Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

The curtains were closed, because there wasn’t light worth letting in. It was damp and miserable and balls-shrinkingly chilly. There wasn’t much to look at, in any case; Ryan was in his father’s house, and all he could see from his bedroom window was other people’s back gardens, sodden from the pitiless April march. Next door and almost a week ago, Tara Duane had dragged a plastic airer outside and draped a number of towels over it, either from desperation or bloated optimism.

He hadn’t meant to spot her, afraid that if she looked up and saw him watching she’d take it as a favourable sign. It was anything but. He’d sunk behind the curtain and sat on his bed, elbows on knees, hands joined and eyes to the floor. There were tons of drawbacks to being home again, but none that frightened him like she did. Two years might have diluted her story to the point where it would sound, to Karine’s ears, reedy and fanciful. That was the best possible scenario and even that could ruin him. Karine might not want to share him, even in secret thought, with someone like Tara Duane.

‘Ew, like she was hollowed out and sewn back together,’ she’d whispered one time, years back, when Duane had offered to do an offy run for the underagers.

Tara’s airer had toppled and the towels had fallen to the ground. They were still there today, rumpled in the mud.

Karine slipped her shoes off, smoothed her school skirt and climbed onto the bed beside him.

‘Pass me my roll there,’ she said, and he retrieved the tobacco and started rolling a joint as she tucked in.

‘Where’d you get the smoke?’ she asked.

‘Dan the Man posted it to me.’

‘He posted it to you?’

‘Swear to God. He has me spoiled.’

‘Eat your roll first,’ she said. ‘There’s warm chicken in that.’

‘All right, Mammy.’

He finished rolling the joint and tucked it behind the curtain on the windowsill, and they sat together, munching into the picnic in their cobalt cave. When he was a couple of bites from the end she reached into her schoolbag and produced a pen, pad and her maths book.

‘Where are you supposed to be, anyway?’ he asked.

‘Maths grind,’ she said, and placed the things on his lap.

‘You’re funny.’

She buried her head in the bag again. ‘Come on, Ryan,’ she said, once she emerged. ‘Be sensible. The sooner I get my homework done the sooner we can relax.’

‘I’m already relaxed.’

‘Unrelax yourself, then. Page 57, questions 11 to 20. And I’ll do my French while you’re doing that and if you’re really, really good, you might even get a blowjob at the end of it.’

‘I’ll get a blowjob anyway.’

‘And you’re haunted, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘You think you’d be more inclined to help your girlfriend out with her homework, so? When she’s so nice to you?’

She placed her French book primly on her lap and brushed a strand back from her face and he started laughing and she said, ‘What?’ in mock indignation.

‘It’s just funny.’

‘What’s just funny?’

‘You’re just funny.’

‘D’you know what’s not funny?’

‘What?’

‘The fact that you haven’t started my homework.’

He opened the book. ‘You can’t keep doing this to me,’ he said.

‘Yeah? What are you going to do about it?’

He was haunted; plenty of fellas would confirm it. His girlfriend liked giving him blowjobs. There was only the fact of his required passivity to sully the act. As a precursor to sex a blowjob was a hundred per cent awesome, but occasionally — only very occasionally, he wasn’t a total loss — if she was going down on him just for the hell of it, there was a shade of submission that maybe knocked that hundred per cent down to ninety-five. He tried to reframe it as something which put him in the driver’s seat, but it wasn’t easy to claim control when he was putting his cock in someone else’s mouth. There was something of la Bocca della Verità about it.

He knew what was wrong. He knew that on the occasions that last five per cent was taken from him it was because of a flashback, not to a scene — there was little of the memory left — but to a feeling of losing the run of himself, and making stupid mistakes for no good reason.

There was a time they filmed it and it was a hundred and ten per cent, fucking perfect.

Now there was a half-hour of quiet, punctuated by the odd remark about something that had happened in school, various text messages, the sounds of his father opening and shutting the living-room door, of Niamh and Cathal bickering about who had authority over the remaining Coco Pops. He finished the maths before she’d done her French and lay back on the bed, and when she’d caught up she put away the books and pens and lay with him.

As was custom in the years before, he had pushed Cian’s bed in front of the door after she’d come in. It was a strange thing to be back where every second was bloated with the possibility of ambush. They kissed for a while; she was fine with removing her school jumper and letting him unbutton her shirt but when he went to remove it she hunched her shoulders and whispered, ‘Oh God, Ryan, I’m so scared he’s going to come up the stairs. I don’t know how we ever did it like this.’

‘Necessity is the mother of invention.’

‘Eh, you’d want to invent something more convincing than that!’

‘He won’t come up,’ Ryan said. ‘He’s been avoiding me like the fucking plague since I got here. Like he thinks I’ll drive him back to drink.’

‘I guess it’s awkward because you were away so long.’

‘It’s awkward coz he doesn’t know what to do with me. I came back here and I wasn’t a kid anymore… He knows anyway.’

She winced in agreement. ‘I know that video was more than a year ago, boy, but I’m still cringing.’

‘Me and all, but… It means he knows. And that, plus the fact that he spends his days pretending there’s nothing wrong from his fort in the sitting room, means he’s not coming near us, girl. And even if he did come up, he can’t get in.’

‘I suppose not.’

‘Are you gonna let me in then?’ He kissed the spot where her neck joined her shoulder and she arched her back and sat up with him. He slid her shirt from her shoulders and she pulled his T-shirt up and off and when they were a lot less decent they dived under his duvet.

He framed her against the sheet, skin-blush to blue shadow. She kissed his neck and traced his spine but both as reactions to his actions, because that’s what he wanted, today and anymore. After a while she put her hands on his shoulders, wordlessly suggesting he roll onto his back to accept the promised blowjob. He kissed her; she pushed at him again and he resisted again, and she pulled back and smiled and whispered, ‘Don’t you want me to go down on you?’

‘It’s just… I dunno… I could go down on you?’

She gave him her most pained smile, the kind she usually reserved for instances where she had to cry off on a date, or guilt him into a shopping trip, or indeed, turn down his offer of cunnilingus.

‘I don’t know, ’ she sighed, which generally meant Not in a fit, but I don’t want you to feel bad about it .

‘You go down on me all the time,’ he said.

‘I know, but you love it.’

‘But you might love this.’

‘I don’t know .’

‘We’re two years together, like. I don’t know anyone who’s been together longer than we have. And I’ve never gone down on you.’

‘You might not like it.’

‘It’s supposed to be about you, though.’

‘Why are you so mad for it, then?’

‘Coz I want to do it for you.’