Read Online City of Bohane: A Novel by Kevin Barry - Free Book Online

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.’
    ‘Been busy, Girly.’
    ‘Busy gowlin’ around,’ she said. ‘Bring me flicks, y’did?’
    ‘Did,