by Kevin Barry
Careful, Gant.
He walked the Nothin’ plain. The hardwind by ’n’ by walloped a little sense into him. A feral goat watched from a high vantage, its eyes a glaring yellow. The Gant willed himself to straight thinking. He felt the tread of their shared past underfoot. Your step there, he thought, and my step here. That’s your step there, and my step here, on the days that we walked out, Macu, in the noonday of the lost-time.
Nostalgia, on the peninsula, was a many-hooked lure.
The Gant had come back early in August. At once, he had fallen victim to our native reminiscence. In the Bohane creation, time comes loose, there is a curious fluidity, the past seeps into the future, and the moment itself as it passes is the hardest to grasp. The Gant came back with a couple of hundred in his pocket and a pair of busted boots on his feet and a reefed shoulder gone halfways septic – that was as much as he had to show for twenty-five years gone. A hot summer day with the bare lick of a breeze to it and the breeze among the long grasses whispered the old Nothin’ mysteries. The bog was dried out and above it a shifting black gauze of midge-clouds palpitated and the turloughs had drained off and there was that strange air of peace in the hills: never-changing, sea-tanged, western. The horizon wavered in hard sun over the poppy fields as the workers toiled in silhouette at the crop. Bleached light on the plain of Nothin’ and a fado lament wailed distant from somewhere on the pikey rez. His feet were blistered.
The breath came hard and jaggedly in him as he made it to Ol’ Boy Mannion’s longhouse. It was set in a valley’s dip, and as he quietly came on the place, he saw that its door was open. This was as expected – Ol’ Boy in the summer was by long habit to be found at his Nothin’ residence. The Gant stuck his head inside the door. He leaned against the jamb to slow his breath.
‘Benni,’ he said.
Ol’ Boy looked up from a settle in the dank and fly-thick shade, and he showed not a flicker of surprise.
‘You been settin’ the world on fire, Gant?’
The Gant raised his eyes. Ol’ Boy stood and shook his head woefully.
‘So who’s responsible for this masterpiece?’ he said.
‘By mine own fair hand,’ the Gant said.
‘Ah, come in out of it, would you? Before you frighten the fuckin’ ducks.’
The Gant sat in the shade of the longhouse and at length he took his breath back. Ol’ Boy asked no questions. Just waited it out.
‘E’er a notion where a fella could lay his achin’ bones, Benni?’
‘You’ll have to let me see about that.’
Ol’ Boy busied himself. On the stove he mixed up a bowl of pinhead oatmeal and he added a measure of Jameson to the pour of cream. He made a place at the table for the Gant and watched as he came slowly across the flagstones.
‘S’either yer gone rickety before yer time or there’s a story worth gobbin’, G?’
The Gant grimaced.
‘Y’lie down with dogs,’ he said.
As the Gant ate, Ol’ Boy examined the shoulder wound. He took a bottle of evil-smelling fluid from the high shelf and dabbed it on a wedge of cotton and applied the cotton to the wound.
‘Landed just a lucky stretch shy of a lung, Gant,’ he said. ‘And it have the look of a cratur who’s came at ya with a rusty blade, boy?’
‘Y’get off the peninsula,’ said the Gant, ‘and you find they got no class.’
Ol’ Boy salved the wound as best he could and shook another measure of the fluid onto it, for badness’ sake, and the Gant hissed a startle of pain. Ol’ Boy blew on the wound.
‘Trust me,’ he said, ‘I’m a nurse.’
He dressed the wound neatly. He was dainty about his work. He’d patched up more than a few go-boys in his day.
‘An’ you’re back here why, Gant Broderick, precisely? What bizarre fucking notion has weaselled itself into that sorry noggin o’ yours?’
He rapped his knuckles on the Gant’s head. The Gant laid down his spoon and thought a moment.
‘You’d find there’s a quare aul’ draw to Big Nothin’,’ he said.
‘An’ what about to Bohane city?’
‘Maybe we need to talk about that an’ all, Mr Mannion.’
Ol’ Boy’s opinion, which he transmitted in a single, sharp glance, was that Bohane wasn’t the same place it had been twenty-five years back.
‘S’pose it’ll be interestin’ whatever happens,’ he said.
The Gant agreed that it would be.
‘I need a place out here, Benni. Gather me thoughts, you know?’
So it was that Mannion had set him up with the trailer home. Told him to lie low a while and keep his snout to the wind: see how she blew.
Trailer was a hard find even to an aborigine like the Gant. It was located in the lee of an old quarry’s wall and it had that shelter at least from the evil of the hardwind. The trailer sat across an expanse of bog from a small lake. You’d barely drown a child in it, as they say of such a lake out on Nothin’. The lake’s waters were dark and cloudy and thatched at the verges with an accumulation of broken reeds. The Gant had settled to this place, and he watched the summer fade into autumn, and heard the hardwind rise, and he knew that winter was on the soon-come.
He walked the October night its length through. He came into a white space of mind and it was restful. He circled the plain. Towards dawn, he walked across the splintered boards of an old jetty by the small lake – the boards gave and groaned as he walked, the boards sang – and he crouched there, and he felt the looming presence of the Nothin’ hills beyond. Dark shadow of mountain against the waking sky. He felt a presence; he felt it as a great tenderness. And then he heard its voice.
‘Oh Baba?’ the Gant pleaded. ‘Oh Sweet B?’
9
Girly
Girly Hartnett lay in bed at the Bohane Arms Hotel. Eighty-nine she was, and bored. The boredom she sung with a frequent sighing. Her top-floor suite’s black velvet drapes were as always drawn – Girly had seen more than enough of Bohane city to last her a frigging lifetime. She was on a diet of hard booze and fat pills against the pain of her long existence. She was regally arranged on the plump pillows of a honeymooners’ bed. Girly’s days were slow, and they ran headlong into her nights, and she lay awake most of the nights, and yet she could never quite place the nights once they’d passed. Could never quite get a fix on the fuckers. As often as the hotel had juice enough to run a projector, she watched old movies on a pull-down screen. Girly liked old movies and menthol ciggies and plotting the city’s continued derangement. The Hartnett Fancy held the runnings of Bohane, and there were those who’d swear the steer was Girly’s yet as much as Logan’s. She could identify every knock on her door and she cried an answer now to her son’s.
‘Get in to me!’
The worry in him she read before he had his long bones folded in the bedside chair.
‘How we now?’ he said.
She raised a brittle hand to her throat, Girly, and let its fingers fraily rest there.
‘Not long for the stations, boy.’
‘So you been saying.’
They did not kiss nor lay a hand to each other. The Hartnetts were not touchy-touchy people. The Hartnetts were Back Trace: blood and bone.
‘Time you callin’ this anyhow?’
‘It’s gone seven alright.’
‘Was goin’ to get onto the morgue,’ she said. ‘See if they’d ta’en in any long pale-lookin’ fuckers.’
‘Been busy, Girly.’
‘Busy gowlin’ around,’ she said. ‘Bring me flicks, y’did?’
‘Did, Girly.’
He passed over the reels and she examined them.
‘Y’got me nothin’ with Tab Hunter an’ Natalie Wood, nah?’
‘They didn’t have anything.’
‘Arra Jay.’
‘I tried, Girly.’
‘Tab and Natalie made some beautiful pictures.’
‘You been saying.’
‘Word was t
hey were doin’ a line.’
‘Go ’way?’
‘There’d be photos at premieres.’
‘We got uptown aggravators working a caper, Girly.’
‘Natalie in a class of an ermine wrap. Tab in peg pants and a knit shirt. Beige!’
‘Cusack says he got the flatblocks stacked, Girly.’
‘Course the wan o’ the Woodses was hangin’ offa every-thin’ in kecks. Man-crazy.’
‘I said Eyes Cusack, Girly. Word I have? He has families behind him. He has the McGroartys, the Lenanes, the Sullivans …’
‘They said filth about Tab, of course. I never believed a word o’ what they said about Tab.’
‘It’s good word, Girly. We’re talking three families at least weighing in with the Cuse. And that’s a wealth of fucking headjobs, no?’
‘Ferocious the muck they threw at Tab.’
‘I think he’s about to throw a shape, Girly.’
‘You know I wouldn’t repeat what they said about Tab? Wouldn’t soil the roof o’ me mouth with it.’
‘What way should I play it?’
Girly reached for the bedside bottle of John Jameson and poured a decent measure to her tumbler. She offered him the bottle. He shook his head, closed his eyes, and massaged with bunched fingertips the space between them. He swung his booted feet onto the bed. Soon as they landed she batted them away.
‘Watch me fuckin’ eiderdown,’ she said.
She tasted and savoured the whiskey. Colour rose up in her – a purplish rush to chase the greyness.
‘Yunno I’d a dream there a while ago,’ she sighed, ‘and who arrives into it only Fernando Lamas above on a horse?’
‘Girly, listen to me! Eyes Cusack is about to make a move down the 98 Steps.’
‘Of course in my mother’s day? In Peggy’s time? There would have been sixteen picturehouses in Bohane at that time. Is there just the one now still?’
‘Just the one.’
‘And all it’s showin’ is maggots lickin’ the melt off each other.’
‘Girly?’
‘Shut up, I’m thinkin’.’
She closed her eyes. She was an unspeakable age as Bohane lives go. She blinked hard.
‘Cusacks been hustlin’ in the Trace?’
‘Not in the Trace but in Smoketown. And making plenty of noise up on the Rises, up in the shebeens. Putting new skins on their lambeg drums, is the word, and they got their chanters tuning up.’
‘Norrie fuckin’ nonsense!’
‘But how’ll I go at it, Mam?’
She shook her head to dismiss his fear.
‘Catnip to Wolfie and the boys,’ she said.
He nodded.
‘That’s the way I’m hoping. But if we hadn’t enough of a head count …’
‘Who’ve we to call in, child?’
He regarded her dolefully.
‘Most of the bridges are fairly well burned at this stage.’
‘Who’re you tellin. But we’ve no one at all?’
‘Unless I hit out the dunes and try talk to –’
‘Arra fuckin’ Jay!’
They let the matter quieten before them. Both teased through it in the silence. No decision was ever made quickly or rashly by a Hartnett. At length, Girly spoke up.
‘D’ya find me anythin’ with a young Yul Brynner, nah? From the days o’ the hair?’
‘No, Girly. I found you The Wanderers alright?’
He raised the case to her.
‘I see that,’ she said.
These evening times together were brief but an unbreakable custom. Each of them eased in the company of the other. She eyed him carefully, and he drew back just a fraction from the examination – this was evident in a slight tensing of the shoulders, which she noted. Also, the way he had taken up the reel cases from the eiderdown, and the way he turned them nervously in his hands.
‘That’s a quare weight you’re carryin’,’ she said, ‘on account of a few Norrie wall-bangers?’
Girly let that sit a moment, then:
‘So how’s herself keepin’?’
Logan allowed his feint, yellow smile.
‘Marvellously,’ he said.
Girly nodded, as though greatly satisfied.
‘From what I’m hearin’,’ she said, ‘the Gant Broderick is still a han’some cut of a man.’
He flung the reel cases onto her bed and rose to go.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘Go watch your aul’ films.’
She snorted a laugh as he went. She listened carefully for the precise heft of the slam he gave the door, and she laughed again when it loudly came. Served the pale fucker right for marryin’ boat trash.
De Valera Street down below thrummed with the slow build of night: its rude energies were gathering. Yes and October was ending, the last of it falling from our diseased civic trees, and there was Trouble with a Big T on the Bohane soon-come.
Girly in the vast bed wriggled with delight.
10
In a Smoketown Patois
Dark came on Smoketown. Was a hell of a place in the black night – a sad-dream world across the footbridge. On the skinny streets the old town houses leaned in to each other: how-we-now? As though the old houses they was holding one another up, like. This Smoketown you take one brick from the pile and the whole heap’d come tumbledown. Smoketown it don’t even make a square mile in size: a tight, small, squashed-up place, hard-pressed its airways, its troubled lungs, and the air had an oily feel in the night. Smoketown generators chugged like good things. Mark this: if there was juice nowhere in Bohane, there’d be a bit left all the same for the S’town operations.
The madwoman of Smoketown paraded in her white cowgirl suit, sequins aglitter, and directed the sky traffic of angry gulls.
A toothless she-man hoor with painted-on eyebrows tossed shouts to the sky from the footbridge.
A violently unpredictable Alsatian bitch name of Angelina dragged along on a leash the Fancy lieutenant Fucker Burke.
Fucker and Angie were in and out of the Chalk ’n’ Cue.
Fucker and Angie were in and out of the Land o’ Baize.
Fucker and Angie were in and out of the 147.
The fuck was Wolfie was what Fucker and Angie wanted to know.
Chiefly spud-aters on the S’town streets at this hour – they’d be in need of a knee-trembler and the suck of a dream-pipe before hitting the Boreen and dragging their woeful souls across the Nothin’ wastes.
Edmund ‘The Gypo’ Lenihan came ’cross the footbridge with a honey-blonde sixteen-year-old in tow – fresh tush recruited off the Rises, with a big brazen puss on: there’d be no fear of her.
Low throb of the grindbars as they was gearing up – sinuous basslines rumbled as the early-shift gals shinned the bars and spun there, and slid again, their dead eyes lurid.
Fish wagons (Hartnett-owned) unloaded to the Chinkee troughs – fins and spines and bones for the chowder, oh it is some quare-lookin’ craturs you get swimming the Bohane river.
A blur of booze-pasted faces moved along the streets.
Chinkee dives, hopper bars, dream salons.
And here at last came Wolfie Stanners out of the Ho Pee Ching Oh-Kay Koffee Shoppe – five foot two inches of pure man in a velveteen puffa and a pair of stormtrooper lace-ups.
His ginger bonce swivelled and searched as he marched the Smoketown streets.
He fell in with Fucker Burke and Angelina outside the Land o’ Baize.
Narky look off the Wolfie-boy, Fucker reckoned, and rightly.
‘Was lookin’ for ya, Wolf.’
‘I been lookin’ for Jenni, ain’t I? You seen fuckin’ Jenni, yuh?’
‘Ain’t, Wolf.’
‘Said y’seen Jenni anywhere about, Fuck?’
Mad eyes swivellin’ in the Wolfie-boy puss.
‘Said I ain’t seen her, Wolf.’
‘Fuck she at ’n’ all, like?’
Taint of badness on the Bohane air had its various stran
ds and jealousy was not the least among them.
‘Dunno, Wolf. Ain’t seen –’
Wolfie turned and without breaking stride took a flying kick at the door of a dream salon, and issued a raspin’ grunt, and the effort seemed to calm him some, and he set to the S’town prowl and the night’s business.
‘Word off the ’bino?’
‘Word is – Cantillon.’
‘Tonight?’
‘Word.’
‘Let’s do it then. There any sign o’ the fishmonger, Fuck?’
Oh and indeed the unfortunate Deccie Cantillon had chosen the wrong evening for an S’town crawl. Not bad enough he was doing jigger with the missus of his own cuz – misfortunate Ger Reid, master butcher – but he was bothering Smoketown tush too.
‘On a fanny crawl, is he?’ Wolfie said.
‘He be at the pay-for tush an’ all,’ Fucker confirmed.
Angelina dragged on the leash, and the boys followed, and soon enough Cantillon was made out in the S’town haze.
A whippety cratur, Cantillon, with mackerel scales all over his hands, in his forties, sharp-featured, a card player, looked after hissel’, a sculpted Frenchie-looking nose just built for a tush-chaser, the thick hair slathered back with a pawload of perfumed gunk, top five buttons of a purple dress shirt open to the night even though it was deep end of October in Bohane, the west’s evil winter looming.
Deccie followed his pecker around the narrow streets.
Angelina and the boys followed Deccie.
Anything aged fourteen to sixty-eight took the rake of his glance. Ankles to nape, he sized ’em up. Laid the gamey eye on. Nearly hop up on that, he thought. Nearly give that an auld lash of the baste, he thought. Nearly ate me dinner offa that, he thought. Oh, a rabid tush patrol he was on, with the peepers out on stalks, looking left, looking right, looking bang ahead, but … ah.
He didn’t look behind him, did he?
No.
‘Full whack on the fishmonger is the ’bino’s word,’ Fucker said.
‘Full whack?’
‘He been messin’ with a missus, ain’t he?’