Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

Oh, you fucking gom, boy, for fuck’s sake, it’s only a fucking piano, it wasn’t your knob you lost.

Now he crossed the assembly area, taking care to plant a foot on the thin blue cushion of the nearest of the benches laid out in rows, pushing off each to land with mock jubilant grace in front of the next.

Only hours after the theft he told Karine, even though he knew what would happen once he lost the confession from his gritted teeth to her ears. He told her up in his bedroom as she lay happy and naked on top of him; he always got chatty Afterwards, in a stupid Here’s my soul, why don’t you shit on it? kind of way.

‘My dad sold the piano.’

That bit was easy, but then she raised her head from his chest and he realised that none of the other things he wanted to tell her — how the piano meant this much to him and fuck all to his father, how it wasn’t fair that they didn’t just sell the telly if they needed the money, even though he knew the telly was worth a fraction of what his dad got for the piano, proceeds he was probably soaking in right now, having followed the piano out the door — that none of those things had to be pushed past his throat because she already knew. Instead he fought to keep his eyes unfocused and fought to not look at her and started losing the fight and feeling that horrible juddering weakness begin in his tummy and work its way up to his face. So he pulled his arm over his eyes and sucked air through his teeth.

‘Aw, baby boy,’ she said.

Still with his eyes screwed up, he put his arms back around her and pressed her against him so that she’d stop his heart leaping out of his mouth, and she lay there until he was able to breathe again.

She lifted her head, and said, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’s all right.’

His phone was on the floor beside the bed. He reached down to get it, and started thumbing the screen, blinking at menus.

She smoothed the corners of his eyes with a fingertip.

‘I want to make you feel better,’ she said. ‘Will I give you a blowjob?’ and he thought how lucky he was, really, no matter what else kept landing on him, and he said, ‘Yes please.’

He didn’t bother announcing his transgression when he got to the office. He sat himself in a grey plastic chair facing the secretaries and the saggy one, Mrs Cronin, looked up at him and said, ‘For God’s sake, Ryan.’

He folded his arms and stretched out his legs and stared at the floor beyond his runners.

Karine had heard plenty warning about allowing a boy to keep compromising images of her on his phone, because boys are cruel and the moment any of them see your tits is the moment you lose all value in their piggy eyes. Yeah, yeah. But she trusted Ryan, and he trusted her, and the two-minute video of her looking up doe-eyed while she sucked him off was something he knew he would never show to anyone else. Never. It would have ruined it.

He watched it a couple of times late at night, with the lights off and his dad passed out and his brothers snoring. OK, a fuck of a lot more than a couple of times, but he didn’t feel anyone could blame him. Even Karine was OK with it still being on his phone weeks and weeks after. Any time she’d texted him something sexy before, she insisted on nominating use-by dates, and went through his phone afterwards just to be sure. The video was different. Maybe it was that she could see the same thing in her upturned eyes that he could. Maybe it was because she knew that there was something missing from his life now, but something he chose to think of as a necessary loss as he transitioned to a better future. No piano, but who needs pianos anyway? That was something he did as a boy. At night he looked at the nymph on the screen and let his hand close tighter and his chest rise and fall and thought, Yeah, well, she’s something I do as a man, isn’t she?

The thief’s guilt was manifest. There’d been more drink taken than usual; Tony Cusack clearly felt the loss of the piano in the back of his mouth. He was irritable and when he was irritable he was to be avoided — everything was everyone else’s fault when he was on the skite.

The neighbours knew. Why wouldn’t they know? It takes persistence and dedication to remain oblivious to violent noise in a small terrace, and if there was work in the bed Ryan was sure most of his neighbours would sleep on the floor.

Last Saturday night he got a nice black eye over something Kelly had done. God forbid his dad would ever smack Kelly — Tony didn’t hit girls, oh sure girls were precious altogether — so Ryan had to take it like a good big brother, a puck into the left eye administered after closing time.

The shiner was a map left for Tony to read on the Sunday morning, and it put him in even worse form. He went out in the afternoon and Ryan stayed in his room, tripping between seething and sadness and smoke. When Tony arrived back that night his son counted his steps and paid heed to the drumbeat of cabinets and doors, and when Tony settled in the sitting room Ryan pulled his runners on and went out into the back garden and sat on the wall. He did that plenty, on the nights he knew that even a glance could nudge his father back onto the warpath. Tony would be asleep soon enough.

And then out scuttled Tara Duane.

With only a hollow wall between her house and theirs, Tara knew the score better than anyone, and she never pretended otherwise. Sometimes Ryan sold her a bit of dope and sometimes she invited him to come in and skin up with her and sometimes if it was raining he complied, because sometimes anywhere was better than home, even if sometimes the stupid bitch tried to pay him in prescription drug leftovers and sometimes she even tried it on with him, with her dainty bone-fingers climbing up his leg to see if they could charm a hard-on.

‘You don’t have to go through this alone, pet,’ she said.

It wasn’t raining but he took her up on the offer anyway.

Afterwards he asked the mirror, What the fuck were you thinking, boy? His reflection suggested, Well, maybe the loss of the piano had shattered his common sense. Or maybe the video had made him cocky. Maybe this, maybe that, maybe the other. Whatever it was he was desperately sorry.

See, there was a cup of tea and a shot of whiskey in the cup of tea. Then there were a couple of joints and a couple of cans of lager and the fact that he’d been smoking earlier on made him especially susceptible to being blasted, he supposed, though wasn’t hindsight twenty-twenty?

All he knew was that he’d drunk too much and smoked too much and lost control, which was the wrong thing to do because c’mon, fucking hell, he knew she had a bit of a thing for the young fellas, everyone knew she had a bit of a thing for the young fellas. He remembered her telling him the back story to the show she was watching on the telly, and he remembered her laughing at some piss-weak anecdote he couldn’t give two shits for, and then he remembered…

He didn’t feel like remembering it even now, days after the fact and not even the worst thing that had happened that week.

The principal’s name was Mr Stephen Barry. He came out into the corridor, in his shirtsleeves, like he was going to have a go and all.

‘I was planning on having a chat with you today, Ryan,’ he sighed, ‘but not like this.’

He remembered waking up in his own bed on Monday morning, the house mercifully still, his siblings long dragged off to school. He was sick as a small hospital. He sent Karine a text, telling her he had caught the flu or something, got up and puked his ring out, went back to bed and put his head under the pillow and watched what was left of the night before jump and fade and bleed in over his eyes.

Piss-weak anecdotes and carefully pitched laughter, and Tara Duane standing then with her arms folded as he pulled his tracksuit pants back up, saying: ‘You have a girlfriend.’ Putting him straight, with her knickers crumpled on the floor beside the couch.