Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

‘You look like you’re appraising the plantation,’ she said. ‘Lord and Master of all you survey.’

‘Only one Lord,’ he said. ‘And no possessions. Isn’t that right?’

She laughed, and he turned to smile. He was neatly proportioned, moulded by good fortune rather than hard work. He had a trimmed beard, which tickled, and eyes blue as the mountain sky.

‘I didn’t think you were one for getting up early,’ she teased.

‘You said it would be worth my while,’ he said.

Gambling was David’s vice. He used to hole himself up for entire weeks, just him and his laptop, losing shirt after shirt in landscapes of flashing lights and vivid green. You wouldn’t think it to look at him. He seemed more like the lead in an IKEA ad. When his parents got divorced, his father had turned to pastors new, which was how his youngest son had ended up at a lakeside refuge run by Christian soldiers whose military tactics amounted to communal porridge pots and long walks in the woods.

Georgie’s first thought had been that it was all very American, but the mission leader was Irish. William Tobin was his name and he called his organisation CAIL, which she had since discovered, with a hastily stifled snigger, stood for Christians Active In Light. Try as she might she couldn’t find an ulterior motive to William’s decency; he was too gentle a soul for trickery. He had a grey ponytail and a wife called Clover to whom he displayed a very non-cultlike monogamous devotion. He had found Georgie in need and had given freely.

What that need had been was nobody else’s business. William had told her that what she disclosed to his knot of volunteers was entirely up to her. So she’d told them she was an alcoholic, which was probably true, even if it was the least of her problems.

It wasn’t rehab in the traditional sense. William Tobin’s West Cork property was more drop-out than check-in. Bed and board in exchange for a little light farming and daily sermons about the loving grace of Jesus Christ. Georgie hadn’t yet found the Lord — in His defence, she hadn’t been looking very hard — but they seemed an honest bunch, she had always liked porridge and she loved the lakeside air.

‘You’re sure you’re set for later?’ David said.

‘Oh yeah. That won’t be a problem.’

‘I guess it’s handy they’re bringing you.’

‘They must trust me not to run off into the nearest pub, screaming for a Jägerbomb.’

‘You think they’re right to trust you?’ he smiled.

‘Please. Booze is so last month.’

He sat beside her on her boulder perch and as he stretched an arm around her he looked back, in the direction of the centre, just in case.

William and Clover didn’t like to make rules not already enshrined in the teachings of Himself, but He probably wasn’t keen on fraternisation and, if Georgie remembered her religion classes correctly, thought fallen women only handy for washing His trotters. The fact that she had embarked on a quiet affair with David would no doubt have been a deal-breaker, at the very least an incitement to proper spluttering Bible-thumping.

But there was something so perversely pure about it. Georgie hadn’t told David about the career path that brought her to William’s door, and his blind attraction was quite the aphrodisiac. And though she had long lost the notion that she would be dragged out of perdition by the clammy hands of a man, there was something therapeutic in the nature of their bond. The secrecy reminded her of the first few stolen kisses as a girl back at home; furtive pecks at the back of the hurling pitch, the fluttering excitement of a hand sliding under her top. So there was a kind of rebirth to it, she supposed.

She leaned into David’s shoulder and they kissed.

The first time had been a revelation. They had been talking late in the common room about his converted father and her stubbornly pious mother. Without warning he’d lurched forward, an action as clumsy as its resulting kiss was tender, and as his mouth worked hers open she’d felt heat spreading, belly to hips to thighs. Like a blossoming, a poet might have said, but at the time she had linked it to the idea of an opening tomb. Something that would stir a pharaoh’s wrath and unleash a plague of locusts. It had been a diversion from genuine butterflies.

That night they’d had sex on the bench Clover used to fold sheets. She thought afterwards that she probably shouldn’t have, on the basis that it wasn’t good for her rehabilitation, but actually wanting to was novelty enough to carry her.

If Robbie were to come home now, would he find her willing and born anew?

If Robbie were to come home now he wouldn’t find her at all.

David slipped his hand down the front of her dress, teasing taut a nipple.

‘D’you think we have time…’ he said.

‘I doubt it.’

But David was a gambling man.

She had leaned against a parked car and heaved.

You could never be safe, even though you’d be so careful and smart, leaning in through car windows to slyly sniff their breath for signs of riled drunkenness, reading the tics and faces pulled to gauge violent intent. A few would always get through, and the ones you couldn’t interpret were the worst of the lot, the real evil bastards, the ones who hid behind stony facades the rage, the frustration, the deep-seated mammy issues they were only dying to take out on you. You, the dirty whore. You, representing in living, breathing audacity everything that was wrong with them.

This one had accepted the terms of the sale, then decided, once she was in his car, that the terms of the sale were unacceptable.

When she protested, he punched her. When she shouted, he walked around the side of the car to the passenger door, took her hair in his fist and dragged her out. He pushed her onto the bonnet and raped her. Then he punched her again and spat into her face and hair and told her that she disgusted him, and left her at the side of the road, and from there she began walking back into town, and a host of the oblivious walked and drove past until by luck or as he might have put it, divine intervention, William Tobin found her.

He was driving home from the hall he maintained in the city for prayer services and Bible study groups.

‘You poor child!’ he exclaimed, tearfully. ‘God is here for you. You have only to let him in.’

She had been asked to return to the prayer hall in the city now with William and Clover and a couple of the converted: Saskia, a girl of near thirty who’d been raised in bohemian carelessness down in Kerry by her German parents and all of their hangers-on; and Martin, a bearded giant in his forties who had spent years in prison for some crime only darkly alluded to. William drove the minibus, and Georgie balanced her chin in her hand and watched the countryside drift by as Saskia wondered aloud if Ireland was, in its heathenism, doomed to suffer the fate of ancient Rome.

The four were to attend some public meeting about political non-compliance, or the threat of feminism, or knitting jumpers for Jesus or something. Her role was to prep the hall for their return; sweep the floor, arrange the chairs, make the sandwiches.

She had been looking forward to the excursion since William had mentioned it, three days before. It wasn’t just because of the plan she’d hatched with David to bring back some goodies for a midnight feast, though that was most of it; giggling with David behind the backs of the brethren made her ache for childish pursuits. She had also been looking forward to some time away from the serenity of the lakeside. To feel something real again, and in its contact make certain that she was entitled to it this time out. Because sometimes she felt that the earnest faith of William and his disciples, the cleansing chill of the lakeside air, even the sanctified secrecy of her encounters with David — all were fragments of someone else’s bedtime story, lost in the aether and erroneously granted her.