Kevin Barry - City of Bohane

River followed its drag through the backswathe of the city, its hinterland – that vague terrain.

Mute’s busy snout rose to snag on the salt tang:

And the wash of the ocean air on this morning of August 13th brought all the colours of the North Atlantic drift.

Bohane was green and grey and brown:

The bluish green of wrack and lichen.

The grey of flint and rockpool.

The moist brown of dulse and intertidal sand.

A slouch of old lads hunkered in the late morning over breakfast pints at the Capricorn Bar on the Bohane front. Weather-bleached skulls of Big Nothin’ goats were mounted behind the bar atop the optics and stacks of tin tankards. Beyond the dusty windows, August Fair shrieked and writhed into rude life; the horse trading busied, the Merries sparked. The old lads wistfully watched it all as they met the day with Wrassler stout, sausage sandwiches, and wistful memories.

The Gant was among them, and having been gone so long, he was himself a relic of the lost-time, and they prompted him, and he succumbed.

‘Do you not remember, G?’

‘Oh, I do, I suppose. I do.’

‘You’d have come out of that place one arm longer than the other.’

‘It was roughish. It sure was. An’ was it Thursday nights it was on there?’

‘Tuesdays and Thursdays but the Tuesdays were quiet. Tuesdays only if you were stuck with a fairly severe lack of it.’

‘Ah yeah, Tuesdays was for plain girls…’

Laughs.

‘And of course it was a place you’d want a twist of blackcurrant in the stout to ease the taste?’

‘Ferocious taps. Though nothing at all to what they were serving below in Filthy Dick’s.’

‘Stop!’

‘Do you remember, Gant, the way all the pony-and-traps would be lined up outside Dick’s?’

‘Of a Sunday. Every fuckin’ latchiko in the town would be out there.’

‘If you came home out of it with the two eyes still in your head, you’d be thinking: result.’

‘Was it Dick had the daughter married the fella of the Delaceys?’

‘Indeed. The daughter married up. Delaceys the bakers.’

‘Where was it they were again, Gant? Top end of Dev?’

‘Just so – opening onto Eamonn Ceannt Street off the New Town side.’

‘Ah… yeah… there was a sideway in?’

‘Of course there was – you’d be knocking in for an apple slice. Through the hatch.’

‘Oh Sweet Baba they were something!’

‘Stop the lights. The finest apple slice that was ever slid across a counter in this town.’

The apples stewed since early morning in the ten-gallon pot. The apples all stirred about by the big, sweating, ignorant-looking Delacey father. The crumble for a topping that was made always with prime Big Nothin’ butter, and the crumble baked till it was golden, and the way the sour note of the cooking apples hung in the air for two blocks at least.

‘Delaceys, yes… Would have been alongside… Alo Finnerty the jeweller?’

‘Alo. A lightin’ crook.’

‘Was said. Then what would you come to, Gant?’

‘Jerry Kycek the weeping Polack butcher.’

‘Of course you would. Poor Jerry!’

‘That man went through the fucking wringer.’

‘Always, with the wife he had. Of course, he was known for his black pudding?’

‘He was. Wrapped in the pages of a Vindicator you’d get it, with the blood still dripping.’

‘Drippin’!’

So happened that not all of our knocking shops in Bohane were on the S’town side of the footbridge. The infamous Blind Nora’s, for example, drew its clientele down a hard-to-find sideway of the Back Trace, and Ol’ Boy Mannion, as Fair Day built to a noontime roar, turned a dainty toe towards the place.

By midday an air of happy derangement had settled on the Trace. You could barely walk the wynds for the large and ragged crew that bounced off the tenement walls. There were big lunks of hill-country sluggers, and pipe-mad pikeys on the loose from the rez, and syphilitic freaks with lost-time dreams in their eyes, and washed-up auld hoors, and one-legged trick-ponies (the gout often a danger to the lads of that trade), and sand-pikey watches roved the city with a strange, unnameable fear about them, and the Fancy boys blithely prowled, and the polis beaks, and scar-faced Norrie mendicants with wooden bowls for alms, and wilding packs of feral teenage sluts, and tormented preachers hollering the wages of sin from the tops of stoops, and any one of this crowd could turn a shkelp in your lung as quick as they’d look at you, but as he walked through it all, with his snout held high and a wryness even in his carriage, even in his footfall, Ol’ Boy Mannion was notably immune to the madness, and he felt no fear.

Ol’ Boy wore:

A three-piece skinny-dude suit in the classic mottled-green shade, a pair of silver-painted jackboots (square-toed) on the dancers, and a dove-grey stovepipe hat up top, leaning westerly, with a delicate length of crimson scarf tied around it.

Snazzy, no?

Slugged from a hip flask of the Beast, did Ol’ Boy, and took the occasional draw on a herb-pipe.

Wasn’t high so much as maintaining.

The wynds of the Trace were mud and shite and puke underfoot and he placed the step carefully, with an eye to his boots, because they hadn’t cost him tuppence ha’penny, no, sir.

He went down a sideway, and then another, and took the twist of a turn once more, and the Trace quietened some as he went deeper into it, and he came at last to Blind Nora’s.

It was a low joint. It was patronised only by the very desperate. If you were turfed out of every place else in the city, there’d be a roost for you yet at Nora’s. They even let the Haitians in. And the Tipperary men. Ol’ Boy entered past the doorkeep, a big simian brute smoking the butt of a stogie – ‘Howya, Dimitri?’ – and he could not but wince against the smell of the place.

Troubled ladies in tragic fishnets were slung down on ancient couches. They clutched pipes and drinks and SBJ medals. A mulatto inebriate put an old rocksteady seven-incher on a wind-up turntable and danced uncertainly as the tune grainily kicked in.

Stumbled against Ol’ Boy.

‘Watch yerself, kid,’ said Ol’ Boy, gently.

A wretched hoor laughed and showed her toothless maw. Now there was a dangerous-looking tunnel for you. The bordello shades were drawn against even the Murky daylight and the place was lit by table lamps on upturned crates and coloured silks were drawn over these – for mood , no less – and the silks were singed by the heat of the lamps and the burning smell met with others in the air: pipe, Beast, baccy and seed.

Ol’ Boy smiled for each of the ladies in turn but he was not here to have his needs satisfied. It wouldn’t be Nora’s he’d be hitting if that was the cause. Ol’ Boy was here to see the woman herself.

‘Is it you?’ she said.

‘You know it is,’ he said.

Nora was an enormous cheese-coloured old blind lady with ringlets of black curls, like a doll’s. She was perched on a divan down back of the room. She drank psychoactive mushroom tea, delicately, from a Chinkee pot. She was magnificently fat. She beamed for Ol’ Boy and shuffled along the divan, haunch by ample haunch, and he moved in beside her, crossed his legs, laid a hand on her knee.

‘Another one ’round to us, Nora?’

‘Fair Day come ’round so quick, Mr Mannion.’

Together they smiled, and they were comfortably silent for a time. Savoured the day and their moment together. Then Ol’ Boy said:

‘You’ve that lady well hid for me yet?’

‘I have, sir.’

‘You’re to keep her well hid today, Nora, if you can at all.’