City of Bohane

1 The Nature of the Disturbance

Whatever’s wrong with us is coming in off that river. No argument: the taint of badness on the city’s air is a taint off that river. This is the Bohane river we’re talking about. A blackwater surge, malevolent, it roars in off the Big Nothin’ wastes and the city was spawned by it and was named for it: city of Bohane.

He walked the docks and breathed in the sweet badness of the river. It was past midnight on the Bohane front. There was an evenness to his footfall, a slow calm rhythm of leather on stone, and the dockside lamps burned in the night-time a green haze, the light of a sad dream. The water’s roar for Hartnett was as the rushing of his own blood and as he passed the merchant yards the guard dogs strung out a sequence of howls all along the front. See the dogs: their hackles heaped, their yellow eyes livid. We could tell he was coming by the howling of the dogs.

Polis watched him but from a distance – a pair of hoss polis watering their piebalds at a trough ’cross in Smoketown. Polis were fresh from the site of a reefing.

‘Ya lampin’ him over?’ said one. ‘Albino motherfucker.’

‘Set yer clock by him,’ said the other.

Albino, some called him, others knew him as the Long Fella: he ran the Hartnett Fancy.

He cut off from the dockside and walked on into the Back Trace, the infamous Bohane Trace, a most evil labyrinth, an unknowable web of streets. He had that Back Trace look to him: a dapper buck in a natty-boy Crombie, the Crombie draped all casual-like over the shoulders of a pale grey Eyetie suit, mohair. Mouth of teeth on him like a vandalised graveyard but we all have our crosses. It was a pair of hand-stitched Portuguese boots that slapped his footfall, and the stress that fell, the emphasis, was money.

Hard-got the riches – oh the stories that we told out in Bohane about Logan Hartnett.

Dank little squares of the Trace opened out suddenly, like gasps, and Logan passed through. All sorts of quarehawks lingered Trace-deep in the small hours. They looked down as he passed, they examined their toes and their sacks of tawny wine – you wouldn’t make eye contact with the Long Fella if you could help it. Strange, but we had a fear of him and a pride in him, both. He had a fine hold of himself, as we say in Bohane. He was graceful and erect and he looked neither left nor right but straight out ahead always, with the shoulders thrown back, like a general. He walked the Arab tangle of alleyways and wynds that make up the Trace and there was the slap, the lift, the slap, the lift of Portuguese leather on the backstreet stones.

Yes and Logan was in his element as he made progress through the labyrinth. He feared not the shadows, he knew the fibres of the place, he knew every last twist and lilt of it.

Jenni Ching waited beneath the maytree in the 98er Square.

He approached the girl, and his step was enough: she needn’t look up to make the reck. He smiled for her all the same, and it was a wry and long-suffering smile – as though to say: More of it, Jenni? – and he sat on the bench beside. He laid a hand on hers that was tiny, delicate, murderous.

The bench had dead seasons of lovers’ names scratched into it.

‘Well, girleen?’ he said.

‘Cunt what been reefed in Smoketown was a Cusack off the Rises,’ she said.

‘Did he have it coming, Jen?’

‘Don’t they always, Cusacks?’

Logan shaped his lips thinly in agreement.

‘The Cusacks have always been crooked, girl.’

Jenni was seventeen that year but wise beyond it. Careful, she was, and a saucy little ticket in her lowriders and wedge heels, her streaked hair pineappled in a high bun. She took the butt of a stogie from the tit pocket of her white vinyl zip-up, and lit it.

‘Get enough on me fuckin’ plate now ’cross the footbridge, Mr H.’

‘I know that.’

‘Cusacks gonna sulk up a welt o’ vengeance by ’n’ by and if yer askin’ me, like? A rake o’ them tossers bullin’ down off the Rises is the las’ thing Smoketown need.’

‘Cusacks are always great for the old talk, Jenni.’

‘More’n talk’s what I gots a fear on, H. Is said they gots three flatblocks marked Cusack ’bove on the Rises this las’ while an’ that’s three flatblocks fulla headjobs with a grá on ’em for rowin’, y’check me?’

‘All too well, Jenni.’

It is fond tradition in Bohane that families from the Northside Rises will butt heads against families from the Back Trace. Logan ran the Trace, he was Back Trace blood-and-bone, and his was the most ferocious power in the city that year. But here were the Cusacks building strength and gumption on the Rises.

‘What’s the swerve we gonna throw, Logan?’

There was a canniness to Jenni. It was bred into her – the Chings were old Smoketown stock. Smoketown was hoors, herb, fetish parlours, grog pits, needle alleys, dream salons and Chinese restaurants. Smoketown was the other side of the footbridge from the Back Trace, yonder across the Bohane river, and it was the Hartnett Fancy had the runnings of Smoketown also. But the Cusacks were shaping for it.

‘I’d say we keep things moving quite swiftly against them, Jenni-sweet.’

‘Coz they gonna come on down anyways, like?’

‘Oh there’s no doubt to it, girl. They’re going to come down barkin’. May as well force them to a quick move.’

She considered the tactic.

‘Afore they’s full prepped for a gack off us, y’mean? Play on they pride, like. What the Fancy’s yelpin’? Ya gonna take an eye for an eye, Cuse, or y’any bit o’ spunk at all, like?’

Logan smiled.

‘You’re an exceptional child, Jenni Ching.’

She winced at the compliment.

‘Pretty to say so, H. O’ course the Cusacks shouldn’t be causin’ the likes a us no grief in the first place, y’check? Just a bunch o’ Rises scuts is all they is an’ they gettin’ so brave an’ lippy, like? Sendin’ runners into S’town? Why’s it they’s gettin’ so brave all of a sudden is what we should be askin’.’

‘Meaning precisely what, Jenni?’

‘Meanin’ is they smellin’ a weakness, like? They reckonin’ you got your mind off the Fancy’s dealins?’

‘And what else might I have my mind on?’

She turned her cool look to him, Jenni, and let it lock.

‘That ain’t for my say, Mr Hartnett, sir.’

He rose from the bench, smiling. Not a lick of warmth had entered the girl’s hand as long as his had lain on it.

‘Y’wan’ more Cusacks hurted so?’ she said.

He looked back at her but briefly – the look was his word.

‘Y’sure ’bout that, H? ’nother winter a blood in Bohane, like?’

A smile, and it was as grey as he could will it.

‘Ah sure it’ll make the long old nights fly past.’

Logan Hartnett was minded to keep the Ching girl close. In a small city so homicidal you needed to watch out on all sides. He moved on through the gloom of the Back Trace. The streets of old tenements are tight, steep-sided, ill-lit, and the high bluffs of the city give the Trace a closed-in feel. Our city is built along a run of these bluffs that bank and canyon the Bohane river. The streets tumble down to the river, it is a black and swift-moving rush at the base of almost every street, as black as the bog waters that feed it, and a couple of miles downstream the river rounds the last of the bluffs and there enters the murmurous ocean. The ocean is not directly seen from the city, but at all times there is the ozone rumour of its proximity, a rasp on the air, like a hoarseness. It is all of it as bleak as only the West of Ireland can be.

The Fancy boss Hartnett turned down a particular alleyway, flicked the cut of a glance over his shoulder – so careful – then slipped into a particular doorway. He pressed three times on a brass bell, paused, and pressed on it twice more. He noted a spider abseil from the top of the door’s frame, enjoyed its measured, shelving fall, thought it was late enough in the year for that fella, being October, the city all brown-mooded. There was a scurry of movement within, the peephole’s cover was slid and filled with the bead of a pupil, the brief startle of it, the lock clacked, unclicked, and the red metal door was slid creaking – kaaarrrink! – along its runners. They’d want greasing, thought Logan, as Tommie the Keep was revealed: a wee hairy-chested turnip of a man. He bowed once and whispered his reverence.

‘Thought it’d be yourself, Mr Hartnett. Goin’ be the hour, like.’

‘They say routine is a next-door neighbour of madness, Tommie.’

‘They say lots o’ things, Mr Hartnett.’

He lit his pale smile for the Keep. He stepped inside, pushed the door firmly back along its runners, it clacked shut behind – kraaank! – and the men trailed down a narrow passageway; its vivid red walls sweated like disco walls, and the building was indeed once just that but had long since been converted.

Long gone in Bohane the days of the discos.

‘And how’s your lady wife keepin’, Mr H?’

‘She’s extremely well, Tommie, and why shouldn’t she be?’

A tautness at once had gripped the ’bino’s smile and terrified the Keep. Made him wonder, too.

‘I was only askin’, Mr H.’

‘Well, thank you so much for asking, Tommie. I’ll be sure to remember you to her.’

Odd, distorted, the glaze that descended for a moment over his eyes, and the passage hooked, turned, and opened to a dimly lit den woozy with low night-time voices.

This was Tommie’s Supper Room.

This was the Bohane power haunt.

The edges of the room were lined with red velvet banquettes. The banquettes seated heavy, jowled lads who were thankful for the low lights of the place. These were the merchants of the city, men with a taste for hair lacquer, hard booze and saturated fats.

‘Inebriates and hoor-lickers to a man,’ said Logan, and it was loud enough for those who might want to hear.

Across the fine parquet waited an elegant brass-railed bar. Princely Logan marched towards it, and the obsessive polishing of the floor’s French blocks was evident in the hump of Tommie the Keep’s back as he raced ahead and ducked under his bar hatch. He took his cloth and hurried a fresh shine into the section of the counter where Logan each night sat.

‘You’ve grooves worn into it, Tommie.’

Logan shucked loose from the sleeves of his Crombie and he hung it on a peg set beneath the bar’s rail. The handle of his shkelper was visible to all – a mother-of-pearl with markings of Naples blue – and it was tucked into his belt just so, with his jacket hitched on the blade the better for its display. He smoothed down the mohair of the Eyetie suit. He picked at a loose thread. Ran dreamily the tip of a thumb along a superstar cheekbone.

‘So is there e’er a bit strange, Tommie?’

There was a startle in the Keep for sure.

‘Strange, Mr H?’

Logan with a feint of innocence smiled.

‘I said is there e’er a bit of goss around the place, Tommie, no?’

‘Ah, just the usual aul’ talk, Mr Hartnett.’

‘Oh?’

‘Who’s out for who. Who’s fleadhin’ who. Who’s got what comin’.’

Logan leaned across the counter and dropped his voice a note.

‘And is there any old talk from outside on Big Nothin’, Tommie?’

The Keep knew well what Logan spoke of – the word already was abroad.

‘I s’pose you know ’bout that aul’ talk?’

‘What talk, Tommie, precisely?’

‘’Bout a certain… someone what been seen out there.’

‘Say the name, Tommie.’

‘Is just talk, Mr Hartnett.’

‘Say it.’

‘Is just a name, Mr Hartnett.’

‘Say it, Tom.’

Keep swivelled a look around the room; his nerves were ripped.

‘The Gant Broderick,’ he said.

Logan trembled, girlishly, to mock the name, and he drummed his fingertips a fast-snare beat on the countertop.

‘First the Cusacks, now the Gant,’ he said. ‘I must have done something seriously fucking foul in a past life, Tom?’

Tommie the Keep smiled as he sighed.

‘Maybe even in this one, Mr H?’

‘Oh brave, Tommie. Well done.’

The Keep lightened it as best as he could.

‘Is the aul’ fear up in yuh, sir?’

‘Oh the fear’s up in me alright, Tommie.’

The Keep hung his bar cloth on its nail. He whistled a poor attempt at nonchalance. Tommie could not hide from his face the feeling that was current in the room, the leanings and nuance of the talk that swirled there. Logan used him always as a gauge for the city’s mood. Bohane could be a tricky read. It has the name of an insular and contrary place, and certainly, we are given to bouts of rage and hilarity, which makes us unpredictable. The Keep tip-tapped on the parquet a nervy set of toes, and he played it jaunty.

‘What’d take the cares off yuh, Mr Hartnett?’

Logan considered a moment. He let his eyes ascend to the stoically turning ceiling fan as it chopped the blue smoke of the room.

‘Send me out a dozen of your oysters,’ he said, ‘and an honest measure of the John Jameson.’

The Keep nodded his approval as he set to.

‘There ain’t no point livin’ it small, Mr Hartnett.’

‘No, Tommie. We might as well elevate ourselves from the beasts of the fields.’

2 The Gant’s Return

That hot defiant screech was the Bohane El train as it took the last turn onto De Valera Street. The El ran the snakebend of the street, its boxcar windows a blurring yellow on the downtown charge. The main drag was deserted this windless a.m. and it was quiet also in the car the Gant was sat in. There was just a pair of weeping hoors across the aisle – Norrie girls, by the feline cut of their cheekbones – and a drunk in greasy Authority overalls down the way. The El train was customarily sad in this last stretch before dawn – that much had not changed. The screech of it was a soul’s screech. If you were lying there in the bed, lonesome, and succumbed to poetical thoughts, that screech would go through you. It happens that we are often just so in Bohane. No better men for the poetical thoughts.

The Gant took a slick of sweat off his brow with the back of a big hand. He had a pair of hands on him the size of Belfast sinks. The sweat was after coming out on him sudden. It was hot on the El train – its elderly heaters juddered like halfwits beneath the slat benches – and the flush of heat brought to him a charge of feeling, also; the Gant was in a fever spell this season. The tang of stolen youth seeped up in his throat with the rasping burn of nausea and on the El train in yellow light the Gant trembled. But the familiar streets rushed past as the El train charged, and the pain of memory without warning gave way to joy – he was back! – and the Gant beamed then, ecstatically, as he sucked at the clammy air, and he listened to the hoors.

‘Fuckin’ loved dat blatherin’ cun’ big time!’ wailed one.

‘Fucker was filth, girl, s’the bone truth of it,’ consoled the other. ‘Fucker was castin’ off all o’er the town, y’check me? Took ya for a gommie lackeen.’

He was back among the city’s voices, and it was the rhythm of them that slowed the rush of his thoughts. He had walked in off Big Nothin’ through the bogside dark. He had been glad to hop the El train up on the Rises and take the weight off his bones. The Gant was living out on Nothin’ again. The Gant was back at last in the Bohane creation.

Down along the boxcar, he saw the Authority man mouth a sadness through his sozzled half-sleep, most likely a woman’s name – was she as green and lazy-eyed as the Gant’s lost love? – and the city unpeeled, image by image, as the El train screeched along De Valera: a shuttered store, a war hero’s plinth, an advert for a gout cure, a gull so ghostly on a lamp post.

Morning was rising against the dim of the street lights and the lights cut just as the El screeched into its dockside terminus. The train locked onto its berth – the rubber jolt of the stoppers meant you were downtown, meant you were in Bohane proper – and the El’s diesel tang settled, and died.

He let the hoors and the drunk off ahead of him. The Gant as he disembarked was fleshy and hot-faced but there was no little grace to his big-man stride. A nice roll to his movement – ye sketchin’? The Gant had old-time style.

The station is named Bohane St Francis Xavier, officially, but everyone knows it as the Yella Hall. The Gant sniffed at the evil, undying air of the place as he walked through. Even at a little after six in the morning, the concourse was rudely alive and the throb of its noise was by the moment thickening. Amputee walnut sellers croaked their prices from tragic blankets on the scarred tile floors, their stumps so artfully displayed. The Bohane accent sounded everywhere: flat and harsh along the consonants, sing-song and soupy on the vowels, betimes vaguely Caribbean. An old man bothered a melodeon as he stood on an upturned orange crate and sang a lament for youth’s distant love. The crate was stamped Tangier – a route that was open yet – and the old dude had belters of lungs on him, was the Gant’s opinion, though he was teetering clearly on Eternity’s maw.

Choked back another tear did the Gant: he was big but soft, hard yet gentle.

The early edition of the Bohane Vindicator was in but the bundles had as yet to be unwrapped by the kiosk man, who listened, with his eyes closed, to an eerie sonata played on a transistor wireless – at this hour, on Bohane Free Radio, the selector tended towards the classical end of things, and towards melancholy. Nodded his head softly, the kiosk man, as the violins caught.

Oh we’d get medals for soulfulness out the tip end of the peninsula.

The Gant settled into the blur of faces as he passed through. The faces, the voices, the movement – all the signals were coming in clear. They told that he was home again; it was at once painful and beautiful. He looked for her in every woman he passed, in every girl. He bought a package of tabs off a lady of great vintage wrapped in green oilskins: Annie, a perpetual of the scene.

‘Three bob… tuppence?’ she said.

There seemed to be that question in it, for sure, as if she recognised him back there beyond the dead years.

‘Keep the change for me, darlin’,’ he said.

A hoarseness to his voice, emotional, and his accent was still quietly of the peninsula even after the long years away. Years of sadness, years of blood – this Gant had his intimate agonies. A snatch of a lost-time song came to him, and beneath his breath he shaped the words:

The hoors who had wept on the train were ahead of him now on the concourse. They had gathered themselves. They were painting on bravery from snap-clasp compacts as they walked. The hoors would be bound, he knew, for Smoketown, and its early-morning trade. The Gant watched as they went through the Yella Hall. Ah, look: the quick switching of their bony buttocks beneath the thin silk fabric of their rah-rah skirts, and the way their calves were so finely toned from half their young lives spent on six-inch spike heels. The sight of the girls made him sentimental. He had run stables of hoors himself as a young man. There was a day when it was the Gant had the runnings of Smoketown, a day when the Gant had the runnings of the city entire.

Was said in Bohane the Gant had run it clean.

He stopped for a shot of tarry joe by the main portal of the Yella Hall. It was served expertly by a midget from the back of a licensed joe wagon. He watched, rapt, as the midget tamped the grounds, twisted a fix on the old Gaggia, arranged a tiny white cup to catch the pour. The midget also was familiar – a squashed little brow, a boxer’s nose, oddly sensuous lips. Same midget’s father, the Gant would have sworn, had the licence on that chrome wagon before him. The generations tag so in Bohane. He drank the joe in one, and shivered. He thanked the midget, and paid him, and he let the coffee’s bitter kick arch his eyebrows as he looked out to the first of an October morning. The gulls were going loolah on the dockside stones.

Of course those gulls were never right. That is often said. The sheer derangement in their eyes, and the untranslatable evil of their cawing as they dive-bomb the streets. The gulls of Bohane are one ignorant pack of fuckers. He had missed them terribly. He laughed out loud as the gusts of morning wind flung the birds about the sky but he drew no looks – sure the Yella Hall would be crawling with wall-bangers at the best of times.

The Gant set out towards the Smoketown footbridge. He took a scrap of paper from his pocket and opened it. He read a hand that had not changed with the years – still those big, nervous, childish letters – and its scrawl spelt out these words:

Ho Pee Ching Oh-Kay Koffee Shoppe.

The Gant had a wee girl to meet at this place. It was a good time for such a meeting – he could be lost among the crowd. Smoketown, he knew, would be black at this hour of the morning. The late shifts from the slaughterhouses and the breweries were only now clocking off. Bohane builds sausages and Bohane builds beer. We exist in the high fifties of latitude, after all, the winters are fierce, and we need the inner fire that comes from a meat diet and voluminous drinking. The plants worked all angles of the clock, and after the night shift, it was the custom to make for S’town and a brief revel. In the dawn haze, the brewery lads were dreamy-eyed from hopsfume, while the slaughterhouse boys had been all the silver and shade of night up to their oxters in the corpses of beasts, filling the wagons for the butchers’ slabs at the arcade market in the Trace, and the wagons rolled out now across the greasy cobbles, and it was a gorey cargo they hauled:

See the peeled heads of sheep, and the veined fleshy haunches of pigs, and the glistening trays of livers and spleens, skirts and kidneys, lungs and tongues – carnivorous to a fault, we’d ate the whole lot for you out in Bohane.

The Gant hunched his big shoulders against the morning chill. The lowing of condemned beasts sounded in bass tones on the air – our stockyards are laid out along the wharfs. The Gant stepped over a gutter that ran torrentially with fresh blood.

How, he wondered, was a man expected to think civilised thoughts in a city the likes of it?

He kept his head down as he walked. He would try not to romance the place – he had work to do. His was a face where the age receded as often as it surfaced. Sometimes the boy was seen in him; sometimes he might have been a very old man. The Gant’s humours were in a rum condition – he was about fit for a bleed of leeches. His moods were too swift on the turn. He was watchful of them. He had a sack of tawny wine on him. He untwisted its cap and took a pull on it for the spurt of life – medicinal. There was pikey blood in the Gant, of course – the name, even, was an old pikey handle – but then there’s pikey blood in most of us around this city. Have a sconce at the old gaatch of us – the slope-shouldered carry, the belligerence of the stride, the smoky hazel of our eyes; officer material we are not. Of course if you were going by the reckoning of pikey bones the Gant was old bones now for certain. He was fifty years to paradise.

And life tumbled on, regardless.

All the red-faced lads went in chortling twos and happy threes in the direction of the footbridge. These gentlemen of Bohane tend to be low-sized and butty: the kind who would be hard to knock over. Smoketown is their bleak heaven. And there is an expression here to describe a man in moral decline:

There is a fella, we say, who’s set for the S’town footbridge.

It is a humpback bridge of Big Nothin’ limestone. The Gant walked it and reached its high point, above the black river, above the nauseous rush of the Bohane river, and he descended into Smoketown. Each of our districts has a particular feeling, a signature melody, and he felt the dip in the stomach, the swooning of the soul, the off-note, that entrance to this neighbourhood brings.

Smoketown laid out its grogshops, its noodle joints, its tickle-foot parlours. Its dank shebeens and fetish studios. Its shooting galleries, hoor stables, bookmakers. All crowded in on each other in the lean-to streets. The tottering old chimneys were stacked in great deranged happiness against the morning sky. The streets in dawn light thronged with familiar faces. The Gant felt at once as if he had never been gone. He might get a twist yet on the combinations of the place. Maybe the Ching girl would give instruction.

The Gant threw a swift look over the shoulder – in his condition, he was intuitive – and he spotted that the Authority man from the El was on his trail now, and apparently had sobered. His movement, then, was already noted – the Gant scolded himself for being so taken. High innocence! But to be followed was in some ways a relief. It told that his name meant something yet. He stopped on his way and rested against a grogshop wall. He saw the Authority man stop also and peer casually at a stack of mucky postcards.

To throw him off, the Gant entered a hoorshop, and he found there that most familiar of S’town fragrances – the age-old blend of rash-calming ointment, Big Nothin’ bush-weed, and penny-ha’penny scent.

He paid the tax to a scowling hoor-ma’am, and he ascended to the upstairs slots, and there on the rush matting he spent time with a Norrie girl, and there was little enough but time spent.

‘Are you lonely?’ she said to him.

‘I’m so lonely I could claw my fuckin’ brains out,’ he said, and she laughed, and she lit a coochie for him.

‘Dinky little number, ain’t ya?’ he said, dragging deep.

‘You wanna have another try off it?’ she said.

Later, when he emerged to the street again, the Authority man was no longer to be seen, and the Gant moved on towards the Ho Pee. Now the city shimmered in the new morning’s light, its skyline loomed in shadow, but it was what was out and beyond again, the Gant knew, that was the cause and curse of us.

Beyond was Big Nothin’.

3 A Marriage

The Hartnett seat was a Beauvista Gothical, a gaunt and lumbering old pile, all elbows and chimneys. Its thin, tall windows were leaded and reproachful, its gable ivied, the brickwork sharply pointed and with a honeyish tone that emerged fully now against the blue of late morning in October. It sat plumb on a line of po-faced old manses that made a leafy avenue up top of the Beauvista bluff. The Bohane Dacency had built their Beauvista residences to face away from the city – though the money that built them had been bled from it – but Logan Hartnett and his wife were Trace-born, the pair of them, and they kept a rooftop garden on a terrace shaded by the chimney stacks, and it was oriented to look back across the great bowl of the city, as though in nostalgia for it. They spent a whole heap of time up there.

Catch them in the morning light – so elegant and childless.

Logan sat at the wrought-iron table. He wore ox-blood boots laced high, a pair of smoke-grey, pre-creased strides, and thin leather braces worn over a light blue shirt. He was tentative in his private domain. He warmed his hands on a bowl of tea and he regarded his wife.

‘You knocking along the town, girl?’

‘Why’d you ask?’

‘It’s a simple question, Macu.’

‘You want every minute of my fuckin’ day, don’t you?’

Macu, from Immaculata, her sidelong glance hot with Iberian flare. Her father was a Portuguese off a fishing boat who got beached up in the creation. He married Trace, and Macu was dark-complected and thin, with a graceful carry of herself, and a sadness bred into her. One of her eyes was halfways turned in to meet the other, but attractively so.

‘All I’m asking is are you going to town?’

‘Hard to keep away,’ she said.

‘Who are you seeing in town?’

She wore a sleeveless fox-fur jerkin against the chill of the morning. She worked a pair of secateurs along the wall-creeping rose bushes. She ignored the question. Sometimes, she could knife the very thought of him. Right there between the shoulder blades – feel the sweet bite and settle of an eight-inch Bohane shkelp. But the slyness in him could soften her still.

He winced at the sour herbal bite of the tea. She went to the table and poured a fill for herself. She had let it stew till it was brown as old boots.

‘Nettles,’ she said.

‘Surprise me,’ he said. ‘Ne’er a chance of a mug of joe in this place, no?’

‘Good for the kidneys,’ she said.

‘Nice to know,’ he said.

By the look of him, he had hardly slept but that was not new. An hour or two, no more, and Logan Hartnett was awake to the city again. The black shadows beneath his eyes made for a gauntness but this, he maintained, merely added to his air of wasted elegance. She’d gainsay him but halfways believe it.

‘Got to head down soon myself,’ he said.

‘All fall apart without you,’ she said.

Bohane was seasonably calm down there. Always there are these pet days in October, when the impression of peace – at least – lies briefly on the place. Church bells sounded and did not pierce so much as emphasise the drowsiness of the morning.

‘Got the fiends to talk to, ain’t I?’ he said.

‘Ain’t you always,’ she said. ‘The Fancy, the Fancy…’

It was the last morning there would be heat enough in the sun to sit outside. He sipped at his tea. There was a fresh worry in him, a sliver, from somewhere, and she enjoyed that, and she knew not to try and coax it. It would come soon enough.

‘You seein’ Girly?’

He sighed.

‘Oh, I’ll look in, I suppose.’

Girly Hartnett, the mother, was eighty-nine years of age, and in riotous good health. Girly was the greatest rip that ever had walked the Trace but she resided now in a top-floor suite at the Bohane Arms Hotel. The curtains hadn’t been drawn back in decades.

‘Kisses from me,’ she said.

‘She’ll be waiting on those.’

It was satisfaction to lay a hand on the flatness of her belly. Holding well, she felt, all things considered. Logan, he always said she could crack walnuts between those thighs. He squinted as he watched her. His skin was almost translucent in the morning light. She saw now he was ready to reveal the bother.

‘Well,’ she said.

He smiled at the read she had of him.

‘It’s probably just old talk.’

‘S’what the place is made of, Logan. What’s it particular?’

‘They’re saying the Gant’s back.’

She was not prepared for this.

‘Gant Broderick?’

‘You know any other Gants?’

She tried to keep an evenness to her voice.

‘Who’s sayin’ this?’

‘Word all over. Word in the shebeens. Word on the wynds. Word is, he’s back on Nothin’.’

‘Shitetalk,’ she said.

‘In all probability,’ he said.

When it was the Gant had the Bohane runnings, it was Macu had been by his side.

Her father had been taken by Bohane – the place has a way; visit just once and you will forever be homesick for it. He opened a bar on De Valera Street. He called it the Café Aliados after a square of his home town. He married, and the girl was born, and she gave a measure of youth back to him, a late radiance in his life. The Aliados became a haunt of the Back Trace Fancy as the years passed. Hard for a Fancy boy not to notice the looker working the joe machine, capping the beer, laying out the saucers of pumpkin seeds. A lick of the tarbrush, surely, but she was Bohane to her bones, Bohane in the sharpness of her glance and the quickness of her tongue.

The Bohane taint was stronger than blood.

‘Y’worried?’

He looked at her, open-faced. He shrugged and turned again to the morning sun.

‘If there was truth in it,’ he said, ‘the timing wouldn’t be so hot.’

‘Why so?’

‘Cusacks are playing up and all, girl. Could have random assaults coming at me from all fucking sides.’

‘S’the fun o’ the life you picked, Logan.’

‘That we picked. I hear you.’

He would not ask her directly how she felt about the Gant’s return. There are areas too tender for even the longest marriage. Twenty-five years the Gant had been gone out of Bohane.

It was the morning when she would bring in the pot plants from the rooftop terrace – the hardwind would soon be up for real. She set to the task as though she had no other cares but she kept her eyes down and hidden from him.

Her mind raced, her heart ached.

The dim greens and blues of her pitcher plants murmured to her in the morning sun.

4 A Powwow on the Rises

Directly across the bowl of the city from Beauvista was the rude expanse of the Northside Rises. The aborigines of Bohane had over the years bred themselves too plentiful for the narrow wynds of the Back Trace – long winters, dark nights, romantic natures – and flatblocks were built on the Rises to house the overflow. Trace and Rises families are almost all blood-related, if you go way back, and this perhaps explains the depth of the bitterness between them.

The Rises is a bleak, forlorn place, and violently windy. Too little has been said, actually, about living in windy places. When a wind blows in such ferocious gusts as the Big Nothin’ hardwind, and when it blows forty-nine weeks out of the year, the effect is not physical only but… philosophical. It is difficult to keep a firm hold of one’s consciousness in such a wind. The mind is walloped from its train of thought by the constant assaults of wind. The result is a skittish, temperamental people with a tendency towards odd turns of logic. Such were (and are) the people of the Northside Rises.

This particular noon, however, as Ol’ Boy Mannion loped stylishly along the wasted avenues of the Norrie terrain, an October lull still governed. On either side of the avenues, the flatblocks were arranged in desolate crescent circles, and the odd child leapt from a dead pylon, and dogs roamed in skittish packs, but mostly it was quiet, for the Rises is by its nature a night-time kind of place.

Tipping seventy, Ol’ Boy dressed much younger. He wore low-rider strides, high-top boots with the heels clicker’d, a velveteen waistcoat and an old-style yard hat set at a frisky, pimpish angle. Ol’ Boy had connections all over the city – he was the Bohane go-between. He was as comfortable sitting for a powwow in the drawing room of a Beauvista manse as he was making a rendezvous at a Rises flatblock. Divil a bit stirred in the Trace that he didn’t know about, nor across the Smoketown footbridge. He was on jivey, fist-bumping terms with the suits of the business district – those blithe and lardy boys who worked Endeavour Avenue down in the Bohane New Town – and he could chew the fat equably with the most ignorant of Big Nothin’ spud-aters. The Mannion voicebox was an instrument of wonder. It mimicked precisely the tones and cadence of whoever he was speaking to, while retaining always a warm and reassuring note. Hear him on Endeavour and you’d swear he had shares in the Bohane First Commercial; hear him out on Nothin’ and you’d swear he was carved from the very bog turf.

Ol’ Boy, bluntly, was political.

He approached now a flatblock circle of the Cusack mob. A gent name of Eyes Cusack waited for him on the diseased green space out front of the blocks. He leaned back, brooding, against a burned-out generator shed. He smoked. He acknowledged Ol’ Boy by dropping his tab and stomping it, and the men embraced, mannishly and briefly.

‘Things with you?’ enquired Ol’ Boy.

Eyes was named so for good reason. He saw the city through tiny smoking holes set deep in a broad, porridgy face.

‘Lad o’ mine wearin’ an eight-incher of a reef ’cross his chest,’ he said. ‘Smoketown.’

‘Heard there was an incident alright,’ said Ol’ Boy. ‘Will he pull through for you, Eyes?’

‘Well, he ain’t gonna be botherin’ no dancehalls for a time. An’ this is a nephew o’ mine, Mr Mannion. This a lad o’ me brud’s, like? I said blood? Me brud’s gone loolah on accoun’ and his missus gobbin’ hoss trankillisers like they’s penny fuckin’ sweets, y’check me?’

He was bald and stout, Eyes Cusack. He was in a vest top, trackies and boxer boots – the standard uniform of a Rises hardchaw this particular season – and he wore an unfortunate calypso-style moustache.

‘I’d say hold off on things for a breath or two, Eyes, if you can at all.’

The Mannion tone was pitched low as a calming strategy but it was no use – Eyes had a want on for vengeance.

‘Long Fella ain’t had none o’ his lads reefed, Mr Mannion. Long Fella wanna know this ain’t gonna play out pretty, like.’

Ol’ Boy nodded his understanding. He leaned back with Eyes Cusack against the generator shed and together they looked out over the sighing city.

‘There’s a Calm has held for a good stretch in Bohane,’ said Ol’ Boy. ‘Be a hoor if it went the road, like.’

‘I ain’t the one been wieldin’ a shkelp.’

‘Arra, you know it’s Hartnett has the Smoketown trade.’

‘Sweet Baba Jay pass down the rights, he did?’

Ol’ Boy raised his eyes.

‘Let’s not bring the Sweet Baba into things just yet,’ he said.

Eyes pushed off from the shed with a bitter little jolt of the shoulder blades and he turned to face Ol’ Boy square.

‘I wan’ word got to him and got to him flashy, y’hear?’

‘Go on.’

‘Wan’ word to him that I got the flatblocks stacked behind me. Got people in every circle. Got the MacNiece, the Kavanagh, the Heaney. Wan’ word got to him that reparations need makin’. An innocent lad reefed, like?’

‘Ah, Eyes, there ain’t gonna be no–’

‘Reparations, Mannion! S’my word, like. Tell him a fair shake o’ the Smoketown trade’d work for me.’

‘And what’s he gonna say to me, Eyes?’

‘Tell.’

‘He’s gonna say Eyes Cusack is sending aggravators into Smoketown by design. He’s makin’ a martyr for the uptown so as to get a hold o’ leverage, plain as. He’s gonna say you’re spoilin’ to smash the Calm.’

‘Gonna say all that, he is?’

He turned to go, Cusack. Made as though he had a royal hump on. Ol’ Boy tried again.

‘Eyes? Y’ain’t been asked to turn over no face, check? You just got to say your lad was rogue. That he was messin’ where he shouldn’t have been messin’.’

‘That’s a lad o’ me brud’s, Mannion. Me brud in bits an’ his missus all drooly an’ spooked off the hoss–’

‘Ah let it go, Eyes, would you? Let the Calm hold an’ we can all get on with our business.’

‘Get word to him that I’m willin’ to sit and talk a Smoketown divvy.’

‘A divvy I would very much doubt, Eyes.’

A hard jab of a forefinger from Cusack, then:

‘If he wanna keep the Trace under Hartnett colours? Wanna keep slurpin’ his oysters below in Tommie’s and keep playin’ footsie with his mad fuckin’ cross-eyed missus–’

‘Leave a man’s wife out of it.’

‘He wanna keep suckin’ the wind? Then he’ll sit an’ he’ll talk a fuckin’ divvy on fuckin’ Smoketown!’

Ol’ Boy shut his eyes – the worst of it was when they got brave.

‘So you want me to go down to the ’bino with an out-and-out threat, like?’

A smile from Eyes Cusack the likes of which you wouldn’t get off a stoat in a ditch.

‘Tell him I got the flatblocks stacked.’

‘Don’t do this, Eyes.’

‘Fella gets back what he gives out, Ol’ Boy.’

‘That’s said, yes.’

‘An’ maybe he got old stuff comin’ back ’n’ all, y’sketchin’? Hear tell of a certain man pass this way in the bleaky hour…’

‘This mornin’ gone?’

‘Same one. A man what hop an El for the downtown.’

‘Who are we talkin’ about, Eyes?’

‘That’s a man the Long Fella wanna watch ’n’ all.’

‘I said who’re we talkin’ about, Eyes?’

‘Long Fella know him well enough. His missus know him ’n’ all.’

Ol’ Boy raised softly a palm in warning.

‘Plenty o’ folk have thought before Hartnett was weakening. Same folk feedin’ maggots down the boneyard now.’

‘Just get the word out for me, Mannion.’

He nodded, and he let Cusack move along. He watched the old scut hoick a gobber and tug the trackies from the crack of his arse. Shook his head, Ol’ Boy – they had no fucking class up on the Northside Rises.

A winter’s bother was brewing then. Blood would flow and soon. But there was the possibility, Ol’ Boy realised, that too long and persistent a Calm might be no good for the city.

A place should never for too long go against its nature.

5 The Mendicants at the Aliados

Above De Valera Street the sun climbed and caught on each of the street’s high windows and each whited out and was blinded by the glare; each became a brilliant, unseeing eye. The light seemed to atomise the very air of the place. The air was rich, maritime, nutritious. It was as if you could reach up and grab a handful of the stuff. The evil-eyed gulls were antic on the air as they cawed and quarrelled and the street beneath them was thick with afternoon life.

Yes and here they came, all the big-armed women and all the low-sized butty fellas. Here came the sullen Polacks and the Back Trace crones. Here came the natty Africans and the big lunks of bog-spawn polis. Here came the pikey blow-ins and the washed-up Madagascars. Here came the women of the Rises down the 98 Steps to buy tabs and tights and mackerel – of such combinations was life in the flatblock circles sustained. Here came the Endeavour Avenue suits for a sconce at ruder life. The Smoketown tushies were between trick-cycles and had crossed the footbridge to take joe and cake in their gossiping covens. The Fancy-boy wannabes swanned about in their finery and tip-tapped a rhythm with their clicker’d heels. De Valera Street was where all converged, was where all trails tangled and knotted, and yes, here came Logan Hartnett in the afternoon swell. He was…

Gubernatorial.

Like a searchlight he turned his cold smile as he walked. He picked out all the De Valera Street familiars. He spotted a haggard old dear from the Trace. With one arm she pushed a dog in a pram, with the other she cradled a cauliflower, and he leaned into her as he passed.

‘Howya, Maggie, you’re breaking hearts, you are?’

Logan in the afternoon was almost sentimental – it was the taint that set him so. When he whispered to his old familiars, it was as if he hadn’t seen them for years.

By Henderson the Apotechary:

‘How-we-now, Denis? Any news on the quare fella?’

By Meehan’s Fish ’n’ Game:

‘Is that lung giving you any relief, Mrs Kelly?’

By the Auld Triangle:

‘When do the bandages come off, Terence?’

His smoke-grey suit, finely cut, set off nicely his deadhouse pallor. The walk of him, y’sketch? Regal, yes, quite so, and he made grand progress towards the Café Aliados.

De Valera Street runs its snakebend roll from the base of the Northside Rises all the way down to the river. It separates the Back Trace from the New Town. Its leases are kept cheap and easy – buckshee enterprises appear overnight and fold as quick. There are soothsayers. There are purveyors of goat’s blood cures for marital difficulties. There are dark caverns of record stores specialising in ancient calypso 78s – oh we have an old wiggle to the hip in Bohane, if you get us going at all. There are palmists. There are knackers selling combination socket wrench sets. Discount threads are flogged from suitcases mounted on bakers’ pallets, there are cages of live poultry, and trinket stores devoted gaudily to the worship of the Sweet Baba Jay. There are herbalists, and veg stalls, and poolhalls. Such is the life of De Valera Street, and Logan Hartnett at this time had the power over it.

He approached the Aliados. The crowd walked a perceptible curve around its front entrance in due respect. The Aliados opened onto Dev Street from the front and to the Back Trace from a laneway door. It was still, after all these years, the afternoon haunt of the Hartnett Fancy. He ducked down the laneway so as to come in, as always, by the side door – a creature of ritual and set habits. A scatter of his boys lounged inside at the low zinc tables. They smoked, and they drank tiny white cups of joe, and they ate sesame seeds and pumpkin seeds from saucers of thin china delft, and they sighed, languidly, as they leafed through the fashion magazines. The Aliados was no longer in the hands of Macu’s people, her father had long since passed, but somehow it had an air of wistfulness for the old country yet: a lingering saudade.

Logan took his usual table down back of the long, low-lit cafe. He had a clear view to both doorways from here – he was careful. He hung his jacket on a peg set for the purpose in the wall behind. The wall held photographs, faded, of ancient football teams. These were from the long-gone days when Bohane would have won All-Irelands. The girl – who was as homely as he could reasonably hire, not wanting his boys overly distracted – brought him his joe and a saucer of seeds and he smiled for her sweetly in thanks. The murmuring of talk among the Fancy boys was lower since Logan had entered the place. He smiled now for all of them. He turned the smile around the room; it was a masterpiece of priestly benevolence. Nobody was fooled by it for a minute – Logan’s smile was packed with nuance. Before its arc had fully swung the cafe, its message – its news – had changed many times, just a half-degree of a turn here, a half-degree there, adjusting minutely as it settled on the various parties of the room.

You would be in no doubt whatsoever as to your current standing within the ranks of the Hartnett Fancy.

Logan flicked his coffee cup with a fingernail. It tinked, pleasingly. He sighed then in long suffering. Examined his nails – a manicure was overdue. He allowed a particular glaze to settle over his fine-boned features. It was as though to emphasise the extent of a martyr’s devotion to the city; his devotion.

Now the custom at the Aliados, afternoons, was that mendicants would take a high stool at the bar and there they would wait precisely in turn for their brief audience with Logan. That an audience could begin was signalled by the slightest raising of the pale Hartnett eyebrows. This afternoon was a quiet one – just a couple of men waited. Logan signalled that the first of them might now approach, and it was the whippet-thin butcher Ger Reid who came dolefully across the tiled floor.

Wary always, Logan would be, of a thin butcher.

Reid was allowed a seat at the table beside him. He sat on the seat’s edge, and he had the look, close up, of a man lately a stranger to peace. Logan took his hand, gently, and held it.

‘You’re not well, butcher?’

‘I ain’t so hot at all, Mr Hartnett.’

‘Ah my poor man.’

The butcher raised his eyes as though the mystery of his misfortune might be read up there on the Aliados’s smoke-cured ceiling.

‘I’ve a… situation, sir.’

‘I know that, Ger.’

‘What’s goin’ on, Mr H, is…’

‘I know, Ger.’

He held the butcher’s hand yet and he stroked it most tenderly. Eye-locked the poor fucker.

‘It’s your wife, Ger. It’s Eileen. She’s been getting familiar with Deccie Cantillon, hasn’t she?’

Reid scrunched his face against the threat of tears. That his situation was known made the humiliation complete.

‘With your own cuz, Ger?’

Reid burped hard on deep, ragged sobs. Logan placed a forearm along the butcher’s spindly shoulders. Noted the way the shoulders jerked and fell with the sobs, and he enjoyed the feeling of that.

‘S’what I’m dealin’ with now, sir!’

‘Oh my poor child of the Sweet Baba… Oh Deccie Deccie Deccie… Deccie’s… below in the fish market, isn’t he?… Ah… You can never trust a fishmonger, Gerard. That is what I’d always say. That would be my advice to you. It’s the way they’d be looking down all day at those dead glistening little eyes. How’re they going to come out of that right?’

‘I only know of it the last week, Mr Hartnett… I haven’t slept.’

‘Only know of it myself the past fortnight, Gerard.’

A dart of animal pain went through the man. Logan smiled as his forearm felt the shock of the words jolting the butcher’s slight frame.

‘Oh I have dark fuckin’ thoughts, Mr Hartnett!’

‘I’d well imagine, Ger. Sure he’s lappin’ her out an’ all, I’d say.’

The butcher now openly wept.

‘Would you say, Mr Hartnett?’

‘He’s like a little cat at a saucer of milk, I’d say.’

The butcher stood and bunched his wee, gnarled fists but Logan pulled him gently into the seat again.

‘Oh I have dark fuckin’ thoughts, sir! Dark!’

Logan placed a finger to his lips and softly blew. Brought his lips then to the butcher’s ear.

‘Gerard? You’re going to stow those thoughts for me. Hear? I’m going to look after this for you, Ger.’

‘Are you, Mr H?’

‘Yes, Gerard. I’ll look after the fishmonger. And you can look after the adulterous cunt you married.’

His pale skin caught the low light of the Aliados – the skeleton of him was palpable, there greyly beneath the skin, the bone machine that was Logan Hartnett – and he smiled his reassurance; it had weight to it in Bohane.

‘But we need be very careful, Ger. You hear what I’m saying to you?’

‘I do.’

‘Think on. If anything unpleasant were to befall a particular cuz, who’d those fat polis fucks come lookin’ for?’

‘You mean everyone knows, Mr Hartnett?’

‘The dogs on the streets, Gerard.’

‘Ah Mr Hartnett…’

The butcher’s head dipped, and tears raced down his cheeks, and they fell towards the zinc top of the table, but Logan one by one caught them as they fell.

‘So where’d the polis be sticking the old beak, eh?’

‘I hear what you’re sayin’ to me, Mr Hartnett.’

‘It’ll be taken care of, Gerard. You can trust me on that. Now go back to your work and put this out of your mind like a good man, d’you hear?’

‘It’s hard, Mr Hartnett.’

‘I know it’s hard, Gerard. Or I can imagine so.’

‘Thanks, Mr H.’

The butcher rose to go.

‘Of course, Ger, you know that I’ll be back to you in due course?’

‘I know that.’

‘Favour done’s a favour answered, Gerard.’

‘Yes, Mr Hartnett, sir.’

In such a way in the city was a man’s fate decided. Logan Hartnett yawned, stretched, and stirred a half-spoonful of demerara into his joe. The Aliados eased through its slow, afternoon moments. The Fancy boys talked lazily of bloodshed, and tush, and new lines in kecks. They combed each other’s hair and tried out new partings. Logan brooded a while, and went into his own smoky depths, and then he signalled again with a raising of his eyebrows. No surprise at all the next man to shuffle from a high stool. It was Dominick Gleeson, aka Big Dom, editor of the city’s only newspaper, the Bohane Vindicator. Of course, it was in no small part thanks to Logan Hartnett that the Vindicator remained the city’s only paper. Its masthead slogan: ‘Truth or Vengeance’, as inked above a motif of two quarrelling ravens.

The Dom was a busy-faced lardarse who walked a soft-shoe shuffle, and as he came padding across to the Long Fella’s table, already he was muttering sadly, as if the machinations of life in the city had become too much for him. Dom fed on an all-meat diet and he had the high colour of it. He carried with him a small glass of moscato wine and the following morning’s proposed editorial comment. He laid the copy before Logan, took a seat, removed grandly a silken handkerchief from inside his three-quarter-length autumn coat, and mopped his bone-dry brow.

‘Oh my angina,’ he sorrowfully wheezed.

Impatiently, the copy was brushed aside.

‘Summarise for me, Dominick.’

The fat newsman leaned forward and allowed on his features a moist, hammy scowl.

‘I’m after comin’ out bullin’ against the plan for a Beauvista tram, Mr H.’

He sipped at his moscato and winked broadly. Tiptoed his fingers across the tabletop and onto the saucer of pumpkin seeds – Logan swiped the fingers away, and Dom winced, blew on them, and adopted a look of brutalised innocence. Logan couldn’t but grin.

‘Your rationale, Dom?’

‘I’m sayin’ the las’ place that need a tram is Nob Hill, sir.’

Beauvista was always referred to thus in the Vindicator’s common-touch argot.

‘I’m sayin’ the Bohane Authority would be far better off spendin’ the bucks on improving the El train and serving the dacent ordinary people…’

With chubby fingertips Big Dom mimicked a tiny violin.

‘… of the Northside Rises.’

‘Good man, Dom. We want the Rises kept well buttered.’

‘Of course, we just got to be seen to be sayin’, like. There ain’t no fear the Authority will pay the slightest bit o’ notice, Logan. The Beauvista tram?’

He fisted a soft palm happily.

‘She’s a lock, sir.’

‘Happy news, Dominick. We won’t have to lug our old bones up that bastard of a hill.’

The newsman was also established, naturally, in a Nob Hill manse, and he shuddered his relief.

‘Lungs are like broken stout bottles in me on account of it, Logan.’

‘Oh you suffer, Dominick.’

‘Don’t be talkin’ to me, sir. The latest is I’m after gettin’ a class of a shake in the mitt, are you watchin’?’

Dominick held up his left mitt and quivered it dramatically.

‘Could it be an excess of self-abuse, Dom?’

The newsman’s eyes popped in outrage.

‘If I threw ya tuppence, would ya lower the tone?’

Big Dom sat back then, and he sighed as he let his piggy little eyes swivel about the cafe. In the sigh, there was his blunt opinion of things: that this place would be the end of him yet.

‘What I wanted to ask you, Mr H…’

‘Yes, Dom?’

‘Is regardin’ the Cusack situation.’

‘Oh? Is there a Cusack situation, Dominick?’

The Dom chuckled.

‘What we’re wondering, Logan, is there any hope at all that, ah… that… things might hold off for a stretch yet?’

‘Who the we, Dom?’

Gleeson glared indignantly.

‘I’m speakin’ on behalf o’ the Bohane people, Mr Hartnett!’

Logan leaned forward for a low-voiced confide:

‘I ain’t the one sending martyrs of young fellas across the footbridge, Dominick. I ain’t the one rousing the flatblocks.’

The Dom showed his palms. He moaned, softly, and he let his eyes roll up in his head until all that could be seen was the whites – this to signify the delicate politics the city required, and the weariness such work exacted from an honest soul.

‘I know they’re wall-bangers to a man, H, an’ feckin’ uppity with it. But all we’re sayin’…’

‘The we again, Dom?’

‘Okay, Mr Hartnett. Truth be told, I’m carryin’ representations from the Authority.’

‘Ah, I see now.’

‘Bohane Authority is at a critical stage in negotiations with the NB, Mr Hartnett.’

NB, in Bohane cant: the Nation Beyond.

‘So I believe.’

‘NB tight enough with the aul’ tit this year, H.’

‘I understand it’s the way.’

‘So the last thing we need is one half o’ the town tryin’ to ate the other half. This place got a bad enough name as things stand, Logan.’

‘You’re saying that the Authority wishes for the Calm to persist, Dom, until such a time as the NB tit has been successfully massaged?’

‘That’s very nicely put, Mr Hartnett.’

Logan knit his elegant fingers beneath his chin.

‘I’m reasonable, Dom. I wouldn’t be fouling the air still if I wasn’t. Our only problem is we got a loolah up on the Rises and he has a horn on him for a massive fucking ruck. And I can’t be seen to back off.’

‘I’m knowin’ this all too well, Logan.’

‘And! I’ve got a fucking maniac outside on Big Nothin’ and he’s working his own plan.’

‘You’re talkin’ about the Gant Broderick.’

‘I am indeed, Dominick. So here’s what I’d say to you. If ye want the Calm to stretch for a while, I’ll play my part but on a particular condition.’

‘Name it, sir.’

‘Get me a bead on the Gant.’

The fat newsman soul-wrestled for the cheap seats.

‘Ah, Logan… The Gant’s a man with a quare stretch o’ history to his name outside on Nothin’…’

‘You’ve contacts out there, Dom.’

‘I have, but…’

‘I’m sending my boys out. And your very best contact is to meet with them. And they better be given the Gant’s precise whereabouts, Dom. Whatever fucking rock he’s hiding under, we need to know it.’

Dom trembled his jowls.

‘Mr Hartnett? Peoples got long memories in Bohane. If the Gant got hurted…’

‘I want a bead drawn on the big unit, Dom. Do you hear me clearly?’

‘Cathedral bells, Mr Hartnett.’

‘Good. Have we any other business?’

They smiled, and they shook, and the newsman took his leave. Logan reached for his jacket, removed from its breast pocket a red handkerchief, and wiped his hands. He ate seeds, then, and he drank joe, and he examined the reach of his manipulation. He smiled for the young gents of the Fancy. They watched him with the usual regard, awe, puzzlement.

The day they could snag a read on him would be the day he would lose them.

6 Big Nothin’ Rendezvous

Was the day following a pair of hombres by the name of Wolfie Stanners and Fucker Burke took to the High Boreen. The Boreen is the main passage across the Big Nothin’ wastes – a double-width cindertrack passable in most weathers. Smaller tracks lead from it into the hills and onto the bog and down briary laneways peopled by haggard souls in cottages that sag with damp, and loss, and sadness. The rain fell hard as the boys grimly walked, and rain was no surprise to the place. A low bank of cloud had moved in from the Atlantic and broke up when it hit the foothills of the Nothin’ massif. The bog was livened and opened its maw hungrily for the rain. The boys squelched along and eyed with disgust the effect of the mud on their high-top boots. The rain ran in fresh silver freely down the gullies of the hills and fed the patient lakes and the poppy fields also were sated. Even in the midst of the rain, sunlight flashed from behind the cloudbank – it peeped out for a few seconds at a time, skittish as a young thing, and showed the colours of the rain. The yellow of the high-summer broom had faded in memory of that summer. There was a thick silence from the direction of the pikey reservation – ‘the rez’, as it is known in the Bohane cant – a most sinister silence, and the boys were watchful of the pikey lands, easterly. Never know what could come flyin’ at you from that direction.

‘I’m tryin’ to get this straight in me noggin,’ said Fucker.

‘Here we go,’ said Wolfie.

‘The fuck how we gonna find the big unit, Wolf?’

‘We’re gonna have a bead drawn, Fucker.’

‘Hey but Wolf? We don’t know fuckin’ Nothin’ from fuckin’ no place, y’heed me?’

‘Shut up, Fucker.’

These boys were the roaming lieutenants of the Hartnett Fancy. The mood was not good.

‘But seriously, Wolfie? I mean there’s a whole heap o’ Big fuckin’ Nothin’ out here, y’sketchin’?’

Indeed, it was a rude expanse. The reeds that fringed the wee lakes swayed but barely in a light breeze. Big Nothin’ is a place of thorn and stone and sudden devouring swamp-holes. It has an infinity of small wet fields. The fields are broken up by rough and ill-formed drystone walls that tend to give out altogether about two-thirds of the way across a field. A lazy job, the walls. It wasn’t Presbyterians put up those walls.

‘What we know about the big unit?’ said Fucker.

‘The Gant Broderick,’ said Wolfie. ‘Halfways pikey, halfways whiteman. Been gone outta the creation since back in the day. Was the dude used to have the runnins before the Long Fella. Use’ t’do a line with the Long Fella’s missus an’ all, y’check?’

Fucker’s jaw lolloped.

‘Say she was a proper lash in her day, like?’

‘She ain’t too bad now, Fuck.’

‘Ain’t, like.’

‘Wouldn’t kick her outta bed for atein’ anchovies, like.’

‘No way, Wolf. The way the eye be class o’ turned in on her, like? Bit tasty.’

On a stone wall Wolfie and Fucker paused to rest a while. They smoked, and they savoured a spectacle. In the near distance, a scraggle of country lads cantered around a small field. Polis trials were coming up, and to get a start in the Bohane polis, a lad is expected to be able to lep over a sixbar farm gate of the type made by the sand-pikeys who live on the dunes oceanside of the city. The lads jogged in a staggered line around the irregular perimeter of the field and in sequence one of them would break off from the stagger, take a sprint for the field’s gate and have a lep at it. Knees, elbows and chins were taking punishment down there. The Bohane polis was spud-ater to a man.

‘Smart-lookin’ crop,’ said Wolfie Stanners.

‘World-beaters,’ said Fucker Burke.

Wolfie and Fucker were by their nature city boys. They were not built for the wilds. If he had his way, Fucker would have been sat on a bollard of the Bohane front, with a pipeload of herb on the draw and a dangerous glare trained on the river traffic. If he had his way, Wolfie would have been patrolling the Trace and S’town in the Fancy’s cause – with concrete under his feet – and bustin’ the heads of Norrie scuts.

‘Got the fuckin’ spooks up in me, Wolf.’

‘Well, that’s Big fuckin’ Nothin’ for ya, ain’t it, Fucker?’

The boys bitterly climbed to their feet and hit again along the High Boreen. Went deeper into the Nothin’ wastes. They came to a particular turn and took it and it led to a ridge path that skirted a granite knoll. Made a harlequin spectacle out on the bog plain, these boys.

Fucker wore:

Silver high-top boots, drainpipe strides in a natty-boy mottle, a low-slung dirk belt and a three-quarter jacket of saffron-dyed sheepskin. He was tall and straggly as an invasive weed. He was astonishingly sentimental, and as violent again. His belligerent green eyes were strange flowers indeed. He was seventeen years of age and he read magical significance into occurrences of the number nine. He had ambition deep inside but could hardly even name it. His true love: an unpredictable Alsatian bitch name of Angelina.

Wolfie wore:

Black patent high-tops, tight bleached denims with a matcher of a waistcoat, a high dirk belt, and a navy Crombie with a black velvet collar. Wolfie was low-sized, compact, ginger, and he thrummed with dense energies. He had a blackbird’s poppy-eyed stare, thyroidal, and if his brow was no more than an inch deep, it was packed with an alley rat’s cunning. He was seventeen, also, and betrayed, sometimes, by odd sentiments under moonlight. He wanted to own entirely the city of Bohane. His all-new, all-true love: Miss Jenni Ching of the Hartnett Fancy and the Ho Pee Ching Oh-Kay Koffee Shoppe.

‘Get ’round the far side o’ that hill,’ said Wolfie, ‘an’ we should see the place, yeah?’

‘Like I know the fuckin’ bogs from fuckology,’ said Fucker.

They were headed for a low tavern out at Eight Mile Bridge. A tout was to be met there. They walked on through the damp air.

‘If yer askin’ me?’ said Fucker.

‘Well, I ain’t,’ said Wolfie.

‘If yer askin’ me,’ said Fucker, ‘Logan H, he gone seriously fuckin’ para, like.’

‘Logan H, he always been para, Fucker. You don’t land the runnins o’ Bohane without bein’ seriously on the fuckin’ para side, y’check me? S’how y’keep suckin’ wind.’

Fucker waggled his beanie head in puzzlement.

‘But what’s this old Gant cunt gonna go and do on him? Who got the juju over Logan, like? He’s well protected, the Long Fella.’

‘Ours ain’t to reason why, Fucker. We’s oney the boys, like. Yet.’

They came upon the Bohane river. Feeding directly off the bog, it was a tarry run of blackwater, and it burbled its inanities. Fucker listened as they walked, and was antsy, and he ran the tip of his tongue across his cracked, nervous lips. He let free a nagging worry.

‘You an’ the Jenni-chick gone kinda serious lately, Wolf?’

‘We’s a lock, Fucker.’

‘Knew I ain’t been seein’ you around the place so much of an evenin’.’

‘Missin’ me, Fucker?’

‘Aw she’s a wee lash an’ all, like. I wouldn’t blame you, kid.’

‘Breed a bairn off her quick as you’d look at me.’

‘You would? A Chinkee gettin’ bred off a ginge? Weird-lookin’ fuckin’ baba, no?’

‘Stow it, Fucker.’

The river ran, and the Nothin’ massif loomed in a grey haze, and swaying briars scraped at the boys’ noggins, and Eight Mile Bridge was at last reached.

‘Spud-ater Central,’ said Wolfie Stanners.

A scatter of inebriates hung out beneath the great stone arches of the bridge. They sucked at their sacks of tawny wine. Misfortunate souls in beanie hats, ragged-arsed trews, ancient geansais. The boys eyeballed them hard as they passed.

‘Awful to see fellas let themselves go,’ said Fucker.

‘No self-respec’ is the prob,’ said Wolfie.

They went down a short fall of carved stone steps to the old tavern: the Eight Mile Inn. The inn was set low on the river’s bank to dodge the hardwind’s assaults. It was lit only by turf fires and the boys squinted in the gloom as they entered.

Door creaked shut behind, and slammed, and wisps of steam like spectral maggots rose from their damp coats in the inn’s fuggy heat.

Their eyes adjusted. They picked out their man at a far corner. As was arranged, he read a copy of the Vindicator. Gestured with it as the boys entered. He was a nervy-looking old-timer with milk-bottle shoulders. Mug of brandy before him. A few old bogside quaffers in flat caps were slung about the dim corners but they kept their eyes down. Wolfie and Fucker crossed the room and slid onto the high stools either side of the tout. Wolfie called a pair of amber halves off the fat-armed Big Nothin’ wench behind the counter. She served them, and was all slow and lazy-eyed about it – a lass, no doubt, with notions of being carted off to the city some day. The boys pointedly ignored her. At length, Wolfie addressed the tout in a sidelong whisper.

‘Understand,’ he said, ‘that the man from the paper put word to you?’

‘Mr Gleeson, he did.’

‘Know why we’re here so?’ said Fucker.

‘It’s about a bead wants drawin’.’

‘You the man to draw it for us, cove?’

‘The man ye’re lookin’ for been seen awrigh’, like.’

‘Seen when and where?’

‘Would it mean somethin’ t’ye if I said, like? Ye know Big Nothin’, ye do?’

‘Said when and where?’

‘He oney comes out on night walks.’

‘Comes out where, cove?’

‘Comes out. Walks abroad.’

Fucker snapped.

‘Fuck’s walks a-fuckin-broad mean, fuckface?’

‘He walks Nothin’.’

‘There’s a whole wealth,’ said Wolfie, ‘o’ Big fuckin’ Nothin’ out here, in’t there?’

‘Where’s it he’s kippin’, cove?’

‘That ain’t known.’

The boys threw their hands up. Consulted each other quietly. They were tempted already towards a spilling of blood but wary of the report that needed making to Logan Hartnett. The spud-ater knew this well. Spud-aters – they can be as cute as shithouse slugs.

Fucker sat on his hands and bit his bottom lip. Wolfie, more the diplomat of the pair, changed tack.

‘You’d be a fella who’d take a turn ’round Smoketown the odd time, sir?’

‘Now,’ said the spud-ater, ‘we are talkin’ decen’ cuts o’ turkey.’

‘An’ what’d have an interest for you ’cross the footbridge, sir?’

The old-timer’s eyes sparkled.

‘I’d lick a dream off the belly of a skinny hoor as quick as you’d look at me.’

Wolfie nodded soberly, as though appreciative of the spudater’s delicate tastes.

‘Draw a bead and you’ll have your pick o’ the skinnies,’ he said. ‘Could have a season o’ picks.’

‘A season?’

‘Cozy aul’ winter for ya,’ said Fucker. ‘Buried to the maker’s name in skinnies and far gone off the suck of a dream-pipe, y’check me?’

The old tout sighed as temptation hovered.

‘Oh man an’ boy I been a martyr to the poppy dream…’

‘An’ soon as you done with the dream-pipe,’ Fucker teased some more, ‘there’d be as much herb as you can lung an’ ale to folly.’

‘All dependin’,’ said Wolfie, ‘on you drawin’ a bead on the man’s berth for us, check?’

Spud-ater considered the dregs of his brandy.

Swirled it.

Drained it.

Wolfie nodded for the bar wench to bring him another. She did so. The spud-ater swallowed a fresh nip and savoured it and wrinkled with some delicacy his nostrils. Said:

‘That man we’re talkin’ about? That’s a man with a wealth o’ respect behind him out here on Nothin’. Lot o’ friends here still.’

‘Hear ya, cove.’

‘A man like that? A man that go waaaay the fuck back on Big Nothin’? Man like that get a bead drawn on him for a pair o’ Fancy headjobs… I mean no offence.’

Wolfie held up a forgiving palm.

‘None taken, sir.’

‘All I’m sayin’? It mightn’t auger so well for the fella that draws a bead on Gant Broderick, y’get me?’

‘Don’t say the name,’ said Wolfie.

The tout massaged then slowly with one the other his Judas palms. Niggled at the decision.

‘You gonna draw the fuckin’ bead for us?’ said Fucker. ‘Or we passin’ the time o’ fuckin’ day, like?’

The old-timer put his face in his hands. Looked sadly at the boys then, nodded, and bit down hard on his lip. Jerked a thumb outside.

‘Meet me under that bridge a week t’moro,’ he said. ‘Three bells in the a.m. An’ boys? It’s gonna be moonless.’

7 The Lost-Time: A Romance

Quick as a switchblade’s flick the years had passed and she was forty-three years old. She walked each evening in the Bohane New Town, as if every step might bring her further from the life she had made. But always she circled towards home again.

Macu wore:

A silk wrap, in a rich plum tone, with her dark hair stacked high and shellacked, and her bearing was regal, and a jewelled collar-belt was clasped about her throat; the dullness of its gleam was in the evening light a soft green burn.

By custom, this was the hour of the paseo for the Bohane Dacency – the hour when a parade of the New Town was decorously made. Here was Macu among the delicate ladies as they gently wafted along the pretty greystone crescents.

The paseo whirl:

One might trouble one’s dainty snout with a whiff of the taleggio displayed in an artisanal cheese shop, or run one’s nails along the grain of a silvery hose shipped in from Old Lisbon (if the route was open), or take a saucer of jasmine tea and a knuckle of fennel-scented snuff at a counter of buffed Big Nothin’ granite.

But there was a want in these ladies yet, and it was for the rude life of youth. These old girls had Rises blood in them or they had Back Trace bones, one or the other. Most of the money in Bohane was new money, and it was a question merely of a lady’s luck if she was to be headed for a Beauvista manse or for the Smoketown footbridge.

Macu in the reminiscent evening walked the New Town and she traced a mapline to her lost-time.

It was one of those summers you’re nostalgic for even before it passes. Pale, bled skies. Thunderstorms in the night. Sour-smelling dawns. It brought temptation, and yearning, and ache – these are the summer things. And sweet calypso sounded always from the Back Trace shebeens. Fancy boys sucked on herb-pipes in the laneway outside the Café Aliados. Aggravators were on the prowl from the flatblock circles of the Rises and the ozone of danger was a sexy tang on the air.

Skirmishes.

Blood spilling.

Hormones raging.

And the Trace Fancy had the Gant Broderick’s name to it then. That would have been the day in Bohane – she smiled now as she recalled it – a Fancy boy would wear clicker’d clogs with crimson sox pulled to the top of the calf and worn beneath three-quarter-length trackie cut-offs, with a tweed cap set back to front, a stevedore donkey jacket with hi-viz piping, the hair greased back and quiffed – oh we must have looked like proper fucking rodericks – and a little silver herb-pipe on a leather lace around the neck.

Her mother was gone by then and her father was weakening. There was a greenish tint to his skin in the low light of the Aliados. Always wincing, always reaching for his lower back. Macu was taking on the upkeep of the caff, and she was quick-tongued with the Fancy boys who lounged there. They hung off the Aliados’s tapped-brass counter and were dreamy-eyed for her. She was skinny and seventeen and working it on wedge heels. A darting glance from under the lashes that’d slice a boy’s soul open. A bullwhip lash of the tongue and they’d whimper, swoon, let their eyes roll. Macu was the first-prize squaw that summer back deep in the Bohane lost-time.

The Gant was a slugger of a young dude and smart as a hatful of snakes. Sentimental, also. He had washed in off the Big Nothin’ wastes, the Gant, and it was known in Bohane there was a good mix of pikey juice in him. A rez boy – campfire blood.

See him back there:

A big unit with deep-set eyes and a squared-off chin. Dark-haired, and sallow, and wry. The kind of kid who wore his bruises nicely. A cow lick that fell onto his high forehead.

Her father warned her off – pikeys is differen’, he said – and the warning lent its own spice; fathers never learn.

The Gant jawed a mouthful o’ baccy barside of the Aliados one night, and he winked at her, and he said what’s it they call yez anyway, girl-chil’? Macu, s’it?

‘Back off, pike,’ she said. ‘Y’foulin’ me air, sketch?’

The Gant down the Aliados vibed it like he was an older dude. Summer nights in Bohane, with tempers coming untamped, and tangles in the wynds, and he was losing some of his boys to the dirks of the uptown aggravators. That put its heaviness on him.

He loaded the sad glare on Macu.

She turned it straight back to him.

Oh these were good-looking young people, in a hard town by the sea, and the days bled into the sweet nights, and it was as if the summer would never end.

‘Macu, you get time off ever, girl?’

A shyness on him she could hardly believe. The runnings of the town under his shkelp belt already and he was blushing for her.

‘Me aul’ dude ain’t the hottest.’

‘I see that, girl.’

‘Busy, yunno…’

‘Get to get an aul’ walk in sometime, though? A turn down the river, Macu?’

He showed no front when he talked to her. She liked the rez spiel that came from him. She liked those spun-out Big Nothin’ yarns. Of the old weirds who roamed out there and of the paths that opened to the Bohane underworld. Of the cures and the curses. Of the messages writ in starsign on the night sky. The Gant had the weight of Nothin’ in his step. It felt grown-up to walk the Bohane Trace with the Gant by her side. They took it slowly.

‘I ain’t lookin’ for no easy lackeen,’ he said.

‘Y’ain’t found one,’ she said.

He spoke of the taint that was on the town. He spoke often of premonition. He said it came to him as a cold quiver at the base of the spine. He said that it came in the hour before dawn. He said if he stayed in the creation, he’d come to a bad end sure enough. He said there was no gainsaying that. He said he had the feeling – he said it was in the blood.

‘Sounds to me like a rez boy gettin’ spooked,’ she said, and she traced the tips of her fingers along the creases of his hunched neck.

‘I got a feel for these things,’ he said.

The Bohane river blackly ran. They fell into its spell. It became official in the Trace that summer that Macu from the Aliados was the Gant Broderick’s clutch. He told her that he loved her and that his love caused the fear inside to amplify.

‘Before was like I ain’t had so much to lose,’ he said.

‘Y’breakin’ me fuckin’ heart, pike,’ she said.

‘Don’t want to miss seein’ what you turn into,’ he said.

He said that already they were conspiring against him in the Fancy. He said he was watchful of more than one.

‘Like who?’

‘Like the skinny boy. You know who.’

He talked about leaving the peninsula behind. He asked her to come with him.

‘But go where, G?’

‘Maybe… Go across over?’

‘That fuckin’ scudhole?’

‘I won’t go without you, girl.’

‘I dunno, G…’

‘I could set us up, girl. You could follow me over…’

In the New Town, at the hour of the paseo, she looked carefully over her shoulder – sketch? – and it was clear: she had not been followed by a Fancy scout today. She turned into the quietest of the Endeavour Avenue cafes. Ol’ Boy Mannion waited for her there on a high stool. He smiled but she did not answer the smile.

‘What’s this about, Ol’ Boy?’

‘I’d say you know or you wouldn’t be here.’

‘I won’t see him, Ol’ Boy.’

He passed across the letter.

‘Just read what he’s written to you, Macu.’

8 Night on Nothin’

Midnight.

Big Nothin’.

A trailer home.

And Jenni Ching was butt-naked on the sofa bed.

The trailer was a double-wide aluminium, twenty-two-foot long, and it contained the fold-out bed, a pot-belly stove, an odour of intense sadness, a set of creaking floorboards, and the Gant Broderick. The Gant also was naked, and he was straining, with his eyes tightly shut, to recall the darkest of all his dark times – this so as not to come.

Hardwind was up, and it raged across the bog outside, and it made speeches in the stove’s flue; threats, it sounded like, in a spooky, hollowed-out voice: an eerie song for the Gant as he grimly thrusted.

Jenni Ching was on her hands and knees, with her slender rump in the air, and a brass herb-pipe clamped in her gob. She cast over her shoulder a bored glance at the Gant. He looked as if his heart might at any moment explode. His face was purpled, blotched, sweaty.

‘If y’wanna take five,’ she said, ‘jus’ holler.’

The mocking tone was too much for him, was too delicious, and the Gant spent himself. He fell onto his back and was ashamed then. His heart was a rabid pit bull loose inside his chest.

Jenni Ching consulted the wall clock.

‘Three minutes even,’ she said. ‘You’re comin’ on, kid.’

She turned and sat back against the sofa bed’s headrest. She drew her legs up about her. She relit her herb-pipe, sucked on it deep, and blew a greenish smoke. The Gant risked an eye at her. She smiled at him, so feline.

‘This what it feel like?’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Love.’

‘Sarky for your age, girl.’

She placed her tiny feet on his wheezing chest. He laid his hand across her feet and it covered them entirely. She wriggled her toes, the ten, taunting tips of them. Sighed.

‘So what’s the script with Ganty-boy?’ she said. ‘An’ no more bollick-talk about settlin’ in the countryside an’ growin’ cabbages.’

‘Why shouldn’t I settle, Jenni? Rest me old bones.’

She drew a hard suck on the pipe, held the smoke, and then reached and pulled his face to hers, laid her mouth on his, and sent with a sharp hiss the blowback.

He glazed.

Coughed.

‘Don’t always agree with me,’ he said, his chest heaving, his humours all twisted.

She reached again and held with her tiny iron hand his chin.

Locked a glance.

‘An’ you’d be doin’ the fuck what out here, Gant, ’xactly?’

‘I’m supposed to be askin’ the questions, Jenni.’

‘You havin’ an’ aul’ chat with the stoats, G? Goin’ fishin’?’

‘You doin’ a little fishin’ yourself, Jenni?’

‘All I’m doin’ is talkin’ to ya. All I’m doin’ is passin’ the lonesome aul’ night, y’check me?’

‘You got the gift for talk, girleen.’

She was tiny. She lifted her feet from his chest. She swung her legs from the sofa bed. She padded to the door of the trailer and unclasped the catch and pushed out the door agin the hardwind. She looked out to the night. A swirl of stars made cheap glamour of the sky above the bog plain.

Without looking at him:

‘Y’plannin’ damage for the ’bino, Gant?’

‘Would I confide as much?’

‘The ’bino’s had wall-bangers come lookin’ for him before, Gant. Same boyos down the boneyard since. An’ it’s a spooky aul’ spill o’ moonlight y’gets down that place, y’sketchin’?’

The Gant with a cheeky grin:

‘Time does he come along S’town in the evenings, Jenni? Usually?’

She spat the same grin back over her shoulder.

‘This look like a tout’s can to you?’ she said.

‘Are you fuckin’ him, Jenni?’

‘You jealous, G?’

‘Or does he mess with the Fancy tush at all?’

‘Happens that the Long Fella don’t mess with no tush.’

‘Oh?’

‘Looked after in his marriage is Mr H. He’s takin’ about as much as he can handle up Beauvista way off the skaw-eye bint.’

A sly one. Knew where to aim; knew where to bite.

‘Oh? Happy, are they? The Hartnetts?’

She shook her head, and shaped a curious snarl and somehow he read truth here.

‘Happy? Who’s happy in fuckin’ Bohane? Ya’d be a long time scoutin’ for happy in this place.’

She gathered up her clothes and began to dress in the oily candlelight of the trailer. The girl was close to unreadable in the Gant’s view. She had told him nothing about the Fancy, nor about the S’town operations, nor about the movements of Logan Hartnett. Even so, she was keeping close, she was calling on him, and consenting to his bed. It was said this Ching girl had a count to her name already and the Gant was inclined to believe it from the taste of her.

‘You can’t stay a while?’

She didn’t dignify that with an answer.

And it was a moody Gant she left on the sofa bed as she took off into the night again. Cat’s eyes on her. As easy in her stride out on Nothin’ as she was in S’town or the Back Trace.

Watch her close, Gant.

But he relished her, despite himself, and he asked then for forgiveness as the trailer’s siding creaked ominously in the night. Awful thing to still have a taste for young ’un and you up to the view from fifty.

He lay among the stew of his thoughts a while. Now that was a murky old soup. He rose wearily after a time and dressed. He felt bone-ache and sad bliss. He went outside for a taste of the wind. His mind for a brief stretch ran clear. He closed his eyes and tried to bring himself to the lost-time, but it could never be regained. He would never take back the true taste. He had known it just once and it was Macu’s.

The Gant walked a keen edge always across the territories of the mind. At any moment he might trip to either side and fall into the blackness. Of course, it is a husky race of people we’re talking about outside in the Bohane creation, generally. Cursed and blessed with hot feeling.

Images from the lost-time now came to him in quick assault. When she was eighteen. When she walked with him. The way that she spoke to him. The way that her lips shaped to form his name.

He walked on into the night and he shook his great, bearish head against memory, and he briefly wept, and he chortled at himself then for the weeping. Oh this is a nice package you’re presenting, Gant. Oh this is a nice game you’ve got yourself involved with. And nice people to play it with.

Careful, Gant.

He walked the Nothin’ plain. The hardwind by ’n’ by walloped a little sense into him. A feral goat watched from a high vantage, its eyes a glaring yellow. The Gant willed himself to straight thinking. He felt the tread of their shared past underfoot. Your step there, he thought, and my step here. That’s your step there, and my step here, on the days that we walked out, Macu, in the noonday of the lost-time.

Nostalgia, on the peninsula, was a many-hooked lure.

The Gant had come back early in August. At once, he had fallen victim to our native reminiscence. In the Bohane creation, time comes loose, there is a curious fluidity, the past seeps into the future, and the moment itself as it passes is the hardest to grasp. The Gant came back with a couple of hundred in his pocket and a pair of busted boots on his feet and a reefed shoulder gone halfways septic – that was as much as he had to show for twenty-five years gone. A hot summer day with the bare lick of a breeze to it and the breeze among the long grasses whispered the old Nothin’ mysteries. The bog was dried out and above it a shifting black gauze of midge-clouds palpitated and the turloughs had drained off and there was that strange air of peace in the hills: never-changing, sea-tanged, western. The horizon wavered in hard sun over the poppy fields as the workers toiled in silhouette at the crop. Bleached light on the plain of Nothin’ and a fado lament wailed distant from somewhere on the pikey rez. His feet were blistered.

The breath came hard and jaggedly in him as he made it to Ol’ Boy Mannion’s longhouse. It was set in a valley’s dip, and as he quietly came on the place, he saw that its door was open. This was as expected – Ol’ Boy in the summer was by long habit to be found at his Nothin’ residence. The Gant stuck his head inside the door. He leaned against the jamb to slow his breath.

‘Benni,’ he said.

Ol’ Boy looked up from a settle in the dank and fly-thick shade, and he showed not a flicker of surprise.

‘You been settin’ the world on fire, Gant?’

The Gant raised his eyes. Ol’ Boy stood and shook his head woefully.

‘So who’s responsible for this masterpiece?’ he said.

‘By mine own fair hand,’ the Gant said.

‘Ah, come in out of it, would you? Before you frighten the fuckin’ ducks.’

The Gant sat in the shade of the longhouse and at length he took his breath back. Ol’ Boy asked no questions. Just waited it out.

‘E’er a notion where a fella could lay his achin’ bones, Benni?’

‘You’ll have to let me see about that.’

Ol’ Boy busied himself. On the stove he mixed up a bowl of pinhead oatmeal and he added a measure of Jameson to the pour of cream. He made a place at the table for the Gant and watched as he came slowly across the flagstones.

‘S’either yer gone rickety before yer time or there’s a story worth gobbin’, G?’

The Gant grimaced.

‘Y’lie down with dogs,’ he said.

As the Gant ate, Ol’ Boy examined the shoulder wound. He took a bottle of evil-smelling fluid from the high shelf and dabbed it on a wedge of cotton and applied the cotton to the wound.

‘Landed just a lucky stretch shy of a lung, Gant,’ he said. ‘And it have the look of a cratur who’s came at ya with a rusty blade, boy?’

‘Y’get off the peninsula,’ said the Gant, ‘and you find they got no class.’

Ol’ Boy salved the wound as best he could and shook another measure of the fluid onto it, for badness’ sake, and the Gant hissed a startle of pain. Ol’ Boy blew on the wound.

‘Trust me,’ he said, ‘I’m a nurse.’

He dressed the wound neatly. He was dainty about his work. He’d patched up more than a few go-boys in his day.

‘An’ you’re back here why, Gant Broderick, precisely? What bizarre fucking notion has weaselled itself into that sorry noggin o’ yours?’

He rapped his knuckles on the Gant’s head. The Gant laid down his spoon and thought a moment.

‘You’d find there’s a quare aul’ draw to Big Nothin’,’ he said.

‘An’ what about to Bohane city?’

‘Maybe we need to talk about that an’ all, Mr Mannion.’

Ol’ Boy’s opinion, which he transmitted in a single, sharp glance, was that Bohane wasn’t the same place it had been twenty-five years back.

‘S’pose it’ll be interestin’ whatever happens,’ he said.

The Gant agreed that it would be.

‘I need a place out here, Benni. Gather me thoughts, you know?’

So it was that Mannion had set him up with the trailer home. Told him to lie low a while and keep his snout to the wind: see how she blew.

Trailer was a hard find even to an aborigine like the Gant. It was located in the lee of an old quarry’s wall and it had that shelter at least from the evil of the hardwind. The trailer sat across an expanse of bog from a small lake. You’d barely drown a child in it, as they say of such a lake out on Nothin’. The lake’s waters were dark and cloudy and thatched at the verges with an accumulation of broken reeds. The Gant had settled to this place, and he watched the summer fade into autumn, and heard the hardwind rise, and he knew that winter was on the soon-come.

He walked the October night its length through. He came into a white space of mind and it was restful. He circled the plain. Towards dawn, he walked across the splintered boards of an old jetty by the small lake – the boards gave and groaned as he walked, the boards sang – and he crouched there, and he felt the looming presence of the Nothin’ hills beyond. Dark shadow of mountain against the waking sky. He felt a presence; he felt it as a great tenderness. And then he heard its voice.

‘Oh Baba?’ the Gant pleaded. ‘Oh Sweet B?’

9 Girly

Girly Hartnett lay in bed at the Bohane Arms Hotel. Eighty-nine she was, and bored. The boredom she sung with a frequent sighing. Her top-floor suite’s black velvet drapes were as always drawn – Girly had seen more than enough of Bohane city to last her a frigging lifetime. She was on a diet of hard booze and fat pills against the pain of her long existence. She was regally arranged on the plump pillows of a honeymooners’ bed. Girly’s days were slow, and they ran headlong into her nights, and she lay awake most of the nights, and yet she could never quite place the nights once they’d passed. Could never quite get a fix on the fuckers. As often as the hotel had juice enough to run a projector, she watched old movies on a pull-down screen. Girly liked old movies and menthol ciggies and plotting the city’s continued derangement. The Hartnett Fancy held the runnings of Bohane, and there were those who’d swear the steer was Girly’s yet as much as Logan’s. She could identify every knock on her door and she cried an answer now to her son’s.

‘Get in to me!’

The worry in him she read before he had his long bones folded in the bedside chair.

‘How we now?’ he said.

She raised a brittle hand to her throat, Girly, and let its fingers fraily rest there.

‘Not long for the stations, boy.’

‘So you been saying.’

They did not kiss nor lay a hand to each other. The Hartnetts were not touchy-touchy people. The Hartnetts were Back Trace: blood and bone.

‘Time you callin’ this anyhow?’

‘It’s gone seven alright.’

‘Was goin’ to get onto the morgue,’ she said. ‘See if they’d ta’en in any long pale-lookin’ fuckers.’

‘Been busy, Girly.’

‘Busy gowlin’ around,’ she said. ‘Bring me flicks, y’did?’

‘Did, Girly.’

He passed over the reels and she examined them.

‘Y’got me nothin’ with Tab Hunter an’ Natalie Wood, nah?’

‘They didn’t have anything.’

‘Arra Jay.’

‘I tried, Girly.’

‘Tab and Natalie made some beautiful pictures.’

‘You been saying.’

‘Word was they were doin’ a line.’

‘Go ’way?’

‘There’d be photos at premieres.’

‘We got uptown aggravators working a caper, Girly.’

‘Natalie in a class of an ermine wrap. Tab in peg pants and a knit shirt. Beige!’

‘Cusack says he got the flatblocks stacked, Girly.’

‘Course the wan o’ the Woodses was hangin’ offa every-thin’ in kecks. Man-crazy.’

‘I said Eyes Cusack, Girly. Word I have? He has families behind him. He has the McGroartys, the Lenanes, the Sullivans…’

‘They said filth about Tab, of course. I never believed a word o’ what they said about Tab.’

‘It’s good word, Girly. We’re talking three families at least weighing in with the Cuse. And that’s a wealth of fucking headjobs, no?’

‘Ferocious the muck they threw at Tab.’

‘I think he’s about to throw a shape, Girly.’

‘You know I wouldn’t repeat what they said about Tab? Wouldn’t soil the roof o’ me mouth with it.’

‘What way should I play it?’

Girly reached for the bedside bottle of John Jameson and poured a decent measure to her tumbler. She offered him the bottle. He shook his head, closed his eyes, and massaged with bunched fingertips the space between them. He swung his booted feet onto the bed. Soon as they landed she batted them away.

‘Watch me fuckin’ eiderdown,’ she said.

She tasted and savoured the whiskey. Colour rose up in her – a purplish rush to chase the greyness.

‘Yunno I’d a dream there a while ago,’ she sighed, ‘and who arrives into it only Fernando Lamas above on a horse?’

‘Girly, listen to me! Eyes Cusack is about to make a move down the 98 Steps.’

‘Of course in my mother’s day? In Peggy’s time? There would have been sixteen picturehouses in Bohane at that time. Is there just the one now still?’

‘Just the one.’

‘And all it’s showin’ is maggots lickin’ the melt off each other.’

‘Girly?’

‘Shut up, I’m thinkin’.’

She closed her eyes. She was an unspeakable age as Bohane lives go. She blinked hard.

‘Cusacks been hustlin’ in the Trace?’

‘Not in the Trace but in Smoketown. And making plenty of noise up on the Rises, up in the shebeens. Putting new skins on their lambeg drums, is the word, and they got their chanters tuning up.’

‘Norrie fuckin’ nonsense!’

‘But how’ll I go at it, Mam?’

She shook her head to dismiss his fear.

‘Catnip to Wolfie and the boys,’ she said.

He nodded.

‘That’s the way I’m hoping. But if we hadn’t enough of a head count…’

‘Who’ve we to call in, child?’

He regarded her dolefully.

‘Most of the bridges are fairly well burned at this stage.’

‘Who’re you tellin. But we’ve no one at all?’

‘Unless I hit out the dunes and try talk to–’

‘Arra fuckin’ Jay!’

They let the matter quieten before them. Both teased through it in the silence. No decision was ever made quickly or rashly by a Hartnett. At length, Girly spoke up.

‘D’ya find me anythin’ with a young Yul Brynner, nah? From the days o’ the hair?’

‘No, Girly. I found you The Wanderers alright?’

He raised the case to her.

‘I see that,’ she said.

These evening times together were brief but an unbreakable custom. Each of them eased in the company of the other. She eyed him carefully, and he drew back just a fraction from the examination – this was evident in a slight tensing of the shoulders, which she noted. Also, the way he had taken up the reel cases from the eiderdown, and the way he turned them nervously in his hands.

‘That’s a quare weight you’re carryin’,’ she said, ‘on account of a few Norrie wall-bangers?’

Girly let that sit a moment, then:

‘So how’s herself keepin’?’

Logan allowed his feint, yellow smile.

‘Marvellously,’ he said.

Girly nodded, as though greatly satisfied.

‘From what I’m hearin’,’ she said, ‘the Gant Broderick is still a han’some cut of a man.’

He flung the reel cases onto her bed and rose to go.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘Go watch your aul’ films.’

She snorted a laugh as he went. She listened carefully for the precise heft of the slam he gave the door, and she laughed again when it loudly came. Served the pale fucker right for marryin’ boat trash.

De Valera Street down below thrummed with the slow build of night: its rude energies were gathering. Yes and October was ending, the last of it falling from our diseased civic trees, and there was Trouble with a Big T on the Bohane soon-come.

Girly in the vast bed wriggled with delight.

10 In a Smoketown Patois

Dark came on Smoketown. Was a hell of a place in the black night – a sad-dream world across the footbridge. On the skinny streets the old town houses leaned in to each other: how-we-now? As though the old houses they was holding one another up, like. This Smoketown you take one brick from the pile and the whole heap’d come tumbledown. Smoketown it don’t even make a square mile in size: a tight, small, squashed-up place, hard-pressed its airways, its troubled lungs, and the air had an oily feel in the night. Smoketown generators chugged like good things. Mark this: if there was juice nowhere in Bohane, there’d be a bit left all the same for the S’town operations.

The madwoman of Smoketown paraded in her white cowgirl suit, sequins aglitter, and directed the sky traffic of angry gulls.

A toothless she-man hoor with painted-on eyebrows tossed shouts to the sky from the footbridge.

A violently unpredictable Alsatian bitch name of Angelina dragged along on a leash the Fancy lieutenant Fucker Burke.

Fucker and Angie were in and out of the Chalk ’n’ Cue.

Fucker and Angie were in and out of the Land o’ Baize.

Fucker and Angie were in and out of the 147.

The fuck was Wolfie was what Fucker and Angie wanted to know.

Chiefly spud-aters on the S’town streets at this hour – they’d be in need of a knee-trembler and the suck of a dream-pipe before hitting the Boreen and dragging their woeful souls across the Nothin’ wastes.

Edmund ‘The Gypo’ Lenihan came ’cross the footbridge with a honey-blonde sixteen-year-old in tow – fresh tush recruited off the Rises, with a big brazen puss on: there’d be no fear of her.

Low throb of the grindbars as they was gearing up – sinuous basslines rumbled as the early-shift gals shinned the bars and spun there, and slid again, their dead eyes lurid.

Fish wagons (Hartnett-owned) unloaded to the Chinkee troughs – fins and spines and bones for the chowder, oh it is some quare-lookin’ craturs you get swimming the Bohane river.

A blur of booze-pasted faces moved along the streets.

Chinkee dives, hopper bars, dream salons.

And here at last came Wolfie Stanners out of the Ho Pee Ching Oh-Kay Koffee Shoppe – five foot two inches of pure man in a velveteen puffa and a pair of stormtrooper lace-ups.

His ginger bonce swivelled and searched as he marched the Smoketown streets.

He fell in with Fucker Burke and Angelina outside the Land o’ Baize.

Narky look off the Wolfie-boy, Fucker reckoned, and rightly.

‘Was lookin’ for ya, Wolf.’

‘I been lookin’ for Jenni, ain’t I? You seen fuckin’ Jenni, yuh?’

‘Ain’t, Wolf.’

‘Said y’seen Jenni anywhere about, Fuck?’

Mad eyes swivellin’ in the Wolfie-boy puss.

‘Said I ain’t seen her, Wolf.’

‘Fuck she at ’n’ all, like?’

Taint of badness on the Bohane air had its various strands and jealousy was not the least among them.

‘Dunno, Wolf. Ain’t seen–’

Wolfie turned and without breaking stride took a flying kick at the door of a dream salon, and issued a raspin’ grunt, and the effort seemed to calm him some, and he set to the S’town prowl and the night’s business.

‘Word off the ’bino?’

‘Word is – Cantillon.’

‘Tonight?’

‘Word.’

‘Let’s do it then. There any sign o’ the fishmonger, Fuck?’

Oh and indeed the unfortunate Deccie Cantillon had chosen the wrong evening for an S’town crawl. Not bad enough he was doing jigger with the missus of his own cuz – misfortunate Ger Reid, master butcher – but he was bothering Smoketown tush too.

‘On a fanny crawl, is he?’ Wolfie said.

‘He be at the pay-for tush an’ all,’ Fucker confirmed.

Angelina dragged on the leash, and the boys followed, and soon enough Cantillon was made out in the S’town haze.

A whippety cratur, Cantillon, with mackerel scales all over his hands, in his forties, sharp-featured, a card player, looked after hissel’, a sculpted Frenchie-looking nose just built for a tush-chaser, the thick hair slathered back with a pawload of perfumed gunk, top five buttons of a purple dress shirt open to the night even though it was deep end of October in Bohane, the west’s evil winter looming.

Deccie followed his pecker around the narrow streets.

Angelina and the boys followed Deccie.

Anything aged fourteen to sixty-eight took the rake of his glance. Ankles to nape, he sized ’em up. Laid the gamey eye on. Nearly hop up on that, he thought. Nearly give that an auld lash of the baste, he thought. Nearly ate me dinner offa that, he thought. Oh, a rabid tush patrol he was on, with the peepers out on stalks, looking left, looking right, looking bang ahead, but… ah.

He didn’t look behind him, did he?

No.

‘Full whack on the fishmonger is the ’bino’s word,’ Fucker said.

‘Full whack?’

‘He been messin’ with a missus, ain’t he?’

‘Long Fella don’t like that.’

‘He sure don’t, Wolf.’

They ghosted through the Smoketown crowds and kept just a short ways back from their prey.

They knew to wait on the moment.

The fishmonger slithered into a shotbar.

He schlepped back a couple of mulekickers and tried to paw the plastik bazookas off the Ukrainer barkeep.

All the while he was watched from the street.

Wolfie had by this stage a punnet of fried chicken on the go and he offered Fucker a drumstick and Fucker took it and sucked it clean in one and tossed the bone and offered his greased fingers then to Angelina, who cleaned them good.

‘I worry ’bout you an’ that dog sometimes,’ said Wolfie.

Fucker shrugged; Angelina drooled.

And Cantillon rode a string of dives but he bought nowhere, he was looking for the good price, and at length, as the boys and the dog trailed him, he hit towards the dune end.

Now the dune end of Smoketown is the cheaper line. There you will find a very low class of customer. The worst of the slagshops and the most insalubrious needle galleries are out there. Weird atmosphere on account of the system of dunes that rise just beyond and give the name to it. A spooky place that dune reef. Haunted by ferocious pikeys it is – their fires burn against the black night; sand-pikeys we call ’em – and the sea withers on, always and forever, insanely.

Fishmonger took a turn down an empty side street.

Bad move.

Suddenly, silently, Wolfie Stanners was at his side.

So sweetly:

‘A word, Mr Cantillon?’

And yes there was Fucker Burke the other side of him.

All jaunty:

‘Howya, Dec?’

And there was Angelina with a spill of happy drool falling.

Steered him down a tight alleyway, the boys, and a sea of rats parted underfoot.

Electric bristling of them.

Parting of the grey sea.

Angie yapped at the rats and was shushed by Fucker. Gently the boys arranged the man against a gable end.

‘This about, lads?’

Fair play he even managed to keep the quake of fear from his voice. For all the good it did him. Wolfie took a wee lep off the dancers and was airborne, just briefly, but long enough to plant a perfect butt on the bridge of Cantillon’s nose.

Soft explosion: muscle, sinew, blood.

The butt was a kindness; Deccie whited out – Goodnight, Smoketown! – and he slumped agin the wall and slid the length of it and was no sooner on the ground than Fucker Burke arranged the heel of a size thirteen high-top boot on his windpipe and mashed it down hard, and Angie on the leash was lapping already at the blood spilt.

Wolfie meantime worked his stormtroopers repeatedly about the man’s face in neat precise stomps – happy in his work, the boy – so it would be a while anyways before this meat had a name put to it.

They lepped at the ribs also – they snapped easily as fish bones.

Angelina danced.

Boys walked out the dune end again. Glanced quickly left and quickly right and hit directly for the busier Smoketown of the riverside streets.

‘I’ve a horn on me,’ said Fucker.

‘I’d ate,’ said Wolfie.

Angelina lurched at the leash, she wanted to go back to the alleyway, she wanted more, but she was dragged along and scolded:

‘Leave it, Ange!’

Smoketown juddered. The girls called out and the barkers hollered. Dreams were sold, songs were gargled, noodles were bothered. Wolfie Stanners and Fucker Burke and the Alsatian bitch Angelina melted back into the night, and as they passed me by, I saw the true-dark taint in their eyes.

It is at this hour that I like to walk the S’town wharfs myself. I like to look out over the river to the rooftops of the Back Trace and the Northside Rises beyond.

I like to see the river fill up with the lamps of the city.

11 The Gant’s Letter to Macu

Dear Macu,

I saw you on Dev Street the other day. I wondered if I’d know you it’s been so long girl but the shock to me was how little you’d changed. I ain’t sure I can say the same about myself I’d say the years have gone on me sure enough it was always the way with my crowd the way we’d wear our lives on our faces. I want to cause you no unhappiness Macu. It was plain to me when I saw you on Thursday you been caused enough of that. I don’t mean to pass remark on the life that you made for yourself I’d be the last one who could draw rosy pictures of a life for anyone. It doesn’t mean that I have not dreamt of what kind of life it might have been if things hadn’t happened the way they did. I saw you Macu and I wanted to go to you but it would not have been fair to you. Not yet I told myself not this time. Twenty-five year pass and leaves nothing at all hardly in your hand I don’t know exactly when it was that I started to feel old but I feel it now true enough you can believe me I suppose there has been dark times for me as for anyone in a life but it is no good to nobody to dwell on the dark times. It only seems like weeks ago that I walked out of the place. A lot has happened to me in that time as you can well imagine since I took to the High Boreen that was a hard day believe me that day marked me. I am not in many ways the person that I was I have done things I am not proud of Macu. I have not married though I suppose there have been women. I have never settled anyplace. I am told you are without children and that is a sadness you should have been a mother it would have suited you.

I am living back on Nothin’ now and it is my intention to settle here for as long as I have left may the SBJ grant that it is more than a season or two. I cannot say that I have known happiness since I came back here a few months ago I cannot say that I will ever know that again but there is quiet out here all the same that suits me and is a comfort to my old bones. You know that Nothin’ has been a special place for me always. You know my feelings for this place and you will understand it was painful for me to be away from it so long. I come back here with no intention of causing you unhappiness.

I want to see you Macu. I want to look at you and not have to speak have to say stupid things I want to look at you and see what you’ve become. I want to hold you for a while. I am sorry to put these words before you I have no choice I must. I am a worm I know that to come back after all this time and what it must do to you it is hard and painful.

You said something to me once I wonder if you remember. You said that no matter what happened we would end up together. Do you remember that? It was probably just something a young girl would say and she was in love but I believed it for years it kept me together for years it kept me from the lip of the grave Macu.

I love you still. That has a horrible bare look to it I know when it is put down on the page maybe the truth is I do want it to cause pain for you. Maybe I believe there is some of that due to you. We make choices and we have to live with them. It might seem like madness that I would write those words after all these years but there you are you can deal with them I have had to deal with them so long.

When we walked the Back Trace and we were kids in Bohane I thought my heart was going to escape my mouth. Lay my hand on the small of your back and it was like stepping off a roof. Big soft grin on my face and I was suppose to be the hard boy in town. You were so slight. And the way that you talked to me low in a whisper almost and that it was so many weeks before you’d kiss me even.

We used to walk on those nights in the Trace and go down to the river. I can hear again the river on the summer nights and the way we’d sit on the stone steps and you would lean your head back onto my chest and rest it there. I thought that nothing that nobody could ever come between us Macu.

I tell myself that to come back here might be a way to break the hold on me you have still. The touch that I have felt on me these years in my dark times always it is your touch. I see you at seventeen, eighteen so perfectly clear every detail the tiny bones under the skin of your brow when you worried for me if there was trouble times in the Bohane Trace. I believe they were the wrong paths we took and what I have seen of your life here with Hartnett does not change that belief.

My days are quiet now. There are places that you would remember I’m sure from our own time when sometimes we’d walk out here. We would lie in the long grass do you remember Macu? As much as things change in Bohane things stay the same on Big Nothin’. The place I am living is no palace but comfort enough I sit like a true auld fella off the Nothin’ bogs in front of my pot belly stove. I’d have laughed back then to see what I would turn into later. Though I will say again the same years I could hardly see on you on Dev Street the other day it took the breath from me you were so familiar. The way that you moved was just as I remembered. Do not think I was spying on you but when I saw you I could hardly be expected to look away.

I am back on Nothin’ to stay and I wish to see you Macu. Even if it kills me I want to see you. What I ask is for a single meeting. The time and the place could be arranged as you see fit. If there are things I should say to you now after all this time then I could say them much better in person. Let me know through Mr Mannion if such a meeting can be arranged. All I can plead is that it would be heaven to see your lips form my name again.

That I may hear from you soon, girl,

12 Who Gots the Runnings?

Dom Gleeson, the lardarse newsman, was on De Valera Street, fresh-shaven, his face still blotchy from the razor. He wore a baby-blue zoot suit and a pair of clicker’d heels that he danced in excitement against the pavement. He was nifty on the hoof for a fat lad and he gazed soulfully in the direction of Big Nothin’. He slowed his moves then and stilled himself. He looked down and regarded his small, sinister feet. He raised his fingertips to his lips. Nibbled them.

‘The Gant’s up top o’ fifty, Mr Mannion,’ he whispered. ‘He’s hardly gonna try and lay a snakey mickey into her at this stage, is he?’

Ol’ Boy in a Crombie against the night chill, wearing a jaunty pork-pie hat, was sat up on the Dev Street railings, moocher-style, and he raised his eyebrows.

‘Love can be so strange and enduring, Dom.’

‘Then Hartnett is gonna have to be seen to act, Mr Mannion.’

‘You ain’t sellin’ a spoof, Big D. He’s got to throw down some class of a welcome for the Gant sure enough. The city’s watchin’. The Authority’s watchin’. And his missus is watchin’ an’ all, y’check me?’

The city’s mood was a blend of fear and titillation. There was going to be an almighty collision, and a small world shudders when giants collide.

‘He’s been wantin’ a bead on the Gant outside on Nothin’, Mr Mannion. An’ I could hardly be seen not to oblige…’

‘I wouldn’t worry about the G out on Nothin’, Dom.’

Ol’ Boy smiled his reassurance, and there beneath the Dev Street lights the Dom, amped on the city’s intrigue, tiptoed a dance step again. Shimmied his hips. Swivelled them. Made gasping little fishmouths. Winked then, and whispered:

‘They say the missus’ eyes straighten in her head when she gets fleadhed, Mr Mannion?’

‘They do so that, Dom.’

The Dom gurgled, and gazed to the stars, and he swirled with them. Went kind of woozy and glad.

‘Oh we got us a love mess on our paws!’ he shrieked.

‘We certainly have, Dom.’

The newsman swivelled his peepers over a shoulder as though he might be watched from back there, and he leaned closer then to Ol’ Boy.

‘An’ o’ course we got other problems, Gant aside.’

‘Don’t talk to me about the Cusacks, Dominick, please.’

Dom clutched himself tragically about the chest. Made as though to drop and hit the stones.

‘Oh my angina!’ he wheezed.

Ol’ Boy regarded him soberly.

‘If the Calm breaks,’ he said, ‘we can all go an’ whistle for a Beauvista tram, Dom. And every last site for a manse beside it, y’hear me?’

‘Cathedral bells, Mr Mannion. Last thing Bohane needs is a winter o’ blood, like.’

Ol’ Boy climbed down from the railings, and together the men made aim for the S’town footbridge: it was the hour in Bohane when gents would be inclined towards recreation.

‘What we gotta be askin’?’ said the newsman. ‘Who’s it truly gots the Bohane runnings right now?’

‘Oh that’s the question, Dom,’ said Ol’ Boy. ‘I said that’s the capital Q, y’check me?’

Big lunks of polis made a cordon at the entrance to a Smoketown alleyway.

Rubberneckers piled down the dune end and stalked out their eyes to see past.

‘Back away to fuck’ll ye!’ yelped a polis. ‘We need a stretcher backin’ in here, like!’

Wisecracker in the crowd didn’t miss a beat:

‘More’n a stretcher that fella’s needin’!’

A low round of chuckles ribboned out and even the polis good-naturedly joined in. Bohane was (and is) a perpetual source of amusement to itself.

Down the alleyway, a polis ’spector knelt by the bloody remains and peered closely at the bootmarks on blue flesh.

‘Fancy,’ he whispered.

He gestured to a raw polis, a mouth-breather not long off the Nothin’ plain, and the young ’un crouched beside him.

‘See this?’ said the ’spector.

He showed in the pool of blood the particular shape of the clicker’d boot heels that had made their marks there.

‘If this tells us it’s an F-boy caper,’ he asked the young polis, ‘what else does it tell us?’

Mouth-breather was a quick learner, and he rose, and he faced the crowd at the alley’s maw, and he addressed them loudly.

‘S’lookin’ like another suicide, lads.’

‘Good boy,’ the ’spector whispered.

Up from the river an assault of wind came knifing and it had a bone-deep chill in it for a sharpener.

That would be the winter in on top of us.

Girly Hartnett cued up a Mario Lanza flick from 1952 – Peg would have been eighteen; she dated the flicks always to her mother’s age. Because You’re Mine it was, the one where he sang ‘Granada’, a powerful set of lungs on the boy. She took a sip of John Jameson from her tumbler and she recapped the pill bottle. She relaxed her old bones to enjoy the rush of tranquilliser and the soaring of the young tenor’s voice.

Girly was downtown.

Girly was seeing the lights.

Girly startled as a particular knock sounded on her door, the knock that always came late on, and she answered it with a single, sharp whistle.

Jenni Ching entered, and sat by the bedside, and poured herself a whiskey. She kicked her tiny lethal feet up onto the bed and Girly fondly laid a hand across them.

‘Manners on ’em yet out there, Jenni-chil’?’

‘Oh aye, Girly. Manners o’ pigs an’ dogs.’

Girly squinted then, and she made out the bite marks rearside of Jenni’s neck.

‘S’it the Wolfie kid been havin’ an aul’ jaw on ya, girl?’

Jenni took a stogie from the tit pocket of her white vinyl zip-up. Torched the motherfucker.

‘For me to know,’ she said. ‘Now c’mere till ya hear the latest.’

She would tell the old bint as much as she needed and no more.

On Beauvista, Macu and Logan lay in the bed their long marriage had made and they held each other grimly against the coming of the winter. He sniffed hard at her as he sought a telltale smell – the taint of another – but he found no deceit.

‘Don’t you ever fucking leave me,’ he said.

Fucker Burke and Wolfie Stanners walked the Big Nothin’ plain in the great vault of dark. They came to the particular turn from the High Boreen and took it and it led to the ridge path that skirted the granite knoll and soon the Eight Mile Bridge loomed, and it was a moonless night surely as the tout said it would be, and they went by the water’s edge and climbed down the bank and came underneath the arches of the bridge.

Tout waited for them sure enough.

He was tied by his ankles to a girder of the bridge, and his hands were tied also, and much of his skin had been taken off, and his throat was reefed plain open, and he was bled like a pig, with a pool of it congealing blackly beneath him, and the eyes were gouged from the sockets for badness’ sake – draw a bead now! – and what was left of the skin hung in white rags and shreds from him.

On the stone of the bridge’s arch where the tout was hung two words were daubed in blood:

Fucker looked at Wolfie.

Wolfie looked at Fucker.

They headed at pace for the High Boreen.

The night always on Nothin’ brought dread with it and gusts of hardwind swayed the walls of the Gant’s aluminium trailer. The bassoon call of a bittern sounded – that forlorn bird – and there were mystery rustlings and creakings outside, and the nerves were not a hundred per cent on the Gant just yet.

Pulse still up.

Head unsettled.

A roar of hot wind in his ears.

He shivered and tensed at every sound. He asked the night for forgiveness. His legs blazed with the cold aches of age and as he rose from his stool he moaned the same moan that had chorused his poor father to the grave. Even the moans get passed down. He heard the shrieks of the night critturs outside and droning voices among the reeds.

He wrapped himself in a buckskin and blew out the candles. He went to the darkness. He knew it was better to be among it and to be an agent of it than to sit and tremble with guilt in the trailer. He closed his eyes as he walked and he tried to attune himself to her proximity, her frequency.

He walked to a high vantage and across the bog plain the lights of Bohane city burned – was a Babylon on fire in the October dark.