City of Bohane

IV ON THE NIGHT OF AUGUST FAIR

We came through the green hollows of June, and through slow lascivious July, and then the August Murk descended: it was late summer in the city, and our world was so densely made and intricate about us.

The Murk is a thick seafog that settles each year on the creation and just about smothers us alive. It is a curiously localised event that affects this peninsula alone of the western seaboard. The meteorologists, long puzzled, term it ‘The Murk of Bohane’, and leave it at that. The Murk comes down as a greyish, impenetrable mist and it lays a great torridness on the city, a swamp heat.

This is the weather of August Fair.

This is by tradition the time of betrothal in Bohane, and for the week leading up to Fair Day, all the young tush paraded the Murky streets in their glitter and swank.

Oh and the tushies worked it like only the Bohane tush can – their hair was pineappled and freshly streaked, the warpaint was laid on with shovels, and their navels gleamed with tuppenny jewels that shone as their eyes shone with badness and delight. All the young fiends followed at close quarters, with their tongues hanging out for the sheer want of it – sheer, the cliff face of adolescent desire – and festive mode for a fiend was to be barechested beneath a straw hat with a rash of sunburn and freckles across the nose and jaws. They fell into love as though to a precipice.

As the Fair’s build-up progressed, Bohane Free Radio broadcast from the back of a herring boat and blasted righteous samba cuts across the dockside, and the young things danced on the cobbles with fervent desperation:

They did the Grind, and the Three-B (Bohane-Bum-Buster), and the S’town Shuffle.

Mothers and fathers sat nervously in the tenements and rotated slowly their thumbs one around the other – this was also, by tradition, a time of mass impregnation in Bohane.

Sure how many of us are mid-May babies, born of a Fair Day grapple down a Back Trace wynd? How many of us sucked at life for the first time beneath a taurine moon?

Indeed a quare shake of us.

Big Nothin’ for weeks in advance worked itself up for the Fair’s great release.

The seasonal lakes of the hillsides filled with Murky precipitation and the young lay about by these swimming holes, and they rolled into one another’s arms, and they whispered of Fair Day on the soon-come.

Of course, many a stout-hipped daughter or big-arsed son of the plain would lose the run of themselves at the Fair. Was common enough for a Nothin’ child to hit down the High Boreen for the Fair, innocent as a three-legged lamb, and be discovered, weeks later, haggard and dream-addicted down the wrong end of a Smoketown salon, and all set to be signed for a trick-pony ranch or hauled off to a lurcher cage.

But if there wasn’t such danger, there’d be no such spice.

Expectation travelled the hill-country smallholdings, and along the poppy fields that extend east of Ten Light village – see the dream fields undulate in the tropic heat of August – and through the pikey rez, and the day at last came, and every stony acre of the plain tossed out a choice of spudaters, and legions of them were led on the morning of August 13th by their livestock through the dawn gloom along the length of the High Boreen. They had calves for the slaughter and piebalds for to sell.

‘Name t’me a price for yon palomino, kid?’

Fair Day of ’54 had a grey and ominous sky: the usual Murksky.

Rain came in bad-minded spats.

An eerie wind taunted.

And the city of Bohane spread itself for all comers.

Smoketown geared up for the busiest day of its calendar. Half the creation would be over the footbridge for the suck of a dream-pipe, a hand shandy and a bowl of noodles.

Hoors waxed themselves.

Mortars of dream-bulb paste were expertly grinded.

Chillis were chopped, seeds and all, and fecked into vast tureens of mackerel chowder that were hauled around S’town and gave fine nutrition for the sweaty labours ahead.

Nervous hoors were adrift in the rustle of nylons and the fixing of garter-belts and lost in the misty valleys of their own cheap scent.

Oh the loneliness of it all.

It was the city’s habit to drink hard for the week leading up to August Fair, and De Valera Street, by the morning of the 13th, looked as if a riot had already passed through.

Emptied wine sacks filled every gutter and diamonds of broken glass – Bohane gemstones – sparkled on the sidewalks. There was hardly a set of eyes in the town that weren’t already at the far end of their stalks. Fair Day was a time of massive hilarity, and sentimental music, and it was a most useful pressure valve, for these were hard times in the city, in this hard town by the sea.

Along the dockside, the Merries were set up: the swing-bucket whirligigs were tested, the dog-fight rings marked out with hay bales, the test-your-strength meter raised on its platform. Impromptu stages made of ale barrels, ship’s rope and lengths of four-be-two were erected for the barek-nuckle fistfights. Tiered seating was arranged around a rodeo ring and sawdust was thickly strewn. The dark-eyed carnies who set up these attractions were from the same families as always brought the Merries to Bohane. Powerful smokers, the carnies. And of course many a carnie was sprung from the peninsula originally. We would be the sort, outside in Bohane, who’d run away with the Merries as quick as you’d look at us.

Hoss polis were a heavy presence. Even at daybreak, they were at every Back Trace entry that led off from the docks. The brethren of the St John’s Ambulance Brigade – Here come the good guys! In their little jackets! – were preparing to stretcher the wounded towards the medicine tents. Back Trace old dears threw back their shutters and from the high windows hung out their bosoms and were wistful for their own remembered Fair Days.

Fair Day, as we always say in Bohane, is a day for the youth.

And they lace into it like pagans.

August Fair…

August the 13th…

We whisper of it for months in advance, and we are as long again recovering.

Logan Hartnett stepped over stuporous bodies on the Bohane front. He heard the cry of the auction down the yards: all the old taunts and threats of the horse trading, which was the main business of Fair Day. He swivelled a reck along De Valera and the ’bino’s glance was clear-eyed and sharp this weather as he reckoned the polis numbers. He moved for the Trace. He was barechested. He wore three-quarter-length black strides in a narrow-leg cut over a pair of Spanish Harlem arsekickers. The scars on his chest were faded and wattled, like folds of chickenskin, and were reminders of the reefings he’d walked away from in his day. He had a dress-shkelp in his belt, ivory-handled.

As he turned into the Trace, the air changed, as it always did, and he asked how many times in his life he had swung into these dank, narrow streets for some whispering rendezvous.

Herb and sick and tawny wine were on the air.

Each turn of the Trace that he took signified – there he’d had a knee-trembler, there he’d bled a foe. He took a particular turn and the broken glass on an alleyway’s surface amped his footfall to a noirish crunch. The yellow light of an early-doors caff gleamed from the back of the alley.

There was a handful of customers already at the caff: lads who had been late at the bottle, and were now haggardly hunched over Bohane Specials, and wondering how long it would be before their lungs could chance the first tab of the day.

At a rear table, nursing a short black joe and puffing a stogie, was Jenni Ching.

Logan took the seat opposite.

‘You wouldn’t chance a fry, Jenni, no?’

The girl laid a hand on her ribcage.

‘Me body’s a fuckin’ temple, like.’

‘I suppose if you can’t look out for yourself, Jen?’

‘Then there ain’t nobody gonna do it for you, Mr Hartnett.’

The serving girl came, and Logan asked for coffee only, and he winked at Jenni, who nodded sombrely, as if that was the best decision a grown man could make. The shocking yellow of the egg-yolk stains on the Special plates would not anyway betray a man to gluttony.

‘Polis is bought,’ Jenni said.

‘The price?’

‘Fuckin’ savage.’

‘I’d imagine.’

‘But at least they’s gonna face off the sand-pikes.’

‘Saves us doing it, Jen-gal.’

‘O’ course Prince T is born canny. He’s gonna be keepin’ to the rear end o’ things when the polis fucks arrive.’

‘A leader’s prerogative,’ Logan said.

‘If you say so, H.’

‘Maybe time you learned such things?’

Jenni scowled.

‘Way it’s pannin’,’ she said. ‘Ed Lenihan reckons it’s the night to clear Wolfie a path to the Far-Eye.’

‘Tremendous.’

They drank joe; they smoked tabs. They were wary of each other but fond, too. He knew she had watched out on all sides – the swivelling glance an S’town apprenticeship will teach – but she had betrayed no Fancy confidence; she had given nothing to the Gant.

‘Ain’t been seein’ ya at the Ho Pee these nights,’ she said.

‘Keeping my snout clean, Jenni,’ he said. ‘Got to stay on top of things.’

‘Plenty happenin’ ’bout the place awrigh’, H.’

‘Speaking of, Jenni. I’m to understand you’ve got these Trace girls at your beck lately?’

‘It’s said.’

She bopped in high innocence a smoke ring.

‘And you got the Gant naming you to all and sundry as the soon-come kid.’

‘A sloppy aul’ dude wanna spout bollick-talk an’ he down the boozer, it ain’t my lookout to stop him.’

‘Of course my darling mother is lending the weight an’ all, ain’t she, Jen?’

‘Girly and me is close.’

‘Oh, more than that, I think. Not a hand to be laid on the Jen-chick ever, is there? That’s my instruction.’

‘You wanna try a hand, ’bino?’

He smiled.

‘It’s hard not to love you, Jenni.’

She pulled down her coldest glaze, gave him a blast of it, briefly, and then let her eyes scan the morning wynd beyond.

‘Those Fancy boys don’t stand a chance against you, do they, Jenni?’

Logan raised the joe to his lips and savoured its bitterness. Old photographs on the cafe walls were of Bohane faces – hard-set stares in hard-chaw faces – and he looked at them a moment.

‘See this gang?’ he said.

Jennie surveyed the faces.

‘You’d notice a type. Their noses in the air, watch? Haughty! Even if they ain’t got the arse of their kecks. What we are in this town is an arrogant fucking breed. We think it’s all been thrown down to our particular design.’

All the old faces were in their own time fabled in the Back Trace universe, he said. The Trace was a world within a world, he said, and each of these dead souls had a power in the world once, was known for his swiftness with the shkelp, or his knack with the tush, or his canniness with a buck. Each was in the boneyard now, he said; Logan Hartnett, reality instructor.

‘You have to remember, Jenni, that all we’re trying to do is keep the place someways fucking civilised.’

‘Y’spoutin’ me own creed, H.’

‘We get a stretch of Calm in place and we get the S’town trade flowing in the right direction again and then we can decide on what comes next, yes?’

‘I’m listenin’.’

‘Oh I know you are, Jenni. I know it too well.’

The Alsatian cur Angelina sloped low to the ground across the Big Nothin’ plain. She aimed contrary to the Bohane river as it surged through the August Murk. Great swathes of rhododendron along the bank filled and shimmied with gusts of a hardwind and the knotweed swayed on its copper-red canes all along the malevolent river. Angelina shivered her bones to loose the ’skeetos that fed hungrily on her blood and she keened; the sharp of the yellow fangs showed.

Angelina went upriver.

And she passed along the way a mute child bound for the city as he steered with the tip of a whitethorn switch to its rump a feral mountain goat.

The puck goat’s hard grey eyes pierced the Murk.

Angelina threw a hungry glance at the pair but she walked on, and she kept low to the ground, and she searched everywhere with snout and hooded eye.

Mute child and the puck goat moved west, and away; they went with the river’s flow.

By ’n’ by the rooftops of the high bluffs loomed through the Murk.

River followed its drag through the backswathe of the city, its hinterland – that vague terrain.

Mute’s busy snout rose to snag on the salt tang:

And the wash of the ocean air on this morning of August 13th brought all the colours of the North Atlantic drift.

Bohane was green and grey and brown:

The bluish green of wrack and lichen.

The grey of flint and rockpool.

The moist brown of dulse and intertidal sand.

A slouch of old lads hunkered in the late morning over breakfast pints at the Capricorn Bar on the Bohane front. Weather-bleached skulls of Big Nothin’ goats were mounted behind the bar atop the optics and stacks of tin tankards. Beyond the dusty windows, August Fair shrieked and writhed into rude life; the horse trading busied, the Merries sparked. The old lads wistfully watched it all as they met the day with Wrassler stout, sausage sandwiches, and wistful memories.

The Gant was among them, and having been gone so long, he was himself a relic of the lost-time, and they prompted him, and he succumbed.

‘Do you not remember, G?’

‘Oh, I do, I suppose. I do.’

‘You’d have come out of that place one arm longer than the other.’

‘It was roughish. It sure was. An’ was it Thursday nights it was on there?’

‘Tuesdays and Thursdays but the Tuesdays were quiet. Tuesdays only if you were stuck with a fairly severe lack of it.’

‘Ah yeah, Tuesdays was for plain girls…’

Laughs.

‘And of course it was a place you’d want a twist of blackcurrant in the stout to ease the taste?’

‘Ferocious taps. Though nothing at all to what they were serving below in Filthy Dick’s.’

‘Stop!’

‘Do you remember, Gant, the way all the pony-and-traps would be lined up outside Dick’s?’

‘Of a Sunday. Every fuckin’ latchiko in the town would be out there.’

‘If you came home out of it with the two eyes still in your head, you’d be thinking: result.’

‘Was it Dick had the daughter married the fella of the Delaceys?’

‘Indeed. The daughter married up. Delaceys the bakers.’

‘Where was it they were again, Gant? Top end of Dev?’

‘Just so – opening onto Eamonn Ceannt Street off the New Town side.’

‘Ah… yeah… there was a sideway in?’

‘Of course there was – you’d be knocking in for an apple slice. Through the hatch.’

‘Oh Sweet Baba they were something!’

‘Stop the lights. The finest apple slice that was ever slid across a counter in this town.’

The apples stewed since early morning in the ten-gallon pot. The apples all stirred about by the big, sweating, ignorant-looking Delacey father. The crumble for a topping that was made always with prime Big Nothin’ butter, and the crumble baked till it was golden, and the way the sour note of the cooking apples hung in the air for two blocks at least.

‘Delaceys, yes… Would have been alongside… Alo Finnerty the jeweller?’

‘Alo. A lightin’ crook.’

‘Was said. Then what would you come to, Gant?’

‘Jerry Kycek the weeping Polack butcher.’

‘Of course you would. Poor Jerry!’

‘That man went through the fucking wringer.’

‘Always, with the wife he had. Of course, he was known for his black pudding?’

‘He was. Wrapped in the pages of a Vindicator you’d get it, with the blood still dripping.’

‘Drippin’!’

So happened that not all of our knocking shops in Bohane were on the S’town side of the footbridge. The infamous Blind Nora’s, for example, drew its clientele down a hard-to-find sideway of the Back Trace, and Ol’ Boy Mannion, as Fair Day built to a noontime roar, turned a dainty toe towards the place.

By midday an air of happy derangement had settled on the Trace. You could barely walk the wynds for the large and ragged crew that bounced off the tenement walls. There were big lunks of hill-country sluggers, and pipe-mad pikeys on the loose from the rez, and syphilitic freaks with lost-time dreams in their eyes, and washed-up auld hoors, and one-legged trick-ponies (the gout often a danger to the lads of that trade), and sand-pikey watches roved the city with a strange, unnameable fear about them, and the Fancy boys blithely prowled, and the polis beaks, and scar-faced Norrie mendicants with wooden bowls for alms, and wilding packs of feral teenage sluts, and tormented preachers hollering the wages of sin from the tops of stoops, and any one of this crowd could turn a shkelp in your lung as quick as they’d look at you, but as he walked through it all, with his snout held high and a wryness even in his carriage, even in his footfall, Ol’ Boy Mannion was notably immune to the madness, and he felt no fear.

Ol’ Boy wore:

A three-piece skinny-dude suit in the classic mottled-green shade, a pair of silver-painted jackboots (square-toed) on the dancers, and a dove-grey stovepipe hat up top, leaning westerly, with a delicate length of crimson scarf tied around it.

Snazzy, no?

Slugged from a hip flask of the Beast, did Ol’ Boy, and took the occasional draw on a herb-pipe.

Wasn’t high so much as maintaining.

The wynds of the Trace were mud and shite and puke underfoot and he placed the step carefully, with an eye to his boots, because they hadn’t cost him tuppence ha’penny, no, sir.

He went down a sideway, and then another, and took the twist of a turn once more, and the Trace quietened some as he went deeper into it, and he came at last to Blind Nora’s.

It was a low joint. It was patronised only by the very desperate. If you were turfed out of every place else in the city, there’d be a roost for you yet at Nora’s. They even let the Haitians in. And the Tipperary men. Ol’ Boy entered past the doorkeep, a big simian brute smoking the butt of a stogie – ‘Howya, Dimitri?’ – and he could not but wince against the smell of the place.

Troubled ladies in tragic fishnets were slung down on ancient couches. They clutched pipes and drinks and SBJ medals. A mulatto inebriate put an old rocksteady seven-incher on a wind-up turntable and danced uncertainly as the tune grainily kicked in.

Stumbled against Ol’ Boy.

‘Watch yerself, kid,’ said Ol’ Boy, gently.

A wretched hoor laughed and showed her toothless maw. Now there was a dangerous-looking tunnel for you. The bordello shades were drawn against even the Murky daylight and the place was lit by table lamps on upturned crates and coloured silks were drawn over these – for mood, no less – and the silks were singed by the heat of the lamps and the burning smell met with others in the air: pipe, Beast, baccy and seed.

Ol’ Boy smiled for each of the ladies in turn but he was not here to have his needs satisfied. It wouldn’t be Nora’s he’d be hitting if that was the cause. Ol’ Boy was here to see the woman herself.

‘Is it you?’ she said.

‘You know it is,’ he said.

Nora was an enormous cheese-coloured old blind lady with ringlets of black curls, like a doll’s. She was perched on a divan down back of the room. She drank psychoactive mushroom tea, delicately, from a Chinkee pot. She was magnificently fat. She beamed for Ol’ Boy and shuffled along the divan, haunch by ample haunch, and he moved in beside her, crossed his legs, laid a hand on her knee.

‘Another one ’round to us, Nora?’

‘Fair Day come ’round so quick, Mr Mannion.’

Together they smiled, and they were comfortably silent for a time. Savoured the day and their moment together. Then Ol’ Boy said:

‘You’ve that lady well hid for me yet?’

‘I have, sir.’

‘You’re to keep her well hid today, Nora, if you can at all.’

‘Oh?’

‘It’s just sometimes I get a black feeling…’

‘She’s well hid, sir.’

‘Where have you her, Nora?’

‘I wouldn’t even tell you that, Mr Mannion.’

‘Trace-side anyway, I s’pose?’

‘She’s well hid, sir.’

They sat a while. And then he turned to her again, and squeezed her hand, and he said:

‘Will you sing one for me, Nora?’

She loosed a hard laugh that rippled her fleshy shoulders. She took a nip of the Beast from the flask he offered. She leaned back, and a lovely gentleness spread over her features, and it was from the heart that she sang:

Jenni Ching had the polis palm crossed with Judas coin and them polis fucks they was hard-prepped for a swipe at the sand-pikey ranks, y’sketchin’?

Jenni Ching had her lovelorn beau Wolfie-boy Stanners hard-prepped to wield a shkelp in the direction of the Far-Eye maniac Prince Tubby, y’heed?

Jenni Ching had a pack of feral teenage sluts at her beck ’n’ call in the Bohane Trace, y’check me?

Every time Logan closed his eyes he saw Fucker again. He saw the pain, the way it twisted as the shkelp was moved neatly from side to side, and then the quick deadening of the features. He felt over and again the moment, the way he had leaned in, sadly, and the feeling of the dead boy’s brow as it fell onto his.

It was the first of his killings that had lingered so. He knew it now for a mistake. He’d seen only the need for vengeance. He hadn’t played the long game. He hadn’t reckoned on the loyalty a reprieve might have bred in the Fancy’s ranks. Gant had been right – he should have just sent the galoot out the High Boreen.

Logan Hartnett was the most sober man on De Valera Street. He walked a tread of memory and regret. The street in the hot afternoon roiled, thrashed, simmered; August Fair was remorseless.

From her divan, at the sad bordello, Blind Nora yet sang:

At the Capricorn Bar, as the crowds thronged outside on the Bohane front, as the Merries got into swing, the old-timers worked a whiskey-fed reminiscence, and the Gant was its conductor:

‘Of course the Vindicator itself was at that time on De Valera Street?’

‘It was. This would have been before Big Dom Gleeson’s time. Before Dom came in and got notions about the New Town.’

‘Notions in Bohane’d be nothin’ new.’

‘No, Gant.’

‘What was the bar the Vindicator lads would drink in? The printers?’

‘You mean the place…’

‘Down off…’

‘Off…’

‘Half Moon Street?’

‘Precisely so… You’re talking about the Llama, aren’t you?’

‘No I am not. I remember the Llama. A filthy place.’

‘Filthy. A honk out of it.’

‘A honk that’d knock you. But that wasn’t the printers’ bar… Was it Corbett’s I’m thinkin’ of?’

‘Corbett’s was polis always… The polis frats all drank there, goin’ way, waaay back…’

Yes. A dim-lit saloon with pictures of old sergeants on the walls. Touts sneaking out of it late on – looking left, then right, a swivel of their Judas eyes. A jukebox loaded with sentimental Irish ballads (‘Mother McCree’, ‘Four Green Fields’, ‘The Goat Broke Loose’) and in the lounge section a few sanctioned hoors peddling herb and dream up top of their tricks.

‘Corbett’s was polis, you’re right.’

‘Polis had more to them at that time.’

‘They did. And were rotten on account o’ the heft they had.’

‘Rotten… And do you remember at all Silly Herbert the loolah?’

‘Ah poor Silly! I do.’

The Gant all but weeping then.

‘A desperate masturbator!’

‘Will anyone ever forgot the time he hauled it out in the middle of the 98er Square?’

‘Of a Christmas Eve?’

‘An’ he chokin’ the squirrel?’

Christmas Eve, and poor Silly, the lunatic, smashed on sherry given as a present by the Devotional Brigade, with his hideously long member in his hand, and he lying in the middle of the square, with his kecks around his ankles, and the old Trace crones blessing themselves as they passed by, with fresh-plucked fowl and bags of Brussels sprouts under their oxters, and trying to keep straight faces on them, and failing.

‘Silly came to a bad end. Of course they do, up in that place they had him.’

‘And there was Candy, do you remember Candy?’

‘Candy Stanners!’

‘I dunno if there was ever a finer dip-pocket on Dev.’

‘Not a one then or since fit to lace her boots.’

‘Of course she’d a bad end as well.’

‘That’s the Back Trace for you.’

‘Oh that’s the Trace.’

Wolfie for a share of quiet travelled the Back Trace rooftops. He scaled the Trace by the rickety Zs of its rusting fire escapes. He turned at the landing of each flight, and climbed again with a jolting grab on the handrail, and the packed wynds faded to a grey-voiced murmuring below – his stomper boots bamped the oxide-red steps.

Tenements were so densely packed you could make it across the Trace without ever once setting foot on the ground. It just took a leap here and there, that was all, above the green voids of the wynds.

He looked out into the Murk, and he remembered Candy, the softness of her touch. He felt the fear reach deep into his bones now – he no longer had the galoot beside him.

Wolfie riffed on a double-tip:

He would take the Far-Eye – he had shamed his clutch, and Jenni came first. And then he would take vengeance for Fucker – the ’bino would suffer.

Wolfie on the rooftops felt for the shkelp, and he wielded it for heft and balance in his palm, and he twirled it, and flicked it, and he caught it.

Night would come quickly.

And Blind Nora in the bordello sang:

Ol’ Boy Mannion left Blind Nora’s, and he skulked through the wynds, and he watched the revel thicken in the Trace, and he bought a falafel from a cart in the 98er Square.

Spat the first bite and tossed the deep-fried mulch back at the cart’s keeper.

‘Wouldn’t feed it to a fuckin’ cat,’ he said.

Hit for the dockside, and he had a particular heaviness on him – an odd feeling. Name it fear. Checked his timepiece, and he made for the livestock yards, as the Fair Day’s late bidding rose to a great and rhythmical chant in the near distance. It was out back of the yards that Ol’ Boy rendezvoused with the mute child.

Child was a scruffy wee thing off the far reaches of Nothin’, about knee-high to a grasshopper, with a snotty face on, and that strange, impenetrable glaze you’d get always on a bog-plain no-speak.

Of course, Big Nothin’ has always been known for its high incidence of mutes. You would so often see those wordless children out there, roaming the wastes, forming abstract shapes on their lips, and squealing mournfully into the hardwind.

Now the mute eyed Mannion and he was brazen and wilful.

‘Bin the hardchaw gimmick,’ said Ol’ Boy. ‘Where’s the cratur?’

Mute child flapped an arm and directed Ol’ Boy towards a dark corner of the stock sheds. There the most regal puck was tethered.

‘How we now?’ said Ol’ Boy.

The goat acknowledged him with a brief lowering of its gaze. The most important thing for an August Fair puck was that it had a gnarled, ancient look to it. It needed that whiskery Nothin’ gravitas.

‘You’ve picked a good ’un here, child,’ said Ol’ Boy.

A squeal from the mute sounded and dogs barked distant in the Bohane Trace. Ol’ Boy reached for the inside pocket of his jacket and he took out a brick of compressed herb and he passed it to the child and the mute hungrily sniffed it and again squealed.

‘Ah but hush, would you?’ said Ol’ Boy.

The mute child grinned. Ol’ Boy raised the back of his hand as though for a smack but the mute brazened him and spat on the ground. Child knelt by the puck then and put his wordless lips to its ear and moaned softly – very odd, a type of keening – and the puck flickered its gaze in response, and turned its head to regard Ol’ Boy with a most intelligent disdain.

‘Don’ mind that auld Nothin’ bollocks,’ said Ol’ Boy but he was unnerved.

Was said always on Nothin’ our mutes had the gift o’ goatspeak.

The mute rose then and he went out through the yards and on the lightest of feet vaulted the steel gates. These mutes could have a very superior air to them betimes. Ol’ Boy took the goat’s tether and the animal tensed against his touch.

‘Hup now,’ said Ol’ Boy.

He dragged the puck through the sheds and made for the dockside where the Fair’s revels were by degrees supplanting the business of the day.

Samba blasted; the Merries roiled.

The puck goat would tonight be raised on a platform mounted on tall stilts and carried through the city. The puck was symbol and spirit of the place and as the Bohanians marked the goat’s passing, they would, as per tradition, beat slowly at the air with switches of hazel to make a whooshed and haunting music.

No argument: it is a thin enough layer of civilisation we have laid over us out in Bohane.

As Fair descended into evening, a pathway opened for Logan through the manic throng. The pasted faces of the drunks briefly sobered as they made a reck on the pale tall figure passing by:

Long Fella’s abroad.

Albino’s abroad.

Hartnett… Ye sketchin’?

Screams and chants pierced the Trace-deep night. Fornication was not entirely kept to the shadows – fiends and tushies were wearing the gobs off each other in every doorway of the wynds. They dry-humped in a slow, rhythmical grind to the Trojan dub plates that blasted from the rooftop sound systems. The Murk of Bohane sat in unexcitable billows of fallen cloud that obscured the entries and closes, and the city’s many-coloured mobs passed this way and that; the motion on the streets was as a single, great rolling, and bottles were smashed, and go-boy taunts were hollered, and dream tents were huckstered by bearded touts with crackly loudhailers, and hysterically devout Norries screamed the Word of the SBJ, and the Ten-Light Ebonettes did the Three-B with skipropes, and the wilding girls snogged each other viciously, and the whole great raucous night of the 13th drew in around us.

Drumbeats sounded everywhere in the city – timpanis and tom-toms, snares and tenors, lambegs, bodhrans, dustbin lids.

Logan Hartnett took a turn onto De Valera Street. He smiled like a wry old bishop as he passed along, as though humorously outraged by all that he saw. He was not a man, however, to let a carnival spirit take hold inside – he was too gaunt and graceful for that.

And Fair night made him wistful always – would he see another one?

At the Capricorn Bar:

‘And of course there was the dunes you’d saunter off to of a fine evening? Summer.’

‘If you had a girleen in tow, a kite to fly.’

‘A roll in the dunes takes the badness out of a young fella.’

‘What puts it there, Gant?’

‘Well now…’

‘Wasn’t even pikey on the dunes in those days.’

‘Pikeys there now sure enough.’

‘Those days a pikey knew his place. Made pegs out on the reservation. Raised a dozen bairn or so. Played a bit o’ fiddle music and had a scrap at a weddin’. Strange now to see a shake of ’em in S’town?’

‘You remember, of course, when Atta “The Turk” Foley had the poolhall down the dune end?’

‘Turk’s… I do.’

‘All the young crowd.’

‘All the girls, all the boys. Summer evenings and the blinds drawn against the sun. An’ remember you’d get the holy marchers coming down through Smoketown? All the old dears with their tongues hanging out for Baba-love?’

‘Patterns o’ Devotion being made…’

White-face preachers in ankle-length soutanes swinging incense on the wharfside cobbles. The women shaking out holy water from Jay-shaped plastic bottles as their headscarves were whipped about by random assaults of hardwind, as though it was the devil himself sprang it from Nothin’.

‘I remember,’ said the Gant, ‘the way on the night of August Fair we’d burn whitethorn branches at the bonnas all along the Rises…’

‘… and the way we’d be collecting a month for the bonnas and stashing the wood.’

‘You’d have gangs of young fellas going around stealing from each other’s woodpiles. Got good and vicious now, recall?’

‘Oh I do.’

‘Rucks bustin’ out on the 98 Steps.’

‘Heavenly times, Gant.’

‘Was it Sergeant Taafe had the polis that time?’

‘One of the greatest fucking maggots that ever crawled into this town off the Big Nothin’ plain. Where was it Taafes were from outside, G?’

‘Taafes were this near side o’ Nothin’ Mountain. Skinned goats for a trade his people.’

‘Was a price paid for goat pelt that time.’

‘A fine price. But that’s all gone now.’

‘All gone.’

‘Lots of it gone.’

‘Lots of it.’

‘Oh we’re all getting old now.’

‘Old, yes.’

‘Oh, old.’

‘Old!’

‘Oh.’

The Gant slid from his stool at the Capricorn Bar and stumbled to a corner and vomited.

A twist and a turn and a feint, then a twist and a left turn, and the wynds gave onto wynds, and deep in the heart of the Bohane Trace, at its still calm centre, as the Fair roistered distantly about the edges, a set of high tenement doors opened – heavy wooden doors carved with renditions of hares, sprites, rooks – and Macu emerged.

Macu wore:

A fitted knee-length dress of lynxskin, a fox stole, a ritual eyepaint that drew flames of crimson from the corners of her eyes, and a slash of purple lippy.

Macu set to walking.

A twist and a turn, a feint. A twist and a turn, and the pathways of her thoughts were intricate as the Trace, and as indeterminate. He would be waiting at midnight in the Café Aliados. She did not yet know if she would go to him there.

The notables of Bohane congregated on the plaza outside the Yella Hall. It was the moment for the crowning of the puck – the most famous moment of the Bohane year – and all the usual faces were in evidence: the draper de Bromhead, the sawbones Fitzsimmons, the Protestant Alderton. All were growing old and hideous together. A movement, then, from the dockside, and all heads turned, and cheers were raised as Ol’ Boy Mannion led his regal puck onto the plaza, and the hunchback, Balthazar Mary Grimes, captured the moment for the Vindicator with a shriek of blue flash.

The gulls squalled – mmwwaaoorrk! – and rain came in warm drifts from the August sea, and a fat merchant of the city stood on a crate to drone the night’s courtesies.

‘An’ as always on this happy occasion we remember our fallen and our dead and aren’t we so lucky and Baba-blessed to be suckin’ yet at the air o’ Bohane city and didn’t the likes a us…’

There was more interest in the goat. The crowd gathered around Ol’ Boy, the puck was expertly inspected, and compliments were passed on the fine bearing of the creature.

‘…an’ this majestic beast afore us now has in the great tradition of August Fair been taken from the gorsey wilds o’ Big Nothin’ by a member o’ the Mannion family and here beneath this glorious Murk that is our curse and favour let it be said that…’

Four stout sons of the city – slaughterhouse boys – stepped forward as the puck was tethered to its platform on the tall stilts. The creature was raised slowly into the night sky, and great applause broke out, and whoops and hollers and roars, and the procession set off, in medieval splendour, towards the snakebend roll of De Valera Street.

Puck didn’t bat an eyelid.

Wolfie Stanners crossed into the S’town night and he met with the Gypo Lenihan and he was led by a tangled course down past the dune end’s pikey watches.

They ghosted through the night, the pair, and went unseen.

Came at length to a particular alleyway and the Gypo arranged the boy carefully in its shadows.

‘Wait here, Wolf. It’s where he come up for air from the grindbar yonder, y’heed?’

‘You’re sure?’

‘I’m sure.’

Wolfie was left alone, and waited, and he was bare-chested against the hot Murk as it came down freely now as a weird, greenish rain.

Felt for the bone handle of his shkelp, its heft.

Long Fella threw a sconce along the dockside. The judder of the hook-up generators was a memory jolt from adolescence. Diesel tang was sharp memory of the lost-time. The youth of Bohane balled through the Merries. The youth were in rut heat; for Logan, it was a careful parade through the fun.

He smiled for the old familiars of the town. The smiles he took back were as scared and respectful as always but they were weighted with emotion, too. Smiles were as though to say…

We’ve made it, ’bino, we’ve made it to August Fair again.

Since he was a child, Logan Hartnett had not missed a turn around the Merries on the night of Bohane Fair. The sights of it never changed:

Sweatin’ lunks of spud-ater lads in off Nothin’ took turns to slap the hammer at the test-your-strength meter.

Chinkee old-timers threw five-bob notes in each other’s faces at the dog fight.

Face-offs erupted between fiends for the affections of particular tushies, the shrieked challenges as old as time in Bohane:

‘Said c’mon!’

‘Mon way out of it so!’

‘Said c’mon so!’

‘Mon!’

Dreary-voiced yodellers up on Tangier orange crates howled death ballads. Knots of SBJ devotees from the Norrie towers knelt on the stones and joined hands to pray against the evil of the Bohane frolics but they were as much a part of them as everyone else. The lights of the Merries were a gaiety against the darkness that had descended over the Bohane front. The whirligigs turned young lovers through the air, and the screams of the girls spiralled, wrapped around, twisted.

A strolling brass band played lost-time waltzes.

A pikey rez sound system set up on the back of a horse cart spun rocksteady plates.

A transex diva hollered Milano arias from atop a bollard.

At the rodeo an eight-year-old Nothin’ child stayed the course and rode an epileptic Connemara pony into the dirt and great hollers of approval rose – the kid had a future.

And the girls’ screams twisted, turned in the air.

Bets were hollered, notes counted, palms spat on. There were fire-eaters from Faro, sword-swallowers from Samoa, jugglers from Galway. Pikey grannies read palms, stars, windsong.

Shots of primo Beast were offered at a fair price by the infamous retard brothers from the Nothin’ massif and the polis turned a blind eye having made off with a couple of crates theyselves.

There were stabbings, molestings, stompings.

Bohane city rose up on the spiral of the girls’ screams as they twisted in the air.

And Logan came upon the boy Cantillon then. He sat alone on the harbour wall – the fishmonger’s orphan, his glands swollen with quiet rage. He was lit gaudily by the lights of the revel and he looked at Logan as if he knew him from somewhere but could not quite place him.

The smile the boy gave was faint and murderous.

Logan raised an eyebrow in soft questioning but it was not answered. He approached but the boy hopped from the wall, and walked a little ways ahead, through the Merries’ crowd, and he took the same stride as Logan, precisely, with his hands clasped behind his back – this was a mockery.

He turned once and winked, the boy Cantillon, and then he disappeared into the throng.

‘Mon so!’

‘Said c’mon way out of it so!’

‘Said c’mon!’

And Blind Nora gave voice again to her old song:

The Gant walked off his nausea but not his bitterness. He settled into a circuit of the Trace and De Valera Street, a ritual circling of the old city, and all the while he watched for her. He saw her slip into the face of every young tush he passed by, and the drums of Bohane city carried a rhythm and a message both.

Maybe he would never walk himself clear of… Macu… Macu… Immaculata.

Girly Hartnett, on the occasion of her nintieth Fair, stood before a full-length mirror in her suite at the Bohane Arms Hotel. She wore stockings, a suspender belt, a bodice and a scowl. Mysterious injections from a whizz-kid Chinkee sawbones were keeping her upright. She laid a frail hand across her belly and sucked in deeply. She eyed herself dispassionately. She made a plain and honest read of the situation, and it was this:

She wasn’t in bad fuckin’ nick at all.

A particular knock sounded. She cried an answer to it. Jenni Ching entered. She wore a white leather catsuit up top of silver bovvers, and this outfit Girly now considered.

‘Choice,’ she said.

Jenni raised a moscato bottle, found it empty, and instead poured herself a slug of John Jameson from the bottle on the bedside table.

Downed it in one, and lit a cigar.

‘Who breaks the news to him?’ Jenni said.

‘That ain’t your worry, child. Now c’mon an’ get me dressed.’

Jenni went and slid the door of the mirrored wardrobe and flicked through the frocks that were piled there – many of them dated back as far as the lost-time.

‘You decided, Girly?’

Girly sighed.

‘I’m wondering if I shouldn’t go with a class of an ankle-length?’ she said. ‘Maybe the ermine trim? Kinda, like… Lana Turner-style?’

Jenni fetched it and unzipped it. As she offered it, she asked of her mentor quietly:

‘What do I do later, Girly?’

‘You jus’ got to show yerself.’ Girly took the old frock and sniffed it. She passed it back. She raised her feeble arms above her head.

‘Now strap me in,’ she said, ‘and alert the authorities.’

A line of hoss polis came along the cobbles towards the S’town footbridge.

Sand-pikey taunts sounded cross-river.

From the Merries, dockside, Logan watched and listened.

He lingered a while by the dog fights.

Winked at the old bookmaker there – an Afghan off the Rises.

A pair of bull terriers went at it, their great muscled necks hunched, their hackles heaped and muzzles locked, the blood coming in spurts.

‘Who’d ya fancy, Mr H?’

Logan carefully regarded the dogs – he let a cupped palm take the weight of his chin.

‘I’d put tuppence on meself yet,’ he said.

The alleyway of the Smoketown dune end:

Clicker’d heels on smooth cobbles.

Two young men circled but slowly.

Each handled a shkelp and moved warily, slowly.

Tip-tap, the heelclicks… tip… tap… tip… but slowly.

Seeping of bile and poison.

Jealousy’s bile.

Fear’s poison.

They circled.

Then a lunge…

A feint…

A stumbling…

A righting.

They circled.

A lunge.

A feint.

Shkelp blades gleamed as moonlight pierced the Murk.

They circled.

Wolfie kid and the Far-Eye.

They circled.

No taunts, no foulspeak, no curses.

Just a lunge.

A feint.

A stumbling.

A righting.

They circled.

They lunged.

Their blades ripped the air.

There came a time always on the night of August Fair when the badness took over.

Clock outside the Yella Hall sounded nine bells, and then ten, and then eleven, and nastiness cut the air – it was as high-pitched and mean as the homicide cry of the gulls.

The surfeit of moscato soured in the belly.

The herb took on a darker waft.

The dream-pipe twisted more than it mellowed.

And the fists of all the young fiends balled into hard tight knots, and the tushies egged ’em on…

‘Said y’takin’ that, like?’

…and scraps broke out all over the wynds, on the front, along the snakebend roll of De Valera Street, and on either side of the footbridge.

The decent and the cowardly fled along the escape routes offered by the New Town streets.

Rest of us piled in like savages.

And this year the badness was set to follow a particular design – an S’town riot was orchestrated.

It took quickly.

Big Dom Gleeson and Ol’ Boy Mannion had a vantage view of the riot from the hot tub on the roof of Ed ‘The Gypo’ Lenihan’s joint.

They had bottles of the Beast to hand, their herb-pipes also, and an amount of hoors on stand-by.

It was quickly a general bloodbath and the two men sighed in despair and happiness both.

On the main drag a line of sand-pikeys faced up to a massed assault of hoss polis.

Hoss polis were straining to make it to the S’town dune end to raid the premises there but the pikeys were keeping a firm line.

Smoketown revellers traded their frolics for violence, and the polis/sand-pikey face-off as the night progressed took in random participators. Eyes were being taken out down there, and ears were bitten off, and gobs were twisted open.

‘Is it any wonder, really,’ said Ol’ Boy, ‘that this place has the bad name it has?’

Yes and the hardwind was making speeches agin the August night and fresh hordes of sand-pikey back-up came in off the dunes and fell in by their brethren and wore hare-skin pelts and had branded themselves with hot irons from the forge – abstract symbols of the sand-pikey cult were engraved on every chest – and they waved dirks and tyre-irons and then a quare shake of polis back-up trudged over the Smoketown footbridge and it was noted that they were guzzling whiskey and moscato from carry-sacks as they came, and taking nips of the Beast, and howling the ritual chants of the polis frats, and they aimed headlong for the sand-pikeys who were about an equal to them in number and certainly in terms of derangement.

‘Tell you one thing,’ said Ol’ Boy, ‘this shower will keep goin’ a while yet.’

Big Dom, meantime, had arranged a tushie on his lap and he was gently brushing her hair with a pearl-encrusted brush and the girl’s eyes glazed with dream-sent romance.

‘They’ll take quare damage on both sides, Mr Mannion.’

‘Much,’ said Ol’ Boy, ‘to the Hartnett plan.’

The Gant saw her pass through the 98er Square.

He followed.

She took the turn of a wynd, and then another, and she looked back, and she saw that it was him, but she did not stop.

‘Macu!’

He watched her go. He allowed her to disappear into the darkness of a sudden turn. He said beneath his breath:

‘Don’t ever go back to him.’

Prince Tubby the Far-Eye’s death journey was a beautiful voyage. He sailed over the clouds and across his dune-side terrain and the great spectacle once more was enacted for him.

Here was a place of wind and rain and violent starburst, where the throw of light is ever-changing, is constantly shifting, and he saw the great expanse of the bog plain, and the lamps of Bohane city, too, as they burned against the night of August Fair.

Wolfie Stanners sat on the stone steps cut into the river wall and he held both hands tightly against a gut wound and he closed his eyes and a fever sweat broke on his forehead as the S’town riot raged nearby.

Heard the black surge of the Bohane as it called to him.

Big Dom topped a fresh bottle of Beast and torched a whackload of primo Big Nothin’ bushweed sourced from the pikey rez.

He squinted to bring into focus the progress of the riot:

The beak of the law was blunted by the sand-pikey assault; the pikey ferocity was dulled by polis resolve.

And lives went under, it has to be said, but as quickly as their vitals dimmed they came to again, out beneath the Nothin’ plain, in the ruts and tunnels of the Bohane underworld, where the strange ferns rustle and the black dogs roam.

Meantime:

Ol’ Boy Mannion nodded in the direction of the Smoketown footbridge.

‘Y’watchin’?’ he said.

Big Dom clocked it.

‘The killer gal,’ he said.

Jenni Ching surveyed the riot serenely from the high arch of the footbridge – bopped smoke rings from her pouted lips.

Logan knew that the boy had circled to follow him.

He could sense movement behind on the wharf.

He sighed in long-suffering.

He turned into the stockyards and slipped into the shadows to wait.

The boy Cantillon appeared.

Logan stepped out, noiselessly, and he was quick as a stoat as he took the boy’s throat in a forearm lock, and he took from the boy’s belt his shkelp and he drove it into his heart, and whispered to him – unrepeatable words – as the young life began to drain.

Felt the tip of that life as it tilted towards the dark but he took no savour from the moment.

He let the Cantillon boy fall and he considered for an incredulous moment, there in the foul stockyards, the advanced stupidity of the dead kid’s frozen features.

The Long Fella would not stain his dress-shkelp with such frivolous blood.

He walked on. There was a tiredness now on Logan. He knew his own line would end soon enough and, with it, his renown. The succession had been decided beyond him when he was lost to an April dream. All that was left, maybe, was the consolation of Macu’s touch.

He aimed his boots for the Café Aliados.

‘How would you imagine all this might play out, Mr Mannion?’

‘Not prettily, Dom.’

At Blind Nora’s low-rent bordello the Gant cued an old seven-incher on the turntable, and as the tune came through he felt it in the balls of his feet, and he skanked alone on the floor, and the toothless hoors on the ratty old couches grinned and hoarsely sang along, and Nora handclapped the beat, and the Gant danced slowly, and his bearing was quiet, and proud, and sane.

The Café Aliados was deserted but for the bar girl as Logan waited on a high stool there.

He sipped at a John Jameson.

On the cusp of midnight he slipped off the stool and went to the jukebox and he selected a slow-burner of an old calypso tune from the lost-time.

She’d know this one.

He sat again by the barside as the old music played and with an unsure hand he fixed his hair.

And at midnight precisely, on this the night of August Fair, the cut yellow flowers in a vase on the Aliados countertop trembled as the sideway door opened, and stilled again as it closed, and he turned a quiet swivel on his stool.

‘Well,’ she said.

A set of ninety Bohane Fairs were graven in the hard sketch lines of her face, and already he was resigned.

‘Girly,’ he said.

The night aged, and the city quietened along its length, and the young were drawn by the hard pull of their blood to the river. We throbbed with the pulse of August in Bohane.

At intervals along the wharf, on the stone steps of the river wall, the young lazed in pairs and held each other. Their lips made words – promises, devotions – and the words carried on the river’s air and mingled with the words of its murmurous dead. A single voice was made in the mingling, and this voice had in mysterious ways the quality of silence, for it blocked out all else; it mesmerised.

The taint came off the water as a delicious mist.

A green lizard crept between a crack in a fall of steps and climbed across a mound of flesh and fed on the blood that caked around the gut wound of a dead boy with a blackbird’s stare.

The hardwind rose and shifted the cloudbank and the rooftops emerged from the Murk – the city’s shape reasserting – and now the lamplight of the city was fleet on the water. The water played its motion on the green wrack and stone of the river wall. We listened – rapt – as it carried through the city of Bohane, as it ran to the hidden sea, as the sea dragged on its cables.

Summer’s reach was shortening; we would face soon what the autumn might bring, and what the winter. But the city was content on this one night for time to slow, for a while at least, and it sent its young down to the river.

First ache of light was inaugural:

Jenni Ching rode bareback a Big Nothin’ palomino along the Bohane front.

On either side of her mount – as its flanks worked smoothly, slowly in the ochre dawn – a half-dozen wilding girls marched in ceremonial guard – they wore cross-slung dirk-belts, groin-kicker boots, white vinyl zip-ups, black satin gym shorts – and the native gulls in the early morning were raucous above the river.

A mad-eyed black-back dived at the killer-gal Ching but she raised a glance and eyed it as madly for an answer and the gull swerved and turned and wheeled away downriver.

Jenni cried a taunt after it:

‘Mmwwaaoork!’

And all the girls laughed.

The procession moved, and the chained dogs in the merchant yards along the front cowered in the cold shadows of morning, their own thin flanks rippling with fright.

Hung upon the livid air a sequence of whinnies and pleadings, the dogs, and the first taste of the new life came to Jenni

as she rode out the measured beat of her ascension and a bump of fear, too, y’check me

as she searched already the eyes of her own ranks for that yellow light, ambition’s pale gleam

as she saw in the brightening sky at a slow fade the lost-time’s shimmer pass.