Free City of Bohane: A Novel by Kevin Barry Page B

to hold you for a while. I am sorry to put these words before you I have no choice I must. I am a worm I know that to come back after all this time and what it must do to you it is hard and painful.
    You said something to me once I wonder if you remember. You said that no matter what happened we would end up together. Do you remember that? It was probably just something a young girl would say and she was in love but I believed it for years it kept me together for years it kept me from the lip of the grave Macu.
    I love you still. That has a horrible bare look to it I know when it is put down on the page maybe the truth is I do want it to cause pain for you. Maybe I believe there is some of that due to you. We make choices and we have to live with them. It might seem like madness that I would write those words after all these years but there you are you can deal with them I have had to deal with them so long.
    When we walked the Back Trace and we were kids in Bohane I thought my heart was going to escape my mouth. Lay my hand on the small of your back and it was like stepping off a roof. Big soft grin on my face and I was suppose to be the hard boy in town. You were so slight. And the way that you talked to me low in a whisper almost and that it was so many weeks before you’d kiss me even.
    We used to walk on those nights in the Trace and go down to the river. I can hear again the river on the summer nights and the way we’d sit on the stone steps and you would lean your head back onto my chest and rest it there. I thought that nothing that nobody could ever come between us Macu.
    I tell myself that to come back here might be a way to break the hold on me you have still. The touch that I have felt on me these years in my dark times always it is your touch. I see you at seventeen, eighteen so perfectly clear every detail the tiny bones under the skin of your brow when you worried for me if there was trouble times in the Bohane Trace. I believe they were the wrong paths we took and what I have seen of your life here with Hartnett does not change that belief.
    My days are quiet now. There are places that you would remember I’m sure from our own time when sometimes we’d walk out here. We would lie in the long grass do you remember Macu? As much as things change in Bohane things stay the same on Big Nothin’. The place I am living is no palace but comfort enough I sit like a true auld fella off the Nothin’ bogs in front of my pot belly stove. I’d have laughed back then to see what I would turn into later. Though I will say again the same years I could hardly see on you on Dev Street the other day it took the breath from me you were so familiar. The way that you moved was just as I remembered. Do not think I was spying on you but when I saw you I could hardly be expected to look away.
    I am back on Nothin’ to stay and I wish to see you Macu. Even if it kills me I want to see you. What I ask is for a single meeting. The time and the place could be arranged as you see fit. If there are things I should say to you now after all this time then I could say them much better in person. Let me know through Mr Mannion if such a meeting can be arranged. All I can plead is that it would be heaven to see your lips form my name again.
    That I may hear from you soon, girl,
    The G

12
    Who Gots the Runnings?
    Dom Gleeson, the lardarse newsman, was on De Valera Street, fresh-shaven, his face still blotchy from the razor. He wore a baby-blue zoot suit and a pair of clicker’d heels that he danced in excitement against the pavement. He was nifty on the hoof for a fat lad and he gazed soulfully in the direction of Big Nothin’. He slowed his moves then and stilled himself. He looked down and regarded his small, sinister feet. He raised his fingertips to his lips. Nibbled them.
    ‘The Gant’s up top o’ fifty, Mr Mannion,’ he whispered. ‘He’s hardly gonna try and lay a snakey mickey into her at this stage, is he?’
    Ol’ Boy in