Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

Tony called up the stairs around midday, saying that he was heading out but that he’d be back soon, and Ryan couldn’t answer except under his breath: I don’t care if you never come home, you prick; look what’s after happening. He curled into terror and tears.

Tara fucking Duane.

If Karine found out, she’d never forgive him.

But I’m sorry , he told her, and she a mile away in a classroom and utterly oblivious. I’m so fucking sorry. I fucked up. I didn’t mean it .

Kelly came home at half past four and popped her head in the door and screeched, ‘You must be dying , boy. You were a mess last night. I’d to let you in at three in the morning and you fell down twice and it was Un. Fucking. Real.’

‘Yeah,’ he said. He rolled onto his belly and closed his eyes; the sheet smelled of sweat and sick. ‘I pulled a whitey I guess.’

‘Where were you, anyway?’

‘Nowhere,’ he said. ‘Leave me alone.’

‘You’ve been out for three days, Ryan. Is it too much to ask that you sit quietly for three hours on your return?’ said Mr Stephen Barry, Principal.

Ryan said, ‘I might as well. I’m fucking invisible anyway.’

The penance was swift and as deserved as its supplier was ill-chosen. When his dad got back on Monday evening he let a roar out of him that ricocheted off each of the four walls in turn.

‘Ryan!’

He inched into the kitchen. Tony was leaning on the sink, his lips and eyes bulging. ‘Gimme your phone.’

Ryan handed it over.

He assumed his dad needed the phone to make a call, because Tony was as often lacking credit as he was lacking everything else. He stood waiting for it to be handed back; that’s why he was only an outstretched arm away when the phone played out the soundtrack to Karine’s salve. The floor plunged under his feet and his blood pushed through pallor; Tony said, ‘What the fuck, Ryan? What the fuck ?’ and the first slap landed, on his left cheek, and he breathed in the shock and the whiskey stench and willed himself hard not to cry.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘You’re sorry? You’re fucking sorry?’

‘It’s just a video, Dad. Just a stupid thing.’

‘You’re proud of it, aren’t you?’

There was nothing new in his father’s intent to wreck his head inside and out; whiskey had never agreed with Tony, no matter how convincing his arguments. Ryan puckered his brow. ‘What?’

‘Who else has seen this?’

‘No one.’

‘Then why the fuck did Tara Duane just tell me to go looking for it?’

‘What?’ Ryan said again.

Didn’t matter how many whats he managed; those bits of the night before he needed to access had been erased by shots and dope and bile. Gone. Slipped down the back of Tara Duane’s couch, on which he’d spent just one too many nights getting stoned for the sake of having something to do. Had he shown her the film he was so privately proud of? Had his traitorous dick been fuelled by her reaction? There was no room for remembering in any case; he was being slapped back out into the hall, pinned to the wall by the front door, cuffed between accusations.

‘How did that bitch know it was there?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know? Is she fucking psychic, is she?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Ryan… Do you think I’m fucking stupid?’

This is how he knew he was in the biggest trouble of his life; his dad was crying. He grabbed Ryan’s neck and slid two clammy thumbs up to his cheekbones. ‘Where were you last night?’ he howled. Nowhere wouldn’t do; Ryan started into it by loose instinct, and Tony shook him. ‘Where!’

‘Next door,’ Ryan whimpered.

‘What were you doing next door?’

Hiding out coz you were fucking langers, you useless, bitter prick.

None of the truth for Tony Cusack. Instead Ryan blubbered, ‘I’m sorry, Dad. I didn’t mean to. She started it. I was really, really drunk.’

‘What the fuck does that mean?’

Ryan was pushed onto the stairs. His forehead clattered the fourth step. His father continued the interrogation with one knee between his son’s knees and both hands down hard on his back. You didn’t mean to what? Ryan shut his eyes and coughed out brackish remorse. Tony wasn’t happy with rescinded answers from a spineless child. And sure why would he be? Why should he be?

‘What the fuck do I do with you, boy? What the fuck else can I do?’

‘You are going to have to calm down,’ said Barry. ‘Into the office here. We’ll talk over it.’

‘We’ll talk over it, will we, boy?’ Ryan said. ‘What’ll we talk over?’

Mrs Cronin wasn’t even bothering to hide her interest. She stood by the photocopier with her outrage hung on the set of her mouth.

‘We’ll talk over your behaviour,’ said Barry. ‘We’ll talk over what it is that’s compelling you to spit in the face of your potential, Ryan. And the best place to do it is behind closed doors, don’t you think?’

‘Fuckton that happens behind closed doors, don’t you think, sir?’

‘Watch your language.’

‘I will,’ said Ryan. ‘When you start watching. When you start opening your fucking eyes.’

‘Fill me in, then. I’m on your side, Ryan. Tell me what I’m missing.’

Ryan’s fingers, which had the grace for concertos so long as there was no one there to hear them, closed around the baggie in his pocket and he fucked it at his headmaster, and it fluttered to his feet, inconsequential and shining bright.

‘You see that, I bet. You see that all right.’

Mr Barry looked down at the offering and said, ‘What. Is that?’

‘That’s cocaine, sir.’

The principal looked up again, and for once in his eyes, proper fury; not disappointment, but something Ryan could deal with.

‘You’re a fucking stupid boy, Ryan Cusack,’ he said.

The city isn’t going to notice the first brave steps of a little freeman, especially one emancipated only by tearing down all around him, but all the same, Ryan Cusack walked on like he was being watched.

That was an easy strut. Chest out, shoulders back, the heavy gatch of a lad whose balls hung low. Locomotive chicanery for after the tears had dried up. Once school had finished for him he’d had one last run-in with his father, anticlimactic in that there wasn’t room in his throat, past the gawks and the hot mass of babyish misery, to force the words up from his belly. Then he’d left home, followed (courtesy of his cousin Joseph) by his hobo’s kerchief of personal effects: socks and jocks and a toothbrush. A brief spell of sleeping on strange couches and, twice, town centre doorways, and he conceded and approached his boss for extra work.

‘I’m just saying that if you need any bit more, boy, I’m at a loose end.’

Hanging from it.

His boss’s name was Dan Kane. He was a well-turned-out brute in his early thirties: mild-eyed, going grey, accent dampened, intentionally featureless up to the point his hands closed round your throat and his spit bubbled through a growl only an inch from your empty pleas. He was an anomaly in the underworld, a little monolith in a city held on blood bonds. Ryan had been selling for him indirectly before Kane copped on and decreed it hilarious; there weren’t many teenagers who could move quantities. Dan had made kind of a pet of him — allowed him tick and engaged him in grinning debate on ethics and best practices — but better a pet than the leech that drew blood from Tony Cusack’s knuckles.

Dan had work for him. More than he could spare. He possessed the keys to a couple of apartments which he used as walk-in safes for stashes of shifting size. He installed Ryan in one to keep an eye on things — the four walls, mostly. On the first night they sat at the bare kitchen table and talked fathers, and Dan slapped him on the back and grimaced in sympathy. He had an arctic disposition punctuated by explosions of lurid temper, but a heart too, when it suited him.