Kevin Barry - City of Bohane

Upon the right ankle, I noted at a glance – I don’t miss much – there was a small tattoo, in Indian ink, of a Bohane dirk.

‘How does it work?’ she said.

I merely nodded, and smiled, and I raised the hatch on the counter, and with a gesture (priestly, I fancy) bid her enter.

She came through, and I parted the curtains, and I led her into the back room. It is a silvery, mica tone of darkness that persists there, and the room contains just the drawn-down screen, and an easy chair, and to one side a hatch that leads to my projection room.

‘When?’ I asked. ‘Roughly.’

She sat in the easy chair, and removed the wrap, and the bareskin of her shoulders had a glisten in the silver of the gloom, and she crossed her legs, and she named the era that she longed for.

Anxiously, then:

‘Can you do this?’

I nodded.

‘The footage goes into the Thirties,’ I said.

Discreetly, I withdrew to the projection room. I flicked through the cans of reels. I had transferred onto these reels what had been rescued from the street cameras. I called to her, softly, through the hatch:

‘De Valera Street? The Trace?’

‘Dev,’ she said. ‘Maybe there by the Aliados?’

‘Where it gives onto the Trace,’ I whispered, soulfully.

I picked a favourite compendium; a really lovely reel. It shows the snakebend roll of Dev Street, deep in the bustle and glare of the lost-time, at night, with the darting of the traffic as it rolled then – ah, the white-tyred slouch-backs, the fat Chaparelles, the S’town cruisers – and the crowds milling outside the bars, the stags and the hens, and it was a different world, so glaringly lit.

Of course, it is a silent footage always in the back room’s replay, and so I cued up an old 78 on the turntable I keep by the projector, and I played it as accompaniment. It was a slow-moving calypso burner that gave a lovely sadness, I felt, to the scenes it worked with.

Discreetly, through the hatch, I watched the lady as she watched the screen. She was mesmerised.

And though I have watched this reel thousands of times myself, I was as always drawn into it, I was put under a spell by the roll and carry of the Dev Street habituees. If all had changed in Bohane, the people had not, and would never:

That certain hip-swing.

That especially haughty turn-of-snout.

That belligerence.

An old Bohane proverb:

The beginning of wisdom is first you get you a roof.

Of course, the Gant knew that a rez-born long-tooth can escape his wandering nature about as easily as outrun the length of his shadow, but he was willing to try. Big Nothin’ had over the winter months become too much, too lonesome. He had felt like he was losing the sense of himself again – the old darknesses were seeping once more through the cracks of his life. And so, quietly, he had taken a room in the Back Trace. It was a place to breathe in the city and see what feeling he could take from it. The room was the attic of a tenement; it was maybe fifteen feet along by ten feet wide, with a sloped ceiling. It contained a single bed and a sink and damp-warped old floorboards that creaked and sang as he paced them. The bed was an insomniac’s heroically rumpled nest, the sink for pissing in. A small window set in the roof gave a view over the Trace: the up-and-down of it, the rise-and-fall, the skewed calligraphy of the Bohane skyline, the dead pylons and dead cables, the half-dead birds with their spooked eyes, the strange dark blossom that trailed over the rickety zees of the fire escapes and the deep green voids of the wynds. The sense of being high above things gave to the Gant a feeling of breathlessness and abyss.

He had put the hard word on Jenni – Jenni had not turned.

He had put the hard word on Wolfie – Wolfie had not turned.

He had put the hard word on Fucker – Fucker said, what’s in it for me, like?

The Gant shook his head at the kid’s foolishness. He hoped that he would leave the place now. Take to the Boreen and head due east and never look back over the shoulder, not even once.

That’s the mistake, boy: the looking back.

The day persisted, outside; the world persisted. The gulls belligerently called – mmwwaaoork! – and morning sounds rose up from the Trace. The bustle and pep of the arcade market. The old dears as they milled and chirruped. The veg prices hollered, the stony-voiced haggling. The old dudes out on their stoops with wind-up transistors tuned to Bohane Free Radio – where it was always yesteryear. The old love songs, the slow calypso rhythms that triggered the sense memory of dance steps that were still wired into his bones, and that he tried out, now and then, laughing, on the warped floorboards.

The snatches of song opened him up. The streets below were for the Gant a memory hoard. Every kiss, every reefing – it all came back to him. The detail was close up, hallucinatory, blood-warm.

It was just three weeks they had been together. The night she left him he remembered in a visceral way. He could summon it at will. The colours of the lonely street that night; the nausea of defeat. He knew where she was and who she was with. He experienced again every moment of it. He saw it so clearly. The facts were plain:

She was eighteen, and Logan was cooler.

There in the attic room the Gant came back to the moment and he seethed again with youth’s intensity. The shallow fucking bitch. In the glare of spring, he was seeing things plain. He feared now he had come back to extract a revenge from Macu as much as from Logan. He had wanted to make her fall for him again, to make her sway, to make her world come loose. But on the longest night of the winter, on Beauvista, he saw that time had already from Macu taken its revenge.

He glared out over the rooftops.

Shallow fuckin’ town.

He watched now the young ones in the April morning as they roamed down there. You could pick out the blowins so easily: the arrivistes, the hard-eyed adventurers. They would by long tradition head for the city of Bohane in springtime – they brought their shkelps, their herb-pipes, their dreams. See the way they tried out a walk – getting the roll of the hips just right, and the loose carry of the shoulders, and the glide of the feet; you didn’t want to arrive Trace-deep on the stride of a cow-hand. He smiled but knew in his own way he was still trying out a walk. Still trying to fit into his own skin. At fifty! Oh hapless G, oh neurotic Broderick, oh the comical shame of this never growing old.

And still the lost-time music rose to him, remorselessly.

The Fancy boys had packed away their Crombies and wore sleeveless tanktops in bright pastel colours. The tattoo shops worked overtime – he could hear the zit-zing-zinging of their needles. And see the girls down there – the young stuff – in their wedge heels, their vinyl zip-ups, their spray-on catsuits; all trying to work it like Jenni Ching. Yes a shallow fucking town.

Now, critically, something shifted, a new pool of clarity opened, and the Gant as he watched the girls go by saw his revenge tack to a richer course.

He saw a slow way to hurt Logan.

Jenni Ching whipped from the tit pocket a fresh cigarillo, clipped it and lit it, and she winced against the glare as a dose of filthy sunlight filled the Smoketown wharf. She looked yonder to the Trace across the Bohane’s charismatic waters. She leaned back against the old cinnamon warehouse – it was lately got up as a grindbar – and she closed her eyes in long-suffering. Bit her pretty lip. Then she opened her eyes again, and blinked hard, and she turned to the sand-pikey bossman who was slouched beside her. This was an arranged meet, and his dreadlock brethren from the near distance warily kept guard. They fingered nervously their dirk sheaths. They kept careful sconce on the slanty bint. She scraped at the scummy cobblestones with a six-inch spike heel. She sucked from the lung-blackener what patience its tars might give. She said: