City of Bohane: A Novel Read Free

terminus. The train locked onto its berth – the rubber jolt of the stoppers meant you were downtown, meant you were in Bohane proper – and the El’s diesel tang settled, and died.
    He let the hoors and the drunk off ahead of him. The Gant as he disembarked was fleshy and hot-faced but there was no little grace to his big-man stride. A nice roll to his movement – ye sketchin’? The Gant had old-time style.
    The station is named Bohane St Francis Xavier, officially, but everyone knows it as the Yella Hall. The Gant sniffed at the evil, undying air of the place as he walked through. Even at a little after six in the morning, the concourse was rudely alive and the throb of its noise was by the moment thickening. Amputee walnut sellers croaked their prices from tragic blankets on the scarred tile floors, their stumps so artfully displayed. The Bohane accent sounded everywhere: flat and harsh along the consonants, sing-song and soupy on the vowels, betimes vaguely Caribbean. An old man bothered a melodeon as he stood on an upturned orange crate and sang a lament for youth’s distant love. The crate was stamped Tangier – a route that was open yet – and the old dude had belters of lungs on him, was the Gant’s opinion, though he was teetering clearly on Eternity’s maw.
    Choked back another tear did the Gant: he was big but soft, hard yet gentle.
    The early edition of the Bohane Vindicator was in but the bundles had as yet to be unwrapped by the kiosk man, who listened, with his eyes closed, to an eerie sonata played on a transistor wireless – at this hour, on Bohane Free Radio, the selector tended towards the classical end of things, and towards melancholy. Nodded his head softly, the kiosk man, as the violins caught.
    Oh we’d get medals for soulfulness out the tip end of the peninsula.
    The Gant settled into the blur of faces as he passed through. The faces, the voices, the movement – all the signals were coming in clear. They told that he was home again; it was at once painful and beautiful. He looked for her in every woman he passed, in every girl. He bought a package of tabs off a lady of great vintage wrapped in green oilskins: Annie, a perpetual of the scene.
    ‘Three bob … tuppence?’ she said.
    There seemed to be that question in it, for sure, as if she recognised him back there beyond the dead years.
    ‘Keep the change for me, darlin’,’ he said.
    A hoarseness to his voice, emotional, and his accent was still quietly of the peninsula even after the long years away. Years of sadness, years of blood – this Gant had his intimate agonies. A snatch of a lost-time song came to him, and beneath his breath he shaped the words:
    ‘ I was thinkin’ today of that beaut-i-ful land ,
    That I’ll see when the su-un goeth down …’
    The hoors who had wept on the train were ahead of him now on the concourse. They had gathered themselves. They were painting on bravery from snap-clasp compacts as they walked. The hoors would be bound, he knew, for Smoketown, and its early-morning trade. The Gant watched as they went through the Yella Hall. Ah, look: the quick switching of their bony buttocks beneath the thin silk fabric of their rah-rah skirts, and the way their calves were so finely toned from half their young lives spent on six-inch spike heels. The sight of the girls made him sentimental. He had run stables of hoors himself as a young man. There was a day when it was the Gant had the runnings of Smoketown, a day when the Gant had the runnings of the city entire.
    Was said in Bohane the Gant had run it clean.
    He stopped for a shot of tarry joe by the main portal of the Yella Hall. It was served expertly by a midget from the back of a licensed joe wagon. He watched, rapt, as the midget tamped the grounds, twisted a fix on the old Gaggia, arranged a tiny white cup to catch the pour. The midget also was familiar – a squashed little brow, a boxer’s nose, oddly sensuous lips. Same midget’s father, the