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: