Long Fella was working the latest plan from Girly’s play-book. Goal: the immediate pacification of the Norrie kind. The Norries in humid springtime were restless, wounded and brooding, and a play was urgently needed.
‘We picked her up,’ the polis confirmed, ‘but that’s a dangerous game on the Rises, y’understand? When tis a Cusack kid we’s talkin’?’
Logan slid distastefully a fold of notes to the polis. The fathead smirked, and took the fold, and raised it to his porcine snout and sniffed it, and then stood from his desk.
‘’Course it was Mr Reid the master butcher did the job itself,’ he said. ‘Said to say t’ya tis a favour answered.’
‘Whatever that might mean,’ Logan said.
Polis picked a ring of keys from the wall with his tab-stained fingers. Swung the ring as he trailed down a dank, urine-smelling corridor. Strip lights overhead buzzed, failed, briefly came to life again, and failed again. Corridor sang with old spirits. Logan as he followed the fat polis closed his eyes – he was tapering yet from a Ho Pee dream – and heard the screeches of age-dead Fenians seep from the walls. No shortage of ghosts in this place. There were occult frequencies in the Back Trace heard only by dogs and the ’bino.
He came with the polis on the cell rooms down back of the station.
Polis slid a key from the ring into a cell’s lock and the lock clacked, unclicked, and the polis flicked a switch outside and as they entered a dim bulb found a young girl on a straw pallet. Polis winked for Logan and went and crouched down by the girl. Polis took her wrists and turned her palms to show Logan the fresh marks that had been skilfully cut in:
A pair of clover-shaped stigmata.
Logan nodded, painfully – his mother was such a sick old fuck; the skewed logic of her derangement was beyond even him – and the polis rose and left the cell, sniggering.
The girl looked up at him. She was hard-eyed as any Norrie bint but she could not keep the scare from her voice. She said:
‘I’ll do what you wan’ me to, ’bino …’
Logan got down on his haunches to meet the girl with a level and reassuring gaze.
‘I know that, sweet,’ he said. ‘And you’ll do fine work for me.’
She cried despite herself.
‘Hush, lovie,’ he said. ‘Now I hope that fat polis fuck ain’t been taking no undue liberties … Was it painful for you, child? With the butcher?’
She looked at her palms – shrugged. No more than twelve, and a pure Norrie hard-face, but awed, all the same, by his proximity. In Bohane, you make your name and let your name do the work.
‘We need to get this trick working, Little Cuse,’ he said. ‘You’ve been missing for three days and three nights, check?’
‘S’right.’
‘You were drawn to Big Nothin’,’ he said. ‘You felt a strange drag from the bog plain. Something brought you to the High Boreen – it was a particular star in the sky, a bright, bright star. And then, upon a high knoll … do you know what a knoll is, Little Cuse?’
‘Nah.’
‘Class of a wee hill,’ Logan sighed. ‘And out there, in the night, on this
knoll
you came across a puck goat – you know what a puck goat is …’
He turned his own palm and showed on the inside of his wrist the finely inked tat of a puck’s horns – symbol of the Trace Fancy.
‘I know that awrigh’, ’bino.’
‘And the goat spoke to you, Little Cuse. But as he spoke to you, it was the words of the Sweet Baba you heard, y’check me?’
The eyes of Little Cuse widened.
‘Baba took the form of a puck, ’bino?’
Logan inclined his head respectfully.
‘He most certainly did, girl-child. And now His Perpetual Sweetness has left the mark on you. Do you understand?’
Mouth open, eyes popping, she displayed the faked stigmata – Logan liked this kid.
‘And listen good now,’ he said, ‘because the Sweet Baba has passed to you a special message for your people.’
‘What’s it, ’bino?’
He leaned in, and he whispered to her a moment, and the message was understood. He let it be known, too, what would happen should she fail to comply precisely with his instructions. He stood then and he led the girl from the cell. The fat polis leaned back against a corridor wall and smiled like the fondest of uncles. Gestured to a back door down the far end of the corridor. Logan brought the girl there and he kissed his bunched fingertips and he placed the kiss lightly, so very lightly, on her cheek. He trailed then his fingertips along the filigree down of her arm’s fine hair, and this touch was electric, his eyes closed; he felt youth, he felt vitality, he felt the sense-memory of Macu, when young. His eyes watered, his gut lurched. His throat screamed for the dream-pipe. He turned the girl loose to the dusky streets. He had made a decent connection, he felt. He came back down the corridor. Fat polis grinned, and he said:
‘Baba due an appearance, Mr H?’
‘Sweet Jay on the comeback trail,’ Logan said.
He went again to the evening and he walked the Back Trace shadows. Girly’s shrewd reckon: gullibility on the Northside Rises was to be fostered and worked with. Long Fella admired her canniness as he walked the darkening Trace.
The Back Trace was the brain of the city, and he felt the wynds’ pulsing: an arterial throb.
Pitbull behind a chain fence lurched for him.
He hissed at the dog.
It barked a yard of stars.
31
All Our Yesterdays
Big Dom Gleeson, the corpulent news hound, and Balthazar Mary Grimes, his hunchback lensman, were on official
Vindicator
business in the Bohane Trace. It was dusk of the same hot April evening – with a mango wash to the sky above the rooftops – and Dom was breathing hard and fretfully as he followed his snapper down a dizzying tangle of wynds and turns.
‘Go handy on me, Balt, please! I am not a young gentleman!’
‘You’re thirty-eight, Mr Gleeson.’
Through the dank squares they went, and they were deep in the foul and ancient maze, and they came at length to a certain tenement building in the shadows of the arcade market. Dom took from the fob pocket of his mustard-yellow waistcoat a piece of paper on which the address was scrawled, and he showed it to Balthazar, and the hunchback turned from address to tenement, and back again, and yet again for the triple-check, and he nodded.
‘S’the place awrigh’, Mr Gleeson.’
Dom gathered himself with a couple of deep breaths and he pushed in the heavy door of the tenement.
‘Sufferin’ Baba above on the cross,’ he said. ‘The heart would be skaw-ways in you, Balt?’
Balthazar shrugged, and grimly lugged his medieval Leica through the door, passed by his boss, and set first to the stairs.
‘He knows we’re comin’,’ he said. ‘Let’s move.’
They climbed a flight of the old stone stairs, and then climbed again, winding at each turn, and climbing again, and the building was deadly silent, with an eerieness palpable, and Big Dom was frankly unmanned, his bottom lip quivered babyishly, but he was set all the same to his task. There was prize copy for the taking.
‘All Our Yesterdays’ was by far the most popular and prestigious column of the
Bohane Vindicator
. It was penned by Dominick himself, in a limpid and melancholy prose, and its stock was reminiscence and anecdotes of the Bohane lost-time. It appeared – twenty-seven inches of nine-point type over three column drops – in the Thursday evening edition, and the queue for it formed early outside the paper’s office and snaked far down the streets of the New Town. This week’s column, Dom was certain, would attract a record readership.
‘What I’m wonderin’, Mr Gleeson,’ Balt panted against the climb, ‘is why’s he agreein’ to the interview jus’ now?’
Dom rested a moment on the turn of a stair. Smiled; sweated.
‘Ol’ Boy’s worked his powers of persuasion,’ he said. ‘What we’re tryin’ to do, Balt, is distract the town from atein’ itself alive.’
‘But what’s in it for the man hissel’?’
Dom shrugged as he began to climb again.
‘It lets a certain party know he’s back in town, don’t it? An’ that he ain’t afraid to show his jaws.’
The Gant Broderick appeared then on the landing at the top of the last flight of stairs. He had to bend a little against the angle of the low ceiling. He looked down without expression to the climbing pair, and he gestured lazily to indicate the door to the garret space behind, and he turned and went through.
‘Mercy,’ Dom whispered as he climbed the last haul of steps, ‘but he’s still a powerful cut of a man, Balt?’
Balthazar nodded grimly.
‘Big unit,’ he agreed.
They entered the spartan garret. Gant sat on the bed and he eyed them calmly and he massaged with one massive hand the other. Dom removed his pork-pie hat in greeting.
‘Mr Gant …’
‘Gant is fine,’ said the Gant. ‘Jus’ Gant, okay?’
‘Yes, sir. Gant … sir.’
The Gant eyed the hunchback as he went about propping his Leica and mounting its flash. The Gant looked to the window set in the garret’s slanting roof, and said:
‘We got a nice aul’ tawny light comin’ through yet. Probably don’ need that flash, y’heed?’
Balthazar looked to the evening light, and he nodded.
‘Might be nice alrigh’, Gant …’
‘It’ll be lovely,’ the Gant said. ‘And don’t be shy. You can come up good and close.’
The Gant turned expertly then his square jaw to the tawniness of the light as it poured through, with dust motes rising atmospherically about him, and the hunchback crouched in close, and he framed the old scoundrel so that he loomed, poetically, and the G allowed to form on his features a poignant, dark, unknowable glaze.
Click-and-whirr of the old Leica’s motor:
Prime shot … peach … one for the portfolio … manly gravitas in haunted black-and-white.
Dom Gleeson meantime sat on the garret’s one hardback chair and nervously he licked the tip of his pencil and turned to a fresh page of his spiral-bound notebook. With a nervous croak to his tone, he began:
‘Mr Gant … Gant … It’s been a … been a stretch o’ lonesome moons since ya last hauled yer bones aroun’ the city o’ Bohane, sir. So what I’m wonderin’ is –’
‘Twenty-five years such a long time?’ the Gant said.
‘Well, we ain’t talkin’ yesterday nor today, sir.’
‘No,’ the Gant handsomely smiled. ‘That we ain’t.’
They spoke then at length of the Bohane lost-time. They talked of the great feeling for it that had drawn the Gant to the creation once more. They talked of those who had passed, and of how their spirits persisted yet and carried always on the air of the city (or lingered, maybe, away yonder on the bog plain). Dom Gleeson felt that the Gant spoke lyrically, yes, but guardedly, and at length he sucked up the courage to launch an especially toothsome question.
‘I s’pose what a lot o’ people would be wonderin’, Gant, is … ah … Well, sir, about these pas’ twenty-five year, like … Where the hell you been, G?’
The Gant as the last of the evening light began to fail smiled wryly at the fat newsman, and at his hunchback accomplice who sat cross-legged now on the floor, and he said:
‘Over.’
Jerked a rueful thumb easterly.
‘Crossed the water.’
The Gant confided that he had roamed for many a desperate year England’s cheerless marshes. He worked the dark cities of the north for any who had the price of a shkelping. Got older. Got sadder. Got fatter. He came out of that rough trade with the sure scars of it. Worked the riverboats for a while …
‘Like many a Bohane émigré before ya, sir,’ Gleeson said.
… worked the Tyne, the Mersey, and the Clyde. He spent a cruel infinity staring into the smoke-coloured wind that blows always across those dead rivers. He saw the Wigan riots of ’36, he saw the ascendance of Borthwick in Macclesfield, and he saw the bloody last days of D’Alton’s Humberside Fancy.
Balt Grimes whistled low.
‘Now that was some fuckin’ massacre!’
He spent long nights, he said, walking the backstreets of strange cities. Skunk hours in the demon mist. The Gant walked every street of every city and they were never his streets and when the streets are not your own they are not for dreaming. He admitted that he had seen too much. He allowed that he had found solace, for a time, in the arms of the Sweet B.
‘Happen a lot of lads when they go over,’ said Big Dom, kindly.
‘I renounced the blade,’ said the Gant, and he smiled against the dark that seeped then into the attic room.
He told that he had spoken the Word in the West Midlands for a time. Found a congregation of swayers, swooners, shriekers. Spoke out against the violence of life. Spoke out against the lust. Spoke out against the lies. Oh yes, there he was, stood up on a beer crate, in tragic Wolverhampton, with tears in his eyes, and he hollering the Baba-love.
‘A man with a good brogue,’ said Big Dom, ‘would get a start easy enough at the preachin’ over.’
‘Didn’t last at that trade neither,’ the Gant chuckled.
‘Oh?’
‘Bothered a pawful o’ young tush an’ got ran out o’ Brum.’
The roofops of the Trace beyond were ghostly as they settled into night’s shade; bitter, the memories that settled in the Gant. A taste of Macu, in her youth, had left him with an insatiable taste for girls of that age. This was not the least of her crimes against him.
‘I was on life’s great turning wheel,’ the Gant said, and Big Dom scribbled furiously.
‘The longer the past receded, the clearer it became in me mind’s eye,’ the Gant said.
Philosopher we got on our hands, the hunchback Grimes reckoned.
‘I was drawn back to the lost-time,’ the Gant said.
‘And did you find it a dangerous place to linger?’ Big Dom showed his skill.
‘Yeah,’ said the Gant. ‘It’s too sweet back there.’
Big D thinking: headline –
LOST-TIME TOO SWEET FOR THE LINGERING
Beneath them, the wynds simmered with life in the oily night, and the savour of a sadness came up; the men quietened, and listened.
‘Been changes around here sure enough,’ Dom sighed.
‘It’s all change.’ Balt, too, fell woebegone.
‘Not all change is for the worse,’ the Gant smiled.