Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

‘You can handle yourself, grand, but can you start aggro when you have to?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘You suppose so?’

‘It’s not something I do all that often. I don’t go around raking up shit, like.’

‘And usually I’d say life’s too short but sometimes you’ve got to throw down, d’you know what I mean? Our troublemaker today isn’t going to flake into you, but nor are they going to listen to reason. If I said, Here, slap this cunt , would you do it?’

They stopped at traffic lights. Ryan fixed on the red glow and said, ‘Yeah. I would.’

‘You’re pure obedient, aren’t you? You’d have made a great guard. Can you drive yet?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Have you a car?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Have you your licence?’

‘Not yet.’

‘I’d stick that on the To Do list if I were you,’ said Shakespeare.

He followed Shakespeare’s instructions with the same robotic deference that had inspired the enforcer to sneer about a vocation in An Garda Síochána; what else could he do?

He did the knocking, Shakespeare barged in. He pulled the curtains and checked the gaff for hangers-on, Shakespeare kicked his target down the darkened hallway. He found their quarry’s phone and purse, Shakespeare hissed and grumbled as she expelled choked promises for deaf ears.

‘C’mere!’ Shakespeare snapped, and Ryan came into the hallway just as Shakespeare smashed the woman’s forehead off the kitchen door sill.

‘Show me that purse.’

Ryan handed it over and Shakespeare, one runner jammed over the woman’s right wrist, rifled through it, pulling out cards and receipts. A couple of twenty euro notes fluttered to the floor.

Shakespeare flicked a small photo in front of her nose and said, ‘What age is the small wan? Four? Five? Nearly time to collect her, I suppose,’ and Ryan’s eyes flickered onto the crying debtor, a dumpy girl with a weak chin and a belly halved by an elasticated waist, whose curls plastered to the skin under her eyes, whose top lip was split and bleeding.

‘I don’t understand people who drag their kids into this shit,’ said Shakespeare. ‘You’d think if your fella was snapping tempers all over the town you’d send the child to live with someone a bit more organised. You think you wouldn’t expose your smallies to your failings. One thing that drives me mental, like.’

He opened the door under the stairs, slapping it off the debtor’s head.

‘I’m going for a slash,’ he said. ‘Don’t let her get up.’

His back to the wall, Ryan slipped into the living room. He shut his eyes tight and swallowed, opened them again and caught snapshots of a life scattered around him. An orange striped mug on the coffee table, the TV tuned to a chat show in which a procession of slobs tried to snarl tears out of each other, on the mantel a photograph of a doleful tot in a roomy blue and grey school uniform. The smell of fresh toast, wafting from the kitchen.

All against the steady stream of Shakespeare’s piss hitting the bowl.

Ryan rolled around, forehead to the plaster.

This woman’s partner could owe Dan thousands. He could have stolen from him. She could have threatened to involve the guards; they were likely to do that, he supposed, the ould dolls.

‘Fucking disgusting,’ Shakespeare said.

Ryan stood back into the hall. Shakespeare was in the doorway to the toilet, curling his lip.

‘Smells like a wino’s drawers in here. Jesus Christ, it wouldn’t kill you to sluice the place out once in a fucking blue one.’

She whimpered. Shakespeare grabbed her hair at the back of the neck, dragged her onto her knees and pulled her into the bathroom.

‘Lookit! Fucking bog roll and everything still in the bowl. You don’t even flush, you scab.’

Louder tears now, then a scream. Ryan caught a grunt in his chest.

‘Are you just going to fucking leave it there?’

‘Please,’ she said. ‘Oh God, please…’

‘Pick it up. Go on.’

Ryan had assumed a male target and had prepped for fists swung. Instead Shakespeare had settled for intimidating the sinner’s woman, not as a consolation prize, but because the task didn’t call for finesse. Perhaps Shakespeare would have claimed its ugliness was the mark of any entry-level mission. Didn’t matter. It was a jolt no matter how Ryan defended it.

He sat on the stairs, facing the front door, his head in his hands.

‘Put it to your nose and take a good sniff and tell me, girl, that that’s any way to keep a house.’

The woman retched, and Ryan echoed her.

If there was one thing Joseph O’Donnell loved, outside of starting shouting matches with political conservatives in old-man pubs, it was launching short-lived bands. When Ryan arrived back there were three other blokes sprawling with his cousin in the living room, guitars abandoned in corners to make room for the migration of a couple of chunky joints.

‘Cusack Cusack Cusack, do you have anything nice for me?’

‘I might do,’ Ryan said. He’d put aside an eighth for Joseph. He wasn’t keen on flashing it about. Fuck knows who any of these dudes were, and open season on dealers lasted the whole twelve months with double points on bank holiday weekends. Joseph acknowledged his glare, tutted, and made his way out into the hall. ‘They’re all sound,’ he said, ‘honest to fuck. I know you’re a bit… y’know.’

‘You know the way the “sound” ones get once they get wind of a dealer. There’d be girlfriends less possessive.’

‘Like you’d fucking know. You’re only one step up from “virgin”.’

Ryan winced and Joseph took it as confirmation.

The lads were watching Family Guy clips on Joseph’s laptop. Ryan sat on the armrest of the couch and was introduced — ‘This is Darragh, this is Graham, this is Barry, we call him Bobo, don’t ask’ — but he’d left his mind back with Dan Kane, who’d been glib and jovial about the mission and who’d peeled Ryan’s reluctance from his vacant answers and labelled it a temporary blip.

‘ It’s a lesson, little man. You’ve got to be tough. If you’re a soft touch in this game you’ll get steamrollered, and you can’t call the cops when you’re shafted, can you? ’

What the fuck was the game? The playing field expanded with every step he took; he was always at the middle of it.

Dan Kane had caught his shoulder and laughed and given him a handy hundred quid.

A hundred quid, you silly panicking fuck, and just for sitting on the stairs with the gawks while Shakespeare made a cokehead suck his piss from a handful of bog roll .

A joke went around his new front room, and he missed it. Bobo reached for the laptop and said, ‘This one’s my favourite,’ and there was Peter Griffin, standing in the doorway of a young fella’s bedroom, trying to talk to him about bullying, losing the rag altogether with the brat and lashing out with trademark brutality. The lads howled.

What was it, ten seconds? If that? Ten fucking seconds of a cartoon man punching a cartoon kid, and it stretched into a wound.

Ryan gave the congregation a swift thumbs-up and went to his bedroom.

A cartoon man beat up a cartoon boy. One pile of pixels laid into another. Same thing as blasting through bots on the Xbox, and you didn’t see Ryan Cusack falling to pieces over virtual casualties for the sake of a couple of overwound heartstrings. Nor should you see him seizing the corners of his mattress and gulping back the sniffles over something as fucking stupid as seeing Peter Griffin fly into a rage.

Ryan pulled out his own stash, found the book he’d requisitioned for the task — one of Joseph’s, a hardback boasting a hundred essential chords — and rolled a spliff. He sparked it, opened the window and leant against the sill staring into the silver evening fog; he breathed deep, willing the thoughts drowned, but they persisted. Of course they did. The weight of his psychosis dwarfed a piddling fucking eighth.