City of Bohane: A Novel

by Kevin Barry

  ‘Baba come down among us! Said Baba come down!’

  ‘Please!’ cried Ol’ Boy. ‘Will ye lay off the bollockin’ Baba-love! Baba won’t help ye now!’

  Runner-child’s eyes focused on Ol’ Boy’s, and locked, and Ol’ Boy knew it was truth the child spoke.

  ‘An’, sir? He got the McGraths an’ all, y’check me?’

  ‘That’s the eight.’ Big Dom whistled low and made the note – eight (8) – and confirmed it with a tick mark.

  Ol’ Boy Mannion didn’t like the sound of this one bit. All around him in the inn there was disbelief, awe, terror. Tell ye this for thruppence: many a yella moon had shone on the glorified pig’s mickey that is the Bohane peninsula since we had seen the likes of an eight-family mobbed descent off the Northside Rises.

  ‘Eight families …’ said Ol’ Boy, calculating. ‘That could mean anything up to … I dunno … what are we talkin’, Dom … a hunnerd an’ fifty latchiko headjobs?’

  ‘Easy,’ said Big D.

  ‘At least that, sir,’ said the runner-child, ‘if’n yer to go by what these peepers ha’ seen.’

  ‘That’ll be plenty to take the Trace,’ said the innkeeper.

  ‘I’d nearly want to be thinkin’ about a thirty-two-page special,’ Big Dom sighed.

  ‘Shush, will ye?’ said Ol’ Boy. ‘Let the child tell it.’

  ‘Happens they gots the Trace awready, sir.’

  Consternation in the inn at this, and more wailing, but Ol’ Boy raised a firm hand to stop it.

  ‘What’re you sayin’, son?’

  ‘Hartnett deserted the Trace, sir … He left it to ’em!’

  Shock at this, and hisses of anger, but Ol’ Boy smiled.

  ‘Fancy’s where?’

  ‘Ain’t seen it meself, sir. But it’s said the Fancy’s mobbed yet ’cross the S’town footbridge.’

  ‘And he has the Trace all locked down, am I right?’

  ‘Every las’ tenement in the Trace shut and bolted agin the Norrie assault since before first crack, sir. Fancy didn’t send a sinner out to meet ’em, sir.’

  ‘I see,’ said Ol’ Boy. ‘Looks like the Long Fella wants the Norrie mob to blow itself out.’

  ‘You’ve lamped it in one, Mr Mannion,’ said Big D. ‘He’s lullin’ ’em!’

  ‘At least that’s what we hope, Dom. You get a look on the families close up, child? It have the look of a mob that means business?’

  ‘Blackthorns. Hatchets. Hammers,’ said the child. ‘Dirks flashin’ and bricks being lobbed. They’s layin’ into anythin’ that moves Trace-side but not much does move, sir. Bar a few dogs an’ drunks, like.’

  ‘Ain’t it shockin’,’ said the innkeeper, ‘for this manner a caper to be goin’ on in Bohane an’ we oney three days to the birthday o’ the Sweet Baba Jay? What do be wrong with us at all?’

  ‘There are those, ma’am, who’ll say it carries in off that river …’ Big Dom mused.

  ‘Stow it!’ barked Ol’ Boy. ‘Go on, child.’

  ‘Cusack’s mob is makin’ shit o’ the Trace, sir. Smashin’ it up bad now. Startin’ fires in the squares.’

  ‘And they’re on the rant already, I suppose?’

  ‘An’ hard on it, sir. Suckin’ at carry-sacks o’ moscato and batterin’ the herb-pipes goodo. Gots some o’ their wenches down awready and havin’ a lash off the jiggy in plain view o’ the wynds.’

  ‘Oh they’ve got no class!’ cried Dom Gleeson.

  ‘Norries can’t even rent it,’ Ol’ Boy concurred.

  ‘Bohane sliced in twain,’ sighed the innkeeper, and she too was loving every minute of it.

  ‘An’ is Hartnett prepped, y’reckon?’

  Child paused for a slug of the Beast. Wee fecker had a tongue got for it so he had.

  ‘Is said it’s the man-chil’ Stanners is callin’ the Fancy to order.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Ol’ Boy.

  ‘No sign o’ Long Fella hissel’ just yet. Is said the ginge gots the Fancy about eighty strong and mobbed beneath the colours. Waitin’ on a whistle is all.’

  ‘They’re beneath the colours, they are?’

  ‘The purple and the black, sir.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Ol’ Boy, and as he felt the full horror of the day, he felt also the great pride of it.

  ‘Polis tactic?’ Big Dom enquired.

  ‘Cordon gone up every which way, sir. Everythin’ Trace-side o’ Dev’s a no-go zone.’

  ‘They’re trying to contain,’ said Big Dom. ‘Good luck to ’em with that.’

  ‘Could it spread to Nothin’?’ The innkeeper was fearful now.

  Ol’ Boy considered.

  ‘That’s a tricky call to make, ma’am. We know what Big Nothin’s like. Sympathies out here might switch with a lick of the hardwind. A lot of us got peoples in the Trace but a lot of us got peoples on the Rises too. My gut’s read? It won’t spread bogside till one or other of the mobs is suffering an’ suffering bad.’

  The runner-child had by now greatly recovered. He was placed on a stool by the fire and was coddled there. He was fed hot milk and further slugs of the Beast. Big Dom leaned in close and coaxed from the child some further background detail. There was great pride in the child at having witnessed the outbreak of a Bohane Feud. And the inn this winter’s day had suddenly about it a most festive and excited air.

  Ol’ Boy left the crowd to its gossiping and its chirruping and he took a quiet high stool in a snug. Was it wise, he wondered, for the Long Fella to allow the boy Stanners such a prominent role upfront of a massed Fancy?

  Big Dom, reading over his notes, came to join him.

  ‘Looks like y’picked a wise day for a spot check on yer Nothin’ bureau, D?’

  ‘I thank you again for the word, Mr Mannion.’

  They sat amid the flickers and turfsmoke and they let the situation hover before them a moment – picked at it silently. Then:

  ‘Way you readin’ the Hartnett tactic, Dom?’

  Fat newsman’s eyelashes fluttered.

  ‘Leavin’ the Wolfie-boy step out? Seems to me like he’s droppin’ a hint he’s set to move along, Mr Mannion.’

  ‘Droppin’ it for who?’

  ‘His lady wife?’

  ‘Could be you’re right, Dom.’

  ‘Maybe she wants him spendin’ more time above in the yard, y’check? Helpin’ with the rose garden.’

  ‘Or goin’ at a more respectable line o’ business. Of course, it must be hard to balance family life with the Fancy’s runnins. You’d have sympathy there.’

  ‘He don’t wan’ to be leavin’ any gaps on the home front …’

  ‘Indeed. But ain’t it weird, hah? That the Gant comin’ back might spell a lucky season for the Wolfie-boy.’

  ‘It is strange, Mr Mannion, what can bring change to a Fancy.’

  ‘A change to the city with it.’

  Thoughtful, the pair, as they considered love’s quiet but decisive manoeuvres, and how an entire city might be shaped by them, a fiefdom, a world. Ol’ Boy called another amber; Dom, a French brandy.

  Was the Wolfie-boy coming through, then?

  It is at times of the Bohane Feudin’, after all, when Bohane reps get made.

  18

  The Light That Never Goes Out

  Looky-here:

  The Gant Broderick, without a lick of sleep to his name in three weeks solid, walked the deserted streets of the New Town, in foulest December weather, and he aimed his hopeful toots for the Beauvista bluffs.

  From the Trace, distantly as he climbed, he heard the hollers and taunts of the Norrie fiends.

  Fancy, meantime, held to an S’town stand-off as it waited on the sure mo’ and the ’bino’s call.

  The Gant had spotted a gap sure enough.

  He was after an assault of the midwinter blues. Each sleepless night in the trailer’s cot had been an infinity. Each morning he had felt as if he had fought a war. The Bohane taint had lost no drag on him in all the years he’d been
gone. Violent thoughts reared up in his ham-faced noggin. It had been as much as he could do the night before not to throttle the little ginger cuss on the spot – spare him the wait for a sure fate ahead. But he had work to do, the Gant. There was a job agreed to, a price to be paid for his passage of return.

  He could not settle. The level of drooling lust was unspeakable. Nostalgia was off the fucking charts. He was calling out his daft thoughts to the four winds. He was in fierce debate, at all angles of the clock, with the very many versions of himself. He was flatulent, he was baggy-eyed, he was hoarse with emotion. And here he was, despite it all, presenting himself for love.

  Rum, Gant.

  Scaled the Beauvista ascent by ’n’ by and came to the more genteel Bohane – the austerity of the trees here along the grand terraces, their tangled limbs bared in winter and hazed in rainfall, this was unspeakably beautiful, and a tear trailed softly the Gant’s cheek. All the great turrets and chimneys leapt at the foul winter sky, and he knew where to head for, sure enough, because it wasn’t his first climb of the bluff this season.

  He had watched her in shade and silhouette; he had watched her the winter through, but from a distance.

  With a dart of his tongue he wet a thumb the width of a tab-box and he smoothed back the cow lick that fell onto his forehead always, but then he thought that maybe it might work to spark her memory of him, and that he should let it fall unchecked, boyishly. Then he chortled. He almost choked on the harsh comedy, at the teenage turns his mind was taking; he felt so young again. The Gant was the length of fifty and here he was in a moony love-flap.

  All the winter through he had prepared the first words he would speak to her. Rolled them out and weighted them. Offered them to the Big Nothin’ moon and the roaming puck goats. Tried to foresee the read she’d take on the words – tried to see them go in. Nights unending he had tried to gauge the meaning of her silence, her refusal to answer the letter. It signalled there was a fear in her, surely, a fear of what his return might mean, and that fear for the Gant spelt hope. Tricky the paths that a long love might follow, like the spiral-down twists of a raindrop on a windowpane.

  He came to their terrace. His belly swollen with fright, he was ill with nerves – it could all end right here and now – but as with death, you look away from the approach of a darkness, and he was at their door, and he knocked, and all the words he had prepared were in that instant lost, forgotten, gone, and he was reduced to a single word – almost at once she answered – and he said the word:

  ‘Macu.’

  19

  Logan and Fucker Meet the Sand-Pikeys

  Shortest day worsened as it went on and by threat of evening it was about as dreck as you’d get it in the creation. There in the black pit of December the rain came side-on and whipped its cold assaults. The hardwind was bossing about the place belligerent as a hoor’s broken-faced mother. There was an icy mist ghosting from the ocean that’d just about freeze the tongue solid in your gob. Logan Hartnett and Fucker Burke walked through the squalls and wallops of weather and they were largely oblivious to it being Bohane aborigines both.

  They went out the back end of Smoketown and made it onto the track that led to the dune system. Track was an ancient one. There was a time – it wasn’t today nor yesterday – when young folk walked down it to take the sea air, fly kites and get fluffy with their sweethearts. But long gone in Bohane the days of the kites, and Fucker turned to Logan, and he said:

  ‘The fuck we doin’ callin’ on them fuckin’ sand-pikes, H?’

  ‘The fuck we’re doing, Fucker,’ said Logan, ‘is we’re thinking on our fucking feet, check?’

  ‘Ah but the sand-pikeys, Mr H? In all fairness? There’s low an’ there’s fuckin’ low again, like.’

  Logan allowed the boy a dismal shrug. His calculations of the day a misread, he was in no mood to debate sand-pikey morals with the galoot Burke.

  ‘I know that you have high standards, Fucker,’ he said, ‘so I’ll explain the tactic again. What we’re dealing with is an eight-family descent from the Northside Rises. I said eight! We ain’t seen that many wall-bangers hop down the 98 Steps since back in the lost-time. But as many as they’ve got, they have the old flaw in them still. Just listen to ’em back there …’

  He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, and despite the howls of the weather, the Norrie aggravators could be heard to roister still in the Back Trace.

  ‘These young gentlemen, they’ve no sense of … restraint, Fucker. They think that we’ve fled and left it to them. They’re taking knee-tremblers in the wynds. They’re bothering booze and pipe like booze and pipe just been invented. Another hour or two of that and they’ll be more than a little sapped. As long as we’ve the numbers to match them, it’ll be a simple cleaning-out operation.’

  ‘Still, H … Sand-pikeys for back-up? Sand-pikeys allegianced to the Back Trace Fancy?’

  Logan stopped up short then; Fucker made the reck a note later.

  On a high dune above, in the gloom of dusk, a line of sand-pikeys had noiselessly appeared.

  Ye sketchin’?

  Sand-pikeys – so silent there in the thickening light.

  Now out on the Bohane peninsula, there were those who’d say your sand-pikey was just about the cutest devil of the lot. Say your sand-pikey had it made out there on the dunes, so hidden it was. Your sand-pikey was of the pavee kind but specific to the tip-end of the peninsula, a thin sliver of land out beyond Smoketown where a sequence of towering dunes is knit together with marram grass – great ropey chains of marram as thick again as the cables the sea rides on – and the dunes have a bad-luck air to them, by legend, but it was the sand-pikeys always that talked up the legend. Maybe they just wanted to keep the place to themselves.

  They stood a dozen strong on the high dune and with their braids and feathers and markings they had the look of strange birds indeed.

  ‘I’ll do the talking, Fucker,’ said Logan.

  And so at duskfall on the shortest day Logan Hartnett and Fucker Burke climbed the duneside and the line of pikeys stood and silently watched their approach and an orphan clutch of pine trees sang in the dark haze as hardwind careened off the crested dunes.

  Sand-pikeys wore armless jerkins year-round, their hair was braided thickly and dressed with magpie feathers, and their torsos were covered with ash markings – unreadable to all but their own kind. They were martyrs to the sweet herb and as noiseless and wary as the dune hares they had for neighbours and sometimes, in the hard times, for prey.

  ‘How’re we now?’ cried Logan Hartnett, cheerfully.

  Our sand-pikey brethren settled the dunes way back. They had a forge out there in which they made weaponry for their protection and for trade. They built also six-bar gates they sold to the farming fraternity: the Big Nothin’ fermoiri. They drank elderflower gin and married at fourteen years of age and enjoyed the maudlin scrape of a fiddle. They didn’t get mixed up in Feuds too often, but when they did?

  Was said there was no sight on the peninsula quite so fearsome as that of a sand-pikey at the business end of a scrap.

  Logan and Fucker were close enough to make out the faces now. Creased, typically, a sand-pikey’s features – this was from squinting out for generations into the dusty expanse of the dunes, and the decades of fine sand blown hard at them gave an odd, silvery sheen to the complexion, as though your sand-pikey was born of some distant planet altogether, a place made of different minerals and gases.

  No answer was made to Logan’s call but he could see the pikeys looked serene enough.

  It was known that the sand-pikeys in the evenings listened intently to the wind’s tune and divined what messages from Big Nothin’ it might contain. If you had e’er a drop of the pikey blood in you at all, it was Big Nothin’ was the spirit-home, was the bog-maternal, check? The sand-pikeys also read messages in the sky at night – Word was delivered to them in the arrangement of the stars. Logan knew that if he was to secure their aid this eve
ning, much would depend on what they were hearing in the wind and reading in the sky. This was the level of it when you were dealing with the sand-pikey kind.

  Logan and Fucker stalled a few yards from the pikey line.

  ‘Smile, Fucker!’

  Fucker pasted what he could of a grin across his chops and the hardwind dipped and there was momentarily an awful silence and a grey hare passed along a dune crest down the way and rose on its hind legs and was frozen still as it watched the men and the mystique of the dunes was stored, somehow, in the stillness of its stringy frame.

  Your sand-pikey, it so happens, was given also to superstitious thinking about the significance of the grey hare – but that is a bag of sticks we are as well keeping for another, less trying day.

  ‘That’s not a bad evening at all!’ called Logan Hartnett.

  Was there a leader among the sand-pikeys? There was – it was the fattish lad that styled himself Prince Tubby.

  He stepped out now from the pikey line and he was a big cuss of a young fella for sure. He was the same width across the shoulders as a dray-horse would be. Was known he kept eight wives, aged fourteen to forty-six, and they were all lookers, one as black-eyed and sharp-boned as the next, and three of ’em sisters, and a head count of twenty-two bairns had thus far been bred off them. Twas as if Prince Tubby was out to explode the sand-pikey population with just the lash of his own member.

  He eyeballed Logan and Fucker.

  He silently chuckled.

  He went blank-faced, vague, mystic.

  ‘I-and-I’s de Far-Eye,’ he said.

  Prince Tubby wore his braids waist-length and as thick as the marram and his filthy red velvet lowriders were tucked into leather boots and up top he had his jerkin open across a broad, bare chest on which was tattooed with Indian ink an evil eye.

  ‘Fuck’s he sayin’, H?’ said Fucker.

  ‘It’s just their old cant,’ said Logan. ‘Hush, child.’

  Prince Tubby came down to Logan and Fucker, side-footing the duneside neatly in the sand-pikey style, and close up he had the look of a full-blown howler.