Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

Lacking the necessary equipment to answer, the ghost of Robbie O’Donovan said nothing.

‘I’ll atone,’ grumbled Maureen, ‘but I’m not taking any more punishment. Up to me oxters in punishment I was, for doing feck all. Do you hear me?’

Her thirst for redemption unquenched by the wraith’s sullen insubstantiality, Maureen was left picking through more indirect routes.

The church seemed like the obvious place to start. The clergy were self-professed experts in bestowing grace on behalf of the absentee landlord. Then there was the notion of being pre-cleared of the burden of Robbie O’Donovan’s death by dint of her suffering years of penitence with no sin to show for it. Was that not a thing with the Holy Roman Empire? Didn’t they tend to make up these kind of dirt-kicking assurances whenever anyone sufficiently gold-laden came to them dragging a sack of their indiscretions? If the church that condemned her to childless banishment forty years ago could offer her something in the way of a consolation prize, well, she was interested in hearing it.

The church nearest her was across the river and ten minutes down the quays. The morning after she told Robbie O’Donovan his bedtime story, she took a walk.

It had been a nasty April so far, the weather weak and wet, and bitter. She had wanted to wear white for the occasion, but the rain dissuaded her; she swapped white trousers for a black pair, and her sandals for sturdy dark shoes, and her cream cardigan and white shirt gave her the look of someone who’d only sinned from the waist down, which was generally where it manifested on nineteen-year-olds in the seventies.

It was an old church, imposing in a way they’d discourage now that the country was wide to their private flamboyances. Maureen strode up the steps and through the colossal doors and inside spied grandeur good-oh. Gold and marble and wall-mounted speakers so as to better hear the word of the Law-Di-Daw. She chortled, loud enough to upset a couple of biddies sitting in one of the end pews.

There were confession boxes in the corner. She ran her hands over the outside of the left-hand door. Hardwood, varnished over and over again; all veneer at this stage, she thought. There was a black grille on the top half. The priest’s station in the middle was hung with a velvet curtain.

Maureen slipped inside and stood in the dark, remembering all that time ago, when you’d be waiting on the priest to slide the hatch open, enjoying the stuffiness, the pomp of the ritual, even the smell of the thing, rich and musty, something of the bygones…

The hatch slid to the side and a voice said, ‘We’re not scheduled for confessions now, but I saw you come in.’

‘Jesus Christ!’

‘ “Bless me father for I have sinned” is the customary salutation.’

She shoved the door open and hurried to the exit, and behind her the priest, bespectacled and white-haired as uniform dictated, opened the door of the confessional and hung out on one foot.

‘I didn’t mean to startle you,’ he called.

Robbie O’Donovan was waiting for her when she banged shut the door of the brothel. His face, elongated this time, mouthless and sallow, stared her down from the end of the corridor. He was standing at the kitchen door, blocking entry.

‘I’ll get them,’ she said. ‘Not today, obviously. But you’ll see at the end of it: you, my lad, have no right to be here.’

She wanted a cup of tea and to sit down, and so she blinked hard, and when she opened her eyes again he was gone.

Maureen sat on it like a bird of prey fluffed up on an egg. She guarded it closely at first, but as soon as Jimmy gratefully consigned the deed to history the air around her turned viscous with her glee, and Jimmy watched it bubble into thick sighs and snorts and unspent exclamations until she decided it was time to tell him what she’d learned; it wasn’t good.

That gowl Cusack had let slip the name of the corpse.

What harm? Dougan might have asked, if he’d been let in at all, and he hadn’t. The worst of all possible outcomes had already happened; the fool was dead. What difference did it make if Maureen knew the name of the man she’d killed?

Without Dougan, though, Jimmy Phelan was a mess of what-ifs and how-dares.

The name of the corpse was a complication. Maureen made casual references to a ghost who’d popped into existence as soon as she had a name to give it, and the breeziness bothered him. No manifestation of guilt, this. Who knew what else the witch could do with a name?

It had been a season of extremes. The sun, when it shined, crisped everything it caught, but it never appeared except in a bruise of cumulus clouds. Showers kept the children indoors. The air was thick with fuming wasps.

Jimmy drove up to Cusack’s house to beat out of him what in fuck’s name he thought he was doing telling Maureen who the dead man was. He drove up to beat sense into him. He drove up to gauge his unruliness, and to find out whether there was more to this fuck-up than insubordination. Jimmy Phelan thought himself a great judge of character, and Cusack hadn’t seemed like he knew the corpse’s identity on the day they’d removed it from Maureen’s floor. There was a possibility the fucker had conducted his own investigation, and carried the results back to Maureen for her to do with as she pleased. Jimmy didn’t know.

He didn’t know!

Tony Cusack’s terrace was only one of dozens flung out in a lattice of reluctant socialism. There was always some brat lighting bonfires on the green, or a lout with a belly out to next Friday being drunkenly ejected from his home (with a measure of screaming fishwife fucked in for good luck), or squad cars or teenage squeals or gibbering dogs. Jimmy parked and grabbed a passing urchin for exactitudes.

Tony’s house was in the middle of a short terrace facing the green. There was a silver Scenic in the stubby driveway, but the curtains were closed on both floors and there were no signs of life behind the frosted glass on the front door. Jimmy knocked anyway, and knocked harder when he didn’t get an answer. How many children did the man say he’d sired? Six? Jimmy turned. The lawn was overgrown, the garden didn’t sport anything in the way of ornamental hedges or flowerbeds, and the only indication of children was the couple of sweet wrappers caught between the corner of the lawn and the pebble-dashed front wall.

He stepped onto the drive and leaned against the car bonnet.

‘Where are you, you little maggot?’

He cast his eyes to the end of the terrace, where figures shrank behind cars and walls and rosebushes, then looked the other way and caught a familiar face diving behind a curtain in the house next door.

That would do.

He began to whistle as he crossed from this driveway into the next. When he rapped on the door she opened it only a couple of inches and allowed him her eyes and her forehead.

‘Can I help you?’

‘For fuck’s sake, Tara. You’re not playing oblivious, are you?’

He slapped the door again, and it bumped off her nose.

‘I’m not playing oblivious,’ she said.

‘Good girl. Because I don’t have the patience for your play-acting. Are you going to let me in?’

‘My daughter’s in bed.’

‘That’s not an answer.’

She winced and sniffed as she stood aside and let him into her hall.

The sitting-room curtains were drawn. The room was illuminated by the glow from a laptop on the coffee table, supplemented by rolling sunlight from the sundered summer sky. Jimmy sat on the couch, spreading his arms across the back and crossing his left leg over his right and Tara Duane hovered by her own sitting-room door like a burglar made to face the music.