Kevin Barry - City of Bohane

These were the dates of his father’s span. It was in the same alleyway his father was stomped to death by Fancy boots. The boy Cantillon knew that vengeance might cost his young life to exact but his screams told the need for it. He felt inside the waistband of his lowriders for the shkelp – the reassurance of its bone handle – and he wondered how long it would take for the moment to present itself. The wooziness of the spring night was all about him and a silence held briefly to worry the moment.

Then a round of roars and chants surged on the measured beat of handclaps from a pikey-run grindbar nearby.

Sand-pikey floor show was in full swing:

A slave-gal lurcher, painted with lizard motifs about the face, was chained at the waist. The chain’s end was held by her handler, a hooded dwarf. She writhed and twisted in a diamond-shaped pit marked out with burning reed-torches. A fat gent got up as a dog-demon, in full pelt, then entered the pit on his fours – whoops and hollers rose – and the pair cavorted, frankly, and at great, unsavoury length, and they kept a good rhythm with the handclaps as they went.

All the while, the lurcher ranted for the tiered punters a devil’s babble – it was learned to her in the dune cages – and her eyes were livid in the dim of the pikey joint.

The dwarf handler fed out lengths of chain at certain moments, and withdrew chain at others – this so as to assist and steer the design of the cavort. The punters clapped out a steady, three-beat rhythm, and whistled and hissed, and they sucked on herb-pipes – squinting through the greenish fug of their smoke – and they lapped up a three-for-two offer on bottles of Phoenix ale.

Lurcher had the telltale welts of captivity on her back. Type that would have been taken as a girl-chil’ from the high reaches of the Nothin’ massif, and dune-raised. Such were the sad old stories you’d get out that end of the creation. Gal the likes of the lurcher might have been bought for a few bottles of the Beast and a box of colouredy bangles.

Get ’em young – that was the sand-pikey reckon when it was lurchers they was talking.

Yes and the sand-pikeys held all the hottest tickets out the S’town dune end this season. The lurcher and her dog-man were tonight but a curtain-raiser. It got lowdown and brutish altogether as the night stretched out its hairy arms, and the trick-ponies emerged, and the big lasses in harness, and the biters, and the maulers, and the double-jointed chap with the moustache what styled hissel’ ‘The Magician’. You would blush to even repeat the details of that man’s act – suffice to say there wasn’t a cat safe for miles.

And all the while Prince Tubby, the Far-Eye, kept sconce from the doorway, and he tallied a head count in the tiered seats around the pit. There was a couple of stag parties in, which was always a help. He reckoned the toll he’d taken in door tax and he nodded serenely.

Prince Tubby was offering cheap entry, credit lines for repeat custom and rotating deals on Phoenix ale, Wrassler stout and Big Nothin’ bushweed. Ambition lit the Tubster like a star this weather. He had taken to city living. He placed a hand in the pocket of his velvet loon pants, and he felt the weight of coins there, and he set them merrily a-janglin’. He scratched his balls and he wanted more – more! – and he brooded on the weakness he perceived in the Trace Fancy. The ’bino was down to lonesomeness and the dream-pipe, and the Fancy boys were whispering.

Tubby went outside for a taste of the night. He took a sniff at the S’town air. His guards were stationed all along the dune-end alleyways – the Fancy was not to be trusted – and he felt the reassurance of them. He ate a lungful of mineral wind. Raised his eyes and read the stars. Briefly, in Bohane, there was that feeling again of stillness.

And then a nightbird’s strange call from the treetops.

Bird’s call had the neat, rapid, whirring sound of an old motor, and it carried a distance along the tops of the scarred trees, and it was picked up by others of its kind, and answered. The call – this sequence of whirrs and tiny, deep-throated clicks – ascended thus the gable-end of a fetish parlour, and crept through the window of a top-floor suite, and Big Dom Gleeson, the stout newsman, heard it as he lay on a bed with his belly-side down. He suckled on a sour French brandy from the nipple of a baby’s bottle, and he sweated profusely as a seventeen-year-old tushie whipped him a hundred strokes on the raw of his arse with a pearl-encrusted hairbrush.

‘Oh I am a weak, weak man,’ the Dom sighed.

The pouty tush weltered him and muttered the count:

‘Seven’y-sic’… seven’y-se’en… se’eny-ate…’

And Big Dom between soft moans and sucks on the bobba’s tit pondered the weird, precise whirring of the night-bird, and he made it as a blow-in from an ocean storm – it was the season for them. He groaned, in happiness and in shame, and he enjoyed as always the slow turning of the season, the opening out of the Bohane year.

‘Se’eny-noine… atey… atey-wan…’

Oh, this one had a wrist on her! And as he succumbed – once more! – to his weakness, and as he – oh snivelling, oh putrid Dom! – relished the…

‘Atey-foe… atey-fi…”

…measure of pain the tushie extracted from his sinful bones, he started to think about supper, too – would I ate a lump o’ halibut? – and the way the whirring of the strange bird had the sound of the hunchback Grimes’s old Leica – didn’t it? – and also his proposed editorial comment…

‘Noin’ey… noin’ey-wan…’

…for the following evening’s Vindicator . A succession ruck was brewing in the Fancy – no question. This marked a difficult moment in the city.

The boy Stanners.

The galoot Burke.

The slanty-eye Ching.

They were all making shapes. They were all manoeuvring. Even in victory, Logan Hartnett had shown a weakness – he’d gone beyond the Fancy’s colours for back-up. Such a plain display of weakness was in Bohane oftentimes fatal. But Dom’s editorial, he decided, would plead for patience, for the Long Fella to be left in place for a time yet, for the status quo…

‘Noin’ey-sic… noin’ey-se’en…’

…to be maintained. After all, you could say what you liked about the Long Fella, but at least he had class.

‘Noin’ey-noine…’

And there was the fact that he made a very fine picture. A tall man, thin, a clothes horse. Strange, but he’d be missed. Dom braced himself for the last stroke of the brush, for which she always retained a special venom, and indeed she raised the arm high for it, and a whack of pleasure with great fury was landed.

‘A hundert even, Mr Gleeson!’

Moaned loudly, the Dom – shamed, yet again! – and his fat-man moan carried through the window, and floated downwards, softly, until a lick of the hardwind caught it and threw it above the rooftops of Smoketown, sent it across the blackwaters of the Bohane, and it faded as it carried, and it reduced, and it was succeeded on the Trace front by the sound of the meat wagons as they crossed the cobbles, the iron rut and clanking of them.

As they sketched the wagons roll out from the arcade market and head for the slaughterhouse – the night shift already was in swing – Ol’ Boy Mannion and the Gant Broderick leaned back against the stained brickwork of an old warehouse, and they spoke crankily against the din.

‘You been soundin’ kinda bitter this weather, G. If you don’t mind me sayin’, like?’

‘It’s bred into me, Benni.’

‘Ah, stop, will you? The fuckin’ martyrdom!’

Gant sourly shrugged.