Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

I probably shouldn’t have told you about the poison spiders, should I? Now you’ll probably never go. Get over the poison spiders. Sun, sea, sand and surfing. There’s no way we wouldn’t love it. Of course, they’re always looking for nurses there so maybe we could go once you’re qualified. Until then though I guess I can cope with Fountainstown.

Guess who sent me a letter? Head-wrecker general herself, Tara Duane. I know. Freaky. The woman’s actually off her game. How she’d think I’d want to hear from her I don’t know. Even reading it gave me the wobblies. You know she lives in cuckoo land. There’s rumours about her, like. Heard stuff like she told Con Harrington’s ould doll that they were having an affair and poor Con hadn’t gone next nor near her. It’s insane what some people make up. No way is she to be trusted and no way do I want letters from her. Keep well away, like.

Yesterday it came. Opened it up in front of the officer because you always open letters in front of officers and he said my face could have turned milk sour. Unreal, in fairness. Restless all morning waiting for the post to come around and when it does it’s a letter from a raving loon. Excitement wilting into nothing in the space of five seconds. Like you’d ask yourself if she really thinks I’m wasting one of my letters writing back to her? Obviously not.

She had nothing to say either. It’s very quiet on the terrace, my dad’s grand, my brothers and sisters are grand and she’s sure they all miss me. No shit Sherlock, thanks for the update. God almighty like. I know I’m bored but I’m not that desperate. The silly bitch even hinted that I should stick her name down on the visitor’s thing and she’d travel up to see me. Batshit! Up the walls of the cave batshit!

The thing is, I know it’s not easy for you to come up and see me but your name is down as a visitor, like. I know I’m kinda clutching at straws on that one. Can’t imagine your mam and dad would be too keen. And I know that I really let you down when I did what I did and ended up here. Never thought you’d even write for a while. Thought you’d be furious. But I guess you’re even more amazing than I thought you were, aren’t you? Really, you didn’t have to be as nice about this as you’ve been. Every time I think about it it shames me. All I can say is that I don’t deserve you.

That’s the sad truth, isn’t it? How I let you down. Even though the worst thing I could think of was being away from you I let it happen. When I get out I’ll make it up to you.

I could do a hundred of these stints and if you read one letter for every one of those sentences I’d consider myself lucky.

That’s about all for this letter I’d say. How to end these things I never know. Only to say I love you I suppose. Understand? There’s nothing more true in the whole entire world.

Yeah, that’s a pretty soppy ending.

Off I go.

Until January.

Ryan.

Tony got the call at a most inconvenient time, halfway down his second pint with Catherine Barrett’s hand halfway up his thigh, to which she’d progressed following a friendly pinch of his knee maybe ten minutes back.

He didn’t get up to answer. ‘Hello?’ Eyes on his conquest, who smirked with easy confidence, welcoming even. She was married but on bad terms with her fella, who’d been sniping at her from England for the last four months. She had cropped dark hair, laughing eyes and a great wide mouth like a sock puppet; no looker, but she had a soft spot for Tony, and he’d learned to manage with a lot less.

‘Am I speaking to Tony Cusack?’

‘You are.’

‘Hello, Mr Cusack; it’s Michael Tynan here.’

It was the governor. The fucking governor, at whose voice Tony became immediately enfeebled. He had always been inept in his dealings with authority figures, even when they weren’t his own.

‘The car isn’t on the road so I can’t get up there,’ he said, and Catherine Barrett returned to her glass of beer with the careful grace of a spurned braggart. ‘But I could send my sister? My sister lives in Dublin. She could pick him up.’

‘The usual arrangement would be to give him his train ticket,’ said the governor, ‘but with him not being eighteen yet, I’d prefer to have him picked up. If your sister is available that would do.’

‘Yeah, of course, yeah. I’ll get her to meet him.’ He paused. ‘I thought he’d be another week.’

He’d counted wrong, or they’d been messing with the dates again up there. They did that. Tony was confused by the process, but then it was made to be confusing, was it not? They were trained to make a monkey out of you. Over the past nine months he’d visited, written, received phone calls which were recorded and often, whether by design or shoddy apparatus, cut ridiculously short. Every time there was communication facilitated by these people they made Tony feel like a shit-flinger.

The visits were the worst. It was like going back to school. The same impatient courtesy, the same hot mass settling at the back of his tongue.

For the second call he made his way out to the smoking area, ignoring the woman Barrett with whom he might otherwise have enjoyed an ugly but crucial ride.

‘Fiona? You’d never do me a favour, girl?’

‘Jesus. What’s he need now?’

‘A lift to the station?’

January, and his lungs were full of fog and soot. January was a cunt at the best of times, pissing ice down upon a crowd damp to their bones. Sudden room in the shops after the Christmas eruption, cold space in the pubs and the cheer sucked back out and up the chimney.

This January reeked of vengeance. Tony had suffered a Christmas subdued for his recharged addiction and the absence of his oldest son, and then a dose that confined him to the bed for a week. In the horrors, he’d had to plead with his mother to buy him a few naggins, citing the DTs, the sickness, his weakness, his failures, until she’d angrily relented. Then he’d curled on his side under the duvet, clammy and gulping.

He deserved it, oh, he knew it well. He’d turned in the pregnant girl, he’d watched a man die, he’d broken his sobriety, he’d betrayed his son.

Now and then J.P. took his recreation at the terrace, watching him or watching Duane or neither; he didn’t know. His children, oblivious, had walked past the Volvo on the way home from school. They had been in the house when J.P. had barged in for unscheduled one-to-ones. He’d even turned up on Christmas Day with a bottle of Jameson, gift-wrapped but only half full.

Tony attempted to show his belly and hoped that it would prove too pathetic for the invader’s sense of pride. The rolling over stung. Late at night, between hallucinated gunshots in a concrete bay and his next nightmare, he remembered J.P.’s sneer about jellylegged dads, and the shame burned down his gullet and summoned sweat. Feeling keenly the gaps in his character, he wept alone.

He had betrayed his son but his son was the forgiving sort and Tony Cusack was deeply sorry. The rationale had stood up to scrutiny; little doubt the boy thought he could handle himself, but wandering into Jimmy Phelan’s field of vision was a life-changing experience, as Tony knew too well. Even so. Seventeen was no age to be locked up. Tony’s family had intimated he deserved it. Gurriers tied to you were still gurriers.

During their visits the boy had been reticent to the point of silence but that was nothing to wonder about, not when the visiting room had been so full. Roaring mammies and young fellas screeching ‘HA?’ down the phones; who could have a conversation in that environment? Ryan had always been soft-spoken.