by Kevin Barry
Another old sort arrived in off the wynd and blew on his hands and brushed past Wolfie – want to watch himself – and he took a seat barside. Called for a hot Jameson. A big-boned old sort, voice like an actor, like something out of the Crescent Hall, and Wolfie noted the hands on him; the hands were massive, scarred, gnarled.
Wolfie kept an eye on the old sort in the mirror over the bar.
Half mad by the looks of things. Mouthing off to himself. Square-cut chin, as handsome as an old actor an’ all, but gone to daftness. And then the old sort took a half-swivel on the high stool.
‘Wolfie-boy makin’ a move?’ he whispered.
An actor’s whisper – hushed yet loud. Wolfie didn’t so much as grace it with a look. Kept face.
‘An openin’ for the boy-child?’ said the old sort.
Wolfie turned an eye to him now and glared. The old sort smiled and nodded.
‘Ne’er a sign o’ that bead, no?’
A chill came into Wolfie then.
‘Madam? Lay up another Wrassler for this kid. He’s after comin’ over class o’ pale-faced.’
Wolfie stared straight ahead and felt for the four-inch dirk in his waistband – it was gone.
‘Pale as his master,’ the Gant said, and he took the dirk from his inside pocket and slid it along the bar.
‘Be more careful with that,’ he said.
Wasn’t often Wolfie Stanners had the gob dry up on him but it was dried up now sure enough.
‘You’ll have got the message, Wolf?’
The others in the bar supped up and ghosted from the place, lively, and the ancient barkeep arranged herself as far down the end of the counter as was possible.
Wolfie didn’t answer the Gant Broderick – he just stared at him.
‘Underneath the bridge, Wolfie?’
The Gant shook his head sadly.
‘Mercy on that poor man’s soul,’ he said. ‘Shockin’ end he came to.’
Wolfie’s gut told him to flee the place but the Gant’s dark stare mesmerised.
‘You working a plan, Wolfie?’
Wolfie turned from him and looked straight ahead.
‘You’d want to be at this stage, child. The way the Fancy’s gonna break up?’
Wolfie didn’t answer.
‘Come back along with me here,’ said the Gant, ‘and maybe we can talk a little.’
The Gant went to a low table in the rear dim of the grog-hole, and Wolfie found himself slipping from the high stool, and going quietly to join him there.
17
The Shortest Day
Solstice broke and sent its pale light across the Big Nothin’ bogs. A half-woken stoat peeped scaredly from its lair in a drystone wall and a skinny old doe stood alert and watchful on a limestone outcrop. Sourly lit, a cruel winter scene – a raven clan soared and watched for scavenge, and there was a slushy melt to the hillside as the distant sun burned, and a puck goat chewed morosely on a high mound there. Bohane river ran as ever it did and fed off the bog ice that quaked into it as the shortest day’s sun came still higher. Surge of the water was all to be heard as Ol’ Boy Mannion stood in the first of the year-turn light on a high bank of the river and pensively urinated into it.
He finished, and trousered himself, and he stood a while longer to listen.
It was among Ol’ Boy’s more esoteric opinions that the bog plain had over the course of the years become weirdly… untamped. These times, the city of Bohane was powered largely on its turf, and the bog had been cut away and reefed everywhere. Who knew what passages to its underworld had been disturbed? The bog’s occult nature had been interfered with, its body left scarred, its wounds open, and might this also be a source of the Bohane taint? It would not surprise Ol’ Boy Mannion one bit.
He tied the string of his pants and he let the hardwind come in rearside of him and he aimed his boots in the direction of Eight Mile Bridge.
There was a tingle of excitement in Ol’ Boy this morning and he knew it was caused by the prospect of bloodshed and he was shamed by that.
Oh, the Bohane taint darkened each and all of us – even a long-tooth as honourable as Ol’ Boy.
He had sent a runner-child to the city to watch on developments overnight. A Feud was like an ember lying low in a tinder of straw – no telling when the spark would ignite, but that it surely would, and Ol’ Boy sure as the Sweet Baba bled on a cross wasn’t going to be around when it did. Ol’ Boy had long since slapped a preservation order on hissel’ – a long-tooth out the tip-end o’ this western peninsula was never by accident, always by design. A long life was a decision to be made.
The child was about due back to the inn at Eight Mile and Ol’ Boy marched for it and he kept an eye on the angle of the sun to know the hour.
Ol’ Boy wore:
High-top boots expensively clicker’d with gold taps, a pair of hip-hugging jodhpur-style pants in a faded mauve tone, an amount of gold chains, a heavy mink coat to keep out the worst of the hardwind’s assaults and a goatskin beanie hat set pavee-style at the crown of his head.
Truth of it – this was as suave an old dude as you’d come across in the whole of the Bohane creation.
He went to Eight Mile via the hills. It was his tactic always to keep to the higher paths. Ghost around the place as best as you can – that was the way to stay alive out on Nothin’. His shadow as he climbed the hillsides was long and needling in the white winter sun. He was not at all immune to the dark magic he walked through.
Nothin’s colours in low December:
The soft gold of the withered reeds – pale as an old wedding band’s gold.
The bluish mica glint of the stone knolls – the same precise glint as a gull’s eye’s.
The purples, discriminating, of the sleeping gorse.
Ol’ Boy walked on and the winter light came across Big Nothin’ slantwise and grudgingly – the bog plain was a whole heap of distance from the sun, and it had all the odour of that distance. It was a grave’s wet musk.
Mannion chewed on his thoughts. His hope was that the Feud sparked up fast and was over as quickly and that it would have the rejuvenating effect of a gorse fire. Then he could go back and pad a downtown prowl. See how things settled.
He walked the high reaches and skirted the boundary of the pikey rez and wondered what messages those sombre folk had been reading lately in the arrangement of cloud-fall and the scattering of the stars.
The pavee kind knew sure enough when there was Trouble a-brew.
He began a descent towards Eight Mile and walked for a time on the river’s high bank and was mesmerised by its remorselessness. He came at length to Eight Mile Bridge and he crossed the great stones of it and the Bohane thundered for the city. He waved to the scatter of inebriates beneath the bridge’s arches: the red-eyed habituals of the scene, suckin’ tawny, and these were intimates of Ol’ Boy, too, but then who wasn’t?
He descended the three stone steps to the inn and pushed through the door.
Turfsmoke, hidden nooks, ale fumes.
He went barside and nodded to the innkeeper. She was a stout-thighed widow with a game eye on her and she gave him the flash of it sure enough.
Ol’ Boy caught a kiss as though she had blown one and gently caressed it onto his cheek and winked.
‘Pour me an amber, sweetness,’ he said, ‘an’ pour it slow so’s I can have a good aul’ lamp at ya.’
She laughed for him, huskily.
‘Ya never lost it, Boy Mannion.’
Ol’ Boy had made his parade of life without ever knowingly failing to flirt with a serving lady. Even if they were plain, he viewed it as a necessary courtesy. If we do not have manners in this life, we do not have much. He took the glass as it was served to him and slapped down a shilling piece. She moved her hand for the coin – a shiver of lust in the auld dear yet, though she must have been pushin’ forty – but he slapped his hand over the coin at the last moment and hers fell onto his. Let the moment sit, did Ol’ Boy, and
he winked for her once more.
‘Ne’er a sign o’ that runner-child, missus?’
The innkeeper took on a look of fright and crossed her arms across her bosom and allowed one hand to rise and clutch hungrily her throat – this was a peninsula woman’s semaphore to indicate troubled times.
‘Sure ain’t we all waitin’ on the same young fella, Mr Mannion?’
Ol’ Boy took his glass of beer, and winked again, and he skulked about the premises. The usual Big Nothin’ quaffers lurked in the smoky corners. There was a good crowd in for this hour of the morning – all knew that word was expected on the Bohane situation. Ol’ Boy took a seat by the fireplace nook and sipped at the bitter Phoenix ale and he waited.
Sipped.
And he waited.
Listened.
He sipped.
And just before noon the door fell in and a welt of hardwind in a flash filled the room and raised smoke from the fires and as the door was kicked closed and the turfsmoke settled again everyone turned to see if it was the runner-child who had arrived but indeed it was not – it was Big Dom Gleeson.
The fat newsman stood in the middle of the floor in an emerald frock-coat and knee-high patent boots and closed his eyes and shook his great jowls in distress and sounded a bull-elephant’s moan.
‘Oh!’ he cried.
Staggered – staggered! – over to where Ol’ Boy sat and collapsed – collapsed! – onto a chair beside him and he let his frail, pudgy fingers reach for Ol’ Boy’s arm and he trembled.
‘Oh…’ said Big Dom.
‘I know, Dom,’ said Ol’ Boy, ‘your angina.’
The innkeeper brought a bowl of brandy for Dom and he wept – wept! – thanks to her and clutched her hand and lay it against his brow.
‘Yes I know, Mr Gleeson, I know,’ she said.
As she departed, raising her eyes, Ol’ Boy raked a knowing look over Big D, and he smiled.
‘So you been inside watching the ructions?’
‘Indeed I have not,’ said Big Dom. ‘They ain’t seen my arse for dust in that horrid, horrid town!’
‘You got out awright then?’
‘I did, Mr Mannion,’ he said, and he patted with a wink his stout legs. ‘Early yesterday, I took to me getaway sticks. I thank you kindly for sending the word, sir.’
Ol’ Boy sipped.
‘So if you ain’t been inside watchin’ the Feud, what explains your distressed condition? Don’t tell me, Dom, that you’ve been hiding out in some Ten Light knockin’ shop?’
Ten Light was the village of the Nothin’ hill country where the rural hoor-parlours clustered.
Dom shut his eyes in mortification, and grimly nodded.
‘Let me guess, Dom… Suckin’ on a dream-pipe… skullin’ French brandy… an’ buried to the maker’s name in buxom jailbait?’
‘Oh I’m a weak, WEAK man!’ cried Big Dom.
The door fell in again, and the hardwind again set the smoke from the turf-fires billowing, and it settled as the door was kicked shut and this time, true enough, a biteen of a young fella was revealed: it was the runner-child.
Child at once dropped flat onto his back in the middle of the flagstone floor.
Child stared hard and with great derangement at the ceiling and had terror in his eyes.
Child went into a trembling fit.
Ol’ Boy went to him and he knelt and cradled the child’s head in his hands and he cried out to the innkeeper.
‘Slug o’ the Beast there, missus, an’ lively!’
She brought from beneath the counter a bottle of illicit green spirit – the Beast – as was brewed in the high reaches of the Nothin’ massif by a pair of retard brothers who had the gift. Everyone in the inn gathered around the child. Innkeeper passed to Ol’ Boy the bottle and he uncapped it and he filled the cap with the noxious fluid and he held it to the child’s trembling lips. Drizzled it down carefully. The child gasped and spat and retched and then swallowed a wee sip and brightened just a shade. He opened his mouth for another drop or two. Ol’ Boy allowed him some. The runner-child it was clear had been witness to Dark Events.
Big Dom most professionally – grant him that – slid from the inside pocket of his frock-coat a spiral-bound notebook and licked the nib of his pencil.
‘Easy now,’ said Ol’ Boy. ‘And try and tell it for us, yes?’
As the Beast went to work, it brought slowly some colour and strength to the child. He tried to shape a word and everybody leaned in closer.
‘Bo…’ he said.
Silence was deathly in the room as the child struggled with the word. A little more of the Beast was drizzled into him. Fire of the spirit lit the word.
‘Bo…’ he said, ‘… hane!’
‘Very good,’ said Ol’ Boy, drily. ‘But what of it, child?’
‘Bohane,’ said the child, ‘is gone… to… to… to the Sweet Baba!’
Ol’ Boy took the child’s hand and stroked it gently.
‘Tell as much as you can, son.’
Child was stronger now by quick degrees. He was feeding well off slugs of the Beast and off the attention also.
‘Polis blockin’ all roads out,’ he said.
Low whistles caroused the turf-smoked inn.
‘High Boreen?’ Ol’ Boy prompted.
‘Cordon up, sir,’ said the child.
‘How’d ya get out, son?’
‘Came crossbog.’
Shivers in the room at the thought of the runner-child coming crossbog in low winter. That would be a trial for a fit and grown man. Wonder a swamphole hadn’t devoured the wee cove. Big Dom happily flushed as he sketched notes for a Vindicator colour-piece.
‘Way’s she blowin’ in there now, child-o’-mine?’ the newsman whispered.
Runner shut his eyes and slowly he let the story come.
‘All the night through bonnas is leppin’ off the Rises like dogs for the lick of a bone, sir.’
‘Ah sure we know that,’ said Ol’ Boy. ‘Sure the bonnas were seen from as far back as the plantation road.’
‘Come first crack?’ said the child. ‘First the Norrie whistlers marched out, then the fife drums…’
‘Uh-oh.’ Big D was loving it.
‘Then the Norrie chanters came down, sir. An’ as many as never’s been heard!’
‘Go on, runner. More.’
‘Nex’ thing I seen? An’ with me own peepers, like? Seen… an… an… an…’
‘Say it, child!’
‘I seen an… an eight-family descent, sir.’
The inn collapsed into delirium, wailing, tears. And the Big Nothin’ drinkers, as at all times of Trouble, turned immediately to religion:
‘Oh mother o’ the Sweet Baba!’
‘Oh Sweet Baba won’t ya come down an’ protect us!’
‘SBJ be good!’
‘SBJ be faithful!’
‘Oh Baba don’t forsake us said don’t forsake us now!’
‘Baba-love be with us!’
‘Baba-love always be with us!’
‘Ah shush it, will ye, for fucksake!’ cried Ol’ Boy. ‘Herd o’ bleatin’ fuckin’ lambs!’
He leaned down close to the runner-child.
‘Speak to me now, son, please. Twas an eight-family mob, you’re sure of that? You counted eight, like?’
‘Eyes Cusack, sir? He got the McGroartys, the Lenanes, the Dillons–’
‘That’s not news at all. He’s always got them fuckers.’
‘But he got the Halpins, sir, he got the Fitzhenrys, he got the Lenihans too–’
‘Sweet Baba-love don’t desert us now!’
‘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?’