City of Bohane: A Novel by Kevin Barry Page A

Hartnett Fancy’s mark – a puck goat’s head. Inside was the Feud’s declaration.
    Wolfie Stanners offered the envelope to Eyes Cusack.
    Beat – a weird pause.
    The pause suggested to Wolfie that confidence might not be all it should be among the ranks of the Cusack mob. But Eyes reached for the envelope then, and stuffed it in the waistband of his kecks, and from the arse pocket of same he took out a filthy scrap of paper that had been folded over twice, and he passed it to Wolfie.
    Wolfie opened it out to find a drawing so crude as to be done by a child’s hand. It showed a skinny stick-man in crayoned colours with a cock-and-balls attached to his forehead.
    ‘The receipt,’ said Eyes Cusack. ‘See if yer man spot a likeness.’
    Wolfie nodded most politely and with Fucker in tandem he turned to go.
    ‘I’ll let him know Feud’s accepted,’ he said.
    ‘Do that, boy-chil’,’ said Eyes Cusack. ‘An’ we’ll see ye down there, check?’
    ‘Time o’ your choosin’, Cuse. All the same t’us, like.’
    They walked again the pocked avenues of the Rises. There was a heat up in them now. There was a great thrumming on the air. There was going to be a Feud the size of which Bohane city hadn’t seen in fucking yonks, y’sketchin’?

15
    Black Crab Soup
    The Ho Pee Ching Oh-Kay Koffee Shoppe, a whistle after midnight, and three steaming bowls of black crab soup were carried from the back kitchen by a wordless, scowling Ching uncle.
    These were set with grave ceremony before:
    – Mr Logan Hartnett, aka the Albino, aka the Long Fella, and he was sat there, breezing on the moment, and with a toothpick he worked lumps of cashew from the gaps between his yellow teeth. He was all got up in a wowser of a straight-cut grey vinyl suit – its sheen catching the Ho Pee’s fairy-light glow – and there was a matching grey vinyl mackintosh laid over the back of his chair. Dapper motherfucker.
    – Miss Jenni Ching, boss-lady of the Ho Pee ever since her black-mooded momma had tossed her small demented bones into the Bohane river (just a quick headlong dash from the caff), on account of dog-fight debts, some said, or because of a persistent strain of Ching family madness, according to others, and Jenni regarded the fatty, creamy soup her uncle offered with an as-if glare – on my hips? – and she pushed it aside. She was in a white leather jumpsuit up top of hoss-polis zippered boots, with her fine hair let down, and her hair was streaked and worn this season in a blunt-cut fringe that she blew aside with regular, rhythmic spouts of tabsmoke.
    – Mrs Macu Hartnett, née Simhao, born to the Café Aliados, the queen of the Back Trace Fancy, with any amount of a cashmere jersey dress worn in a clingy fit beneath a thin crinolene duster coat (cream) that didn’t cost her tuppence ha’penny in whatever high-faluting New Town boutique she scored it in, and she was eyeballing Jenni hard, and she was eyeballing Logan hard, and she was thinking: I’m forty-fuckin’-three and I’m sat around talkin’ fuckin’ gang fights ?
    ‘Many families Cuse gonna send down up top o’ his own?’ said Jenni.
    ‘I’m guessing three tops,’ said Logan. ‘He’ll have the McGroartys, sure enough. McGroartys are born latchiko. McGroartys would hop into a Feud on account of two flies fucking. He’ll have the Lenanes also. That’s a cert, coz the Lenanes can be bought, the Lenanes have always been bought. After that, well …’
    Logan flapped a hand in the air, dismissively, to illustrate the thinness of the Rises’ alliance.
    ‘That’s sure a lot o’ chanters they got hollerin’ for a three-family descent,’ said Macu.
    ‘If you wanted to be of a negative set of mind, love-o’-my-heart, you might think so,’ said Logan.
    In truth, he could not but hear them: the high bluffs of Bohane city were raucous with Norrie Feud-chants.
    ‘A quare rake o’ bonnas burnin’ an’ all, Logan? Saw ’em an’ I comin’ down from