Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

‘You don’t know me at all.’

‘He’s the bulb off you. It’s unreal. Are you trying to tell me you’re not Ryan’s dad?’

‘I haven’t a notion of talking about my children with some girl who’s just accused me of burying a man I never met.’

‘Look, I’m sorry. This past week has just been throwing the weirdest shit at me… I don’t know what I’m doing here.’ She started sobbing again.

‘Stay here a second,’ Tony snapped, and bounded up the stairs and onto the landing, where he knocked an elbow off the boy’s bedroom door.

Ryan came out far too wide-eyed.

‘Who the fuck is yer wan downstairs?’ Tony hissed.

‘Who?’

‘Don’t fuck with me, Ryan. That’s why you came sidling out when I was up here at the hot press; there’s a fucking woman downstairs claiming to know you and flinging some serious shit at me.’

‘Who’s she looking for?’

‘Me, for some fucking reason. Why is that?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Ryan, for fuck’s sake. Not this now. Of all times, not now.’

The lad… could he even call him that anymore? He’d left the homestead in a haze of his father’s regret and he’d done so as such a narrow thing. He’d come home again with a couple more inches on him and a trim muscularity his father could track most easily down his back, across his shoulders. Maria’s brothers were sinewy and tall. It was disconcerting to spot that in his own son.

The lad, what was left of him, said, ‘I know her from a couple of years ago but I haven’t a notion why she’s up here.’

‘How? How’d you know her?’

‘Jesus, Dad… How d’you think? I used to sell her a bit of dope. That’s all. She’s not my buddy or anything.’

‘She’s a grown woman, Ryan! How in Christ’s name were you selling her dope?’

Ryan paused. ‘She’s a pal of yer wan next door.’

‘Oh, fuck me. And?’

‘And yer wan gave her my number.’

Tara Duane was a hex neither of them had given name to since the boy’s return. ‘Tara Duane,’ said Tony, and Ryan looked away. ‘Every time I hear that cunt’s name it shaves years off my life… Get rid of yer wan downstairs, Ryan.’

‘But what’s she want with you?’

‘Don’t fucking talk to me, boy, just get fucking rid of her.’

He followed Ryan down the stairs and hovered then in the kitchen doorway, listening to the hum of his son’s words and the shrill, to lowing, to wet return he was getting from the stranger.

‘Who’s that, Dad?’ Ronan had gotten a slick of butter on one of his cuffs. Tony beckoned him to the sink and swiped at it with a damp J-Cloth. ‘Who’s that?’ Ronan said again. He was only seven, friendly and guileless.

‘No one,’ Tony said.

‘Is she sad coz she’s fat?’

‘Yeah.’ He caught Cian’s eye. The boy snorted.

After ten minutes he returned to the living room. Ryan was standing in front of the fireplace. The crying woman was holding the towel on her lap, twisting it in her hands, wringing salt out of it. From the kitchen there came a crash, then a clamour of moving chairs and giggling.

‘You only need to hop the front wall,’ Tony told Georgie, ‘if you want to take it up with the person you really have a problem with. I told you I can’t help you.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m desperate.’

‘I don’t care how desperate you are; this is intimidation.’

‘Dad,’ Ryan winced.

‘What? It is. On the behest of that crazy bitch Duane you’re coming to my home and telling me ghost stories.’

‘It is a ghost story,’ Georgie said. ‘That’s exactly it. Two years on and suddenly I’m hearing his name everywhere.’

‘If it’s everywhere that means there’s a ton of other places you can haul your lunacy. I’m a single father, for fuck’s sake. Crackawlies instructed to hold seances in my sitting room while my kids are doing their homework… This is all wrong.’

‘Georgie,’ said Ryan, ‘why did Tara tell you my dad would know where your fella went?’

‘She just asked if I knew him and when I said I didn’t she said I should speak to him. She said that he’d have known Robbie well.’

‘You didn’t ask her how she knew that?’

‘Why would I?’ Georgie cried. ‘I just thought maybe they were friends or something. Ryan… you know I’m not crazy.’

Ryan said, ‘I don’t know you at all, Georgie,’ whether through honest affirmation or a clumsy sidestep, his father couldn’t tell.

‘You know me well enough! So if I tell you that this is the second time in a week someone’s mentioned Robbie to me and the first time I was told he was dead, you know I’m not making it up.’

‘This is bullshit,’ Tony said. ‘Bullshit, and you need to get the fuck out of my house.’

He flung open the front door and clambered over the dividing wall, marking his hands with the mossy slime of a barrier unkempt for its significance. He pounded on Tara Duane’s door but it stayed closed. He pounded on it so hard that it looked like giving underneath his fists. He came back into the house and the girl Georgie was standing up, still crying, with Ryan beside her looking for once in his little life like he had encyclopaedias in his gob lined up and ready to be recited.

‘The bitch isn’t home to shed light on this,’ said Tony. ‘And the last time I tried busting in there to drag her arse out for an inquisition I got done for it. In the absence of her mediation, you’re going to have to jog on. And do it quick, girl. Heavy and all as you are you don’t want to push me.’

Georgie said, ‘I’m sorry. But you have to understand—’

‘I understand you’re unhinged. I understand you’re only familiar with my son because you were using him to get your drugs for you, and I understand you’re associated in some way with that toxic whore next door. I don’t have to understand anything more than that. Leave now, stay away from me, and stay away from my kids. Do you understand?’

She left. She closed the door out gently behind her and made her way down the driveway — as he noted when he looked out to make sure of her trajectory — with shaking shoulders and a gait to match. There was a pang of sympathy, involuntary. Tony clasped his right hand around his neck to choke it down. Every time Maria had been pregnant it had built in him what her wild nature had eroded. He was a whole man when biology had required it. Six times he’d watched her blossom and it had been the making of him, as well as of his children.

The first of them, his sullen antagonist, his bravest soldier, stood waiting for his father to grill or dismiss him.

‘What the fuck, Ryan?’ Redundant, repetitive, and frail, and what else could he manage?

‘I swear to God, Dad, I haven’t a clue what that was about.’

‘Never mind what it was about! Jesus!’ He pushed his hands over his forehead, walked to the far wall and knocked the flat of his fist against the plaster. His son stood his ground, though even Tony wasn’t sure whether this spat could escalate according to precedent.

A sober man now, he felt the months tug at him.

‘Why would you have anything to do with these people?’ he said, and Ryan looked away; they both knew it wasn’t just the visitor he was referring to.

‘I wouldn’t now,’ he said. ‘That was years ago.’

‘How many years ago?’

The pause had him well told before his son confirmed it: ‘I dunno. A couple.’

‘And we know what you were up to a couple of years ago.’

This was old ground, overgrown. There was more laughter from the kitchen, reminding him he could choose just as easily to push forward, to send Ryan back upstairs to the charming little tyrant to whom he was sweetly indentured.