by Kevin Barry
‘Long Fella don’t like that.’
‘He sure don’t, Wolf.’
They ghosted through the Smoketown crowds and kept just a short ways back from their prey.
They knew to wait on the moment.
The fishmonger slithered into a shotbar.
He schlepped back a couple of mulekickers and tried to paw the plastik bazookas off the Ukrainer barkeep.
All the while he was watched from the street.
Wolfie had by this stage a punnet of fried chicken on the go and he offered Fucker a drumstick and Fucker took it and sucked it clean in one and tossed the bone and offered his greased fingers then to Angelina, who cleaned them good.
‘I worry ’bout you an’ that dog sometimes,’ said Wolfie.
Fucker shrugged; Angelina drooled.
And Cantillon rode a string of dives but he bought nowhere, he was looking for the good price, and at length, as the boys and the dog trailed him, he hit towards the dune end.
Now the dune end of Smoketown is the cheaper line. There you will find a very low class of customer. The worst of the slagshops and the most insalubrious needle galleries are out there. Weird atmosphere on account of the system of dunes that rise just beyond and give the name to it. A spooky place that dune reef. Haunted by ferocious pikeys it is – their fires burn against the black night; sand-pikeys we call ’em – and the sea withers on, always and forever, insanely.
Fishmonger took a turn down an empty side street.
Bad move.
Suddenly, silently, Wolfie Stanners was at his side.
So sweetly:
‘A word, Mr Cantillon?’
And yes there was Fucker Burke the other side of him.
All jaunty:
‘Howya, Dec?’
And there was Angelina with a spill of happy drool falling.
Steered him down a tight alleyway, the boys, and a sea of rats parted underfoot.
Electric bristling of them.
Parting of the grey sea.
Angie yapped at the rats and was shushed by Fucker. Gently the boys arranged the man against a gable end.
‘This about, lads?’
Fair play he even managed to keep the quake of fear from his voice. For all the good it did him. Wolfie took a wee lep off the dancers and was airborne, just briefly, but long enough to plant a perfect butt on the bridge of Cantillon’s nose.
Soft explosion: muscle, sinew, blood.
The butt was a kindness; Deccie whited out – Goodnight, Smoketown! – and he slumped agin the wall and slid the length of it and was no sooner on the ground than Fucker Burke arranged the heel of a size thirteen high-top boot on his windpipe and mashed it down hard, and Angie on the leash was lapping already at the blood spilt.
Wolfie meantime worked his stormtroopers repeatedly about the man’s face in neat precise stomps – happy in his work, the boy – so it would be a while anyways before this meat had a name put to it.
They lepped at the ribs also – they snapped easily as fish bones.
Angelina danced.
Boys walked out the dune end again. Glanced quickly left and quickly right and hit directly for the busier Smoketown of the riverside streets.
‘I’ve a horn on me,’ said Fucker.
‘I’d ate,’ said Wolfie.
Angelina lurched at the leash, she wanted to go back to the alleyway, she wanted more, but she was dragged along and scolded:
‘Leave it, Ange!’
Smoketown juddered. The girls called out and the barkers hollered. Dreams were sold, songs were gargled, noodles were bothered. Wolfie Stanners and Fucker Burke and the Alsatian bitch Angelina melted back into the night, and as they passed me by, I saw the true-dark taint in their eyes.
It is at this hour that I like to walk the S’town wharfs myself. I like to look out over the river to the rooftops of the Back Trace and the Northside Rises beyond.
I like to see the river fill up with the lamps of the city.
11
The Gant’s Letter to Macu
Dear Macu,
I saw you on Dev Street the other day. I wondered if I’d know you it’s been so long girl but the shock to me was how little you’d changed. I ain’t sure I can say the same about myself I’d say the years have gone on me sure enough it was always the way with my crowd the way we’d wear our lives on our faces. I want to cause you no unhappiness Macu. It was plain to me when I saw you on Thursday you been caused enough of that. I don’t mean to pass remark on the life that you made for yourself I’d be the last one who could draw rosy pictures of a life for anyone. It doesn’t mean that I have not dreamt of what kind of life it might have been if things hadn’t happened the way they did. I saw you Macu and I wanted to go to you but it would not have been fair to you. Not yet I told myself not this time. Twenty-five year pass and leaves nothing at all hardly in your hand I don’t know exactly when it was that I started to feel old but I feel it now true enough you can believe me I suppose there has been dark times for me as for anyone in a life but it is no good to nobody to dwell on the dark times. It only seems like weeks ago that I walked out of the place. A lot has happened to me in that time as you can well imagine since I took to the High Boreen that was a hard day believe me that day marked me. I am not in many ways the person that I was I have done things I am not proud of Macu. I have not married though I suppose there have been women. I have never settled anyplace. I am told you are without children and that is a sadness you should have been a mother it would have suited you.
I am living back on Nothin’ now and it is my intention to settle here for as long as I have left may the SBJ grant that it is more than a season or two. I cannot say that I have known happiness since I came back here a few months ago I cannot say that I will ever know that again but there is quiet out here all the same that suits me and is a comfort to my old bones. You know that Nothin’ has been a special place for me always. You know my feelings for this place and you will understand it was painful for me to be away from it so long. I come back here with no intention of causing you unhappiness.
I want to see you Macu. I want to look at you and not have to speak have to say stupid things I want to look at you and see what you’ve become. I want to hold you for a while. I am sorry to put these words before you I have no choice I must. I am a worm I know that to come back after all this time and what it must do to you it is hard and painful.
You said something to me once I wonder if you remember. You said that no matter what happened we would end up together. Do you remember that? It was probably just something a young girl would say and she was in love but I believed it for years it kept me together for years it kept me from the lip of the grave Macu.
I love you still. That has a horrible bare look to it I know when it is put down on the page maybe the truth is I do want it to cause pain for you. Maybe I believe there is some of that due to you. We make choices and we have to live with them. It might seem like madness that I would write those words after all these years but there you are you can deal with them I have had to deal with them so long.
When we walked the Back Trace and we were kids in Bohane I thought my heart was going to escape my mouth. Lay my hand on the small of your back and it was like stepping off a roof. Big soft grin on my face and I was suppose to be the hard boy in town. You were so slight. And the way that you talked to me low in a whisper almost and that it was so many weeks before you’d kiss me even.
We used to walk on those nights in the Trace and go down to the river. I can hear again the river on the summer nights and the way we’d sit on the stone steps and you would lean your head back onto my chest and rest it there. I thought that nothing that nobody could ever come between us Macu.
I tell myself that to come back here might be a way to break the hold on me you have still. The touch that I have felt on me these years in my dark times always it is your touch. I see you at seventeen, eighteen so perfectly clear every detail the tiny bones under the skin of your brow
when you worried for me if there was trouble times in the Bohane Trace. I believe they were the wrong paths we took and what I have seen of your life here with Hartnett does not change that belief.
My days are quiet now. There are places that you would remember I’m sure from our own time when sometimes we’d walk out here. We would lie in the long grass do you remember Macu? As much as things change in Bohane things stay the same on Big Nothin’. The place I am living is no palace but comfort enough I sit like a true auld fella off the Nothin’ bogs in front of my pot belly stove. I’d have laughed back then to see what I would turn into later. Though I will say again the same years I could hardly see on you on Dev Street the other day it took the breath from me you were so familiar. The way that you moved was just as I remembered. Do not think I was spying on you but when I saw you I could hardly be expected to look away.
I am back on Nothin’ to stay and I wish to see you Macu. Even if it kills me I want to see you. What I ask is for a single meeting. The time and the place could be arranged as you see fit. If there are things I should say to you now after all this time then I could say them much better in person. Let me know through Mr Mannion if such a meeting can be arranged. All I can plead is that it would be heaven to see your lips form my name again.
That I may hear from you soon, girl,
The G
12
Who Gots the Runnings?
Dom Gleeson, the lardarse newsman, was on De Valera Street, fresh-shaven, his face still blotchy from the razor. He wore a baby-blue zoot suit and a pair of clicker’d heels that he danced in excitement against the pavement. He was nifty on the hoof for a fat lad and he gazed soulfully in the direction of Big Nothin’. He slowed his moves then and stilled himself. He looked down and regarded his small, sinister feet. He raised his fingertips to his lips. Nibbled them.
‘The Gant’s up top o’ fifty, Mr Mannion,’ he whispered. ‘He’s hardly gonna try and lay a snakey mickey into her at this stage, is he?’
Ol’ Boy in a Crombie against the night chill, wearing a jaunty pork-pie hat, was sat up on the Dev Street railings, moocher-style, and he raised his eyebrows.
‘Love can be so strange and enduring, Dom.’
‘Then Hartnett is gonna have to be seen to act, Mr Mannion.’
‘You ain’t sellin’ a spoof, Big D. He’s got to throw down some class of a welcome for the Gant sure enough. The city’s watchin’. The Authority’s watchin’. And his missus is watchin’ an’ all, y’check me?’
The city’s mood was a blend of fear and titillation. There was going to be an almighty collision, and a small world shudders when giants collide.
‘He’s been wantin’ a bead on the Gant outside on Nothin’, Mr Mannion. An’ I could hardly be seen not to oblige …’
‘I wouldn’t worry about the G out on Nothin’, Dom.’
Ol’ Boy smiled his reassurance, and there beneath the Dev Street lights the Dom, amped on the city’s intrigue, tiptoed a dance step again. Shimmied his hips. Swivelled them. Made gasping little fishmouths. Winked then, and whispered:
‘They say the missus’ eyes straighten in her head when she gets fleadhed, Mr Mannion?’
‘They do so that, Dom.’
The Dom gurgled, and gazed to the stars, and he swirled with them. Went kind of woozy and glad.
‘Oh we got us a love mess on our paws!’ he shrieked.
‘We certainly have, Dom.’
The newsman swivelled his peepers over a shoulder as though he might be watched from back there, and he leaned closer then to Ol’ Boy.
‘An’ o’ course we got other problems, Gant aside.’
‘Don’t talk to me about the Cusacks, Dominick, please.’
Dom clutched himself tragically about the chest. Made as though to drop and hit the stones.
‘Oh my angina!’ he wheezed.
Ol’ Boy regarded him soberly.
‘If the Calm breaks,’ he said, ‘we can all go an’ whistle for a Beauvista tram, Dom. And every last site for a manse beside it, y’hear me?’
‘Cathedral bells, Mr Mannion. Last thing Bohane needs is a winter o’ blood, like.’
Ol’ Boy climbed down from the railings, and together the men made aim for the S’town footbridge: it was the hour in Bohane when gents would be inclined towards recreation.
‘What we gotta be askin’?’ said the newsman. ‘Who’s it truly gots the Bohane runnings right now?’
‘Oh that’s the question, Dom,’ said Ol’ Boy. ‘I said that’s the capital Q, y’check me?’
Big lunks of polis made a cordon at the entrance to a Smoketown alleyway.
Rubberneckers piled down the dune end and stalked out their eyes to see past.
‘Back away to fuck’ll ye!’ yelped a polis. ‘We need a stretcher backin’ in here, like!’
Wisecracker in the crowd didn’t miss a beat:
‘More’n a stretcher that fella’s needin’!’
A low round of chuckles ribboned out and even the polis good-naturedly joined in. Bohane was (and is) a perpetual source of amusement to itself.
Down the alleyway, a polis ’spector knelt by the bloody remains and peered closely at the bootmarks on blue flesh.
‘Fancy,’ he whispered.
He gestured to a raw polis, a mouth-breather not long off the Nothin’ plain, and the young ’un crouched beside him.
‘See this?’ said the ’spector.
He showed in the pool of blood the particular shape of the clicker’d boot heels that had made their marks there.
‘If this tells us it’s an F-boy caper,’ he asked the young polis, ‘what else does it tell us?’
Mouth-breather was a quick learner, and he rose, and he faced the crowd at the alley’s maw, and he addressed them loudly.
‘S’lookin’ like another suicide, lads.’
‘Good boy,’ the ’spector whispered.
Up from the river an assault of wind came knifing and it had a bone-deep chill in it for a sharpener.
That would be the winter in on top of us.
Girly Hartnett cued up a Mario Lanza flick from 1952 – Peg would have been eighteen; she dated the flicks always to her mother’s age. Because You’re Mine it was, the one where he sang ‘Granada’, a powerful set of lungs on the boy. She took a sip of John Jameson from her tumbler and she recapped the pill bottle. She relaxed her old bones to enjoy the rush of tranquilliser and the soaring of the young tenor’s voice.
Girly was downtown.
Girly was seeing the lights.
Girly startled as a particular knock sounded on her door, the knock that always came late on, and she answered it with a single, sharp whistle.
Jenni Ching entered, and sat by the bedside, and poured herself a whiskey. She kicked her tiny lethal feet up onto the bed and Girly fondly laid a hand across them.
‘Manners on ’em yet out there, Jenni-chil’?’
‘Oh aye, Girly. Manners o’ pigs an’ dogs.’
Girly squinted then, and she made out the bite marks rearside of Jenni’s neck.
‘S’it the Wolfie kid been havin’ an aul’ jaw on ya, girl?’
Jenni took a stogie from the tit pocket of her white vinyl zip-up. Torched the motherfucker.
‘For me to know,’ she said. ‘Now c’mere till ya hear the latest.’
She would tell the old bint as much as she needed and no more.
*
On Beauvista, Macu and Logan lay in the bed their long marriage had made and they held each other grimly against the coming of the winter. He sniffed hard at her as he sought a telltale smell – the taint of another – but he found no deceit.
‘Don’t you ever fucking leave me,’ he said.
Fucker Burke and Wolfie Stanners walked the Big Nothin’ plain in the great vault of dark. They came to the particular turn from the High Boreen and took it and it led to the ridge path that skirted the granite knoll and soon the Eight Mile Bridge loomed, and it was a moonless night surely as the tout said it
would be, and they went by the water’s edge and climbed down the bank and came underneath the arches of the bridge.
Tout waited for them sure enough.
He was tied by his ankles to a girder of the bridge, and his hands were tied also, and much of his skin had been taken off, and his throat was reefed plain open, and he was bled like a pig, with a pool of it congealing blackly beneath him, and the eyes were gouged from the sockets for badness’ sake – draw a bead now! – and what was left of the skin hung in white rags and shreds from him.
On the stone of the bridge’s arch where the tout was hung two words were daubed in blood:
WITH LOVE
Fucker looked at Wolfie.
Wolfie looked at Fucker.
They headed at pace for the High Boreen.
*
The night always on Nothin’ brought dread with it and gusts of hardwind swayed the walls of the Gant’s aluminium trailer. The bassoon call of a bittern sounded – that forlorn bird – and there were mystery rustlings and creakings outside, and the nerves were not a hundred per cent on the Gant just yet.
Pulse still up.
Head unsettled.
A roar of hot wind in his ears.
He shivered and tensed at every sound. He asked the night for forgiveness. His legs blazed with the cold aches of age and as he rose from his stool he moaned the same moan that had chorused his poor father to the grave. Even the moans get passed down. He heard the shrieks of the night critturs outside and droning voices among the reeds.
He wrapped himself in a buckskin and blew out the candles. He went to the darkness. He knew it was better to be among it and to be an agent of it than to sit and tremble with guilt in the trailer. He closed his eyes as he walked and he tried to attune himself to her proximity, her frequency.
He walked to a high vantage and across the bog plain the lights of Bohane city burned – was a Babylon on fire in the October dark.
II
DECEMBER
13
The View from Girly’s Eyrie
Here was Girly, after the picture show, drugged on schmaltz, in equatorial heat beneath the piled eiderdowns, a little whiskey-glazed and pill-zapped, in her ninetieth – Sweet Baba help us – Bohane winter, and she found herself with the oddest inclination: Girly had a notion to get out of the bed. It was afternoon yet below on De Valera Street and she was determined to have a good old lamp at the place. Some fucker was playing a melodeon down there despite it all.