City of Bohane: A Novel (12 page)

But nobody came to free him.

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

‘Please!’ he screamed. ‘Someone!’

Nobody came.

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

‘C’mon’ll someone!’

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

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

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

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

‘Please, someone!’

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

‘C’mon, someone!’

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

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

‘Fuck you doin’ up there, Stanners?’

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

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

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

‘Min’ yer shoes,’ said Fucker Burke.

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

‘Y’help me get him?’

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

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

Later:

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

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

‘Th’fuck, like?’

Typical Norrie squawk of fear in there, sketch?

‘Big fella now, aintcha?’ Wolfie said.

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

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

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

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

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

Lay on the quay, then, quenched but sizzling.

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

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

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

No Bohane Fancy ever had two names to it.

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

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

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

Wolfie wore:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Ne’er a sign o’ that bead, no?’

A chill came into Wolfie then.

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

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

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

‘Be more careful with that,’ he said.

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

‘You’ll have got the message, Wolf?’

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

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

‘Underneath the bridge, Wolfie?’

The Gant shook his head sadly.

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

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

‘You working a plan, Wolfie?’

Wolfie turned from him and looked straight ahead.

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

Wolfie didn’t answer.

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

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

17

The Shortest Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ol’ Boy wore:

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

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

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

Nothin’s colours in low December:

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

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

The purples, discriminating, of the sleeping gorse.

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