City of Bohane

13 The View from Girly’s Eyrie

Here was Girly, after the picture show, drugged on schmaltz, in equatorial heat beneath the piled eiderdowns, a little whiskey-glazed and pill-zapped, in her ninetieth – Sweet Baba help us – Bohane winter, and she found herself with the oddest inclination: Girly had a notion to get out of the bed. It was afternoon yet below on De Valera Street and she was determined to have a good old lamp at the place. Some fucker was playing a melodeon down there despite it all.

She shifted with a lung-quaking sigh the eiderdowns and the effort caused a dose of pins-and-needles across her shoulder blades that would put down a good-sized horse. The pins-and-needles, another of her daily trials, were symptomatic of thirty-odd years buzzing on off-script tablets, hard liquor and Hedy Lamarr pictures.

‘Hell,’ she said, but stoically.

She swung her legs out over the side of the honeymooners’ special. She sat a moment, for breath, and regarded her legs carefully. It was Girly’s opinion that she still had a fine pair of pins on her, all told, but it took a massive effort to plant the bastaring things on the floor and raise herself to an uncertain stand. This move in turn seemed to unseat a kidney. A dart of pain squirmed up through the small of her back on a zigzag course and it was as though the devil himself was jabbing at her with a pared stick. She sat back down again.

‘Mother o’ fuckin’ Jay,’ she said.

A frail arm she swung onto the bedside table and it upended a family-sized tub of tranquillisers. She fished a couple from the spill and aimed them at her gob. There was no great dignity here, of course. The pills that landed on her tongue – and she had a tongue like sandpaper today, whatever was after going skaw-ways in that department – she washed down with a swallow of John Jameson taken direct from the neck of the bottle.

So long, elegance.

Bravely she raised herself to a stand again and she endured a mighty assault of vertigo. She clamped her lips meanly against it. Then came a massive volt of lightness through her head. Girly had for many decades been suffering from attacks of what she called ‘the lightness’. Also, there was shame. When you could not even get the whiskey into the tumbler, it was nearly time, in Girly Hartnett’s opinion, to go and fuck yourself into the Bohane river altogether.

Of course the next thing was the walking.

Girly considered the vast Sahara of the beige-tone carpet that opened out between herself and the far window overlooking the Dev Street drag. She tested a step, tentatively, with her spider-veined feet. If the pins were holding well enough, the dancers were letting the side down rotten – Girly would not lie to herself. She moved a foot forward and tried her weight. If the one hip held out it would be a result, the two a Baba-sent mystery. She breathed as deeply as she could after ninety winters of damp peninsular air. Her step was unsure and she tragically wavered. It was as if the Big Nothin’ hardwind was inside in the room with her. She heard the whistling of the air as it went through her scoured cavities – Girly felt like a derelict house.

Strike that – a derelict mansion.

No panes in the windows and no fire in the grate and crows in the attic but there was grandeur yet, even so. A stately ruin was Girly. She settled again on the sad, squalling music of the melodeon below, a wintersong for foul December in the Bohane creation.

She was determined, and one quivering foot she put in front of the other, and she made for a view of the place. The great tragic armies of history had made it over storm-whipped mountain ranges quicker than Girly made it across that carpet but she persevered, and she reached, after an epic struggle, the drapes. She clutched, wheezing, at their long folds of blue velvet – dizzying, the flow of the fabric – and Girly whited out for a moment – the lightness! – and then regathered. She dragged the drapes apart the inch or two she had the strength for and aimed a hard squint down onto De Valera Street.

A December Tuesday. As miserable as hell’s scullery beneath a soot-black sky. The nerves of the city were ripped. Bohane was looking at a total of eight young fellas reefed since the October bank holiday. Five of them belonged to the Cusack mob, three to the Hartnett Fancy, and the city simmered now with bitterness, rage, threat. Girly smiled. To keep Bohane at a rolling boil you just had to turn the heat up on the burner.

There were nightly rumbles in the Back Trace. There were skirmishes on the 98 Steps. There were random attacks in Smoketown hoorshops. Bottles and insults were being flung across the rooftops of the city. Fellas’ sisters were being insulted. And mothers. It had drawn short, just yet, of an outright Feud, but the Hartnett Fancy and the families of the Northside Rises were close to it now.

Girly’s reckon: a good Feud was just what the place needed.

In the high distance, she heard the Norries drone their ritual battle chants. She saw above the rooftops the flicker of their bonnas blazing. The Norries were letting it be known they were Feud-ready. Their chants were rhythmical, bass-toned, and punctuated by sombre handclaps. This was the music of taunt and resolve in Bohane.

Polis were everywhere on parade, with their riot sticks swinging, and the fear of the SBJ lighting their bog-crawler eyes. Poor goms of boys fresh off the bog and they were going to be duckin’ shkelps and sweepin’ innards to the far side of the year’s turn.

The Vindicator’s evening edition was being hollered by the corner sellers – Big Dom Gleeson was scraping his violin and weeping hot prose for the maintenance of a Yuletide Calm.

Headline:

But the families of the Rises were united in a way they had not been for years and hard-prepped for a move against the Fancy.

Wistfully Girly looked on De Valera Street – ah, that she might have the strength for a good ruck yet herself – and the box windows of the El train zipped past then, the flick and yellow flashing of them, and the street blurred, and her mind went with it – the lightness – and Girly travelled to the Bohane lost-time.

The Gant Broderick she saw as a ten-year-old gypo child. A good-looking kid, blue-eyed and mournful. He was always scouring Dev Street for the main chance. A careful boy. Mind a mouse for you on a tramline. His father was a no-good Nothin’ quaffer. His father was half his life nose-deep in a bowl of Wrassler stout and sentimental as a sackful of ballads. The family was in and out from the bog plain: half their time in Trace tenements and half in Big Nothin’ trailer homes. The Gant kid was the oldest of them and soon enough he was running wild in the Trace. He took to knocking along with the sharps of the Fancy. Like a mascot he became. Went on errands for them. Was getting busy early on. Was getting into scraps with grown men on the wharfside stones. Oh, and watch the moves on it – you’d put your tuppence on the mannish boy in off the Nothin’ rez. A gentle-spoken kid, but proud. Don’t speak no pavee put-down if the Gant boy is around – he’d flatten your snout for you. Took to growing in spurts. Took to working a rep. Girly on a stoop one day in the Back Trace saw him come peltin’ by on a badness errand and she stuck out a foot and tripped him up.

‘Headed for, gypy-kid?’

Stood up slowly, the Gant child, and eyed her carefully as he backed away. He held the gaze on her all the same, he had the confidence for that, and not many could have said the same. Girly knew from one close look where this Gant boy was headed.

‘Careful where you place your feet, son.’

Girly returned; she left old Bohane to itself, at least for the time being, but the past, she knew, was never still in this city, it continued to seethe and brew back there, and it gave taint to the present. How would the Gant’s return play out? Now there was an intrigue.

She weakened, just for a moment, and she dug her claws into the velvet of the drapes. She took down a hard breath. She opened her eyes and strained for a view to the Aliados and she brought it into focus at just the moment she had waited for.

Wolfie Stanners and Fucker Burke marched out of the place. Girly kept an eye, always, on the young ’uns coming through. It was the young who shaped the city’s moment. She watched the short, densely packed ginge – knew his mother – and smiled at the way he always walked with his wee fists bunched. You don’t step in that boy’s way, and the stringy galoot was beside, the boy of the Burkes, he’d put the heart sideways in you with that razor grin, and Girly thought:

There’s little fear of the Fancy if we can keep this pair vertical.

Watched as the boys headed into the Trace and went northering. They were bound, she knew, for the 98 Steps. The Feud was to be officially declared.

In Bohane, at this time, if a Feud was to be engaged, it must be offered in writing, and accepted – acceptance, on behalf of the party challenged, was known always as ‘the receipt’. There was an etiquette to the thing; we weren’t savages. The Fancy’s offering was in Girly’s mannish hand.

She felt the strength come back into her. She straightened in her bearing. And as she looked down to the streets below she saw that Bohane had taken to the winter like an old dog to its blanket.

Bohane was thrun down, as we say, with winter.

Oh give us a grim Tuesday of December, with the hardwind taking schleps at our heads, and the rain coming slantways off that hideous fucking ocean, and the grapes nearly frozen off us, and dirty ice caked up top of the puddles, and we are not happy, exactly, but satisfied in our despair.

It is as though we can say…

Now!

D’ye see, now, what it is we are dealing with?

14 The 98 Steps

Fucker Burke and Wolfie Stanners set their faces against the hardwind as they climbed the bluffs. Wolfie was zipped neck-deep into a velveteen puffa, and all to be seen was the vicious little head, with his eyes swivelling left and right to check out the sideways for lurking aggravators. Fucker was in a stripey dress shirt made out of a fine yellow cheesecloth – he was the sort of young fella who didn’t feel the cold when a ruck was brewing; a strange fire burned inside. They clipped through the Trace and aimed for the 98 Steps. Eerie was the call of the hardwind in winter and the wynds of the Trace were deadhouse sombre.

Feel the chill moistness of the air – Bohane would be a hoor of a town for a lung infection now.

And of course feeling settles into the bones of a place – we know this – and the Trace had an odd, nervous shimmer to it this evening. It’ll get this nauseous air when a Feud is on the short fuse.

Fucker and Wolfie made it to the 98 Steps. Ol’ Boy Mannion had brokered an unmolested passage to the Rises for the pair but it was for this one evening only, and for this lone purpose.

The 98 is a steep, high-walled climb, and as they ascended, the Back Trace gave way by degrees to the Northside Rises.

From the broad and derelict avenues above the Norrie voices scraped at the dank sky and the chanters droned an age-old warsong and the flames of the bonnas licked and spat.

Fucker and Wolfie neared the crest of the 98 and the voices faded a note and gave away now to a sequence of long, tuneful whistles.

Clear enough that the Watches of the Rises were marking the ascent.

Fucker Burke said a silent prayer to the Sweet Baba Jay that Mannion’s word was good and that the passage was secure, and if it was not, and if he never saw or held his sweet Angelina again – never drowned again in the pools of her eyes – that she would find a happy berth, somewhere, and maybe after a time forget him.

Wolfie Stanners had recourse to no gods but to the even beating of his own fierce Back Trace heart and he stared hard and fearlessly about the Rises avenues as they cleared now the last of the 98.

The avenues of the Rises were broad, treeless, broken, and laid out to a vaguely Soviet pattern. The cement facades of the flatblocks were cracked from decades of freeze-and-thaw. Mean dogs patrolled the gutters, and still the slow whistles sounded, and a sharp voice cut out at them from the shadows of evening.

‘Cunty fuckin’ scum up outta da Trace!’

Wolfie smiled.

‘That the best they got?’

High-rise blocks loomed either side of the broad avenue they walked along. There was a shimmering at the edges as they stared dead ahead – movement there – and yes, there were skangs all around then, evil little scuts of whistling Norrie young fellas, but they stayed back a way as the Fancy pair stepped along.

They hissed from behind and hoicked a few gobbers but they kept their distance true enough.

The melody of the whistles changed and took on an urgency and this told the boys they were coming in close on Cusack ground.

‘Looks like we’s gettin’ a folly awrigh’,’ said Fucker, and there was a quake to his tone.

Wolfie, shrugging, remained entirely quakeless.

Behind them, the pack of skangs was growing in number by the minute and it was the way the melody of their whistles was so sweet was Fucker’s worry.

From a roadside bonfire a rogue dog came at them, it hissed and lurched and bared its fangs, but Wolfie took a swift wee lep into the air and he landed a kick plumb on the cur’s nose and it scurried away again.

‘Norrie grapes on that crittur,’ said Wolfie.

Taunts and threats sniped from the following pack but Wolfie turned daintily on his heel, a single swivel of a movement to grace any dancefloor, and he walked backwards, jauntily, and he smiled at the following pack, and they kept their distance despite the taunts.

Was said in Bohane this winter we’re talking about there was no one quite so feared lately as Logan Hartnett’s roaming lieutenant, Wolfie Stanners, the short-arse little dude with the ginger top and that evil motherfucker of a leer.

Wolfie and Fucker headed direct for Croppy Boy Heights.

This was the circle of flatblocks that was home ground to the Cusack mob. It was announced by an expanse of rough, untarred ground where barrel fires blazed and wild-eyed flatblock bairns were doing cats-tumbles off ancient pylons and there were severe gusts of Nothin’ hardwind from the gaps between the blocks. A tang of menace sat heavily hereabouts.

From the basement of one of the blocks came the heavy throb of a Trojan dub bassline. They lamped it at once as the shebeen block and aimed for it: Fucker breathing shallow, Wolfie breathing deep.

On the Northside Rises, it was at this time the custom for each circle of flatblocks to have its own shebeen. This would be located in one of the flatblock basements, and there, the circle’s young gents would drink beer, smoke herb, listen to dub plates, talk tush and practise knife tricks.

Wolfie and Fucker approached the Cusack shebeen.

A pair of goons were arranged in violent lethargy by its stairwell entrance. They carried tyre-chains, wore cross-slung dirks, and tugged idly at their pants. Fucker and Wolfie trained their eyes against the hard stares of the goons, there was a heavy beat of silence, and the goons parted, sure enough, but took their sweet time about it.

Now the basement shebeen opened out.

It was a low dive alright and wall-to-wall with Cusack filth. The family’s allegiancers stood about with their bottles of Phoenix ale and their herb pipes on the sweet burn and a sinuous bassline thrummed on the air: feel it in the marrow of your spine.

Wolfie and Fucker did not need to be announced.

Quickly the dub plates were cut. The shebeen mob turned as one on this apparition in the doorway. Dark murmurs, hissed whistles, but the Hartnett Fancy was known always for its brazenness, its insouciance, and these boyos mounted it good:

Wolfie, hunched, beadily staring, with the little paws tightened into hard nuts of fists.

Fucker, hanging loose and limber, and wearing his trademark glaze of vast unpredictability.

The Cusack filth cawed like street birds – starlings were their symbol – but the mob did not step forward; it allowed itself to part.

The lights were turned up to a harsh, striplit glare.

A mighty bark sounded from the rear of the mob then and it was answered, ritually, by a mad volley of barks from all around the freaky shebeen.

In the cruel light the pocked skin of the Cusacks was all the worse for the badly inked starling tats it was covered with. (Complexions generally on the Northside Rises are nothing to write home about.)

Wolfie and Fucker looked around the enemy’s lair:

Markings on the walls depicted the sacred symbols of the Rises: pit bulls in bout and the strange winged daemon-sluts of the flatblocks and there were memorials also to the dead knifemen of Northside lore.

Wolfie and Fucker looked massively unimpressed as they took a lamp on the Cusack mob:

Cusacks had settled this season on high-rolled denims and armless geansais and they had starling feathers – glossily iridescent, a greenish black – tucked into the bands of their pork-pie hats. Low brows were uniform and gave that vaguely puzzled look that is associated always with Northside knuckle-draggers.

The bark sounded again, was met by a volley of barks, and now it was Eyes Cusack himself, the king barker, who made his way through the mob.

Topless but for his gold chains, stoutly built, as near enough wide as he was long, with a mouthful of gold caps, he grinned malevolently as he approached the boys.

Stopped a couple feet from them.

Eyeballed Wolfie and took measure of the kid.

Nodded appreciatively.

‘So the boy-chil’ step up,’ he said.

Rubbed his chin, thoughtfully. Came closer.

‘So the boy-chil’ workin’ his own plan or he keepin’ Fancy’s affairs in nick?’

Sadly let his shoulders fall.

‘Coz, boy-chil’, it gotta be said, like? We got a rake o’ Cusacks wearin’ scars an’ welts offa ye lot this las’ while, y’check?’

Wolfie agreed.

‘Been lively aroun’ the place awrigh’, Cuse,’ he said. ‘But there weren’t no one got what weren’t comin’.’

Hisses, caws, growls sounded – Eyes Cusack raised a hand to stop them.

‘Boy-chil’… Reefins aside, like? There been floaters on the Bohane river down the years and them floaters got bruds and cuzzes in this place, y’heed?’

Wolfie bowed his head, briefly, and then turned his glance sombrely around the shebeen.

‘I’m sorry for yere troubles,’ he said.

The mob shook free of itself and came hissing forward but Eyes Cusack raised again his mottled hand, and he cried:

‘Hup! Hup now!’

The mob eased up, despite itself, despite its awful compacted energy, and Eyes Cusack was admiring.

‘The boy-chil’ got grapes,’ he said. ‘Sure y’ain’t got Norrie juice in ya someplace?’

Wolfie winced.

‘Oney yella in me’s what I piss in the mornins,’ he said.

Eyes pursed his lips and raked a sconce on Fucker then.

‘An’ the galoot got a lash o’ the pike in him, yep? Sketch the green eyes on it.’

Fucker spat, and flexed, and glared hard at Cusask.

‘Business wan’ doin’,’ he said. ‘So don’ min’ the aul’ bitchtalk, Cusey-gal.’

Eyes turned to his hissing mob and smiled and danced a wee skank.

‘Oh the Long Fella don’t rear no blouses for lieutenants,’ he said. ‘Sends me up a prize pair o’ comanches. Don’t do the walk hissel’, though, do he? No, sir. Long Fella stayin’ close to home, yep? Watchin’ his yard. Am I right or wrong, ginge?’

‘Mr Hartnett is indisposed,’ said Wolfie.

‘Oh aye?’ said Cusack. ‘What’s he at? Straightenin’ the eyes in his bint’s head, s’he? Or he workin’ a little plan with his mammy, like? He mammy’s lil’ boy yet, like? O’ course the Hartnetts all for doin’ business down the New Town these times, ain’t they? Herb and hoors not good enough for the Fancy no more. No, sir. Now it’s all trams and manses, ain’t it?’

Wolfie raised a hand to signal the talk was at an end.

‘We gots somethin’ to put t’ye,’ he said.

He reached inside his puffa and removed an envelope of silver vellum. It was embossed with the Hartnett Fancy’s mark – a puck goat’s head. Inside was the Feud’s declaration.

Wolfie Stanners offered the envelope to Eyes Cusack.

Beat – a weird pause.

The pause suggested to Wolfie that confidence might not be all it should be among the ranks of the Cusack mob. But Eyes reached for the envelope then, and stuffed it in the waistband of his kecks, and from the arse pocket of same he took out a filthy scrap of paper that had been folded over twice, and he passed it to Wolfie.

Wolfie opened it out to find a drawing so crude as to be done by a child’s hand. It showed a skinny stick-man in crayoned colours with a cock-and-balls attached to his forehead.

‘The receipt,’ said Eyes Cusack. ‘See if yer man spot a likeness.’

Wolfie nodded most politely and with Fucker in tandem he turned to go.

‘I’ll let him know Feud’s accepted,’ he said.

‘Do that, boy-chil’,’ said Eyes Cusack. ‘An’ we’ll see ye down there, check?’

‘Time o’ your choosin’, Cuse. All the same t’us, like.’

They walked again the pocked avenues of the Rises. There was a heat up in them now. There was a great thrumming on the air. There was going to be a Feud the size of which Bohane city hadn’t seen in fucking yonks, y’sketchin’?

15 Black Crab Soup

The Ho Pee Ching Oh-Kay Koffee Shoppe, a whistle after midnight, and three steaming bowls of black crab soup were carried from the back kitchen by a wordless, scowling Ching uncle.

These were set with grave ceremony before:

– Mr Logan Hartnett, aka the Albino, aka the Long Fella, and he was sat there, breezing on the moment, and with a toothpick he worked lumps of cashew from the gaps between his yellow teeth. He was all got up in a wowser of a straight-cut grey vinyl suit – its sheen catching the Ho Pee’s fairy-light glow – and there was a matching grey vinyl mackintosh laid over the back of his chair. Dapper motherfucker.

– Miss Jenni Ching, boss-lady of the Ho Pee ever since her black-mooded momma had tossed her small demented bones into the Bohane river (just a quick headlong dash from the caff), on account of dog-fight debts, some said, or because of a persistent strain of Ching family madness, according to others, and Jenni regarded the fatty, creamy soup her uncle offered with an as-if glare – on my hips? – and she pushed it aside. She was in a white leather jumpsuit up top of hoss-polis zippered boots, with her fine hair let down, and her hair was streaked and worn this season in a blunt-cut fringe that she blew aside with regular, rhythmic spouts of tabsmoke.

– Mrs Macu Hartnett, née Simhao, born to the Café Aliados, the queen of the Back Trace Fancy, with any amount of a cashmere jersey dress worn in a clingy fit beneath a thin crinolene duster coat (cream) that didn’t cost her tuppence ha’penny in whatever high-faluting New Town boutique she scored it in, and she was eyeballing Jenni hard, and she was eyeballing Logan hard, and she was thinking: I’m forty-fuckin’-three and I’m sat around talkin’ fuckin’ gang fights?

‘Many families Cuse gonna send down up top o’ his own?’ said Jenni.

‘I’m guessing three tops,’ said Logan. ‘He’ll have the McGroartys, sure enough. McGroartys are born latchiko. McGroartys would hop into a Feud on account of two flies fucking. He’ll have the Lenanes also. That’s a cert, coz the Lenanes can be bought, the Lenanes have always been bought. After that, well…’

Logan flapped a hand in the air, dismissively, to illustrate the thinness of the Rises’ alliance.

‘That’s sure a lot o’ chanters they got hollerin’ for a three-family descent,’ said Macu.

‘If you wanted to be of a negative set of mind, love-o’-my-heart, you might think so,’ said Logan.

In truth, he could not but hear them: the high bluffs of Bohane city were raucous with Norrie Feud-chants.

‘A quare rake o’ bonnas burnin’ an’ all, Logan? Saw ’em an’ I comin’ down from the house.’

Strings of fires all along the bluffs – Norrie families on a war footing was the message.

‘They can light their little fires all they want. And remember this much for me, Macu, please – you never once in your fucking life had a good feeling the night before a Feud, check?’

‘Maybe a time comes when there be one Feud too far, Logan, y’heed?’

He glared at his wife, but kept silent his anger, and he twisted it instead to aim coldly, smilingly at his girl-chil’ lieutenant.

‘Jenni-gal,’ he said, ‘I understand you’re becoming quite a regular ’cross at the Bohane Arms?’

Jenni Ching didn’t so much as flutter an eyelash.

‘I’m findin’ it’s the kind o’ spot you’d hear an interestin’ yarn about the Bohane los’-time,’ she said.

‘Oh yeah?’ said Macu. ‘Concerning’?’

‘All kin’ o’ caper,’ said Jenni. ‘’bout how peoples come up and ’bout how they goes back down again.’

‘My dear mother would have the sketch for you there sure enough.’

Jenni eyeballed Macu hard.

‘An’ ’bout where it was peoples come from. Originally, like.’

Laminate posters on the Ho Pee wall showed roosters, pigs, rats. The fairy lights were strung from wall to wall above the Formica tables and they burned a lurid note. Logan was smiling now as he spooned up his soup – he liked a catfight.

Macu, polite as the seeping of a poison, said:

‘An’ where’s it the Chings is boxin’ out of original, Jenni-chick?’

Jenni from her tit pocket yanked a stogie, clipped and lit it, sucked deep and blew a brownish smoke.

‘Chings in Bohane goin’ back an’ again beyond the los’-time. S’town built offa Ching blood. We goes way back. We ain’t in off the las’ wave at all, missus.’

A motion she drew in the air then, slowly and looping, with her cigar hand, to indicate the wave, and the smoke made signals indeciperable atop the Ho Pee’s dreamy glow.

‘Ye sure ain’t,’ said Macu. ‘Chings been snakin’ aroun’ them wynds long as I got the recall. Gettin’ the reck on everyone’s business, like.’

‘Ladies,’ said Logan, ‘please.’

He pushed back his soup. He knit long fingers across his slender belly. He always enjoyed the eve of a Feud. He knew that Eyes Cusack would not for long keep his mongrels leashed, and his mood was high and expectant. When you were running a Fancy, regular demonstrations of rage were needed to keep the town in check and, just as importantly, the Fancy boys in trim. Too much sweetness and light and they got fat, unpleasantly smiley and over-interested in the fashion mags.

Jenni Ching looked from Logan to Macu and back again.

Jenni Ching raised her brow and blew smoke to the tapped-brass ceiling of the Ho Pee.

Jenni Ching was thinking: This is what’s runnin’ the Back Trace motherfuckin’ Fancy?

‘Colours to be raised?’ she asked.

‘Absolutely,’ said Logan. ‘If we’re going do it at all, we’re going to do it properly.’

‘Colours a pain in the fuckin’ gee,’ she said. ‘Fuck we wanna be marchin’ with flags for, H? This the Paddy’s Day fuckin’ Parade or what, like? Just get the fuck out there and reef the scutty fucks! Flags and fuckin’ colours ain’t gonna make no differ to the gack we welt outta the Rises filth no-how, y’check me?’

Logan sighed, was sweetly paternal.

‘Jenni?’ he said. ‘We’re not savages. If there’s young fellas gonna be planted in the boneyard tomorrow, they ain’t going down without knowing who’s responsible. Fancy’s colours will be raised.’

‘S’the kin’ o’ mawky shite that gets my melt off,’ she said. ‘Flags an’ fuckin’ banners…’

‘I’m hearin’ Girly talkin’,’ said Macu.

‘True enough,’ Logan smiled.

Girly Hartnett was long noted for nose-thumbing at tradition. Girly’s reckon was that Bohane was far too sentimental a town. Of course, it didn’t stop her spending a quare chunk of clock travelling to the lost-time.

‘All I’m sayin’, we’ve enough on us plates, like, without puttin’ on the usual circus–’

‘Jenni,’ Logan was stern here, ‘don’t call it a circus.’

‘All I’m sayin’–’

‘Jenni? Just leave it, please?’

‘But Girly says–’

‘Don’t mind fucking Girly! I’m running the fucking Fancy!’

‘That so, H? Then why’s it Girly gots to sign off on the Feud?’

His cold glare would strip a lesser child of its front but not Jenni.

‘A nicety,’ he said. ‘Protocol. Keep her thinking she’s involved still. It keeps her going, you know?’

A silence swelled.

Logan pussed.

Jenni smoked.

And Macu looked out into Smoketown’s greenish night-time haze. It was the early a.m. parade of skinpoppers and inebriates and hoor-botherers. She wondered – against her will – if he was among the streets somewhere. And if she would recognise the gaatch of him. If he still carried in the same way. She had not replied to the letter. There had been no further word. It was sixty days since the letter had been passed to her.

Jenni Ching slithered from her seat and made for the door. As she opened it a great surge of street noise rose.

‘Time you givin’ em till, H?’

‘They won’t need long, if I know Cusacks.’

‘Fancy prepped?’ said Macu.

‘Stop your fretting, girl. Been weeks prepped if I’m right, Jen?’

‘Fancy’d ate a child, H.’

He finished his soup and lay down his spoon and clasped his thin fingers across his middle.

‘Go and make sure anyhow, Jenni-gal.’

‘Feuds!’ Macu cried. ‘An’ we a stretch pas’ fuckin’ forty!’

‘It’s the life, girl,’ Logan said.

‘For how long more, Logan?’

Jenni waved as she stepped outside.

‘Tell Girly I was askin’ for her,’ Macu called.

Jenni mouthed a badness beneath her breath.

‘Say what, girl?’

‘Say nothin’, Mrs Hartnett.’

‘I’ll be fuckin’ dug out o’ you yet, slant, y’hear me?’ Macu said.

‘Ladies, would ye leave it? Please?’ Logan said.

‘But d’ya hear her, Logan? About straightenin’ eyes she’s mutterin’!’

16 Wolfie: His Allegiances

Wolfie Stanners hung by the ruff of his jumper from a coat hook in the schoolhouse cloakroom. He squealed for help.

‘C’mon to fuck will someone!’

But nobody came to free him.

He was ten years old, the tiniest runt in the creation, and the eyes rolled dangerously in his chickpea head as his feet flailed at the air.

‘Please!’ he screamed. ‘Someone!’

Nobody came.

His breaths jabbed hard at the walls of his chest and tasted of sick.

‘C’mon’ll someone!’

Nobody came, and he swung from the coat hook, and he soaked in a panic sweat.

It was a lardy fatarse off the Rises that had hung him there.

‘S’what ya get for sniffin’ up sisters, filthy ginge!’

Wolfie in truth had tried to crawl up the gaberdine skirt of a wee Norrie sister – just for the sconce, like – but this was a harsh measure of justice.

‘Please, someone!’

He hung there, and he jigged on the air, and he near enough throttled himself.

‘C’mon, someone!’

But his screams came weaker now and hardly carried at all.

He stretched his arms behind his head but his reach was too short and fell shy of the hook. The jumper’s ruff caught tightly at his throat and he tried to force his weight to rip it free but it would not give. And Wolfie turned blue.

‘Fuck you doin’ up there, Stanners?’

The Burke kid at ten years old was already a long-legged galoot and a gommie sort with it. He was a blurry apparition down there below Wolfie in the cloakroom, and the small boy squinted to bring him into focus, and he lamped him as that beanpole from the wynds – Fucker, he was known as.

‘C’mon t’fuck an’ get me down offa here’d ya!’

His spindly arms had no more than the girth of chopsticks, Fucker Burke, but might have been threaded with steel wool for the strength in them, and easily from his tiptoes he lifted Wolfie clear from the coat hook, and the runt staggered into a corner of the cloakroom and spluttered his guts on the floor.

‘Min’ yer shoes,’ said Fucker Burke.

Wiping the drool away, Wolfie turned to Fucker, and he cleaned his gob with his sleeve, and he was awestruck in the presence of a saviour. He said:

‘Y’help me get him?’

Fucker liked the gaatch of this gingery kid – even if he couldn’t tell exactly what it was that made him smile (it was the dense, packed menace) – and he said:

‘Know where we can get diesel an’ all, y’check me, gingey-pal?’

Later:

The lardy-boy off the Rises wobbled along the wynds of the Trace and headed for the 98 Steps on the dreck afternoon of a winter’s day. Lunatic gulls dive-bombed his nosh bag but he batted ’em away with an impatient, pudgy arm. He had a duck’s walk, the chubster – here’s me head, me arse is comin’ – and he chomped on a lump of macaroon so hard the jaw-motion made a thundery roar in his ears. He didn’t hear Wolfie Stanners step up the one side of him, nor Fucker Burke the other.

Fucker gripped and twisted the boy’s arms and locked them behind his back and he marched him down a dead-end wynd.

‘Th’fuck, like?’

Typical Norrie squawk of fear in there, sketch?

‘Big fella now, aintcha?’ Wolfie said.

Fucker held him steady, and Wolfie kicked the boy’s shins until they gave from under him, and the lardarse was on his knees then, whelping, and Fucker knelt in behind, and he held the boy’s arms locked with one hand and with his free hand scrunched the boy’s hair to get his head back.

The boy screamed hard and showed his fat pink tonsils to the Bohane sky.

Wolfie poured diesel from a can into the opened gullet. Lardarse choked on it and spat and Wolfie slapped him; Fucker chortled.

Drizzled the diesel on the boy’s clothes and hair, too, most carefully – he’d a dainty touch for badness, Wolfie – and he produced the matchbook with a flourish, and he signalled for Fucker to back off, sharpish, and as he did so, Wolfie ripped a match, sparked it, and flicked.

So it was a lardarse kid on fire sprinted tubbily the wynds of the Trace and he ran onto the dock and leapt head first into the roaring blackwaters of the river. Flapped and splashed and gurgled, and the sight caused a wailing commotion on the wharfside stones – auld dears out of the Trace market threw their sprouts and cabbages in the air and roared a great commotion, coz it wasn’t every day you saw a fat child in flames, not even on the Bohane front – but then a hero of a dock polis came pounding along, with his porter-gut swinging, and by ’n’ by the lardarse got fished out again with a winch hook.

Lay on the quay, then, quenched but sizzling.

Ain’t been a pretty sight since, the same lardarse, face on him like an S’town burrito, and plenty more in the city suffered at the same hands as the years turned, and as many as were left sucking the air and could tell the tale, the same amount again were fattening maggots down the eerie bone-yard. Was the way of things Trace-deep since Wolfie and Fucker took to working in tag.

They realised that day that no matter how fast their hearts might beat at the brink of an atrocity they would not pull back from it, not ever, and Wolfie saw where this gift could send them in Bohane.

But now it was the eve of a Feud, and in the small, ominous hours of the night Wolfie walked the Back Trace, alone, and he felt a creep of grim knowledge:

No Bohane Fancy ever had two names to it.

He tried to put manners on his thoughts – the black surge of them was malevolent as the river’s. Walked through the 98er Square and he felt the dip of the glance from the quarehawks who were gathered beneath the winter-bared trees in their greatcoats, with their sacks of tawny wine, and he knew that his name was spreading, its power building, but he realised that it had Fucker’s maniac strength behind it, too. He knew there were others in the ranks had ambition to match his own. He knew there was no viciousness to match his but for Fucker’s, but for Jenni’s.

Hardwind was up and Norrie chanters sounded in the distance and the Fancy was mobbed ’cross in Smoketown. He would go to the ranks soon enough. He felt an icy tinkling at his spine – thought he sussed a follow – and he looked sharply over his shoulder but he saw nobody, and he told himself it was just Feud juice that had him edgy.

He decided on a quiet drink in a groghole down a Trace wynd. Pushed in the door to a brood of silence. There were just a couple of old sorts at the low tables. Wolfie sat at the bar and asked for half a Wrassler stout and the ancient dear serving said it would put the iron in him sure enough, boy, medicinal for ya, and the smile Wolfie showed as the stout settled to its blackness put a certain end to all conversation. Sat with his half and his thoughts and it was as quiet a night as you’d get down the Trace – with the Feud so near, as many as could had cleared out already. Wolfie sat there all soulful and bothered in the half-light of the dank old bar.

Wolfie wore:

A neatly cut Crombie of confederate grey above green tweed peg pants, straight-legged, a starched white shirt, collar open to show a harlequin-patterned cravat, and a pair of tan-coloured arsekickers on the hooves that’d been imported from far Zagreb (them boys knew how to make a boot, was the Fancy’s reckon; if the Long Fella wasn’t walkin’ Portuguese, he was walkin’ Croat).

Wolfie sipped at his Wrassler’s smoky bitterness. There was a sulk to his mouth. It was never far away, not since his ninth year, and the night that his mother, Candy, got herself kicked to death in the Trace. She was a quick-fingered thief and a scuttery drunk and she wasn’t shy with a blade in her paw. She worked the snakebend line of De Valera Street. He used to stand up on a street bench to keep decks for polis. He smiled over the stout as he thought of Candy inside in Horgan’s Department Store, whipping eyeliner pencils and tubs of mascara to flog to the Smoketown tushies at low bars in the afternoons. Drinking money. And nightly, then, their roaming of the Trace. The way she’d drag him close to her when she was boozed up and croon old songs, the tunes of the lost-time. He felt yet the hard beating of her heart and the way she nuzzled his neck. Later in the night she’d disappear for a while. The night came that she didn’t come back. She was found by the 98 Steps. Wolfie was brought there by Trace women and he did not cry at all but he lay with her for a few minutes, where she’d been stomped, and already he felt the way the cold of the ground rose up into her. Then he got dragged away and Candy got shovelled up.

He blamed Norries, and he finished the Wrassler, and he called another. Drank sombre; brewed foul thoughts.

Another old sort arrived in off the wynd and blew on his hands and brushed past Wolfie – want to watch himself – and he took a seat barside. Called for a hot Jameson. A big-boned old sort, voice like an actor, like something out of the Crescent Hall, and Wolfie noted the hands on him; the hands were massive, scarred, gnarled.

Wolfie kept an eye on the old sort in the mirror over the bar.

Half mad by the looks of things. Mouthing off to himself. Square-cut chin, as handsome as an old actor an’ all, but gone to daftness. And then the old sort took a half-swivel on the high stool.

‘Wolfie-boy makin’ a move?’ he whispered.

An actor’s whisper – hushed yet loud. Wolfie didn’t so much as grace it with a look. Kept face.

‘An openin’ for the boy-child?’ said the old sort.

Wolfie turned an eye to him now and glared. The old sort smiled and nodded.

‘Ne’er a sign o’ that bead, no?’

A chill came into Wolfie then.

‘Madam? Lay up another Wrassler for this kid. He’s after comin’ over class o’ pale-faced.’

Wolfie stared straight ahead and felt for the four-inch dirk in his waistband – it was gone.

‘Pale as his master,’ the Gant said, and he took the dirk from his inside pocket and slid it along the bar.

‘Be more careful with that,’ he said.

Wasn’t often Wolfie Stanners had the gob dry up on him but it was dried up now sure enough.

‘You’ll have got the message, Wolf?’

The others in the bar supped up and ghosted from the place, lively, and the ancient barkeep arranged herself as far down the end of the counter as was possible.

Wolfie didn’t answer the Gant Broderick – he just stared at him.

‘Underneath the bridge, Wolfie?’

The Gant shook his head sadly.

‘Mercy on that poor man’s soul,’ he said. ‘Shockin’ end he came to.’

Wolfie’s gut told him to flee the place but the Gant’s dark stare mesmerised.

‘You working a plan, Wolfie?’

Wolfie turned from him and looked straight ahead.

‘You’d want to be at this stage, child. The way the Fancy’s gonna break up?’

Wolfie didn’t answer.

‘Come back along with me here,’ said the Gant, ‘and maybe we can talk a little.’

The Gant went to a low table in the rear dim of the grog-hole, and Wolfie found himself slipping from the high stool, and going quietly to join him there.

17 The Shortest Day

Solstice broke and sent its pale light across the Big Nothin’ bogs. A half-woken stoat peeped scaredly from its lair in a drystone wall and a skinny old doe stood alert and watchful on a limestone outcrop. Sourly lit, a cruel winter scene – a raven clan soared and watched for scavenge, and there was a slushy melt to the hillside as the distant sun burned, and a puck goat chewed morosely on a high mound there. Bohane river ran as ever it did and fed off the bog ice that quaked into it as the shortest day’s sun came still higher. Surge of the water was all to be heard as Ol’ Boy Mannion stood in the first of the year-turn light on a high bank of the river and pensively urinated into it.

He finished, and trousered himself, and he stood a while longer to listen.

It was among Ol’ Boy’s more esoteric opinions that the bog plain had over the course of the years become weirdly… untamped. These times, the city of Bohane was powered largely on its turf, and the bog had been cut away and reefed everywhere. Who knew what passages to its underworld had been disturbed? The bog’s occult nature had been interfered with, its body left scarred, its wounds open, and might this also be a source of the Bohane taint? It would not surprise Ol’ Boy Mannion one bit.

He tied the string of his pants and he let the hardwind come in rearside of him and he aimed his boots in the direction of Eight Mile Bridge.

There was a tingle of excitement in Ol’ Boy this morning and he knew it was caused by the prospect of bloodshed and he was shamed by that.

Oh, the Bohane taint darkened each and all of us – even a long-tooth as honourable as Ol’ Boy.

He had sent a runner-child to the city to watch on developments overnight. A Feud was like an ember lying low in a tinder of straw – no telling when the spark would ignite, but that it surely would, and Ol’ Boy sure as the Sweet Baba bled on a cross wasn’t going to be around when it did. Ol’ Boy had long since slapped a preservation order on hissel’ – a long-tooth out the tip-end o’ this western peninsula was never by accident, always by design. A long life was a decision to be made.

The child was about due back to the inn at Eight Mile and Ol’ Boy marched for it and he kept an eye on the angle of the sun to know the hour.

Ol’ Boy wore:

High-top boots expensively clicker’d with gold taps, a pair of hip-hugging jodhpur-style pants in a faded mauve tone, an amount of gold chains, a heavy mink coat to keep out the worst of the hardwind’s assaults and a goatskin beanie hat set pavee-style at the crown of his head.

Truth of it – this was as suave an old dude as you’d come across in the whole of the Bohane creation.

He went to Eight Mile via the hills. It was his tactic always to keep to the higher paths. Ghost around the place as best as you can – that was the way to stay alive out on Nothin’. His shadow as he climbed the hillsides was long and needling in the white winter sun. He was not at all immune to the dark magic he walked through.

Nothin’s colours in low December:

The soft gold of the withered reeds – pale as an old wedding band’s gold.

The bluish mica glint of the stone knolls – the same precise glint as a gull’s eye’s.

The purples, discriminating, of the sleeping gorse.

Ol’ Boy walked on and the winter light came across Big Nothin’ slantwise and grudgingly – the bog plain was a whole heap of distance from the sun, and it had all the odour of that distance. It was a grave’s wet musk.

Mannion chewed on his thoughts. His hope was that the Feud sparked up fast and was over as quickly and that it would have the rejuvenating effect of a gorse fire. Then he could go back and pad a downtown prowl. See how things settled.

He walked the high reaches and skirted the boundary of the pikey rez and wondered what messages those sombre folk had been reading lately in the arrangement of cloud-fall and the scattering of the stars.

The pavee kind knew sure enough when there was Trouble a-brew.

He began a descent towards Eight Mile and walked for a time on the river’s high bank and was mesmerised by its remorselessness. He came at length to Eight Mile Bridge and he crossed the great stones of it and the Bohane thundered for the city. He waved to the scatter of inebriates beneath the bridge’s arches: the red-eyed habituals of the scene, suckin’ tawny, and these were intimates of Ol’ Boy, too, but then who wasn’t?

He descended the three stone steps to the inn and pushed through the door.

Turfsmoke, hidden nooks, ale fumes.

He went barside and nodded to the innkeeper. She was a stout-thighed widow with a game eye on her and she gave him the flash of it sure enough.

Ol’ Boy caught a kiss as though she had blown one and gently caressed it onto his cheek and winked.

‘Pour me an amber, sweetness,’ he said, ‘an’ pour it slow so’s I can have a good aul’ lamp at ya.’

She laughed for him, huskily.

‘Ya never lost it, Boy Mannion.’

Ol’ Boy had made his parade of life without ever knowingly failing to flirt with a serving lady. Even if they were plain, he viewed it as a necessary courtesy. If we do not have manners in this life, we do not have much. He took the glass as it was served to him and slapped down a shilling piece. She moved her hand for the coin – a shiver of lust in the auld dear yet, though she must have been pushin’ forty – but he slapped his hand over the coin at the last moment and hers fell onto his. Let the moment sit, did Ol’ Boy, and he winked for her once more.

‘Ne’er a sign o’ that runner-child, missus?’

The innkeeper took on a look of fright and crossed her arms across her bosom and allowed one hand to rise and clutch hungrily her throat – this was a peninsula woman’s semaphore to indicate troubled times.

‘Sure ain’t we all waitin’ on the same young fella, Mr Mannion?’

Ol’ Boy took his glass of beer, and winked again, and he skulked about the premises. The usual Big Nothin’ quaffers lurked in the smoky corners. There was a good crowd in for this hour of the morning – all knew that word was expected on the Bohane situation. Ol’ Boy took a seat by the fireplace nook and sipped at the bitter Phoenix ale and he waited.

Sipped.

And he waited.

Listened.

He sipped.

And just before noon the door fell in and a welt of hardwind in a flash filled the room and raised smoke from the fires and as the door was kicked closed and the turfsmoke settled again everyone turned to see if it was the runner-child who had arrived but indeed it was not – it was Big Dom Gleeson.

The fat newsman stood in the middle of the floor in an emerald frock-coat and knee-high patent boots and closed his eyes and shook his great jowls in distress and sounded a bull-elephant’s moan.

‘Oh!’ he cried.

Staggered – staggered! – over to where Ol’ Boy sat and collapsed – collapsed! – onto a chair beside him and he let his frail, pudgy fingers reach for Ol’ Boy’s arm and he trembled.

‘Oh…’ said Big Dom.

‘I know, Dom,’ said Ol’ Boy, ‘your angina.’

The innkeeper brought a bowl of brandy for Dom and he wept – wept! – thanks to her and clutched her hand and lay it against his brow.

‘Yes I know, Mr Gleeson, I know,’ she said.

As she departed, raising her eyes, Ol’ Boy raked a knowing look over Big D, and he smiled.

‘So you been inside watching the ructions?’

‘Indeed I have not,’ said Big Dom. ‘They ain’t seen my arse for dust in that horrid, horrid town!’

‘You got out awright then?’

‘I did, Mr Mannion,’ he said, and he patted with a wink his stout legs. ‘Early yesterday, I took to me getaway sticks. I thank you kindly for sending the word, sir.’

Ol’ Boy sipped.

‘So if you ain’t been inside watchin’ the Feud, what explains your distressed condition? Don’t tell me, Dom, that you’ve been hiding out in some Ten Light knockin’ shop?’

Ten Light was the village of the Nothin’ hill country where the rural hoor-parlours clustered.

Dom shut his eyes in mortification, and grimly nodded.

‘Let me guess, Dom… Suckin’ on a dream-pipe… skullin’ French brandy… an’ buried to the maker’s name in buxom jailbait?’

‘Oh I’m a weak, WEAK man!’ cried Big Dom.

The door fell in again, and the hardwind again set the smoke from the turf-fires billowing, and it settled as the door was kicked shut and this time, true enough, a biteen of a young fella was revealed: it was the runner-child.

Child at once dropped flat onto his back in the middle of the flagstone floor.

Child stared hard and with great derangement at the ceiling and had terror in his eyes.

Child went into a trembling fit.

Ol’ Boy went to him and he knelt and cradled the child’s head in his hands and he cried out to the innkeeper.

‘Slug o’ the Beast there, missus, an’ lively!’

She brought from beneath the counter a bottle of illicit green spirit – the Beast – as was brewed in the high reaches of the Nothin’ massif by a pair of retard brothers who had the gift. Everyone in the inn gathered around the child. Innkeeper passed to Ol’ Boy the bottle and he uncapped it and he filled the cap with the noxious fluid and he held it to the child’s trembling lips. Drizzled it down carefully. The child gasped and spat and retched and then swallowed a wee sip and brightened just a shade. He opened his mouth for another drop or two. Ol’ Boy allowed him some. The runner-child it was clear had been witness to Dark Events.

Big Dom most professionally – grant him that – slid from the inside pocket of his frock-coat a spiral-bound notebook and licked the nib of his pencil.

‘Easy now,’ said Ol’ Boy. ‘And try and tell it for us, yes?’

As the Beast went to work, it brought slowly some colour and strength to the child. He tried to shape a word and everybody leaned in closer.

‘Bo…’ he said.

Silence was deathly in the room as the child struggled with the word. A little more of the Beast was drizzled into him. Fire of the spirit lit the word.

‘Bo…’ he said, ‘… hane!’

‘Very good,’ said Ol’ Boy, drily. ‘But what of it, child?’

‘Bohane,’ said the child, ‘is gone… to… to… to the Sweet Baba!’

Ol’ Boy took the child’s hand and stroked it gently.

‘Tell as much as you can, son.’

Child was stronger now by quick degrees. He was feeding well off slugs of the Beast and off the attention also.

‘Polis blockin’ all roads out,’ he said.

Low whistles caroused the turf-smoked inn.

‘High Boreen?’ Ol’ Boy prompted.

‘Cordon up, sir,’ said the child.

‘How’d ya get out, son?’

‘Came crossbog.’

Shivers in the room at the thought of the runner-child coming crossbog in low winter. That would be a trial for a fit and grown man. Wonder a swamphole hadn’t devoured the wee cove. Big Dom happily flushed as he sketched notes for a Vindicator colour-piece.

‘Way’s she blowin’ in there now, child-o’-mine?’ the newsman whispered.

Runner shut his eyes and slowly he let the story come.

‘All the night through bonnas is leppin’ off the Rises like dogs for the lick of a bone, sir.’

‘Ah sure we know that,’ said Ol’ Boy. ‘Sure the bonnas were seen from as far back as the plantation road.’

‘Come first crack?’ said the child. ‘First the Norrie whistlers marched out, then the fife drums…’

‘Uh-oh.’ Big D was loving it.

‘Then the Norrie chanters came down, sir. An’ as many as never’s been heard!’

‘Go on, runner. More.’

‘Nex’ thing I seen? An’ with me own peepers, like? Seen… an… an… an…’

‘Say it, child!’

‘I seen an… an eight-family descent, sir.’

The inn collapsed into delirium, wailing, tears. And the Big Nothin’ drinkers, as at all times of Trouble, turned immediately to religion:

‘Oh mother o’ the Sweet Baba!’

‘Oh Sweet Baba won’t ya come down an’ protect us!’

‘SBJ be good!’

‘SBJ be faithful!’

‘Oh Baba don’t forsake us said don’t forsake us now!’

‘Baba-love be with us!’

‘Baba-love always be with us!’

‘Ah shush it, will ye, for fucksake!’ cried Ol’ Boy. ‘Herd o’ bleatin’ fuckin’ lambs!’

He leaned down close to the runner-child.

‘Speak to me now, son, please. Twas an eight-family mob, you’re sure of that? You counted eight, like?’

‘Eyes Cusack, sir? He got the McGroartys, the Lenanes, the Dillons–’

‘That’s not news at all. He’s always got them fuckers.’

‘But he got the Halpins, sir, he got the Fitzhenrys, he got the Lenihans too–’

‘Sweet Baba-love don’t desert us now!’

‘Baba come down among us! Said Baba come down!’

‘Please!’ cried Ol’ Boy. ‘Will ye lay off the bollockin’ Baba-love! Baba won’t help ye now!’

Runner-child’s eyes focused on Ol’ Boy’s, and locked, and Ol’ Boy knew it was truth the child spoke.

‘An’, sir? He got the McGraths an’ all, y’check me?’

‘That’s the eight.’ Big Dom whistled low and made the note – eight (8) – and confirmed it with a tick mark.

Ol’ Boy Mannion didn’t like the sound of this one bit. All around him in the inn there was disbelief, awe, terror. Tell ye this for thruppence: many a yella moon had shone on the glorified pig’s mickey that is the Bohane peninsula since we had seen the likes of an eight-family mobbed descent off the Northside Rises.

‘Eight families…’ said Ol’ Boy, calculating. ‘That could mean anything up to… I dunno… what are we talkin’, Dom… a hunnerd an’ fifty latchiko headjobs?’

‘Easy,’ said Big D.

‘At least that, sir,’ said the runner-child, ‘if’n yer to go by what these peepers ha’ seen.’

‘That’ll be plenty to take the Trace,’ said the innkeeper.

‘I’d nearly want to be thinkin’ about a thirty-two-page special,’ Big Dom sighed.

‘Shush, will ye?’ said Ol’ Boy. ‘Let the child tell it.’

‘Happens they gots the Trace awready, sir.’

Consternation in the inn at this, and more wailing, but Ol’ Boy raised a firm hand to stop it.

‘What’re you sayin’, son?’

‘Hartnett deserted the Trace, sir… He left it to ’em!’

Shock at this, and hisses of anger, but Ol’ Boy smiled.

‘Fancy’s where?’

‘Ain’t seen it meself, sir. But it’s said the Fancy’s mobbed yet ’cross the S’town footbridge.’

‘And he has the Trace all locked down, am I right?’

‘Every las’ tenement in the Trace shut and bolted agin the Norrie assault since before first crack, sir. Fancy didn’t send a sinner out to meet ’em, sir.’

‘I see,’ said Ol’ Boy. ‘Looks like the Long Fella wants the Norrie mob to blow itself out.’

‘You’ve lamped it in one, Mr Mannion,’ said Big D. ‘He’s lullin’ ’em!’

‘At least that’s what we hope, Dom. You get a look on the families close up, child? It have the look of a mob that means business?’

‘Blackthorns. Hatchets. Hammers,’ said the child. ‘Dirks flashin’ and bricks being lobbed. They’s layin’ into anythin’ that moves Trace-side but not much does move, sir. Bar a few dogs an’ drunks, like.’

‘Ain’t it shockin’,’ said the innkeeper, ‘for this manner a caper to be goin’ on in Bohane an’ we oney three days to the birthday o’ the Sweet Baba Jay? What do be wrong with us at all?’

‘There are those, ma’am, who’ll say it carries in off that river…’ Big Dom mused.

‘Stow it!’ barked Ol’ Boy. ‘Go on, child.’

‘Cusack’s mob is makin’ shit o’ the Trace, sir. Smashin’ it up bad now. Startin’ fires in the squares.’

‘And they’re on the rant already, I suppose?’

‘An’ hard on it, sir. Suckin’ at carry-sacks o’ moscato and batterin’ the herb-pipes goodo. Gots some o’ their wenches down awready and havin’ a lash off the jiggy in plain view o’ the wynds.’

‘Oh they’ve got no class!’ cried Dom Gleeson.

‘Norries can’t even rent it,’ Ol’ Boy concurred.

‘Bohane sliced in twain,’ sighed the innkeeper, and she too was loving every minute of it.

‘An’ is Hartnett prepped, y’reckon?’

Child paused for a slug of the Beast. Wee fecker had a tongue got for it so he had.

‘Is said it’s the man-chil’ Stanners is callin’ the Fancy to order.’

‘Ah,’ said Ol’ Boy.

‘No sign o’ Long Fella hissel’ just yet. Is said the ginge gots the Fancy about eighty strong and mobbed beneath the colours. Waitin’ on a whistle is all.’

‘They’re beneath the colours, they are?’

‘The purple and the black, sir.’

‘Indeed,’ said Ol’ Boy, and as he felt the full horror of the day, he felt also the great pride of it.

‘Polis tactic?’ Big Dom enquired.

‘Cordon gone up every which way, sir. Everythin’ Trace-side o’ Dev’s a no-go zone.’

‘They’re trying to contain,’ said Big Dom. ‘Good luck to ’em with that.’

‘Could it spread to Nothin’?’ The innkeeper was fearful now.

Ol’ Boy considered.

‘That’s a tricky call to make, ma’am. We know what Big Nothin’s like. Sympathies out here might switch with a lick of the hardwind. A lot of us got peoples in the Trace but a lot of us got peoples on the Rises too. My gut’s read? It won’t spread bogside till one or other of the mobs is suffering an’ suffering bad.’

The runner-child had by now greatly recovered. He was placed on a stool by the fire and was coddled there. He was fed hot milk and further slugs of the Beast. Big Dom leaned in close and coaxed from the child some further background detail. There was great pride in the child at having witnessed the outbreak of a Bohane Feud. And the inn this winter’s day had suddenly about it a most festive and excited air.

Ol’ Boy left the crowd to its gossiping and its chirruping and he took a quiet high stool in a snug. Was it wise, he wondered, for the Long Fella to allow the boy Stanners such a prominent role upfront of a massed Fancy?

Big Dom, reading over his notes, came to join him.

‘Looks like y’picked a wise day for a spot check on yer Nothin’ bureau, D?’

‘I thank you again for the word, Mr Mannion.’

They sat amid the flickers and turfsmoke and they let the situation hover before them a moment – picked at it silently. Then:

‘Way you readin’ the Hartnett tactic, Dom?’

Fat newsman’s eyelashes fluttered.

‘Leavin’ the Wolfie-boy step out? Seems to me like he’s droppin’ a hint he’s set to move along, Mr Mannion.’

‘Droppin’ it for who?’

‘His lady wife?’

‘Could be you’re right, Dom.’

‘Maybe she wants him spendin’ more time above in the yard, y’check? Helpin’ with the rose garden.’

‘Or goin’ at a more respectable line o’ business. Of course, it must be hard to balance family life with the Fancy’s runnins. You’d have sympathy there.’

‘He don’t wan’ to be leavin’ any gaps on the home front…’

‘Indeed. But ain’t it weird, hah? That the Gant comin’ back might spell a lucky season for the Wolfie-boy.’

‘It is strange, Mr Mannion, what can bring change to a Fancy.’

‘A change to the city with it.’

Thoughtful, the pair, as they considered love’s quiet but decisive manoeuvres, and how an entire city might be shaped by them, a fiefdom, a world. Ol’ Boy called another amber; Dom, a French brandy.

Was the Wolfie-boy coming through, then?

It is at times of the Bohane Feudin’, after all, when Bohane reps get made.

18 The Light That Never Goes Out

Looky-here:

The Gant Broderick, without a lick of sleep to his name in three weeks solid, walked the deserted streets of the New Town, in foulest December weather, and he aimed his hopeful toots for the Beauvista bluffs.

From the Trace, distantly as he climbed, he heard the hollers and taunts of the Norrie fiends.

Fancy, meantime, held to an S’town stand-off as it waited on the sure mo’ and the ’bino’s call.

The Gant had spotted a gap sure enough.

He was after an assault of the midwinter blues. Each sleepless night in the trailer’s cot had been an infinity. Each morning he had felt as if he had fought a war. The Bohane taint had lost no drag on him in all the years he’d been gone. Violent thoughts reared up in his ham-faced noggin. It had been as much as he could do the night before not to throttle the little ginger cuss on the spot – spare him the wait for a sure fate ahead. But he had work to do, the Gant. There was a job agreed to, a price to be paid for his passage of return.

He could not settle. The level of drooling lust was unspeakable. Nostalgia was off the fucking charts. He was calling out his daft thoughts to the four winds. He was in fierce debate, at all angles of the clock, with the very many versions of himself. He was flatulent, he was baggy-eyed, he was hoarse with emotion. And here he was, despite it all, presenting himself for love.

Rum, Gant.

Scaled the Beauvista ascent by ’n’ by and came to the more genteel Bohane – the austerity of the trees here along the grand terraces, their tangled limbs bared in winter and hazed in rainfall, this was unspeakably beautiful, and a tear trailed softly the Gant’s cheek. All the great turrets and chimneys leapt at the foul winter sky, and he knew where to head for, sure enough, because it wasn’t his first climb of the bluff this season.

He had watched her in shade and silhouette; he had watched her the winter through, but from a distance.

With a dart of his tongue he wet a thumb the width of a tab-box and he smoothed back the cow lick that fell onto his forehead always, but then he thought that maybe it might work to spark her memory of him, and that he should let it fall unchecked, boyishly. Then he chortled. He almost choked on the harsh comedy, at the teenage turns his mind was taking; he felt so young again. The Gant was the length of fifty and here he was in a moony love-flap.

All the winter through he had prepared the first words he would speak to her. Rolled them out and weighted them. Offered them to the Big Nothin’ moon and the roaming puck goats. Tried to foresee the read she’d take on the words – tried to see them go in. Nights unending he had tried to gauge the meaning of her silence, her refusal to answer the letter. It signalled there was a fear in her, surely, a fear of what his return might mean, and that fear for the Gant spelt hope. Tricky the paths that a long love might follow, like the spiral-down twists of a raindrop on a windowpane.

He came to their terrace. His belly swollen with fright, he was ill with nerves – it could all end right here and now – but as with death, you look away from the approach of a darkness, and he was at their door, and he knocked, and all the words he had prepared were in that instant lost, forgotten, gone, and he was reduced to a single word – almost at once she answered – and he said the word:

‘Macu.’

19 Logan and Fucker Meet the Sand-Pikeys

Shortest day worsened as it went on and by threat of evening it was about as dreck as you’d get it in the creation. There in the black pit of December the rain came side-on and whipped its cold assaults. The hardwind was bossing about the place belligerent as a hoor’s broken-faced mother. There was an icy mist ghosting from the ocean that’d just about freeze the tongue solid in your gob. Logan Hartnett and Fucker Burke walked through the squalls and wallops of weather and they were largely oblivious to it being Bohane aborigines both.

They went out the back end of Smoketown and made it onto the track that led to the dune system. Track was an ancient one. There was a time – it wasn’t today nor yesterday – when young folk walked down it to take the sea air, fly kites and get fluffy with their sweethearts. But long gone in Bohane the days of the kites, and Fucker turned to Logan, and he said:

‘The fuck we doin’ callin’ on them fuckin’ sand-pikes, H?’

‘The fuck we’re doing, Fucker,’ said Logan, ‘is we’re thinking on our fucking feet, check?’

‘Ah but the sand-pikeys, Mr H? In all fairness? There’s low an’ there’s fuckin’ low again, like.’

Logan allowed the boy a dismal shrug. His calculations of the day a misread, he was in no mood to debate sand-pikey morals with the galoot Burke.

‘I know that you have high standards, Fucker,’ he said, ‘so I’ll explain the tactic again. What we’re dealing with is an eight-family descent from the Northside Rises. I said eight! We ain’t seen that many wall-bangers hop down the 98 Steps since back in the lost-time. But as many as they’ve got, they have the old flaw in them still. Just listen to ’em back there…’

He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, and despite the howls of the weather, the Norrie aggravators could be heard to roister still in the Back Trace.

‘These young gentlemen, they’ve no sense of… restraint, Fucker. They think that we’ve fled and left it to them. They’re taking knee-tremblers in the wynds. They’re bothering booze and pipe like booze and pipe just been invented. Another hour or two of that and they’ll be more than a little sapped. As long as we’ve the numbers to match them, it’ll be a simple cleaning-out operation.’

‘Still, H… Sand-pikeys for back-up? Sand-pikeys allegianced to the Back Trace Fancy?’

Logan stopped up short then; Fucker made the reck a note later.

On a high dune above, in the gloom of dusk, a line of sand-pikeys had noiselessly appeared.

Ye sketchin’?

Sand-pikeys – so silent there in the thickening light.

Now out on the Bohane peninsula, there were those who’d say your sand-pikey was just about the cutest devil of the lot. Say your sand-pikey had it made out there on the dunes, so hidden it was. Your sand-pikey was of the pavee kind but specific to the tip-end of the peninsula, a thin sliver of land out beyond Smoketown where a sequence of towering dunes is knit together with marram grass – great ropey chains of marram as thick again as the cables the sea rides on – and the dunes have a bad-luck air to them, by legend, but it was the sand-pikeys always that talked up the legend. Maybe they just wanted to keep the place to themselves.

They stood a dozen strong on the high dune and with their braids and feathers and markings they had the look of strange birds indeed.

‘I’ll do the talking, Fucker,’ said Logan.

And so at duskfall on the shortest day Logan Hartnett and Fucker Burke climbed the duneside and the line of pikeys stood and silently watched their approach and an orphan clutch of pine trees sang in the dark haze as hardwind careened off the crested dunes.

Sand-pikeys wore armless jerkins year-round, their hair was braided thickly and dressed with magpie feathers, and their torsos were covered with ash markings – unreadable to all but their own kind. They were martyrs to the sweet herb and as noiseless and wary as the dune hares they had for neighbours and sometimes, in the hard times, for prey.

‘How’re we now?’ cried Logan Hartnett, cheerfully.

Our sand-pikey brethren settled the dunes way back. They had a forge out there in which they made weaponry for their protection and for trade. They built also six-bar gates they sold to the farming fraternity: the Big Nothin’ fermoiri. They drank elderflower gin and married at fourteen years of age and enjoyed the maudlin scrape of a fiddle. They didn’t get mixed up in Feuds too often, but when they did?

Was said there was no sight on the peninsula quite so fearsome as that of a sand-pikey at the business end of a scrap.

Logan and Fucker were close enough to make out the faces now. Creased, typically, a sand-pikey’s features – this was from squinting out for generations into the dusty expanse of the dunes, and the decades of fine sand blown hard at them gave an odd, silvery sheen to the complexion, as though your sand-pikey was born of some distant planet altogether, a place made of different minerals and gases.

No answer was made to Logan’s call but he could see the pikeys looked serene enough.

It was known that the sand-pikeys in the evenings listened intently to the wind’s tune and divined what messages from Big Nothin’ it might contain. If you had e’er a drop of the pikey blood in you at all, it was Big Nothin’ was the spirit-home, was the bog-maternal, check? The sand-pikeys also read messages in the sky at night – Word was delivered to them in the arrangement of the stars. Logan knew that if he was to secure their aid this evening, much would depend on what they were hearing in the wind and reading in the sky. This was the level of it when you were dealing with the sand-pikey kind.

Logan and Fucker stalled a few yards from the pikey line.

‘Smile, Fucker!’

Fucker pasted what he could of a grin across his chops and the hardwind dipped and there was momentarily an awful silence and a grey hare passed along a dune crest down the way and rose on its hind legs and was frozen still as it watched the men and the mystique of the dunes was stored, somehow, in the stillness of its stringy frame.

Your sand-pikey, it so happens, was given also to superstitious thinking about the significance of the grey hare – but that is a bag of sticks we are as well keeping for another, less trying day.

‘That’s not a bad evening at all!’ called Logan Hartnett.

Was there a leader among the sand-pikeys? There was – it was the fattish lad that styled himself Prince Tubby.

He stepped out now from the pikey line and he was a big cuss of a young fella for sure. He was the same width across the shoulders as a dray-horse would be. Was known he kept eight wives, aged fourteen to forty-six, and they were all lookers, one as black-eyed and sharp-boned as the next, and three of ’em sisters, and a head count of twenty-two bairns had thus far been bred off them. Twas as if Prince Tubby was out to explode the sand-pikey population with just the lash of his own member.

He eyeballed Logan and Fucker.

He silently chuckled.

He went blank-faced, vague, mystic.

‘I-and-I’s de Far-Eye,’ he said.

Prince Tubby wore his braids waist-length and as thick as the marram and his filthy red velvet lowriders were tucked into leather boots and up top he had his jerkin open across a broad, bare chest on which was tattooed with Indian ink an evil eye.

‘Fuck’s he sayin’, H?’ said Fucker.

‘It’s just their old cant,’ said Logan. ‘Hush, child.’

Prince Tubby came down to Logan and Fucker, side-footing the duneside neatly in the sand-pikey style, and close up he had the look of a full-blown howler.

‘Tis the ’bino I’s talkin’ at, tis?’

‘Logan Hartnett, Prince. And this is my boy Fucker Burke.’

The sand-pikey pulled a slow hand through his braids and the hand he bunched into a fist then and bumped it sardonically with Logan’s.

‘Awrigh’?’ said Fucker.

The Prince smiled at him benignly and Fucker dipped his eyes. Could a pikey tell at a glance, he wondered, if there was pikey blood in you yourself, like? The Prince signalled to his ragged crew behind that they could remain at ease and he gently regarded Logan and he raised his eyes in polite questioning.

‘Maybe a quiet word we’d have?’ said Logan.

‘T’ain’t needed, ’bino.’

‘Oh?’

‘I-and-I’s de Far-Eye.’

‘You were saying.’

‘Far-Eye cop a reck at de Bohane mash-up.’

‘And what are you making of it, Prince?’

Prince Tubby shook his head in sadness.

‘I-and-I gots the feelin’ de ’bino facin’ a manky shake o’ uptown aggravators.’

‘You’re speaking the truth, Prince.’

‘I-and-I don’t need tellin it’s truth he speak,’ Tubby softly corrected. ‘All that come from de I-and-I is truth and Baba-sent. I-and-I’s de Far-Eye.’

Logan placated:

‘My visit to you is no surprise then?’

‘T’aint, ’bino. An’ dere’s a price I can name an’ all, y’check me?’

They trailed down to the pikey camp. Women ’n’ childer scurried forth from the darkness, wide-eyed, to watch: there were strangers on the dunes. Of course, sand-pikey children were an odd breed – they didn’t walk till they were seven years of age but were quick as lizards on the four-hoof crawl, and they came about the Fancy pair, and made hissing noises. Fucker, frankly, was a little shook, and all the more so when he heard a strange rattling, a kind of keening nearby.

‘What’s it, H?’

‘Lurcher cages.’

‘Do they really exis—’

‘Stow it, Fucker!’

They came to the bonfire in the central pit of the sand-pikey camp, and sharp-pointed posts ’bout yea high, maybe ten foot tall, were arranged to a ritual design around the fire, and atop each post a scalp was nailed.

Sand-pikey old-timers looked up from their haunches by the bonna, and passed wee bottles of the Beast around, and there was a heady aroma of bushweed, and some old cove hollered a ballad of the pikey lost-time, and the surging throb of the forge was palpable nearby.

Logan maintained as best he could; Fucker kept his eyes down.

‘Said you’ve a price in mind, Prince T?’

The sand-pikey menfolk all took to crouching by the fire, all went to the haunches, and Logan and Fucker joined them, and Prince Tubby for a while whispered.

Sand-pikeys didn’t come out of camp all that often. Sure, they might head off for a time, after a few palominos, perhaps, or for a rendezvous with some mustachioed diesel seller in Clare or Galway, but they would be back again to the dunes, soon enough, with fresh scars, a good bake on them, and more bleak tales for the telling. And more often than not with new scalps for the posts. They were not to be crossed in business, and the Long Fella knew it, and so he nodded in agreement as Prince Tubby named his price.

It was spat on and shook.

And so it was that less than a half-hour later, the runnings of life on the Bohane streets were set to a different and yet stranger course. For their willingness to help clear the Back Trace of Norrie aggravators, Logan had sworn to the sand-pikeys a third of a share in the Smoketown trade and a role in its daily management.

Fucker Burke could not take his jaws from the ground.

‘Pikeys, H! With a third the business o’ Smoketown?’

‘Just shut your fucking pipehole, Fucker, please!’

A demon vision was to be seen come nightfall. From atop the high dunes, led by Prince Tubby, came a line four-dozen strong of sand-pikeys, and they were armed for Feudin’.

Carried hatchets and iron bars and lengths of ancient fender and blackthorn sticks soaked in brine for the hardness and bricks and shkelps and rocks and hammers and screwdrivers and they carried these items with a lovely… insouciance.

Fucker Burke and Logan Hartnett kept to the rear of the line.

Fucker carried a forlorn and puzzled air.

Logan carried a length of rope.

20 Beauvista Interior

The entire structure of the old manse had been scooped out to leave a vast and sombre space. From the limestone flags to the wooded vault of the ceiling was maybe a forty-foot climb along the rendered walls. The leaded windows were thin and pointed, stern as church, and of a dark, opaque glass. A mezzanine platform circled the room entirely, two-thirds of the way up, and it was reached by a pair of spiral stairways, set opposed to each other across the room, and the entire platform was lined with clothes rails, hundreds of them in dizzying rows around the circumference of the room, his ’n’ hers, and the rails were hung with all the colours – some seasons gaudy, some muted – of capricious fashion. Peninsula symbols marked the hangings that were tied to the oak beams of the ceiling. A great length of chimney breast ascended from a central hearth to the high vault of the room. A blaze of Nothin’ turf lengths burned in the hearth space and the flickers danced on Macu, who sat by the hearth, on a low settle, with her legs crossed, her slenderness unchanged, and her age showing.

Macu wore:

A pair of suede capri pants dyed to a shade approaching the dull radiance of turmeric, a ribbed black top of sheer silk that hugged her lithe frame, a wrap of golden fur cut from an Iberian lynx, an expression of wry bemusement about the eyes, and about the mouth an expression unreadable.

The room was lit, at Gothical intervals, by candelabras mounted agin the buff render of the walls on cast-iron brackets.

Gant’s eye was drawn morbidly to the bed space. It was tucked away in a nook down back, and was heaped with furs and rugs, and there was a headboard cut from driftwood.

Nausea sent a spike to his throat.

A single, enormous photograph was framed above the hearth – it was as outsized as its subject: a great Irish wolfhound of doleful mien.

The Gant said:

‘Who’s the dog?’

Macu regarded him evenly.

‘Why’re you back, G?’

He took to a settle opposing her by the hearth – he took to it before his legs gave out. He could hold her glance for just a moment at a time. Every gesture, every piece of weather that passed across her face was pain to him. He saw clearly now the age that had crept on. He saw the faint crowlines and the puckering that would tighten and dry out as the dreck seasons passed.

‘I can’t answer you,’ he said.

She had opened the door as to one expected. She stood aside and let him enter the great vault of room. He felt conscious of his every movement. He felt nineteen again, and he tried not to carry himself like a Big Nothin’ gombeen.

‘Dog’s Alfie,’ she said. ‘Was Alfie. Got a slap of an El train.’

‘Logan’s?’

‘Ours.’

‘Handsome.’

‘An’ stupid.’

‘Often the way those’d go together, Macu.’

The flicker of his humour he could see was a reassurance to her. But careful, Gant, he told himself, don’t go tossing out the wiseacre lines now; you don’t need to impress.

‘Look at you,’ she said.

‘I know,’ he said.

‘Where’ve you been, Gant?’

There was no quick answer to that. Except to say he had been to the darkest caverns, where ogres loomed.

‘Been away over,’ he said.

‘I know that,’ she said. ‘We’d have…’

The regal ‘we’.

‘… got word the odd time.’

He rubbed his hands together to distract them from trembling. Every word that spilled from her spun him back to the lost-time. It was better if he didn’t look at her – better to let the dream persist.

‘I moved around a lot,’ he said.

‘No settling in those bones.’ She was sly here. ‘A rez boy born true.’

He was sly right back.

‘Whiff o’ the campsmoke to a lotta blood ’round this place, Mac.’

The pale boy Logan had not long been in the Fancy’s ranks. He was tall, he was skinny, he was stylish. Vicious as a mink and cute in the noggin also. What you did, in the Fancy, with one you were afraid of? You kept him close, and so it was that Logan became a lieutenant for the Broderick Fancy. The Gant was wary of him and he set him the trickier errands. Maybe hoped he didn’t come back from them, maybe he had designed it just… Ah but talk to her, Gant, don’t let her see you travelling back. Don’t let her see the weakness of that.

‘See you got scary boys about the Trace?’

‘Norrie trash,’ she said.

All of the feuds in Bohane go way back, the Gant thought, as he sat there on the settle and dried out in the warm fug. Such a childish town.

He recalled the lad who was tarred and feathered on the dockside one night by Norries – it was the Gant found him, writhing in the black goo, a nightmare bird he had the look of. The lad belonged to the Gant and there was vengeance required. It was callow Logan was sent to take it. After the vengeance he took, there was even Fancy boys could not look him in the eye.

‘You know I wrote you.’

‘You know that I got it.’

‘Not just that letter, Macu. Hundreds of ’em. Decades of ’em, girl. I never did send ’em though.’

Logan was quiet-spoken.

Logan didn’t parade no Fancy-boy machismo.

Logan was… cooler.

‘I’ve seen him about the place,’ he told her.

‘Guessed you’d been hauntin’ the shadows, G,’ she said. ‘You were always handy at stayin’ hid… for a big unit.’

‘It’s a knack,’ he said. ‘He doesn’t look happy.’

‘Who is? In fuckin’ Bohane… You think I am?’

The dark girl he had known resurfaced, for an instant, in her glance but he knew now – he saw it with migraine intensity – that their time was gone.

Logan had dressed a little differently to the rest. It would be the flourish of a neck scarf maybe. Or a different cut to the boot. If everyone else was wearing a square toecap, nothing would do Logan Hartnett only to arrive into the Aliados in a winklepicker, and the sly puss on. The other Fancy boys would look at him, study him, see what was coming next. The Gant had the finest threads himself, of course, but he couldn’t help feeling he wore ’em like a turf-cutter.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t send you word,’ she said. ‘But what was I suppose’ to say?’

He remembered the way she had snagged on Logan. He could see it happening – right there in the Café Aliados. Logan down back of the bar, by the jukebox, summoning up a slow-mover of a calypso tune. He’d kick at the corner with his ’picker, a deft little toe-dink to take the life out of a maggot. Soon as they were all wearing winklepickers, Logan Harnett would be dusting off the square toecaps.

Nights, the Gant would talk to Macu about Logan. He sensed the double-feeling in her when he talked. The Gant could hide nothing from his own face. He knew that Logan would be meaner to her.

‘Macu, I don’t need to…’

He could not find the words. The Gant flailed in the strange and sombre room. She looked at him and held the look and smiled. She was beautiful but forty-three.

‘No taking it back, is there?’ he said.

All the years he had been gone, he had remembered their talks word for word:

‘You get so long in this place and no more. Maybe it’s time we took to the High Boreen, girl?’

He could not stay in the city without falling to its taint. Logan would never leave, and Macu, too, was Bohane to the bone. Macu was a stayer.

‘I asked you, remember?’ He came back to the Beauvista hearth. ‘I asked you to come with me.’

‘Ah, Gant, please…’

‘I knew that you wouldn’t.’

She edged forward on her settle. She clasped her hands and held them a moment to her mouth. She spoke to him now very gently.

‘Gant,’ she said, ‘we went out together for three weeks.’

Spike of nausea.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know that’s all it was.’

‘Oh why’re you here, G?’

The firelight traced out the lines of her aged skin. She was no longer what he needed or wanted. Reality infected him with its sourness and truth. A new course swiftly presented; it had its own sweet and vengeful logic.

‘I’ll tell you exactly why I’m here,’ he said.

21 Feud

The Hartnett Fancy was mobbed beneath its colours out the Smoketown dune end. It was first-dark of the longest night. The Fancy was edgy. The hot charge of adrenalin rushed, mitts were flexed, knuckles cracked, jaws clenched, and the ranked banners in the wind’s assault made an ominous rattling. The purple and black of the banners had an ecclesiastical look, neo-Romish, and upon the banners were daubed the symbols and the slogan of the Back Trace Fancy:

Symbols –

Slogan –

S’town was agog, and freaky-eyed hoors amped on Feud-juice shrieked their XXX-rated tributes to the Fancy boys from the high windows.

Fancy boys waved back to the hoors and attempted a semblance, at least, of blithe spirit.

Among the Fancy – as was remarked, with awe and suspicion, in the S’town grogpits and herb-parlours – the fearsome sand-pikeys now were mingled.

Sand-pikeys had about them the calmest of airs. They shook out their limbs, and performed calisthenic stretches, and tossed their hatchets for show in the air, and caught ’em again behind their backs, and filled repeatedly their neckpipes with bead-sized nodges of blackest hashish, and sucked deep on the fill – these were the Dreadlock Assassins of the dune system.

Fancy regulars and sand-pikey buy-ins were of a number, combined, that’d be a match, but just about, for the eight families of Norrie aggravators roisterin’ cross-river in the Bohane Trace.

Logan Hartnett suavely walked the ranks and he offered his smiles and his whispers of encouragement. There was confidence to be read in the sly pursing of his lips, and atop a most elegant cut of an Eyetie suit he wore, ceremonially, an oyster-grey top hat.

Mothers and sisters and lovers of the Fancy boys meantime passed through the mob, shedding tears and Sweet Baba Jay medals as they went. The medals were for protection.

Fucker Burke was bouncing about as though on springs, and he hissed his encouragement to the Fancy, and he kept on an extendable battle leash his Alsatian love, Angie, who pranced, and drooled, and whose eye-gleam gave back the glow of December moon. Fucker was bare-armed beneath a denim waistcoat and wore his finest brass-toed bovvers and he felt the racing currents of pride, emotion, fear. Angie had been kept without a feed for three days.

Jenni Ching pinballed about the assembled mob and screamed crazy Mandarin curses. Jenni Ching carried a spike ball on a chain and swung it above her head. She wore an all-in-one black nylon jumpsuit, so tightly fitted it might have been applied with a spray-can, and she smoked a black cheroot to match it, and her mouth was a hard slash of crimson lippy.

Wolfie Stanners, however, was widely acknowledged to have taken the prize. Wolfie was dressed to kill in an electric-blue ska suit and white vinyl brothel-creepers with steel toecaps inlaid. Four shkelps were readied on a custom-made cross-belt. He danced along the ranks of the Fancy, and he eyeballed each of the Fancy boys in turn, and he gestured to the Back Trace beyond, where the Norrie aggravators could be heard to howl their taunts and curses.

‘Ye takin’ that?’ Wolfie hissed. ‘I said ye gonna fuckin’ well take that, like?’

Logan approached the boy then, and he embraced him, and he whispered to him; Wolfie aye-ayed.

Yes and it was Wolfie that blew a short, three-noted whistle then, and a great wealth of feeling settled that moment on the Fancy.

The whistle was a plain melody that rose once and then fell, that was melancholy, that was sourced from the lost-time in Bohane, that had a special power to it – a power that I cannot even begin to explain to those of you unfortunate enough not to come from this place – and it was answered after a silence had for a moment held, it was answered in sweet, sad sequence by the Fancy, and by this plain music they swore allegiance to the Back Trace, and as one they moved to reclaim it.

Man – even the sand-pikeys were zoned on the mo’.

And as the mob marched out across the S’town streets, the whistled melody was taken up as a general tune, and it carried across the footbridge, and in the wynds and alleyways of the Back Trace the uptown aggravators knew their assault was not to go unanswered.

That drained the blood from the bastards’ faces sure enough.

Trace families barricaded in their tenement homes for the length of the assault heard also the Fancy’s whistles, and they rushed to their rooftops, and their breaths caught with pride as yonder across the Bohane river they saw the hoisted banners come steadily closer – the purple and the black – and the night had cleared, as though on cue, and all of cruel heaven’s cold stars were flung gaily about.

Logan Hartnett, kingly outlaw, arranged himself towards the rear of the marching Fancy. The Eyetie suit was sharp enough to slice an eyeball open, the top hat rakishly set, and he was unencumbered by weapons save for that same coil of rope wrapped loosely about his shoulder. Hard not to be floored by the nerveless elegance of that slender old dog.

Fancy made its way onto the footbridge and it crossed onto the Bohane front and the ranks of hoss polis clustered along the dockside kept their mounts and their backs discreetly turned. Looked in the opposite direction, the polis. As though it was the pretty streets of the New Town where the Feud was to be played.

Fucker and Jenni and Wolfie pelted up and down between the advancing lines of the Fancy and motivated the fighters. Wolfie winked for Jenni as they passed, and he blew her a kiss, and he hit a high-hand salute with Fucker.

But it was Wolfie that took the general lead of the Fancy as it made its way across the wharfside cobbles to the Trace, for he was bone-Trace, that kid, he had Trace wynds for bloodlines.

And Wolfie sounded a ripper of a Back Trace howl and everyone behind him heard it in their deeps and they were fortified by it.

Shkelpers were unsheathed and chains were swung and blackthorns raised.

Sky itself was about ripped by the Fancy’s cries.

Wolfie turned on his heel and trotted backwards so as to face the moving lines and he performed most jauntily a natty-boy skank – the signature move of the Hartnett Fancy – and the cheers that rose had a raw, terrifying jaggedness to them, a want to them, and it was a want for blood, y’check?

Wolfie turned again and entered the Trace.

A flashbulb’s blue shriek lit the sky and caught his battle scream.

22 The Note That Macu Left for Logan

This is the end Logan. You are too sick now. The jealousy is poison. How could you do such a thing to that poor man? He came here tonight and if you could see him it would break even your sick fucking heart. I can’t be with you any more. I can’t hear your voice any more. I don’t know where I’m going to go but I’m going and I would say do not try to find me but I know you’ll try to find me. You’ll have your boys come looking for me just like they did the last time just like they follow me always. But this is the end Logan. Do not try to find me. You cannot change my mind no more. You must leave me alone now Logan. Please will you just leave me, Logan?

23 The Darkroom

The longest night simmered, and the Feud raged, and the hunchback Grimes pelted about the wynds of the Trace and laboured under the weight of a medieval Leica.

The hunchback, Balthazar Grimes, watched the great surge of the Fancy as it ran into the waiting lines of the uptown aggravators, and fearlessly he shot the clash.

The hunchback, Balthazar Mary Grimes, lensman supreme of the Bohane Vindicator, had worked a share of Feuds in his day but few to match this one for belligerence.

When it was all but done he took from the Trace on his short, quick, twisted legs and he darted through the polis cordons on De Valera Street.

Took the smirk of a fat polis:

‘Tasty one, Balt?’

Shook his head woefully, the hunchback, and he kept running – there was a thirty-two-page special on the cards for sure, and it wanted filling.

The offices of the Vindicator were located on a New Town street, a block of stout Edwardiana in prim greystone, and Balt Grimes descended to its basement along the rusted iron stair.

Shut the door of his darkroom behind him and leaned back against it and felt the lightness of relief and the pride of an assignment completed.

He set about unspooling the reels and soaking them.

From the pools of developer – brought in from the Lisbon route now, most often – a succession of images rose from the blue fluid. The images were lifted from the pool and pegged along the line. The hunchback Grimes walked the line, thoughtfully, as the photographs dried, and he made notes for the captions.

He saw:

– The Fancy’s mobbed ranks enter the Trace… their gobs violently agape as they hollered (per tradition) random names of the Back Trace dead… interesting… the way they had the look of young crows out for a feed.

– The boy Wolfie Stanners as he led a squall of followers into the 98er Square, his hackles heaped like a rabid dog.

– A Norrie line, barechested, as they hissed and cawed… oh and a lovely detail: the way their tongues were held as bits between their teeth to make the sound… and upon their scrawny chests crude renditions in charcoal of starlings, their symbol.

– Close-up: what looked like a Cusack–McGroarty crossbreed – the hunchback Grimes squinted – giving the come-on to the Stanners kid directly, with his eyes rancid and herbshot, a scrunchy look to him, a classic Norrie scobe.

– Close-up: same boy on his knees, a moment later, with his face busted open by the sling of a chain, and Wolfie whispering to him as he prepared with a scimitar dirk to slit his throat. (Just a boy he was – sixteenish?)

– A scraggle of shit-faced McGroartys in a wynd’s shadow looking none too sure of themselves.

– Wolfie appearing to hover in the filthy air – prime shot, page lead – as he made for the McGroartys in a lung-busting dash.

– A broken face.

– A gaunt Norrie lad with a dislocated shoulder: lovely, the way his features were caught in a rictus of animal pain.

– Distant shot of Trace women and bairns on the rooftops as they roared encouragement – no good, too fuzzy.

– A gouging.

– A kicking.

– A shkelping… this one too much… the spilt innards visible… bin it.

– Wolfie, again, so low-sized, and neck-deep now in Norrie gore.

– A sand-pikey, his dreadlocks flailing as he went hand to hand with a Lenane bro’ – there was only going to be one outcome.

– The boy Burke – Fucker, known as – with an Alsatian on a battle leash, in the 98er Square, fending off a pair of Norries with his boots as the Ala feasted on a gore spill.

– The Ching gal – prime shot, page lead – as she lands a flying kick to split open the noggin of Eyes Cusack hissel’ with a steel toecap.

– Close-up – page lead – Eyes Cusack, bleeding, as reality dawns.

– Close-up – Logan Hartnett… the Long Fella… the ’bino – a page lead – leaning back against the wall of a wynd, arms folded, a rope coiled and waiting on his shoulder, and not a single fucking hair out of place. Smoking a tab.

– Wide-shot: cackling sand-pikeys chase down a gang of fleeing Norries.

– Close-up: Fucker, a hank of hair in his paw, looking… sexual. Bin it.

– Close-up: Angelina drooling.

– Ching gal – prime shot – with Eyes Cusack in a headlock.

– Wolfie bricks a scuttling Norrie weasel on the back of the noggin – a comic turn, page… 6?

– Triumphant Fancy lads doing a natty-boy skank in the 98er Square – lovely, a double-page spread.

– Close-up: Fucker’s forehead raw and scabbed from headbutting.

– Close-up: the Long Fella, stony-faced beneath his top hat.

– Jenni Ching arriving into the 98er Square – prime shot – with Eyes Cusack before her, a shkelp to his throat and his hands tied behind his back.

– Peach: the high arc of the Smoketown footbridge, its shape beautifully embossed on the dark of night, just as Fucker and Jenni hoist Eyes Cusack over the railings, while Logan makes the knot, and Wolfie waits.

– Peach: Wolfie slips on the noose, delicately, and this one’s an interesting study, his expression is almost… saintly – one for the portfolio, certainly, coz Eyes maintains a dignity too. Fair dues to him.

– Wide-shot: along the dockside, the ranks of hoss polis as they keep their mounts discreetly turned. Lovely.

The hunchback Balt Grimes came to the end of the line and wryly he smiled. Norrie bluster, it seemed, was of a moment’s lasting, and Back Trace class was permanent.

– Front-page shot: Eyes Cusack is hung by the neck from the Smoketown footbridge.

24 22 December, 12.01 a.m., Bohane Authority

Each of them ashen-faced, each with bloodshot eyes and trembling hands, the twelve members of the Bohane Authority sucked on high-tar tabs and drank a dose of filthy coffee from paper cups. Talk ran madly the length of the conference table as the Feud’s aftermath was reckoned.

‘What’re we talkin’, boys?’

‘It’s lookin’ like a dozen dead.’

‘An’ twice that lamed, blinded, or generally crippled.’

‘SBJ wept! As if our fuckin’ name wasn’t bad enough!’

‘Oh those bastards outside in the Nation Beyond will be laughin’ up their sleeves tonight!’

‘It’s the end of a Beauvista tram!’

‘Think the NB tit was gone witchy on us b’fore? It’ll be witchy on us now mos’ certain!’

‘Ne’er a sign o’ Mr Mannion, nah?’

‘They’re at it again! That’s what they’ll all be sayin’! One half o’ Bohane tryin’ to ate the other half!’

The Authority men were desperate and ill-paid souls who lived as peaceably as they could in the modest terraces that ascended towards (but did not reach) the Beauvista heights. They kept always to the New Town side of De Valera Street. They went nervously about their business in an animal town. Their business was to keep the place in some manner civilised. It was a job of work.

‘What do we know of the kid Stanners?’

‘Came up rough. Orphaned early. Runs with the boy of the Burkes.’

‘Fucker, known as. A regular savage.’

‘But not much of a brain, really, just a viciousness. It’s said the Wolfie runt is as smart as he’s vicious.’

‘We know he’s attached to the girl of the Chings.’

‘Sweet Baba Jay float down and preserve us!’

There was plenty to be bothered about in Bohane at the best of times. The El train must be kept running, and the sodium lights must rise for whatever few hours of the night could be afforded, and occasionally – if only that – the gutters must be swept clear of dead dogs, jack-up works, and mickey-wrappers. The Authority men truly cared that the once great and cosmopolitan city of Bohane should retain at least the semblance of its old civility.

‘Polis need to be kept tight on the Norrie families. We don’t want some halfwit of a young fella coming down the 98 to make a martyr of himself on account o’ Eyes Cusack.’

‘Agreed.’

‘Is Mr Mannion on the El train?’

‘That’s the word we have – he’s just in offa Nothin’.’

The men of the Authority wished that the docks be kept open and working. They wished for beer to be brewed and sausages packed. They wished that relations between the factions be kept just a shade short of murderous. They wished that the gentlemen of Endeavour Avenue be allowed to go about the administration of their business. They wished that the lost-time in Bohane might with the years that passed fade into less painful memory.

‘What way is the Mercy holding?’

‘What doctors we have are called in. The Mercy’s handled worse than this.’

‘Did Girly give nod to the pikeys?’

‘Must ha’! Logan’s the babby-boy yet. He couldn’t call in the pikeys without Girly’s say-so.’

The door of the conference room fell open then and it was Ol’ Boy Mannion that stylishly appeared. The Authority men rose as one and came about him in a great kerfuffle.

‘Ah shush, will ye!’ Ol’ Boy cried. ‘Barnyard fuckin’ fowl ye’re like.’

He quietened them, and quickly, for he was practised in the art, and soon all were seated and smoking again around the long table. Ol’ Boy stood at its head and raised his palms once more for hush.

‘Now let’s not get this out of proportion, boys,’ he said. ‘There were minor disturbances among juveniles in the Back Trace area of the city. We can get past this. We get the bodies down to the riverside smokehouse under cover of dark. We get the corpses burned off before first light. How’re we fixed for diesel?’

It was confirmed that sufficient supplies could be rounded up for the purpose.

‘Good. Now we need to let Eyes dance on the air for an hour or so yet. The Fancy will want to linger on the sight – leave them to it. We don’t want to rile the boys when they’re in a celebratory mood. They’ll have the calypso records out and the herb-pipes burnin’. Tomorrow, we’ll let the Vindicator special go ahead, coz the town has an appetite for it, but I’ll have Dominick cut any mention of a body count. A nice few gorey pictures and Bohane will be happy enough – you know the way of it, gents. Of course, the polis will have to keep the 98 Steps especially tight for the holiday period. We’ll want every unit out: hoss polis, dog polis and the knuckle-draggers general.’

The Authority clucked a henhouse concensus.

‘Do we know,’ Ol’ Boy continued, ‘what level of brute animal violence has been committed to the properties of the Trace?’

He was informed of what damage was known.

‘At least the market canopies seem to be intact. That’s something. If an old dear can pass through the market of a morning and snag herself a stalk of sprouts, it seems as if all is right with the world. Next thing is Girly.’

Shudders around the table, which he acknowledged with a sad closing of his eyes.

‘There is no way around it. We need to send a delegation to the old rip. We need it made clear that if the sand-pikey element is to be allowed a share of the Smoketown trade, then they have to be kept in some way decent. We can’t let the place go to hell altogether. We might suppose, of course, that the Fancy’s promise to the sandies is half-hearted at best and they’ll attempt to fob ’em off with the run of a couple of hoorshops and a few vouchers for a tickle-foot parlour…’

Pale smiles surfaced – the first of the night. Ol’ Boy’s grasp and control was so reassuring.

‘But that would be a dangerous game for the Hartnetts to play. There is nothing so terrifying to behold, as those of us ever so slightly longer in the tooth know, as a sand-pikey feeling hissel’ to be double-dealed. Now I mean no disrespect to their ethnic heritage…’

He raised his eyebrows.

‘… but we don’t want them lightin’ bastards getting any sort of a foothold. Bohane’s name is bad enough. And I am not suggesting for a moment that it is altogether unjustified. This is a bad-ass kind of town.’

The Authority men shrugged in sad agreement.

‘All I’m saying,’ Ol’ Boy went on, ‘is the last thing we want to be known as is Pikey Central. Things are bad enough, lads. We need to get Girly onside agin the pikey influx. Now. With regards to the Gant Broderick…’

The Authority members edged forwards in their seats.

‘… situation, I’ve spoken to him more than once but I confess his motives are still a mystery to me. I don’t know for sure why the Gant is back. What I do know is that he’s causin’ sleepless nights for a certain pale-face. And the way I’m figurin’?’

Ol’ Boy shrewdly grinned.

‘We got the Gant, and the Long Fella, and lovely Macu. So think on, boys-a-mine. It’s a rum ol’ love mess for certain and it could make fine distraction for the Bohane people this weather. Could make ’em forget an aul’ Feud quick enough…’

Slowly the Authority men nodded as they grasped the sense of it.

‘Hear this!’ Ol’ Boy cried. ‘Bohane city don’t always gots to be a gang-fight story. We can give ’em a good aul’ tangle o’ romance an’ all, y’check me?’