Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

Ryan didn’t bother trying to make himself at home. He knew he’d be moved on soon enough. Dan Kane’s flat was a place to sleep: that would have to be sufficient.

He wasn’t fond of being alone. This apartment, climate-controlled for the benefit of the stash, was as clean and as cold as the cavity in his chest. He had a telly, an Xbox and a laptop, and a fridge for beer, and a double bed with a duvet heavy enough to keep his girlfriend warm. That only helped a little. He missed home and this failing kept him up at night. He missed the terrace and the green outside it and the shortcuts and gatting spots that had marked the boundaries of his world. He missed his brothers’ snoring and the banging on the bathroom door and the blaring of non-stop Simpsons episodes from the sitting room. A couple of times he thought he might miss his father, kind of like you’d miss a bad tooth, or a gangrenous arm.

He guessed that it was just the hangover of being from a big family. And like any hangover, he could only deal with it by getting through it and avoiding the source until he forgot how much it hurt.

Beside his father’s house was the scene of the crime, tended by a treacherous curator, preserved without his collusion. One day he knew he’d want to see his dad again, and that shame would line the path home. He’d seen enough of Tara Duane to last him till perdition, in her sickly back garden come-ons, in her half-dressed admonishment, in the crippling late-night replays he conducted alone in his borrowed apartment. She had turned him on to turn him in, and though he’d folded up the memory and folded it again, it flared on dark occasion, and he couldn’t get his head around it.

It was April. A surf of cloud broke grey over the streets and Ryan walked through a city where debris stuck in damp clumps in every dirty corner. He was alone, still feeling out the expanse of it. There was hint of Dan coming around later on to evaluate his reserves, which wouldn’t take long with a bit of luck, because Karine had a dance class she intended to mitch from so she could come up to the flat and get naked.

They had celebrated their first anniversary in March, on his sixteenth birthday. There was another anniversary today, and he wasn’t sure whether it’d be a good idea to mention it. It had been a year since they’d first had sex. Would she go for that, he wondered? Some alcohol, maybe a smidge of Dan Kane’s coke, and fuck right through the everyday and into something new to make another anniversary of?

He trotted on, chest out, shoulders back, for an audience oblivious.

He was headed for a service station, which by a perverse twist would probably employ the people with the fewest fucks to give, but there was an off-licence on the way, and it was worth a shot. He ducked in out of the drizzle and stood back from the counter, behind a half-sized, snuffling woman intent on procuring a kind of liquor that neither he nor the thin-smigged clown at the till had ever heard of.

‘This is the only ice wine we stock,’ said the fella behind the counter. ‘It’s Canadian. That’s probably the one.’

The woman spun her wrist like she was winding a crank.

‘That’s not it either,’ she said. Her voice was thick and deep; she cleared her throat. ‘Maybe it’s like a schnapps thing? Or a brandy even.’

‘What fruit?’

‘I can’t remember. I’ll know it when I see it.’

Ryan picked a couple of bags of Taytos from a lopsided display and gawped at the ceiling. It made sense to cloak himself in the inertia of a musty shop interior if his success depended on his not looking like he was on a great adventure. No adventure to doing the shopping, was there? Grabbing a naggin, heading home, doing the washing or his taxes or whatever the fuck. Ryan Cusack was a grown-up and grown-ups were always bored.

That left just one person in the off-licence who wasn’t a grown-up, and she appeared to be the dithering woman’s child. A doonshie wan of no more than four stood back by the beer fridge, her baby finger in her mouth. Her mother postulated that the alcohol she sought was cherry-based. The assistant turned to the shelves behind him and the child stuck her paws into the beer fridge and picked up four tins and ran out the door of the off-licence as quick as her matchstick legs would carry her.

‘D’you know what?’ said the scrawny woman. ‘I’ll leave it. I’ll check the name of it and be back to you.’

She didn’t look at Ryan as she went past. Through the window he watched her join the tiny thief and a man as bony as she was, and the man picked up the cans and she picked up the child, and they darted over the wet streets like the city was being ripped out from under them.

‘Can I help you?’ said the guy behind the counter.

If there had been a bit more enthusiasm in his offer, Ryan might have warned him to look out for repeat visits. Instead he threw the Taytos on the counter and said, ‘A naggin of Smirnoff and a naggin of Jameson.’

‘Have you ID?’ snapped yer man.

‘Nope.’

‘Well, what age are you?’

‘Sixteen, boy.’

The sarcastic feigning of sarcasm proved too dense a barrier to cut through and, besides, it was during the school day, and Ryan was in civvies. The vendor twitched and turned.

‘Bring some ID next time,’ he said, knocking the bottles off the counter.

They had a dog at home. Nero. A mongrel with a touch of Labrador to him and a habit, in his old age, of sleeping underneath the kitchen table, farting at intervals with such gusto that it was a wonder there was varnish left on the legs. He’d come home with Tony when Ryan was five — too young to teach his puppy any tricks. When he was old enough to have given it a shot, he no longer wanted to. It was as though in teaching the little fucker to fetch, he would have been corrupting him. Changing his lolling doggy nature to suit a movie mandate.

It was pretty fucked up to do the same to a kid.

He gathered his purchases and went in the direction the matchstick trio had taken.

Here’s your trick, Junior . When Mammy’s in her hour of need and the guardian’s back is turned, you stick your hands into the icebox and retrieve the medicine. When Daddy needs it and he can’t drag his arse out of bed to get it, you dash down to the offy with your blankest-ever face and wait till Missus Horgan’s cleared her weepy eyes enough to hand over the whiskey. And maybe Matchstick Mammy will drink up and get warm and happy, and cover you with cuddles and confirmation of your preciousness, or maybe Splintered Daddy will turn on you and accuse you of judging him or having the wrong kind of face, and maybe all you’ll get from it is a clatter headache. Either way just do the trick and shut up.

He found them preparing to cross the road. The man’s eyes met Ryan’s as he approached, but there was no flicker until Ryan said, ‘C’mere, what d’you think you’re doing?’

At which the man said, ‘What?’

‘I said what the fuck do you think you’re doing?’

The man stood in front of the woman and the child — more by accident than instinct. He was wearing a baggy green hoodie. He looked like he’d shrunk in the wash. Or maybe he’d swiped the hoodie like he’d swiped the gatt; maybe he flung his little accomplice over garden walls in the sunshine so she could harvest washing lines for him. Whatever it was, he was a mismatched nothing with sticky eyes; Ryan knew his sort.

‘Getting a small wan to steal your drink for you while your ould doll throws fairy stories at the shopkeeper. And you outside with your hands down your trousers. Aw stop, aren’t you the fucking berries?’

‘Listen—’ said the man.

‘You fucking listen,’ said Ryan, ‘because people obviously don’t tell you you’re a scumbag half enough.’