Four stout sons of the city – slaughterhouse boys – stepped forward as the puck was tethered to its platform on the tall stilts. The creature was raised slowly into the night sky, and great applause broke out, and whoops and hollers and roars, and the procession set off, in medieval splendour, towards the snakebend roll of De Valera Street.
Puck didn’t bat an eyelid.
*
Wolfie Stanners crossed into the S’town night and he met with the Gypo Lenihan and he was led by a tangled course down past the dune end’s pikey watches.
They ghosted through the night, the pair, and went unseen.
Came at length to a particular alleyway and the Gypo arranged the boy carefully in its shadows.
‘Wait here, Wolf. It’s where he come up for air from the grindbar yonder, y’heed?’
‘You’re sure?’
‘I’m sure.’
Wolfie was left alone, and waited, and he was bare-chested against the hot Murk as it came down freely now as a weird, greenish rain.
Felt for the bone handle of his shkelp, its heft.
*
Long Fella threw a sconce along the dockside. The judder of the hook-up generators was a memory jolt from adolescence. Diesel tang was sharp memory of the lost-time. The youth of Bohane balled through the Merries. The youth were in rut heat; for Logan, it was a careful parade through the fun.
He smiled for the old familiars of the town. The smiles he took back were as scared and respectful as always but they were weighted with emotion, too. Smiles were as though to say …
We’ve made it, ’bino, we’ve made it to August Fair again.
Since he was a child, Logan Hartnett had not missed a turn around the Merries on the night of Bohane Fair. The sights of it never changed:
Sweatin’ lunks of spud-ater lads in off Nothin’ took turns to slap the hammer at the test-your-strength meter.
Chinkee old-timers threw five-bob notes in each other’s faces at the dog fight.
Face-offs erupted between fiends for the affections of particular tushies, the shrieked challenges as old as time in Bohane:
‘Said c’mon!’
‘Mon way out of it so!’
‘Said c’mon so!’
‘Mon!’
Dreary-voiced yodellers up on Tangier orange crates howled death ballads. Knots of SBJ devotees from the Norrie towers knelt on the stones and joined hands to pray against the evil of the Bohane frolics but they were as much a part of them as everyone else. The lights of the Merries were a gaiety against the darkness that had descended over the Bohane front. The whirligigs turned young lovers through the air, and the screams of the girls spiralled, wrapped around, twisted.
A strolling brass band played lost-time waltzes.
A pikey rez sound system set up on the back of a horse cart spun rocksteady plates.
A transex diva hollered Milano arias from atop a bollard.
At the rodeo an eight-year-old Nothin’ child stayed the course and rode an epileptic Connemara pony into the dirt and great hollers of approval rose – the kid had a future.
And the girls’ screams twisted, turned in the air.
Bets were hollered, notes counted, palms spat on. There were fire-eaters from Faro, sword-swallowers from Samoa, jugglers from Galway. Pikey grannies read palms, stars, windsong.
Shots of primo Beast were offered at a fair price by the infamous retard brothers from the Nothin’ massif and the polis turned a blind eye having made off with a couple of crates theyselves.
There were stabbings, molestings, stompings.
Bohane city rose up on the spiral of the girls’ screams as they twisted in the air.
And Logan came upon the boy Cantillon then. He sat alone on the harbour wall – the fishmonger’s orphan, his glands swollen with quiet rage. He was lit gaudily by the lights of the revel and he looked at Logan as if he knew him from somewhere but could not quite place him.
The smile the boy gave was faint and murderous.
Logan raised an eyebrow in soft questioning but it was not answered. He approached but the boy hopped from the wall, and walked a little ways ahead, through the Merries’ crowd, and he took the same stride as Logan, precisely, with his hands clasped behind his back – this was a mockery.
He turned once and winked, the boy Cantillon, and then he disappeared into the throng.
‘Mon so!’
‘Said c’mon way out of it so!’
‘Said c’mon!’
*
And Blind Nora gave voice again to her old song:
‘
That bright stars may be mine in the glorious day
When His praise like the sea billow rolls
…’
*
The Gant walked off his nausea but not his bitterness. He settled into a circuit of the Trace and De Valera Street, a ritual circling of the old city, and all the while he watched for her. He saw her slip into the face of every young tush he passed by, and the drums of Bohane city carried a rhythm and a message both.
Maybe he would never walk himself clear of … Macu … Macu … Immaculata.
*
Girly Hartnett, on the occasion of her nintieth Fair, stood before a full-length mirror in her suite at the Bohane Arms Hotel. She wore stockings, a suspender belt, a bodice and a scowl. Mysterious injections from a whizz-kid Chinkee sawbones were keeping her upright. She laid a frail hand across her belly and sucked in deeply. She eyed herself dispassionately. She made a plain and honest read of the situation, and it was this:
She wasn’t in bad fuckin’ nick at all.
A particular knock sounded. She cried an answer to it. Jenni Ching entered. She wore a white leather catsuit up top of silver bovvers, and this outfit Girly now considered.
‘Choice,’ she said.
Jenni raised a moscato bottle, found it empty, and instead poured herself a slug of John Jameson from the bottle on the bedside table.
Downed it in one, and lit a cigar.
‘Who breaks the news to him?’ Jenni said.
‘That ain’t your worry, child. Now c’mon an’ get me dressed.’
Jenni went and slid the door of the mirrored wardrobe and flicked through the frocks that were piled there – many of them dated back as far as the lost-time.
‘You decided, Girly?’
Girly sighed.
‘I’m wondering if I shouldn’t go with a class of an ankle-length?’ she said. ‘Maybe the ermine trim? Kinda, like … Lana Turner-style?’
Jenni fetched it and unzipped it. As she offered it, she asked of her mentor quietly:
‘What do I do later, Girly?’
‘You jus’ got to show yerself.’ Girly took the old frock and sniffed it. She passed it back. She raised her feeble arms above her head.
‘Now strap me in,’ she said, ‘and alert the authorities.’
*
A line of hoss polis came along the cobbles towards the S’town footbridge.
Sand-pikey taunts sounded cross-river.
From the Merries, dockside, Logan watched and listened.
He lingered a while by the dog fights.
Winked at the old bookmaker there – an Afghan off the Rises.
A pair of bull terriers went at it, their great muscled necks hunched, their hackles heaped and muzzles locked, the blood coming in spurts.
‘Who’d ya fancy, Mr H?’
Logan carefully regarded the dogs – he let a cupped palm take the weight of his chin.
‘I’d put tuppence on meself yet,’ he said.
*
The alleyway of the Smoketown dune end:
Clicker’d heels on smooth cobbles.
Two young men circled but slowly.
Each handled a shkelp and moved warily, slowly.
Tip-tap, the heelclicks … tip … tap … tip … but slowly.
Seeping of bile and poison.
Jealousy’s bile.
Fear’s poison.
They circled.
Then a lunge …
A feint …
A stumbling …
A righting.
They circled.
A lunge.
A feint.
Shkelp blades gleamed as moonlight pierced the Murk.
They circled.
Wolfie kid and the Far-Eye.
They circled.
No taunts, no foulspeak, no curses.
Just a lunge.
A feint.
A stumbling.
A righting.
They circled.
They lunged.
Their blades ripped the air.
*
There came a time always on the night of August Fair when the badness took over.
Clock outside the Yella Hall sounded nine bells, and then ten, and then eleven, and nastiness cut the air – it was as high-pitched and mean as the homicide cry of the gulls.
The surfeit of moscato soured in the belly.
The herb took on a darker waft.
The dream-pipe twisted more than it mellowed.
And the fists of all the young fiends balled into hard tight knots, and the tushies egged ’em on …
‘Said y’takin’ that, like?’
… and scraps broke out all over the wynds, on the front, along the snakebend roll of De Valera Street, and on either side of the footbridge.
The decent and the cowardly fled along the escape routes offered by the New Town streets.
Rest of us piled in like savages.
And this year the badness was set to follow a particular design – an S’town riot was orchestrated.
It took quickly.
Big Dom Gleeson and Ol’ Boy Mannion had a vantage view of the riot from the hot tub on the roof of Ed ‘The Gypo’ Lenihan’s joint.
They had bottles of the Beast to hand, their herb-pipes also, and an amount of hoors on stand-by.
It was quickly a general bloodbath and the two men sighed in despair and happiness both.
On the main drag a line of sand-pikeys faced up to a massed assault of hoss polis.
Hoss polis were straining to make it to the S’town dune end to raid the premises there but the pikeys were keeping a firm line.
Smoketown revellers traded their frolics for violence, and the polis/sand-pikey face-off as the night progressed took in random participators. Eyes were being taken out down there, and ears were bitten off, and gobs were twisted open.
‘Is it any wonder, really,’ said Ol’ Boy, ‘that this place has the bad name it has?’
Yes and the hardwind was making speeches agin the August night and fresh hordes of sand-pikey back-up came in off the dunes and fell in by their brethren and wore hare-skin pelts and had branded themselves with hot irons from the forge – abstract symbols of the sand-pikey cult were engraved on every chest – and they waved dirks and tyre-irons and then a quare shake of polis back-up trudged over the Smoketown footbridge and it was noted that they were guzzling whiskey and moscato from carry-sacks as they came, and taking nips of the Beast, and howling the ritual chants of the polis frats, and they aimed headlong for the sand-pikeys who were about an equal to them in number and certainly in terms of derangement.
‘Tell you one thing,’ said Ol’ Boy, ‘this shower will keep goin’ a while yet.’
Big Dom, meantime, had arranged a tushie on his lap and he was gently brushing her hair with a pearl-encrusted brush and the girl’s eyes glazed with dream-sent romance.
‘They’ll take quare damage on both sides, Mr Mannion.’
‘Much,’ said Ol’ Boy, ‘to the Hartnett plan.’
*
The Gant saw her pass through the 98er Square.
He followed.
She took the turn of a wynd, and then another, and she looked back, and she saw that it was him, but she did not stop.
‘Macu!’
He watched her go. He allowed her to disappear into the darkness of a sudden turn. He said beneath his breath:
‘Don’t ever go back to him.’
*
‘
It would sweeten my bliss in this ci-ty of gold
,
Should there be any stars in my-yy crooown
…’
*
Prince Tubby the Far-Eye’s death journey was a beautiful voyage. He sailed over the clouds and across his dune-side terrain and the great spectacle once more was enacted for him.
Here was a place of wind and rain and violent starburst, where the throw of light is ever-changing, is constantly shifting, and he saw the great expanse of the bog plain, and the lamps of Bohane city, too, as they burned against the night of August Fair.
*
Wolfie Stanners sat on the stone steps cut into the river wall and he held both hands tightly against a gut wound and he closed his eyes and a fever sweat broke on his forehead as the S’town riot raged nearby.
Heard the black surge of the Bohane as it called to him.
*
Big Dom topped a fresh bottle of Beast and torched a whackload of primo Big Nothin’ bushweed sourced from the pikey rez.
He squinted to bring into focus the progress of the riot:
The beak of the law was blunted by the sand-pikey assault; the pikey ferocity was dulled by polis resolve.
And lives went under, it has to be said, but as quickly as their vitals dimmed they came to again, out beneath the Nothin’ plain, in the ruts and tunnels of the Bohane underworld, where the strange ferns rustle and the black dogs roam.
Meantime:
Ol’ Boy Mannion nodded in the direction of the Smoketown footbridge.
‘Y’watchin’?’ he said.
Big Dom clocked it.
‘The killer gal,’ he said.
Jenni Ching surveyed the riot serenely from the high arch of the footbridge – bopped smoke rings from her pouted lips.
*
Logan knew that the boy had circled to follow him.
He could sense movement behind on the wharf.
He sighed in long-suffering.
He turned into the stockyards and slipped into the shadows to wait.
The boy Cantillon appeared.
Logan stepped out, noiselessly, and he was quick as a stoat as he took the boy’s throat in a forearm lock, and he took from the boy’s belt his shkelp and he drove it into his heart, and whispered to him – unrepeatable words – as the young life began to drain.
Felt the tip of that life as it tilted towards the dark but he took no savour from the moment.
He let the Cantillon boy fall and he considered for an incredulous moment, there in the foul stockyards, the advanced stupidity of the dead kid’s frozen features.
The Long Fella would not stain his dress-shkelp with such frivolous blood.
He walked on. There was a tiredness now on Logan. He knew his own line would end soon enough and, with it, his renown. The succession had been decided beyond him when he was lost to an April dream. All that was left, maybe, was the consolation of Macu’s touch.