Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

Finding the craitur all caved in on the floor of Jimmy Phelan’s flat, though, had turned Tony’s gut inside out. There was, of course, the ugliness of it, in a practical sense. Smashed egg physics, enough to turn all the stomachs of a cow. Then there was the fact that Tony knew the bloke, and that he hadn’t expected to, and that he needed to yank tight his instincts in front of J.P. before that recognition gushed right out of him and all over the floor. That was physically exerting; Tony wasn’t cut out to be an actor.

But more than that again. There was something of sickly camaraderie between Tony Cusack and the faces he saw, blurred and blubbering, haloed around him on a daily basis. Robbie O’Donovan got it on the back of the head and Robbie O’Donovan wasn’t all that different to him. And what was the difference, really, if a man was going to meet a sticky end? The universe didn’t care whether he was a gangly ginger or a dusty-haired chunk, if it was in the mood for killing off wasters. Fuck, like. It could have been him. It could have been any of them.

And if it had been him, would he not want his mother to know about it?

He’d gone home from the clean-up with a roll of J.P.’s money in his pocket and a headache that started somewhere below his shoulders and pulled a hood of churning colours down over his eyes. Sat in the kitchen with a bottle of Jameson and an empty glass. He’d wanted the drink, but it had taken him time and effort to get the whiskey from the bottle to the glass and then from the glass past his teeth. A few hours in the company of a corpse would do that to a man still living. And that state was hardly guaranteed, with his having duped J.P. into thinking he didn’t know who the dead man was.

Maybe he should have told him. Maybe it would have worked out. Eh, Jimmy boy, I know this feen.

And maybe J.P. would have taken it as an invitation to drive Tony’s head back into his shoulders. You don’t go around telling wrought-iron hard men that you know who they’ve been offing. Otherwise they go around wearing your skin as a cravat.

It was such an insignificant thing, when he thought about it. He knew a guy, and he neglected to disclose it. That’s all. A small fucking thing to be in fear of your life over. Forget to move your tongue and suddenly you’re driven to drink with piddle dribbling down your trouser leg at your kitchen table.

He dragged himself between each conclusion for days stretching into weeks: read the death notice on the O’Donovan doorstep, or bend under Jimmy’s shadow and wait for the guilt to wither. He was harsher with the kids because of it. Everything they did wrecked his head. He hid in the kitchen when they were watching TV, in his bedroom when they were eating, in the pub when he could afford it. He went over his potential revelation from various angles, and from each perspective it ended badly — with O’Donovan’s family riotously questioning and him at a gaping loss.

Missus O’Donovan? I’m sorry to catch you unawares… Poor bitch. … but your son is dead as a fucking dodo .

And how would you know that, you bedraggled old fuck?

Cue J.P. screeching in just as the guards finished their questioning and blowing him out of this life and into the next, as if Tony Cusack’s existence held only the durability of plastic sheeting stretched tight on an old door frame.

Tony and Maria had gotten married as a postscript; sure weren’t they already bound together by offspring and his parents’ disapproval? Maria had mentioned it as something that ought to be done at some stage after they got the keys to the house. Tile the bathroom. Adopt a puppy. Get hitched, I suppose, in fairness like.

He brought her home to Naples so that they could say their vows. The reception was held on the terrace of a restaurant chosen, decorated and, more importantly, paid for by her parents. He hadn’t a clue what any of them were saying but they looked relatively jolly. Keen to provide an alternative to the Italians’ frolics, his parents had spent the day wrinkling their noses as if, roused by foreign tradition, each of their new in-laws had lined up to cordially shit on the cake.

It got to him; first that the Irish party was so scrubby-thin, and then that it was in such foul form. The language barrier wasn’t helping. Nor was Maria, floating around the place as Princess Mammy, a toddler under each arm while her décolletage was muddied with sugary thumbprints and white chocolate. She let the Italians monopolise the baby talk and kept her tanned back to her old enemy, her new mother-in-law, who sat sipping her G&T, scowling, sour, making a holy show of him right there on the edge of the dance floor.

Maria put down their small fella to adjust her neckline and Tony scooped him up again, walked with him to the bar, and bought a Nastro Azzurro and a Coke.

‘You having fun, Rocky?’

His son looked at him with the dopey, Disney-brown eyes the Italians had tried to claim credit for, and Tony pressed his lips against the curls on his little forehead and said, ‘Coz I’m fucking not.’

He cowered between choices until the decision was made for him.

It was midday on a Thursday, some Thursdays after the deed. He’d been on the go since seven, and not for entirely wholesome reasons; the ugly favour he’d done Phelan had left him with episodic insomnia and an unwelcome tendency to rise early. This morning there had been copybooks to locate, shoelaces to tie, slices of toast to butter, teenagers to bellow out of bed. Once the brood had loped off to school he’d tidied away the topmost stratum of jumble, put on the first of two loads of washing, and made his way to the supermarket for milk, bread and whiskey. He was on his way home again when his mobile rang.

The thing with Cork having been built on a slope was the further out you got from the hub, the better the views were. Tony put the bag of groceries on the footpath and reached into his jeans pocket for the phone. Below him, his city spread in soft mounds and hollows, like a duvet dropped into a well.

The breeze and the elevation made the city feel emptier than it had the right to feign. Less than a mile further out the estates would lose to green fields and hedgerows; it was calm here, as if the residents had flowed sleepily down the hill to pool in the streets around the Lee. Else they were indoors drinking tea and quietly dying. Tony leaned on a dustbin sporting three of the same sticker: a guide in aggressive bold letters to rejecting the authority of the Irish courts and the banks they slyly served. Not for the first time, he was glad he’d never bought a house. The country had gone to shit and the desperate were growing mad.

When he turned his phone over in his hand there was J.P.’s number, fresh in his contact list from their collaboration, bright and brash on the screen.

Tony Cusack felt a bolt of fear shoot down his throat and out his arse.

He hit the answer button.

‘Are you busy, Cusack?’

‘No,’ Tony said. ‘No, boy. No, I’m not.’

There was a gap, as J.P. considered the triplicated guarantee and Tony caught his tongue between his teeth.

‘D’you remember that tiling job you did for me?’ J.P. said.

‘I do.’

‘You’re going to have to redo it.’

At the end of the quay, where the river curved and the traffic quietened and the grand Georgian facades were smudged and flaking and tagged black and blue in unsure, ugly hands, stood the house in which Tony was expected to replicate his own hard work.

He knocked and the door was opened by an ould wan, about his mother’s age, dressed like a chilblained scarecrow with a face that would have reversed the course of the Grand National.

‘You’re Tony?’ she asked.