Kevin Barry - City of Bohane

‘All Our Yesterdays’ was by far the most popular and prestigious column of the Bohane Vindicator . It was penned by Dominick himself, in a limpid and melancholy prose, and its stock was reminiscence and anecdotes of the Bohane lost-time. It appeared – twenty-seven inches of nine-point type over three column drops – in the Thursday evening edition, and the queue for it formed early outside the paper’s office and snaked far down the streets of the New Town. This week’s column, Dom was certain, would attract a record readership.

‘What I’m wonderin’, Mr Gleeson,’ Balt panted against the climb, ‘is why’s he agreein’ to the interview jus’ now?’

Dom rested a moment on the turn of a stair. Smiled; sweated.

‘Ol’ Boy’s worked his powers of persuasion,’ he said. ‘What we’re tryin’ to do, Balt, is distract the town from atein’ itself alive.’

‘But what’s in it for the man hissel’?’

Dom shrugged as he began to climb again.

‘It lets a certain party know he’s back in town, don’t it? An’ that he ain’t afraid to show his jaws.’

The Gant Broderick appeared then on the landing at the top of the last flight of stairs. He had to bend a little against the angle of the low ceiling. He looked down without expression to the climbing pair, and he gestured lazily to indicate the door to the garret space behind, and he turned and went through.

‘Mercy,’ Dom whispered as he climbed the last haul of steps, ‘but he’s still a powerful cut of a man, Balt?’

Balthazar nodded grimly.

‘Big unit,’ he agreed.

They entered the spartan garret. Gant sat on the bed and he eyed them calmly and he massaged with one massive hand the other. Dom removed his pork-pie hat in greeting.

‘Mr Gant…’

‘Gant is fine,’ said the Gant. ‘Jus’ Gant, okay?’

‘Yes, sir. Gant… sir.’

The Gant eyed the hunchback as he went about propping his Leica and mounting its flash. The Gant looked to the window set in the garret’s slanting roof, and said:

‘We got a nice aul’ tawny light comin’ through yet. Probably don’ need that flash, y’heed?’

Balthazar looked to the evening light, and he nodded.

‘Might be nice alrigh’, Gant…’

‘It’ll be lovely,’ the Gant said. ‘And don’t be shy. You can come up good and close.’

The Gant turned expertly then his square jaw to the tawniness of the light as it poured through, with dust motes rising atmospherically about him, and the hunchback crouched in close, and he framed the old scoundrel so that he loomed, poetically, and the G allowed to form on his features a poignant, dark, unknowable glaze.

Click-and-whirr of the old Leica’s motor:

Prime shot… peach… one for the portfolio… manly gravitas in haunted black-and-white.

Dom Gleeson meantime sat on the garret’s one hardback chair and nervously he licked the tip of his pencil and turned to a fresh page of his spiral-bound notebook. With a nervous croak to his tone, he began:

‘Mr Gant… Gant… It’s been a… been a stretch o’ lonesome moons since ya last hauled yer bones aroun’ the city o’ Bohane, sir. So what I’m wonderin’ is–’

‘Twenty-five years such a long time?’ the Gant said.

‘Well, we ain’t talkin’ yesterday nor today, sir.’

‘No,’ the Gant handsomely smiled. ‘That we ain’t.’

They spoke then at length of the Bohane lost-time. They talked of the great feeling for it that had drawn the Gant to the creation once more. They talked of those who had passed, and of how their spirits persisted yet and carried always on the air of the city (or lingered, maybe, away yonder on the bog plain). Dom Gleeson felt that the Gant spoke lyrically, yes, but guardedly, and at length he sucked up the courage to launch an especially toothsome question.

‘I s’pose what a lot o’ people would be wonderin’, Gant, is… ah… Well, sir, about these pas’ twenty-five year, like… Where the hell you been, G?’

The Gant as the last of the evening light began to fail smiled wryly at the fat newsman, and at his hunchback accomplice who sat cross-legged now on the floor, and he said:

‘Over.’

Jerked a rueful thumb easterly.

‘Crossed the water.’

The Gant confided that he had roamed for many a desperate year England’s cheerless marshes. He worked the dark cities of the north for any who had the price of a shkelping. Got older. Got sadder. Got fatter. He came out of that rough trade with the sure scars of it. Worked the riverboats for a while…

‘Like many a Bohane émigré before ya, sir,’ Gleeson said.

… worked the Tyne, the Mersey, and the Clyde. He spent a cruel infinity staring into the smoke-coloured wind that blows always across those dead rivers. He saw the Wigan riots of ’36, he saw the ascendance of Borthwick in Macclesfield, and he saw the bloody last days of D’Alton’s Humberside Fancy.

Balt Grimes whistled low.

‘Now that was some fuckin’ massacre!’

He spent long nights, he said, walking the backstreets of strange cities. Skunk hours in the demon mist. The Gant walked every street of every city and they were never his streets and when the streets are not your own they are not for dreaming. He admitted that he had seen too much. He allowed that he had found solace, for a time, in the arms of the Sweet B.

‘Happen a lot of lads when they go over,’ said Big Dom, kindly.

‘I renounced the blade,’ said the Gant, and he smiled against the dark that seeped then into the attic room.

He told that he had spoken the Word in the West Midlands for a time. Found a congregation of swayers, swooners, shriekers. Spoke out against the violence of life. Spoke out against the lust. Spoke out against the lies. Oh yes, there he was, stood up on a beer crate, in tragic Wolverhampton, with tears in his eyes, and he hollering the Baba-love.

‘A man with a good brogue,’ said Big Dom, ‘would get a start easy enough at the preachin’ over.’

‘Didn’t last at that trade neither,’ the Gant chuckled.

‘Oh?’

‘Bothered a pawful o’ young tush an’ got ran out o’ Brum.’

The roofops of the Trace beyond were ghostly as they settled into night’s shade; bitter, the memories that settled in the Gant. A taste of Macu, in her youth, had left him with an insatiable taste for girls of that age. This was not the least of her crimes against him.

‘I was on life’s great turning wheel,’ the Gant said, and Big Dom scribbled furiously.

‘The longer the past receded, the clearer it became in me mind’s eye,’ the Gant said.

Philosopher we got on our hands, the hunchback Grimes reckoned.

‘I was drawn back to the lost-time,’ the Gant said.

‘And did you find it a dangerous place to linger?’ Big Dom showed his skill.

‘Yeah,’ said the Gant. ‘It’s too sweet back there.’

Big D thinking: headline –

Beneath them, the wynds simmered with life in the oily night, and the savour of a sadness came up; the men quietened, and listened.

‘Been changes around here sure enough,’ Dom sighed.

‘It’s all change.’ Balt, too, fell woebegone.

‘Not all change is for the worse,’ the Gant smiled.

‘Oh?’

‘Mean to say,’ the Gant said, ‘I see these young girls workin’ it now in the Trace an’ I got to tell ya?’

‘Yes?’ Dom was interested.

‘Them girls the future in Bohane.’

A strange glint in the Gant’s eye.

‘You reckon, Mr Broderick?’

‘An’ on the soon-come too, y’check me? Change be good for Bohane sometimes.’

Dom and his lensman quietly regarded each other. Dom said: