Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

The yard was trimmed with nets and rope, the substantiation of a forsaken hobby or a career left to rust in old age. Later on, when Dougan arrived, they would take the boat out. They would wrap the body in rope and weigh it down with shale and quarry blocks. They’d drop it where it would never wash up again.

Jimmy Phelan hadn’t been able to swim in the sea for many years.

‘I don’t know this one,’ Franko said. ‘What’s he done on you?’

‘Why would you think I’d answer that?’ Jimmy said.

‘Ah, I’m only asking. It’d be a rare time you wouldn’t know the feen, is all.’

‘You’re all mouth, Franko.’

Cotter simpered.

The yard was at the bottom of a boreen bordered by overgrown hedges and divided by a thick ridge of thriving grass. Sometimes you got dog-walkers and joggers chancing the stretch; they never got close enough to worry about. Half a mile along the wild shoreline, over flaking gates and on a path beaten only by shuffling gangsters when there was an undesirable trussed up to use as pollock bait, you reached the little harbour, and the dinghy that would take you out to the fishing boat. It was a good spot. Jimmy and his boys had used it for a couple of years, longer than he was comfortable with, but the yard was a hard habit to break.

Besides, he liked getting out of the city.

‘Right,’ said Franko. He pulled Cusack forward, to a tearful yelp.

Jimmy shook his head. Cowardice was nobody’s darling. So much of a man was stripped away when notice was given of his demise; it was no surprise to see them cry and beg and empty their bladder all over their shoes, but it was an ugly thing. What use was a man who couldn’t stand up straight to face his mortality?

He saw Cusack clearly now, a prolific weakling, a creature at his peak in his teens who’d been steadily sinking since.

Franko had begun the prep. The tarpaulin was laid flat. The hose was extended to sluice the inevitable mess from the concrete; they were promised rain later, too. Jimmy raised an eyebrow, and Franko produced the prearranged weapon and handed it over.

Jimmy crooked a finger around the trigger. It had been years since he’d taken on a job himself, but he had the same good reason for keeping Cusack from his crew now as he’d had when the waster had first clawed at his patience. Dougan knew nothing about the O’Donovan corpse and the brief maternal glitch that had produced it. It followed that he couldn’t be told about Cusack’s flapping insurrection, his spilling the dead man’s name in front of Maureen. It followed then that he couldn’t be told about Cusack’s reluctant reveal of yet another damned aggravation: a visit from a panicked ex-girlfriend on the direction of that ridiculous cunt Duane. For what could Jimmy tell Dougan on that cock-up? That his mother was a loon and that his attempts to provide a smokescreen had backfired and left him blind and gasping?

It was a skit of the highest fucking order.

Franko stood Cusack in the middle of the yard, shaded his eyes, and searched the skies.

‘Why are you here, Cusack?’ asked Jimmy, and his old friend whined, ‘This isn’t something that needs to happen, boy. You know I’m no danger to you. I’m a father, for fuck’s sake. They’re already missing a mam; don’t do this to them.’

‘D’you know your problem?’ Jimmy brooded. ‘You don’t know when to stop. I asked you why you were here and you went off on a tangent. I don’t know what Maureen asked you but you went off on a tangent there, too. So many angles are bound to ride your arse eventually. Why are you here, Cusack?’

‘Because of a fucking accident, boy, a stupid slip-up, a name and a surname is all, dear God.’

‘You’d think that’d be all, but what happened? You left it unchecked because you thought Maureen might neglect to tell me. You retreated to your hovel on the hill and quaked into a bottle and you let your slip-up grow and grow until there was a whore prying at your door for a dead man. See what happens when you think shit’ll just work itself out?’

‘I get it, I get it.’ There were two colours a man could turn out here, apart from the pervading yellow backdrop: ashen or dribbling puce. Cusack was white from forehead to knuckles. ‘But I’m not the problem, boy. All I did was make a mistake. I’m no danger to you. Why can’t you see that? Why can’t you…’ Whatever force had fed his voice ran dry.

‘You’re a waste of space, Cusack.’

‘I was there when you needed me,’ Tony rasped.

‘And look where that brought me.’

He’d been sniffling even when he’d come crawling to Jimmy. Panic about a mourning girl turning up on his doorstep, two years after he’d done his good deed for his old friend, compounded by the fact she’d been directed there by Tara Duane. It might just be one of Duane’s notions , he’d said, flaccid and wheedling . She may have only just remembered that we used to drink in the same pub, some shit like that . Jimmy had cursed the bitch under his breath, warned Cusack to let him handle her, and assuaged his anxiety through gritted teeth.

Alone in the aftermath he’d wondered if Tim Dougan was his good-luck charm. It had been decades since he’d tried unpicking complications without his old buddy’s help, and his efforts had double-knotted the thing and bound his hands with it.

This morning he’d determined to have a final lash of it, called General Franko, hounded the retching Cusack into his car and made for West Cork.

By the time Dougan showed up Cusack would be gone and Franko certainly wouldn’t be talking.

Cusack got a second wind and launched into another petition he’d cobbled together on behalf of his little darlings. Jimmy held up his hand.

‘Nothing you say’s going to change my mind that you’re a maggot and my mistake.’

‘Jesus, Jimmy, do you want me to fucking beg?’ Cusack sobbed.

‘You are begging.’

‘Six kids, Jim. Four boys and two girls. Seven to seventeen. What d’you think is going to happen to them? We’re so brittle as it is. I’ve one in prison, I need to be around for them… You have kids of your own!’

Jimmy said, ‘I have to show you what happens to people who I can’t trust, Cusack.’

‘Please! Please, for fuck’s sake—’

The gunshot shut him up. The second made him wail. Jimmy stood over the little General Franko and put a final bullet in his head.

Tony was on his knees. He heaved. Saliva anchored his head to the ground.

‘You see?’ Jimmy said.

Cusack said nothing. He was crying.

‘One mistake can bring the whole city down around me, Cusack. I take mistakes more seriously than you think. Don’t for a second believe that if it had made sense to, I wouldn’t have wiped you the fuck out.’

‘What did he do?’ Cusack blubbered.

‘Him?’ Jimmy waved a wrist at the former general and his fragments and fluids. ‘He talked too much. More than you do, even.’

He stepped over to his old friend and caught the back of his head, twisting him on his hands and knees so he could face another future.

‘Don’t let what happened to him happen to you, Cusack.’

Cusack dispatched to wait in a pub five miles back, Jimmy relaxed in his car with a well-earned cigarette and half a playthrough of Against the Grain . On the other side of the yard, beyond the concrete wall and over the rutted sea, cloud begat cloud and the air turned damp and grey. Where Frank Cotter’s blood had washed into the muck the flies danced, intoxicated.

Dougan arrived a couple of hours post-mortem. Jimmy watched from the car as he approached the tarpaulin and surveyed the glittering concrete. He was a bulldog of a man: squat, muscular, and stern. He had a stomach lined with iron and a pragmatism that extended to murder and murder’s horizon.