Kevin Barry - City of Bohane

‘I’d put tuppence on meself yet,’ he said.

The alleyway of the Smoketown dune end:

Clicker’d heels on smooth cobbles.

Two young men circled but slowly.

Each handled a shkelp and moved warily, slowly.

Tip-tap, the heelclicks… tip… tap… tip… but slowly.

Seeping of bile and poison.

Jealousy’s bile.

Fear’s poison.

They circled.

Then a lunge…

A feint…

A stumbling…

A righting.

They circled.

A lunge.

A feint.

Shkelp blades gleamed as moonlight pierced the Murk.

They circled.

Wolfie kid and the Far-Eye.

They circled.

No taunts, no foulspeak, no curses.

Just a lunge.

A feint.

A stumbling.

A righting.

They circled.

They lunged.

Their blades ripped the air.

There came a time always on the night of August Fair when the badness took over.

Clock outside the Yella Hall sounded nine bells, and then ten, and then eleven, and nastiness cut the air – it was as high-pitched and mean as the homicide cry of the gulls.

The surfeit of moscato soured in the belly.

The herb took on a darker waft.

The dream-pipe twisted more than it mellowed.

And the fists of all the young fiends balled into hard tight knots, and the tushies egged ’em on…

‘Said y’takin’ that, like?’

…and scraps broke out all over the wynds, on the front, along the snakebend roll of De Valera Street, and on either side of the footbridge.

The decent and the cowardly fled along the escape routes offered by the New Town streets.

Rest of us piled in like savages.

And this year the badness was set to follow a particular design – an S’town riot was orchestrated.

It took quickly.

Big Dom Gleeson and Ol’ Boy Mannion had a vantage view of the riot from the hot tub on the roof of Ed ‘The Gypo’ Lenihan’s joint.

They had bottles of the Beast to hand, their herb-pipes also, and an amount of hoors on stand-by.

It was quickly a general bloodbath and the two men sighed in despair and happiness both.

On the main drag a line of sand-pikeys faced up to a massed assault of hoss polis.

Hoss polis were straining to make it to the S’town dune end to raid the premises there but the pikeys were keeping a firm line.

Smoketown revellers traded their frolics for violence, and the polis/sand-pikey face-off as the night progressed took in random participators. Eyes were being taken out down there, and ears were bitten off, and gobs were twisted open.

‘Is it any wonder, really,’ said Ol’ Boy, ‘that this place has the bad name it has?’

Yes and the hardwind was making speeches agin the August night and fresh hordes of sand-pikey back-up came in off the dunes and fell in by their brethren and wore hare-skin pelts and had branded themselves with hot irons from the forge – abstract symbols of the sand-pikey cult were engraved on every chest – and they waved dirks and tyre-irons and then a quare shake of polis back-up trudged over the Smoketown footbridge and it was noted that they were guzzling whiskey and moscato from carry-sacks as they came, and taking nips of the Beast, and howling the ritual chants of the polis frats, and they aimed headlong for the sand-pikeys who were about an equal to them in number and certainly in terms of derangement.

‘Tell you one thing,’ said Ol’ Boy, ‘this shower will keep goin’ a while yet.’

Big Dom, meantime, had arranged a tushie on his lap and he was gently brushing her hair with a pearl-encrusted brush and the girl’s eyes glazed with dream-sent romance.

‘They’ll take quare damage on both sides, Mr Mannion.’

‘Much,’ said Ol’ Boy, ‘to the Hartnett plan.’

The Gant saw her pass through the 98er Square.

He followed.

She took the turn of a wynd, and then another, and she looked back, and she saw that it was him, but she did not stop.

‘Macu!’

He watched her go. He allowed her to disappear into the darkness of a sudden turn. He said beneath his breath:

‘Don’t ever go back to him.’

Prince Tubby the Far-Eye’s death journey was a beautiful voyage. He sailed over the clouds and across his dune-side terrain and the great spectacle once more was enacted for him.

Here was a place of wind and rain and violent starburst, where the throw of light is ever-changing, is constantly shifting, and he saw the great expanse of the bog plain, and the lamps of Bohane city, too, as they burned against the night of August Fair.

Wolfie Stanners sat on the stone steps cut into the river wall and he held both hands tightly against a gut wound and he closed his eyes and a fever sweat broke on his forehead as the S’town riot raged nearby.

Heard the black surge of the Bohane as it called to him.

Big Dom topped a fresh bottle of Beast and torched a whackload of primo Big Nothin’ bushweed sourced from the pikey rez.

He squinted to bring into focus the progress of the riot:

The beak of the law was blunted by the sand-pikey assault; the pikey ferocity was dulled by polis resolve.

And lives went under, it has to be said, but as quickly as their vitals dimmed they came to again, out beneath the Nothin’ plain, in the ruts and tunnels of the Bohane underworld, where the strange ferns rustle and the black dogs roam.

Meantime:

Ol’ Boy Mannion nodded in the direction of the Smoketown footbridge.

‘Y’watchin’?’ he said.

Big Dom clocked it.

‘The killer gal,’ he said.

Jenni Ching surveyed the riot serenely from the high arch of the footbridge – bopped smoke rings from her pouted lips.

Logan knew that the boy had circled to follow him.

He could sense movement behind on the wharf.

He sighed in long-suffering.

He turned into the stockyards and slipped into the shadows to wait.

The boy Cantillon appeared.

Logan stepped out, noiselessly, and he was quick as a stoat as he took the boy’s throat in a forearm lock, and he took from the boy’s belt his shkelp and he drove it into his heart, and whispered to him – unrepeatable words – as the young life began to drain.

Felt the tip of that life as it tilted towards the dark but he took no savour from the moment.

He let the Cantillon boy fall and he considered for an incredulous moment, there in the foul stockyards, the advanced stupidity of the dead kid’s frozen features.

The Long Fella would not stain his dress-shkelp with such frivolous blood.

He walked on. There was a tiredness now on Logan. He knew his own line would end soon enough and, with it, his renown. The succession had been decided beyond him when he was lost to an April dream. All that was left, maybe, was the consolation of Macu’s touch.

He aimed his boots for the Café Aliados.

‘How would you imagine all this might play out, Mr Mannion?’

‘Not prettily, Dom.’

At Blind Nora’s low-rent bordello the Gant cued an old seven-incher on the turntable, and as the tune came through he felt it in the balls of his feet, and he skanked alone on the floor, and the toothless hoors on the ratty old couches grinned and hoarsely sang along, and Nora handclapped the beat, and the Gant danced slowly, and his bearing was quiet, and proud, and sane.

The Café Aliados was deserted but for the bar girl as Logan waited on a high stool there.