‘I could set us up, girl. You could follow me over …’
In the New Town, at the hour of the paseo, she looked carefully over her shoulder – sketch? – and it was clear: she had not been followed by a Fancy scout today. She turned into the quietest of the Endeavour Avenue cafes. Ol’ Boy Mannion waited for her there on a high stool. He smiled but she did not answer the smile.
‘What’s this about, Ol’ Boy?’
‘I’d say you know or you wouldn’t be here.’
‘I won’t see him, Ol’ Boy.’
He passed across the letter.
‘Just read what he’s written to you, Macu.’
8
Night on Nothin’
Midnight.
Big Nothin’.
A trailer home.
And Jenni Ching was butt-naked on the sofa bed.
The trailer was a double-wide aluminium, twenty-two-foot long, and it contained the fold-out bed, a pot-belly stove, an odour of intense sadness, a set of creaking floorboards, and the Gant Broderick. The Gant also was naked, and he was straining, with his eyes tightly shut, to recall the darkest of all his dark times – this so as not to come.
Hardwind was up, and it raged across the bog outside, and it made speeches in the stove’s flue; threats, it sounded like, in a spooky, hollowed-out voice: an eerie song for the Gant as he grimly thrusted.
Jenni Ching was on her hands and knees, with her slender rump in the air, and a brass herb-pipe clamped in her gob. She cast over her shoulder a bored glance at the Gant. He looked as if his heart might at any moment explode. His face was purpled, blotched, sweaty.
‘If y’wanna take five,’ she said, ‘jus’ holler.’
The mocking tone was too much for him, was too delicious, and the Gant spent himself. He fell onto his back and was ashamed then. His heart was a rabid pit bull loose inside his chest.
Jenni Ching consulted the wall clock.
‘Three minutes even,’ she said. ‘You’re comin’ on, kid.’
She turned and sat back against the sofa bed’s headrest. She drew her legs up about her. She relit her herb-pipe, sucked on it deep, and blew a greenish smoke. The Gant risked an eye at her. She smiled at him, so feline.
‘This what it feel like?’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Love.’
‘Sarky for your age, girl.’
She placed her tiny feet on his wheezing chest. He laid his hand across her feet and it covered them entirely. She wriggled her toes, the ten, taunting tips of them. Sighed.
‘So what’s the script with Ganty-boy?’ she said. ‘An’ no more bollick-talk about settlin’ in the countryside an’ growin’ cabbages.’
‘Why shouldn’t I settle, Jenni? Rest me old bones.’
She drew a hard suck on the pipe, held the smoke, and then reached and pulled his face to hers, laid her mouth on his, and sent with a sharp hiss the blowback.
He glazed.
Coughed.
‘Don’t always agree with me,’ he said, his chest heaving, his humours all twisted.
She reached again and held with her tiny iron hand his chin.
Locked a glance.
‘An’ you’d be doin’ the fuck what out here, Gant, ’xactly?’
‘I’m supposed to be askin’ the questions, Jenni.’
‘You havin’ an’ aul’ chat with the stoats, G? Goin’ fishin’?’
‘You doin’ a little fishin’ yourself, Jenni?’
‘All I’m doin’ is talkin’ to ya. All I’m doin’ is passin’ the lonesome aul’ night, y’check me?’
‘You got the gift for talk, girleen.’
She was tiny. She lifted her feet from his chest. She swung her legs from the sofa bed. She padded to the door of the trailer and unclasped the catch and pushed out the door agin the hardwind. She looked out to the night. A swirl of stars made cheap glamour of the sky above the bog plain.
Without looking at him:
‘Y’plannin’ damage for the ’bino, Gant?’
‘Would I confide as much?’
‘The ’bino’s had wall-bangers come lookin’ for him before, Gant. Same boyos down the boneyard since. An’ it’s a spooky aul’ spill o’ moonlight y’gets down that place, y’sketchin’?’
The Gant with a cheeky grin:
‘Time does he come along S’town in the evenings, Jenni? Usually?’
She spat the same grin back over her shoulder.
‘This look like a tout’s can to you?’ she said.
‘Are you fuckin’ him, Jenni?’
‘You jealous, G?’
‘Or does he mess with the Fancy tush at all?’
‘Happens that the Long Fella don’t mess with no tush.’
‘Oh?’
‘Looked after in his marriage is Mr H. He’s takin’ about as much as he can handle up Beauvista way off the skaw-eye bint.’
A sly one. Knew where to aim; knew where to bite.
‘Oh? Happy, are they? The Hartnetts?’
She shook her head, and shaped a curious snarl and somehow he read truth here.
‘Happy? Who’s happy in fuckin’ Bohane? Ya’d be a long time scoutin’ for happy in this place.’
She gathered up her clothes and began to dress in the oily candlelight of the trailer. The girl was close to unreadable in the Gant’s view. She had told him nothing about the Fancy, nor about the S’town operations, nor about the movements of Logan Hartnett. Even so, she was keeping close, she was calling on him, and consenting to his bed. It was said this Ching girl had a count to her name already and the Gant was inclined to believe it from the taste of her.
‘You can’t stay a while?’
She didn’t dignify that with an answer.
And it was a moody Gant she left on the sofa bed as she took off into the night again. Cat’s eyes on her. As easy in her stride out on Nothin’ as she was in S’town or the Back Trace.
Watch her close, Gant.
But he relished her, despite himself, and he asked then for forgiveness as the trailer’s siding creaked ominously in the night. Awful thing to still have a taste for young ’un and you up to the view from fifty.
He lay among the stew of his thoughts a while. Now that was a murky old soup. He rose wearily after a time and dressed. He felt bone-ache and sad bliss. He went outside for a taste of the wind. His mind for a brief stretch ran clear. He closed his eyes and tried to bring himself to the lost-time, but it could never be regained. He would never take back the true taste. He had known it just once and it was Macu’s.
The Gant walked a keen edge always across the territories of the mind. At any moment he might trip to either side and fall into the blackness. Of course, it is a husky race of people we’re talking about outside in the Bohane creation, generally. Cursed and blessed with hot feeling.
Images from the lost-time now came to him in quick assault. When she was eighteen. When she walked with him. The way that she spoke to him. The way that her lips shaped to form his name.
He walked on into the night and he shook his great, bearish head against memory, and he briefly wept, and he chortled at himself then for the weeping. Oh this is a nice package you’re presenting, Gant. Oh this is a nice game you’ve got yourself involved with. And nice people to play it with.
Careful, Gant.
He walked the Nothin’ plain. The hardwind by ’n’ by walloped a little sense into him. A feral goat watched from a high vantage, its eyes a glaring yellow. The Gant willed himself to straight thinking. He felt the tread of their shared past underfoot. Your step there, he thought, and my step here. That’s your step there, and my step here, on the days that we walked out, Macu, in the noonday of the lost-time.
Nostalgia, on the peninsula, was a many-hooked lure.
The Gant had come back early in August. At once, he had fallen victim to our native reminiscence. In the Bohane creation, time comes loose, there is a curious fluidity, the past seeps into the future, and the moment itself as it passes is the hardest to grasp. The Gant came back with a couple of hundred in his pocket and a pair of busted boots on his feet and a reefed shoulder gone halfways septic – that was as much as he had to show for twenty-five years gone. A hot summer day with the bare lick of a breeze to it and the breeze among the long grasses whispered the old Nothin’ mysteries. The bog was dried out and above it a shifting black gauze of midge-clouds palpitated and the turloughs had drained off and there was that strange air of peace in the hills: never-changing, sea-tanged, western. The horizon wavered in hard sun over the poppy fields as the workers toiled in silhouette at the crop. Bleached light on the plain of Nothin’ and a fado lament wailed distant from somewhere on the pikey rez. His feet were blistered.
The breath came hard and jaggedly in him as he made it to Ol’ Boy Mannion’s longhouse. It was set in a valley’s dip, and as he quietly came on the place, he saw that its door was open. This was as expected – Ol’ Boy in the summer was by long habit to be found at his Nothin’ residence. The Gant stuck his head inside the door. He leaned against the jamb to slow his breath.
‘Benni,’ he said.
Ol’ Boy looked up from a settle in the dank and fly-thick shade, and he showed not a flicker of surprise.
‘You been settin’ the world on fire, Gant?’
The Gant raised his eyes. Ol’ Boy stood and shook his head woefully.
‘So who’s responsible for this masterpiece?’ he said.
‘By mine own fair hand,’ the Gant said.
‘Ah, come in out of it, would you? Before you frighten the fuckin’ ducks.’
The Gant sat in the shade of the longhouse and at length he took his breath back. Ol’ Boy asked no questions. Just waited it out.
‘E’er a notion where a fella could lay his achin’ bones, Benni?’
‘You’ll have to let me see about that.’
Ol’ Boy busied himself. On the stove he mixed up a bowl of pinhead oatmeal and he added a measure of Jameson to the pour of cream. He made a place at the table for the Gant and watched as he came slowly across the flagstones.
‘S’either yer gone rickety before yer time or there’s a story worth gobbin’, G?’
The Gant grimaced.
‘Y’lie down with dogs,’ he said.
As the Gant ate, Ol’ Boy examined the shoulder wound. He took a bottle of evil-smelling fluid from the high shelf and dabbed it on a wedge of cotton and applied the cotton to the wound.
‘Landed just a lucky stretch shy of a lung, Gant,’ he said. ‘And it have the look of a cratur who’s came at ya with a rusty blade, boy?’
‘Y’get off the peninsula,’ said the Gant, ‘and you find they got no class.’
Ol’ Boy salved the wound as best he could and shook another measure of the fluid onto it, for badness’ sake, and the Gant hissed a startle of pain. Ol’ Boy blew on the wound.
‘Trust me,’ he said, ‘I’m a nurse.’
He dressed the wound neatly. He was dainty about his work. He’d patched up more than a few go-boys in his day.
‘An’ you’re back here why, Gant Broderick, precisely? What bizarre fucking notion has weaselled itself into that sorry noggin o’ yours?’
He rapped his knuckles on the Gant’s head. The Gant laid down his spoon and thought a moment.
‘You’d find there’s a quare aul’ draw to Big Nothin’,’ he said.
‘An’ what about to Bohane city?’
‘Maybe we need to talk about that an’ all, Mr Mannion.’
Ol’ Boy’s opinion, which he transmitted in a single, sharp glance, was that Bohane wasn’t the same place it had been twenty-five years back.
‘S’pose it’ll be interestin’ whatever happens,’ he said.
The Gant agreed that it would be.
‘I need a place out here, Benni. Gather me thoughts, you know?’
So it was that Mannion had set him up with the trailer home. Told him to lie low a while and keep his snout to the wind: see how she blew.
Trailer was a hard find even to an aborigine like the Gant. It was located in the lee of an old quarry’s wall and it had that shelter at least from the evil of the hardwind. The trailer sat across an expanse of bog from a small lake. You’d barely drown a child in it, as they say of such a lake out on Nothin’. The lake’s waters were dark and cloudy and thatched at the verges with an accumulation of broken reeds. The Gant had settled to this place, and he watched the summer fade into autumn, and heard the hardwind rise, and he knew that winter was on the soon-come.
He walked the October night its length through. He came into a white space of mind and it was restful. He circled the plain. Towards dawn, he walked across the splintered boards of an old jetty by the small lake – the boards gave and groaned as he walked, the boards sang – and he crouched there, and he felt the looming presence of the Nothin’ hills beyond. Dark shadow of mountain against the waking sky. He felt a presence; he felt it as a great tenderness. And then he heard its voice.
‘Oh Baba?’ the Gant pleaded. ‘Oh Sweet B?’
9
Girly
Girly Hartnett lay in bed at the Bohane Arms Hotel. Eighty-nine she was, and bored. The boredom she sung with a frequent sighing. Her top-floor suite’s black velvet drapes were as always drawn – Girly had seen more than enough of Bohane city to last her a frigging lifetime. She was on a diet of hard booze and fat pills against the pain of her long existence. She was regally arranged on the plump pillows of a honeymooners’ bed. Girly’s days were slow, and they ran headlong into her nights, and she lay awake most of the nights, and yet she could never quite place the nights once they’d passed. Could never quite get a fix on the fuckers. As often as the hotel had juice enough to run a projector, she watched old movies on a pull-down screen. Girly liked old movies and menthol ciggies and plotting the city’s continued derangement. The Hartnett Fancy held the runnings of Bohane, and there were those who’d swear the steer was Girly’s yet as much as Logan’s. She could identify every knock on her door and she cried an answer now to her son’s.
‘Get in to me!’
The worry in him she read before he had his long bones folded in the bedside chair.
‘How we now?’ he said.
She raised a brittle hand to her throat, Girly, and let its fingers fraily rest there.
‘Not long for the stations, boy.’
‘So you been saying.’
They did not kiss nor lay a hand to each other. The Hartnetts were not touchy-touchy people. The Hartnetts were Back Trace: blood and bone.
‘Time you callin’ this anyhow?’
‘It’s gone seven alright.’
‘Was goin’ to get onto the morgue,’ she said. ‘See if they’d ta’en in any long pale-lookin’ fuckers.’