City of Bohane

25 Babylon Montage

A hot scream cut the April night in S’town.

Logan Hartnett, the sad-eyed Fancy boss, looked drowsily to the high window of the dream salon’s booth. The window was open to the great swelter of spring and the air was pierced by the white syllables of the scream. Heartbroken in the cruel season, Logan as he lay on the settle bed felt the scream along the tracklines of his blood as though carried by an army of racing ants. His true love had left him, and he closed his eyes against the scream, and the pink backs of his lids pulsated woozily. He felt the slow, negotiating trickle of a single bead of sweat as it rolled from his forehead along the line and tip of his nose, dropped to the indent above his thin lips, trickled slowly across his lips to leave a residue of salt burn, and rolled onto his chin to be removed with the single neat swipe of a toe by Jenni Ching.

He opened his eyes to the girl.

She winked as she drew back her foot again. She sat on her haunches, at the far end of the settle, facing him. She took up the pestle and mortar and grinded still more of the poppy bulb’s paste. She spread it on the burner of the dream-pipe, and she came to him along the length of the settle – see the slow and sinuous movement of her as she brought balm for his soul’s ache – and she placed the pipe to his lips, and she sparked the flame.

‘More,’ she said.

The scream ripped the air again but it broke up as it caught at its source, and it became a hacking cough, and a boy of fifteen doubled over in a dune-end alleyway. His thin hands clutched at his sides and his fingertips kneaded his ribs and on each knuckle a numeral was marked in the pale blue of Indian ink:

These were the dates of his father’s span. It was in the same alleyway his father was stomped to death by Fancy boots. The boy Cantillon knew that vengeance might cost his young life to exact but his screams told the need for it. He felt inside the waistband of his lowriders for the shkelp – the reassurance of its bone handle – and he wondered how long it would take for the moment to present itself. The wooziness of the spring night was all about him and a silence held briefly to worry the moment.

Then a round of roars and chants surged on the measured beat of handclaps from a pikey-run grindbar nearby.

Sand-pikey floor show was in full swing:

A slave-gal lurcher, painted with lizard motifs about the face, was chained at the waist. The chain’s end was held by her handler, a hooded dwarf. She writhed and twisted in a diamond-shaped pit marked out with burning reed-torches. A fat gent got up as a dog-demon, in full pelt, then entered the pit on his fours – whoops and hollers rose – and the pair cavorted, frankly, and at great, unsavoury length, and they kept a good rhythm with the handclaps as they went.

All the while, the lurcher ranted for the tiered punters a devil’s babble – it was learned to her in the dune cages – and her eyes were livid in the dim of the pikey joint.

The dwarf handler fed out lengths of chain at certain moments, and withdrew chain at others – this so as to assist and steer the design of the cavort. The punters clapped out a steady, three-beat rhythm, and whistled and hissed, and they sucked on herb-pipes – squinting through the greenish fug of their smoke – and they lapped up a three-for-two offer on bottles of Phoenix ale.

Lurcher had the telltale welts of captivity on her back. Type that would have been taken as a girl-chil’ from the high reaches of the Nothin’ massif, and dune-raised. Such were the sad old stories you’d get out that end of the creation. Gal the likes of the lurcher might have been bought for a few bottles of the Beast and a box of colouredy bangles.

Get ’em young – that was the sand-pikey reckon when it was lurchers they was talking.

Yes and the sand-pikeys held all the hottest tickets out the S’town dune end this season. The lurcher and her dog-man were tonight but a curtain-raiser. It got lowdown and brutish altogether as the night stretched out its hairy arms, and the trick-ponies emerged, and the big lasses in harness, and the biters, and the maulers, and the double-jointed chap with the moustache what styled hissel’ ‘The Magician’. You would blush to even repeat the details of that man’s act – suffice to say there wasn’t a cat safe for miles.

And all the while Prince Tubby, the Far-Eye, kept sconce from the doorway, and he tallied a head count in the tiered seats around the pit. There was a couple of stag parties in, which was always a help. He reckoned the toll he’d taken in door tax and he nodded serenely.

Prince Tubby was offering cheap entry, credit lines for repeat custom and rotating deals on Phoenix ale, Wrassler stout and Big Nothin’ bushweed. Ambition lit the Tubster like a star this weather. He had taken to city living. He placed a hand in the pocket of his velvet loon pants, and he felt the weight of coins there, and he set them merrily a-janglin’. He scratched his balls and he wanted more – more! – and he brooded on the weakness he perceived in the Trace Fancy. The ’bino was down to lonesomeness and the dream-pipe, and the Fancy boys were whispering.

Tubby went outside for a taste of the night. He took a sniff at the S’town air. His guards were stationed all along the dune-end alleyways – the Fancy was not to be trusted – and he felt the reassurance of them. He ate a lungful of mineral wind. Raised his eyes and read the stars. Briefly, in Bohane, there was that feeling again of stillness.

And then a nightbird’s strange call from the treetops.

Bird’s call had the neat, rapid, whirring sound of an old motor, and it carried a distance along the tops of the scarred trees, and it was picked up by others of its kind, and answered. The call – this sequence of whirrs and tiny, deep-throated clicks – ascended thus the gable-end of a fetish parlour, and crept through the window of a top-floor suite, and Big Dom Gleeson, the stout newsman, heard it as he lay on a bed with his belly-side down. He suckled on a sour French brandy from the nipple of a baby’s bottle, and he sweated profusely as a seventeen-year-old tushie whipped him a hundred strokes on the raw of his arse with a pearl-encrusted hairbrush.

‘Oh I am a weak, weak man,’ the Dom sighed.

The pouty tush weltered him and muttered the count:

‘Seven’y-sic’… seven’y-se’en… se’eny-ate…’

And Big Dom between soft moans and sucks on the bobba’s tit pondered the weird, precise whirring of the night-bird, and he made it as a blow-in from an ocean storm – it was the season for them. He groaned, in happiness and in shame, and he enjoyed as always the slow turning of the season, the opening out of the Bohane year.

‘Se’eny-noine… atey… atey-wan…’

Oh, this one had a wrist on her! And as he succumbed – once more! – to his weakness, and as he – oh snivelling, oh putrid Dom! – relished the…

‘Atey-foe… atey-fi…”

…measure of pain the tushie extracted from his sinful bones, he started to think about supper, too – would I ate a lump o’ halibut? – and the way the whirring of the strange bird had the sound of the hunchback Grimes’s old Leica – didn’t it? – and also his proposed editorial comment…

‘Noin’ey… noin’ey-wan…’

…for the following evening’s Vindicator. A succession ruck was brewing in the Fancy – no question. This marked a difficult moment in the city.

The boy Stanners.

The galoot Burke.

The slanty-eye Ching.

They were all making shapes. They were all manoeuvring. Even in victory, Logan Hartnett had shown a weakness – he’d gone beyond the Fancy’s colours for back-up. Such a plain display of weakness was in Bohane oftentimes fatal. But Dom’s editorial, he decided, would plead for patience, for the Long Fella to be left in place for a time yet, for the status quo…

‘Noin’ey-sic… noin’ey-se’en…’

…to be maintained. After all, you could say what you liked about the Long Fella, but at least he had class.

‘Noin’ey-noine…’

And there was the fact that he made a very fine picture. A tall man, thin, a clothes horse. Strange, but he’d be missed. Dom braced himself for the last stroke of the brush, for which she always retained a special venom, and indeed she raised the arm high for it, and a whack of pleasure with great fury was landed.

‘A hundert even, Mr Gleeson!’

Moaned loudly, the Dom – shamed, yet again! – and his fat-man moan carried through the window, and floated downwards, softly, until a lick of the hardwind caught it and threw it above the rooftops of Smoketown, sent it across the blackwaters of the Bohane, and it faded as it carried, and it reduced, and it was succeeded on the Trace front by the sound of the meat wagons as they crossed the cobbles, the iron rut and clanking of them.

As they sketched the wagons roll out from the arcade market and head for the slaughterhouse – the night shift already was in swing – Ol’ Boy Mannion and the Gant Broderick leaned back against the stained brickwork of an old warehouse, and they spoke crankily against the din.

‘You been soundin’ kinda bitter this weather, G. If you don’t mind me sayin’, like?’

‘It’s bred into me, Benni.’

‘Ah, stop, will you? The fuckin’ martyrdom!’

Gant sourly shrugged.

‘It’s this place, you know?’

Ol’ Boy’s read: the way the Gant trained his stare on the black surge of the river was a worry. Mesmerised, he seemed. And not in a good way. Ol’ Boy trickled some beads of soft talk from his velvet bag.

‘A place ain’t gonna be the cause of all your woes ever, Gant. Y’hearin’ me sense now? And a place ain’t gonna solve your woes neither. You been puttin’ too much faith in–’

‘A dream is what you’re sayin’.’

‘We all dream of being young again, Gant! Dancin’ in the pale moonlight and claspin’ a pawful of fresh fuckin’ arse! Fact it ain’t gonna happen makes it all the sweeter! But don’t let yourself drown in that old stuff, boy. Get over it! I mean to say, Gant, you were with the bint three fuckin’ weeks! But you’ve come sluggin’ down the Boreen with a fixed notion on you and the mad little eyes all lit up inside your head–’

‘She jus’ didn’t want to know, Ol’ Boy.’

‘Ah, Gant, what did you expect?’

‘But that ain’t the cruellest of it.’

‘Oh?’

‘The cruellest of it? I didn’t even want her.’

‘Coz it’s been twenty-five fuckin’ years! Ya plum fuckin’ ape! A lot happens, Gant. A life happens. A girl don’t stay girl in Bohane for long. An’ then, you know, we gotta make… arrangements with ourselves? Else how can we put up with the things we done, choices we made? Likes a fuckin’ Bohane… ah look… this is a hard town… it’s a place… an’ okay, okay, I know. Here I am sayin’ just the fuckin’ same…’

The Gant slyly winked for Ol’ Boy then.

‘You think I came back o’ me own volition?’

Silence played a long beat as Ol’ Boy weighed this.

‘Sayin’ what to me, G?’

‘You think I’d ha’ been given the pass?’

A chill of recognition for Ol’ Boy.

‘What you’re sayin’…’

The Gant shoved off from the warehouse and aimed his toots for the Trace-deep night.

‘Sayin’ I got work to do, Benni.’

Looked back with an evil smile.

‘But don’t worry, Mr Mannion, sir – things to occupy me… I’m workin’ a plan, y’sketch?’

Ol’ Boy smiled at the very notion of a plan – as if the Mad-Town of Bohane was amenable to design.

‘You wanna make me laugh, G?’ he said. ‘Then just go ahead an’ tell me those plans o’ yours.’

Watched him go:

A big unit, with the splay-footed gaatch of an old slugger, and he turning down a Trace wynd… the carry, the burliness, the country shoulders rolling. But even a creature as canny and brave as the Gant could not make Bohane concede to his wishes, and Ol’ Boy felt a darkness imminent.

Sadness was the breeze that came off the river and warmed his face.

And then, despite himself, he fingerclicked a snare beat, for the clanking of the meat wagons worked nicely as percussion to the shimmer of a calypso rhythm that travelled from De Valera Street.

A pack of wannabe Fancy boys – fourteenish, hormonal, all bumfluff ’taches and suicide eyes, with the wantaway croak of bravado in their breaking voices – traced the hip-sway of the rhythm outside the calypso joint, drew circles in the air with the winkled tips of their patent booties, passed along a coochie – eight of ’em drawin’ on it – and they kept watch – so shyly – on the Café Aliados down the way.

You might see Wolfie Stanners pass through those doors, or Fucker Burke with his prize Alsatian bitch, Angelina, or – swoon of swoons – the killer-gal Ching from the Ho Pee.

These were the legend names on the lips of the young ones in Bohane as the spring of ’54 came through.

And the spirit of the humid night at a particular moment caught the boys, and the badness (the taint) was passed down, and they broke into an old tune that worked off a doo-wop chorus – it fit nicely up top of the calypso beat – and they sang so hoarsely, so sweetly, and their young faces were menacingly tranquil.

Yes and the song carried to the old dears hanging out washing on the rooftops of the Trace, and they paused a mo’, and smiled sadly, and sang croakily the words also: ‘It’s a bomp it’s a stomp it’s a doo-wop dit-eee… it’s comin’ from the boys down in Bohane cit-eee…’

And a whisper of change travelled on the April air with the song, it went deeper and on and into the Trace, and the ancient wynds came alive with the season.

Dogs inched their snouts out of tenement hallways and onto the warming stoops.

Upon the stoical civic trees in the Trace squares a strange and smoke-streaked blossom appeared, its flowers a journey from sea grey to soot black, and the blossom was held to work as a charm against our many evils.

Beyond the city, the sea eased after the viciousness of springtide and softly, now, it drew on its cables – its rhythms a soft throb beneath the skin of the Bohane people.

Night in the Back Trace shimmered with dark glamour.

The Gant passed through the Trace, and he turned down a particular wynd, and he entered there a grog pit. He met in its shadows, by prior arrangement, the galoot Burke, who was hunched traitorously over a bottle of Wrassler stout.

Sidled in beside.

Eyed the kid.

‘Been havin’ a little think about what I said to you, boy?’

Fucker nodded.

‘We can go a long way together,’ the Gant said, ‘if you got things to tell me?’

It came at a great surge then the Judas testimony of Fucker Burke:

‘Long Fella, he come ’roun’ the dockside evenins, late on, I mean you be talkin’ pas’ the twelve bells at least when he come creepin’ the wharf, an’ that’s when you’d catch him cuttin’ Trace-deep, an’ he walk alone, sketch? An’ it’s like maybe he head for Tommie’s – you know ’bout the supper room, sir? I can make a map for ya – or if mood take him maybe he haul his bones ’cross the footbridge, stop in at the Ho Pee, that’s the Ching place, he might suck on a dream-pipe, coz Long Fella a martyr to the dream since the wall-eye missus took a scoot on him, and the Chings is known for the top dream, like, but o’ course you mus’ know ’bout the Ching gal, Jenni, the slant bint that been workin’ her own game, if you askin’ me? An’ she got my boy Wolfie in a love muddle ’n’ all, and that ain’t like Wolfie, no sir it jus’ fuckin’ ain’t, like, and the way I been seein’ it, Gant, what’s goin’ down with the Back Trace Fancy, or I mean say what’s on the soon-come with the Fancy, if it all plays out the way I’m expectin’…’

Mercy, the Gant thought, there’s no shutting the kid up.

26 The Burden

Logan Hartnett on an April morning walked the stony rut of his one-track mind:

Where does she sleep now?

The shadow of his disease was beneath every inch of his skin. Since she left him, in the winter, he had realised the true extent of it. She had left him when he tested her, and maybe he had designed it just so. Maybe he wanted his sourest fictions to come to life.

Where does she sleep?

He crossed the S’town footbridge. He walked the Bohane front. He was dream-sick in the morning, and his nausea fed on the squalling of the gulls, the slaughterhouse roar, the clanking of the meat wagons. He turned onto De Valera Street. Blur of the street life, the faces indistinct and greenish. He aimed for the Bohane Arms Hotel. The street people still dropped their eyes as he passed but a questioning note combined now with the fear.

His jealousy had weakened him.

A night of fever-dreams and half-sleep was behind him at his berth above the Ho Pee Ching Oh-Kay Koffee Shoppe. He didn’t climb the Beauvista bluff any more – he couldn’t face those lonesome walls. He just sent Jenni now and then to fetch some fresh clothes.

Logan wore:

A pale green suit, slim-cut, of thin spring cotton, a pair of burnt-orange arsekickers with a pronounced, bulbous toe, a ruffle-fronted silver shirt open at the neck, a purple neckscarf, a pallor of magnificently wasted elegance, and his hair this season swept back from the forehead and worn just slightly longer, so that it trailed past the ruff of his jacket. Also, a three-day stubble.

Was the Long Fella’s opinion that, if anything, his suffering made him even more gauntly beautiful. He had all the handsome poignancy of heartbreak.

He hoicked a mouthful of green phlegm at the gutter – the pipe was affecting his lungs. XXX-rated images came at him randomly as he walked – they showed Macu in hot-mouthed abandon with a phantom sequence of young lovers – and he relished these pictures as does the tip of the tongue the gumboil. A burning sensation in his throat, a hollowness.

Where does she sleep?

Through the warm caffeine waft and dust-moted quiet of the shaded hotel foyer he passed, and he was watched by an Authority tout from an old suede lobby couch. They were waiting on his fall. Tout’s excited eyes jerked up from behind a conspicuously raised Vindicator, and Logan blew a thin-lipped kiss for the gombeen fool.

He ascended – hear now the dreary clank and groaning of the age-old elevator as it works its frayed ropes; Logan heard the workings slowed down, drawn out, dreamily – and he came along the corridor and knocked his particular knock on the suite’s numberless door.

‘Get in t’me, ya long fuckin’ ape!’

Girly was propped on a dozen pillows in the honey-mooners’ bed. She was apparently well fuelled: she had the weird crimson colour about the cheeks. When she was sixty, he had worried that the colour spelt her imminent death. She had lately turned ninety. Logan took the bedside seat, and she watched him, and she held the glance, and she puffed her cheeks then in exasperation.

‘Night I’m after puttin’ down?’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t put a fuckin’ dog through it.’

‘A bad one, Girl?’

She let her eyes roll tragically in her head.

‘I’m between sleep an’ wakin’ all the night – y’know that kind o’ way? The dreams is gone halfways fuckin’ alive on me. Four o’clock this mornin’, I was convinced Yul Brynner was on top o’ the bedspread tryin’ to claw in at me and have his way. In the days of the hair.’

Logan, impatient – he had heard it all so many times – rose again, and he went to the velvet drapes, and he shifted their weight a fraction, and he moved a little on the balls of his feet, shifted from one to the other, and he looked out to the rooftops of the Trace wynds.

Was she Trace-deep somewhere? The city was big enough, but only just, to get lost in.

‘Things ain’t looking so tasty away yonder,’ he said.

‘An’ the nex’ thing your father appears. In all his glory. Fuckin’ Patcho! Las’ toss-bucket I wanna set me peepers on. An’ he’s above on that wall there on top o’ the light switch playin’ his little trumpet? About the size of a stood-up rat. Dreams! An’ me eyes wide fuckin’ open, like?’

‘I’m being squeezed,’ Logan said. ‘I got the sand-pikes getting ambitious in Smoketown. Same time, I got the Norries working up a sour fucking brood for vengeance.’

‘Mind you, he could make that trumpet talk, yer aul’ fella.’

‘Never met him,’ Logan said. ‘And of course every swivel-eyed runt in the Fancy with a shkelp to his name and a nobber the size of a peanut is weighing his chances.’

‘Well, you’re hittin’ fifty, aintcha?’ she said. ‘Then I had the sensation, this was about half five, I’d say? Sensation that I was bein’ sucked into a bog-hole. Me! Ousside on fuckin’ Nothin’! Being swallied by a mound o’ wet turf! Me what ain’t left Bohane city since back in the lost-time. Sweet Baba! How many yella moons gone since I saw the Nothin’ plain, Log? Not since one o’ the times you went missin’ out there, I’d say.’

A lonesome kid, he would walk out the Boreen – he ghosted about the rez, the massif villages, the backlanes, the haunted cottages, their roofs all caved in. See him in a field of reeds – at ten years old – his pale face above the burning gold of the reeds caught in drenching sun, and the reeds ride slowly the sway of the wind.

‘I haven’t been able to find Macu,’ he said. ‘There’s no word from her even.’

‘She ain’t slidin’ a pole in S’town, no?’

Out on Nothin’, as a kid, he would listen to the old dudes at the rez fires, and in the shebeens, and he would watch the way they held themselves, and the way they carried themselves. That stuff didn’t get taught in the schoolhouse.

‘If I don’t find her, I don’t know that I can go on.’

Girly made a fist and bit down weakly on its bunched knuckles. For patience.

‘Comin’ along about seven bells?’ she said. ‘Gettin’ light out, the gulls havin’ a yap, the early El clankin’ a beat? And I came up outta mesel’ again.’

Logan winced at the bleach of morning sky over the Trace.

‘I don’t know what to do, Girly.’

‘Lay off the fuckin’ pipe for a start,’ she said. ‘Anyways I came outta mesel’, and I floated out that same window you’re stood at with a gommie fuckin’ puss on ya. Saw the rooftops. Saw the mornin’ get itsel’ all worked up. Saw the rush in S’town, saw the suits on Endeavour at their little cups o’ joe, their pinkies stuck out, and I saw the Rises women build their fires in the tower circles. An’ I saw a way to work it all yet, y’check me?’

He turned to her, and smiled. Girly in her floating visions so often spied a new course. He came back to the bedside chair, and folded his bones into it, and he crossed his legs neatly. He wasn’t the world’s most masculine man. He leaned forward. Weighed his chin in a cupped palm.

‘Tell me, you old witch,’ he said.

She reached across and slapped his knee, and the move had a playful note, and playfully he slapped her hand away. But the slap and parry – they both knew – had a deeper meaning in freight: it was for the consolation of touch.

27 The Ancient & Historical Bohane Film Society

It is not often that I get a good-looking woman in here. It is more usually men who are my patrons. The women can keep their feelings tamped a little more. But the men get to a certain age and it becomes too much for them. They must reach again for the whimsical days of their youth, and for the city as it was back then.

Mine is a small premises of the Back Trace. You will discover it down a dead-end wynd, with an unprosperous old draper to one side, his hands shaky now on the measuring tape, and a rotisserie the other, the charred smell of chicken skin wafting from ten in the morning. It is a glass-fronted shop, but the glass is a smoked grey, opaque, and on the door there is just a small title on a piece of white card, with the lettering of the Ancient & Historical picked out in gold ink. I do not need to advertise.

This particular April morning, the bell announced a customer, and I came forth, sighing, from behind the curtain, expecting the usual sad-eyed gent, the usual droop-of-mouth, the usual plea.

It was natural, then, that my breath should catch a little at the fine lady who appeared on the bell’s tingle. She was tall, Iberian, green-eyed, one of the eyes turned slightly in – but the quirk an emphasis, somehow, to her attractiveness – and her lips parted just a fraction, and I inclined my head patiently for her words, but she hesitated.

She wore:

A light, silken, springtime wrap of pistachio green turned just so across her shoulder, a scoop-neck top, French-striped, a pair of three-quarter-length buckskin hiphuggers that accentuated her tallness, and wooden clogs with a wedge-rise that lengthened the ankle beautifully.

Upon the right ankle, I noted at a glance – I don’t miss much – there was a small tattoo, in Indian ink, of a Bohane dirk.

‘How does it work?’ she said.

I merely nodded, and smiled, and I raised the hatch on the counter, and with a gesture (priestly, I fancy) bid her enter.

She came through, and I parted the curtains, and I led her into the back room. It is a silvery, mica tone of darkness that persists there, and the room contains just the drawn-down screen, and an easy chair, and to one side a hatch that leads to my projection room.

‘When?’ I asked. ‘Roughly.’

She sat in the easy chair, and removed the wrap, and the bareskin of her shoulders had a glisten in the silver of the gloom, and she crossed her legs, and she named the era that she longed for.

Anxiously, then:

‘Can you do this?’

I nodded.

‘The footage goes into the Thirties,’ I said.

Discreetly, I withdrew to the projection room. I flicked through the cans of reels. I had transferred onto these reels what had been rescued from the street cameras. I called to her, softly, through the hatch:

‘De Valera Street? The Trace?’

‘Dev,’ she said. ‘Maybe there by the Aliados?’

‘Where it gives onto the Trace,’ I whispered, soulfully.

I picked a favourite compendium; a really lovely reel. It shows the snakebend roll of Dev Street, deep in the bustle and glare of the lost-time, at night, with the darting of the traffic as it rolled then – ah, the white-tyred slouch-backs, the fat Chaparelles, the S’town cruisers – and the crowds milling outside the bars, the stags and the hens, and it was a different world, so glaringly lit.

Of course, it is a silent footage always in the back room’s replay, and so I cued up an old 78 on the turntable I keep by the projector, and I played it as accompaniment. It was a slow-moving calypso burner that gave a lovely sadness, I felt, to the scenes it worked with.

Discreetly, through the hatch, I watched the lady as she watched the screen. She was mesmerised.

And though I have watched this reel thousands of times myself, I was as always drawn into it, I was put under a spell by the roll and carry of the Dev Street habituees. If all had changed in Bohane, the people had not, and would never:

That certain hip-swing.

That especially haughty turn-of-snout.

That belligerence.

28 The View from Fifty

An old Bohane proverb:

The beginning of wisdom is first you get you a roof.

Of course, the Gant knew that a rez-born long-tooth can escape his wandering nature about as easily as outrun the length of his shadow, but he was willing to try. Big Nothin’ had over the winter months become too much, too lonesome. He had felt like he was losing the sense of himself again – the old darknesses were seeping once more through the cracks of his life. And so, quietly, he had taken a room in the Back Trace. It was a place to breathe in the city and see what feeling he could take from it. The room was the attic of a tenement; it was maybe fifteen feet along by ten feet wide, with a sloped ceiling. It contained a single bed and a sink and damp-warped old floorboards that creaked and sang as he paced them. The bed was an insomniac’s heroically rumpled nest, the sink for pissing in. A small window set in the roof gave a view over the Trace: the up-and-down of it, the rise-and-fall, the skewed calligraphy of the Bohane skyline, the dead pylons and dead cables, the half-dead birds with their spooked eyes, the strange dark blossom that trailed over the rickety zees of the fire escapes and the deep green voids of the wynds. The sense of being high above things gave to the Gant a feeling of breathlessness and abyss.

He had put the hard word on Jenni – Jenni had not turned.

He had put the hard word on Wolfie – Wolfie had not turned.

He had put the hard word on Fucker – Fucker said, what’s in it for me, like?

The Gant shook his head at the kid’s foolishness. He hoped that he would leave the place now. Take to the Boreen and head due east and never look back over the shoulder, not even once.

That’s the mistake, boy: the looking back.

The day persisted, outside; the world persisted. The gulls belligerently called – mmwwaaoork! – and morning sounds rose up from the Trace. The bustle and pep of the arcade market. The old dears as they milled and chirruped. The veg prices hollered, the stony-voiced haggling. The old dudes out on their stoops with wind-up transistors tuned to Bohane Free Radio – where it was always yesteryear. The old love songs, the slow calypso rhythms that triggered the sense memory of dance steps that were still wired into his bones, and that he tried out, now and then, laughing, on the warped floorboards.

The snatches of song opened him up. The streets below were for the Gant a memory hoard. Every kiss, every reefing – it all came back to him. The detail was close up, hallucinatory, blood-warm.

It was just three weeks they had been together. The night she left him he remembered in a visceral way. He could summon it at will. The colours of the lonely street that night; the nausea of defeat. He knew where she was and who she was with. He experienced again every moment of it. He saw it so clearly. The facts were plain:

She was eighteen, and Logan was cooler.

There in the attic room the Gant came back to the moment and he seethed again with youth’s intensity. The shallow fucking bitch. In the glare of spring, he was seeing things plain. He feared now he had come back to extract a revenge from Macu as much as from Logan. He had wanted to make her fall for him again, to make her sway, to make her world come loose. But on the longest night of the winter, on Beauvista, he saw that time had already from Macu taken its revenge.

He glared out over the rooftops.

Shallow fuckin’ town.

He watched now the young ones in the April morning as they roamed down there. You could pick out the blowins so easily: the arrivistes, the hard-eyed adventurers. They would by long tradition head for the city of Bohane in springtime – they brought their shkelps, their herb-pipes, their dreams. See the way they tried out a walk – getting the roll of the hips just right, and the loose carry of the shoulders, and the glide of the feet; you didn’t want to arrive Trace-deep on the stride of a cow-hand. He smiled but knew in his own way he was still trying out a walk. Still trying to fit into his own skin. At fifty! Oh hapless G, oh neurotic Broderick, oh the comical shame of this never growing old.

And still the lost-time music rose to him, remorselessly.

The Fancy boys had packed away their Crombies and wore sleeveless tanktops in bright pastel colours. The tattoo shops worked overtime – he could hear the zit-zing-zinging of their needles. And see the girls down there – the young stuff – in their wedge heels, their vinyl zip-ups, their spray-on catsuits; all trying to work it like Jenni Ching. Yes a shallow fucking town.

Now, critically, something shifted, a new pool of clarity opened, and the Gant as he watched the girls go by saw his revenge tack to a richer course.

He saw a slow way to hurt Logan.

29 The Intrigue in Smoketown

Jenni Ching whipped from the tit pocket a fresh cigarillo, clipped it and lit it, and she winced against the glare as a dose of filthy sunlight filled the Smoketown wharf. She looked yonder to the Trace across the Bohane’s charismatic waters. She leaned back against the old cinnamon warehouse – it was lately got up as a grindbar – and she closed her eyes in long-suffering. Bit her pretty lip. Then she opened her eyes again, and blinked hard, and she turned to the sand-pikey bossman who was slouched beside her. This was an arranged meet, and his dreadlock brethren from the near distance warily kept guard. They fingered nervously their dirk sheaths. They kept careful sconce on the slanty bint. She scraped at the scummy cobblestones with a six-inch spike heel. She sucked from the lung-blackener what patience its tars might give. She said:

‘Tubby, I wan’ ya to hear this now. I don’ care what fuckin’ savagery ye practise out on them fuckin’ dunes, y’check me? Ye can chant yere fuckin’ pikey curses and ye can skin yere fuckin’ hares for the stewpot and ye can build yere little sixbar fuckin’ gates for the Big Nothin’ fermoiri an’ ye can hang yere fuckin’ scalps and paint yere bollix blue an’ have a read o’ the fuckin’ stars. Ye can train yere lurchers and hose out their minty fuckin’ cages. Fine! Coz I don’ have to fuckin’ well look at ye while ye’re at it. But lissen up, fatboy, and lissen good, coz yer in the fuckin’ city now, right? I said look around you, Tubs! Them’s buildings, them’s streets, them’s human fuckin’ peoples! I’m tryin’ to keep things a bit fuckin’ civilise aroun’ this joint, ya hear what I’m sayin’ t’ya? So let’s keep it all fit for biz, lardy-boy! Heed?’

The killer-gal glare she trained on him would put the scrotum hairs standing on a lesser gent but Prince Tubby just smiled serenely. He reached for the herb-bag that hung from his neck – fashioned, in the pikey way, from the skin of a goat’s testicle sac – and he took out a bud, and he crumbled it expertly into the bowl of his pipe, and he pulled the drawstring on the herb-bag to secure his supply, and he lit the bud with his Zippo – the lighter of choice, always, for the Bohane smoker, no other providing sufficient protection against the hardwind’s abrupt gusts – and he drew on the pipe. He glazed beautifully. He eyed Jenni Ching. He said:

‘I-and-I’s de Far-Eye, Jennie-sweet, y’check-back? I needs oney state dis one and true belief – de woman must not serve de man when she seein’ de moon.’

Way it was in S’town, this weather, Prince Tubby had his sand-pikey goons doing the rounds of every grogpit and shothouse and dream salon, and they were questioning the women who worked in these places about their menstrual cycles. Sand-pikeys held the belief that women were unclean when in flow.

‘It’s us way, Jen-chick, y’get me?’

Jenni Ching, defender of womankind, spat her cigarillo.

‘Y’ain’t nothin’ but a pikey fuckin’ throwback!’ she cried. ‘People’s got their fuckin’ privacy, check?’

Tubby displayed his palms.

‘Said it’s de sand-pike way, Jen,’ he said. ‘An’ what’s our way is de Smoketown way dese times, heed?’

She let a scowl devour him.

‘Oh we’ll see about that,’ she said. ‘Now g’on down the dune end an’ watch yer fuckin’ back, y’check me?’

She pushed off from the grindbar’s wall. Prince Tubby watched her go, and he glazed again on his draw, and he nodded slowly, appreciatively, at the clip of her spike heels, and the way she carried that high ’n’ tight slanty-chick can.

Jenni felt his glare and turned to it over her shoulder.

‘An’ don’ even fuckin’ dream it,’ she said.

Jenni wore:

Black nylon ski pants, a sheer black nylon top, a silver dirk belt, and a pork-pie crownsitter perched jauntily up top.

She aimed for the Ho Pee Ching Oh-Kay Koffee Shoppe. April sweltered, and there was a glisten of sweat on her forehead. The burn of his eyes on her rear end had planted a notion. In springtime, the city was opened to the elements like a wound and the sky bled its rude light on her as she walked. Manic birds hovered and cawed. The Ching gal plotted.

This seeing-the-moon caper was the least of it. That the sand-pikeys were opening credit lines for repeat customers was an even greater taunt. Not to mention their specials on brew and bushweed and particular methods of fornication. They were also, in Jenni Ching’s opinion, spreading all manner of superstition among the hoors, the dream sellers and the trick-pony boys. Then there was their general demeanour. They were fire-eating in the sideways and blowing perpetually on their horrible didgeridoos. Jenni reached the Ho Pee. She stormed through the swing doors of the place. She found Wolfie Stanners settled in a booth over a plate of gingered cuttlefish. He raised a moony look to her.

‘Stow the love-eyes,’ she said. ‘I gots enough on me fuckin’ noodle, check?’

‘S’up with ya, girl-a-mine?’

He laid down his chopsticks and pushed back his plate. Attentive, husbandly, lost to first love – it gets even the Wolfies among us – he reached for a cup and poured her a fill of jasmine tea from the bamboo-handled pot.

‘Sand-pikeys!’ she cried. ‘They ain’t got no fuckin’ class, Wolf!’

He sighed. He thought for a moment, and then he winked slyly. He placed on the table a small, scarred hand, the palm down, its fingers splayed, and with his other hand he drew a four-inch dirk from the inside pocket of his Crombie. He jabbed the dirk first slowly into the wooden tabletop between his splayed fingers, and then more quickly, and then at a furious pace until the knife became a blur. Knife tricks rarely failed to distract his girl from her troubles, but today she could raise only a wan smile. She laid a hand on his to still the blur. She spoke in a low voice.

‘Pikeys sendin’ Smoketown straight to fuckin’ hell, Wolf. An’ I’m suppose to stand around and look at the fuckheads while they’s at it?’

Jenni lit another cigarillo. She bopped smoke rings from her pouted lips. Wolfie became aroused beneath his gaberdine peg pants. He replaced with trembling hand the dirk in his inside pocket.

‘I think I know what you’re goin’ to say to me next,’ he said.

‘Where’s the change we wan’ to see comin’?’ she said.

‘That’s what I knew you’d say to me,’ he said.

She had been laying it on since the year-turn. Every day and every night. Jenni would lean in a little closer to him, and she would bring her lips to his ear, and she’d lick the lobe briefly, just once, with a single dart of her tongue, and then whisper to him:

‘The change, Wolf? Where’s the change we been wantin’?’

Now in the Ho Pee afternoon she saw there was too much loyalty in the boy. He was not ready to move. And Jenni made a decision. The sand-pikes without a leader would be headless and fatally degenerate. The Fancy without her boy-clutch, Wolfie, would be still riper for the taking. One or the other, Tubby or Wolfie, would not survive a collision. If her luck was in, both might fall.

‘What I wanted to talk t’ya about, Wolf…’

She turned her glance from him, and assumed a tragic aspect, as though too wounded for speech.

‘What’s it, girl?’

‘This Tubby, y’know? He ain’t got no fuckin’ respec’, like.’

‘How’d ya mean, Jen?’

She jerked a thumb over her shoulder to indicate the S’town beyond.

‘Not five minute since?’ she said. ‘He oney goes and drops the hand on me, don’t he?’

Homicidal rage at once travelled the short length of Wolfie Stanners. It forced him to a stand. His freckle-puss crimsoned. He gripped the booth’s tables with his tiny, scarred fingers.

‘He did… fuckin’… what?’

30 The Beak of the Law

See a busted-nose smirk from a Bohane polis. See his great slabs of ham-bone arms crossed on the station’s high counter and inked with tats showing the symbols of the polis fraternities:

Was a bottle of Phoenix ale on the counter and he raised it and sucked deep on it and burped a cloud of kebab breath (mutton flavour) and he placed the bottle down again, wiped his mouth and smacked his greasy lips and a wee lizardy tongue emerged and tickled the air; see the searching tip of it.

Logan Hartnett was stood up on the other side of the counter and he winced, delicately – his gut was already unsure from the dream-pipe – as the cloud of polis breath meatily lingered.

‘You’ve got the fucking rot in you, friend,’ he said. ‘Not long for the beat would be my call.’

Polis smirked even more slyly – the arrogant chops of the fucker creased to a fold there beneath the bleached glare of the stationhouse strip lights.

The station walls were painted an institutional green and old bloodstains were dark inkblobs against the green. Polis reached beneath the desk and brought up a bottle of state whiskey; he showed it. Logan shook his head – he wouldn’t shame his throat with that tangerine-coloured pisswater. The polis fathead nodded politely – no offence taken – blew another damp, liverish breath, and lightly, he said:

‘Mr Hartnett, why’s it you’re here again, sir?’

Was the thinnest of smiles Logan allowed the fat polis.

‘I think you might have someone I need to see.’

Long Fella was working the latest plan from Girly’s play-book. Goal: the immediate pacification of the Norrie kind. The Norries in humid springtime were restless, wounded and brooding, and a play was urgently needed.

‘We picked her up,’ the polis confirmed, ‘but that’s a dangerous game on the Rises, y’understand? When tis a Cusack kid we’s talkin’?’

Logan slid distastefully a fold of notes to the polis. The fathead smirked, and took the fold, and raised it to his porcine snout and sniffed it, and then stood from his desk.

‘’Course it was Mr Reid the master butcher did the job itself,’ he said. ‘Said to say t’ya tis a favour answered.’

‘Whatever that might mean,’ Logan said.

Polis picked a ring of keys from the wall with his tab-stained fingers. Swung the ring as he trailed down a dank, urine-smelling corridor. Strip lights overhead buzzed, failed, briefly came to life again, and failed again. Corridor sang with old spirits. Logan as he followed the fat polis closed his eyes – he was tapering yet from a Ho Pee dream – and heard the screeches of age-dead Fenians seep from the walls. No shortage of ghosts in this place. There were occult frequencies in the Back Trace heard only by dogs and the ’bino.

He came with the polis on the cell rooms down back of the station.

Polis slid a key from the ring into a cell’s lock and the lock clacked, unclicked, and the polis flicked a switch outside and as they entered a dim bulb found a young girl on a straw pallet. Polis winked for Logan and went and crouched down by the girl. Polis took her wrists and turned her palms to show Logan the fresh marks that had been skilfully cut in:

A pair of clover-shaped stigmata.

Logan nodded, painfully – his mother was such a sick old fuck; the skewed logic of her derangement was beyond even him – and the polis rose and left the cell, sniggering.

The girl looked up at him. She was hard-eyed as any Norrie bint but she could not keep the scare from her voice. She said:

‘I’ll do what you wan’ me to, ’bino…’

Logan got down on his haunches to meet the girl with a level and reassuring gaze.

‘I know that, sweet,’ he said. ‘And you’ll do fine work for me.’

She cried despite herself.

‘Hush, lovie,’ he said. ‘Now I hope that fat polis fuck ain’t been taking no undue liberties… Was it painful for you, child? With the butcher?’

She looked at her palms – shrugged. No more than twelve, and a pure Norrie hard-face, but awed, all the same, by his proximity. In Bohane, you make your name and let your name do the work.

‘We need to get this trick working, Little Cuse,’ he said. ‘You’ve been missing for three days and three nights, check?’

‘S’right.’

‘You were drawn to Big Nothin’,’ he said. ‘You felt a strange drag from the bog plain. Something brought you to the High Boreen – it was a particular star in the sky, a bright, bright star. And then, upon a high knoll… do you know what a knoll is, Little Cuse?’

‘Nah.’

‘Class of a wee hill,’ Logan sighed. ‘And out there, in the night, on this knoll you came across a puck goat – you know what a puck goat is…’

He turned his own palm and showed on the inside of his wrist the finely inked tat of a puck’s horns – symbol of the Trace Fancy.

‘I know that awrigh’, ’bino.’

‘And the goat spoke to you, Little Cuse. But as he spoke to you, it was the words of the Sweet Baba you heard, y’check me?’

The eyes of Little Cuse widened.

‘Baba took the form of a puck, ’bino?’

Logan inclined his head respectfully.

‘He most certainly did, girl-child. And now His Perpetual Sweetness has left the mark on you. Do you understand?’

Mouth open, eyes popping, she displayed the faked stigmata – Logan liked this kid.

‘And listen good now,’ he said, ‘because the Sweet Baba has passed to you a special message for your people.’

‘What’s it, ’bino?’

He leaned in, and he whispered to her a moment, and the message was understood. He let it be known, too, what would happen should she fail to comply precisely with his instructions. He stood then and he led the girl from the cell. The fat polis leaned back against a corridor wall and smiled like the fondest of uncles. Gestured to a back door down the far end of the corridor. Logan brought the girl there and he kissed his bunched fingertips and he placed the kiss lightly, so very lightly, on her cheek. He trailed then his fingertips along the filigree down of her arm’s fine hair, and this touch was electric, his eyes closed; he felt youth, he felt vitality, he felt the sense-memory of Macu, when young. His eyes watered, his gut lurched. His throat screamed for the dream-pipe. He turned the girl loose to the dusky streets. He had made a decent connection, he felt. He came back down the corridor. Fat polis grinned, and he said:

‘Baba due an appearance, Mr H?’

‘Sweet Jay on the comeback trail,’ Logan said.

He went again to the evening and he walked the Back Trace shadows. Girly’s shrewd reckon: gullibility on the Northside Rises was to be fostered and worked with. Long Fella admired her canniness as he walked the darkening Trace.

The Back Trace was the brain of the city, and he felt the wynds’ pulsing: an arterial throb.

Pitbull behind a chain fence lurched for him.

He hissed at the dog.

It barked a yard of stars.

31 All Our Yesterdays

Big Dom Gleeson, the corpulent news hound, and Balthazar Mary Grimes, his hunchback lensman, were on official Vindicator business in the Bohane Trace. It was dusk of the same hot April evening – with a mango wash to the sky above the rooftops – and Dom was breathing hard and fretfully as he followed his snapper down a dizzying tangle of wynds and turns.

‘Go handy on me, Balt, please! I am not a young gentleman!’

‘You’re thirty-eight, Mr Gleeson.’

Through the dank squares they went, and they were deep in the foul and ancient maze, and they came at length to a certain tenement building in the shadows of the arcade market. Dom took from the fob pocket of his mustard-yellow waistcoat a piece of paper on which the address was scrawled, and he showed it to Balthazar, and the hunchback turned from address to tenement, and back again, and yet again for the triple-check, and he nodded.

‘S’the place awrigh’, Mr Gleeson.’

Dom gathered himself with a couple of deep breaths and he pushed in the heavy door of the tenement.

‘Sufferin’ Baba above on the cross,’ he said. ‘The heart would be skaw-ways in you, Balt?’

Balthazar shrugged, and grimly lugged his medieval Leica through the door, passed by his boss, and set first to the stairs.

‘He knows we’re comin’,’ he said. ‘Let’s move.’

They climbed a flight of the old stone stairs, and then climbed again, winding at each turn, and climbing again, and the building was deadly silent, with an eerieness palpable, and Big Dom was frankly unmanned, his bottom lip quivered babyishly, but he was set all the same to his task. There was prize copy for the taking.

‘All Our Yesterdays’ was by far the most popular and prestigious column of the Bohane Vindicator. It was penned by Dominick himself, in a limpid and melancholy prose, and its stock was reminiscence and anecdotes of the Bohane lost-time. It appeared – twenty-seven inches of nine-point type over three column drops – in the Thursday evening edition, and the queue for it formed early outside the paper’s office and snaked far down the streets of the New Town. This week’s column, Dom was certain, would attract a record readership.

‘What I’m wonderin’, Mr Gleeson,’ Balt panted against the climb, ‘is why’s he agreein’ to the interview jus’ now?’

Dom rested a moment on the turn of a stair. Smiled; sweated.

‘Ol’ Boy’s worked his powers of persuasion,’ he said. ‘What we’re tryin’ to do, Balt, is distract the town from atein’ itself alive.’

‘But what’s in it for the man hissel’?’

Dom shrugged as he began to climb again.

‘It lets a certain party know he’s back in town, don’t it? An’ that he ain’t afraid to show his jaws.’

The Gant Broderick appeared then on the landing at the top of the last flight of stairs. He had to bend a little against the angle of the low ceiling. He looked down without expression to the climbing pair, and he gestured lazily to indicate the door to the garret space behind, and he turned and went through.

‘Mercy,’ Dom whispered as he climbed the last haul of steps, ‘but he’s still a powerful cut of a man, Balt?’

Balthazar nodded grimly.

‘Big unit,’ he agreed.

They entered the spartan garret. Gant sat on the bed and he eyed them calmly and he massaged with one massive hand the other. Dom removed his pork-pie hat in greeting.

‘Mr Gant…’

‘Gant is fine,’ said the Gant. ‘Jus’ Gant, okay?’

‘Yes, sir. Gant… sir.’

The Gant eyed the hunchback as he went about propping his Leica and mounting its flash. The Gant looked to the window set in the garret’s slanting roof, and said:

‘We got a nice aul’ tawny light comin’ through yet. Probably don’ need that flash, y’heed?’

Balthazar looked to the evening light, and he nodded.

‘Might be nice alrigh’, Gant…’

‘It’ll be lovely,’ the Gant said. ‘And don’t be shy. You can come up good and close.’

The Gant turned expertly then his square jaw to the tawniness of the light as it poured through, with dust motes rising atmospherically about him, and the hunchback crouched in close, and he framed the old scoundrel so that he loomed, poetically, and the G allowed to form on his features a poignant, dark, unknowable glaze.

Click-and-whirr of the old Leica’s motor:

Prime shot… peach… one for the portfolio… manly gravitas in haunted black-and-white.

Dom Gleeson meantime sat on the garret’s one hardback chair and nervously he licked the tip of his pencil and turned to a fresh page of his spiral-bound notebook. With a nervous croak to his tone, he began:

‘Mr Gant… Gant… It’s been a… been a stretch o’ lonesome moons since ya last hauled yer bones aroun’ the city o’ Bohane, sir. So what I’m wonderin’ is–’

‘Twenty-five years such a long time?’ the Gant said.

‘Well, we ain’t talkin’ yesterday nor today, sir.’

‘No,’ the Gant handsomely smiled. ‘That we ain’t.’

They spoke then at length of the Bohane lost-time. They talked of the great feeling for it that had drawn the Gant to the creation once more. They talked of those who had passed, and of how their spirits persisted yet and carried always on the air of the city (or lingered, maybe, away yonder on the bog plain). Dom Gleeson felt that the Gant spoke lyrically, yes, but guardedly, and at length he sucked up the courage to launch an especially toothsome question.

‘I s’pose what a lot o’ people would be wonderin’, Gant, is… ah… Well, sir, about these pas’ twenty-five year, like… Where the hell you been, G?’

The Gant as the last of the evening light began to fail smiled wryly at the fat newsman, and at his hunchback accomplice who sat cross-legged now on the floor, and he said:

‘Over.’

Jerked a rueful thumb easterly.

‘Crossed the water.’

The Gant confided that he had roamed for many a desperate year England’s cheerless marshes. He worked the dark cities of the north for any who had the price of a shkelping. Got older. Got sadder. Got fatter. He came out of that rough trade with the sure scars of it. Worked the riverboats for a while…

‘Like many a Bohane émigré before ya, sir,’ Gleeson said.

… worked the Tyne, the Mersey, and the Clyde. He spent a cruel infinity staring into the smoke-coloured wind that blows always across those dead rivers. He saw the Wigan riots of ’36, he saw the ascendance of Borthwick in Macclesfield, and he saw the bloody last days of D’Alton’s Humberside Fancy.

Balt Grimes whistled low.

‘Now that was some fuckin’ massacre!’

He spent long nights, he said, walking the backstreets of strange cities. Skunk hours in the demon mist. The Gant walked every street of every city and they were never his streets and when the streets are not your own they are not for dreaming. He admitted that he had seen too much. He allowed that he had found solace, for a time, in the arms of the Sweet B.

‘Happen a lot of lads when they go over,’ said Big Dom, kindly.

‘I renounced the blade,’ said the Gant, and he smiled against the dark that seeped then into the attic room.

He told that he had spoken the Word in the West Midlands for a time. Found a congregation of swayers, swooners, shriekers. Spoke out against the violence of life. Spoke out against the lust. Spoke out against the lies. Oh yes, there he was, stood up on a beer crate, in tragic Wolverhampton, with tears in his eyes, and he hollering the Baba-love.

‘A man with a good brogue,’ said Big Dom, ‘would get a start easy enough at the preachin’ over.’

‘Didn’t last at that trade neither,’ the Gant chuckled.

‘Oh?’

‘Bothered a pawful o’ young tush an’ got ran out o’ Brum.’

The roofops of the Trace beyond were ghostly as they settled into night’s shade; bitter, the memories that settled in the Gant. A taste of Macu, in her youth, had left him with an insatiable taste for girls of that age. This was not the least of her crimes against him.

‘I was on life’s great turning wheel,’ the Gant said, and Big Dom scribbled furiously.

‘The longer the past receded, the clearer it became in me mind’s eye,’ the Gant said.

Philosopher we got on our hands, the hunchback Grimes reckoned.

‘I was drawn back to the lost-time,’ the Gant said.

‘And did you find it a dangerous place to linger?’ Big Dom showed his skill.

‘Yeah,’ said the Gant. ‘It’s too sweet back there.’

Big D thinking: headline –

Beneath them, the wynds simmered with life in the oily night, and the savour of a sadness came up; the men quietened, and listened.

‘Been changes around here sure enough,’ Dom sighed.

‘It’s all change.’ Balt, too, fell woebegone.

‘Not all change is for the worse,’ the Gant smiled.

‘Oh?’

‘Mean to say,’ the Gant said, ‘I see these young girls workin’ it now in the Trace an’ I got to tell ya?’

‘Yes?’ Dom was interested.

‘Them girls the future in Bohane.’

A strange glint in the Gant’s eye.

‘You reckon, Mr Broderick?’

‘An’ on the soon-come too, y’check me? Change be good for Bohane sometimes.’

Dom and his lensman quietly regarded each other. Dom said:

‘But I’m wonderin’, Gant…’

‘Yeah?’

‘Why’s it you’ve come back… now?’

But the Gant just smiled, and he began to speak again, softly, of the lost-time, of the old butchers and bakers who had premises once on De Valera Street, of all the shebeens and herb-shacks, of the life of the street as was. Emotional Dom Gleeson lapped it up. Big Dom remembered the dogs and cats of Dev Street. Dom would be happy to talk about the old Bohane until the clock came down the stairs, and there on the hardback chair he rocked to and fro, rhythmically, as he made notes from the Gant’s powerful recall, and the hunchback Grimes, too, was set adrift on memory bliss – ah youth; he’d been a puckish spirit in his youth, Balt Grimes; the hump hadn’t kept him from his share of tushies (your Bohane tush anyways tending to incline towards a bit of strange) – and the three men cut across each other, and prompted each other, and riffed; when a reminiscence got going in the Back Trace, nights, it worked like a freestyle morphine jazz.

32 Wolfie Got a Brood On

Wolfie Stanners prowled an S’town beat.

Wolfie Stanners worked a vengeance plot.

Wolfie Stanners was amped to wade in the Far-Eye’s blood.

Drop the hand on a fiend’s clutch – in this town – and you’d best be ready to meet your manufacturer. But there was a kink in the plot – the sand-pikes kept their premises, and their leader, well guarded, and Wolfie would need help to get a clear shot at the dreadlock bossman in his dune-end fastness.

He aimed his bovver boots for Ed ‘The Gypo’ Lenihan’s hoorshop.

Afternoon, yes, in an April swelter, and this was as quiet a time as you’d get in Smoketown, but there was a scatter of degenerates around all the same – skin-poppers, tush-maulers, dream-chasers. Wolfie-boy as he made his parade of the cobbled streets breathed deep to take in their savour: Smoketown smelt of chemical burn, untreated sewerage and sweet chilli noodles. There were faint back-notes, also: pig, brew, oxen, coriander. The atmosphere generally was riverine and as Wolfie walked the wharf there was no small amount of poetry mingled with violent intention. Was the prospect of violence that stirred the poetics in Wolfie.

He approached a two-storey, narrow-shouldered, old town house, an S’town leaner, and he knocked on its door – it was quickly answered by the aged hoor-ma’am of the place.

‘Mr Stanners,’ she said.

The ‘mister’! To be addressed as ‘mister’ made him as aroused almost as Jenni Ching’s cigar-flavoured kiss.

‘Gypo about?’ he asked.

He did not make eye contact with the hoor-ma’am. Truth be told, Wolfie had a secret fancy for these handsome older ladies, and he was shy of them.

‘Mr Lenihan’s above with the girls,’ she said.

Edmund ‘The Gypo’ Lenihan had blown a gasket since the sand-pikeys arrived into Smoketown. Pikey himself, and proud of it, he was dismayed at the intrusion of the dune breed. Ed Lenihan was the oldest hoormaster in the creation. He had been trading in tush since the lost-time. Nobody knew S’town like the Gypo Lenihan. The Gypo knew the backways of the red-light streets, and the nuance of the double-jointed lingo, and the whereabouts of the secret passageways. He waited, smiling, as Wolfie made it to the top of the hoorshop stairs. The upper floor was given over entirely to screened slots with rush matting for beds. The girls present at this hour were using the afternoon lull to wax themselves. They squealed mightily as they waxed. The Gypo called to them:

‘Arra jus’ fuckin’ do it, would ye!’

He sighed.

‘I’d have a pack o’ gorillas to me name if I didn’t keep on top a things, Wolf.’

‘Runnin’ brassers ain’t no easy life, Gyp.’

They fist-bumped. They set to a smoke by the sash window overlooking the S’town run. The Gypo’s filmy eyes widened as the boy explained – in tooth ’n’ claw detail – his intentions with regard to Prince T the Far-Eye.

Ed Lenihan whistled low:

‘It’s a radical plan of action, Wolf. I’d say that for it. And while I’d be very much in favour, technically speaking, it ain’t gonna be a cinch to pull off, y’heed? He’s well guarded down there.’

‘You know the dune end, Mr L.’

‘I surely do but–’

‘You can get me close in, Gypy-pal. If we wait on the mo’, like?’

‘Could be a longish wait, kid.’

They talked it through.

‘Certainly they’re lowerin’ the tone, Wolf. Which is some fuckin’ trick in S’town. And decent Baba-fearin’ premises the likes a me own can’t compete. All I’m offerin’ is clean, fresh-shaven girl. Which ain’t good enough for Bohane no more. No, sir! Now we all wants to be ate alive by slave-girl lurchers! But still an’ all, Wolfie, you don’t want to go off on no loolah mission just on account of a sand-pikey–’

‘He dropped the hand on me clutch, Mr Lenihan.’

‘As you’ve been sayin’, boy.’

‘Jenni’s me all-time doll, y’sketch? I wanna start a fam’ly with the bint an’ all, like.’

Silently, the Gypo Lenihan tried to imagine the likely spawn of a Ching–Stanners union, and he shuddered.

‘That’s very lovely, Wolf,’ he said.

A strange moment, then: the boy-villain seemed to come over a little bashful. Stared at his bovver boots a pensive moment.

‘Actually, Mr Lenihan, that’s somethin’ else I wanted to ask your advice on, sir.’

‘Oh, Wolf?’

‘Mr L… You’ve run a share o’ Chinkee chicks in yer day, check?’

‘Certainly,’ said Ed Lenihan. ‘Our oriental is a powerful cut of a hoor.’

‘And what I wanted to ask ya, Gyp…’

A blush! Lenihan could hardly believe it – there was a blush on the demon’s cheek!

‘What’s it, Wolf?’

‘Your Chinkees,’ said Wolfie, ‘they’d a gone down from time to time with the, ah… with the carryin’ o’ childer, like?’

‘Of course. Any young lady can get herself caught. The precautions aren’t what they were, Wolf.’

‘Okay,’ said Wolfie, and he breathed deep, ‘so what I wanted to ask ya was…’

He pointed to his fine-cropped red hair.

‘D’ya ever come across a Chinkee gettin’ bred off one a these?’

Ah, thought Ed Lenihan, the boy has a brood on. He was young for that. But they know, sometimes, in Bohane, that they may not be long for the road.

‘D’ya mean, Wolf…’

‘Off a ginger, Gyp. D’ya ever come across a Chinkee bint gettin’ bred off a ginge?’

Lenihan smiled.

‘What is it exactly you’re asking me, Wolf?’

Shyness glowed all over Wolfie Stanners. Fear, also.

‘Could the chil’ not come out skaw-ways, Mr L?’

Sympathy for the little demon, Ed Lenihan found he had, and he placed a fatherly arm around Wolf’s shoulders. Felt a tremor in the boy at this touch, a recoil.

‘When yer lookin’ to start a family, Wolf, you just got to pack away your fears and throw it all to the fates, boy.’

‘But what y’reckon, Gyp? Would it come out ginger or would it come out Chinkee, like?’

As he led Wolfie back towards the stairs, with his hoors yelping as they waxed themselves smooth, he leaned in, and said:

‘Wolf Stanners? When any child o’ yours appears ’pon the face of the earth, I don’t think there’s gonna be e’er a doubt about it.’

‘Thanks very much, Mr Lenihan.’

By the doorway then, the Gypo consented to be the boy’s guide to the dune-end backways, and to get him close in on Prince T. Wolfie’s blackbird stare told him he had no choice.

And so it was that a lightness in the step was evident as Wolfie walked out again through the Smoketown streets. He didn’t notice the sand-pikey watches who eyed him from the doorways and the rooftops there, and who knew already of his intention.

33 Jenni Ching, Superstar

This was the year all the girls in the Back Trace started to dress like Jenni Ching. They wore white vinyl zip-ups tighter than sin, or black nylon catsuits as though fitted with a spray-can, or gym shorts worn a handful of sizes too small over sheer silver stockings, and always there would be a set of custom steelcaps fitted to the high-steppers: groin-kicker boots for bad girls. They all started chewing on stogies, too. And in the Dev Street salons de coiffure, if you wanted a blunt-cut fringe while keeping some length and body in back, you asked for a Jenni.

Next thing?

The girls started to run in a wilding pack in the Trace. There were all-girl roisters in the midnite yards. You were a girl in Bohane, in the springtime of ’54, you had a shkelp in your inside pocket, and a stogie on the chomp, and you walked the wynds with that Ching-patented S’town glide. And you did not kowtow to no fuckwad boy-chil’.

Witness:

The girls skanked in the wee hours to dub-plate cuts blasted from the Trace rooftops.

The girls walked the snakebend roll of De Valera Street and they kept their mangle-dogs on chain leads.

The girls took from the malevolent surge of the river its defining taint, and fed on it.

Their talk travelled and lit on the usual nodes of adolescence – rage, lust, shame – but always this season, in the city of Bohane, it circled back to the one subject, again and again and again:

‘I seen her crossin’ the S’town footbridge an’ she got like a pair o’ wedge heels workin’ off a pair o’ pedal pushers in like a lemony, like a tangy shade, an’ she got like…’

‘Heard ya can get in the Ho Pee awrigh’ but not pas’ the caff bit, like. Y’gots to get the connects right afore they lets ya to the upstairs rooms, like, to the dream salons an’ Jenni’d be up there mos’…’

‘Is said she gots the Long Fella stashed up there an’ all, y’sketch?’

‘Gots him hangin’ on a string, like.’

‘Gots the Gant on another.’

‘An’ Wolfie besides…’

‘Is said she gots a dozen, maybe thirteen, scalp to the shkelp belt, check, an’ that’s oney wots known o’, like.’

‘She’s a size six tops, like…’

‘She gots the bes’ cheekbones in the whole o’ Bohane, like…’

‘An’ tell you this, heed?’

‘S’that, gurl?’

‘She’s a fuckin’ mega dancer.’

34 The Succession

Ol’ Boy Mannion braved the top-floor suite at the Bohane Arms Hotel. He found himself at the foot of the honey-mooners’ bed. He stood up straight. He held his hat in his hands. He had brass enough – but just about – to keep his eyes locked on Girly’s. She raised a tumbler of neat John Jameson to her lips.

‘S’pose you know he’s gone fuckin’ loolah?’ she said.

‘Ma’am?’

‘As a bucket o’ cats,’ she said.

Ol’ Boy shaped his mouth sadly, and shrugged – it was not for him to pass remark on the Long Fella’s mental status.

‘I blame the thunderin’ rip he married,’ she said. ‘Gave him delusions of grandeur, didn’t she? Trace not good enough, oh no. He’s got to be up on Beauvista like some fuckin’ Protestant, ain’t he? Swingin’ off the rafters o’ that fuckin’ manse. And I wouldn’t mind…’

She paused, sipped.

‘Wouldn’t mind but Immacu-fuckin’-lata is the spawn o’ fuckin’ dock trash off a fuckin’ tuna boat, ain’t she? And the hoor of a mother she had was from the wrong end o’ the Trace an’ all, wasn’t she? With the smell of a thousand fuckin’ campfires off her.’

Ol’ Boy sighed.

‘Marriage is a hard old game at the best o’ times,’ he said.

She eyed him in silence a moment. Saw that he held yet her gaze. Tickled her upper lip with the tip of her tongue.

‘Course now she’s gone off in a hump and he’s lying about on a Chinkee settle horsin’ the dream-smoke into hissel’ like there ain’t no t’moro and the Back Trace Fancy is runnin’ around like a fuckin’ rat with its hole on fire.’

Ol’ Boy soothed:

‘The Hartnett family still has the runnins o’ Bohane, missus.’

‘Ah yeah,’ she said. ‘For now anyways.’

She laughed then, miserably, and wheezed, and paled. She said:

‘I see you got the Gant all over the paper?’

‘I’m trying to distract the town, Girly.’

‘From what, Mannion?’

‘From badness.’

‘Best of luck with that,’ she said. ‘How’s our tram comin’ along?’

‘To be honest, it looks like the NB is long fingerin’.’

‘Well, that ain’t no surprise, is it? When we been actin’ like a pack o’ savages! An’ you know what’s comin’ next, don’t ya? A royal scrap out back o’ the Aliados as all the little Fancy fuckheads try and put their call on the handle. Oh I seen it more than once in my time, Ol’ Boy. They’ll be pullin’ hair and gougin’ eyes all the way to the far side o’ fuckin’ Crimbo. An’ while they’s at it? Some wee bollicks off the Rises or some sand-pikey dickwipe outta the Smoketown dune end is going to march through the town and take care o’ business. Or how’s about some gang o’ wildin’ gals from me own fuckin’ Bohane Trace?’

‘I have been meanin’ to ask about Jenni…’

‘Y’know the latest, Ol’ Boy? She’s encouragin’ them girls!’

‘This is all we need.’

‘You’re tellin’ me! It’s as much as I can do to keep a halter on that friggin’ Chinkee bint.’

‘I understand ye’re close.’

Girly smiled, so fondly, despite her hard words; Ol’ Boy could read the love. He worried where it might send the town.

‘Way I am with Jenni,’ she said, ‘dunno whether to put in the adoption papers or take her slant eyes out with a six-inch dirk.’

‘She’s impressive,’ Ol’ Boy admitted.

Girly hacked out a chuckle.

‘S’the way she hold me gaze an’ all, y’know? Ne’er let it flit at all, like. Stone cold!’

‘I hold your gaze, Girly.’

‘Yeah, but you’re all act.’

It was the lines that came with a smile that stung, and Ol’ Boy duly winced. That he recovered as quickly was the mark of his skill. Gauche, he knew, to ask, but he could not resist.

‘So who’d you reckon on, Girly? If Logan’s done his time…’

Girly creased again with laughter – as though she’d answer! The laughter was torture but slowly she recovered, and she poured another whiskey, and she lit another tab, and she said:

‘Tell ya this, Ol’ Boy. S’been keepin’ me awake nights. But I’ll keep ya posted on me call, y’check?’

35 On Riverside Boulevard

Take a left out of the Yella Hall station – as so few of us ever do – and you will come quickly to a long, curving run of pathway known as Riverside Boulevard. It follows the Bohane river along the last of the city’s bluffs until the river opens out to a vague, estuarine nowhere. Haggard seabirds hover above the empty walkway, and the air is ghostly. It is a place few of us go to because of its strangeness. You will encounter there an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. Invariably, that odd swoop in the spirit occurs, and you are flung back to an inner lost-time that you can never quite place. It is a frightening sensation – one senses an odd lurch within, a movement that can feel almost nauseous. Thoughts come loose. Souls hang on the air. Warps occur. And Logan Hartnett, dream-sick in April, sold to the pipe and heartache, had begun almost daily to haunt the place.

He walked it; he fed on the weird. He chased with clouded eyes the flight of the demon skuas. Hummed softly. And he made – with pale lips moving – his dark reckonings.

Now a particular afternoon of April presented, and the ’bino was again on Riverside, but today he was not alone. He sat on a bollard, as the hot river wind blew, and he gazed up, most pleasantly, at a very nervous Fucker Burke.

Fucker hung his limbs from the chainlink fence that edged the Bohane river hereabouts and he slapped at imagined bugs on his neck.

Logan regarded him with a loving smile.

‘You’ll notice a certain feeling, Fucker?’

‘This place, Mr H, it’s like…’

‘Is it sendin’ you, Fuck?’

Fucker had in his voice a child’s quiver:

‘Ain’t feelin’ so hot now, Mr H, if I’m bein’ honest with ya.’

Fucker threw a hopeful glance towards the Bohane downtown – its rooftops loomed royally in the near distance – but the Long Fella shook his head sadly; there was no going back.

‘You’d pass along this way much yourself, Fucker?’

Spoke to the boy in the sweetest hush, as though whispering a lullaby, and Fucker felt a chill dampness at the base of his spine.

‘No, Mr Hartnett.’

Logan nodded, firmly, as if that was the best tactic the boy could choose.

‘So tell me about Wolfie and Jenni,’ he said.

The jaw lolloped on the galoot boy Burke.

‘What would I know, H?’

‘Are they rock-steady, Fuck?’

‘W-wolfie is.’

‘Got the hook in his gut, he has? I thought as much. And Jenni?’

Fucker made an attempt at indifference.

‘Dunno, Mr H. I mean she givin’ him the whiff of it, like, but…’

Fucker’s words trailed off. His eyes rolled some. Logan let a silence hover, for just a moment, and he watched carefully to see where it would send the boy. Fucker Burke had a routinely Gothical West of Ireland childhood under his belt, and it was there again, his own desperate lost-time, beneath the glaze of his green eyes. He was sent to it. The horrors he had seen, and those by his own hand begotten. There was no way to escape the tingling of his past; it was ever-present, like tiny fires that burned beneath the skin.

‘Come back to me now, Fucker.’

‘You think the Baba’ll wan’ me for a finish, H?’

‘Shush, boy, and come back to me – the Baba loves you.’

Fucker Burke swung down from the chainlink and shuffled his feet uselessly. Shifted his weight from the left to the right and back again. Logan raised a hand to still him.

‘What do you think of the situation with Wolfie, Fuck?’

‘Situation how, Mr Hartnett?’

Logan smiled delightedly, as if a notion had just occurred.

‘Would you say we should do away with him?’

There were dried flecks of spit at the corners of the ’bino’s mouth – they cracked as he spoke.

‘But H, Wolf is like the Fancy’s bes’–’

‘Are ye close still?’

There was a wrinkle to the ’bino’s collar, and his kecks were unpressed.

‘Close ain’t got nothin’ to do with it. Jus’ ain’t seein’ what Wolfie’s done.’

‘Loyalty is a tremendous asset, Fucker Burke.’

‘I don’t like it out here, Mr H.’

There was a greenish wash to the ’bino’s deadhouse pallor – the colour of a mould.

‘Oh I know that Riverside feeling, boy. Things rise up in you, don’t they?’

Swallowed hard, Fucker, a crab-apple of terror descending and then rising again the length of his throat.

‘We strollin’ back, H?’

‘And what about Jenni – should we do away with Jenni Ching, Fucker?’

‘I wasn’t brought up to mess with no Chinkees, Mr Hartnett.’

‘You’d be as wise not to, child, under normal circumstances. But what I’m hearing about Jenni Ching?’

He shook his head slowly.

‘She’s got plans, ain’t she, Fuck?’

‘Don’t know about that, H.’

‘Do you not? I see.’

Logan stood from the bollard and approached the boy and he placed his hand on the back of the boy’s head and pulled him close. He leaned in, brow to brow. He said:

‘Let me tell you a few things, Fucker. All this?’

A wee swoop with the palm was shaped – a gesture to take in the world as was.

‘All this is going to pass away from you so quickly now, hear me? You’ve been in your glory, Fucker Burke. A set of grapes on you and a few bob put away and I dare say certain females who’ve been deranged enough to put themselves at your disposal. You’ve had your lovely dog, Angelina. And I understand what you did, Fucker. I do. It felt as if your life would never start but in fact it’s been racing past you all the while. But this ain’t for play no more. What are you, eighteen?’

The certainty of what was to come apparent, Fucker’s tone was flat now with resignation.

‘I’m seventeen, Mr H.’

‘Oh that’s a beautiful age to be, Fuck. You think you’re going to live forever… Well, I’m here to tell you that you ain’t.’

Logan made an O with his lips, and he blew a slow, steady whooshing, like the wind through the hollows of a wood, and it was aimed directly at the boy’s face.

The breath lingered as a foul breeze – Fucker smelt the pipe-burn and the Ho Pee on it, and the rot of an old outlaw that he would never be.

Logan said:

‘Look at me, Fucker. Look at me, sweetness. I can’t say that I ain’t had the luck. I’ve been twenty-five years with the Fancy to my name. I’ve been reefed six times and I’m still sucking at the poison air. An accident, do you think?’

He smiled, and the pale blue of his eyes showed the colours of sky and water, refracted.

‘Did you think I was fit to move on from things, Fucker? That I’d go and play a few hands of rummy and dribble my moscato and get fat?’

The boy’s lips greyed in expectation. He felt again the breath of the Long Fella on his face, the cold hand on his throat.

‘Why did you do it, Fucker?’

A mark of the city that it was not fear that flushed the boy’s face now but shame.

‘Mr H, I never meant nothin’ by–’

‘Gave the Gant everything you had, Fucker.’

‘H, please.’

‘I know what you told him, Fucker.’

‘Don’t have to do this, H, please…’

A strange glow came to Fucker: what little of love and intimacy he had known in his life surfaced for a last time and gave succour for the journey ahead.

‘I know because the Gant told me, Fucker.’

The air on Riverside was washed by the Atlantic gusts that came over the estuary and it carried all the dread of its ghosts. The Bohane all the while ferried a drag of gravel and stones and the drag swirled drunkenly deep down – it had the sound of chains being swung.

Logan slid the dirk slowly and let it sit heavily in the boy’s gut. Then he worked it from side to side, a neat and easy movement, and he held the boy, gently, as his head slumped forward, and he whispered to him.

He stepped back, and with a deft wrench removed the dirk, and the vitals flowed as he kept the boy propped still.

He felt an oddness then, Logan, it was a kind of… lightness, and he near enough succumbed to it.

He took a breath down, hard, and held it.

Let his brow lean in to the dying boy’s again and rested it there a moment and asked forgiveness.

He stepped back and the last of Fucker Burke was left to slump where it would – like a useless hand puppet – and he stepped nimbly aside. With a stick from the ground and the blood that had spilt he daubed on the path by the body the word ‘Judas’ – it was written in his big, nervous, childish hand.

He scaled the chainlink fence then and descended a set of thick stone steps cut into the river wall.

Daintily with forefinger and thumb he raised the ankle cuff of his trouser leg and dipped a Croat boot into the water to wash it clean.

Saw a red vibrancy mingle with the tarry brown of bog water and so quickly disappear in the great mass of the river.

36 Macu’s Dilemma

Then it was night-time in the Trace.

She walked the wynds, and she came at length to a small, deserted square, and she sat for a while on the wrought-iron bench. Dead lovers’ names were scratched into the wooden seat back. The growth all about was so fervent, so cloying, so diseased. Fescue grass gone to the black rot, and the cat’s tail that climbed mangily the tenement walls, and the sickly perfume of the clematis that persisted, even yet, and trailed from the rooftops; petals on a grave. Late spring was a rude throbbing as the Bohane creation ascended to the peak of its year, and ever closer to its precipice.

The pulsing of April brought a soreness to her glands.

Sometimes, in the good times, they didn’t even have to speak to know what the other was feeling. A child would have put fear in the town, sure enough, and would have given to the marriage a motive force. But a child never came, and the space was filled by his jealousy.

He would come back to the Beauvista manse in the small, dim hours, and he would say:

Were you out at all?

Did you see anyone?

What have you been doing?

What did you do today?

Where did you go today?

Who did you see today, Macu?

Who did you see today?

Were you out at all?

Where did you go?

Who did you see today, Macu?

It had made a child of him. He began to lock her in. She said that she would leave him if he turned those locks on her again, and he stopped for a while, and it drove him all the madder to stop, and he could no longer sleep at night.

He sat in the dark and watched over her.

Were you below in the town, Macu?

Who did you see today, girl?

He had the Fancy boys follow her. She would walk the New Town, at the hour of the evening paseo, and catch a sconce of Fucker Burke and Angelina acting blithe in a sideway – and Fucker wasn’t born to blithe – or Wolfie Stanners at a discreet distance behind, with his thyroidal eyes bulging.

She said:

This is not a life for me, Logan.

He dreamed up new ways of testing her. There was nothing he could do any more that would surprise her. Only the persistence of her love for him was a surprise to her.

Was she strong enough now to stay lost to him?

37 Speak a Dream

Midnight.

The Ho Pee Ching Oh-Kay Koffee Shoppe.

An upstairs salon.

And Logan Hartnett lay on the settle, and he placed softly the tips of his fingers on the back of Jenni Ching’s hand. The girl put the flame to the pipe for him. He drew deeply. She placed a dampened cloth on his brow.

Jenni said:

‘So you’d been doin’ her yet, y’had? Till she went an’ legged it on ya, like?’

‘With a long marriage, Jenni, one needs to make the effort.’

‘Fair dues t’ya, H. Guts o’ thirty year on, like, an’ still fleadhin’ the same aul’ bint… Not get samey?’

Logan squinted through the smoke and tightened his lips. Nobody else but Girly could talk to him like this. Hot night rippled in the salon’s dense air. A slow moment passed – it had somehow a memorial taste. He sighed for Fucker. He slipped a little deeper into his dream, and he felt the seep of the Bohane lost-time, and he softened.

‘Know how the Fancy got started, Jenni?’

Eyes-to-heaven from the Chinkee gal.

‘Here he goes,’ she said. ‘D’ya remember when and d’ya remember how – stall a halt, ’bino, till I goes an’ fetches me knittin’.’

‘Was on account of the gee-gees, going way back,’ he said. ‘When we had the horses running.’

She gave in to him.

‘Fancy was the lads what did the follyin’ o’ the hoss business, check?’

‘The only money in this town was horse money, Jenni. And that’s a fact, girl. In the Back Trace, out on the stoops? The boys would trade horse-talk all day. If we knew anything at all out here, we knew our horses. We had the best horses, the best track, best jockeys…’

‘Spooky, jockeys,’ said Jenni, ‘when you see ’em in the ol’ pix, like? Weird eyes.’

‘Fancy opened out from the horse business. Went into herb and dream and hoors.’

Jenni lit the flame again.

‘Always nice to hear about the olden days, H.’

He drew deep and held it a count against the nausea and then slowly exhaled. He ascended. She leaned in and kissed him. The kiss was slow and deep and not quickly to be recovered from.

‘The fuck is that comin’ from, Jenni?’

‘Jus’ a taste for ya, ’bino.’

‘Don’t ever do that again.’

‘Won’t so.’

‘You’d have the melt out on a fucking statue,’ he said. ‘How’ll the Gant get over you at all?’

A freeze ran through her sure enough.

‘Fuck y’sayin’ to me?’

‘He’ll get lonesome, girl. These long old spring evenings…’

Gathered herself quickly.

‘Am I lookin’ impressed, H?’

‘Oh I don’t blame you, girl. You need to keep the eye out on all sides in a small town. I’d almost have been disappointed if you hadn’t.’

Jenni’s breath came evenly. She looked hard at him. She said:

‘I didn’t give him nothin’ about the Fancy’s dealings.’

‘I know that, Jenni. He told me.’

For a moment she had no comeback, and looked scared. But she never let go the eye-lock. She said:

‘I ain’t no gommie lackeen, Logan.’

‘No, Jenni,’ he said. ‘If there’s one thing you ain’t it’s no gommie lackeen.’

38 Baba-love

Let it be said that the Hartnett magic still worked a drag across the city. Their reach yet was sinuous. It crabbed out across the rooftops, and each action they played in due course begot its reaction, and sure enough, before the month of April was done, there was an outbreak of Sweet Baba Jay mania on the Northside Rises.

In defeat, of course, they very often turned up there to religion. An SBJ revival needed no more than a little prompting. And within days of the faked stigmata appearing on the palms of the Cusack girl, there were holler-meetings being staged in the shebeen basements of the flatblocks. The meetings were writhing with fainters, swooners, hot-foot shriekers. There was a quare amount of roaring going on. One-time Norrie aggravators packed away the tyre-chains and the dirk-belts and the sweat was dripping off them as they swayed in the shebeens and roared tearful thanks to His Indescribable Sweetness. Great tremblings took hold of these boys and their knees buckled and oftentimes gave way altogether as Word was delivered from Messengers Unseen. Next thing, miracle gave onto miracle – as is the way – and there were reports that an SBJ icon atop the fountain outside Croppy Boy Heights had shed tears of blood. Sure the same wee stigmatic girl-chil’ of the Cusacks saw it with her own fervent eyes. And thus a congregation was on its knees around the icon, night and day, praying for more signs. The Norries were hugging each other and whispering blessings on the bleak avenues. It became a season of midnight visitations. In no time at all, the Sweet Baba Jay was showing up all over. Was said His Likeness had smiled down from the gable wall of an avenue grogpit. Was said His Likeness had appeared in the shape of a cloud over Louis MacNiece Towers. Was said His Likeness had formed, and shimmered, though briefly, in a puddle by the top of the 98 Steps. Norries were waking in the night and sitting bolt upright in their cots and crying out the Word of Love. Norrie sound systems had packed away their dub plates and their Trojan 45s and were playing for the shebeen gatherings a sacramental music of harpsong and hymnal chant. Women of the Northside were sporting a more modest cleavage line. They walked primly their Patterns of Devotion in the sweltering spring afternoons. They muttered half-remembered novenas as they paraded. Many found that their hair had taken on a fresh shine. There was great colour in everybody’s cheeks. Nobody went downtown much. They prayed for and pitied the doomed sinners down there. They forgave their recent losses. They forgave their fallen and their dead…

See the dream-fed twist of the ’bino’s crooked smile.

… and tiny yellow flags were cut out from great screeds of fabric choo-chooed in specifically for the purpose, and the flags were initialled ‘SBJ’ in an ornate hand soon mastered by lads henceforth to be known as flag-stylers, and the flags were tied onto lengths of rope at measured intervals and were strung from rooftop to rooftop of the flatblocks – dozens of them, then hundreds, then the sky was filled – and the effect was at once festive and pious.

Swearing all but disappeared. Beards were trimmed. Fornication – previously on the Northside an activity as common as sucking air and to be found, at all angles of the clock, on stairwells, in turf-bunkers, behind avenue wind-shelters, generally everywhere, and in broad daylight – was confined now to marital beds, and was soberly practised, missionary-style, and swiftly, wordlessly concluded. It became the habit of the Norrie gentleman to bite the pillow at the end-moment so as not to embarrass the air with expressions of bodily joy.

The yellow flags spun, the yellow flags turned, the yellow flags shimmered.

And though they were tied securely enough to withstand even the harshest assaults of Big Nothin’ hardwind, the flags were found when the wind got up to create a many-voiced cacophony – they rattled and groaned and sang in the wind, and if one listened to the flags for long enough, the effect was mesmeric, haunting, and it became the common understanding this spring that messages were being transmitted by Sweet Baba Jay through the medium of the flags.

Oh indeed.

And there were those on the Northside this particular spring we’re talking about who became acknowledged experts in flag-listening. These were generally older gents who had known a share of life. You would see them crouched on their haunches, there on the avenues, in the hot April afternoons, beneath the flags, listening, and betimes approaching each other to compare notes. Quiet, interested faces on them. Faces full of… Significance. And it became the practice that by teatime each day the listeners (as they were quickly named) would convene in the shebeen basement of a Croppy Boy Heights flatblock and come to agreement about the gist of the day’s message. The message would then be written in block letters a foot tall upon banners that were carried along the Northside avenues, for a period of one hour precisely, by local sluts. The sluts were given the punishment of banner-bearing for their attempted seductions of decent Baba-devoted young Norrie men. At holler-meetings nightly, it was argued that banner-bearing was hardly punishment enough for these Baba-denying harlot bitches, and that their private parts should by force be rendered useless, with the aid of knitting needles and hot knives, but this was controversial. An editorial comment in the Vindicator, while acknowledging and declaring joy at what it called ‘The Miracle of the Flags’ – a souvenir supplement was issued – had quietly suggested that genital mutilation might, at this stage, be a step too far, even by the standards of the Bohane uptown. And so for now the sluts merely marched with their heavy banners, and they wept under the strain of the weight, and upon the banners were such flag-whispered messages from the Sweet Baba Jay as:

Sweet Baba Jay was telling them which side was buttered, sure enough, and the people of the Northside were eternally grateful for His Direction. Each night, devout Norrie families would line the avenues for the slut parade. They would kneel and babble in tongues and they gave lusty voice to their Baba-love as the banners were carried past. If the sluts were treated cruelly and occasionally bottled as they stumbled along, it was felt that it was no more than those painted-up little trollops deserved. Certain sluts could take it no more, however, and they banded together, and they fled the Northside Rises under cover of dark.

Yes and so it was this springtime we are talking about that near-feral Norrie sluts hit the downtown, and began to roam the Back Trace, and they took up with the bands of wilding girls who had lately come together there in devotion to the killer-bint Ching, and their shrieks of solidarity were heard across the city – the Northside and the Trace united – and most surely these would mark the summer to come.

I could hear them from the back room of the Ancient & Historical Bohane Film Society as I sat late and drank exquisite Portuguese wine direct from the neck of the bottle, and you may trust, as ever, that I made careful notes.

Beyond the shrieks, the river carried as ever from Big Nothin’ its black throbbing.

Oh and heed this, my fiends, my tushies, my gullible children:

There was nothing good coming in off that river.

39 Logan’s Letter to Macu

Macu, I miss you so badly. Especially at night. I lie there half raving without you beside me. It’s as though you’ve been years gone from me. I can’t even hear your voice. I close my eyes and I picture you but I can’t hear you. I tell you, Macu, I feel barely human without you. I can’t be on Beauvista without you. I think about you all the time. I am ashamed of how jealous I’ve been. All I can say is my love for you has maddened me. I see that clearly now I’m alone. I asked the Gant to do his worst. I asked him to test you and I knew he would try. Please don’t blame him, Macu. The game was mine, he saw it only as a chance to win you back. And I pity the man now his lonely years. I would not have had the strength for them. I’m sorry, Macu. And it’s hideous, I know, but my game has proven your faithfulness. I want you back so badly. Remember once when we were young and we walked in the Trace one night and we found a bottle of moscato, perfectly chilled, just waiting for us on a stoop? With nobody anywhere to be seen. Just you and me in the Back Trace, Macu, and we drank the wine. I ask you to forgive me. I know you will need time. You’ll need these months to understand the pain that was in me. But I know your love is there still. If you want me to pull back from the Fancy, I will. Mr Mannion will deliver this – where are you, Macu? I think maybe I sense you in the Trace. I expect no letter in return. All I ask is that you think about the years ahead. Apart we are nothing. If you choose to come back to me and give me life, Macu, you will meet me at the Café Aliados. At 12 midnight. On the night of August Fair.

40 Late Nite at Tommie’s

It was the eve of May at the Supper Room, and Tommie the Keep had the ceiling fans set to their highest ratchet, and they whirred noirishly against the night, and were stoical, somehow, like the old uncles of the place, all raspy and emphysemic. Tommie’s eyes scanned the room and read a hard scare in each and every one of the Bohane merchants, the Bohane faces. Everybody’s nerves were shot, and the sweet, seductive voice of the girl singer as it wafted from the corner stage seemed only to amplify the tension.

‘As looooong as dat yella moon riiiise…’

She sang a slow, blue-beat calypso – old love songs of the lost-time – and she clicked her fingers lazily with the melody born into her, the tips of her fingers opening and coming to rest between beats against the gleaming length of her silver, sequinned dress. She had for percussion a lone, sleepy-eyed drummer seated at an ancient snare, his hair quiffed high with pomade. She sang in the proper, carefully modulated Bohane calypso style – we are stern about such things – and she had a good charge of huskiness in the delivery, and certainly she was beautiful.

‘As loooong as dat black river flow…’

But even such a girl was poor distraction for the jowly merchants in the banquette booths. Those old boys quivered, almost – they could barely lift the tankards to their lips. Their eyes were drawn to a pair of men seated on high stools at the far end of the Supper Room’s bar. One was broad and densely packed, the other tall and slender.

Double-take:

It was Logan Hartnett and the Gant Broderick.

A tight huddle they had settled to, and they were whispering there. And in a hoarse whisper also the girl’s song came through.

‘As long as dem stars still shiiine / As long as our twined love grow…’

Tommie the Keep occupied himself with chipping ice from a ten-pound block into splinters for the cooler buckets. Almost lost a pair of fingers to the chisel, Tommie, as his scared glance shot along the counter to the men. Hartnett with a raised hand signalled now for another bottle of moscato, and Tommie fetched one and brought it. The men paused in their talk as he nestled the bottle among the ice chips in their cooler. Each wistfully smiled for him.

‘Mr Hartnett,’ said Tommie. ‘Mr Broderick.’

Tommie was not brave enough to linger and he scuttled again down the length of the bar. The girl singer finger-clicked still as her drummer whittled a high thin beat on the snare. In the booths, the heavy lads nervously swayed. Temperatures were yet in the thirties, even after midnight, and the city’s mood was edgy.

Logan Hartnett and the Gant Broderick both rested their forearms on the bar counter, and they both stared straight ahead, and they both rotated their glasses slowly with the tips of their fingers – each unconsciously mimicked the other.

The Gant lifted his glass then and sipped at his moscato.

‘Fuckin’ breakfast wine,’ he said.

‘Have a Jameson so.’

‘Swore off the whiskey over.’

Like a kid, Logan thought, like a surly little kid.

‘Wasn’t agreeing with you, G?’

The Gant shrugged, drained off the glass, and poured another. Held the bottle for Logan, raised an eyebrow; Logan demurely placed a hand to cover his glass. Like an old bint, the Gant thought.

‘Like an ol’ bint,’ he said.

‘Don’t be bitter, Martin,’ Logan said.

The girl singer held a slow note to its fade; it brought up the blue veins of her slender neck, and she let the note die, and she stepped from the stage then for an interval break, pinching carefully at the thighs of the silver dress so as not to trip.

Barely a scatter of applause came for the room was preoccupied: Dominick Gleeson, the fat newsman, slithered an oyster into his gob from the half-shell but barely registered the shiver of its sea tang as he worried about the Hartnett–Broderick clinch. Big Dom scowled tubbily in puzzlement, and it was a puzzlement shared, two booths over, by Edmund ‘The Gypo’ Lenihan, the old-school S’town hoor-master. Ed sipped sourly at a measure of moscato and laid a hand on his belly, the wine interfering lately with his ulcers. At a booth adjacent was a gentleman of the Bohane Authority, poured into a thin flannel suit and licking the salt off a pretzel, and he tried as best as he could to secrete himself in the Supper Room’s shadows.

All watched the two men at the bar.

A great rip of trembling took hold of the Gant just then – he was laughing? – and Logan placed a brotherly hand on his back, as though to steady him.

Shudders in the booths, and nervous tabs were lit in a rolling relay around the room – the sparking of one inclined the sparking of the next.

Logan Hartnett took a handkerchief from an inside pocket to wipe away a morbid, a dream-sent tear.

‘That day in August,’ he said, ‘I wasn’t sure I’d know you right off.’

‘You’re actually weepin’?’ the Gant said.

‘Something in my eye,’ he said. ‘Twenty-five years, you know…’

‘You’re one strange animal, Hartnett.’

‘As people never seem to tire of telling me.’

Again they mimicked without knowing it each the other’s posture – each of them was a little slumped now, and they sat bluesily, sad-eyed; it was past midnite at Tommie’s.

‘If you were askin’ me to place a bet,’ the Gant said, ‘I’d say she’ll come back to you.’

‘If she doesn’t, I’m done for.’

‘I wouldn’t worry too much. A nice berth you made for her atop the hill, ain’t it? And she always was a shallow bitch.’

‘Did you really think she’d choose you, Gant?’

On a morning in August, in the grey dim of a deserted bar room, in the village of Ten Light, in the foothills of the Nothin’ massif, they had sat with each other. The rendezvous was discreet and polite. Logan carefully laid out his terms. To test Macu’s loyalty, and to test the Fancy’s – this was the Gant’s role, and in return for playing it, he was allowed safe passage again to Bohane, to his home and to his lost-time. He could return and he could stay – it was what he had pleaded for in the letters that he had sent to Logan. They spat and shook on it in the grey room. Even to shake hands had caused a wince of pain in the Gant – he’d returned with a last wound from the world beyond; his shoulder reefed in Whitechapel.

‘When you told her about the arrangement,’ Logan said, admiringly, at the barside in Tommie’s, ‘I thought, that’s sly… to turn it back at me like so. Put me in an evil light in my own house, didn’t it? Of course it did for your chances an’ all.’

‘Didn’t want her,’ the Gant said. ‘Soon’s as I saw her close up, y’check?’

‘Tell yourself that often enough, Martin, and you might start to believe it.’

Maybe there was a want in the Gant to hurt him yet but was he capable of it? Brave as the dream he each night blew, Logan believed not – the Gant was sold to the past; the Gant was done for. But if the dream-smoke brought courage, it brought a harsh truth, also: Logan knew that he may not himself be far behind.

The girl singer downed a fast whiskey and returned to the stage, and she finger-snapped a double-quick beat, and she swung out her hips, she tried to get things moving at a jauntier pace, she tried to lift the tension, but the hot old boys in the booths shifted uncomfortably and dropped their piggy little eyes, and she sighed, and she let it slow again to ballad pace, began to croon one, and the merchants again sulkily swayed.

Logan and the Gant sat for a time in the selfsame brood; both rejected, it was an odd bond they shared, and sweetly painful.

‘S’pose you done for the galoot lad?’

‘Poor Fucker,’ Logan sighed.

‘Couldn’t have let him go the High Boreen, nah? A boy o’ what, fifteen?’

‘He was seventeen.’

‘Didn’t look it.’

Anxiety spun a web across the room. Those who had passed word and information to the Gant Broderick over the winter and springtime feared now the consequences. They knew they had been tested.

‘You’re all shoulders, ain’t you, Gant?’ Logan smiled as he turned on his stool, a half-swivel, and took a slow reck of his old acquaintance. ‘A big ham-faced lunk off the bog plain. Of course even as a kid you were a fucking unit. Even when you were in off the rez first, Martin Broderick, eight years of age, and putting the fear of the SB into grown men. Of course a brain would have been useful also.’

‘A brain not so hot if it got maggots wrigglin’ about it.’

‘Ah what did she ever see in you?’

Logan sipped delicately at his moscato. Made a face – the wine had warmed in the night’s humidity. Snapped fingers and pointed, simultaneously, at the optics, and Tommie the Keep scuttled for the John Jameson. One measure was brought, a second offered, but the Gant again refused it.

‘Tell me more about your days over, G. Fun times?’

He joined his long thin hands, the fingers interlocking, about his middle. The Gant ignored the question, and presented his own.

‘What do you really want, Logan?’

An intake of breath, and there was no front to the ’bino here.

‘I want to go on for a while yet.’

‘Then go an’ hold a pillow over yer mother’s face.’

‘Leave my mother out of this.’

The Gant smiled at the advantage he’d found, and he knew it would niggle all the more if he did not play it.

And the girl singer swayed, and she sang, with a smokiness to her voice, and she ran her fingers along her slim hips, and the room went with her to a lost-time melody, the air rearranging as the night tensely progressed.

‘S’the Ching gal I’d watch,’ the Gant teased.

‘You been whispering to her, Gant. You been encouraging her. You been saying pretty things in the paper about the young gals comin’ through.’

‘Hardly needs my word, that gal.’

‘And what about Wolfie?’

‘Well, the Wolfie-boy’s got a prob, don’t he? Wolfie’s in love.’

‘That is a problem.’

The coolers full, the shaved ice glistening, Tommie the Keep took them around to the booths, and he replaced the used ones, and he shared heavy glances with the merchants; who knew what strange course Bohane might be set to now?

The girl singer called her sweet laments, and the fat merchants went soppy in the booths, and the sleepy-eyed drummer teased a sad, slow rhythm with the brushes.

‘Who’s allowin’ who to live?’ the Gant said, and they both laughed at that.

Tommie the Keep ducked under his bar hatch again and took his cloth and hurried a shine into the counter. He strained to hear but he could not hear.

‘When you told me that she talked about me still,’ the Gant said. ‘That she called out my name at night… Do you know I near enough believed it?’

‘Poor fool,’ Logan said.

It was early a.m. at the Supper Room, in the humid soup of a Trace night, and the high-quiffed drummer rode a bushweed drift, and he gazed at the hindquarters of the svelte girl singer, and he floated a while on the rivers of the moon.

Dom Gleeson, in his booth, was defeated by the situation, could not by glance alone untangle its nuance, its news, and he thought, fuck it anyway, I’m away to S’town for the slap of a hairbrush.

The Authority man tried to get straight in his noggin the report that needed making for the members.

‘The Gypo’ Lenihan thought he had seen quareness in his time but nowt so quare as the pairing at the bar.

Tommie the Keep polished madly still the bar counter.

The Gant drained what was left of his moscato.

‘That’s me for the road,’ he said.

He rose from his stool – yes, a big unit still – and politely Logan rose with him. They spoke just a few words more. The Gant turned to leave the Supper Room then but he hesitated, and he turned back again to Logan.

Briefly, oddly, they embraced.