by Kevin Barry
‘Tis the ’bino I’s talkin’ at, tis?’
‘Logan Hartnett, Prince. And this is my boy Fucker Burke.’
The sand-pikey pulled a slow hand through his braids and the hand he bunched into a fist then and bumped it sardonically with Logan’s.
‘Awrigh’?’ said Fucker.
The Prince smiled at him benignly and Fucker dipped his eyes. Could a pikey tell at a glance, he wondered, if there was pikey blood in you yourself, like? The Prince signalled to his ragged crew behind that they could remain at ease and he gently regarded Logan and he raised his eyes in polite questioning.
‘Maybe a quiet word we’d have?’ said Logan.
‘T’ain’t needed, ’bino.’
‘Oh?’
‘I-and-I’s de Far-Eye.’
‘You were saying.’
‘Far-Eye cop a reck at de Bohane mash-up.’
‘And what are you making of it, Prince?’
Prince Tubby shook his head in sadness.
‘I-and-I gots the feelin’ de ’bino facin’ a manky shake o’ uptown aggravators.’
‘You’re speaking the truth, Prince.’
‘I-and-I don’t need tellin it’s truth he speak,’ Tubby softly corrected. ‘All that come from de I-and-I is truth and Baba-sent. I-and-I’s de Far-Eye.’
Logan placated:
‘My visit to you is no surprise then?’
‘T’aint, ’bino. An’ dere’s a price I can name an’ all, y’check me?’
They trailed down to the pikey camp. Women ’n’ childer scurried forth from the darkness, wide-eyed, to watch: there were strangers on the dunes. Of course, sand-pikey children were an odd breed – they didn’t walk till they were seven years of age but were quick as lizards on the four-hoof crawl, and they came about the Fancy pair, and made hissing noises. Fucker, frankly, was a little shook, and all the more so when he heard a strange rattling, a kind of keening nearby.
‘What’s it, H?’
‘Lurcher cages.’
‘Do they really exis—’
‘Stow it, Fucker!’
They came to the bonfire in the central pit of the sand-pikey camp, and sharp-pointed posts ’bout yea high, maybe ten foot tall, were arranged to a ritual design around the fire, and atop each post a scalp was nailed.
Sand-pikey old-timers looked up from their haunches by the bonna, and passed wee bottles of the Beast around, and there was a heady aroma of bushweed, and some old cove hollered a ballad of the pikey lost-time, and the surging throb of the forge was palpable nearby.
Logan maintained as best he could; Fucker kept his eyes down.
‘Said you’ve a price in mind, Prince T?’
The sand-pikey menfolk all took to crouching by the fire, all went to the haunches, and Logan and Fucker joined them, and Prince Tubby for a while whispered.
Sand-pikeys didn’t come out of camp all that often. Sure, they might head off for a time, after a few palominos, perhaps, or for a rendezvous with some mustachioed diesel seller in Clare or Galway, but they would be back again to the dunes, soon enough, with fresh scars, a good bake on them, and more bleak tales for the telling. And more often than not with new scalps for the posts. They were not to be crossed in business, and the Long Fella knew it, and so he nodded in agreement as Prince Tubby named his price.
It was spat on and shook.
And so it was that less than a half-hour later, the runnings of life on the Bohane streets were set to a different and yet stranger course. For their willingness to help clear the Back Trace of Norrie aggravators, Logan had sworn to the sand-pikeys a third of a share in the Smoketown trade and a role in its daily management.
Fucker Burke could not take his jaws from the ground.
‘Pikeys, H! With a third the business o’ Smoketown?’
‘Just shut your fucking pipehole, Fucker, please!’
A demon vision was to be seen come nightfall. From atop the high dunes, led by Prince Tubby, came a line four-dozen strong of sand-pikeys, and they were armed for Feudin’.
Carried hatchets and iron bars and lengths of ancient fender and blackthorn sticks soaked in brine for the hardness and bricks and shkelps and rocks and hammers and screwdrivers and they carried these items with a lovely … insouciance.
Fucker Burke and Logan Hartnett kept to the rear of the line.
Fucker carried a forlorn and puzzled air.
Logan carried a length of rope.
20
Beauvista Interior
The entire structure of the old manse had been scooped out to leave a vast and sombre space. From the limestone flags to the wooded vault of the ceiling was maybe a forty-foot climb along the rendered walls. The leaded windows were thin and pointed, stern as church, and of a dark, opaque glass. A mezzanine platform circled the room entirely, two-thirds of the way up, and it was reached by a pair of spiral stairways, set opposed to each other across the room, and the entire platform was lined with clothes rails, hundreds of them in dizzying rows around the circumference of the room, his ’n’ hers, and the rails were hung with all the colours – some seasons gaudy, some muted – of capricious fashion. Peninsula symbols marked the hangings that were tied to the oak beams of the ceiling. A great length of chimney breast ascended from a central hearth to the high vault of the room. A blaze of Nothin’ turf lengths burned in the hearth space and the flickers danced on Macu, who sat by the hearth, on a low settle, with her legs crossed, her slenderness unchanged, and her age showing.
Macu wore:
A pair of suede capri pants dyed to a shade approaching the dull radiance of turmeric, a ribbed black top of sheer silk that hugged her lithe frame, a wrap of golden fur cut from an Iberian lynx, an expression of wry bemusement about the eyes, and about the mouth an expression unreadable.
The room was lit, at Gothical intervals, by candelabras mounted agin the buff render of the walls on cast-iron brackets.
Gant’s eye was drawn morbidly to the bed space. It was tucked away in a nook down back, and was heaped with furs and rugs, and there was a headboard cut from driftwood.
Nausea sent a spike to his throat.
A single, enormous photograph was framed above the hearth – it was as outsized as its subject: a great Irish wolfhound of doleful mien.
The Gant said:
‘Who’s the dog?’
Macu regarded him evenly.
‘Why’re you back, G?’
He took to a settle opposing her by the hearth – he took to it before his legs gave out. He could hold her glance for just a moment at a time. Every gesture, every piece of weather that passed across her face was pain to him. He saw clearly now the age that had crept on. He saw the faint crowlines and the puckering that would tighten and dry out as the dreck seasons passed.
‘I can’t answer you,’ he said.
She had opened the door as to one expected. She stood aside and let him enter the great vault of room. He felt conscious of his every movement. He felt nineteen again, and he tried not to carry himself like a Big Nothin’ gombeen.
‘Dog’s Alfie,’ she said. ‘Was Alfie. Got a slap of an El train.’
‘Logan’s?’
‘Ours.’
‘Handsome.’
‘An’ stupid.’
‘Often the way those’d go together, Macu.’
The flicker of his humour he could see was a reassurance to her. But careful, Gant, he told himself, don’t go tossing out the wiseacre lines now; you don’t need to impress.
‘Look at you,’ she said.
‘I know,’ he said.
‘Where’ve you been, Gant?’
There was no quick answer to that. Except to say he had been to the darkest caverns, where ogres loomed.
‘Been away over,’ he said.
‘I know that,’ she said. ‘We’d have …’
The regal ‘we’.
‘ … got word the odd time.’
He rubbed his hands together to distract them from trembling. Every word that spil
led from her spun him back to the lost-time. It was better if he didn’t look at her – better to let the dream persist.
‘I moved around a lot,’ he said.
‘No settling in those bones.’ She was sly here. ‘A rez boy born true.’
He was sly right back.
‘Whiff o’ the campsmoke to a lotta blood ’round this place, Mac.’
The pale boy Logan had not long been in the Fancy’s ranks. He was tall, he was skinny, he was stylish. Vicious as a mink and cute in the noggin also. What you did, in the Fancy, with one you were afraid of? You kept him close, and so it was that Logan became a lieutenant for the Broderick Fancy. The Gant was wary of him and he set him the trickier errands. Maybe hoped he didn’t come back from them, maybe he had designed it just … Ah but talk to her, Gant, don’t let her see you travelling back. Don’t let her see the weakness of that.
‘See you got scary boys about the Trace?’
‘Norrie trash,’ she said.
All of the feuds in Bohane go way back, the Gant thought, as he sat there on the settle and dried out in the warm fug. Such a childish town.
He recalled the lad who was tarred and feathered on the dockside one night by Norries – it was the Gant found him, writhing in the black goo, a nightmare bird he had the look of. The lad belonged to the Gant and there was vengeance required. It was callow Logan was sent to take it. After the vengeance he took, there was even Fancy boys could not look him in the eye.
‘You know I wrote you.’
‘You know that I got it.’
‘Not just that letter, Macu. Hundreds of ’em. Decades of ’em, girl. I never did send ’em though.’
Logan was quiet-spoken.
Logan didn’t parade no Fancy-boy machismo.
Logan was … cooler.
‘I’ve seen him about the place,’ he told her.
‘Guessed you’d been hauntin’ the shadows, G,’ she said. ‘You were always handy at stayin’ hid … for a big unit.’
‘It’s a knack,’ he said. ‘He doesn’t look happy.’
‘Who is? In fuckin’ Bohane … You think I am?’
The dark girl he had known resurfaced, for an instant, in her glance but he knew now – he saw it with migraine intensity – that their time was gone.
Logan had dressed a little differently to the rest. It would be the flourish of a neck scarf maybe. Or a different cut to the boot. If everyone else was wearing a square toecap, nothing would do Logan Hartnett only to arrive into the Aliados in a winklepicker, and the sly puss on. The other Fancy boys would look at him, study him, see what was coming next. The Gant had the finest threads himself, of course, but he couldn’t help feeling he wore ’em like a turf-cutter.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t send you word,’ she said. ‘But what was I suppose’ to say?’
He remembered the way she had snagged on Logan. He could see it happening – right there in the Café Aliados. Logan down back of the bar, by the jukebox, summoning up a slow-mover of a calypso tune. He’d kick at the corner with his ’picker, a deft little toe-dink to take the life out of a maggot. Soon as they were all wearing winklepickers, Logan Harnett would be dusting off the square toecaps.
Nights, the Gant would talk to Macu about Logan. He sensed the double-feeling in her when he talked. The Gant could hide nothing from his own face. He knew that Logan would be meaner to her.
‘Macu, I don’t need to …’
He could not find the words. The Gant flailed in the strange and sombre room. She looked at him and held the look and smiled. She was beautiful but forty-three.
‘No taking it back, is there?’ he said.
All the years he had been gone, he had remembered their talks word for word:
‘You get so long in this place and no more. Maybe it’s time we took to the High Boreen, girl?’
He could not stay in the city without falling to its taint. Logan would never leave, and Macu, too, was Bohane to the bone. Macu was a stayer.
‘I asked you, remember?’ He came back to the Beauvista hearth. ‘I asked you to come with me.’
‘Ah, Gant, please …’
‘I knew that you wouldn’t.’
She edged forward on her settle. She clasped her hands and held them a moment to her mouth. She spoke to him now very gently.
‘Gant,’ she said, ‘we went out together for three weeks.’
Spike of nausea.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know that’s all it was.’
‘Oh why’re you here, G?’
The firelight traced out the lines of her aged skin. She was no longer what he needed or wanted. Reality infected him with its sourness and truth. A new course swiftly presented; it had its own sweet and vengeful logic.
‘I’ll tell you exactly why I’m here,’ he said.
21
Feud
The Hartnett Fancy was mobbed beneath its colours out the Smoketown dune end. It was first-dark of the longest night. The Fancy was edgy. The hot charge of adrenalin rushed, mitts were flexed, knuckles cracked, jaws clenched, and the ranked banners in the wind’s assault made an ominous rattling. The purple and black of the banners had an ecclesiastical look, neo-Romish, and upon the banners were daubed the symbols and the slogan of the Back Trace Fancy:
Symbols –
A puck goat’s head.
A scimitar dirk.
A dog-star moon.
Slogan –
Truth Or Vengeance
S’town was agog, and freaky-eyed hoors amped on Feud-juice shrieked their XXX-rated tributes to the Fancy boys from the high windows.
Fancy boys waved back to the hoors and attempted a semblance, at least, of blithe spirit.
Among the Fancy – as was remarked, with awe and suspicion, in the S’town grogpits and herb-parlours – the fearsome sand-pikeys now were mingled.
Sand-pikeys had about them the calmest of airs. They shook out their limbs, and performed calisthenic stretches, and tossed their hatchets for show in the air, and caught ’em again behind their backs, and filled repeatedly their neckpipes with bead-sized nodges of blackest hashish, and sucked deep on the fill – these were the Dreadlock Assassins of the dune system.
Fancy regulars and sand-pikey buy-ins were of a number, combined, that’d be a match, but just about, for the eight families of Norrie aggravators roisterin’ cross-river in the Bohane Trace.
Logan Hartnett suavely walked the ranks and he offered his smiles and his whispers of encouragement. There was confidence to be read in the sly pursing of his lips, and atop a most elegant cut of an Eyetie suit he wore, ceremonially, an oyster-grey top hat.
Mothers and sisters and lovers of the Fancy boys meantime passed through the mob, shedding tears and Sweet Baba Jay medals as they went. The medals were for protection.
Fucker Burke was bouncing about as though on springs, and he hissed his encouragement to the Fancy, and he kept on an extendable battle leash his Alsatian love, Angie, who pranced, and drooled, and whose eye-gleam gave back the glow of December moon. Fucker was bare-armed beneath a denim waistcoat and wore his finest brass-toed bovvers and he felt the racing currents of pride, emotion, fear. Angie had been kept without a feed for three days.
Jenni Ching pinballed about the assembled mob and screamed crazy Mandarin curses. Jenni Ching carried a spike ball on a chain and swung it above her head. She wore an all-in-one black nylon jumpsuit, so tightly fitted it might have been applied with a spray-can, and she smoked a black cheroot to match it, and her mouth was a hard slash of crimson lippy.
Wolfie Stanners, however, was widely acknowledged to have taken the prize. Wolfie was dressed to kill in an electric-blue ska suit and white vinyl brothel-creepers with steel toecaps inlaid. Four shkelps were readied on a custom-made cross-belt. He danced along the ranks of the Fancy, and he eyeballed each of the Fancy boys in turn, and he gestured to the Back Trace beyond, where the Norrie aggravators could be heard to howl their taunts and curses.
‘Ye takin’ that?’ Wolf
ie hissed. ‘I said ye gonna fuckin’ well take that, like?’
Logan approached the boy then, and he embraced him, and he whispered to him; Wolfie aye-ayed.
Yes and it was Wolfie that blew a short, three-noted whistle then, and a great wealth of feeling settled that moment on the Fancy.
The whistle was a plain melody that rose once and then fell, that was melancholy, that was sourced from the lost-time in Bohane, that had a special power to it – a power that I cannot even begin to explain to those of you unfortunate enough not to come from this place – and it was answered after a silence had for a moment held, it was answered in sweet, sad sequence by the Fancy, and by this plain music they swore allegiance to the Back Trace, and as one they moved to reclaim it.
Man – even the sand-pikeys were zoned on the mo’.
And as the mob marched out across the S’town streets, the whistled melody was taken up as a general tune, and it carried across the footbridge, and in the wynds and alleyways of the Back Trace the uptown aggravators knew their assault was not to go unanswered.
That drained the blood from the bastards’ faces sure enough.
Trace families barricaded in their tenement homes for the length of the assault heard also the Fancy’s whistles, and they rushed to their rooftops, and their breaths caught with pride as yonder across the Bohane river they saw the hoisted banners come steadily closer – the purple and the black – and the night had cleared, as though on cue, and all of cruel heaven’s cold stars were flung gaily about.
Logan Hartnett, kingly outlaw, arranged himself towards the rear of the marching Fancy. The Eyetie suit was sharp enough to slice an eyeball open, the top hat rakishly set, and he was unencumbered by weapons save for that same coil of rope wrapped loosely about his shoulder. Hard not to be floored by the nerveless elegance of that slender old dog.
Fancy made its way onto the footbridge and it crossed onto the Bohane front and the ranks of hoss polis clustered along the dockside kept their mounts and their backs discreetly turned. Looked in the opposite direction, the polis. As though it was the pretty streets of the New Town where the Feud was to be played.
Fucker and Jenni and Wolfie pelted up and down between the advancing lines of the Fancy and motivated the fighters. Wolfie winked for Jenni as they passed, and he blew her a kiss, and he hit a high-hand salute with Fucker.