Kevin Barry - City of Bohane

Big Dom, reading over his notes, came to join him.

‘Looks like y’picked a wise day for a spot check on yer Nothin’ bureau, D?’

‘I thank you again for the word, Mr Mannion.’

They sat amid the flickers and turfsmoke and they let the situation hover before them a moment – picked at it silently. Then:

‘Way you readin’ the Hartnett tactic, Dom?’

Fat newsman’s eyelashes fluttered.

‘Leavin’ the Wolfie-boy step out? Seems to me like he’s droppin’ a hint he’s set to move along, Mr Mannion.’

‘Droppin’ it for who?’

‘His lady wife?’

‘Could be you’re right, Dom.’

‘Maybe she wants him spendin’ more time above in the yard, y’check? Helpin’ with the rose garden.’

‘Or goin’ at a more respectable line o’ business. Of course, it must be hard to balance family life with the Fancy’s runnins. You’d have sympathy there.’

‘He don’t wan’ to be leavin’ any gaps on the home front…’

‘Indeed. But ain’t it weird, hah? That the Gant comin’ back might spell a lucky season for the Wolfie-boy.’

‘It is strange, Mr Mannion, what can bring change to a Fancy.’

‘A change to the city with it.’

Thoughtful, the pair, as they considered love’s quiet but decisive manoeuvres, and how an entire city might be shaped by them, a fiefdom, a world. Ol’ Boy called another amber; Dom, a French brandy.

Was the Wolfie-boy coming through, then?

It is at times of the Bohane Feudin’, after all, when Bohane reps get made.

Looky-here:

The Gant Broderick, without a lick of sleep to his name in three weeks solid, walked the deserted streets of the New Town, in foulest December weather, and he aimed his hopeful toots for the Beauvista bluffs.

From the Trace, distantly as he climbed, he heard the hollers and taunts of the Norrie fiends.

Fancy, meantime, held to an S’town stand-off as it waited on the sure mo’ and the ’bino’s call.

The Gant had spotted a gap sure enough.

He was after an assault of the midwinter blues. Each sleepless night in the trailer’s cot had been an infinity. Each morning he had felt as if he had fought a war. The Bohane taint had lost no drag on him in all the years he’d been gone. Violent thoughts reared up in his ham-faced noggin. It had been as much as he could do the night before not to throttle the little ginger cuss on the spot – spare him the wait for a sure fate ahead. But he had work to do, the Gant. There was a job agreed to, a price to be paid for his passage of return.

He could not settle. The level of drooling lust was unspeakable. Nostalgia was off the fucking charts. He was calling out his daft thoughts to the four winds. He was in fierce debate, at all angles of the clock, with the very many versions of himself. He was flatulent, he was baggy-eyed, he was hoarse with emotion. And here he was, despite it all, presenting himself for love.

Rum, Gant.

Scaled the Beauvista ascent by ’n’ by and came to the more genteel Bohane – the austerity of the trees here along the grand terraces, their tangled limbs bared in winter and hazed in rainfall, this was unspeakably beautiful, and a tear trailed softly the Gant’s cheek. All the great turrets and chimneys leapt at the foul winter sky, and he knew where to head for, sure enough, because it wasn’t his first climb of the bluff this season.

He had watched her in shade and silhouette; he had watched her the winter through, but from a distance.

With a dart of his tongue he wet a thumb the width of a tab-box and he smoothed back the cow lick that fell onto his forehead always, but then he thought that maybe it might work to spark her memory of him, and that he should let it fall unchecked, boyishly. Then he chortled. He almost choked on the harsh comedy, at the teenage turns his mind was taking; he felt so young again. The Gant was the length of fifty and here he was in a moony love-flap.

All the winter through he had prepared the first words he would speak to her. Rolled them out and weighted them. Offered them to the Big Nothin’ moon and the roaming puck goats. Tried to foresee the read she’d take on the words – tried to see them go in . Nights unending he had tried to gauge the meaning of her silence, her refusal to answer the letter. It signalled there was a fear in her, surely, a fear of what his return might mean, and that fear for the Gant spelt hope. Tricky the paths that a long love might follow, like the spiral-down twists of a raindrop on a windowpane.

He came to their terrace. His belly swollen with fright, he was ill with nerves – it could all end right here and now – but as with death, you look away from the approach of a darkness, and he was at their door, and he knocked, and all the words he had prepared were in that instant lost, forgotten, gone, and he was reduced to a single word – almost at once she answered – and he said the word:

‘Macu.’

Shortest day worsened as it went on and by threat of evening it was about as dreck as you’d get it in the creation. There in the black pit of December the rain came side-on and whipped its cold assaults. The hardwind was bossing about the place belligerent as a hoor’s broken-faced mother. There was an icy mist ghosting from the ocean that’d just about freeze the tongue solid in your gob. Logan Hartnett and Fucker Burke walked through the squalls and wallops of weather and they were largely oblivious to it being Bohane aborigines both.

They went out the back end of Smoketown and made it onto the track that led to the dune system. Track was an ancient one. There was a time – it wasn’t today nor yesterday – when young folk walked down it to take the sea air, fly kites and get fluffy with their sweethearts. But long gone in Bohane the days of the kites, and Fucker turned to Logan, and he said:

‘The fuck we doin’ callin’ on them fuckin’ sand-pikes, H?’

‘The fuck we’re doing, Fucker,’ said Logan, ‘is we’re thinking on our fucking feet, check?’

‘Ah but the sand-pikeys, Mr H? In all fairness? There’s low an’ there’s fuckin’ low again, like.’

Logan allowed the boy a dismal shrug. His calculations of the day a misread, he was in no mood to debate sand-pikey morals with the galoot Burke.

‘I know that you have high standards, Fucker,’ he said, ‘so I’ll explain the tactic again. What we’re dealing with is an eight-family descent from the Northside Rises. I said eight! We ain’t seen that many wall-bangers hop down the 98 Steps since back in the lost-time. But as many as they’ve got, they have the old flaw in them still. Just listen to ’em back there…’

He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, and despite the howls of the weather, the Norrie aggravators could be heard to roister still in the Back Trace.

‘These young gentlemen, they’ve no sense of… restraint , Fucker. They think that we’ve fled and left it to them. They’re taking knee-tremblers in the wynds. They’re bothering booze and pipe like booze and pipe just been invented. Another hour or two of that and they’ll be more than a little sapped. As long as we’ve the numbers to match them, it’ll be a simple cleaning-out operation.’

‘Still, H… Sand-pikeys for back-up? Sand-pikeys allegianced to the Back Trace Fancy?’

Logan stopped up short then; Fucker made the reck a note later.

On a high dune above, in the gloom of dusk, a line of sand-pikeys had noiselessly appeared.

Ye sketchin’?

Sand-pikeys – so silent there in the thickening light.

Now out on the Bohane peninsula, there were those who’d say your sand-pikey was just about the cutest devil of the lot. Say your sand-pikey had it made out there on the dunes, so hidden it was. Your sand-pikey was of the pavee kind but specific to the tip-end of the peninsula, a thin sliver of land out beyond Smoketown where a sequence of towering dunes is knit together with marram grass – great ropey chains of marram as thick again as the cables the sea rides on – and the dunes have a bad-luck air to them, by legend, but it was the sand-pikeys always that talked up the legend. Maybe they just wanted to keep the place to themselves.