Kevin Barry - City of Bohane

He sipped at a John Jameson.

On the cusp of midnight he slipped off the stool and went to the jukebox and he selected a slow-burner of an old calypso tune from the lost-time.

She’d know this one.

He sat again by the barside as the old music played and with an unsure hand he fixed his hair.

And at midnight precisely, on this the night of August Fair, the cut yellow flowers in a vase on the Aliados countertop trembled as the sideway door opened, and stilled again as it closed, and he turned a quiet swivel on his stool.

‘Well,’ she said.

A set of ninety Bohane Fairs were graven in the hard sketch lines of her face, and already he was resigned.

‘Girly,’ he said.

The night aged, and the city quietened along its length, and the young were drawn by the hard pull of their blood to the river. We throbbed with the pulse of August in Bohane.

At intervals along the wharf, on the stone steps of the river wall, the young lazed in pairs and held each other. Their lips made words – promises, devotions – and the words carried on the river’s air and mingled with the words of its murmurous dead. A single voice was made in the mingling, and this voice had in mysterious ways the quality of silence, for it blocked out all else; it mesmerised.

The taint came off the water as a delicious mist.

A green lizard crept between a crack in a fall of steps and climbed across a mound of flesh and fed on the blood that caked around the gut wound of a dead boy with a blackbird’s stare.

The hardwind rose and shifted the cloudbank and the rooftops emerged from the Murk – the city’s shape reasserting – and now the lamplight of the city was fleet on the water. The water played its motion on the green wrack and stone of the river wall. We listened – rapt – as it carried through the city of Bohane, as it ran to the hidden sea, as the sea dragged on its cables.

Summer’s reach was shortening; we would face soon what the autumn might bring, and what the winter. But the city was content on this one night for time to slow, for a while at least, and it sent its young down to the river.

First ache of light was inaugural:

Jenni Ching rode bareback a Big Nothin’ palomino along the Bohane front.

On either side of her mount – as its flanks worked smoothly, slowly in the ochre dawn – a half-dozen wilding girls marched in ceremonial guard – they wore cross-slung dirk-belts, groin-kicker boots, white vinyl zip-ups, black satin gym shorts – and the native gulls in the early morning were raucous above the river.

A mad-eyed black-back dived at the killer-gal Ching but she raised a glance and eyed it as madly for an answer and the gull swerved and turned and wheeled away downriver.

Jenni cried a taunt after it:

‘ Mmwwaaoork! ’

And all the girls laughed.

The procession moved, and the chained dogs in the merchant yards along the front cowered in the cold shadows of morning, their own thin flanks rippling with fright.

Hung upon the livid air a sequence of whinnies and pleadings, the dogs, and the first taste of the new life came to Jenni

as she rode out the measured beat of her ascension and a bump of fear, too, y’check me

as she searched already the eyes of her own ranks for that yellow light, ambition’s pale gleam

as she saw in the brightening sky at a slow fade the lost-time’s shimmer pass.

Kevin Barry’s story collection, There Are Little Kingdoms , won the Rooney Prize in 2007. His short fiction has appeared widely on both sides of the Atlantic, most recently in the New Yorker. City of Bohane is his first novel and it was short-listed for the Irish Novel of the Year and the Costa First Novel awards, and won the Author’s Club Best First Novel Award. He lives in County Sligo in Ireland.

There Are Little Kingdoms

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The author acknowledges the support of the Arts Council of Ireland

First published in Great Britain in 2011 by

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