Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

She stepped onto the driveway and closed out the door behind her. Beyond her front wall, two bickering girls played on scooters, oblivious to the building pressure above them, the carillon hum of the imminent squall.

‘He’s with one of the… working girls,’ she said. ‘You know.’

‘One of the whores? Which whore?’

‘I don’t know what she calls herself but I know her as Georgie Fitzsimons.’

‘Irish?’

‘They do exist,’ she said.

‘And where does she work? What does she look like?’

‘Oh, she’s one of the unfortunates. She’s on the streets. Not hard to miss; she’s usually down the quay. She’s short but, y’know, chesty.’ She gestured extravagantly. ‘Dark hair down her back. Skinny now, like, but she was pretty once. I think the term is “gone to shit”.’

‘I know the sort.’

‘She used to work for you,’ she said. ‘In the house at the end of Bachelor’s Quay.’

‘Really.’ Well, now the langer’s being there made sense. The insignificant other of one of the whores, probably a junkie, probably thinking the house was empty, probably looking to rip the copper out of the walls or the carpet up. Probably the kind of company that eejit Tony Cusack was used to keeping. The issue of the corpse’s exposed identity quickly shrivelled.

‘Does he owe you money or something?’ Tara asked.

‘Who?’

‘Robbie O’Donovan. I get the feeling he skipped town, is all.’

Jimmy chewed the air.

‘You ask too many questions, Tara.’

‘I’m just trying to help…’

‘It’d be more in your line to try zipping your trap, because the day will come when someone will solder it shut for you.’

‘OK. Jesus,’ she said, and held on to the wall dividing her property from Cusack’s, and put her other hand to her chest.

‘Just a pointer.’ He dismissed her with a casual wave and returned to his car.

She reappeared at her front window, peeked out from behind the curtain, disappeared as soon as she saw him watching. He snorted.

One of the squabbling girls pushed her companion off her scooter. The deposed one screamed. Tara Duane glimpsed out again. Jimmy considered another wave.

The distraught girl’s screams were met and matched by a yowl from one of the gardens across the way. A man with gym-sculpted shoulders pitched towards them, snarling at Sarah or Sasha or whoever she was. Jimmy couldn’t tell whether it was the victim or the perpetrator that had drawn out the yowls, but the chap was coming for them, hard, and when he reached them he picked up the screaming one with one hand and slapped the offender with the other. The one who’d been pushed was set upright. The culpable one was spun around by her wrist. She went white with shock. The judgement kept coming.

Hot day, though. Short tempers.

A woman in lilac with a stretched-out seahorse tattoo waddled towards the scene. She stood back from the spitting man, the bawling children, and threatened to call the guards. The man raised his hand.

Still there was no rain. Jimmy smiled out at the olive light and the drama and drew Tony Cusack’s indiscretion from catastrophe to conspiracy to clanger.

We’re going out later. Nothing much happening, but we’re going to get some cans and go gatting with Joseph and the lads, have a few smokes, a bit of a laugh. Karine, though, she’d get dolled up for the opening of an eye. We’re up in Dan Kane’s stash house and she’s ‘getting ready’. Getting ready, like. So that if she pulls a whitey at least she’ll look gorgeous gawking all over my runners.

I’m at the bottom of the bed, rolling a joint, and she’s sitting up against the pillows watching telly and painting her toenails baby-blue.

It’s one of them dancing competition shows that’s on. She loves them. She does hip hop twice a week and enters competitions with a proper crew and everything. She can do the splits. She can rest her calves on my shoulders. Yeah, it’s fucking awesome.

‘Your manno’s amazing,’ she says, all goo-eyed at this fella lepping around in front of the judges in a pair of leggings.

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah, he’s got moves like.’

She’s completely gripped. She finishes her toenails and leans back, a finger in her mouth as she stares at the screen. I hold the joint up in invitation but she pays me no heed.

Her toes are splayed in case she ruins the paint job.

I take a pinch of tobacco and slowly, slowly stretch over.

She sighs as the judges give a standing ovation. She gets very wrapped up in the feelgoods.

I sprinkle some of the loose tobacco over the nails on her right foot and it sticks to the polish, flecking it baby-blue and bog-water brown.

She doesn’t notice.

I do the other foot. She pulls her knees towards her just as I finish.

‘He is like super talented,’ she says.

I spark up.

She looks over at me, mouth open, ready to tell me something else mind-blowing about the steamer on the screen when she lamps her piebald toes.

‘Oh my God! Ryan!’

I’m breaking my hole laughing.

‘Ryan Cusack, you are fucking LOUSY!’ She jumps up and throws a pillow at me and practically has a fit right there on the floor. ‘You gowl! I don’t even have varnish remover with me, like. They’re ruined! What am I gonna do? Oh my God, you break my melt, d’you know that?’

She is beetroot with fury but I can’t say anything, I’m choked.

She stomps into the bathroom and just before she slams the door she screams, ‘I wish I was a fucking LESBIAN!’

On the screen yer man in leggings is standing with his hands joined in a silent prayer. I wipe the tears from my eyes. The judges call yer man’s name and he jumps out onto the stage like he’s got a wazzie down his drawers.

She comes out again a couple of minutes later.

‘Your boyfriend got through,’ I tell her.

She scowls. ‘My boyfriend better get his jacket on coz he’s going to get me nail polish remover right now. I honestly don’t know why I put up with you, Ryan. You’re such a child.’

It was beautiful down at the lakeside in the early morning. The air was cold, stripped of the fragments it had picked up the day before, though it would be stale by midday and offering mouthfuls of flies by dusk.

Georgie had made a habit out of coming down to the water before breakfast. In the great expanse of hill and sky, it stayed early for longer. Back in the city there was traffic and torment from dawn. Out here, so long as the air held that chill, the limbo between then and now stretched as far as she needed.

She sat on a flat rock by the water’s edge and closed her eyes to the milky-blue sky, and the breeze that coaxed tresses onto her cheeks and over her lashes. The birds could be raucous near the water, but this morning their song was spiralling light. Beyond that, nothing. Later, when duties began, there’d be car engines and noises of cooperation as people grouped off to deny the devil idle hands.

David’s voice, behind her: ‘You weren’t wrong.’

She neither turned nor opened her eyes. ‘You’re so negative, David. You weren’t wrong . You could have said instead, You were right . Turn the negative into the positive, remember? Break free of sour processes. Turn that frown. Upside down.’

His shoes crunched on the shingle. When she opened her eyes, he was standing at the water’s edge, his back to her, hands on his hips.