Kevin Barry - City of Bohane

And life tumbled on, regardless.

All the red-faced lads went in chortling twos and happy threes in the direction of the footbridge. These gentlemen of Bohane tend to be low-sized and butty: the kind who would be hard to knock over. Smoketown is their bleak heaven. And there is an expression here to describe a man in moral decline:

There is a fella, we say, who’s set for the S’town footbridge.

It is a humpback bridge of Big Nothin’ limestone. The Gant walked it and reached its high point, above the black river, above the nauseous rush of the Bohane river, and he descended into Smoketown. Each of our districts has a particular feeling, a signature melody, and he felt the dip in the stomach, the swooning of the soul, the off-note, that entrance to this neighbourhood brings.

Smoketown laid out its grogshops, its noodle joints, its tickle-foot parlours. Its dank shebeens and fetish studios. Its shooting galleries, hoor stables, bookmakers. All crowded in on each other in the lean-to streets. The tottering old chimneys were stacked in great deranged happiness against the morning sky. The streets in dawn light thronged with familiar faces. The Gant felt at once as if he had never been gone. He might get a twist yet on the combinations of the place. Maybe the Ching girl would give instruction.

The Gant threw a swift look over the shoulder – in his condition, he was intuitive – and he spotted that the Authority man from the El was on his trail now, and apparently had sobered. His movement, then, was already noted – the Gant scolded himself for being so taken. High innocence! But to be followed was in some ways a relief. It told that his name meant something yet. He stopped on his way and rested against a grogshop wall. He saw the Authority man stop also and peer casually at a stack of mucky postcards.

To throw him off, the Gant entered a hoorshop, and he found there that most familiar of S’town fragrances – the age-old blend of rash-calming ointment, Big Nothin’ bush-weed, and penny-ha’penny scent.

He paid the tax to a scowling hoor-ma’am, and he ascended to the upstairs slots, and there on the rush matting he spent time with a Norrie girl, and there was little enough but time spent.

‘Are you lonely?’ she said to him.

‘I’m so lonely I could claw my fuckin’ brains out,’ he said, and she laughed, and she lit a coochie for him.

‘Dinky little number, ain’t ya?’ he said, dragging deep.

‘You wanna have another try off it?’ she said.

Later, when he emerged to the street again, the Authority man was no longer to be seen, and the Gant moved on towards the Ho Pee. Now the city shimmered in the new morning’s light, its skyline loomed in shadow, but it was what was out and beyond again, the Gant knew, that was the cause and curse of us.

Beyond was Big Nothin’.

The Hartnett seat was a Beauvista Gothical, a gaunt and lumbering old pile, all elbows and chimneys. Its thin, tall windows were leaded and reproachful, its gable ivied, the brickwork sharply pointed and with a honeyish tone that emerged fully now against the blue of late morning in October. It sat plumb on a line of po-faced old manses that made a leafy avenue up top of the Beauvista bluff. The Bohane Dacency had built their Beauvista residences to face away from the city – though the money that built them had been bled from it – but Logan Hartnett and his wife were Trace-born, the pair of them, and they kept a rooftop garden on a terrace shaded by the chimney stacks, and it was oriented to look back across the great bowl of the city, as though in nostalgia for it. They spent a whole heap of time up there.

Catch them in the morning light – so elegant and childless.

Logan sat at the wrought-iron table. He wore ox-blood boots laced high, a pair of smoke-grey, pre-creased strides, and thin leather braces worn over a light blue shirt. He was tentative in his private domain. He warmed his hands on a bowl of tea and he regarded his wife.

‘You knocking along the town, girl?’

‘Why’d you ask?’

‘It’s a simple question, Macu.’

‘You want every minute of my fuckin’ day, don’t you?’

Macu, from Immaculata, her sidelong glance hot with Iberian flare. Her father was a Portuguese off a fishing boat who got beached up in the creation. He married Trace, and Macu was dark-complected and thin, with a graceful carry of herself, and a sadness bred into her. One of her eyes was halfways turned in to meet the other, but attractively so.

‘All I’m asking is are you going to town?’

‘Hard to keep away,’ she said.

‘Who are you seeing in town?’

She wore a sleeveless fox-fur jerkin against the chill of the morning. She worked a pair of secateurs along the wall-creeping rose bushes. She ignored the question. Sometimes, she could knife the very thought of him. Right there between the shoulder blades – feel the sweet bite and settle of an eight-inch Bohane shkelp. But the slyness in him could soften her still.

He winced at the sour herbal bite of the tea. She went to the table and poured a fill for herself. She had let it stew till it was brown as old boots.

‘Nettles,’ she said.

‘Surprise me,’ he said. ‘Ne’er a chance of a mug of joe in this place, no?’

‘Good for the kidneys,’ she said.

‘Nice to know,’ he said.

By the look of him, he had hardly slept but that was not new. An hour or two, no more, and Logan Hartnett was awake to the city again. The black shadows beneath his eyes made for a gauntness but this, he maintained, merely added to his air of wasted elegance. She’d gainsay him but halfways believe it.

‘Got to head down soon myself,’ he said.

‘All fall apart without you,’ she said.

Bohane was seasonably calm down there. Always there are these pet days in October, when the impression of peace – at least – lies briefly on the place. Church bells sounded and did not pierce so much as emphasise the drowsiness of the morning.

‘Got the fiends to talk to, ain’t I?’ he said.

‘Ain’t you always,’ she said. ‘The Fancy, the Fancy…’

It was the last morning there would be heat enough in the sun to sit outside. He sipped at his tea. There was a fresh worry in him, a sliver, from somewhere, and she enjoyed that, and she knew not to try and coax it. It would come soon enough.

‘You seein’ Girly?’

He sighed.

‘Oh, I’ll look in, I suppose.’

Girly Hartnett, the mother, was eighty-nine years of age, and in riotous good health. Girly was the greatest rip that ever had walked the Trace but she resided now in a top-floor suite at the Bohane Arms Hotel. The curtains hadn’t been drawn back in decades.

‘Kisses from me,’ she said.

‘She’ll be waiting on those.’

It was satisfaction to lay a hand on the flatness of her belly. Holding well, she felt, all things considered. Logan, he always said she could crack walnuts between those thighs. He squinted as he watched her. His skin was almost translucent in the morning light. She saw now he was ready to reveal the bother.

‘Well,’ she said.

He smiled at the read she had of him.

‘It’s probably just old talk.’

‘S’what the place is made of, Logan. What’s it particular?’

‘They’re saying the Gant’s back.’

She was not prepared for this.

‘Gant Broderick?’

‘You know any other Gants?’

She tried to keep an evenness to her voice.

‘Who’s sayin’ this?’

‘Word all over. Word in the shebeens. Word on the wynds. Word is, he’s back on Nothin’.’

‘Shitetalk,’ she said.

‘In all probability,’ he said.

When it was the Gant had the Bohane runnings, it was Macu had been by his side.