‘So who’d you reckon on, Girly? If Logan’s done his time …’
Girly creased again with laughter – as though she’d answer! The laughter was torture but slowly she recovered, and she poured another whiskey, and she lit another tab, and she said:
‘Tell ya this, Ol’ Boy. S’been keepin’ me awake nights. But I’ll keep ya posted on me call, y’check?’
35
On Riverside Boulevard
Take a left out of the Yella Hall station – as so few of us ever do – and you will come quickly to a long, curving run of pathway known as Riverside Boulevard. It follows the Bohane river along the last of the city’s bluffs until the river opens out to a vague, estuarine nowhere. Haggard seabirds hover above the empty walkway, and the air is ghostly. It is a place few of us go to because of its strangeness. You will encounter there an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. Invariably, that odd swoop in the spirit occurs, and you are flung back to an inner lost-time that you can never quite place. It is a frightening sensation – one senses an odd lurch within, a movement that can feel almost nauseous. Thoughts come loose. Souls hang on the air. Warps occur. And Logan Hartnett, dream-sick in April, sold to the pipe and heartache, had begun almost daily to haunt the place.
He walked it; he fed on the weird. He chased with clouded eyes the flight of the demon skuas. Hummed softly. And he made – with pale lips moving – his dark reckonings.
Now a particular afternoon of April presented, and the ’bino was again on Riverside, but today he was not alone. He sat on a bollard, as the hot river wind blew, and he gazed up, most pleasantly, at a very nervous Fucker Burke.
Fucker hung his limbs from the chainlink fence that edged the Bohane river hereabouts and he slapped at imagined bugs on his neck.
Logan regarded him with a loving smile.
‘You’ll notice a certain feeling, Fucker?’
‘This place, Mr H, it’s like …’
‘Is it sendin’ you, Fuck?’
Fucker had in his voice a child’s quiver:
‘Ain’t feelin’ so hot now, Mr H, if I’m bein’ honest with ya.’
Fucker threw a hopeful glance towards the Bohane downtown – its rooftops loomed royally in the near distance – but the Long Fella shook his head sadly; there was no going back.
‘You’d pass along this way much yourself, Fucker?’
Spoke to the boy in the sweetest hush, as though whispering a lullaby, and Fucker felt a chill dampness at the base of his spine.
‘No, Mr Hartnett.’
Logan nodded, firmly, as if that was the best tactic the boy could choose.
‘So tell me about Wolfie and Jenni,’ he said.
The jaw lolloped on the galoot boy Burke.
‘What would I know, H?’
‘Are they rock-steady, Fuck?’
‘W-wolfie is.’
‘Got the hook in his gut, he has? I thought as much. And Jenni?’
Fucker made an attempt at indifference.
‘Dunno, Mr H. I mean she givin’ him the whiff of it, like, but …’
Fucker’s words trailed off. His eyes rolled some. Logan let a silence hover, for just a moment, and he watched carefully to see where it would send the boy. Fucker Burke had a routinely Gothical West of Ireland childhood under his belt, and it was there again, his own desperate lost-time, beneath the glaze of his green eyes. He was sent to it. The horrors he had seen, and those by his own hand begotten. There was no way to escape the tingling of his past; it was ever-present, like tiny fires that burned beneath the skin.
‘Come back to me now, Fucker.’
‘You think the Baba’ll wan’ me for a finish, H?’
‘Shush, boy, and come back to me – the Baba loves you.’
Fucker Burke swung down from the chainlink and shuffled his feet uselessly. Shifted his weight from the left to the right and back again. Logan raised a hand to still him.
‘What do you think of the situation with Wolfie, Fuck?’
‘Situation how, Mr Hartnett?’
Logan smiled delightedly, as if a notion had just occurred.
‘Would you say we should do away with him?’
There were dried flecks of spit at the corners of the ’bino’s mouth – they cracked as he spoke.
‘But H, Wolf is like the Fancy’s bes’ –’
‘Are ye close still?’
There was a wrinkle to the ’bino’s collar, and his kecks were unpressed.
‘Close ain’t got nothin’ to do with it. Jus’ ain’t seein’ what Wolfie’s done.’
‘Loyalty is a tremendous asset, Fucker Burke.’
‘I don’t like it out here, Mr H.’
There was a greenish wash to the ’bino’s deadhouse pallor – the colour of a mould.
‘Oh I know that Riverside feeling, boy. Things rise up in you, don’t they?’
Swallowed hard, Fucker, a crab-apple of terror descending and then rising again the length of his throat.
‘We strollin’ back, H?’
‘And what about Jenni – should we do away with Jenni Ching, Fucker?’
‘I wasn’t brought up to mess with no Chinkees, Mr Hartnett.’
‘You’d be as wise not to, child, under normal circumstances. But what I’m hearing about Jenni Ching?’
He shook his head slowly.
‘She’s got plans, ain’t she, Fuck?’
‘Don’t know about that, H.’
‘Do you not? I see.’
Logan stood from the bollard and approached the boy and he placed his hand on the back of the boy’s head and pulled him close. He leaned in, brow to brow. He said:
‘Let me tell you a few things, Fucker. All this?’
A wee swoop with the palm was shaped – a gesture to take in the world as was.
‘All this is going to pass away from you so quickly now, hear me? You’ve been in your glory, Fucker Burke. A set of grapes on you and a few bob put away and I dare say certain females who’ve been deranged enough to put themselves at your disposal. You’ve had your lovely dog, Angelina. And I understand what you did, Fucker. I do. It felt as if your life would never start but in fact it’s been racing past you all the while. But this ain’t for play no more. What are you, eighteen?’
The certainty of what was to come apparent, Fucker’s tone was flat now with resignation.
‘I’m seventeen, Mr H.’
‘Oh that’s a beautiful age to be, Fuck. You think you’re going to live forever … Well, I’m here to tell you that you ain’t.’
Logan made an O with his lips, and he blew a slow, steady whooshing, like the wind through the hollows of a wood, and it was aimed directly at the boy’s face.
The breath lingered as a foul breeze – Fucker smelt the pipe-burn and the Ho Pee on it, and the rot of an old outlaw that he would never be.
Logan said:
‘Look at me, Fucker. Look at me, sweetness. I can’t say that I ain’t had the luck. I’ve been twenty-five years with the Fancy to my name. I’ve been reefed six times and I’m still sucking at the poison air. An accident, do you think?’
He smiled, and the pale blue of his eyes showed the colours of sky and water, refracted.
‘Did you think I was fit to move on from things, Fucker? That I’d go and play a few hands of rummy and dribble my moscato and get fat?’
The boy’s lips greyed in expectation. He felt again the breath of the Long Fella on his face, the cold hand on his throat.
‘Why did you do it, Fucker?’
A mark of the city that it was not fear that flushed the boy’s face now but shame.
‘Mr H, I never meant nothin’ by –’
‘Gave the Gant everything you had, Fucker.’
‘H, please.’
‘I know what you told him, Fucker.’
‘Don’t have to do this, H, please …’
A strange glow came to Fucker: what little of love and intimacy he had known in his life surfaced for a last time and gave succour for the journey ahead.
‘I know because the Gant told me, Fucker.’
The air on Riverside was washed by the Atlantic gusts that came over the estuary and it carried all the dread of its ghosts. The Bohane all the while ferried a drag of gravel and stones and the drag swirled drunkenly deep down – it had the sound of chains being swung.
Logan slid the dirk slowly and let it sit heavily in the boy’s gut. Then he worked it from side to side, a neat and easy movement, and he held the boy, gently, as his head slumped forward, and he whispered to him.
He stepped back, and with a deft wrench removed the dirk, and the vitals flowed as he kept the boy propped still.
He felt an oddness then, Logan, it was a kind of … lightness, and he near enough succumbed to it.
He took a breath down, hard, and held it.
Let his brow lean in to the dying boy’s again and rested it there a moment and asked forgiveness.
He stepped back and the last of Fucker Burke was left to slump where it would – like a useless hand puppet – and he stepped nimbly aside. With a stick from the ground and the blood that had spilt he daubed on the path by the body the word ‘Judas’ – it was written in his big, nervous, childish hand.
He scaled the chainlink fence then and descended a set of thick stone steps cut into the river wall.
Daintily with forefinger and thumb he raised the ankle cuff of his trouser leg and dipped a Croat boot into the water to wash it clean.
Saw a red vibrancy mingle with the tarry brown of bog water and so quickly disappear in the great mass of the river.
36
Macu’s Dilemma
Then it was night-time in the Trace.
She walked the wynds, and she came at length to a small, deserted square, and she sat for a while on the wrought-iron bench. Dead lovers’ names were scratched into the wooden seat back. The growth all about was so fervent, so cloying, so diseased. Fescue grass gone to the black rot, and the cat’s tail that climbed mangily the tenement walls, and the sickly perfume of the clematis that persisted, even yet, and trailed from the rooftops; petals on a grave. Late spring was a rude throbbing as the Bohane creation ascended to the peak of its year, and ever closer to its precipice.
The pulsing of April brought a soreness to her glands.
Sometimes, in the good times, they didn’t even have to speak to know what the other was feeling. A child would have put fear in the town, sure enough, and would have given to the marriage a motive force. But a child never came, and the space was filled by his jealousy.
He would come back to the Beauvista manse in the small, dim hours, and he would say:
Were you out at all?
Did you see anyone?
What have you been doing?
What did you do today?
Where did you go today?
Who did you see today, Macu?
Who did you see today?
Were you out at all?
Where did you go?
Who did you see today, Macu?
It had made a child of him. He began to lock her in. She said that she would leave him if he turned those locks on her again, and he stopped for a while, and it drove him all the madder to stop, and he could no longer sleep at night.
He sat in the dark and watched over her.
Were you below in the town, Macu?
Who did you see today, girl?
He had the Fancy boys follow her. She would walk the New Town, at the hour of the evening paseo, and catch a sconce of Fucker Burke and Angelina acting blithe in a sideway – and Fucker wasn’t born to
blithe
– or Wolfie Stanners at a discreet distance behind, with his thyroidal eyes bulging.
She said:
This is not a life for me, Logan.
He dreamed up new ways of testing her. There was nothing he could do any more that would surprise her. Only the persistence of her love for him was a surprise to her.
Was she strong enough now to stay lost to him?
37
Speak a Dream
Midnight.
The Ho Pee Ching Oh-Kay Koffee Shoppe.
An upstairs salon.
And Logan Hartnett lay on the settle, and he placed softly the tips of his fingers on the back of Jenni Ching’s hand. The girl put the flame to the pipe for him. He drew deeply. She placed a dampened cloth on his brow.
Jenni said:
‘So you’d been doin’ her yet, y’had? Till she went an’ legged it on ya, like?’
‘With a long marriage, Jenni, one needs to make the effort.’
‘Fair dues t’ya, H. Guts o’ thirty year on, like, an’ still fleadhin’ the same aul’ bint … Not get samey?’
Logan squinted through the smoke and tightened his lips. Nobody else but Girly could talk to him like this. Hot night rippled in the salon’s dense air. A slow moment passed – it had somehow a memorial taste. He sighed for Fucker. He slipped a little deeper into his dream, and he felt the seep of the Bohane lost-time, and he softened.
‘Know how the Fancy got started, Jenni?’
Eyes-to-heaven from the Chinkee gal.
‘Here he goes,’ she said. ‘D’ya remember when and d’ya remember how – stall a halt, ’bino, till I goes an’ fetches me knittin’.’
‘Was on account of the gee-gees, going way back,’ he said. ‘When we had the horses running.’
She gave in to him.
‘Fancy was the lads what did the follyin’ o’ the hoss business, check?’
‘The only money in this town was horse money, Jenni. And that’s a fact, girl. In the Back Trace, out on the stoops? The boys would trade horse-talk all day. If we knew anything at all out here, we knew our horses. We had the best horses, the best track, best jockeys …’
‘Spooky, jockeys,’ said Jenni, ‘when you see ’em in the ol’ pix, like? Weird eyes.’
‘Fancy opened out from the horse business. Went into herb and dream and hoors.’
Jenni lit the flame again.
‘Always nice to hear about the olden days, H.’
He drew deep and held it a count against the nausea and then slowly exhaled. He ascended. She leaned in and kissed him. The kiss was slow and deep and not quickly to be recovered from.
‘The fuck is that comin’ from, Jenni?’
‘Jus’ a taste for ya, ’bino.’
‘Don’t ever do that again.’
‘Won’t so.’
‘You’d have the melt out on a fucking statue,’ he said. ‘How’ll the Gant get over you at all?’
A freeze ran through her sure enough.
‘Fuck y’sayin’ to me?’
‘He’ll get lonesome, girl. These long old spring evenings …’
Gathered herself quickly.
‘Am I lookin’ impressed, H?’
‘Oh I don’t blame you, girl. You need to keep the eye out on all sides in a small town. I’d almost have been disappointed if you hadn’t.’