Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

‘You don’t have the money to take this to a courtroom. You’ll drag it out, you’ll hurt everyone, and you know you’ll fail well before the end. So let’s be sensible and settle this now. For God’s sake, isn’t that the only thing we can do?’

Georgie was sitting on the couch in the living room of the CAIL centre. Flanking her, William and Clover Tobin. Across from her, elbows on his knees and staring at the floor, was David. His mother, a glacial thing in a thin cardigan, sat on the armrest of his chair, rubbing his back. Opposite and to Georgie’s left sat David’s father, Patrick Coughlan, CEO-turned-cultist. He had plump jowls so clean-shaven they seemed artificial. He looked like a melted bucket.

In Georgie’s arms slept Harmony Faye Fitzsimons. Born on a Monday afternoon with a student midwife holding her mother’s hand in her father’s stead, she was, as all babies were, perfect. Her primitive demands invoked something similarly primal in her mother, but Georgie was careful not to indulge instinct. Though Clover said that Harmony should be breastfed and allowed to share the bed with her mother, Georgie chose bottles and a Moses basket. It had been ages since Georgie had done cocaine or touched a drop; being with child had proved a better deterrent than being with Christians. Still, the notion that she was contaminated by her past was a tough one to get shot of. Harmony was too beautiful to risk blemishing.

Patrick Coughlan sighed.

‘This isn’t how we wanted things to go either,’ he said.

‘How did you want things to go?’ asked Georgie. ‘Did you hope David would find a paragon of virtue so tolerant she wouldn’t be turned off by his drugging and gambling?’

‘Well, I tell you what we didn’t want. Him to impregnate an addict when he was supposed to be tackling his own demons.’

William delivered a wobbly interjection. ‘Is this going to resolve anything? This mud-flinging? This is a place of mercy.’

‘It’s a place of bloody vice!’ snapped Coughlan. ‘I’d hoped your adherence to the gospel would be enough to direct David, and look what happens! This woman is a damned vagrant. How did you even accept such a person? I sent David to you, William, because I thought he would be protected. And instead you fed his weaknesses.’

‘All we can do is ask for your forgiveness,’ said William.

Georgie shifted the weight in her arms and leaned forwards. She’d cried all her tears, and was left with a dull headache and stained cheeks.

David kept his eyes on the floor. He had spoken only to confirm his father’s assertion that this takeover was his wish. They were at the centre because they wanted to take Harmony with them, and their logic was watertight.

William and Clover were anxious about the idea of raising a child on their land. They explained that they couldn’t provide structure but were too spineless to admit the fear that Georgie would drag them into ignominy with her once again. In David’s bid for custody he had complained how Georgie introduced him to cocaine, which she’d procured and brought to the centre under pretext of conversion during a city break. William and Clover were upset, but more again, they were frightened. Their lakeside retreat had crumbled into a mess of responsibility and risk. Their notion of bringing the world together under the Jesus banner hinted now at effort without recompense, and they hated it.

‘It’s clearly in the baby’s best interests to be with her father,’ Coughlan said. ‘We can support him. She’ll be safe with us. What has she otherwise?’

‘She has her mother,’ Georgie said.

‘A “mother”. Why do women think that word alone is enough? Why should my granddaughter suffer while her “mother” gets her act together? Grand, you’re clean, whatever. That’s no guarantee that you won’t relapse.’

‘David could relapse just as fast!’

‘If he does, he has his family there to stick him back on the straight and narrow. If you relapse, who’s here for you?’

‘I’m not alone down here.’

William sighed and sat forward off his wife’s silence.

‘We’re not set up for looking after a baby,’ he said. ‘I’m sixty-two, Georgie.’

‘You wouldn’t have to look after her,’ Georgie cried. ‘I’m just saying it’s not as if I don’t have support. You know. For if things… If things don’t…’ She stood and turned to face William. He looked away. ‘Things will be fine, actually,’ said Georgie. ‘Why wouldn’t they be?’

‘We can’t support you both, Georgie,’ said Clover.

‘I’m not asking for charity.’

Coughlan said, ‘Then what are you going to do, ha? Move out? Get a job? Go to college?’

‘Other women manage. I’m not the only single mother on the planet. I’ve been fine up to now, haven’t I? I never starved.’

William said, ‘Georgie, the state you were in when I found you, how much worse would that have been if you’d had a baby at home?’

Harmony Faye pursed her lips. Georgie crooked her first finger and stroked her cheek and the little mouth opened.

‘I didn’t though,’ said Georgie. ‘Did I? I was looking after myself.’

‘And you were failing.’

‘I’ve grown up since.’

‘Have you?’ asked William. ‘Look, Georgie, I know your heart’s in the right place—’

‘I thought that was enough? Belief and good nature and all that shit, am I right?’

‘For God’s sake this isn’t a game, Georgie. You were a prostitute! You could have been killed and you didn’t care!’

Forced to listen to her saviour’s well-intentioned treachery as the faces around them turned white, Georgie fixed her gaze on her daughter, her perfect face, the even features yet to display allegiance to one parent or another. There was nothing she could say. William stammered and David’s mother gasped.

Georgie had not yet been saved. The baby had to be given up. David looked up at last with round eyes and lips pulled back. Georgie managed a tear. It slid down her face and hung on her jawline; when she cuddled Harmony the tear fell and landed on her cheek.

She tried for a while, chasing salvation in hard work, except it was hard work in rounds and circles, and it never got her anywhere. She arranged a cut of the profits from the farmers’ markets in return for her tending shoots and weeding, so that she could put some money away for a training course. But what was she left with, only pennies? William told her not to worry about funds while she was at CAIL; her leaving was no longer a priority, now that the baby was safely away.

David had left her an address and phone number. Whenever she called he would run through Harmony’s development as if he kept milestones noted on a pad by the phone. Should she wish, at any stage, to acknowledge his selfless hard work he was available for praise and appreciation. Should she wish to revisit their arrangement, he warned, she would have to get herself a house, a job and a lawyer.

William and Clover and her fellow spiritual halfmen continued as normal. They got as far as pitying Georgie, for pity was easy enough.

‘I don’t know how you could have done that to me,’ Georgie bawled to William, after the community indicated they’d wring their hands for her behind turned backs.

‘You forced my hand, Georgie. What else could I do?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. What would Jesus have done?’

‘The very same thing,’ William frowned. ‘You’ll see that someday.’

Georgie left CAIL nine months after they’d given her daughter away.

‘Left’, like it was some proud stand? No. ‘Stole away’, months later, like it was a last resort. She went through her stuff in the witching hour and plucked out what remained of her old life, which was sweet fuck all after William had tried shaming the devil out of her wardrobe. She stuffed her world into a stolen knapsack and slipped out the back door, clambered over the fence at the back of the vegetable gardens, and tripped through wet grass in the black night until she had room to skirt around and come back to the road. From there she trudged, the bottom of her dress wringing, a deserter from Christ’s army.