City of Bohane: A Novel by Kevin Barry Page B

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