City of Bohane: A Novel (17 page)

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

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

He raised his eyebrows.

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

The Authority men shrugged in sad agreement.

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

The Authority members edged forwards in their seats.

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

Ol’ Boy shrewdly grinned.

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

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

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

III

APRIL

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:

2 0 1 1

2 0 5 3

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.