Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

‘The Lord works in mysterious ways,’ she said.

‘I know a few lords like that all right.’ He ran the Holy Stone under the tap and looked back at the dead man. ‘You have no idea what he wanted?’

‘Isn’t it funny; I didn’t think to ask.’

The body was weedy, its clothes shabby, even before the chap’s blood had glued them to his frame. He had nothing in his pockets but a balled-up tissue and two-fifty in coins.

‘Some junkie, maybe, looking for cash. I don’t know the face. He looks Irish. Or maybe a Sasanach. Rooted down in West Cork with the rest of the chin-wobblers.’

She sniffed. ‘Dirty tramp. Robbing all around them. I’m just the type they target.’

‘He’s no one I know. And if he had any local knowledge at all he wouldn’t have dared come near this house.’

He tossed the Holy Stone from one hand to the other. ‘Dame Maureen, in the kitchen, with the rock o’ Knock. We’ll get rid of him for you.’

‘The floor will need scrubbing.’

‘And someone to clean the floor.’

‘The grout will need replacing.’

‘We’ll get you a new floor, then.’

‘You’ll get me out of here. Who’d want to stay in a place a man died?’

‘Oh, you’d want to watch out for vengeful spirits. He’ll be in every mirror now, Maureen. He’ll be coming up at you from the floor when you’re trying to make the tay.’

‘You can grin all you like, boy,’ she said, ‘but it’s not right to leave a woman alone in a house like this.’

‘It’s you who made it like this,’ he said. ‘But point taken. I’ll get you a cat.’

She threw daggers.

‘First thing’s first,’ he said. ‘I’ll hire some hands. After that we’ll look at living arrangements. I have nowhere else for you at the moment. I’ll figure something out, but it won’t be tonight.’

‘It will. I’m not staying here.’

‘You are until I find somewhere else for you.’

‘I’m not. I’ll sit outside for the night.’

‘And you’ll freeze and then there’ll be two corpses and I tell you what, girl, I’ve only the patience for digging one grave.’

‘You should have left me in London,’ she said. ‘Poor interest you have in me, at the end of the day.’

‘That’s right, Maureen. Poor interest. That’s why it’s me standing here, being fucking munificent with my fingerprints, instead of the state pathologist and Anglesea Street’s finest.’

‘I’m not staying here,’ she said.

‘First thing’s first, I said. Will you stay here till I get back? Will you at least do that much for me?’

She tipped ash onto the tabletop. ‘I’m not staying here with a corpse.’

‘And whose fault is it that he’s a corpse?’

‘I don’t know yet,’ she said.

He met the challenge and it went right through him.

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Fine. Come on. Sure Deirdre’ll be thrilled to see you.’

Maureen wasn’t officially living in Jimmy Phelan’s building. The building didn’t officially belong to Jimmy Phelan. Even so, he didn’t want to use his nearest and dearest men for this job. There was something off about the whole thing. He wasn’t convinced that the foxy-haired intruder was just some gowl hunting desperately for spare change. Jimmy Phelan trusted his gut, and now he felt it howling.

The job had to be done. There was a body on his mother’s kitchen floor, and it wasn’t going to get up and leave of its own accord. Ordinarily he’d have swiftly handpicked a few decent sorts — at the very least his right-hand man Dougan, whose brutish dexterity and wicked sense of humour would be just right for the occasion — but that would suggest that he had a designated clean-up crew, and he couldn’t be sure how Maureen would take it.

Or how Dougan and the boys would take her. They knew scraps of the story: that he had tracked down his birth mother and brought her home. They didn’t know she was such an odd fish as to be capable of impromptu executions. Their respect for him, and for his lineage, could well be mangled by news of her little rampage. He bristled at the thought of it. He was sore where he’d grafted on this brand-new past.

Deirdre Allen was as stubborn as she was tough, which may have sounded like an admirable mix, but as far as Jimmy could tell it simply meant she was too stupid to know when she was wrong and too slow to notice the consequences. She was still dyeing her hair jet-black, still smoking twenty a day, still insisting that if he funded her expedition into real estate, he’d get his money back and doubled again. Still thinking there was opportunity on the right side of the euro. Still believing the recession was a sag in Ireland’s fabric, stretched as far as it could go and on the point of bouncing upwards.

That pig-headedness was what had taken her so long to leave him. She had sailed through nearly a decade of his debasing their marital vows before she’d run aground. He hadn’t made a habit of affairs; there were plenty of girls he could fuck without having to fork out for extras. Even so, there were so many all-nighters, so many week-long absences that any other woman would have read the warnings. By the time Deirdre noticed, it was much too late to draw boundaries. Jimmy gave her the house and wondered if one day she’d chalk their collaborative fuck-up down to experience. For now, she still laid claim to the title of Jimmy Phelan’s Wife. She didn’t want him in her bed anymore, but she was too stubborn and too tough to give up what she thought were the perks of his infamy.

‘I want to get the kids a piano,’ she said, dispatching a cup of tea in Maureen’s general direction, wrinkling her nose. She hadn’t asked how Maureen took her tea, but Deirdre had long assumed, incorrectly, that she had a knack for hostessing. ‘I’ve always regretted not learning an instrument. I don’t want them saying the same thing in ten years’ time.’

‘Are you having me on, girl? They’d have no more interest in learning the piano than they did in anything else you demanded I foist on them. It’s you who wants the piano. A front-room centrepiece. Something to rest a vase on.’

‘You can be a very thick man, Jimmy.’

‘Maybe it’s because I never learned to tickle the ivories. There’s no art in me.’

‘You’d deny your children the opportunity to learn a skill so? Just because there’s a chance they might not stick with it? Is it depressed you are, or just plain mean?’

Maureen took her mug and walked out onto the back decking.

‘Ah, she’s thrilled you found her,’ sneered Deirdre.

‘I’m glad you know her so well, girl, because she’s staying here with you tonight.’

‘What?’

‘The flat’s getting cleaned. Industrial shit. No way can I have her stay there overnight, and I have too much on to offer her my bed. Long and short of it: you’re stuck with her till tomorrow.’

‘I am in me shit, Jimmy,’ she hissed. ‘You can’t leave that loon here.’

‘You’ve got a spare room. And she’s been wanting to spend more time with her grandchildren. At least until she starts knowing them from the next pair of spoiled brats.’

‘The cheek of you, boy. That woman, wherever you found her, might have ties to you but she doesn’t to my children.’

‘That’s a failure of the most basic concept of human biology, Deirdre.’

‘You know what I mean, Jimmy. There’s a lot more to family than…’ She waved a hand and grimaced. ‘Fluids. Genetics. Whatever you want to call it.’

Maureen wasn’t moving but to bring cigarette to mouth. She stared out across the lawn, serene as a cud-chewing cow. Just the right demeanour for the city’s newest reaper: taking the scythe in her stride. Jimmy hadn’t met many new murderers who weren’t bent double by the aftermath, who didn’t puke on their shoes as an epilogue.