by Kevin Barry
‘What was the bar the Vindicator lads would drink in? The printers?’
‘You mean the place …’
‘Down off …’
‘Off …’
‘Half Moon Street?’
‘Precisely so … You’re talking about the Llama, aren’t you?’
‘No I am not. I remember the Llama. A filthy place.’
‘Filthy. A honk out of it.’
‘A honk that’d knock you. But that wasn’t the printers’ bar … Was it Corbett’s I’m thinkin’ of?’
‘Corbett’s was polis always … The polis frats all drank there, goin’ way, waaay back …’
Yes. A dim-lit saloon with pictures of old sergeants on the walls. Touts sneaking out of it late on – looking left, then right, a swivel of their Judas eyes. A jukebox loaded with sentimental Irish ballads (‘Mother McCree’, ‘Four Green Fields’, ‘The Goat Broke Loose’) and in the lounge section a few sanctioned hoors peddling herb and dream up top of their tricks.
‘Corbett’s was polis, you’re right.’
‘Polis had more to them at that time.’
‘They did. And were rotten on account o’ the heft they had.’
‘Rotten … And do you remember at all Silly Herbert the loolah?’
‘Ah poor Silly! I do.’
The Gant all but weeping then.
‘A desperate masturbator!’
‘Will anyone ever forgot the time he hauled it out in the middle of the 98er Square?’
‘Of a Christmas Eve?’
‘An’ he chokin’ the squirrel?’
Christmas Eve, and poor Silly, the lunatic, smashed on sherry given as a present by the Devotional Brigade, with his hideously long member in his hand, and he lying in the middle of the square, with his kecks around his ankles, and the old Trace crones blessing themselves as they passed by, with fresh-plucked fowl and bags of Brussels sprouts under their oxters, and trying to keep straight faces on them, and failing.
‘Silly came to a bad end. Of course they do, up in that place they had him.’
‘And there was Candy, do you remember Candy?’
‘Candy Stanners!’
‘I dunno if there was ever a finer dip-pocket on Dev.’
‘Not a one then or since fit to lace her boots.’
‘Of course she’d a bad end as well.’
‘That’s the Back Trace for you.’
‘Oh that’s the Trace.’
*
Wolfie for a share of quiet travelled the Back Trace rooftops. He scaled the Trace by the rickety Zs of its rusting fire escapes. He turned at the landing of each flight, and climbed again with a jolting grab on the handrail, and the packed wynds faded to a grey-voiced murmuring below – his stomper boots bamped the oxide-red steps.
Tenements were so densely packed you could make it across the Trace without ever once setting foot on the ground. It just took a leap here and there, that was all, above the green voids of the wynds.
He looked out into the Murk, and he remembered Candy, the softness of her touch. He felt the fear reach deep into his bones now – he no longer had the galoot beside him.
Wolfie riffed on a double-tip:
He would take the Far-Eye – he had shamed his clutch, and Jenni came first. And then he would take vengeance for Fucker – the ’bino would suffer.
Wolfie on the rooftops felt for the shkelp, and he wielded it for heft and balance in his palm, and he twirled it, and flicked it, and he caught it.
Night would come quickly.
*
And Blind Nora in the bordello sang:
‘Will there be any stars, an-y stars in my crown,
When at evenin’ the sun go-eth down …’
*
Ol’ Boy Mannion left Blind Nora’s, and he skulked through the wynds, and he watched the revel thicken in the Trace, and he bought a falafel from a cart in the 98er Square.
Spat the first bite and tossed the deep-fried mulch back at the cart’s keeper.
‘Wouldn’t feed it to a fuckin’ cat,’ he said.
Hit for the dockside, and he had a particular heaviness on him – an odd feeling. Name it fear. Checked his timepiece, and he made for the livestock yards, as the Fair Day’s late bidding rose to a great and rhythmical chant in the near distance. It was out back of the yards that Ol’ Boy rendezvoused with the mute child.
Child was a scruffy wee thing off the far reaches of Nothin’, about knee-high to a grasshopper, with a snotty face on, and that strange, impenetrable glaze you’d get always on a bog-plain no-speak.
Of course, Big Nothin’ has always been known for its high incidence of mutes. You would so often see those wordless children out there, roaming the wastes, forming abstract shapes on their lips, and squealing mournfully into the hardwind.
Now the mute eyed Mannion and he was brazen and wilful.
‘Bin the hardchaw gimmick,’ said Ol’ Boy. ‘Where’s the cratur?’
Mute child flapped an arm and directed Ol’ Boy towards a dark corner of the stock sheds. There the most regal puck was tethered.
‘How we now?’ said Ol’ Boy.
The goat acknowledged him with a brief lowering of its gaze. The most important thing for an August Fair puck was that it had a gnarled, ancient look to it. It needed that whiskery Nothin’ gravitas.
‘You’ve picked a good ’un here, child,’ said Ol’ Boy.
A squeal from the mute sounded and dogs barked distant in the Bohane Trace. Ol’ Boy reached for the inside pocket of his jacket and he took out a brick of compressed herb and he passed it to the child and the mute hungrily sniffed it and again squealed.
‘Ah but hush, would you?’ said Ol’ Boy.
The mute child grinned. Ol’ Boy raised the back of his hand as though for a smack but the mute brazened him and spat on the ground. Child knelt by the puck then and put his wordless lips to its ear and moaned softly – very odd, a type of keening – and the puck flickered its gaze in response, and turned its head to regard Ol’ Boy with a most intelligent disdain.
‘Don’ mind that auld Nothin’ bollocks,’ said Ol’ Boy but he was unnerved.
Was said always on Nothin’ our mutes had the gift o’ goatspeak.
The mute rose then and he went out through the yards and on the lightest of feet vaulted the steel gates. These mutes could have a very superior air to them betimes. Ol’ Boy took the goat’s tether and the animal tensed against his touch.
‘Hup now,’ said Ol’ Boy.
He dragged the puck through the sheds and made for the dockside where the Fair’s revels were by degrees supplanting the business of the day.
Samba blasted; the Merries roiled.
The puck goat would tonight be raised on a platform mounted on tall stilts and carried through the city. The puck was symbol and spirit of the place and as the Bohanians marked the goat’s passing, they would, as per tradition, beat slowly at the air with switches of hazel to make a whooshed and haunting music.
No argument: it is a thin enough layer of civilisation we have laid over us out in Bohane.
*
As Fair descended into evening, a pathway opened for Logan through the manic throng. The pasted faces of the drunks briefly sobered as they made a reck on the pale tall figure passing by:
Long Fella’s abroad.
Albino’s abroad.
Hartnett … Ye sketchin’?
Screams and chants pierced the Trace-deep night. Fornication was not entirely kept to the shadows – fiends and tushies were wearing the gobs off each other in every doorway of the wynds. They dry-humped in a slow, rhythmical grind to the Trojan dub plates that blasted from the rooftop sound systems. The Murk of Bohane sat in unexcitable billows of fallen cloud that obscured the entries and closes, and the city’s many-coloured mobs passed this way and that; the motion on the streets was as a single, great rolling, and bottles were smashed, and go-boy taunts were hollered, and dream tents were huckstered by bearded touts with crackly loudhailers, an
d hysterically devout Norries screamed the Word of the SBJ, and the Ten-Light Ebonettes did the Three-B with skipropes, and the wilding girls snogged each other viciously, and the whole great raucous night of the 13th drew in around us.
Drumbeats sounded everywhere in the city – timpanis and tom-toms, snares and tenors, lambegs, bodhrans, dustbin lids.
Logan Hartnett took a turn onto De Valera Street. He smiled like a wry old bishop as he passed along, as though humorously outraged by all that he saw. He was not a man, however, to let a carnival spirit take hold inside – he was too gaunt and graceful for that.
And Fair night made him wistful always – would he see another one?
*
At the Capricorn Bar:
‘And of course there was the dunes you’d saunter off to of a fine evening? Summer.’
‘If you had a girleen in tow, a kite to fly.’
‘A roll in the dunes takes the badness out of a young fella.’
‘What puts it there, Gant?’
‘Well now …’
‘Wasn’t even pikey on the dunes in those days.’
‘Pikeys there now sure enough.’
‘Those days a pikey knew his place. Made pegs out on the reservation. Raised a dozen bairn or so. Played a bit o’ fiddle music and had a scrap at a weddin’. Strange now to see a shake of ’em in S’town?’
‘You remember, of course, when Atta “The Turk” Foley had the poolhall down the dune end?’
‘Turk’s … I do.’
‘All the young crowd.’
‘All the girls, all the boys. Summer evenings and the blinds drawn against the sun. An’ remember you’d get the holy marchers coming down through Smoketown? All the old dears with their tongues hanging out for Baba-love?’
‘Patterns o’ Devotion being made …’
White-face preachers in ankle-length soutanes swinging incense on the wharfside cobbles. The women shaking out holy water from Jay-shaped plastic bottles as their headscarves were whipped about by random assaults of hardwind, as though it was the devil himself sprang it from Nothin’.
‘I remember,’ said the Gant, ‘the way on the night of August Fair we’d burn whitethorn branches at the bonnas all along the Rises …’
‘ … and the way we’d be collecting a month for the bonnas and stashing the wood.’
‘You’d have gangs of young fellas going around stealing from each other’s woodpiles. Got good and vicious now, recall?’
‘Oh I do.’
‘Rucks bustin’ out on the 98 Steps.’
‘Heavenly times, Gant.’
‘Was it Sergeant Taafe had the polis that time?’
‘One of the greatest fucking maggots that ever crawled into this town off the Big Nothin’ plain. Where was it Taafes were from outside, G?’
‘Taafes were this near side o’ Nothin’ Mountain. Skinned goats for a trade his people.’
‘Was a price paid for goat pelt that time.’
‘A fine price. But that’s all gone now.’
‘All gone.’
‘Lots of it gone.’
‘Lots of it.’
‘Oh we’re all getting old now.’
‘Old, yes.’
‘Oh, old.’
‘Old!’
‘Oh.’
The Gant slid from his stool at the Capricorn Bar and stumbled to a corner and vomited.
*
A twist and a turn and a feint, then a twist and a left turn, and the wynds gave onto wynds, and deep in the heart of the Bohane Trace, at its still calm centre, as the Fair roistered distantly about the edges, a set of high tenement doors opened – heavy wooden doors carved with renditions of hares, sprites, rooks – and Macu emerged.
Macu wore:
A fitted knee-length dress of lynxskin, a fox stole, a ritual eyepaint that drew flames of crimson from the corners of her eyes, and a slash of purple lippy.
Macu set to walking.
A twist and a turn, a feint. A twist and a turn, and the pathways of her thoughts were intricate as the Trace, and as indeterminate. He would be waiting at midnight in the Café Aliados. She did not yet know if she would go to him there.
*
The notables of Bohane congregated on the plaza outside the Yella Hall. It was the moment for the crowning of the puck – the most famous moment of the Bohane year – and all the usual faces were in evidence: the draper de Bromhead, the sawbones Fitzsimmons, the Protestant Alderton. All were growing old and hideous together. A movement, then, from the dockside, and all heads turned, and cheers were raised as Ol’ Boy Mannion led his regal puck onto the plaza, and the hunchback, Balthazar Mary Grimes, captured the moment for the Vindicator with a shriek of blue flash.
The gulls squalled – mmwwaaoorrk! – and rain came in warm drifts from the August sea, and a fat merchant of the city stood on a crate to drone the night’s courtesies.
‘An’ as always on this happy occasion we remember our fallen and our dead and aren’t we so lucky and Baba-blessed to be suckin’ yet at the air o’ Bohane city and didn’t the likes a us …’
There was more interest in the goat. The crowd gathered around Ol’ Boy, the puck was expertly inspected, and compliments were passed on the fine bearing of the creature.
‘ … an’ this majestic beast afore us now has in the great tradition of August Fair been taken from the gorsey wilds o’ Big Nothin’ by a member o’ the Mannion family and here beneath this glorious Murk that is our curse and favour let it be said that …’
Four stout sons of the city – slaughterhouse boys – stepped forward as the puck was tethered to its platform on the tall stilts. The creature was raised slowly into the night sky, and great applause broke out, and whoops and hollers and roars, and the procession set off, in medieval splendour, towards the snakebend roll of De Valera Street.
Puck didn’t bat an eyelid.
*
Wolfie Stanners crossed into the S’town night and he met with the Gypo Lenihan and he was led by a tangled course down past the dune end’s pikey watches.
They ghosted through the night, the pair, and went unseen.
Came at length to a particular alleyway and the Gypo arranged the boy carefully in its shadows.
‘Wait here, Wolf. It’s where he come up for air from the grindbar yonder, y’heed?’
‘You’re sure?’
‘I’m sure.’
Wolfie was left alone, and waited, and he was bare-chested against the hot Murk as it came down freely now as a weird, greenish rain.
Felt for the bone handle of his shkelp, its heft.
*
Long Fella threw a sconce along the dockside. The judder of the hook-up generators was a memory jolt from adolescence. Diesel tang was sharp memory of the lost-time. The youth of Bohane balled through the Merries. The youth were in rut heat; for Logan, it was a careful parade through the fun.
He smiled for the old familiars of the town. The smiles he took back were as scared and respectful as always but they were weighted with emotion, too. Smiles were as though to say …
We’ve made it, ’bino, we’ve made it to August Fair again.
Since he was a child, Logan Hartnett had not missed a turn around the Merries on the night of Bohane Fair. The sights of it never changed:
Sweatin’ lunks of spud-ater lads in off Nothin’ took turns to slap the hammer at the test-your-strength meter.
Chinkee old-timers threw five-bob notes in each other’s faces at the dog fight.
Face-offs erupted between fiends for the affections of particular tushies, the shrieked challenges as old as time in Bohane:
‘Said c’mon!’
‘Mon way out of it so!’
‘Said c’mon so!’
‘Mon!’
Dreary-voiced yodellers up on Tangier orange crates howled death ballads. Knots of SBJ devotees from the Norrie towers knelt on the stones and joined hands to pray against the evil of the Bohane frolics but they were as much a part of them as everyone else
. The lights of the Merries were a gaiety against the darkness that had descended over the Bohane front. The whirligigs turned young lovers through the air, and the screams of the girls spiralled, wrapped around, twisted.
A strolling brass band played lost-time waltzes.
A pikey rez sound system set up on the back of a horse cart spun rocksteady plates.
A transex diva hollered Milano arias from atop a bollard.
At the rodeo an eight-year-old Nothin’ child stayed the course and rode an epileptic Connemara pony into the dirt and great hollers of approval rose – the kid had a future.
And the girls’ screams twisted, turned in the air.
Bets were hollered, notes counted, palms spat on. There were fire-eaters from Faro, sword-swallowers from Samoa, jugglers from Galway. Pikey grannies read palms, stars, windsong.
Shots of primo Beast were offered at a fair price by the infamous retard brothers from the Nothin’ massif and the polis turned a blind eye having made off with a couple of crates theyselves.
There were stabbings, molestings, stompings.
Bohane city rose up on the spiral of the girls’ screams as they twisted in the air.
And Logan came upon the boy Cantillon then. He sat alone on the harbour wall – the fishmonger’s orphan, his glands swollen with quiet rage. He was lit gaudily by the lights of the revel and he looked at Logan as if he knew him from somewhere but could not quite place him.
The smile the boy gave was faint and murderous.
Logan raised an eyebrow in soft questioning but it was not answered. He approached but the boy hopped from the wall, and walked a little ways ahead, through the Merries’ crowd, and he took the same stride as Logan, precisely, with his hands clasped behind his back – this was a mockery.
He turned once and winked, the boy Cantillon, and then he disappeared into the throng.
‘Mon so!’
‘Said c’mon way out of it so!’
‘Said c’mon!’
*
And Blind Nora gave voice again to her old song:
‘That bright stars may be mine in the glorious day
When His praise like the sea billow rolls …’
*
The Gant walked off his nausea but not his bitterness. He settled into a circuit of the Trace and De Valera Street, a ritual circling of the old city, and all the while he watched for her. He saw her slip into the face of every young tush he passed by, and the drums of Bohane city carried a rhythm and a message both.