Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

‘I resent that. All I told Georgie, who I’ve known for years , was that you may have seen her boyfriend before he went missing. He was a drinker.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘You know,’ she said, lowering her voice, ‘like yourself.’

‘The day,’ he said, ‘that I take lifestyle pointers from you…’ He shook his head and dug his fingernails into his palms. ‘You stay away from me, Duane. I don’t know what you’ve done or said to that poor girl but I’m sticking to what J.P. tells me and he can deal with you.’

‘How are you so cosy with J.P. anyway?’ she said.

‘None of your fucking business.’

‘Because if you had nothing to hide you wouldn’t have involved him, would you? I tell Georgie that you knew her boyfriend and the next thing I know Jimmy Phelan is at my door looking for Georgie’s address. Why is that, Tony?’

He exhaled.

Shit , he thought. Fuck. Fuck shit fuck .

The therapist down at Solidarity House once said, in a moment of rare candour, that the problem with functioning on even low, steady levels of alcohol was that it makes you thick as shit. For J.P. to have dealt with Duane as he’d said he did would have meant explaining to the bitch that namedropping Tony Cusack in conversation with the dead man’s ex-girlfriend was inadvisable. Therefore, that there was a real connection between Tony Cusack and the dead man, forged in steel by J.P.’s insistence that Duane forget all about it. To have missed that could only be attributed to the Demon. Ta-dah. A couple in the morning and three afternoon cans made him thick as fucking shit.

Same as thinking about the night his wife’s drunken stubbornness killed her off on the day their firstborn got out of juvenile detention. Same as getting involved at all with Phelan, who he’d run with as a kid, for fuck’s sake, who’d dragged him as a grown-up into murder after murder and Jesus, what was Tony Cusack, only a grown-up with the cop on of a twelve-year-old?

He tried to exude menace but his voice came out croaking.

‘You need to stop talking, Tara.’

‘I see. The shady bully thinks I’m not good enough to be his ally.’

‘Get fucked.’ How he wished he hadn’t said that. Get fucked , as she stripped off in front of his kid and worked at him till he was able for her bony thighs to straddle his. Now he jabbed both elbows backwards, on the chance that it might maim the bitch; it fucking didn’t.

‘I’ve hit a nerve,’ she marvelled. ‘Call Tony Cusack a lot of things, but don’t call him a bully, even when the evidence stacks. Even when he’s running around after Jimmy Phelan.’

She grabbed his wrist and dragged back, and he whirled around, fist in the air and ready, so close to it he could feel the air thicken between his fist and her head.

‘Or running to him!’ she gasped. ‘Setting him on me. Is that because when Georgie got up here she said Robbie was dead? Is he dead? That’s it, isn’t it, Tony? Robbie O’Donovan’s dead. Don’t worry; I’m not going to tell. Why would I drop you in it on the day Ryan’s home from prison?’

‘You don’t fucking mention my son!’

‘Kelly just texted Melinda and said he was coming home — that’s why I thought now would be the time to make peace.’

‘Stay the fuck away from him.’

‘It’s funny, you kill someone and he goes to gaol.’

She dropped his wrist and put her face in her hands. Beneath the tresses, underneath her fingers, from the utter depths she made a gurgling sound that could have been laughter or tears or some mad chant. Tony jumped away and she came to again, smiled and said, ‘Don’t worry, Tony. J.P. asked me to track down the girl. See, I’m just as close to J.P. as you are. We’re on the same team, for God’s sake.’

What did he expect? That he wouldn’t need a drink?

He arrived down at twenty past and ducked into the pub across from Kent station for a pint of Guinness — medicinal, respectable — and a short, straight Jameson.

He took a seat by the window and when the traffic in and out of the station evened he asked the barman to watch his pint and jogged across the road.

There had been one open visit, one opportunity to hold his son in nine months, and that had passed with a kind of apologetic awkwardness, the boy taciturn perhaps because of the screw sitting there all eyes and ears, or maybe because he’d decided, in the long hours of lockdown, to try holding a grudge for a change.

So it had been a while. And there was no guarantee that there would be any contact now, awkward or otherwise, with all that had gone between them, with the courtroom betrayal, and the drink, and the fact that he’d grown way up and all behind Tony’s back…

He was standing at the door of the station with his bag on the ground beside him, wearing his court date clothes. Tony saw it now: the courtroom, the polished wood of the row ahead that he’d gripped when the judge had called him to speak, the black and white checked shirt… Funny how you forget shit, even when it’s something like that, even when it involves your own baby.

Ryan tried a smile when he spotted his father, in fairness to him.

Tony pulled the hooded jacket out from under his coat and held it out.

‘Thanks, Dad.’

‘No bother. How are you, boy?’

A shrug.

‘How was the…’ Tony started, and then, by dint of that shot of whiskey, broke off and found a lump in his throat and reached out and pulled his son into an embrace, caught the back of his neck and pressed his head onto his shoulder and held on until he felt him exhale, until the rigidity across his back and down his arms melted into brief, beautiful amnesty.

He held Ryan then at arm’s length, gritted his teeth and said, ‘You’ve grown again, I’d swear.’

The boy smiled in bitter defeat. He looked over his father’s shoulder and said, ‘You’ve been drinking.’

‘Only a splash. Only coz you’re home. It’s a celebration, isn’t it? I’ve a pint sitting across the road; come on over, I’ll get you one. Bet you were mad for one, weren’t you?’

‘But you’re not supposed to be. I thought.’

Tony swung into step beside his son, one arm around his shoulder, and said, ‘It’s all under control now, though. No difference anymore between me and the next man,’ and they walked together towards the entrance, back in the direction of his pint, towards an interlude in which Tony swore there’d be no thinking about J.P., none at all about Duane, not while this harmony lasted.

Joseph wants to cart me over to his gaff the night I come home and I’m all for it, because my dad’s half cut and it’s weird to see him like that after he’s been dry so long. In fairness, I’m half cut too. Two pints and my knees are going like the Shaky Bridge. We leave my dad nodding in the blue glow of the telly and we swing by the bottom of Karine’s road to pick her up.

I get out of the car when I see her approaching.

Nine months. She’s more beautiful than she was when I left her. She’s in college now so maybe that’s it. She’s eighteen. She’s a grown-up. I dunno, she’s just delicious. And I get weirdly shy, and it’s as if we have to start all over again because I feel like a stranger in front of her.

‘Hey girl.’

She slams into me and puts her arms around my neck and presses her head against my shoulder. I put my arms around her waist and fold over enough to bury my head against her neck, and after a few minutes she pulls away and looks up at me, and places a silk soft hand either side of my face and I kiss her, and she opens her mouth to me, and I’m so relieved I think I could cry.