Kevin Barry - City of Bohane

‘Tell me more about your days over, G. Fun times?’

He joined his long thin hands, the fingers interlocking, about his middle. The Gant ignored the question, and presented his own.

‘What do you really want, Logan?’

An intake of breath, and there was no front to the ’bino here.

‘I want to go on for a while yet.’

‘Then go an’ hold a pillow over yer mother’s face.’

‘Leave my mother out of this.’

The Gant smiled at the advantage he’d found, and he knew it would niggle all the more if he did not play it.

And the girl singer swayed, and she sang, with a smokiness to her voice, and she ran her fingers along her slim hips, and the room went with her to a lost-time melody, the air rearranging as the night tensely progressed.

‘S’the Ching gal I’d watch,’ the Gant teased.

‘You been whispering to her, Gant. You been encouraging her. You been saying pretty things in the paper about the young gals comin’ through.’

‘Hardly needs my word, that gal.’

‘And what about Wolfie?’

‘Well, the Wolfie-boy’s got a prob, don’t he? Wolfie’s in love.’

‘That is a problem.’

The coolers full, the shaved ice glistening, Tommie the Keep took them around to the booths, and he replaced the used ones, and he shared heavy glances with the merchants; who knew what strange course Bohane might be set to now?

The girl singer called her sweet laments, and the fat merchants went soppy in the booths, and the sleepy-eyed drummer teased a sad, slow rhythm with the brushes.

‘Who’s allowin’ who to live?’ the Gant said, and they both laughed at that.

Tommie the Keep ducked under his bar hatch again and took his cloth and hurried a shine into the counter. He strained to hear but he could not hear.

‘When you told me that she talked about me still,’ the Gant said. ‘That she called out my name at night… Do you know I near enough believed it?’

‘Poor fool,’ Logan said.

It was early a.m. at the Supper Room, in the humid soup of a Trace night, and the high-quiffed drummer rode a bushweed drift, and he gazed at the hindquarters of the svelte girl singer, and he floated a while on the rivers of the moon.

Dom Gleeson, in his booth, was defeated by the situation, could not by glance alone untangle its nuance, its news, and he thought, fuck it anyway, I’m away to S’town for the slap of a hairbrush.

The Authority man tried to get straight in his noggin the report that needed making for the members.

‘The Gypo’ Lenihan thought he had seen quareness in his time but nowt so quare as the pairing at the bar.

Tommie the Keep polished madly still the bar counter.

The Gant drained what was left of his moscato.

‘That’s me for the road,’ he said.

He rose from his stool – yes, a big unit still – and politely Logan rose with him. They spoke just a few words more. The Gant turned to leave the Supper Room then but he hesitated, and he turned back again to Logan.

Briefly, oddly, they embraced.

We came through the green hollows of June, and through slow lascivious July, and then the August Murk descended: it was late summer in the city, and our world was so densely made and intricate about us.

The Murk is a thick seafog that settles each year on the creation and just about smothers us alive. It is a curiously localised event that affects this peninsula alone of the western seaboard. The meteorologists, long puzzled, term it ‘The Murk of Bohane’, and leave it at that. The Murk comes down as a greyish, impenetrable mist and it lays a great torridness on the city, a swamp heat.

This is the weather of August Fair.

This is by tradition the time of betrothal in Bohane, and for the week leading up to Fair Day, all the young tush paraded the Murky streets in their glitter and swank.

Oh and the tushies worked it like only the Bohane tush can – their hair was pineappled and freshly streaked, the warpaint was laid on with shovels, and their navels gleamed with tuppenny jewels that shone as their eyes shone with badness and delight. All the young fiends followed at close quarters, with their tongues hanging out for the sheer want of it – sheer, the cliff face of adolescent desire – and festive mode for a fiend was to be barechested beneath a straw hat with a rash of sunburn and freckles across the nose and jaws. They fell into love as though to a precipice.

As the Fair’s build-up progressed, Bohane Free Radio broadcast from the back of a herring boat and blasted righteous samba cuts across the dockside, and the young things danced on the cobbles with fervent desperation:

They did the Grind, and the Three-B (Bohane-Bum-Buster), and the S’town Shuffle.

Mothers and fathers sat nervously in the tenements and rotated slowly their thumbs one around the other – this was also, by tradition, a time of mass impregnation in Bohane.

Sure how many of us are mid-May babies, born of a Fair Day grapple down a Back Trace wynd? How many of us sucked at life for the first time beneath a taurine moon?

Indeed a quare shake of us.

Big Nothin’ for weeks in advance worked itself up for the Fair’s great release.

The seasonal lakes of the hillsides filled with Murky precipitation and the young lay about by these swimming holes, and they rolled into one another’s arms, and they whispered of Fair Day on the soon-come.

Of course, many a stout-hipped daughter or big-arsed son of the plain would lose the run of themselves at the Fair. Was common enough for a Nothin’ child to hit down the High Boreen for the Fair, innocent as a three-legged lamb, and be discovered, weeks later, haggard and dream-addicted down the wrong end of a Smoketown salon, and all set to be signed for a trick-pony ranch or hauled off to a lurcher cage.

But if there wasn’t such danger, there’d be no such spice.

Expectation travelled the hill-country smallholdings, and along the poppy fields that extend east of Ten Light village – see the dream fields undulate in the tropic heat of August – and through the pikey rez, and the day at last came, and every stony acre of the plain tossed out a choice of spudaters, and legions of them were led on the morning of August 13th by their livestock through the dawn gloom along the length of the High Boreen. They had calves for the slaughter and piebalds for to sell.

‘Name t’me a price for yon palomino, kid?’

Fair Day of ’54 had a grey and ominous sky: the usual Murksky.

Rain came in bad-minded spats.

An eerie wind taunted.

And the city of Bohane spread itself for all comers.

Smoketown geared up for the busiest day of its calendar. Half the creation would be over the footbridge for the suck of a dream-pipe, a hand shandy and a bowl of noodles.

Hoors waxed themselves.

Mortars of dream-bulb paste were expertly grinded.

Chillis were chopped, seeds and all, and fecked into vast tureens of mackerel chowder that were hauled around S’town and gave fine nutrition for the sweaty labours ahead.

Nervous hoors were adrift in the rustle of nylons and the fixing of garter-belts and lost in the misty valleys of their own cheap scent.

Oh the loneliness of it all.

It was the city’s habit to drink hard for the week leading up to August Fair, and De Valera Street, by the morning of the 13th, looked as if a riot had already passed through.

Emptied wine sacks filled every gutter and diamonds of broken glass – Bohane gemstones – sparkled on the sidewalks. There was hardly a set of eyes in the town that weren’t already at the far end of their stalks. Fair Day was a time of massive hilarity, and sentimental music, and it was a most useful pressure valve, for these were hard times in the city, in this hard town by the sea.