Kevin Barry - City of Bohane

Along the dockside, the Merries were set up: the swing-bucket whirligigs were tested, the dog-fight rings marked out with hay bales, the test-your-strength meter raised on its platform. Impromptu stages made of ale barrels, ship’s rope and lengths of four-be-two were erected for the barek-nuckle fistfights. Tiered seating was arranged around a rodeo ring and sawdust was thickly strewn. The dark-eyed carnies who set up these attractions were from the same families as always brought the Merries to Bohane. Powerful smokers, the carnies. And of course many a carnie was sprung from the peninsula originally. We would be the sort, outside in Bohane, who’d run away with the Merries as quick as you’d look at us.

Hoss polis were a heavy presence. Even at daybreak, they were at every Back Trace entry that led off from the docks. The brethren of the St John’s Ambulance Brigade – Here come the good guys! In their little jackets! – were preparing to stretcher the wounded towards the medicine tents. Back Trace old dears threw back their shutters and from the high windows hung out their bosoms and were wistful for their own remembered Fair Days.

Fair Day, as we always say in Bohane, is a day for the youth.

And they lace into it like pagans.

August Fair…

August the 13th…

We whisper of it for months in advance, and we are as long again recovering.

Logan Hartnett stepped over stuporous bodies on the Bohane front. He heard the cry of the auction down the yards: all the old taunts and threats of the horse trading, which was the main business of Fair Day. He swivelled a reck along De Valera and the ’bino’s glance was clear-eyed and sharp this weather as he reckoned the polis numbers. He moved for the Trace. He was barechested. He wore three-quarter-length black strides in a narrow-leg cut over a pair of Spanish Harlem arsekickers. The scars on his chest were faded and wattled, like folds of chickenskin, and were reminders of the reefings he’d walked away from in his day. He had a dress-shkelp in his belt, ivory-handled.

As he turned into the Trace, the air changed, as it always did, and he asked how many times in his life he had swung into these dank, narrow streets for some whispering rendezvous.

Herb and sick and tawny wine were on the air.

Each turn of the Trace that he took signified – there he’d had a knee-trembler, there he’d bled a foe. He took a particular turn and the broken glass on an alleyway’s surface amped his footfall to a noirish crunch. The yellow light of an early-doors caff gleamed from the back of the alley.

There was a handful of customers already at the caff: lads who had been late at the bottle, and were now haggardly hunched over Bohane Specials, and wondering how long it would be before their lungs could chance the first tab of the day.

At a rear table, nursing a short black joe and puffing a stogie, was Jenni Ching.

Logan took the seat opposite.

‘You wouldn’t chance a fry, Jenni, no?’

The girl laid a hand on her ribcage.

‘Me body’s a fuckin’ temple, like.’

‘I suppose if you can’t look out for yourself, Jen?’

‘Then there ain’t nobody gonna do it for you, Mr Hartnett.’

The serving girl came, and Logan asked for coffee only, and he winked at Jenni, who nodded sombrely, as if that was the best decision a grown man could make. The shocking yellow of the egg-yolk stains on the Special plates would not anyway betray a man to gluttony.

‘Polis is bought,’ Jenni said.

‘The price?’

‘Fuckin’ savage.’

‘I’d imagine.’

‘But at least they’s gonna face off the sand-pikes.’

‘Saves us doing it, Jen-gal.’

‘O’ course Prince T is born canny. He’s gonna be keepin’ to the rear end o’ things when the polis fucks arrive.’

‘A leader’s prerogative,’ Logan said.

‘If you say so, H.’

‘Maybe time you learned such things?’

Jenni scowled.

‘Way it’s pannin’,’ she said. ‘Ed Lenihan reckons it’s the night to clear Wolfie a path to the Far-Eye.’

‘Tremendous.’

They drank joe; they smoked tabs. They were wary of each other but fond, too. He knew she had watched out on all sides – the swivelling glance an S’town apprenticeship will teach – but she had betrayed no Fancy confidence; she had given nothing to the Gant.

‘Ain’t been seein’ ya at the Ho Pee these nights,’ she said.

‘Keeping my snout clean, Jenni,’ he said. ‘Got to stay on top of things.’

‘Plenty happenin’ ’bout the place awrigh’, H.’

‘Speaking of, Jenni. I’m to understand you’ve got these Trace girls at your beck lately?’

‘It’s said.’

She bopped in high innocence a smoke ring.

‘And you got the Gant naming you to all and sundry as the soon-come kid.’

‘A sloppy aul’ dude wanna spout bollick-talk an’ he down the boozer, it ain’t my lookout to stop him.’

‘Of course my darling mother is lending the weight an’ all, ain’t she, Jen?’

‘Girly and me is close.’

‘Oh, more than that, I think. Not a hand to be laid on the Jen-chick ever, is there? That’s my instruction.’

‘You wanna try a hand, ’bino?’

He smiled.

‘It’s hard not to love you, Jenni.’

She pulled down her coldest glaze, gave him a blast of it, briefly, and then let her eyes scan the morning wynd beyond.

‘Those Fancy boys don’t stand a chance against you, do they, Jenni?’

Logan raised the joe to his lips and savoured its bitterness. Old photographs on the cafe walls were of Bohane faces – hard-set stares in hard-chaw faces – and he looked at them a moment.

‘See this gang?’ he said.

Jennie surveyed the faces.

‘You’d notice a type. Their noses in the air, watch? Haughty! Even if they ain’t got the arse of their kecks. What we are in this town is an arrogant fucking breed. We think it’s all been thrown down to our particular design.’

All the old faces were in their own time fabled in the Back Trace universe, he said. The Trace was a world within a world, he said, and each of these dead souls had a power in the world once, was known for his swiftness with the shkelp, or his knack with the tush, or his canniness with a buck. Each was in the boneyard now, he said; Logan Hartnett, reality instructor.

‘You have to remember, Jenni, that all we’re trying to do is keep the place someways fucking civilised.’

‘Y’spoutin’ me own creed, H.’

‘We get a stretch of Calm in place and we get the S’town trade flowing in the right direction again and then we can decide on what comes next, yes?’

‘I’m listenin’.’

‘Oh I know you are, Jenni. I know it too well.’

The Alsatian cur Angelina sloped low to the ground across the Big Nothin’ plain. She aimed contrary to the Bohane river as it surged through the August Murk. Great swathes of rhododendron along the bank filled and shimmied with gusts of a hardwind and the knotweed swayed on its copper-red canes all along the malevolent river. Angelina shivered her bones to loose the ’skeetos that fed hungrily on her blood and she keened; the sharp of the yellow fangs showed.

Angelina went upriver.

And she passed along the way a mute child bound for the city as he steered with the tip of a whitethorn switch to its rump a feral mountain goat.

The puck goat’s hard grey eyes pierced the Murk.

Angelina threw a hungry glance at the pair but she walked on, and she kept low to the ground, and she searched everywhere with snout and hooded eye.

Mute child and the puck goat moved west, and away; they went with the river’s flow.

By ’n’ by the rooftops of the high bluffs loomed through the Murk.