Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

‘You can breathe now,’ she whispers.

We go back to Joseph’s. He’s only just broken up with his ould doll, so the house is kind of scanty. He’s got some grass and a box of Corona in the fridge. I sit on the couch, and Karine sits beside me with her legs over mine, and we listen to him blether on about his new band, and how my god-daughter’s doing, and what’s been on telly, and what albums have been out and on and on and on and you’d think I’d be bored off my nut but you’d be wrong. Spend nine months inside and you come out just starved for your mates, for the banter.

For your girlfriend.

It’s kind of coming up to it and I don’t know what to do.

In the end Joseph very mildly says he’s going to hit the hay and that if we want to stay over that’s grand, there’s a duvet on the bed in the second bedroom.

I go all shy again. We kind of hang around for fifteen minutes after Joseph goes to bed, talking around it, and then I say, ‘D’you want to stay here, like?’ and she shrugs; she’s shy too. So I take her hand and lead her up to the second bedroom and we sit on the bed.

There’s nothing in the way of mood lighting up here; there’s the overhead or the dim glow of the city outside the curtains. I move against her until she lies back and she hooks her hands around my neck and brings me with her. The bulb’s like a million watts and the room is practically bare. It’s not too far off a cell, I guess.

So we do it, eventually. It takes ages because we’re both kind of waiting to see where the other leads; I only want to do what she seems to want me to do, and she’s very quiet and very timid, and so we get undressed in fits and starts, and I’ve still got my jeans on when we get under the covers. All the way through I’m thinking she’ll stop me and tell me she doesn’t want this now that I’ve done time; I’m so scared I’m fingering her like I’m trying to pull a hair out of a bowl of soup.

And it’s the strangest thing. Like it’s probably the worst fuck we ever had because we’re both so anxious, but at the same time it’s the best feeling in the world, better than the first time even. Despite the pure awkwardness she’s so wet I slide right in and pretty much come straight away. It’s a mixture of having a nine-month horn and being overwhelmed with relief. She doesn’t mind.

Once I’ve come it’s immediately better. Like there’s a weight off. She snuggles onto my chest and doesn’t ask for tissue or a T-shirt or anything. I get used to the air in my lungs and she talks to me till I’m ready to go again.

Dan Kane might as well have carried him out of the prison on his shoulders. The day after he’d come home, Ryan had contacted him, nervous as fuck, really, coz the man might have thought he was tainted or something now, who knew? But Dan had been even more pleased to see him than his father was, and that was saying something. It was nice to get a welcome home. Blew Ryan’s mind, if he was honest.

On the second night of freedom Dan brought him out to dinner. It seemed a rather formal gesture, the mere notion of it pompous and off-putting, but once they were there it was grand. Dan had lumped for a bistro filled with large, loud groups. There was nothing out of place about the pair of them. Ryan wore a T-shirt and a new pair of jeans. He had grown, only an inch or so, but enough to air his ankles in his pre-prison clothes. Funny really; he would have sworn he’d shrunk in there, hunched down to maybe half the size he should have been, homunculus to his own sentence.

Dan said, ‘Order anything you want, boy. Order the fucking lot if you like.’

Ryan grinned and Dan said, ‘I mean that. You did nine months for me, little man.’

‘What else was I gonna do, boy?’

‘Lot of things you could have done and didn’t; you’re a fucking lion, d’you know that? Do you drink red? I’m getting a bottle. Have the steak, for fuck’s sake.’

Ryan ordered lasagne and went through it like a chainsaw through chopsticks. He’d been ravenous since he’d left St Pat’s. When Fiona had collected him she’d brought him for a Big Mac and a milkshake, which he’d been hanging for all week. When he arrived home, he’d had a couple of pints with his father that left him vexingly woozy, eaten three Tayto sandwiches and a jar of pesto, washed that down with a bottle of Coke and then almost gawked the lot out the back door. Hunger had been one prison universal; he ate everything he was given, but there was never enough. He’d thought the liberty to make a pig of himself might take some getting used to. He was wrong. Wrong and famished.

‘Yeah, yeah, put it away,’ said Dan. ‘You’ll hit my age and suddenly everything over a ham sandwich will give you a paunch.’

Ryan sat back and rubbed his belly.

‘It’s the odd time I remember you’re only a cub,’ smirked Dan.

‘It’s just nice to get a bit of decent grub, is all.’

Dan leaned back, arms folded, and smiled.

‘So,’ he said. ‘How bad was it?’

Around them the hubbub continued. Birthday shout-outs slapped the air; cakes went past, sparkling; girls tugging at ambitious hemlines trooped to the toilet in twos and threes; ould fellas, their faces wrinkled with mirth, howled.

‘Worse than I thought it’d be,’ Ryan said. ‘And I thought it was gonna be hell.’

He hadn’t said this to his father when he’d been asked. He’d said, It was grand, Dad , or It was doable, like, you keep your head down . Joseph, on the doorstep as soon as Ryan had crossed it, had pried but Ryan had pleaded with him to change the subject; he wasn’t ready for stories, his thoughts were fucked as far as the rafters.

‘I was there myself,’ said Dan. ‘Just before the millennium. I did three months for nicking a car. It was shit then; I can’t imagine it’s changed much since the nineties.’

‘I don’t think it’s changed since the 1890s.’

‘So what was so bad? The other fellas? The screws? The boredom?’

‘Everything. The whole fucking lot.’

The screws had placed him first night in one of the committal cells. He’d stood waiting for the sound of the door slamming shut behind him, expecting some significant, gut-wrenching crash. It was quieter than he’d predicted and then he stood wondering if that was it, and if he shouldn’t holler out at them to do it again, because he hadn’t felt it hard enough the first time. He didn’t cop right away but realised eventually that he was playing out the echo in his head. The door shut behind him. And shut behind him again. It looped and looped and he was sitting on the bed staring at the wall with his hands in his pockets, retching with the bleak and absolute scale of it.

The screw who processed him in the morning had asked, ‘Did you phone home?’

Ryan hadn’t been given the option.

‘You could have,’ the screw had shrugged. ‘You probably should have. Called your mam at least.’

The seventeen-year-olds had been kept separate from the older lads and the screw had said he was lucky. There were only twenty-one other seventeen-year-olds in there with him. No overcrowding in their wing, separate facilities, spoiled little bastards.

The first month they’d had him on lockdown for, they said, his own protection. He was only a couple of days clear of that when one of the Dubs had volunteered to cut his throat. Ryan had told him to just fucking try it. Back on lockdown. Three months in, and back on the wing, he’d realised that he’d done only a third of his time, and the enormity had crushed him. You didn’t tell them if you were feeling in any way down, whether it was because you’d stubbed your toe or wanted to hang yourself — you just fucking didn’t, not in a fit, you kept your mouth shut because you knew what was waiting for you otherwise. One morning had come around when he just couldn’t get out of bed. The screws had pulled him out, dragged him to the observation cell, stripped him and left him there.