Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

I’ve popped a yoke and I’ve given her a half. She’s never done one before.

So one minute she’s talking to Louise and the next she’s turning around to me saying, ‘I think it’s happening,’ and I hold on tight as the wave hits her. I put my hand under her top, flat on her tummy, and every breath she takes is deeper than the one before.

I turn her so she’s leaning against my shoulder and I put my hand between her thighs and into her ear I say, ‘Y’alright?’

She nods and smiles and her eyes are flying saucers.

There’s a laser show on the dance floor. Green beams chase over the ceiling and dip onto hands held high, everyone’s hollering. I hold on to my girlfriend and press my cheek against her shoulder; she hooks her arm around my neck and strokes my ear and says, ‘Oh God, Ryan. Oh God.’

‘Is it good?’

‘Oh my God, this is amaaaazing.’

She’s floating. She leans her head back and though my buzz is climbing as fast as my dick is waning I catch her and push her back onto my shoulder, and she says Mmm and I laugh and tell her to be careful, because there’s stewards all over the place looking out for wasted kids.

She kisses me then, long and slow, and doesn’t open her eyes again afterwards, just smiles and sighs as if she’s coming. And I just hold her and keep holding her and the lasers make a web in the air over our heads, pull it apart and build it again, make stars to fall down on us.

She’s all over me.

The thing is, every girl in this place is all over some fella, so we don’t look special, but we are. We’re plugged into the lights and plugged into each other and I had no fucking idea it was possible to love someone as much as I love her right now.

So it was during a class on Newton’s Laws of Motion that Ryan had an epiphany. Third Law, as it happened, and probably his third epiphany that month. Maybe even that day, if he was to scale epiphanies down to their basest elements. Small truths. Snatches of caught breath as playback skipped just enough for him to grab on to something new. Maybe that was just growing up, though no one around Ryan seemed to suffer the same sudden expansions of consciousness. He was a bright kid. A bit too fucking bright, it had been said.

There’s no force in the universe, said his teacher (Mr O’Reilly, whose designer spectacles were betrayed by a face mired in 1985), which doesn’t have an opposing force to balance it. Action and reaction, push and pull. That’s the Law, now, kids. Sir Isaac Newton came up with that one. That’s knowledge that came before you and so defines your lives without as much as a by-your-leave. Shit happens, then more shit happens.

Ah, but shit happens right up to the point where it’s happening in the face of someone who doesn’t want to see it. That was the truth and the truth had fuck all respect for Sir Isaac Newton and his axioms. So here, Ryan realised, was a case of the pig-headedness of people versus the Laws of Physics, and while flesh and bones have to obey the push and pull of the universe the real meat of men, their thoughts and actions and utter arrogance, ignores the processes the universe has run on for aeons.

We’re all gods when we fucking feel like it.

There were a number of tiny holes on the surface of his desk, made months or years ago by students with compass points and short attention spans. Ryan jammed his biro into one, pushed down on it, circled the crater with ballpoint ink and swept an awkward black trail across to the next.

Mr O’Reilly liked to sing to the back of the room, and Ryan was right up the tippy-top, under his nose, where, it was said, he could do less damage. Ryan rested his thumb on the top of his pen, balancing it between his touch and the pre-punched holes in the desk, and looked up Mr O’Reilly’s snout. There was a wedge of soft grey gunk caught in the hairs at his left nostril.

Plenty of damage Ryan could do to people’s noses, directly or through encouraging lack of self-control. Did Mr O’Reilly ever take a line of coke? In his life? In college when he was learning to be a physics teacher? Between courses at dinner parties, his moustache brushing the cistern as he hunched over in the under-stairs toilet of some cunt he was only pretending to like? Before he came to work every weekday?

Ryan had a baggie in his pocket that he didn’t yet have a buyer for. He wouldn’t usually have brought it someplace like school, but his dad was mid-episode and hanging for trouble, so it had struck Ryan as being a better idea to take it hidden on his person than leave it where Greedyguts might get at it. And who knew, teachers might be a great market to tap into. God knows they needed an edge.

He let the biro rattle loose and Mr O’Reilly’s moustache twitched.

He picked up the biro again and moved on to another little hole.

Balanced it on its tip, let it fall…

Mr O’Reilly leaned over his desk with his neck arched, like he was doing a push-up.

‘Is there something wrong with you, Ryan?’

Ryan looked down at the biro. ‘Gravity I’d say, sir.’

His nearest neighbour sniggered. O’Reilly glanced over and the sniggering was sucked back behind pursed lips.

‘Look at your desk! School property and it’s covered in black marks…’

There were marks on Ryan’s face this week. Not black. One, kind of greening, on his cheekbone, cradling his left eye like the organic sprouting of a superhero mask. The other, purple and red-dashed, across the top of his forehead where he’d had it whacked off the lip of a step four from the bottom of the stairs. He knew that there were marks on his face because he had felt them applied and he had examined them extensively in the three days he’d spent at home convalescing under the wide eye of a father both ashamed and peevish. They were gaudy blotches, not easily missed.

More Laws there too, he reckoned. The Law of Unavoidable Contusion, where blunt force trauma drew the blood from his capillaries into the tissue around them. The Law of Here, Have a Splash of Ugly that stated that every run-in with his father had to be recorded on his face. Yeah, the Law of Fuck You, Ryan that rendered everyone around him oblivious. Like, he wanted people to see, just for fucking once, and at the same time didn’t want them to notice it at all, and it was the latter that people seized on, to the extent where a moustachioed keeper of the peace could stand not six inches from him and not see the fact that his whole fucking head was bawling out for someone to say, ‘Jesus, boy, whatever kind of little cunt you are I’m sure you didn’t ask for that one.’

‘Now that you’ve made that mess, what are you going to do about it?’ snapped Mr O’Reilly.

Ryan rolled his tongue around his mouth and looked down at the holes and the ink and spat on them.

He looked up at O’Reilly and O’Reilly had a head on him like a salmon rolled into a hot press.

‘Wipe that up,’ he said.

There wasn’t much moisture there to wipe. Ryan’s mouth was dry. It had been for days.

He dragged his sleeve off the desk.

‘Office,’ said O’Reilly.

Ryan’s chair clattered to the floor and he kicked it backwards and marched out of the room, carrying his classmates’ stares and O’Reilly’s dogged impassiveness across his shoulders until the door slammed shut behind him.

Karine asked him all the time why he felt the need to act the maggot. Did it not exhaust him to have to explain himself to teachers? There couldn’t be any peace in demanding to be thrown out of class. Even if he was in terrible form, would it not be the easier option to sit there pretending to listen than to make a show of his repulsion?