sick.

‘C’mon’ll someone!’

Nobody came, and he swung from the coat hook, and he soaked in a panic sweat.

It was a lardy fatarse off the Rises that had hung him there.

‘S’what ya get for sniffin’ up sisters, filthy ginge!’

Wolfie in truth had tried to crawl up the gaberdine skirt of a wee Norrie sister – just for the sconce, like – but this was a harsh measure of justice.

‘Please, someone!’

He hung there, and he jigged on the air, and he near enough throttled himself.

‘C’mon, someone!’

But his screams came weaker now and hardly carried at all.

He stretched his arms behind his head but his reach was too short and fell shy of the hook. The jumper’s ruff caught tightly at his throat and he tried to force his weight to rip it free but it would not give. And Wolfie turned blue.

‘Fuck you doin’ up there, Stanners?’

The Burke kid at ten years old was already a long-legged galoot and a gommie sort with it. He was a blurry apparition down there below Wolfie in the cloakroom, and the small boy squinted to bring him into focus, and he lamped him as that beanpole from the wynds – Fucker, he was known as.

‘C’mon t’fuck an’ get me down offa here’d ya!’

His spindly arms had no more than the girth of chopsticks, Fucker Burke, but might have been threaded with steel wool for the strength in them, and easily from his tiptoes he lifted Wolfie clear from the coat hook, and the runt staggered into a corner of the cloakroom and spluttered his guts on the floor.

‘Min’ yer shoes,’ said Fucker Burke.

Wiping the drool away, Wolfie turned to Fucker, and he cleaned his gob with his sleeve, and he was awestruck in the presence of a saviour. He said:

‘Y’help me get him?’

Fucker liked the gaatch of this gingery kid – even if he couldn’t tell exactly what it was that made him smile (it was the dense, packed menace ) – and he said:

‘Know where we can get diesel an’ all, y’check me, gingey-pal?’

Later:

The lardy-boy off the Rises wobbled along the wynds of the Trace and headed for the 98 Steps on the dreck afternoon of a winter’s day. Lunatic gulls dive-bombed his nosh bag but he batted ’em away with an impatient, pudgy arm. He had a duck’s walk, the chubster – here’s me head, me arse is comin’ – and he chomped on a lump of macaroon so hard the jaw-motion made a thundery roar in his ears. He didn’t hear Wolfie Stanners step up the one side of him, nor Fucker Burke the other.

Fucker gripped and twisted the boy’s arms and locked them behind his back and he marched him down a dead-end wynd.

‘Th’fuck, like?’

Typical Norrie squawk of fear in there, sketch?

‘Big fella now, aintcha?’ Wolfie said.

Fucker held him steady, and Wolfie kicked the boy’s shins until they gave from under him, and the lardarse was on his knees then, whelping, and Fucker knelt in behind, and he held the boy’s arms locked with one hand and with his free hand scrunched the boy’s hair to get his head back.

The boy screamed hard and showed his fat pink tonsils to the Bohane sky.

Wolfie poured diesel from a can into the opened gullet. Lardarse choked on it and spat and Wolfie slapped him; Fucker chortled.

Drizzled the diesel on the boy’s clothes and hair, too, most carefully – he’d a dainty touch for badness, Wolfie – and he produced the matchbook with a flourish, and he signalled for Fucker to back off, sharpish, and as he did so, Wolfie ripped a match, sparked it, and flicked.

So it was a lardarse kid on fire sprinted tubbily the wynds of the Trace and he ran onto the dock and leapt head first into the roaring blackwaters of the river. Flapped and splashed and gurgled, and the sight caused a wailing commotion on the wharfside stones – auld dears out of the Trace market threw their sprouts and cabbages in the air and roared a great commotion, coz it wasn’t every day you saw a fat child in flames, not even on the Bohane front – but then a hero of a dock polis came pounding along, with his porter-gut swinging, and by ’n’ by the lardarse got fished out again with a winch hook.

Lay on the quay, then, quenched but sizzling.

Ain’t been a pretty sight since, the same lardarse, face on him like an S’town burrito, and plenty more in the city suffered at the same hands as the years turned, and as many as were left sucking the air and could tell the tale, the same amount again were fattening maggots down the eerie bone-yard. Was the way of things Trace-deep since Wolfie and Fucker took to working in tag.

They realised that day that no matter how fast their hearts might beat at the brink of an atrocity they would not pull back from it, not ever, and Wolfie saw where this gift could send them in Bohane.

But now it was the eve of a Feud, and in the small, ominous hours of the night Wolfie walked the Back Trace, alone, and he felt a creep of grim knowledge:

No Bohane Fancy ever had two names to it.

He tried to put manners on his thoughts – the black surge of them was malevolent as the river’s. Walked through the 98er Square and he felt the dip of the glance from the quarehawks who were gathered beneath the winter-bared trees in their greatcoats, with their sacks of tawny wine, and he knew that his name was spreading, its power building, but he realised that it had Fucker’s maniac strength behind it, too. He knew there were others in the ranks had ambition to match his own. He knew there was no viciousness to match his but for Fucker’s, but for Jenni’s.