Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

‘Well look, I’ll tell you what I’ll do,’ he said to Deirdre. ‘I’ll find you a piano and you can honky-tonk your musical regrets away to your heart’s content. I won’t even ask why Ellie and Conor’s fingers are still pudgy as pigs’ trotters in a year’s time. And all you have to do is mind my mammy for the night.’

‘Ah, in fairness, Jimmy…’

‘You should try talking to her. She’s got your children’s history knotted up inside that wizened head of hers. She’s got Ireland’s history in there. She’s a very interesting woman.’

‘A bit too interesting. Don’t you think I’ve had it up to here with how interesting you can be?’

‘A piano for sanctuary,’ he said. ‘You’d deny your children the opportunity to learn a skill just because there’s a chance my dear mum will leave smudges on your furniture? Don’t be plain mean, Deirdre. Aren’t you better than me and my ancestry?’

He went out onto the deck and closed the door behind him.

‘You’re to stay with Deirdre tonight, Maureen. Say nothing about yer manno. We’ll have him scooped up and out in no time. Who knows, you might even fall in love with the new floor.’

‘I won’t go back there,’ she said. ‘It’s not safe.’

‘Yeah. Well. We’ll talk about it after.’

He took care of some chores after leaving Maureen in the reluctant hands of the daughter-in-law she’d missed out on, but as day stretched into evening there was still a human sacrifice on his mother’s kitchen floor, one with a dent in the back of its head made by Ireland’s ignorance of fine art and penchant for cut-price religious iconography.

He wondered where Maureen had gotten the Holy Stone. Had someone pressed it on her when she was reeling from childbirth? Had they assumed that even that crude image of the world’s ultimate single mother would provide solace in hard times? Were they just blind, deaf and dumb to style?

Jimmy Phelan was raised by his grandparents, not unwillingly, but awkwardly nevertheless. They brought him to Knock once and offered him up to the wall once favoured by apparitions as a living paradigm of their piety. He’d been very bored, but afterwards they’d taken a jaunt through the town and he remembered gift shop after gift shop, gift shops as far as an eight-year-old eye could see, stocked to the rafters with baubles. Rows of Virgin Mary barometers; her fuzzy cloak would change colour depending on the weather, which was very miraculous. Toy cameras with preloaded images of the shrine; you clicked through them, holding the flimsy yokey up to the light. And so many sticks of rock. You could have built a whole other shrine out of sticks of rock.

Maureen’s Holy Stone wouldn’t have looked far out of place. Maybe his grandparents had purchased it. Maybe it was his speeding around this wonderland of faith-based kitsch, jacked up on neon-pink rock and too many bags of Taytos, that advised them of its relevance.

And so supposing the Holy Stone symbolised something to Maureen. Repentance. Humility. New beginnings. Supposing smashing it off the skull of an intruder set her back forty years. How much healing did a fallen woman require, if she had the whole of Ireland’s fucked up psyche weighing her down to purgatory?

Evening was drawing in and there was a corpse drawing flies back in the flat, and no one yet nominated to move it.

He stopped at a Centra and bought himself a sausage sandwich and a coffee, and sat in his car to eat and think.

It felt wrong to be hiding from Dougan the source of a problem the man would have to fix. Jimmy wasn’t used to this kind of isolation. His mother — the woman he tentatively thought of as his mother, as a rickety leg-up to understanding the blood that ran in his veins — had fucked up, and for once in his life, Jimmy felt a weak spot.

He was mulling this over when he spotted someone, ten feet away from his car. The figure was vaguely familiar. A dark, tousled head bent over an outstretched palm, opposite fingers picking through coins as one would for a parking meter. Thickset running thin, in a navy hoodie and blue jeans that had both been through the wash ten-too-many times. Jimmy balled up the sandwich wrapper, stuck it in his empty coffee cup, and stepped out of the car. Between the bin and his mark, he chanced, ‘Cusack?’

The other looked up. It was him all right. More than a few years older, though Jimmy would have sworn it had been only months since they last spoke.

‘J.P., boy,’ he said, still with his palm out.

‘Cusack. You’re looking well.’

It was a disingenuous greeting but the only alternative was the most brutal honesty. The absolute state a’ yeh, Cusack! If there’s a whore you’ve been visiting, it might be worth sprinkling her with holy water and commanding her back to the fiery depths, because you look like someone’s tapped you for fluids .

The desiccated accepted the salutation with a mournful nod.

‘It’s been a while,’ said Jimmy.

‘I suppose it has.’ His voice was thick. Drunk? It looked more possible than anything else that had demanded his analysis today.

Back when Jimmy was in Iron Maiden T-shirts, Tony Cusack had been the useful kind of scamp, eager to prove he could hang around with the big boys by virtue of his keen eye and malleable morals. He’d been Jimmy’s messenger when he was small enough to be fleet, but as he got bigger they’d drink together, or get stoned, and shoot the breeze about easy women and anarchy. When Jimmy was twenty-four, a coagulation of bad luck convinced him to head to London for a while, where he could carry on as before only with a shiny coat of anonymity, and, having fuck all else to do, Cusack had gone with him.

London had been good to Jimmy. It had given him cause to aim high. London had been good too to Tony, in its own way. He’d met a beour, impregnated her and brought her home with him, instead of staying put where the sun was shining.

His path had seldom crossed Jimmy’s since. Christmases, here and there, they’d spotted each other in pubs. Jimmy had been known to send over a drink, but he’d taken care not to be too inviting. The charming laziness that had once defined Tony Cusack had morphed into dusty apathy; as a thirtysomething he was clumsy and morose, taxidermy reanimated. It was no secret that Cusack had pissed away what good London had given him. Even while his wife — had he even married her? — had been around, he had been steadily eroding his liver and the goodwill of every vintner in the city.

There wasn’t much Jimmy didn’t know about the city’s vintners. Or its moneylenders, or dealers, or bookies. Cusack didn’t have a reputation, as such, for that would be assuming that people bothered thinking about him, but if his demeanour didn’t warn off investors then there were plenty of people able to cure their myopia.

Jimmy Phelan had a reputation. Tony Cusack had more of a stench. Forlorn and forgotten, cast out…

Perversely, that made him a good man for secrets, for who’d believe him if he talked? Who’d even listen to him?

‘Are you busy? Jimmy asked, though he’d already anticipated the answer, and had already settled on the bribe.

Cusack wasn’t busy. He wasn’t a man used to being busy, and took the detour as a short holiday from whatever freeform tedium was routine to him. Jimmy gave him the bones of the brief — frightened woman, dead burglar, no suitable hands to complete the deed — and Cusack flinched, and puffed out his cheeks as if he was considering bolting, but Jimmy was OK with that. Fear was a quality he looked for in part-timers, though it was strange to encourage that attribute in a man he might once have called his friend, back, way back, when Jimmy had neither mother nor need for one.