Jenni’s breath came evenly. She looked hard at him. She said:
‘I didn’t give him nothin’ about the Fancy’s dealings.’
‘I know that, Jenni. He told me.’
For a moment she had no comeback, and looked scared. But she never let go the eye-lock. She said:
‘I ain’t no gommie lackeen, Logan.’
‘No, Jenni,’ he said. ‘If there’s one thing you ain’t it’s no gommie lackeen.’
38
Baba-love
Let it be said that the Hartnett magic still worked a drag across the city. Their reach yet was sinuous. It crabbed out across the rooftops, and each action they played in due course begot its reaction, and sure enough, before the month of April was done, there was an outbreak of Sweet Baba Jay mania on the Northside Rises.
In defeat, of course, they very often turned up there to religion. An SBJ revival needed no more than a little prompting. And within days of the faked stigmata appearing on the palms of the Cusack girl, there were holler-meetings being staged in the shebeen basements of the flatblocks. The meetings were writhing with fainters, swooners, hot-foot shriekers. There was a quare amount of roaring going on. One-time Norrie aggravators packed away the tyre-chains and the dirk-belts and the sweat was dripping off them as they swayed in the shebeens and roared tearful thanks to His Indescribable Sweetness. Great tremblings took hold of these boys and their knees buckled and oftentimes gave way altogether as Word was delivered from Messengers Unseen. Next thing, miracle gave onto miracle – as is the way – and there were reports that an SBJ icon atop the fountain outside Croppy Boy Heights had shed tears of blood. Sure the same wee stigmatic girl-chil’ of the Cusacks saw it with her own fervent eyes. And thus a congregation was on its knees around the icon, night and day, praying for more signs. The Norries were hugging each other and whispering blessings on the bleak avenues. It became a season of midnight visitations. In no time at all, the Sweet Baba Jay was showing up all over. Was said His Likeness had smiled down from the gable wall of an avenue grogpit. Was said His Likeness had appeared in the shape of a cloud over Louis MacNiece Towers. Was said His Likeness had formed, and shimmered, though briefly, in a puddle by the top of the 98 Steps. Norries were waking in the night and sitting bolt upright in their cots and crying out the Word of Love. Norrie sound systems had packed away their dub plates and their Trojan 45s and were playing for the shebeen gatherings a sacramental music of harpsong and hymnal chant. Women of the Northside were sporting a more modest cleavage line. They walked primly their Patterns of Devotion in the sweltering spring afternoons. They muttered half-remembered novenas as they paraded. Many found that their hair had taken on a fresh shine. There was great colour in everybody’s cheeks. Nobody went downtown much. They prayed for and pitied the doomed sinners down there. They forgave their recent losses. They forgave their fallen and their dead …
See the dream-fed twist of the ’bino’s crooked smile.
… and tiny yellow flags were cut out from great screeds of fabric choo-chooed in specifically for the purpose, and the flags were initialled ‘SBJ’ in an ornate hand soon mastered by lads henceforth to be known as flag-stylers, and the flags were tied onto lengths of rope at measured intervals and were strung from rooftop to rooftop of the flatblocks – dozens of them, then hundreds, then the sky was filled – and the effect was at once festive and pious.
Swearing all but disappeared. Beards were trimmed. Fornication – previously on the Northside an activity as common as sucking air and to be found, at all angles of the clock, on stairwells, in turf-bunkers, behind avenue wind-shelters, generally everywhere, and in broad daylight – was confined now to marital beds, and was soberly practised, missionary-style, and swiftly, wordlessly concluded. It became the habit of the Norrie gentleman to bite the pillow at the end-moment so as not to embarrass the air with expressions of bodily joy.
The yellow flags spun, the yellow flags turned, the yellow flags shimmered.
And though they were tied securely enough to withstand even the harshest assaults of Big Nothin’ hardwind, the flags were found when the wind got up to create a many-voiced cacophony – they rattled and groaned and sang in the wind, and if one listened to the flags for long enough, the effect was mesmeric, haunting, and it became the common understanding this spring that messages were being transmitted by Sweet Baba Jay through the medium of the flags.
Oh indeed.
And there were those on the Northside this particular spring we’re talking about who became acknowledged experts in flag-listening. These were generally older gents who had known a share of life. You would see them crouched on their haunches, there on the avenues, in the hot April afternoons, beneath the flags, listening, and betimes approaching each other to compare notes. Quiet, interested faces on them. Faces full of … Significance. And it became the practice that by teatime each day the listeners (as they were quickly named) would convene in the shebeen basement of a Croppy Boy Heights flatblock and come to agreement about the gist of the day’s message. The message would then be written in block letters a foot tall upon banners that were carried along the Northside avenues, for a period of one hour precisely, by local sluts. The sluts were given the punishment of banner-bearing for their attempted seductions of decent Baba-devoted young Norrie men. At holler-meetings nightly, it was argued that banner-bearing was hardly punishment enough for these Baba-denying harlot bitches, and that their private parts should by force be rendered useless, with the aid of knitting needles and hot knives, but this was controversial. An editorial comment in the
Vindicator
, while acknowledging and declaring joy at what it called ‘The Miracle of the Flags’ – a souvenir supplement was issued – had quietly suggested that genital mutilation might, at this stage, be a step too far, even by the standards of the Bohane uptown. And so for now the sluts merely marched with their heavy banners, and they wept under the strain of the weight, and upon the banners were such flag-whispered messages from the Sweet Baba Jay as:
Grog Is The Devil’s Spit!
Dogs Have Souls Too!
Polacks Can Never Be Clean!
Sweet Baba Jay was telling them which side was buttered, sure enough, and the people of the Northside were eternally grateful for His Direction. Each night, devout Norrie families would line the avenues for the slut parade. They would kneel and babble in tongues and they gave lusty voice to their Baba-love as the banners were carried past. If the sluts were treated cruelly and occasionally bottled as they stumbled along, it was felt that it was no more than those painted-up little trollops deserved. Certain sluts could take it no more, however, and they banded together, and they fled the Northside Rises under cover of dark.
Yes and so it was this springtime we are talking about that near-feral Norrie sluts hit the downtown, and began to roam the Back Trace, and they took up with the bands of wilding girls who had lately come together there in devotion to the killer-bint Ching, and their shrieks of solidarity were heard across the city – the Northside and the Trace united – and most surely these would mark the summer to come.
I could hear them from the back room of the Ancient & Historical Bohane Film Society as I sat late and drank exquisite Portuguese wine direct from the neck of the bottle, and you may trust, as ever, that I made careful notes.
Beyond the shrieks, the river carried as ever from Big Nothin’ its black throbbing.
Oh and heed this, my fiends, my tushies, my gullible children:
There was nothing good coming in off that river.
39
Logan’s Letter to Macu
Macu, I miss you so badly. Especially at night. I lie there half raving without you beside me. It’s as though you’ve been years gone from me. I can’t even hear your voice. I close my eyes and I picture you but I can’t hear you. I tell you, Macu, I feel barely human without you. I can’t be on Beauvista without you. I think about you all the time. I am ashamed of how jealous I’ve been. All I can say is my love for you has maddened me. I see that clearly now I’m alone. I asked the Gant to do his worst. I asked him to test you and I knew he would try. Please don’t blame him, Macu. The game was mine, he saw it only as a chance to win you back. And I pity the man now his lonely years. I would not have had the strength for them. I’m sorry, Macu. And it’s hideous, I know, but my game has proven your faithfulness. I want you back so badly. Remember once when we were young and we walked in the Trace one night and we found a bottle of moscato, perfectly chilled, just waiting for us on a stoop? With nobody anywhere to be seen. Just you and me in the Back Trace, Macu, and we drank the wine. I ask you to forgive me. I know you will need time. You’ll need these months to understand the pain that was in me. But I know your love is there still. If you want me to pull back from the Fancy, I will. Mr Mannion will deliver this – where are you, Macu? I think maybe I sense you in the Trace. I expect no letter in return. All I ask is that you think about the years ahead. Apart we are nothing. If you choose to come back to me and give me life, Macu, you will meet me at the Café Aliados. At 12 midnight. On the night of August Fair.
Logan
40
Late Nite at Tommie’s
It was the eve of May at the Supper Room, and Tommie the Keep had the ceiling fans set to their highest ratchet, and they whirred noirishly against the night, and were stoical, somehow, like the old uncles of the place, all raspy and emphysemic. Tommie’s eyes scanned the room and read a hard scare in each and every one of the Bohane merchants, the Bohane faces. Everybody’s nerves were shot, and the sweet, seductive voice of the girl singer as it wafted from the corner stage seemed only to amplify the tension.
‘
As looooong as dat yella moon riiiise
…’
She sang a slow, blue-beat calypso – old love songs of the lost-time – and she clicked her fingers lazily with the melody born into her, the tips of her fingers opening and coming to rest between beats against the gleaming length of her silver, sequinned dress. She had for percussion a lone, sleepy-eyed drummer seated at an ancient snare, his hair quiffed high with pomade. She sang in the proper, carefully modulated Bohane calypso style – we are stern about such things – and she had a good charge of huskiness in the delivery, and certainly she was beautiful.
‘
As loooong as dat black river flow
…’
But even such a girl was poor distraction for the jowly merchants in the banquette booths. Those old boys quivered, almost – they could barely lift the tankards to their lips. Their eyes were drawn to a pair of men seated on high stools at the far end of the Supper Room’s bar. One was broad and densely packed, the other tall and slender.
Double-take:
It was Logan Hartnett and the Gant Broderick.
A tight huddle they had settled to, and they were whispering there. And in a hoarse whisper also the girl’s song came through.
‘
As long as dem stars still shiiine / As long as our twined love grow
…’
Tommie the Keep occupied himself with chipping ice from a ten-pound block into splinters for the cooler buckets. Almost lost a pair of fingers to the chisel, Tommie, as his scared glance shot along the counter to the men. Hartnett with a raised hand signalled now for another bottle of moscato, and Tommie fetched one and brought it. The men paused in their talk as he nestled the bottle among the ice chips in their cooler. Each wistfully smiled for him.
‘Mr Hartnett,’ said Tommie. ‘Mr Broderick.’
Tommie was not brave enough to linger and he scuttled again down the length of the bar. The girl singer finger-clicked still as her drummer whittled a high thin beat on the snare. In the booths, the heavy lads nervously swayed. Temperatures were yet in the thirties, even after midnight, and the city’s mood was edgy.
Logan Hartnett and the Gant Broderick both rested their forearms on the bar counter, and they both stared straight ahead, and they both rotated their glasses slowly with the tips of their fingers – each unconsciously mimicked the other.
The Gant lifted his glass then and sipped at his moscato.
‘Fuckin’ breakfast wine,’ he said.
‘Have a Jameson so.’
‘Swore off the whiskey over.’
Like a kid, Logan thought, like a surly little kid.
‘Wasn’t agreeing with you, G?’
The Gant shrugged, drained off the glass, and poured another. Held the bottle for Logan, raised an eyebrow; Logan demurely placed a hand to cover his glass. Like an old bint, the Gant thought.
‘Like an ol’ bint,’ he said.
‘Don’t be bitter, Martin,’ Logan said.
The girl singer held a slow note to its fade; it brought up the blue veins of her slender neck, and she let the note die, and she stepped from the stage then for an interval break, pinching carefully at the thighs of the silver dress so as not to trip.
Barely a scatter of applause came for the room was preoccupied: Dominick Gleeson, the fat newsman, slithered an oyster into his gob from the half-shell but barely registered the shiver of its sea tang as he worried about the Hartnett–Broderick clinch. Big Dom scowled tubbily in puzzlement, and it was a puzzlement shared, two booths over, by Edmund ‘The Gypo’ Lenihan, the old-school S’town hoor-master. Ed sipped sourly at a measure of moscato and laid a hand on his belly, the wine interfering lately with his ulcers. At a booth adjacent was a gentleman of the Bohane Authority, poured into a thin flannel suit and licking the salt off a pretzel, and he tried as best as he could to secrete himself in the Supper Room’s shadows.
All watched the two men at the bar.
A great rip of trembling took hold of the Gant just then – he was
laughing
? – and Logan placed a brotherly hand on his back, as though to steady him.
Shudders in the booths, and nervous tabs were lit in a rolling relay around the room – the sparking of one inclined the sparking of the next.