Kevin Barry - City of Bohane

‘You’ve got the fucking rot in you, friend,’ he said. ‘Not long for the beat would be my call.’

Polis smirked even more slyly – the arrogant chops of the fucker creased to a fold there beneath the bleached glare of the stationhouse strip lights.

The station walls were painted an institutional green and old bloodstains were dark inkblobs against the green. Polis reached beneath the desk and brought up a bottle of state whiskey; he showed it. Logan shook his head – he wouldn’t shame his throat with that tangerine-coloured pisswater. The polis fathead nodded politely – no offence taken – blew another damp, liverish breath, and lightly, he said:

‘Mr Hartnett, why’s it you’re here again, sir?’

Was the thinnest of smiles Logan allowed the fat polis.

‘I think you might have someone I need to see.’

Long Fella was working the latest plan from Girly’s play-book. Goal: the immediate pacification of the Norrie kind. The Norries in humid springtime were restless, wounded and brooding, and a play was urgently needed.

‘We picked her up,’ the polis confirmed, ‘but that’s a dangerous game on the Rises, y’understand? When tis a Cusack kid we’s talkin’?’

Logan slid distastefully a fold of notes to the polis. The fathead smirked, and took the fold, and raised it to his porcine snout and sniffed it, and then stood from his desk.

‘’Course it was Mr Reid the master butcher did the job itself,’ he said. ‘Said to say t’ya tis a favour answered.’

‘Whatever that might mean,’ Logan said.

Polis picked a ring of keys from the wall with his tab-stained fingers. Swung the ring as he trailed down a dank, urine-smelling corridor. Strip lights overhead buzzed, failed, briefly came to life again, and failed again. Corridor sang with old spirits. Logan as he followed the fat polis closed his eyes – he was tapering yet from a Ho Pee dream – and heard the screeches of age-dead Fenians seep from the walls. No shortage of ghosts in this place. There were occult frequencies in the Back Trace heard only by dogs and the ’bino.

He came with the polis on the cell rooms down back of the station.

Polis slid a key from the ring into a cell’s lock and the lock clacked, unclicked, and the polis flicked a switch outside and as they entered a dim bulb found a young girl on a straw pallet. Polis winked for Logan and went and crouched down by the girl. Polis took her wrists and turned her palms to show Logan the fresh marks that had been skilfully cut in:

A pair of clover-shaped stigmata.

Logan nodded, painfully – his mother was such a sick old fuck; the skewed logic of her derangement was beyond even him – and the polis rose and left the cell, sniggering.

The girl looked up at him. She was hard-eyed as any Norrie bint but she could not keep the scare from her voice. She said:

‘I’ll do what you wan’ me to, ’bino…’

Logan got down on his haunches to meet the girl with a level and reassuring gaze.

‘I know that, sweet,’ he said. ‘And you’ll do fine work for me.’

She cried despite herself.

‘Hush, lovie,’ he said. ‘Now I hope that fat polis fuck ain’t been taking no undue liberties… Was it painful for you, child? With the butcher?’

She looked at her palms – shrugged. No more than twelve, and a pure Norrie hard-face, but awed, all the same, by his proximity. In Bohane, you make your name and let your name do the work.

‘We need to get this trick working, Little Cuse,’ he said. ‘You’ve been missing for three days and three nights, check?’

‘S’right.’

‘You were drawn to Big Nothin’,’ he said. ‘You felt a strange drag from the bog plain. Something brought you to the High Boreen – it was a particular star in the sky, a bright, bright star. And then, upon a high knoll… do you know what a knoll is, Little Cuse?’

‘Nah.’

‘Class of a wee hill,’ Logan sighed. ‘And out there, in the night, on this knoll you came across a puck goat – you know what a puck goat is…’

He turned his own palm and showed on the inside of his wrist the finely inked tat of a puck’s horns – symbol of the Trace Fancy.

‘I know that awrigh’, ’bino.’

‘And the goat spoke to you, Little Cuse. But as he spoke to you, it was the words of the Sweet Baba you heard, y’check me?’

The eyes of Little Cuse widened.

‘Baba took the form of a puck, ’bino?’

Logan inclined his head respectfully.

‘He most certainly did, girl-child. And now His Perpetual Sweetness has left the mark on you. Do you understand?’

Mouth open, eyes popping, she displayed the faked stigmata – Logan liked this kid.

‘And listen good now,’ he said, ‘because the Sweet Baba has passed to you a special message for your people.’

‘What’s it, ’bino?’

He leaned in, and he whispered to her a moment, and the message was understood. He let it be known, too, what would happen should she fail to comply precisely with his instructions. He stood then and he led the girl from the cell. The fat polis leaned back against a corridor wall and smiled like the fondest of uncles. Gestured to a back door down the far end of the corridor. Logan brought the girl there and he kissed his bunched fingertips and he placed the kiss lightly, so very lightly, on her cheek. He trailed then his fingertips along the filigree down of her arm’s fine hair, and this touch was electric, his eyes closed; he felt youth, he felt vitality, he felt the sense-memory of Macu, when young. His eyes watered, his gut lurched. His throat screamed for the dream-pipe. He turned the girl loose to the dusky streets. He had made a decent connection, he felt. He came back down the corridor. Fat polis grinned, and he said:

‘Baba due an appearance, Mr H?’

‘Sweet Jay on the comeback trail,’ Logan said.

He went again to the evening and he walked the Back Trace shadows. Girly’s shrewd reckon: gullibility on the Northside Rises was to be fostered and worked with. Long Fella admired her canniness as he walked the darkening Trace.

The Back Trace was the brain of the city, and he felt the wynds’ pulsing: an arterial throb.

Pitbull behind a chain fence lurched for him.

He hissed at the dog.

It barked a yard of stars.

Big Dom Gleeson, the corpulent news hound, and Balthazar Mary Grimes, his hunchback lensman, were on official Vindicator business in the Bohane Trace. It was dusk of the same hot April evening – with a mango wash to the sky above the rooftops – and Dom was breathing hard and fretfully as he followed his snapper down a dizzying tangle of wynds and turns.

‘Go handy on me, Balt, please! I am not a young gentleman!’

‘You’re thirty-eight, Mr Gleeson.’

Through the dank squares they went, and they were deep in the foul and ancient maze, and they came at length to a certain tenement building in the shadows of the arcade market. Dom took from the fob pocket of his mustard-yellow waistcoat a piece of paper on which the address was scrawled, and he showed it to Balthazar, and the hunchback turned from address to tenement, and back again, and yet again for the triple-check, and he nodded.

‘S’the place awrigh’, Mr Gleeson.’

Dom gathered himself with a couple of deep breaths and he pushed in the heavy door of the tenement.

‘Sufferin’ Baba above on the cross,’ he said. ‘The heart would be skaw-ways in you, Balt?’

Balthazar shrugged, and grimly lugged his medieval Leica through the door, passed by his boss, and set first to the stairs.

‘He knows we’re comin’,’ he said. ‘Let’s move.’

They climbed a flight of the old stone stairs, and then climbed again, winding at each turn, and climbing again, and the building was deadly silent, with an eerieness palpable, and Big Dom was frankly unmanned, his bottom lip quivered babyishly, but he was set all the same to his task. There was prize copy for the taking.