Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

The place had been done up. Even from her tiptoed spot in the downstairs hall she could see that. The walls had been painted cream and there was a new floor; when she closed out the door behind her, gingerly, she noted that it had been painted on the inside, too, and the old bolts and chains removed for a single, modern lock.

‘Come through,’ called the woman, and Georgie followed her voice into a downstairs kitchen, a room she’d never seen when she’d worked there, as her company had only been required in the bedrooms upstairs.

The kitchen was new, too. Cream units around a sleek oven and hood, a breakfast bar, a shining sink before a window that looked into a quaint, ivy-draped yard. The design was defied in magnificent fashion by the proliferation of religious keepsakes on the windowsills, on the shelves and in the corners of the worktops: crosses, statues, rosary beads and sombre brass busts.

The woman clicked on the kettle and took two mugs from one of the presses. ‘Tea, I assume?’

‘Oh, I’m grand.’

‘You’ll have tea. And for God’s sake will you sit yourself down?’

She sat at the table, and the woman stared over with one hand on the counter and the other on her hip.

‘You haven’t a clue about the Good Book, have you?’ she said.

‘I told you,’ said Georgie. ‘I’m not an expert.’

‘You’re an actress is what you are, and you haven’t learned your lines. What’s your name?’

‘… Georgie.’

‘Mine’s Maureen,’ said the woman. ‘And, Georgie, what are you doing wandering around Cork trying to convert people when you haven’t completed the process yourself?’

‘I haven’t been doing this long.’

‘That’s not what I asked.’

Georgie faltered. ‘It’s that obvious, is it?’

‘I just don’t know what your pudgy friend was at, letting you doorstop heathens when your words don’t have a backbone. Not to mention how tired you must be.’

‘They think the Lord appreciates physical labour.’

‘You’ll be going into labour if they’re not careful. Who are they, anyway?’ She turned over the leaflet. ‘Christians Active In Light. Ha! Christians Active In Lumbago.’

‘They’ve been really good to me.’

‘Is that before or after you blossomed out to here,’ she said, with a flamboyant gesture. ‘How long are you gone, anyway?’

‘Six months.’

‘You’re big for six months. I suppose you’re very short, though. I was the same. So when did they recruit you? With sin or without?’

‘Ten months or so ago.’

‘Lord almighty. A sex cult, are they? Christians Active In Lovemaking? How did you manage to get into trouble if your soul had been saved? Married off already?’

‘No.’

Maureen dropped teabags into the mugs. ‘Milk? Sugar?’

‘Yes, please. One.’

‘Christians Active In Lactose,’ Maureen muttered, and Georgie said, ‘Are you going to keep doing that?’

‘Up until it stops amusing me.’

She got a spoon and started jamming the teabags against the sides of their mugs.

‘I met a man through them,’ Georgie said. ‘That’s how.’

‘One of their number? I take it they approved.’

‘They didn’t. He left and I had nowhere to go.’

‘And does he know?’

‘Yes, he knows. He’s from a well-to-do background. It’d be awkward if I went with him. He’ll be back to me once he sorts things out.’

‘Are they still telling the girls those stories?’

‘He will,’ said Georgie. ‘It’s complicated. He’s in recovery too. So… It was just decided it would be damaging to both of us to deal with this together. We can’t focus on our recovery if we’re focused on each other.’

‘How practical. And what are you recovering from, if it’s not virginity?’

‘Drugs,’ Georgie said. She was too tired to snap.

‘What kind of drugs?’

‘I don’t mean to be rude, but what’s it to you?’

Maureen placed the tea in front of her. ‘Would you rather we talked about the Lord Jesus Christ, so? We can do. I fell out with Him myself.’

Georgie cupped her hands around the mug and slumped.

‘I don’t know much. They say you have to be open to letting Him in. They say that He makes everything clearer. That you get a purpose. That it’s… I guess that it’s a load off. I haven’t found Him yet.’

‘Have you checked under the bed?’

‘I’m trying to take this seriously.’

‘And yet something’s telling you it’s not worth taking seriously. Maybe that’s a thing with us short women: hands too small to grasp at straws.’

‘You sound like a preacher yourself.’

Maureen snorted. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t know a soapbox if it was bubbling. I have as much time for the Man Upstairs as he does for me. Take a breather and finish your tea; you’ll do no converting here.’

The mention of the Man Upstairs made Georgie start and glance upwards, and Maureen noticed and smiled a thin smile.

‘Did you know,’ she said, leaning conspiratorially, ‘this house was once a brothel?’

Georgie’s feet were sore, her back ached, she hadn’t taken a full breath in weeks. If she had been just a bit further along, just a bit more drained, she might have come clean to the supernatural quickness of her hostess. Instead she swallowed and feigned interest.

‘I didn’t know that,’ she said. ‘Like, in a historic sense?’

‘Try a couple of years.’

‘Oh, are you serious?’

‘The lines are coming easier now, aren’t they?’ said Maureen, and she straightened. ‘Yes, I am serious. A place of vice in twenty-first century Ireland. Have you ever heard the like?’

Georgie wanted to ask What lines? She took a sip of her tea and scalded out the objection.

‘It might have been a brothel historically too,’ Maureen continued. ‘But not to my knowledge. You don’t need the eras echoing to feel the weight of this place.’

Georgie rested her chin on a trembling hand. ‘Did you buy it cheap, so?’

‘Indeed I did not. It belongs to my son. It’s belonged to my son this long time.’

‘How long?’

‘Long enough,’ Maureen said, ‘for him to direct its activities.’

Georgie stood up, prompting groans of discord from her feet, her thighs, her back. ‘C’mere, thanks so much for the tea. You’re really kind, but I better be going now.’

Maureen said, ‘Would he even recognise you?’

Georgie sat down again. I don’t know what you mean , she tried, but the statement struggled to leave her mouth, and what words she managed wilted in the air.

‘I’m guessing he wouldn’t,’ Maureen said. ‘He doesn’t strike me as the kind who shits where he sleeps.’

Georgie said, ‘I owe nobody anything,’ and started to cry, quietly; she brushed the tears away with a brittle sweep. ‘Don’t think you’ve caught a runaway because you haven’t. That was a long time ago.’

‘There’s a shadow on you,’ said Maureen. ‘Dripping black and miserable. It was there when I opened the door. I knew you didn’t want to come in and that you hadn’t a clue what you were supposed to be doing and that some sanctimonious prig had convinced you that you had something to atone for. You either need to accept the past as the building blocks that brought you right up to today, or you need to be a better liar. The world is full of girls like you.’

‘You’re J.P.’s mother? He puts his mother in a place like this?’

‘I’d like to think your tears are for pitying me. Yes, he put me in a place like this. He’s a bit too pragmatic, that boy. Hollow with it. I didn’t want to stay here at first, but once I learnt the history of the place, something told me it was my duty to remain, in case he drowned it again in squalor. Now he can’t get me to move. I’m sure it’ll come to his barging in and wheeling me out one of the days, but for now I’m happy. It has whispers, like I said. It has ghosts.’