Kevin Barry - City of Bohane

Logan wore:

A pale green suit, slim-cut, of thin spring cotton, a pair of burnt-orange arsekickers with a pronounced, bulbous toe, a ruffle-fronted silver shirt open at the neck, a purple neckscarf, a pallor of magnificently wasted elegance, and his hair this season swept back from the forehead and worn just slightly longer, so that it trailed past the ruff of his jacket. Also, a three-day stubble.

Was the Long Fella’s opinion that, if anything, his suffering made him even more gauntly beautiful. He had all the handsome poignancy of heartbreak.

He hoicked a mouthful of green phlegm at the gutter – the pipe was affecting his lungs. XXX-rated images came at him randomly as he walked – they showed Macu in hot-mouthed abandon with a phantom sequence of young lovers – and he relished these pictures as does the tip of the tongue the gumboil. A burning sensation in his throat, a hollowness.

Where does she sleep?

Through the warm caffeine waft and dust-moted quiet of the shaded hotel foyer he passed, and he was watched by an Authority tout from an old suede lobby couch. They were waiting on his fall. Tout’s excited eyes jerked up from behind a conspicuously raised Vindicator , and Logan blew a thin-lipped kiss for the gombeen fool.

He ascended – hear now the dreary clank and groaning of the age-old elevator as it works its frayed ropes; Logan heard the workings slowed down, drawn out, dreamily – and he came along the corridor and knocked his particular knock on the suite’s numberless door.

‘Get in t’me, ya long fuckin’ ape!’

Girly was propped on a dozen pillows in the honey-mooners’ bed. She was apparently well fuelled: she had the weird crimson colour about the cheeks. When she was sixty, he had worried that the colour spelt her imminent death. She had lately turned ninety. Logan took the bedside seat, and she watched him, and she held the glance, and she puffed her cheeks then in exasperation.

‘Night I’m after puttin’ down?’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t put a fuckin’ dog through it.’

‘A bad one, Girl?’

She let her eyes roll tragically in her head.

‘I’m between sleep an’ wakin’ all the night – y’know that kind o’ way? The dreams is gone halfways fuckin’ alive on me. Four o’clock this mornin’, I was convinced Yul Brynner was on top o’ the bedspread tryin’ to claw in at me and have his way. In the days of the hair.’

Logan, impatient – he had heard it all so many times – rose again, and he went to the velvet drapes, and he shifted their weight a fraction, and he moved a little on the balls of his feet, shifted from one to the other, and he looked out to the rooftops of the Trace wynds.

Was she Trace-deep somewhere? The city was big enough, but only just, to get lost in.

‘Things ain’t looking so tasty away yonder,’ he said.

‘An’ the nex’ thing your father appears. In all his glory. Fuckin’ Patcho! Las’ toss-bucket I wanna set me peepers on. An’ he’s above on that wall there on top o’ the light switch playin’ his little trumpet? About the size of a stood-up rat. Dreams! An’ me eyes wide fuckin’ open, like?’

‘I’m being squeezed,’ Logan said. ‘I got the sand-pikes getting ambitious in Smoketown. Same time, I got the Norries working up a sour fucking brood for vengeance.’

‘Mind you, he could make that trumpet talk, yer aul’ fella.’

‘Never met him,’ Logan said. ‘And of course every swivel-eyed runt in the Fancy with a shkelp to his name and a nobber the size of a peanut is weighing his chances.’

‘Well, you’re hittin’ fifty, aintcha?’ she said. ‘Then I had the sensation, this was about half five, I’d say? Sensation that I was bein’ sucked into a bog-hole. Me! Ousside on fuckin’ Nothin’! Being swallied by a mound o’ wet turf! Me what ain’t left Bohane city since back in the lost-time. Sweet Baba! How many yella moons gone since I saw the Nothin’ plain, Log? Not since one o’ the times you went missin’ out there, I’d say.’

A lonesome kid, he would walk out the Boreen – he ghosted about the rez, the massif villages, the backlanes, the haunted cottages, their roofs all caved in. See him in a field of reeds – at ten years old – his pale face above the burning gold of the reeds caught in drenching sun, and the reeds ride slowly the sway of the wind.

‘I haven’t been able to find Macu,’ he said. ‘There’s no word from her even.’

‘She ain’t slidin’ a pole in S’town, no?’

Out on Nothin’, as a kid, he would listen to the old dudes at the rez fires, and in the shebeens, and he would watch the way they held themselves, and the way they carried themselves. That stuff didn’t get taught in the schoolhouse.

‘If I don’t find her, I don’t know that I can go on.’

Girly made a fist and bit down weakly on its bunched knuckles. For patience.

‘Comin’ along about seven bells?’ she said. ‘Gettin’ light out, the gulls havin’ a yap, the early El clankin’ a beat? And I came up outta mesel’ again.’

Logan winced at the bleach of morning sky over the Trace.

‘I don’t know what to do, Girly.’

‘Lay off the fuckin’ pipe for a start,’ she said. ‘Anyways I came outta mesel’, and I floated out that same window you’re stood at with a gommie fuckin’ puss on ya. Saw the rooftops. Saw the mornin’ get itsel’ all worked up. Saw the rush in S’town, saw the suits on Endeavour at their little cups o’ joe, their pinkies stuck out, and I saw the Rises women build their fires in the tower circles. An’ I saw a way to work it all yet, y’check me?’

He turned to her, and smiled. Girly in her floating visions so often spied a new course. He came back to the bedside chair, and folded his bones into it, and he crossed his legs neatly. He wasn’t the world’s most masculine man. He leaned forward. Weighed his chin in a cupped palm.

‘Tell me, you old witch,’ he said.

She reached across and slapped his knee, and the move had a playful note, and playfully he slapped her hand away. But the slap and parry – they both knew – had a deeper meaning in freight: it was for the consolation of touch.

It is not often that I get a good-looking woman in here. It is more usually men who are my patrons. The women can keep their feelings tamped a little more. But the men get to a certain age and it becomes too much for them. They must reach again for the whimsical days of their youth, and for the city as it was back then.

Mine is a small premises of the Back Trace. You will discover it down a dead-end wynd, with an unprosperous old draper to one side, his hands shaky now on the measuring tape, and a rotisserie the other, the charred smell of chicken skin wafting from ten in the morning. It is a glass-fronted shop, but the glass is a smoked grey, opaque, and on the door there is just a small title on a piece of white card, with the lettering of the Ancient & Historical picked out in gold ink. I do not need to advertise.

This particular April morning, the bell announced a customer, and I came forth, sighing, from behind the curtain, expecting the usual sad-eyed gent, the usual droop-of-mouth, the usual plea.

It was natural, then, that my breath should catch a little at the fine lady who appeared on the bell’s tingle. She was tall, Iberian, green-eyed, one of the eyes turned slightly in – but the quirk an emphasis, somehow, to her attractiveness – and her lips parted just a fraction, and I inclined my head patiently for her words, but she hesitated.

She wore:

A light, silken, springtime wrap of pistachio green turned just so across her shoulder, a scoop-neck top, French-striped, a pair of three-quarter-length buckskin hiphuggers that accentuated her tallness, and wooden clogs with a wedge-rise that lengthened the ankle beautifully.