Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

He turned again and eyed his bedroom window. Where would he go, if he cranked it wide and made a run for it? Even if it was, defiantly, to one of the pubs peppered over the countryside, he’d be waiting until late morning for them to open. Even if it was back to the city, he’d be sitting in the shell of his home, taunted by echoes and prepping himself for Garda custody. The choice was no choice at all.

From the outside world he heard someone cry.

Such sounds had no right to be anomalous in the dry asylum. Tony stared at the window. The cries were faint, but tormented; this was no fellow inmate indulging themselves with a sneaky wah, but someone further afield, across the lake, in one of the bordering copses. There were other buildings viewable from his window with a daytime squint, but they were either farms or piles of stone and glass belonging to Cork’s upper crust. These cries could not have belonged in those places.

No words he could make out.

He got out of the bed and stood by the window with his palms against the glass.

It had been a while since he’d had mind for ghost stories.

The wind rushed the plaintive sounds over the water toward him. He thought about closing the window. Some childhood memory warned him to put the eras between himself and the echo, to make a barrier of modern glazing, or window locks, or a set of headphones. Or was it that you were fucked altogether if you heard the banshee’s wail? Maybe there was no escape; it was an omen stirred in blood.

Shrieking, then silence.

Maybe she had come for someone else and he hadn’t been meant to hear it.

It was an unusual curse and he only barely had room to nestle it with all the others. He stood at the window looking into umbral immensity, waiting for the screech that confirmed his surveillance had been noted, but he heard no more after that.

‘I don’t think you should go in,’ said Joseph, ‘but that’s only me, and I’m a lot less forgiving than you are. Whatever I think, I know for a cold hard fact that if you don’t go in, you’ll regret it.’

They were sitting in the teeming car park of Solidarity House on a Wednesday morning in August. There were vans making deliveries, official sorts carrying folders, visitors doing what Ryan was doing now — hesitating behind their windscreens and tying their fingers up in knots. Ryan’s legs were leaden. His shoulders were fused to the back of the seat.

He’d been badgered into attending by his aunt Fiona, Joseph’s mother. His dad’s twin was as coolly insincere as her counterpart was reckless and thick; the evidence pointed towards her having requisitioned more than her share of nutrients in utero. Her having bullied him into turning up at Solidarity House’s ‘family day’, in which loved ones were roped into the rehabilitant’s long-term recovery plan, had been recognised and assuaged by Joseph, who offered to cadge a car so that Ryan wouldn’t have to suffer Fiona’s pontificating on the journey down. It was a small comfort.

‘What d’you think is going to happen in there?’ Ryan asked.

‘What did they tell you? You get a chance to talk about how his drinking affects you, and then you all learn coping strategies.’

‘How his drinking affected me,’ Ryan grunted. He doubted they’d welcome the answer: Physically .

‘And then you all hug or some shit and Tony goes home to resume gargling himself into the ground. Great craic.’

‘If I don’t show up though I’ll be the biggest cunt on the planet.’

‘You shouldn’t care whether anyone else thinks you’re a cunt. What are they going to say to you, anyway? Oh Ryan, you’re a bold, bold boy with no regard for your daddy’s disease . Fuck off. Like six weeks in the country’s going to cure Tony.’

‘Stranger things have happened.’

From the corner of his eye Ryan saw Joseph consider him.

‘Maybe you’re right, boy. He’s your dad. I get it, you know. I have a dad too.’ And then, ‘Are you going to have that joint or what?’

Ryan had crafted a fat spliff before they had set off from the city. First, he was going to smoke it on the way down — it’d provide a nice rollover from the one he’d had at breakfast — and then he changed his mind and decided he’d smoke it when he got there. Now he didn’t want it at all.

‘Feels wrong,’ he said. ‘Can’t go into a place like this stoned, can you?’

‘Why not? It’s not you making a hames of clean living. They’d probably spot it, mind you. Deprivation can make you very fucking perceptive.’

Ryan shook his head. ‘It’s just wrong.’

‘It’s not a church, boy.’

‘It’s not far off it.’

Fiona’s car glinted across the gravel. It was empty, because it was five past the hour and the session had already started.

‘I better go in,’ Ryan said.

‘You know you don’t have to, boy? You know he doesn’t deserve the steam off your piss?’

‘I know that.’

‘So why’re you doing it, then? What’s making you go through that door and into a meeting that’s just going to wreck your head? Fifteen minutes, boy, and we could be in Clon, buying a box of beer for a day at Inchydoney. Give this a couple of hours and it’ll be baking. Fucking bikini weather and all the lashers down sunning themselves. How bad?’

Ryan let the scene play through his head — the sand, the beers, the sunshine, the flat tummies and the perky arses and necks flowing into shoulders and shoulders pouring into soft curves — and was sorry for it as soon as it faded away. No harm in perusing the goods , Joseph might have said, if Ryan had confessed the periodic crises that turned him from red-blooded man to cowering penitent. Or maybe he’d have said, What the fuck is wrong with you, boy? Are you that whipped?

Once his pause weighed what reverence Joseph’s suggestion demanded he gave his cousin a joyless smile and opened the car door.

Tony waited in the meeting room, chewing his knuckles. His mother was due down to catalogue her myriad disappointments. His father had been invited, of course, but wouldn’t Father Mathew have made the trek before him? And then there was Fiona, who had arrived in the world seven minutes before him and so was very saddened she was so frequently dismissed as a font of knowledge. She lived in Dublin, but had driven down for the brouhaha and custard creams.

Tony’s counsellor had recommended his older children attend, and so Fiona had roped in Cian and Kelly, and vowed that she’d track down Ryan. On the face of it that wouldn’t have been hard; the boy and Fiona’s own son were thick as thieves. In reality, Tony knew that getting Joseph to divulge such a touchy secret would have been like asking the Pope where the bodies were. And yet when the door opened there he was, the brat, bringing up the rear and then, when the door was closed, hanging by the wall as if welded to it.

His mother asked Tony how he was. Fiona positioned herself directly across from the counsellor. Cian smiled at him because he was a generous kid — always had been. Kelly smacked her arse onto the chair nearest the door. Ryan stayed by the wall, his hands behind him and his fingers flexed on the brickwork, not meeting his father’s eyes, not meeting anyone’s.

‘Do you want to take a seat?’ the counsellor chanced.

The boy said, ‘I’m grand.’

‘If you take a seat we can get started.’

‘I’m all right a minute.’

The counsellor was stumped.

‘Yeah, keep standing there,’ said Kelly. ‘G’wan, make everything about you.’

On any other day her barb may have been snatched mid-air and flung back in her face, but the surroundings had sucked the fight out of the lad, just as it had Tony, who late at night stood staring for sídhe and willing them to whip the skin from his bones.