Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

‘Yeah. I understand there’s a problem with the floor?’

‘I bet you do,’ she said. ‘You understand more than you’re letting on.’

She stalked down the hall, and Tony picked his way after her like he was stepping around landmines, which, fuck it, he might as well have been, considering she was capable of knocking the stuffing out of him.

He watched her narrow back for signs of pole-shift. Fuck, he watched her narrow back for signs of brutality of any depth, for how could a pisawn the size and shape of a bog wisp kill someone? And how then could a stout man of thirty-seven, a father of six with the courage to roll up a corpse in a carpet, feel afraid of her?

He followed her into the kitchen and she gestured at the tiles with a floppy wrist and a childish lip.

She’d made a mosaic out of them. The squares he’d put down in rows neater than any he’d thought his own home worthy of had been scattered in overlapping clumps, broken into shards, maybe by a hammer, maybe by the same force that had smashed Robbie O’Donovan’s head like a jam jar.

‘Holy fuck,’ he said.

She sniffed.

He didn’t want to ask. Afraid of the answer, maybe, but something beyond that too, basic as the gawks rising in his throat; he didn’t want to acknowledge the presence of this ghoul in a cardie. In this space occupied by just the pair of them he felt his body seize up; first his neck, then the backs of his arms, then his waist. Like the horror-movie victim who’d just noticed the shadow at his elbow.

‘What did you do?’ The arse of the question formed a tuck in his throat; he swallowed, but it bobbed there, and grew.

‘Ha?’ she said.

He coughed.

‘What did you do?’

‘I told him I wasn’t staying here. And his answer is to throw down a new floor and tell me that makes a new house?’

He didn’t know what to say so he let her statement hang there, counted solemn breaths and said, ‘D’you have black bags, or…’

She produced a roll of flimsy bin liners.

‘That won’t do,’ he said. ‘I’ll look upstairs.’

He left her by her protest piece and hastened to the next floor. He went from room to room — shells of rooms now, bare floorboards and stripped-down walls. The floor echoed under each footfall. Here, he was alone. Downstairs, everything was wrong. The pall of the act and its cover-up. The little lady with the violent streak.

The fresh air of Cork spread out before him seemed a long way back now. Tony paused for breath and wiped his hands off his thighs.

One of the rooms had been set aside as a store for the workmen’s rubble. Tony spotted a dustpan and brush with a roll of bin bags on top of an old bedside table.

He moved to the window and looked down to the street. J.P. had phoned in his orders over an hour ago. He was surely on the way over.

Outside, the Lee lay still and glistened green.

Tony turned his back to the river and looked at the piled furniture.

There was something knotted around the handle of the bedside table from which he’d plucked the clean-up tools. He ran his fingers over it. Fabric. Like a shoelace, only with square cloth tags bound up in it at intervals.

He unwound it from the handle for want of something else to do.

Tony made a home with Maria once they were given four walls to contain it, and he spread out and grew older around the clutter of a life lived in sweeping strokes and splash damage. One night, and one fight too many, she drove away from it all, cursing it loud enough for the whole terrace to hear, leaving Tony on their landing with the colour rushing to his stinging left cheek.

Her insistence on cultivating an independent social life and his disdain of the dawn-to-dusk jobs both their mothers claimed suitable for him were pretty stupid things to fight about, but Tony and Maria could draw a fight from nothing, if they were drunk enough. She had a bottle of red wine in her and blood stoked to madness, and all he could do was wait for the Gardaí to show up on his doorstep with their caps off. Didn’t stop him hoping, though. That she’d swing awkwardly into the driveway — taking the gate with it if she liked, he didn’t care — and hammer an aria up the stairs. Or that she’d phone him from a ditch, bruised but breathing. But she didn’t. She drove from home right into the grave, with the shadow of his hands on the steering wheel.

The Gardaí sat with him at the kitchen table. His oldest son, eleven then and the soft curls well gone from his forehead, appeared at the door with wide-eyed gumption and Tony snapped ‘Get out’ at him, and then, when the lad didn’t move, ‘Get out!’ again, having risen to his feet, and Jesus Christ but he regretted that afterwards. You can’t blame yourself for your reactions when you’re in a state; he knew that. But if he could have gone back to that moment for another shot at it he would have held his arms out and cradled the young fella and maybe stopped the whole thing going to shit from there on in.

‘What’s that?’

Tony stepped backwards, catching a toe off its opposite heel and snagging the end of the brown material as it came with him. The woman strode towards him. She held out her hand.

‘What?’

‘The yoke you’re after ripping off that small table. Let me see.’

‘It’s nothing,’ he said, and held it over her palm. ‘Just a thing. I don’t know what kind of thing.’

‘It’s a scapular,’ she said. ‘A churchy yoke. See? The Virgin Mary there, looking out at you…’

‘What’s she looking at me for?’ he said, and put his hands in his pockets and the ould wan stared at him and said, ‘It was an accident, you know.’

‘What?’

She said, ‘What happened here.’

‘Oh.’ She was no mind reader.

‘I see you looking at me like I might crack you open too, but I’m telling you, ’twasn’t the way I’d planned to spend my morning.’

‘Course not,’ he muttered.

‘Maureen is my name,’ she said.

‘Oh. Yeah. Tony.’

‘Tony what?’

‘Cusack.’

‘And which Cusack are you?’

There wasn’t exactly a rake of Cusacks in Cork. ‘Up Mayfield.’

‘John,’ she said. ‘And Noreen. And you’re the only boy. Ah, I know you now.’

A knack for geographical pinpointing was, at least, an expected trait in an ould wan.

‘It wasn’t intentional,’ she said. ‘I’m living alone, you know. What would you do, if you’re half the size of the fridge and there’s a fella in front of it as wide as he’s tall?’

‘A skinny yoke, wasn’t he?’ Tony said, weakly.

She sniffed again. ‘Sure perspective is the first to go when your arse is against the wall.’

She bunched the scapular into one of her pockets.

‘Was it yours?’ Tony asked.

‘Indeed it was not.’

‘Funny thing to find here,’ he said. ‘What did you call it? A scalpula?’

‘A scapular. Why is it a funny thing to find here?’

It occurred to him that it probably wasn’t the ex-madam he was talking to.

‘No reason,’ he said.

She frowned.

‘No,’ she said, ‘why is it a funny thing to find here, Tony Cusack? Because it’s a holy thing and there’s something wrong in this building, is it? Because a man died, and artefacts of God no longer belong? Is that your line of thinking, is it?’

‘No. Not at all,’ he said, though the sound came out as No, not that tat all. ‘Just… y’know, workmen aren’t known for taking prayer breaks.’

‘That’s not what you were getting at,’ she said. ‘You think I’ve sullied the place.’

‘I don’t.’

‘That’s what it is.’

‘It’s not.’

‘You think I’ve blood on my hands.’

He seized the dustpan and brush and made to walk out of the room, but she caught his left arm and hung on, weight in her now like a bag of coal and his head suddenly humming with the thirst.