Kevin Barry - City of Bohane

‘Tubby, I wan’ ya to hear this now. I don’ care what fuckin’ savagery ye practise out on them fuckin’ dunes, y’check me? Ye can chant yere fuckin’ pikey curses and ye can skin yere fuckin’ hares for the stewpot and ye can build yere little sixbar fuckin’ gates for the Big Nothin’ fermoiri an’ ye can hang yere fuckin’ scalps and paint yere bollix blue an’ have a read o’ the fuckin’ stars. Ye can train yere lurchers and hose out their minty fuckin’ cages. Fine! Coz I don’ have to fuckin’ well look at ye while ye’re at it. But lissen up, fatboy, and lissen good, coz yer in the fuckin’ city now, right? I said look around you, Tubs! Them’s buildings, them’s streets, them’s human fuckin’ peoples! I’m tryin’ to keep things a bit fuckin’ civilise aroun’ this joint, ya hear what I’m sayin’ t’ya? So let’s keep it all fit for biz, lardy-boy! Heed?’

The killer-gal glare she trained on him would put the scrotum hairs standing on a lesser gent but Prince Tubby just smiled serenely. He reached for the herb-bag that hung from his neck – fashioned, in the pikey way, from the skin of a goat’s testicle sac – and he took out a bud, and he crumbled it expertly into the bowl of his pipe, and he pulled the drawstring on the herb-bag to secure his supply, and he lit the bud with his Zippo – the lighter of choice, always, for the Bohane smoker, no other providing sufficient protection against the hardwind’s abrupt gusts – and he drew on the pipe. He glazed beautifully. He eyed Jenni Ching. He said:

‘I-and-I’s de Far-Eye, Jennie-sweet, y’check-back? I needs oney state dis one and true belief – de woman must not serve de man when she seein’ de moon.’

Way it was in S’town, this weather, Prince Tubby had his sand-pikey goons doing the rounds of every grogpit and shothouse and dream salon, and they were questioning the women who worked in these places about their menstrual cycles. Sand-pikeys held the belief that women were unclean when in flow.

‘It’s us way, Jen-chick, y’get me?’

Jenni Ching, defender of womankind, spat her cigarillo.

‘Y’ain’t nothin’ but a pikey fuckin’ throwback!’ she cried. ‘People’s got their fuckin’ privacy, check?’

Tubby displayed his palms.

‘Said it’s de sand-pike way, Jen,’ he said. ‘An’ what’s our way is de Smoketown way dese times, heed?’

She let a scowl devour him.

‘Oh we’ll see about that,’ she said. ‘Now g’on down the dune end an’ watch yer fuckin’ back, y’check me?’

She pushed off from the grindbar’s wall. Prince Tubby watched her go, and he glazed again on his draw, and he nodded slowly, appreciatively, at the clip of her spike heels, and the way she carried that high ’n’ tight slanty-chick can.

Jenni felt his glare and turned to it over her shoulder.

‘An’ don’ even fuckin’ dream it,’ she said.

Jenni wore:

Black nylon ski pants, a sheer black nylon top, a silver dirk belt, and a pork-pie crownsitter perched jauntily up top.

She aimed for the Ho Pee Ching Oh-Kay Koffee Shoppe. April sweltered, and there was a glisten of sweat on her forehead. The burn of his eyes on her rear end had planted a notion. In springtime, the city was opened to the elements like a wound and the sky bled its rude light on her as she walked. Manic birds hovered and cawed. The Ching gal plotted.

This seeing-the-moon caper was the least of it. That the sand-pikeys were opening credit lines for repeat customers was an even greater taunt. Not to mention their specials on brew and bushweed and particular methods of fornication. They were also, in Jenni Ching’s opinion, spreading all manner of superstition among the hoors, the dream sellers and the trick-pony boys. Then there was their general demeanour. They were fire-eating in the sideways and blowing perpetually on their horrible didgeridoos. Jenni reached the Ho Pee. She stormed through the swing doors of the place. She found Wolfie Stanners settled in a booth over a plate of gingered cuttlefish. He raised a moony look to her.

‘Stow the love-eyes,’ she said. ‘I gots enough on me fuckin’ noodle, check?’

‘S’up with ya, girl-a-mine?’

He laid down his chopsticks and pushed back his plate. Attentive, husbandly, lost to first love – it gets even the Wolfies among us – he reached for a cup and poured her a fill of jasmine tea from the bamboo-handled pot.

‘Sand-pikeys!’ she cried. ‘They ain’t got no fuckin’ class, Wolf!’

He sighed. He thought for a moment, and then he winked slyly. He placed on the table a small, scarred hand, the palm down, its fingers splayed, and with his other hand he drew a four-inch dirk from the inside pocket of his Crombie. He jabbed the dirk first slowly into the wooden tabletop between his splayed fingers, and then more quickly, and then at a furious pace until the knife became a blur. Knife tricks rarely failed to distract his girl from her troubles, but today she could raise only a wan smile. She laid a hand on his to still the blur. She spoke in a low voice.

‘Pikeys sendin’ Smoketown straight to fuckin’ hell, Wolf. An’ I’m suppose to stand around and look at the fuckheads while they’s at it?’

Jenni lit another cigarillo. She bopped smoke rings from her pouted lips. Wolfie became aroused beneath his gaberdine peg pants. He replaced with trembling hand the dirk in his inside pocket.

‘I think I know what you’re goin’ to say to me next,’ he said.

‘Where’s the change we wan’ to see comin’?’ she said.

‘That’s what I knew you’d say to me,’ he said.

She had been laying it on since the year-turn. Every day and every night. Jenni would lean in a little closer to him, and she would bring her lips to his ear, and she’d lick the lobe briefly, just once, with a single dart of her tongue, and then whisper to him:

‘The change, Wolf? Where’s the change we been wantin’?’

Now in the Ho Pee afternoon she saw there was too much loyalty in the boy. He was not ready to move. And Jenni made a decision. The sand-pikes without a leader would be headless and fatally degenerate. The Fancy without her boy-clutch, Wolfie, would be still riper for the taking. One or the other, Tubby or Wolfie, would not survive a collision. If her luck was in, both might fall.

‘What I wanted to talk t’ya about, Wolf…’

She turned her glance from him, and assumed a tragic aspect, as though too wounded for speech.

‘What’s it, girl?’

‘This Tubby, y’know? He ain’t got no fuckin’ respec’, like.’

‘How’d ya mean, Jen?’

She jerked a thumb over her shoulder to indicate the S’town beyond.

‘Not five minute since?’ she said. ‘He oney goes and drops the hand on me, don’t he?’

Homicidal rage at once travelled the short length of Wolfie Stanners. It forced him to a stand. His freckle-puss crimsoned. He gripped the booth’s tables with his tiny, scarred fingers.

‘He did… fuckin’… what ?’

See a busted-nose smirk from a Bohane polis. See his great slabs of ham-bone arms crossed on the station’s high counter and inked with tats showing the symbols of the polis fraternities:

Was a bottle of Phoenix ale on the counter and he raised it and sucked deep on it and burped a cloud of kebab breath (mutton flavour) and he placed the bottle down again, wiped his mouth and smacked his greasy lips and a wee lizardy tongue emerged and tickled the air; see the searching tip of it.

Logan Hartnett was stood up on the other side of the counter and he winced, delicately – his gut was already unsure from the dream-pipe – as the cloud of polis breath meatily lingered.