Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

She looked at the man face-down on the tiles. There was blood under him. It gunged into the grout. It’d need wire wool. Bicarbonate of soda. Bleach. Probably something stronger; she wasn’t an expert. She didn’t usually go around on cat feet surprising intruders with blunt force trauma. This was a first for her.

She was shit at cleaning, too. Homemaking skills were for good girls and it was forty years since anyone had told her she was one of them.

He was definitely dead, whoever he was. He wore a once-black jumper and a pair of shiny tracksuit bottoms. The back of his head was cracked and his hair matted, but it had been foxy before that. A tall man, a skinny rake, another string of piss, now departed. She hadn’t gotten a look at his face before she flaked him with the Holy Stone and she couldn’t bring herself to turn him over. It’d be like turning a chop on a grill, the thought of which turned her stomach. She’d hardly eat now. What if his eyes were still open?

There was no question of ringing for the guards. She did think — her face by now halfway to her ankles — that it might be jolly to ring for a priest, just to see how God and his bandits felt about it. Maybe they’d try to clean the kitchen floor by blessing it, by the power vested in me . But she didn’t think she’d be able for inviting one of them fellas over the threshold. Two invasions in a day? She didn’t have the bleach.

She turned from the dead man to pick up her phone.

Jimmy had drawn priests down upon her like seagulls to the bridge in bad weather. He was sin, poor thing, conceived in it and then the mark of it, growing like all bad secrets until he stretched her into a shape no one could shut their eyes to.

If she’d been born a decade earlier, she reckoned giving birth out of wedlock would have landed her a life sentence scrubbing linens in a chemical haze, hard labour twice over to placate women of God and feather their nests. But there was enough space in the seventies to allow her room to turn on her heel and head for England, where she was, on and off, until the terrible deed she’d named James tracked her down again with his own burden to show her.

Some women had illegitimate babies who grew up to be accountants, or teachers, or heirs to considerable acres of good ground in the midlands. Not Maureen.

She frowned at the blood on the floor and dialled. Jimmy would know what to do. This was exactly the kind of thing he was good at.

The man on the street, the scut in the back corner of the pub, and the burnt-out girl on the quay all said the same: it was better to run alongside Jimmy Phelan than have him run over you. In short pants he was king of the terrace; in an Iron Maiden T-shirt he was Merchant General of the catchment area. He’d sold fags and dope and cans of lager, and then heroin and women and munitions. He’d won over and killed cops and robbers both. He’d been married. He’d attended parent-teacher meetings. He’d done deals and time and half the world twice over. There wasn’t much left that Jimmy Phelan hadn’t had a good go of and yet it was only very recently he’d owned up to the notion that inside him was a void kept raw and weeping for want of a family tree. It turned out, though, that Jimmy Phelan’s eyes were bigger than his belly, and that applied to anything he had a yearning for: imported flesh, Cognac, his long-lost mother.

The bint had only gone and killed someone. He supposed it was appropriate carry-on for the block he was chipped from, but it didn’t make it any less of an arseache. Jimmy liked to leave himself room for manoeuvre in his diary, but ‘Clean up after your mother offs someone’ was a much more significant task than he’d ever have thought to factor in.

He had set aside an apartment by the river for Maureen’s use. With his being such a captain of industry, it had never been the plan to have her living with him, even if it hadn’t turned out that she was crazier than a dustbin fox. It hadn’t really been the plan to bring her home in the first place — all he’d aimed for was to track her down and give her the lowdown on her grandchildren — but he’d had to re-strategise when he’d found her living amongst shuffling addicts and weird bachelors in a London tenement. He’d heard enough nationalist rants to know that leaving an Irish person in poverty in England was leaving them behind enemy lines, and it had been well within his capacity to take her home. She’d dug her heels in, but there was no one who could draw away from Jimmy Phelan’s insistence, no matter how much pride or how many limbs they looked set to lose.

He’d bought the building for a song because a bunch of Vietnamese had been using it as a grow house and the guards had left it with more holes in the walls than there were cunts down in Crosser. If there had been any Vietnamese left he might have sold it back to them, on the ‘lightning strikes’ adage, but they’d gathered their skirts and scurried down to Waterford, or so he’d heard, so he’d used it as a brothel for a while, and might do again once he found somewhere less draughty to store his mother. He’d left her in the ground-floor flat, convalescing from her emigration, and had a few part-time part-tradesmen making structural improvements to the floors above, but he’d thought it had been secure. Maybe susceptible to punters lost and roaming, but she’d been under strict instructions not to open the door to anyone, and it had been a while since they’d begun redirecting appointments to the newer venue.

So how Maureen had managed to kill an intruder was beyond him. How did the weasel get in? Had the Vietnamese forgotten him? Had the guards not noticed him tucked away in the attic? Was he a john whose longtime kink was climbing in through skylights?

Whoever he was, he was dead now, and it turned out he probably wouldn’t have been an open casket job even if he’d reached his natural expiration date. In fact, looking at him, he’d clearly been in the process of hurrying that along.

‘What the fuck did you do to him?’ Jimmy asked Maureen, as she sat at the kitchen table making faces at her cigarette. She was a dour little thing. Lacking height himself, he’d resorted to growing outwards to achieve the bulk demanded by his vocation. Even now at forty he was mostly muscle, softened only very lately by a languid habit of eating out and drinking well. Maureen was whittled straight and had a glare just as pointed. They didn’t look alike.

‘Belted him,’ she said. ‘With the Holy Stone. I wasn’t giving up the upper hand on the off-chance he was Santy Claus.’

‘What Holy Stone?’

She gestured towards the sink.

For every Renaissance masterpiece there were a million geegaws cobbled together from the scrapheap, and this was awful even by that standard. A flat rock, about a fistful, painted gold and mounted on polished wood, with a picture of the Virgin Mary holding Chubby Toddler Jesus printed on one side in bright Celtic colours, and the bloody essences of the dead man on the kitchen floor smeared and knotted on top.

‘Where the fuck did you get this?’ If it wasn’t for the fact it was mounted on that plinth, he’d have assumed some opportunistic crackpot had painted it for a car boot sale. He turned it over in his hand. The Blessed Virgin stared guzz-eyed back at him.

‘I’ve had that a long time.’

‘I didn’t take you for a Holy Josephine.’

‘You wouldn’t want to, because I’m not.’

‘You just collect bulky religious souvenirs to use as murder weapons, is it? No one ever suspects the heavy hand of the Lord. Repent, repent, or Jesus might take the head off yeh! How did you even swing this thing, Maureen? Did you take a run at him from the front door?’