Kevin Barry - City of Bohane

Now a particular afternoon of April presented, and the ’bino was again on Riverside, but today he was not alone. He sat on a bollard, as the hot river wind blew, and he gazed up, most pleasantly, at a very nervous Fucker Burke.

Fucker hung his limbs from the chainlink fence that edged the Bohane river hereabouts and he slapped at imagined bugs on his neck.

Logan regarded him with a loving smile.

‘You’ll notice a certain feeling, Fucker?’

‘This place, Mr H, it’s like…’

‘Is it sendin’ you, Fuck?’

Fucker had in his voice a child’s quiver:

‘Ain’t feelin’ so hot now, Mr H, if I’m bein’ honest with ya.’

Fucker threw a hopeful glance towards the Bohane downtown – its rooftops loomed royally in the near distance – but the Long Fella shook his head sadly; there was no going back.

‘You’d pass along this way much yourself, Fucker?’

Spoke to the boy in the sweetest hush, as though whispering a lullaby, and Fucker felt a chill dampness at the base of his spine.

‘No, Mr Hartnett.’

Logan nodded, firmly, as if that was the best tactic the boy could choose.

‘So tell me about Wolfie and Jenni,’ he said.

The jaw lolloped on the galoot boy Burke.

‘What would I know, H?’

‘Are they rock-steady, Fuck?’

‘W-wolfie is.’

‘Got the hook in his gut, he has? I thought as much. And Jenni?’

Fucker made an attempt at indifference.

‘Dunno, Mr H. I mean she givin’ him the whiff of it, like, but…’

Fucker’s words trailed off. His eyes rolled some. Logan let a silence hover, for just a moment, and he watched carefully to see where it would send the boy. Fucker Burke had a routinely Gothical West of Ireland childhood under his belt, and it was there again, his own desperate lost-time, beneath the glaze of his green eyes. He was sent to it. The horrors he had seen, and those by his own hand begotten. There was no way to escape the tingling of his past; it was ever-present, like tiny fires that burned beneath the skin.

‘Come back to me now, Fucker.’

‘You think the Baba’ll wan’ me for a finish, H?’

‘Shush, boy, and come back to me – the Baba loves you.’

Fucker Burke swung down from the chainlink and shuffled his feet uselessly. Shifted his weight from the left to the right and back again. Logan raised a hand to still him.

‘What do you think of the situation with Wolfie, Fuck?’

‘Situation how, Mr Hartnett?’

Logan smiled delightedly, as if a notion had just occurred.

‘Would you say we should do away with him?’

There were dried flecks of spit at the corners of the ’bino’s mouth – they cracked as he spoke.

‘But H, Wolf is like the Fancy’s bes’–’

‘Are ye close still?’

There was a wrinkle to the ’bino’s collar, and his kecks were unpressed.

‘Close ain’t got nothin’ to do with it. Jus’ ain’t seein’ what Wolfie’s done.’

‘Loyalty is a tremendous asset, Fucker Burke.’

‘I don’t like it out here, Mr H.’

There was a greenish wash to the ’bino’s deadhouse pallor – the colour of a mould.

‘Oh I know that Riverside feeling, boy. Things rise up in you, don’t they?’

Swallowed hard, Fucker, a crab-apple of terror descending and then rising again the length of his throat.

‘We strollin’ back, H?’

‘And what about Jenni – should we do away with Jenni Ching, Fucker?’

‘I wasn’t brought up to mess with no Chinkees, Mr Hartnett.’

‘You’d be as wise not to, child, under normal circumstances. But what I’m hearing about Jenni Ching?’

He shook his head slowly.

‘She’s got plans, ain’t she, Fuck?’

‘Don’t know about that, H.’

‘Do you not? I see.’

Logan stood from the bollard and approached the boy and he placed his hand on the back of the boy’s head and pulled him close. He leaned in, brow to brow. He said:

‘Let me tell you a few things, Fucker. All this?’

A wee swoop with the palm was shaped – a gesture to take in the world as was.

‘All this is going to pass away from you so quickly now, hear me? You’ve been in your glory, Fucker Burke. A set of grapes on you and a few bob put away and I dare say certain females who’ve been deranged enough to put themselves at your disposal. You’ve had your lovely dog, Angelina. And I understand what you did, Fucker. I do. It felt as if your life would never start but in fact it’s been racing past you all the while. But this ain’t for play no more. What are you, eighteen?’

The certainty of what was to come apparent, Fucker’s tone was flat now with resignation.

‘I’m seventeen, Mr H.’

‘Oh that’s a beautiful age to be, Fuck. You think you’re going to live forever… Well, I’m here to tell you that you ain’t.’

Logan made an O with his lips, and he blew a slow, steady whooshing, like the wind through the hollows of a wood, and it was aimed directly at the boy’s face.

The breath lingered as a foul breeze – Fucker smelt the pipe-burn and the Ho Pee on it, and the rot of an old outlaw that he would never be.

Logan said:

‘Look at me, Fucker. Look at me, sweetness. I can’t say that I ain’t had the luck. I’ve been twenty-five years with the Fancy to my name. I’ve been reefed six times and I’m still sucking at the poison air. An accident, do you think?’

He smiled, and the pale blue of his eyes showed the colours of sky and water, refracted.

‘Did you think I was fit to move on from things, Fucker? That I’d go and play a few hands of rummy and dribble my moscato and get fat?’

The boy’s lips greyed in expectation. He felt again the breath of the Long Fella on his face, the cold hand on his throat.

‘Why did you do it, Fucker?’

A mark of the city that it was not fear that flushed the boy’s face now but shame.

‘Mr H, I never meant nothin’ by–’

‘Gave the Gant everything you had, Fucker.’

‘H, please.’

‘I know what you told him, Fucker.’

‘Don’t have to do this, H, please…’

A strange glow came to Fucker: what little of love and intimacy he had known in his life surfaced for a last time and gave succour for the journey ahead.

‘I know because the Gant told me, Fucker.’

The air on Riverside was washed by the Atlantic gusts that came over the estuary and it carried all the dread of its ghosts. The Bohane all the while ferried a drag of gravel and stones and the drag swirled drunkenly deep down – it had the sound of chains being swung.

Logan slid the dirk slowly and let it sit heavily in the boy’s gut. Then he worked it from side to side, a neat and easy movement, and he held the boy, gently, as his head slumped forward, and he whispered to him.

He stepped back, and with a deft wrench removed the dirk, and the vitals flowed as he kept the boy propped still.

He felt an oddness then, Logan, it was a kind of… lightness, and he near enough succumbed to it.

He took a breath down, hard, and held it.

Let his brow lean in to the dying boy’s again and rested it there a moment and asked forgiveness.

He stepped back and the last of Fucker Burke was left to slump where it would – like a useless hand puppet – and he stepped nimbly aside. With a stick from the ground and the blood that had spilt he daubed on the path by the body the word ‘Judas’ – it was written in his big, nervous, childish hand.

He scaled the chainlink fence then and descended a set of thick stone steps cut into the river wall.

Daintily with forefinger and thumb he raised the ankle cuff of his trouser leg and dipped a Croat boot into the water to wash it clean.