Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

This community, this flaky citadel of do-gooders, had been poisoned by her presence. The meagre rules of William Tobin, smashed with pitiless zeal. Respect your body ; here she was on her back again, for some man she hardly knew. Respect your friends ; here she was, having brought cocaine into their cocoon.

‘I need to get out of here,’ she said to David, who shrugged it off as he spread her legs. ‘I don’t belong here.’

‘ Ssh , baby; can’t let them hear us.’

‘Get off me,’ she said, and then, ‘Get off me!’

She pushed him off and pulled on her dress as he spluttered disbelief, and ran through the deep shadows of a house she had just begun to know and out onto the yard, down the woodland path to the water, her feet bruised by the shingle, the hem of her ridiculous dress floating as the mud hindered her.

‘Georgie!’ David was behind her; she didn’t turn to look. ‘What are you doing, Georgie? Jesus, you’ll drown!’

No fear of that; the water, cold and still as the morning air, didn’t have the depth to either baptise or kill her. So she stood up to her waist in it, and cried at the shadow shore opposite, for how could good intentions so easily dishonoured ever stand a chance of saving her?

They held it up as a Get Out of Jail Free card when it was just another yellow star. Tony lay in the dark in a residential treatment centre in the middle of a vast nowhere. Here, he was to be crumbled to dust and put back together. Here, he was to admit his failings and submit to something of greater import and headier influence. At the end of it he would be a more humble man with drier balls. And sober! Yes, he’d be sober; the Law decreed it. Inside, he succumbed to the horrors doled out by their programme and sobriety stretched in front of him like miles of broken glass.

It had been a stipulation of his admittance that he completed detox before they began his re-education. Even so, his frailty punished him. Getting to sleep was no longer something accomplished by design, but by some Fates’ trick: he lay sweating and watching shadows, harrowed over fleeting agonies until he began to dream. The dreams were vivid to the point of cruelty, and he would wake up and have to start all over again. His shell cracked and splintered. His stomach heaved; his muscles sagged; toxins oozed from every pore.

Every time he broke the bottle the period of adjustment was longer and harsher. They kept hanging him out to dry before he was ready to come out of the brine. Next time round it would probably be the DTs. Hallucinations, fever and death. But that’d suit them fine, wouldn’t it? They always lumped for the option least bothersome to them. If they’d really given a fuck about his drinking they’d have asked him, Why? Why, Mr Cusack, did you feel the need to medicate yourself into such a state? It was in effect an overdose. To what end, boy? To what fucking end?

He turned on his side. His watch, flung onto his bedside table two days ago when it had begun to itch, flashed 3.17. He had been sleeping. He’d dreamt he was drinking again. In therapy sessions he had kept that recurrence to himself, thinking it a sign of ill intent the staff would take badly, but his fellow inmates had mentioned similar delusions. Horrors to them; they were in it for the long haul.

Well, the why is an interesting thing, Mr Bleeding Heart Bastard. Maybe not everyone in here drinks out of Neanderthal instinct.

Interesting, Mr Cusack. Do go on .

She denied it, the venomous bitch. She struck her chest and made a speech about trust and breach of trust and how she had offered his son nothing but a shoulder to cry on. ‘And why the fuck would you think he’d need to cry?’ Tony snapped, to which Tara cocked her head and wept through narrowed eyes, ‘Oh, we both know you’re struggling, Tony, there’s no shame in admitting that you’re struggling.’

He attempted to hound the truth out of her by demonstrating his rage on her windowpane, but all he’d ended up with was a legal obligation to reimburse her and a neighbour who spent her days by the new glass with her curtains bunched into her fist and who skittered up and down her driveway like a spider making a dash across the kitchen floor.

Ryan, then. Tony might have asked him about the night in Duane’s, his half-confession, about what perversion had prompted his sharing his home-made porn with the pasty witch, but he’d been so fucked from pilfered flashbacks that the thought of holding a conference had riled him into atrophy. He stewed for days. Then he let the boy go to school in an attempt to win back breathing space. The boy threw a bag of cocaine at his headmaster.

Too much to ask for Ryan to have explained this act of self-sabotage before he took off from home. Temper. Revenge. Something foreign and intangible. When threatened, the boy went mute as Father Mathew himself.

So why did you threaten him at all, Mr Cusack? Don’t you think The Demon had something to do with that?

Tony didn’t ever set out to lose the rag with Ryan but in no way did the young fella ever quell the rising tide; God forbid he use the term ‘asking for it’…

Asking for it would be entirely the wrong turn of phrase .

Well, far be it from him, then, to suggest the boy was asking for it but they certainly seemed to have locked themselves into rounds. Tony would attempt to admonish the lad, the lad would go still as a rock, and the boy’s silence drove Tony like a whip.

That he was driven to drink by a taciturn child was as good a reason as being defective in spirit and in genetics, but the counsellors preferred internal triggers and vague spiritual shortcomings to logical grounds for needing the poison. In one of last week’s sessions he’d explained it: the cruelty of his progeny was what had left him in this shitheap.

‘I got into trouble because the woman next door was up to no good with my kid. If that wouldn’t drive you to drink then I don’t know what would.’

‘Did you not find your drinking to be an issue before this?’

‘It’s not an issue at all,’ Tony said. ‘I’m here because the court would rather punish me than prosecute that psychotic whore.’

‘Jesus, what age is your kid?’ said one of his fellow losers.

‘Fifteen at the time. And she’s my age. And I put her window in and suddenly the problem is my relationship with alcohol and not her relationship with my bloody child.’

He could have killed her. He had practice now in getting rid of bodies, didn’t he? He could have killed her and then J.P. would have been obliged to help him turn her to fertiliser, owing him a favour and all. He could have kicked her door in and bludgeoned her, literally knocked the smile off her face, smashed her to pieces. But didn’t she have the devil’s own luck; he wasn’t that kind of man. His rage manifested in muttered oaths. He took out her window instead. He could have killed her but instead he was stuck here, gelded, talking shit in circles so that vultures with clipboards could pick over his compulsions while his children were fed and watered by better people and his son was out there alone being fucked and fucked over.

There were no locks on the windows or doors. Part of the insidiousness of this dungeon was that the only thing keeping him there was torpor. But they didn’t make it easy for you; oh no. They had built their covered hellhole in the middle of a postcard vista: miles from the main road and miles from there to anywhere else.

It was boldly functional. White block walls, blue carpet, big windows which left the place airy and bright and cold and exposed. He supposed the intent was to provide a stark alternative to whatever stuffy sets they’d come from, but he was the participant with the most children — the next to him had only three — and so the contrast hurt him worst of all. He yearned for all of it: the crusts on the worktop, the empty toilet roll tubes, the plates under beds and on shelves and, one time last month, on the bathroom windowsill. The triumphant complaints from Kelly on yet another infringement of her teenage right to languor. A mound of socks tumbled onto the kitchen table for Ronan and Niamh to match into pairs. The modish disdain for schoolday outerwear. Him in the middle of it all, dazed sometimes by the whirligig colours and cacophony, but operating nonetheless, handing out lunches, putting on dinners, emptying bins. He couldn’t think of home as a space that demanded his reconstruction. There was nothing wrong with it. He was not in here because once in a while he forgot to empty the washing machine or get up on time on Mondays.