Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

Georgie gulped and hung on to the tabletop. Maureen brought over a roll of kitchen paper. It was beyond Georgie to ask what the ghosts were doing.

‘Do you think,’ Maureen said, when Georgie had calmed, ‘that this will save you?’

She gestured towards Georgie’s belly, and Georgie clasped her hands over the bump and said, ‘Why do you think I need saving?’

‘I don’t. I figured you thought it, seeing as you’re in the company of zealots. Whatever way you want to look at it, I hope it works for you. Take it I have an interest. Take it that you’re the anti me. Take it pregnancy’s awful transformative.’

‘I didn’t think it was even possible,’ Georgie said.

‘Then you were probably in the wrong line of work.’

‘I mean… I didn’t think I was… entitled to this. This is my second. I lost the first.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Maureen said.

‘You don’t get it. It was my fault. I was on drugs, I was drinking…’

‘Maybe that’s so, maybe it’s not. You don’t know with these things. Pointless to work yourself into a lather wondering about it.’

‘I keep thinking this one’ll leave me as well.’

‘Yeah, well it might if you don’t put your feet up and stop trying to cure the lepers. You tell your Nazarenes that; their path to Heaven isn’t flattened out by you shoving your boulder in front of them.’

‘They’re not bad people.’

‘How very gracious of them.’

Maureen took Georgie’s mug from the table, brought it over to the counter and refreshed it. Georgie sniffed and wiped her eyes and straightened in her seat. She looked towards the kitchen door and at the ceiling. She strained for the whispers and the ghosts.

‘You can look around if you like,’ Maureen said.

‘I don’t think I want to.’

‘Maybe it’ll be good for you. You can scrub the shit off absolutely anything, maybe. This can be your metaphor. Maybe.’

The endeavour to reduce a pile of bricks seeping shadow into a thimble of symbolism didn’t appeal to Georgie, but neither did the idea of entering into another conversation with the seer Missus Phelan. Caught between gratitude and flesh-rucking unease, she chose gratitude, accepted the topped-up mug, smiled weakly at Maureen and skittered into the hallway, where she stood by the banister and stared up at the landing.

‘Go ahead,’ Maureen said, from the kitchen door.

The rooms upstairs had been gutted. Where there was once the colour of lazy decay were clean walls and restored wooden floors. The beds and furniture were gone, as was the telephone on the wall. The makeshift kitchen where the girls had stashed their inebriants had been ripped out and smoothed over.

Maureen was standing behind her. Georgie turned and said, ‘Did you find things here? Were you here when they were doing the work?’

‘I was in once the downstairs flat was done. They were working away up here after that. Why, what are you missing?’

‘Nothing. It’s just that the place looks so empty.’

‘There were a couple of trinkets. I have them in a drawer downstairs. Let me go and look; you’d never know. That said, if it’s a bra you lost I have them well fecked out.’

Georgie frowned, but Maureen had turned away.

She continued through the other rooms, but they were pretty much the same: their darkened corners ripped away, insignificant to the quest Maureen had given her. She tried to reconcile this shell with flashes of a past she had mind for only late at night: being shoved onto her belly, hot breath on her cheek, semen on her breasts, on her face, in her hair, like they were dogs pissing all over their territory. These flares made her shrink into herself — her nails dug into her palms and she hunched her shoulders — but they were still very far away, as if they had taken place not just in her past, but in another country. A lick of paint and she felt no connection to this place.

In one of the rooms on the second floor, there was a small pile of paper and a notebook on the window ledge. A pen made up the accoutrements of the writing space. The ledge was deep, and the room looked onto the Lee. Today the river was swollen, and cars moved either side of it like a lava of litter. But on sunny days, when the light was glinting from the water and the steel, she was sure it would have made a much more inspiring perch. She moved the papers towards the pane, carefully, and sat down with her back to the wall, looking over her shoulder and onto the street.

Two storeys down, she could hear Maureen opening drawers.

She picked up a couple of sheets of the paper on the sill. It was hardly likely that the beast Jimmy Phelan had come from a mother sharpened on art; she had had no run-ins with him, for he had directed their movements only through the pimp, but his legend was monstrous both in reach and report.

The first page appeared to be the start of a letter to a priest.

Bless me Father for I have sinned. Or is Dear Father all right with you, pitter-pater?

Georgie slid this sheet under the other, and read:

Robbie O’Donovan was here .

She should have dropped it. In doing so she’d have given the poor guy some sort of regard, after the fact. Instead she turned it over, as if on the back she’d find an explanation of how his name had scrawled its own clue into the palm of her hand, but the rest of the page was blank. She turned it over again, and reread it: Robbie O’Donovan was here. in the same hand as the priest letter. Her breath caught. She sat suspended in voicelessness, as if the sudden stasis of her lungs could make her float, bounce off the walls, up to the ceiling.

Maureen came back into the room with an armful of leftovers.

‘Robbie O’Donovan was here,’ said Georgie. The air escaped her throat.

‘Oh, him?’ Maureen clucked. ‘Don’t mind him . He won’t touch you. He just stands around.’

‘He just stands around?’

Maureen’s eyes narrowed, and she smiled. ‘Did you know him? He died here.’

Georgie dropped the paper and darted past the woman and down the stairs. Her shoes slipped on the last step; she grasped the banister, and cried out, and scrambled for the door. The lock wouldn’t budge on her first go. She found the clasp and the bolt sprang back and she ran out onto the street, where Clover was approaching, only a few yards to her left.

‘What’s wrong, Georgie?’

‘I’m just feeling sick, Clover, really sick. Please let’s go.’

‘OK,’ Clover said. ‘We can do that.’ She put her arm around Georgie, and Georgie clung to her, sniffing and retching. They had gone only a couple of hundred metres when Georgie heard a voice behind her, calling her name, and Clover slowed but Georgie begged, ‘I’ll be sick, Clover, I’ll be sick!’, but it wasn’t the matriarch Maureen closing in on them. The voice had that unmistakable ringing whine, the musicality of shattering glass. Georgie turned and Tara Duane waved at her, hurrying forwards on stiletto boots that cast her to the left and right as if she was dancing on a listing deck.

‘Georgie! Wait up! Oh my God, it’s so great to see you! Where have you been?’

‘This one’s not a good one,’ Georgie said to Clover, who nodded and squeezed her arm, but stayed otherwise stupidly solid to watch the scrag advance.

Karine arrived over with a bag stuffed with goodies: two chicken salad rolls, four packets of Taytos, handfuls of chocolate bars, tobacco and Rizla, a two-litre bottle of Coke and, best of the lot, a bag of pick ’n’ mix as big as a baby’s head.

Ryan said, ‘You absolute lasher, D’Arcy,’ and she rolled her eyes and said, ‘You better remember this when you’re rich and famous.’