Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

‘Oh my God, whatever about Dan, everything that happened with your dad is his fault only.’

‘Is it, though?’

‘Jesus! Yes!’

She handed back the last drag, and he turned to watch her return to the bed. She slid her legs under the duvet and pulled his hoodie across her chest.

He knocked out the joint on the sill outside and closed the window.

‘Look, there’s more to what went on between me and my dad than…’

‘Abuse?’

‘Don’t say that.’

‘Is there a better word or something?’

‘Look,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to talk about my dad. Not now. Not after what we just did. Coz that was lovely and… amazing and…’

‘Yeah well, I’m scared, Ryan.’

‘What are you scared of?’

‘Ah, the judge? The judge doesn’t know you, like.’

‘It’ll be grand. Honestly. The solicitor said. I’m pleading guilty, I’m not going to break the curfew, I’m being good as gold. We tell the judge that, y’know, I did OK at school and that I’m looking into going back and stuff.’

She considered him. ‘Are you serious?’

‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

‘You’re gonna stop dealing.’

‘If I tell the judge I’m going back to school, I’ll have to go back to school, right?’

He slipped into bed beside her and she rested her head on his chest. Her towel turban scratched his cheek and flopped open on the pillow behind them.

‘It’d mean more of this, though,’ he whispered. ‘Me living here with my dad, me and you having to do it all stuffy-quiet in the middle of the day. The last year of freedom, it’d be gone.’

‘It’d be worth it in the end, wouldn’t it?’

She slid a hand underneath his T-shirt and thumbed the skin around his bellybutton.

‘I like the idea of Ryan going back to school,’ she said. ‘And Ryan going to university. And then Ryan getting a nice job and buying me lots of shoes.’

‘Hey! Buy your own shoes.’

‘I never said I wouldn’t buy you shoes too. A pair of Cons for every day of the week.’

He stroked her shoulder, and she nestled in the crook of his arm.

‘You think we’ll still be together then?’ she said.

‘Told you that earlier, didn’t I?’

‘Really though?’

‘Yeah. I can’t imagine it any other way. If I had another joint right now I’d see the whole decade out before me and every minute would have you in it.’

‘And what would we be doing?’

‘The usual, I suppose. Buying a gaff. Getting married. Popping sprogs.’

‘How many sprogs?’

‘Dunno. Four or five?’

‘Jesus, I hope you can buy them in Tesco by then or you’re going to be very disappointed.’

‘I won’t be disappointed. There’s no disappointment in it. It’s all good. Every second of it.’

He raised his head. Her eyes were closed. He kissed her forehead, and stared up at the ceiling as she started dreaming, and he watched the world spread out in front of him, corner to corner, flush with colour and glowing like the sunrise.

Downstairs, there was a gentle knock on the front door, as if even the visitor was wary of interrupting them.

The next step was getting a job. It wasn’t a step of his own design, but shaped by so many gloating well-wishers that Tony was stuck with it.

The woman at the Social was as helpful as he wanted her to be. He brought up youthful summers working on fishing boats, with pointed references to cutbacks at the Port of Cork. She passed him the details for a deli assistant position. He told her he had six children under eighteen and frying builders’ rashers at 6.30 a.m. was a welcome impossibility. She recommended he try an internship. He asked her if she thought he was fucking crazy.

Springtime held another challenge when the Law, consistent as it was in its pointed cruelty, dropped Ryan back into his lap. Silly gosser had only gotten himself caught with enough cocaine on him to be done for possession with intent. Again.

He’d run from them. That was his undoing. The guards had stopped him on the street when he had a couple of baggies on him, and once he felt their questions were snowballing, he bolted. Stupid thing to do , Tony had groaned; the boy had responded tetchily that they would have searched him anyway, and so he had to chance flight. If one of the guards hadn’t been a young mucksavage swift as he was zealous, he might well have gotten away with it.

The amount they’d caught him with wasn’t enough to threaten him with gaol; he was small fry, and they were trying to squeeze names and dates out of him. Tony noted wryly that the last thing on God’s green earth Ryan Cusack was likely to do was talk. The cops didn’t know that. His capture had been a waste of their time and when they cottoned on to that there might well be hell to pay. Tony didn’t mind that. A bit of intimidation might do the lad good. Maybe the guards would find, through spite, a way to bully him straight.

At the first hearing the judge had imposed a twenty-four-hour curfew, remanding the kid in the custody of a father newly dry and squeaky clean. Between himself and Cian there wasn’t room to swing a cat, but Ryan seemed content to shut himself off in his bedroom, black buds jammed in his ears and a laptop screen as his mask.

An effervescent liar from the phone company had sold Tony a broadband subscription, which had had the effect of lobotomising his three teenagers and giving him the cold comfort of meditative silence. Once a week Kelly commandeered the laptop and went through the jobs website with her father, and between them they figured out which posts were worth procuring rejection letters from. Sometimes he got an email back that thanked him for his efforts but denied the existence of suitable positions. When he was so blessed he showed them to his probation officer. The job hunt was going well.

April had come around in a vicious funk, summoning snowstorms in Dublin and floods in Fermoy. Tony ordered home heating oil earlier than he’d presumed he’d need to, and he’d handed over the fee before it had occurred to him that he’d done, without wheedling procrastination, something of equal import and expense. It was a fine thing to be sober, sometimes. It hadn’t been pointed out in rehab: When you’re sober, you’ll buy home heating oil when you actually need it and it’ll feel like a fucking miracle . It was the small things.

It was the big things that threatened him, though: the loss of routine and the awkward jettison of bad habits and old pals, the boredom, the claustrophobia. Small victories he stockpiled, and yet the barricade was flimsy and dangerously stunted. Sometimes he sat halfway up the stairs when the kids were in school and watched the world warp through the frosted sidelight of the front door. On occasion he rested his head against the wall that separated his territory from the grabby púca Duane’s, and listened with dour intent as one would to penance given as the world outside splintered his front door and chipped away at the plaster. Even purer than that, sometimes: he really wanted a drink. The physical addiction had been dismantled, but the compulsion grew unchecked without its frame. I want a drink , he thought. I want a drink . He would grip the armrests on his living-room furniture as the longing threw a whirlwind around him. Just one. Just one, for Jesus’s sake. I want a fucking drink .

That’s why they were so keen on jobs, the therapists and the probation officers and the mammies and the sisters. They kept telling him: a job to replace an addiction.

Cian brought the Echo home from school and Tony sat in the living room, in front of the telly, and went through the jobs page for opportunities for which he was underqualified. The kitchen, designated as a homework hub, shook with his squabbling brood. Young Karine had arrived over a couple of hours ago and made great haste to wall herself up with Ryan in the back bedroom, where, no doubt, they were getting into divilment, though he’d take that over Duane’s insinuating guilt any day of the week.