Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

As contrite as Tony was there was history in his fists and a thirst on him that couldn’t be quelled by God or son. Peter Griffin had straddled that cartoon boy and knocked a string of pucks into his jaw; that’s the position you needed to be in to be broken, prone on the floor while a row of knuckles knocked red-flecked spit out of the side of your mouth and onto the carpet beside you. Prone again while the screws barged into your cell for your own fucking good, took an arm each and dragged when the enforced crouch failed your legs, three of them, big fucking men weren’t they, cutting every stitch off you if you so much as kicked out, and sure why wouldn’t you? Of course you’d kick out, for fuck’s sake, mechanically if anything, out of fear and shame and what pride you had left.

Who didn’t like a good fight now and again? Who didn’t like to stretch their muscles and throw their body into the fray? It made you feel alive, wasn’t that it? Ah, just the job. Go beat up some young mammy somewhere because you could do with the exercise and after all, she owes you a few bob.

You had to get off on it. They all got off on it. That’s why your shelves were full of Call of Duty games and box sets of The Sopranos . That’s why you could crowd around picking out your favourite bits from Family Guy , because you hadn’t been fucked irrevocably by shit that isn’t even supposed to upset you.

Karine was at home finishing an essay. He was of the conviction that she could have finished her essay just as easily in his gaff, but he’d let it slide. She had stayed with him nearly every other night this week, and they were making up for lost time. He couldn’t get enough of her. Shoulders, breasts, navel, cunt. Everything else too: laugh, smile, voice, breath. Funny thing then that he hadn’t yet given it to her hard. When they’d done it in the past couple of weeks it had been slow and gentle. He’d wanted to savour it, fuck her like a princess should be fucked. Now he worried that his laziness had been born of anxiety, not generosity.

The spark of a brief connection was enough to freak him out. He grabbed his laptop, opened PornHub, and went for everything on the front page: threesomes, cumshots, gangbangs, anal, whatever. The fellas had donkey dicks and dead eyes; the girls glared. Any other day there would have been a ton of shit he would have gotten into, and here he was after nine months of celibacy with barely a semi for the lot of them. Every pounded ass, every rough hand grasping blonde extensions, every ‘bitch’ and ‘whore’ was a weight on his chest. He opened his jeans and coaxed a hard-on but he couldn’t come, didn’t know why either, except that everything looked like humiliation, everything looked like plunder.

In the end he snapped the laptop shut and lay staring at the ceiling. How he managed to start crying with his dick still in his hand he didn’t know, but there you go.

This was only the start of it.

He felt a lot better in the morning. Miles better. Fucktons. Dan phoned and told him to come over for a slice of a delivery. The coke had been cut and divided into grams, and Dan was generous with a payment plan. ‘Get shot of it and pay me then,’ he said. ‘No rush. Don’t I know you’re good for it?’

That evening he and Karine went down to the local, The Relic, which was, converse to its name, one of the lively pubs his dad chose not to frequent. She, eighteen since November, went in ahead of him, so by the time he reached the table she’d procured him a pint and herself a vodka and Coke.

‘Told you you’d come in handy one day,’ he said, and she replied with tart grace, ‘Fuck off.’

It was Friday night and he was two weeks out of St Pat’s. Karine was all dolled up in a white dress and towering sequinned heels, smoky eyes, pale pink lips. Tresses of her hair, styled into loose curls, fell over her shoulders; he teased one around his first finger and said, ‘You look so fucking hot.’

‘I know that.’

‘Grand so. How do I look?’

‘Tall! When did you get so tall, like? I’m wearing five-inch heels and you’re still all the ways up there.’

‘I’m five eleven, Karine, not the BF fucking G.’

‘You couldn’t be,’ she mused. ‘Coz I’m five five.’

‘You are in your shit five five.’

‘My mam’s five five and I’m the height of my mam.’

‘Your mam’s a munchkin.’

‘Yeah well at least I have a mam.’

He choked on his pint, swallowed, coughed, wiped his mouth and then his eyes.

‘You’re some bitch, D’Arcy.’

She bit down on her smile and when he’d recovered she rested her head on his chest; he put an arm around her and kissed her forehead, and she said, ‘I can hear your heart.’

‘How’s it sound?’

‘Steady.’

The plan was to have Joseph and his sometime band meet them in a couple of hours, do some shots, neck some pills, and go into town to meet Karine’s posse. For the time being they shared a stillness. The staff played R&B over the PA system for a sparse crowd too sober to sway. Karine sat up and stretched, and checked his shirt for the powdered residue of her affection.

He thought about asking her to set aside her plans for the night and head back to bed with him, though he knew what the answer would be. Being allowed into nightclubs was a novelty to her, three months legal and only out of school. He felt a twinge for the partying he’d already missed.

‘Karine?’

‘What?’ She was playing with her curls, fluffing them carefully before letting them tumble through her fingers.

‘Can I tell you something?’

‘Only if it follows “You’re amazing and I love you.”’

Pfft . ‘Obviously.’

‘Go on so.’

‘When you’re inside,’ he said, ‘you feel like your life is over. Like even though you know you’re only doing so many months or whatever, it stretches out beyond all logic, and you’re so smothered by all that you forget what’s going on outside. And I missed stuff for you, y’know? Birthday and Christmas and your Leaving and your Debs. I’ve been an asshole. I know it, like. I’ll make it up to you.’

She touched his arm. ‘Ryan…’

‘Y’know, Dan thanked me for it. Doing the time for him. But while I was doing time for Dan you were out here waiting for me and I reckon that deserves thanks too.’

‘That’s just silly,’ she said. ‘Let’s just get on with living, like. Gimme a tenner; I’ll get a couple more drinks.’

He watched her walk to the bar on her killer heels and let his eyes travel from her calves to her thighs and then over the curve of her arse, running into the small of her back… The same way, he thought with a turn, that he’d been looking at the girl in the restaurant, except this time it was right that he wanted to slide his hands between her legs, push out her thighs.

He wasn’t the only one. At the bar, a fella walking past grabbed a handful of her arse, and she started and yelped. The guy put his arm around her waist and that was as much as Ryan saw before he landed over beside them, going, ‘Ah, what the fuck?’

It was a fella they’d gone to school with, a bloke Ryan had barely seen since. Niall Something. Coen? Vaughan. One of the hurlers. One of the sort that was never found hiding behind the fence at the back of the pitch, so stoned he could barely stand up.

‘Fuck me,’ said Niall Vaughan. ‘Is that Ryan Cusack?’

‘Is that my girlfriend’s arse in your hand?’

‘When did they let you out?’ Vaughan asked.

‘Fuck off and mind your own business.’

‘Everyone was talking about it, is all. Y’know, you look at your Leaving Cert class and you remember who’s missing and why.’