Kevin Barry - City of Bohane

‘How we now?’ said Ol’ Boy.

The goat acknowledged him with a brief lowering of its gaze. The most important thing for an August Fair puck was that it had a gnarled, ancient look to it. It needed that whiskery Nothin’ gravitas.

‘You’ve picked a good ’un here, child,’ said Ol’ Boy.

A squeal from the mute sounded and dogs barked distant in the Bohane Trace. Ol’ Boy reached for the inside pocket of his jacket and he took out a brick of compressed herb and he passed it to the child and the mute hungrily sniffed it and again squealed.

‘Ah but hush, would you?’ said Ol’ Boy.

The mute child grinned. Ol’ Boy raised the back of his hand as though for a smack but the mute brazened him and spat on the ground. Child knelt by the puck then and put his wordless lips to its ear and moaned softly – very odd, a type of keening – and the puck flickered its gaze in response, and turned its head to regard Ol’ Boy with a most intelligent disdain.

‘Don’ mind that auld Nothin’ bollocks,’ said Ol’ Boy but he was unnerved.

Was said always on Nothin’ our mutes had the gift o’ goatspeak.

The mute rose then and he went out through the yards and on the lightest of feet vaulted the steel gates. These mutes could have a very superior air to them betimes. Ol’ Boy took the goat’s tether and the animal tensed against his touch.

‘Hup now,’ said Ol’ Boy.

He dragged the puck through the sheds and made for the dockside where the Fair’s revels were by degrees supplanting the business of the day.

Samba blasted; the Merries roiled.

The puck goat would tonight be raised on a platform mounted on tall stilts and carried through the city. The puck was symbol and spirit of the place and as the Bohanians marked the goat’s passing, they would, as per tradition, beat slowly at the air with switches of hazel to make a whooshed and haunting music.

No argument: it is a thin enough layer of civilisation we have laid over us out in Bohane.

As Fair descended into evening, a pathway opened for Logan through the manic throng. The pasted faces of the drunks briefly sobered as they made a reck on the pale tall figure passing by:

Long Fella’s abroad.

Albino’s abroad.

Hartnett… Ye sketchin’?

Screams and chants pierced the Trace-deep night. Fornication was not entirely kept to the shadows – fiends and tushies were wearing the gobs off each other in every doorway of the wynds. They dry-humped in a slow, rhythmical grind to the Trojan dub plates that blasted from the rooftop sound systems. The Murk of Bohane sat in unexcitable billows of fallen cloud that obscured the entries and closes, and the city’s many-coloured mobs passed this way and that; the motion on the streets was as a single, great rolling, and bottles were smashed, and go-boy taunts were hollered, and dream tents were huckstered by bearded touts with crackly loudhailers, and hysterically devout Norries screamed the Word of the SBJ, and the Ten-Light Ebonettes did the Three-B with skipropes, and the wilding girls snogged each other viciously, and the whole great raucous night of the 13th drew in around us.

Drumbeats sounded everywhere in the city – timpanis and tom-toms, snares and tenors, lambegs, bodhrans, dustbin lids.

Logan Hartnett took a turn onto De Valera Street. He smiled like a wry old bishop as he passed along, as though humorously outraged by all that he saw. He was not a man, however, to let a carnival spirit take hold inside – he was too gaunt and graceful for that.

And Fair night made him wistful always – would he see another one?

At the Capricorn Bar:

‘And of course there was the dunes you’d saunter off to of a fine evening? Summer.’

‘If you had a girleen in tow, a kite to fly.’

‘A roll in the dunes takes the badness out of a young fella.’

‘What puts it there, Gant?’

‘Well now…’

‘Wasn’t even pikey on the dunes in those days.’

‘Pikeys there now sure enough.’

‘Those days a pikey knew his place. Made pegs out on the reservation. Raised a dozen bairn or so. Played a bit o’ fiddle music and had a scrap at a weddin’. Strange now to see a shake of ’em in S’town?’

‘You remember, of course, when Atta “The Turk” Foley had the poolhall down the dune end?’

‘Turk’s… I do.’

‘All the young crowd.’

‘All the girls, all the boys. Summer evenings and the blinds drawn against the sun. An’ remember you’d get the holy marchers coming down through Smoketown? All the old dears with their tongues hanging out for Baba-love?’

‘Patterns o’ Devotion being made…’

White-face preachers in ankle-length soutanes swinging incense on the wharfside cobbles. The women shaking out holy water from Jay-shaped plastic bottles as their headscarves were whipped about by random assaults of hardwind, as though it was the devil himself sprang it from Nothin’.

‘I remember,’ said the Gant, ‘the way on the night of August Fair we’d burn whitethorn branches at the bonnas all along the Rises…’

‘… and the way we’d be collecting a month for the bonnas and stashing the wood.’

‘You’d have gangs of young fellas going around stealing from each other’s woodpiles. Got good and vicious now, recall?’

‘Oh I do.’

‘Rucks bustin’ out on the 98 Steps.’

‘Heavenly times, Gant.’

‘Was it Sergeant Taafe had the polis that time?’

‘One of the greatest fucking maggots that ever crawled into this town off the Big Nothin’ plain. Where was it Taafes were from outside, G?’

‘Taafes were this near side o’ Nothin’ Mountain. Skinned goats for a trade his people.’

‘Was a price paid for goat pelt that time.’

‘A fine price. But that’s all gone now.’

‘All gone.’

‘Lots of it gone.’

‘Lots of it.’

‘Oh we’re all getting old now.’

‘Old, yes.’

‘Oh, old.’

‘Old!’

‘Oh.’

The Gant slid from his stool at the Capricorn Bar and stumbled to a corner and vomited.

A twist and a turn and a feint, then a twist and a left turn, and the wynds gave onto wynds, and deep in the heart of the Bohane Trace, at its still calm centre, as the Fair roistered distantly about the edges, a set of high tenement doors opened – heavy wooden doors carved with renditions of hares, sprites, rooks – and Macu emerged.

Macu wore:

A fitted knee-length dress of lynxskin, a fox stole, a ritual eyepaint that drew flames of crimson from the corners of her eyes, and a slash of purple lippy.

Macu set to walking.

A twist and a turn, a feint. A twist and a turn, and the pathways of her thoughts were intricate as the Trace, and as indeterminate. He would be waiting at midnight in the Café Aliados. She did not yet know if she would go to him there.

The notables of Bohane congregated on the plaza outside the Yella Hall. It was the moment for the crowning of the puck – the most famous moment of the Bohane year – and all the usual faces were in evidence: the draper de Bromhead, the sawbones Fitzsimmons, the Protestant Alderton. All were growing old and hideous together. A movement, then, from the dockside, and all heads turned, and cheers were raised as Ol’ Boy Mannion led his regal puck onto the plaza, and the hunchback, Balthazar Mary Grimes, captured the moment for the Vindicator with a shriek of blue flash.

The gulls squalled – mmwwaaoorrk! – and rain came in warm drifts from the August sea, and a fat merchant of the city stood on a crate to drone the night’s courtesies.

‘An’ as always on this happy occasion we remember our fallen and our dead and aren’t we so lucky and Baba-blessed to be suckin’ yet at the air o’ Bohane city and didn’t the likes a us…’