by Kevin Barry
‘Time o’ your choosin’, Cuse. All the same t’us, like.’
They walked again the pocked avenues of the Rises. There was a heat up in them now. There was a great thrumming on the air. There was going to be a Feud the size of which Bohane city hadn’t seen in fucking yonks, y’sketchin’?
15
Black Crab Soup
The Ho Pee Ching Oh-Kay Koffee Shoppe, a whistle after midnight, and three steaming bowls of black crab soup were carried from the back kitchen by a wordless, scowling Ching uncle.
These were set with grave ceremony before:
– Mr Logan Hartnett, aka the Albino, aka the Long Fella, and he was sat there, breezing on the moment, and with a toothpick he worked lumps of cashew from the gaps between his yellow teeth. He was all got up in a wowser of a straight-cut grey vinyl suit – its sheen catching the Ho Pee’s fairy-light glow – and there was a matching grey vinyl mackintosh laid over the back of his chair. Dapper motherfucker.
– Miss Jenni Ching, boss-lady of the Ho Pee ever since her black-mooded momma had tossed her small demented bones into the Bohane river (just a quick headlong dash from the caff), on account of dog-fight debts, some said, or because of a persistent strain of Ching family madness, according to others, and Jenni regarded the fatty, creamy soup her uncle offered with an as-if glare – on my hips? – and she pushed it aside. She was in a white leather jumpsuit up top of hoss-polis zippered boots, with her fine hair let down, and her hair was streaked and worn this season in a blunt-cut fringe that she blew aside with regular, rhythmic spouts of tabsmoke.
– Mrs Macu Hartnett, née Simhao, born to the Café Aliados, the queen of the Back Trace Fancy, with any amount of a cashmere jersey dress worn in a clingy fit beneath a thin crinolene duster coat (cream) that didn’t cost her tuppence ha’penny in whatever high-faluting New Town boutique she scored it in, and she was eyeballing Jenni hard, and she was eyeballing Logan hard, and she was thinking: I’m forty-fuckin’-three and I’m sat around talkin’ fuckin’ gang fights?
‘Many families Cuse gonna send down up top o’ his own?’ said Jenni.
‘I’m guessing three tops,’ said Logan. ‘He’ll have the McGroartys, sure enough. McGroartys are born latchiko. McGroartys would hop into a Feud on account of two flies fucking. He’ll have the Lenanes also. That’s a cert, coz the Lenanes can be bought, the Lenanes have always been bought. After that, well…’
Logan flapped a hand in the air, dismissively, to illustrate the thinness of the Rises’ alliance.
‘That’s sure a lot o’ chanters they got hollerin’ for a three-family descent,’ said Macu.
‘If you wanted to be of a negative set of mind, love-o’-my-heart, you might think so,’ said Logan.
In truth, he could not but hear them: the high bluffs of Bohane city were raucous with Norrie Feud-chants.
‘A quare rake o’ bonnas burnin’ an’ all, Logan? Saw ’em an’ I comin’ down from the house.’
Strings of fires all along the bluffs – Norrie families on a war footing was the message.
‘They can light their little fires all they want. And remember this much for me, Macu, please – you never once in your fucking life had a good feeling the night before a Feud, check?’
‘Maybe a time comes when there be one Feud too far, Logan, y’heed?’
He glared at his wife, but kept silent his anger, and he twisted it instead to aim coldly, smilingly at his girl-chil’ lieutenant.
‘Jenni-gal,’ he said, ‘I understand you’re becoming quite a regular ’cross at the Bohane Arms?’
Jenni Ching didn’t so much as flutter an eyelash.
‘I’m findin’ it’s the kind o’ spot you’d hear an interestin’ yarn about the Bohane los’-time,’ she said.
‘Oh yeah?’ said Macu. ‘Concerning’?’
‘All kin’ o’ caper,’ said Jenni. ‘’bout how peoples come up and ’bout how they goes back down again.’
‘My dear mother would have the sketch for you there sure enough.’
Jenni eyeballed Macu hard.
‘An’ ’bout where it was peoples come from. Originally, like.’
Laminate posters on the Ho Pee wall showed roosters, pigs, rats. The fairy lights were strung from wall to wall above the Formica tables and they burned a lurid note. Logan was smiling now as he spooned up his soup – he liked a catfight.
Macu, polite as the seeping of a poison, said:
‘An’ where’s it the Chings is boxin’ out of original, Jenni-chick?’
Jenni from her tit pocket yanked a stogie, clipped and lit it, sucked deep and blew a brownish smoke.
‘Chings in Bohane goin’ back an’ again beyond the los’-time. S’town built offa Ching blood. We goes way back. We ain’t in off the las’ wave at all, missus.’
A motion she drew in the air then, slowly and looping, with her cigar hand, to indicate the wave, and the smoke made signals indeciperable atop the Ho Pee’s dreamy glow.
‘Ye sure ain’t,’ said Macu. ‘Chings been snakin’ aroun’ them wynds long as I got the recall. Gettin’ the reck on everyone’s business, like.’
‘Ladies,’ said Logan, ‘please.’
He pushed back his soup. He knit long fingers across his slender belly. He always enjoyed the eve of a Feud. He knew that Eyes Cusack would not for long keep his mongrels leashed, and his mood was high and expectant. When you were running a Fancy, regular demonstrations of rage were needed to keep the town in check and, just as importantly, the Fancy boys in trim. Too much sweetness and light and they got fat, unpleasantly smiley and over-interested in the fashion mags.
Jenni Ching looked from Logan to Macu and back again.
Jenni Ching raised her brow and blew smoke to the tapped-brass ceiling of the Ho Pee.
Jenni Ching was thinking: This is what’s runnin’ the Back Trace motherfuckin’ Fancy?
‘Colours to be raised?’ she asked.
‘Absolutely,’ said Logan. ‘If we’re going do it at all, we’re going to do it properly.’
‘Colours a pain in the fuckin’ gee,’ she said. ‘Fuck we wanna be marchin’ with flags for, H? This the Paddy’s Day fuckin’ Parade or what, like? Just get the fuck out there and reef the scutty fucks! Flags and fuckin’ colours ain’t gonna make no differ to the gack we welt outta the Rises filth no-how, y’check me?’
Logan sighed, was sweetly paternal.
‘Jenni?’ he said. ‘We’re not savages. If there’s young fellas gonna be planted in the boneyard tomorrow, they ain’t going down without knowing who’s responsible. Fancy’s colours will be raised.’
‘S’the kin’ o’ mawky shite that gets my melt off,’ she said. ‘Flags an’ fuckin’ banners…’
‘I’m hearin’ Girly talkin’,’ said Macu.
‘True enough,’ Logan smiled.
Girly Hartnett was long noted for nose-thumbing at tradition. Girly’s reckon was that Bohane was far too sentimental a town. Of course, it didn’t stop her spending a quare chunk of clock travelling to the lost-time.
‘All I’m sayin’, we’ve enough on us plates, like, without puttin’ on the usual circus–’
‘Jenni,’ Logan was stern here, ‘don’t call it a circus.’
‘All I’m sayin’–’
‘Jenni? Just leave it, please?’
‘But Girly says–’
‘Don’t mind fucking Girly! I’m running the fucking Fancy!’
‘That so, H? Then why’s it Girly gots to sign off on the Feud?’
His cold glare would strip a lesser child of its front but not Jenni.
‘A nicety,’ he said. ‘Protocol. Keep her thinking she’s involved still. It keeps her going, you know?’
A silence swelled.
Logan pussed.
Jenni smoked.
And Macu looked out into Smoketown’s greenish night-time haze. It was the early a.m. parade of skinpoppers and inebriates and hoor-botherers. She wondered – against her will – if he was among the streets some
where. And if she would recognise the gaatch of him. If he still carried in the same way. She had not replied to the letter. There had been no further word. It was sixty days since the letter had been passed to her.
Jenni Ching slithered from her seat and made for the door. As she opened it a great surge of street noise rose.
‘Time you givin’ em till, H?’
‘They won’t need long, if I know Cusacks.’
‘Fancy prepped?’ said Macu.
‘Stop your fretting, girl. Been weeks prepped if I’m right, Jen?’
‘Fancy’d ate a child, H.’
He finished his soup and lay down his spoon and clasped his thin fingers across his middle.
‘Go and make sure anyhow, Jenni-gal.’
‘Feuds!’ Macu cried. ‘An’ we a stretch pas’ fuckin’ forty!’
‘It’s the life, girl,’ Logan said.
‘For how long more, Logan?’
Jenni waved as she stepped outside.
‘Tell Girly I was askin’ for her,’ Macu called.
Jenni mouthed a badness beneath her breath.
‘Say what, girl?’
‘Say nothin’, Mrs Hartnett.’
‘I’ll be fuckin’ dug out o’ you yet, slant, y’hear me?’ Macu said.
‘Ladies, would ye leave it? Please?’ Logan said.
‘But d’ya hear her, Logan? About straightenin’ eyes she’s mutterin’!’
16
Wolfie: His Allegiances
Wolfie Stanners hung by the ruff of his jumper from a coat hook in the schoolhouse cloakroom. He squealed for help.
‘C’mon to fuck will someone!’
But nobody came to free him.
He was ten years old, the tiniest runt in the creation, and the eyes rolled dangerously in his chickpea head as his feet flailed at the air.
‘Please!’ he screamed. ‘Someone!’
Nobody came.
His breaths jabbed hard at the walls of his chest and tasted of sick.
‘C’mon’ll someone!’
Nobody came, and he swung from the coat hook, and he soaked in a panic sweat.
It was a lardy fatarse off the Rises that had hung him there.
‘S’what ya get for sniffin’ up sisters, filthy ginge!’
Wolfie in truth had tried to crawl up the gaberdine skirt of a wee Norrie sister – just for the sconce, like – but this was a harsh measure of justice.
‘Please, someone!’
He hung there, and he jigged on the air, and he near enough throttled himself.
‘C’mon, someone!’
But his screams came weaker now and hardly carried at all.
He stretched his arms behind his head but his reach was too short and fell shy of the hook. The jumper’s ruff caught tightly at his throat and he tried to force his weight to rip it free but it would not give. And Wolfie turned blue.
‘Fuck you doin’ up there, Stanners?’
The Burke kid at ten years old was already a long-legged galoot and a gommie sort with it. He was a blurry apparition down there below Wolfie in the cloakroom, and the small boy squinted to bring him into focus, and he lamped him as that beanpole from the wynds – Fucker, he was known as.
‘C’mon t’fuck an’ get me down offa here’d ya!’
His spindly arms had no more than the girth of chopsticks, Fucker Burke, but might have been threaded with steel wool for the strength in them, and easily from his tiptoes he lifted Wolfie clear from the coat hook, and the runt staggered into a corner of the cloakroom and spluttered his guts on the floor.
‘Min’ yer shoes,’ said Fucker Burke.
Wiping the drool away, Wolfie turned to Fucker, and he cleaned his gob with his sleeve, and he was awestruck in the presence of a saviour. He said:
‘Y’help me get him?’
Fucker liked the gaatch of this gingery kid – even if he couldn’t tell exactly what it was that made him smile (it was the dense, packed menace) – and he said:
‘Know where we can get diesel an’ all, y’check me, gingey-pal?’
Later:
The lardy-boy off the Rises wobbled along the wynds of the Trace and headed for the 98 Steps on the dreck afternoon of a winter’s day. Lunatic gulls dive-bombed his nosh bag but he batted ’em away with an impatient, pudgy arm. He had a duck’s walk, the chubster – here’s me head, me arse is comin’ – and he chomped on a lump of macaroon so hard the jaw-motion made a thundery roar in his ears. He didn’t hear Wolfie Stanners step up the one side of him, nor Fucker Burke the other.
Fucker gripped and twisted the boy’s arms and locked them behind his back and he marched him down a dead-end wynd.
‘Th’fuck, like?’
Typical Norrie squawk of fear in there, sketch?
‘Big fella now, aintcha?’ Wolfie said.
Fucker held him steady, and Wolfie kicked the boy’s shins until they gave from under him, and the lardarse was on his knees then, whelping, and Fucker knelt in behind, and he held the boy’s arms locked with one hand and with his free hand scrunched the boy’s hair to get his head back.
The boy screamed hard and showed his fat pink tonsils to the Bohane sky.
Wolfie poured diesel from a can into the opened gullet. Lardarse choked on it and spat and Wolfie slapped him; Fucker chortled.
Drizzled the diesel on the boy’s clothes and hair, too, most carefully – he’d a dainty touch for badness, Wolfie – and he produced the matchbook with a flourish, and he signalled for Fucker to back off, sharpish, and as he did so, Wolfie ripped a match, sparked it, and flicked.
So it was a lardarse kid on fire sprinted tubbily the wynds of the Trace and he ran onto the dock and leapt head first into the roaring blackwaters of the river. Flapped and splashed and gurgled, and the sight caused a wailing commotion on the wharfside stones – auld dears out of the Trace market threw their sprouts and cabbages in the air and roared a great commotion, coz it wasn’t every day you saw a fat child in flames, not even on the Bohane front – but then a hero of a dock polis came pounding along, with his porter-gut swinging, and by ’n’ by the lardarse got fished out again with a winch hook.
Lay on the quay, then, quenched but sizzling.
Ain’t been a pretty sight since, the same lardarse, face on him like an S’town burrito, and plenty more in the city suffered at the same hands as the years turned, and as many as were left sucking the air and could tell the tale, the same amount again were fattening maggots down the eerie bone-yard. Was the way of things Trace-deep since Wolfie and Fucker took to working in tag.
They realised that day that no matter how fast their hearts might beat at the brink of an atrocity they would not pull back from it, not ever, and Wolfie saw where this gift could send them in Bohane.
But now it was the eve of a Feud, and in the small, ominous hours of the night Wolfie walked the Back Trace, alone, and he felt a creep of grim knowledge:
No Bohane Fancy ever had two names to it.
He tried to put manners on his thoughts – the black surge of them was malevolent as the river’s. Walked through the 98er Square and he felt the dip of the glance from the quarehawks who were gathered beneath the winter-bared trees in their greatcoats, with their sacks of tawny wine, and he knew that his name was spreading, its power building, but he realised that it had Fucker’s maniac strength behind it, too. He knew there were others in the ranks had ambition to match his own. He knew there was no viciousness to match his but for Fucker’s, but for Jenni’s.
Hardwind was up and Norrie chanters sounded in the distance and the Fancy was mobbed ’cross in Smoketown. He would go to the ranks soon enough. He felt an icy tinkling at his spine – thought he sussed a follow – and he looked sharply over his shoulder but he saw nobody, and he told himself it was just Feud juice that had him edgy.
He decided on a quiet drink in a groghole down a Trace wynd. Pushed in the door to a brood of silence. There were just a couple of old sorts at the low tables. Wolfie sat at the bar and asked for
half a Wrassler stout and the ancient dear serving said it would put the iron in him sure enough, boy, medicinal for ya, and the smile Wolfie showed as the stout settled to its blackness put a certain end to all conversation. Sat with his half and his thoughts and it was as quiet a night as you’d get down the Trace – with the Feud so near, as many as could had cleared out already. Wolfie sat there all soulful and bothered in the half-light of the dank old bar.
Wolfie wore:
A neatly cut Crombie of confederate grey above green tweed peg pants, straight-legged, a starched white shirt, collar open to show a harlequin-patterned cravat, and a pair of tan-coloured arsekickers on the hooves that’d been imported from far Zagreb (them boys knew how to make a boot, was the Fancy’s reckon; if the Long Fella wasn’t walkin’ Portuguese, he was walkin’ Croat).
Wolfie sipped at his Wrassler’s smoky bitterness. There was a sulk to his mouth. It was never far away, not since his ninth year, and the night that his mother, Candy, got herself kicked to death in the Trace. She was a quick-fingered thief and a scuttery drunk and she wasn’t shy with a blade in her paw. She worked the snakebend line of De Valera Street. He used to stand up on a street bench to keep decks for polis. He smiled over the stout as he thought of Candy inside in Horgan’s Department Store, whipping eyeliner pencils and tubs of mascara to flog to the Smoketown tushies at low bars in the afternoons. Drinking money. And nightly, then, their roaming of the Trace. The way she’d drag him close to her when she was boozed up and croon old songs, the tunes of the lost-time. He felt yet the hard beating of her heart and the way she nuzzled his neck. Later in the night she’d disappear for a while. The night came that she didn’t come back. She was found by the 98 Steps. Wolfie was brought there by Trace women and he did not cry at all but he lay with her for a few minutes, where she’d been stomped, and already he felt the way the cold of the ground rose up into her. Then he got dragged away and Candy got shovelled up.
He blamed Norries, and he finished the Wrassler, and he called another. Drank sombre; brewed foul thoughts.