Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

How do you tell your dad something like that?

The other prisoners were cretinous or vicious or in most cases, both. When he was on the wing he hung around with a couple of lads from Waterford. One of them was due to hit eighteen and would be transferred down to Cork, and Ryan assumed he was looking for influence to bring in there with him; Ryan being banged up for possession with intent was, yer manno hoped, a bankable connection. Ryan had little time for either of them, and less time for the Dublin jackeens, and though Dan had various connections in the capital he didn’t wish to find where to plant an affiliation. The Dubs spent most of the time throwing shapes and attempting to kill one another. Ryan was too busy gasping for air to want in on that.

Now, back in the real world, Dan said, ‘It’s no joke, I know that.’

‘It’s grand.’

‘We both know it’s not. Shit like that you don’t forget in a hurry. That’s a burden you carried for me.’

‘Well look… It’s over now.’

Dan grimaced. ‘Hard to say this to you now, Ryan, but it’s not over until you get your head around it. It stays with you. You’ll think of it when you’re meant to be doing anything but thinking of it. That’s what the system’s for — to break you down. And it works. Believe me.’

A girl, maybe Ryan’s age, maybe a bit older, came in from the smoking area. She was wearing a royal-blue dress that wrapped around her fleshy thighs and barely covered her arse. She smiled at him, and he felt an urge to jump up, follow that smile to the back of the restaurant and convince her to cross her ankles behind his waist. He supposed if you’ve been surrounded by nothing but smelly, dopey fellas for nine months it whet your appetite for the ould dolls.

‘I’m just glad to be home,’ he told Dan, who leaned forward.

‘I’m just saying to you, little man, the methods they use inside are designed to control you even after you get out. They want to fuck you. They want to fuck you so hard you forget what it was like to live without a cock up your arse. Don’t let them take your autonomy from you. Don’t bury Pat’s. Because this won’t be the last time the Law will look to lube you up and remembering how they work is the first step to fighting them off.’

He sat back again, sucked his teeth and sighed.

‘This is only the start of it, little man.’

Joseph had broken up with his girlfriend and she’d gone home to her mam and dad with their baby daughter and left him in need of a housemate. On Dan’s promise of more lucrative employment, Ryan volunteered, so only a week after coming home he was out of there again, hobo’s kerchief and all.

Tony went over for an ineffectual root around.

‘I didn’t think you’d leave again so soon,’ he mumbled and Ryan, halfway in behind the television with the Xbox cable bunched in his fist, matched the wounded tone and said, ‘I’m eighteen, Dad.’

‘Not for a couple of months you’re not.’

Ryan came out from behind the telly and concentrated on pointing the remote at the screen.

‘So much shit you don’t know yet,’ Tony said.

‘So much shit I do, as well. I’ve been to prison for fuck’s sake.’

‘You were too young for that, too.’

Ryan could have turned to face his father. What harm? Accept the hint and stare him down. Instead he put the remote on the couch and hunted around for something that wasn’t there.

‘You’re still only a kid.’

‘I’m not.’

‘You should be at home.’

Ryan pulled out the couch and looked behind it.

‘I don’t want to see you making any more stupid mistakes, Rocky.’

Ryan sank to his haunches and rested his head against the back of the couch, giving himself the chance to exhale, to close his fists, to screw up his eyes.

Are you going back to school, boy?

Ryan wasn’t. Not in twenty fits. Where would he be going at almost eighteen? Back into another fucking uniform to sit under the gaze of another fucking moron who knew nothing about anything? It was all bollocks anyway. They’d said he could do school in St Pat’s and there was nothing even like a fucking school up there: arts and fucking crafts and fucking cooking, what good was that to anyone? He’d learned more sitting on his arse staring at the four walls. Some of the lads he’d been in with couldn’t count to twenty without taking off their socks. Learning? No fucking learning in there, unless you were learning how to watch your back or how to get out of a fucking headlock.

So if he went back to school now, at almost eighteen, back into fifth year with all the sixteen-year-olds as his girlfriend danced through university, yeah, well, he’d find himself on the scrapheap before long, wouldn’t he?

Oh Karine, where’s your boyfriend tonight?

He couldn’t come out, girl, he had homework to do.

Not a fucking hope. If he was old enough to throw in a padded cell, he was old enough to make his own way.

What could they teach him anyway? The country was fucked. If he took the straight decision it would be between the airport and the dole queue.

What hadn’t they fucking taught him already? How to be fucking blind and deaf, how to apply the rules that suited them, how to deal with awkward problems: lock them the fuck away. Oh, having trouble with your dad, Ryan? Having trouble with this jackeen scrote? Having trouble with your fucking brain, tangled up in thoughts that your girlfriend, the one fucking good thing in this whole fucking world, is out there finding a better man to fuck? Ah, we have solutions for you, boy. Clang. Another fucking door locks behind you.

Fuck the lot of them.

Dan Kane’s main man was nicknamed Shakespeare, because he was as verbose a thug as you could find. His real name was Shane O’Sullivan, though it had taken Ryan two and a half years of dealing with him to figure that out. He was absurdly wiry for an enforcer; his success stemmed from the fact that there was barely enough of him to punch back. Ryan had heard it intimated that Dan Kane kept him in a spaghetti jar.

The first time Ryan had met him, it was because the order he’d placed with his usual contact was too big to proceed without notice. Shakespeare had come to investigate. Ryan was fourteen, pre-Karine, quick-tempered and unafraid to pay the price for it. Shakespeare hadn’t looked very amused but had apparently reported back that the whole thing was quite the hoot. Kane hadn’t been looking for a protégé but the opportunity to take one had tickled him too much to turn down.

And of course there were parallels. Dan Kane had had a shit time with his own father. Dan Kane had been to St Pat’s.

Shakespeare wouldn’t tell you whether or not he’d been inside. He liked puns and proverbs, but he was as blank a professional as the archetype; you worked with Shakespeare, never with Shane.

Ryan was going on a job with him.

He hadn’t received all of the details and Shakespeare certainly had no mind for filling him in. Dan had nominated him as backup for a recovery operation — some waster who owed a few bob and had a deeper mouth than pockets. This was learning. This was a practical.

Shakespeare picked him up at the end of Ryan’s new road. There had been frost in the morning but now it was foggy and silent. Headlamps moved in the mist like the lanterns of the lost. The stereo played a techno set so tight as to be practically featureless. It was headphone music. Relegated to the background, its rhythm was unsettling and relentless.

‘How are you in a scrap?’ Shakespeare asked.

Ryan shrugged. ‘I can handle myself, like.’

‘And how are you initiating a scrap?’

‘What d’you mean, boy?’

Shakespeare frowned. He had a precise goatee, a slender nose and narrow eyes; his face sharpened into a sparse sketch of geometric shapes.