Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

Ryan couldn’t answer her. It wasn’t boredom, though he’d heard teachers hypothesise that his intellect made him susceptible to impatience. It wasn’t political, for he had no problem in theory with authority figures. Just… sometimes he was sick over it. The burden of it. Himself. All the bits of Ryan were just clumps invented by his father and moulded into an uncomfortable whole by his mother’s birth exertions. Not able to get away from them, not able to get away from himself. Sometimes he thought it was driving him crazy.

A door closed further down the corridor, and there was brief adult laughter from the assembly area, but otherwise there was no sound but the duff pounding of his runners on the carpet. He was such a small thing here, like a marble rolling around in an empty bath.

He hovered outside Room 18. Annie Connelly in the front row spotted him through the glass rectangle over the door handle, and he mouthed ‘Karine’ at her.

She didn’t have to be a lip-reader. She knew what he was saying. Any of them would.

He ducked into one of the locker alcoves.

Karine came out a couple of minutes later, hair piled onto her head in lackadaisical perfection, the sleeves of her school jumper pulled down over her fists.

‘Hey,’ she whispered. She was shaken still. The revelations of the week had drawn tears enough to break her boyfriend’s heart, and yet she only knew the half of it.

‘C’mere,’ he whispered back.

‘I am here.’

‘More here.’

He held her and pressed his lips to her neck and she hooked her hands around the back of his head.

‘Let’s go away,’ he told her neck. ‘Deadly serious; let’s take off.’

‘Ah, I don’t think that’s going to work when I’ve just told Miss Fallon that I’m going to the toilet.’

‘Era fuck her.’

She must have felt the heat building, because she pulled back and said, ‘What’s up with you, boy? You’re not all right.’

One spider-leg eyelash had fallen onto her cheek. He pressed his thumb against it and the lash cushioned itself in the warmth of his skin and came away with his hand.

‘You shouldn’t have come back to school yet,’ she said.

‘The choice wasn’t there this morning.’

‘Even so. You could have gone somewhere else. I’d have come to you.’ She paused. ‘What did you do?’

‘Now? Bad form. It just poured out of me. And I’m on my way to the office. For a stern talking to.’

He rested his forehead against hers.

‘Everything’s wrong, Karine. If I can feel it then why can’t they see it?’

‘You want them to see it?’

‘I don’t know. I honest to fuck don’t know.’

She put her hand on his chest and pushed him back just enough to look into his eyes. Hers were sticky-lined with black pencil, smudged out at one corner by a stray yawn. ‘I can force it, you know. I can say something.’

‘And think of the trouble you’d get into. That’s the thing anyway, girl. I don’t want to have to instigate it. It’s the same thing if I get you to do it. Fuck ’em. I don’t want any of them knowing my… Ah fuck it.’

She winced as he dragged his knuckles off the wall. ‘Don’t do that,’ she said, and she caught his wrist.

‘I think I’m cracking up, like. They can’t see it and look at you, girl, you can’t see it either. Coz I’m all kinds of fucked up and you haven’t noticed yet.’

‘Because you’re not fucked up; shit around you is fucked up. I know that coz I know you. And you know me, and we have each other, right?’

He could have cried. ‘Right,’ he said.

‘And I’m here,’ she said. ‘For you, like. And I will be, too. You don’t need to worry about that.’

‘D’you love me?’

‘More than anything.’

‘It’s “everything” for me. More than everything. Like the whole lot put together.’

She kissed him. A proper kiss, too, one that would have gotten her into heaps of trouble if a teacher were to come along and interrupt her. ‘Maybe we should take off,’ she told him. ‘What kind of girlfriend would I be if I left you feeling shit?’

‘A sensible one.’ He tightened his grip on her waist and swung her around. ‘Naw, it’s OK. I’ll face the music. I’ll conduct the fucking orchestra. Whatever they’ve got to throw at me, I’ll soak it up the way I soak up everything else.’

‘I want you to be OK.’

‘I will be. I’m just… Bad week.’

‘Just don’t…’ She paused, and frowned. ‘… give them any excuse. In the office. Just say you’re sorry. For once, Ryan. Please.’

‘But I’m not sorry.’

‘Pretend you’re sorry.’

‘Like they pretend my face is the right colour, yeah?’

He waited until she was back in her classroom before he continued on.

He imagined himself saying sorry. Imagined the run-up to it: the headmaster’s sighs and solemn pontificating (he’d given up bawling him out long ago), the requests for clarification on motive and psychosis, and, worst of all then, the lecture on a lost future and oh, the miasma of potential he swore he could barely see Ryan through. Maybe that was the reason no one could see the clatter pattern on his face. His being too enveloped in opaque promise, choking the faculty with it. Eyes streaming and throats constricted with the noxious concentrate of Cork’s great post-millennial hope. Oh God, that was it. Ryan was all tied up in nasty knots of his own smothering competence.

Don’t you want to be an engineer? Or an architect? Or a scientist or a programmer or, God help us, a doctor? Don’t you want to be something, Ryan? Oh go on. Fucking be something.

The apology would fit most naturally there, but Ryan knew the words wouldn’t come, not even if they tried beating them out of him.

It was different with Karine. He had every reason to apologise to her, but she didn’t know that. He’d mean every syllable but it wouldn’t matter. Where he’d need forgiveness he wouldn’t get it.

He turned into the final stretch before the principal’s office.

Past the chaplain’s room, and the first action in the chain.

It had started months back. One sticky, airless Saturday, dull as any clump of empty hours and charged with potential because of it.

He woke to muffled thumps and muttered direction.

He lay there for a bit, on his side, blinking at the wall, coming round to the cacophony. When he’d made sense out of it he galloped down the stairs and there was his dad and this other fella, hoisting his piano out the door.

‘What are you at?’ he asked, and his sister Kelly, inflated with knowledge and bobbing into sight from behind the piano case, said, ‘What does it look like?’

‘Dad,’ he said. ‘Dad, you can’t. You can’t take the piano.’

His father said, ‘You don’t need it now your practical exam’s done. You don’t even play anymore.’

‘I play when you’re not here.’

‘Oh, you do, yeah.’ There was a pause as they stared each other down and his father blurted, ‘It’s doing nobody any good having that thing here. Don’t you tell me you still play!’

But he did. When there was no one around to hear him he did, even though it felt increasingly weird to sit on the piano stool and stretch his fingers and watch them fly over keys like they belonged to another boy entirely. A couple of times he’d played for Karine and that was even weirder, when they weren’t his hands and his hands had done so much to her. And she’d said, Oh my GOD Ryan, you’re really good , but he hadn’t been; everything he’d played for her had been stilted, because he was so desperate for it to sound the way it did when he knew there was no one else in the house to hear it and nothing to prove even to himself because he already knew it was there, the music, in his head and in his belly and in his hands. And he’d presumed, Well, one day I’ll be able to do that for her, too, because I won’t be freaking the fuck out about how she thinks of me , but now that day wasn’t going to come, was it, now that his useless cunt father had stolen his piano from him.