Kevin Barry - City of Bohane

‘No taking it back, is there?’ he said.

All the years he had been gone, he had remembered their talks word for word:

‘You get so long in this place and no more. Maybe it’s time we took to the High Boreen, girl?’

He could not stay in the city without falling to its taint. Logan would never leave, and Macu, too, was Bohane to the bone. Macu was a stayer.

‘I asked you, remember?’ He came back to the Beauvista hearth. ‘I asked you to come with me.’

‘Ah, Gant, please…’

‘I knew that you wouldn’t.’

She edged forward on her settle. She clasped her hands and held them a moment to her mouth. She spoke to him now very gently.

‘Gant,’ she said, ‘we went out together for three weeks.’

Spike of nausea.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know that’s all it was.’

‘Oh why’re you here, G?’

The firelight traced out the lines of her aged skin. She was no longer what he needed or wanted. Reality infected him with its sourness and truth. A new course swiftly presented; it had its own sweet and vengeful logic.

‘I’ll tell you exactly why I’m here,’ he said.

The Hartnett Fancy was mobbed beneath its colours out the Smoketown dune end. It was first-dark of the longest night. The Fancy was edgy. The hot charge of adrenalin rushed, mitts were flexed, knuckles cracked, jaws clenched, and the ranked banners in the wind’s assault made an ominous rattling. The purple and black of the banners had an ecclesiastical look, neo-Romish, and upon the banners were daubed the symbols and the slogan of the Back Trace Fancy:

Symbols –

Slogan –

S’town was agog, and freaky-eyed hoors amped on Feud-juice shrieked their XXX-rated tributes to the Fancy boys from the high windows.

Fancy boys waved back to the hoors and attempted a semblance, at least, of blithe spirit.

Among the Fancy – as was remarked, with awe and suspicion, in the S’town grogpits and herb-parlours – the fearsome sand-pikeys now were mingled.

Sand-pikeys had about them the calmest of airs. They shook out their limbs, and performed calisthenic stretches, and tossed their hatchets for show in the air, and caught ’em again behind their backs, and filled repeatedly their neckpipes with bead-sized nodges of blackest hashish, and sucked deep on the fill – these were the Dreadlock Assassins of the dune system.

Fancy regulars and sand-pikey buy-ins were of a number, combined, that’d be a match, but just about, for the eight families of Norrie aggravators roisterin’ cross-river in the Bohane Trace.

Logan Hartnett suavely walked the ranks and he offered his smiles and his whispers of encouragement. There was confidence to be read in the sly pursing of his lips, and atop a most elegant cut of an Eyetie suit he wore, ceremonially, an oyster-grey top hat.

Mothers and sisters and lovers of the Fancy boys meantime passed through the mob, shedding tears and Sweet Baba Jay medals as they went. The medals were for protection.

Fucker Burke was bouncing about as though on springs, and he hissed his encouragement to the Fancy, and he kept on an extendable battle leash his Alsatian love, Angie, who pranced, and drooled, and whose eye-gleam gave back the glow of December moon. Fucker was bare-armed beneath a denim waistcoat and wore his finest brass-toed bovvers and he felt the racing currents of pride, emotion, fear. Angie had been kept without a feed for three days.

Jenni Ching pinballed about the assembled mob and screamed crazy Mandarin curses. Jenni Ching carried a spike ball on a chain and swung it above her head. She wore an all-in-one black nylon jumpsuit, so tightly fitted it might have been applied with a spray-can, and she smoked a black cheroot to match it, and her mouth was a hard slash of crimson lippy.

Wolfie Stanners, however, was widely acknowledged to have taken the prize. Wolfie was dressed to kill in an electric-blue ska suit and white vinyl brothel-creepers with steel toecaps inlaid. Four shkelps were readied on a custom-made cross-belt. He danced along the ranks of the Fancy, and he eyeballed each of the Fancy boys in turn, and he gestured to the Back Trace beyond, where the Norrie aggravators could be heard to howl their taunts and curses.

‘Ye takin’ that?’ Wolfie hissed. ‘I said ye gonna fuckin’ well take that, like?’

Logan approached the boy then, and he embraced him, and he whispered to him; Wolfie aye-ayed.

Yes and it was Wolfie that blew a short, three-noted whistle then, and a great wealth of feeling settled that moment on the Fancy.

The whistle was a plain melody that rose once and then fell, that was melancholy, that was sourced from the lost-time in Bohane, that had a special power to it – a power that I cannot even begin to explain to those of you unfortunate enough not to come from this place – and it was answered after a silence had for a moment held, it was answered in sweet, sad sequence by the Fancy, and by this plain music they swore allegiance to the Back Trace, and as one they moved to reclaim it.

Man – even the sand-pikeys were zoned on the mo’.

And as the mob marched out across the S’town streets, the whistled melody was taken up as a general tune, and it carried across the footbridge, and in the wynds and alleyways of the Back Trace the uptown aggravators knew their assault was not to go unanswered.

That drained the blood from the bastards’ faces sure enough.

Trace families barricaded in their tenement homes for the length of the assault heard also the Fancy’s whistles, and they rushed to their rooftops, and their breaths caught with pride as yonder across the Bohane river they saw the hoisted banners come steadily closer – the purple and the black – and the night had cleared, as though on cue, and all of cruel heaven’s cold stars were flung gaily about.

Logan Hartnett, kingly outlaw, arranged himself towards the rear of the marching Fancy. The Eyetie suit was sharp enough to slice an eyeball open, the top hat rakishly set, and he was unencumbered by weapons save for that same coil of rope wrapped loosely about his shoulder. Hard not to be floored by the nerveless elegance of that slender old dog.

Fancy made its way onto the footbridge and it crossed onto the Bohane front and the ranks of hoss polis clustered along the dockside kept their mounts and their backs discreetly turned. Looked in the opposite direction, the polis. As though it was the pretty streets of the New Town where the Feud was to be played.

Fucker and Jenni and Wolfie pelted up and down between the advancing lines of the Fancy and motivated the fighters. Wolfie winked for Jenni as they passed, and he blew her a kiss, and he hit a high-hand salute with Fucker.

But it was Wolfie that took the general lead of the Fancy as it made its way across the wharfside cobbles to the Trace, for he was bone-Trace, that kid, he had Trace wynds for bloodlines.

And Wolfie sounded a ripper of a Back Trace howl and everyone behind him heard it in their deeps and they were fortified by it.

Shkelpers were unsheathed and chains were swung and blackthorns raised.

Sky itself was about ripped by the Fancy’s cries.

Wolfie turned on his heel and trotted backwards so as to face the moving lines and he performed most jauntily a natty-boy skank – the signature move of the Hartnett Fancy – and the cheers that rose had a raw, terrifying jaggedness to them, a want to them, and it was a want for blood, y’check?

Wolfie turned again and entered the Trace.

A flashbulb’s blue shriek lit the sky and caught his battle scream.