Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

The road was bordered with brambles. She pushed into the hedgerow and dragged her arm along the thorns, and after seven miles of penance she found a bus stop and sat on the other side of the wall propping it up until morning.

Was there a more miserable month than February? Was there a less welcoming time to return to the streets?

Once off the bus at Parnell Place, Georgie realised she had nowhere to go. Her escape had been fuelled on the assumption that some way would open up as soon as she arrived, but she left the bag on the ground by her feet, bunched her hair behind her head, looked out over the Lee and that was as much as she got.

She had accumulated enough to rent a cheap hotel room. The receptionist directed her to the nearest Internet cafe, which was full of Spanish students attempting to stave off the damp by flailing loudly at one another from computers placed inconvenient yards apart. Georgie searched for one-bedroom flats and calculated deposits.

She got a takeaway for dinner and felt sick afterwards. In her hotel room, she fought a losing battle with the air conditioning and made herself a cup of instant coffee that twitched in her veins for an hour afterwards.

At eight thirty she got a phone call.

‘William said you’d run off.’

It was David. He was peevish.

‘I’m back in the city,’ Georgie said. ‘I’m going to get my life together and I’m going to come for Harmony then.’

‘You’re going to get your life together with what, Georgie?’

‘Something more concrete than prayer.’

‘Yeah? Well, if you think you can battle with me using ill-gotten gains, you’re mistaken.’

‘Ill-gotten gains? What the hell are you talking about, David?’

‘You know what I’m talking about.’

Quivering with the effort of indirect accusation, he berated her for vague intent as she sat on the hotel bed and cried.

‘I never said I was going back to that, David. I’ve moved on. I’m only sorry that William Tobin didn’t have the decency to see that and keep his stupid hippy mouth shut.’

‘See, that’s what’s poisonous about you, Georgie. After all he did for you, you’re insulting him. If it wasn’t for William Tobin you’d probably be dead in a ditch somewhere.’

‘If it wasn’t for William Tobin I wouldn’t have met you, you mean.’

‘If you cared about Harmony you’d never have said that.’

‘I meant it for you! You think it would have been best if you’d never met me. Your parents think it!’

‘I accept my trials,’ he said.

‘You’re turning into one of Them, David. Is that how you’re going to raise my daughter? As a judgemental little prig?’

‘Something tells me you won’t be around to find out.’

She paid for two nights in the hotel and for two nights she lay awake and fancied ways out of the rut. One time she was passing out CVs and getting called for interviews. In the next vision she was awarded an emergency payment from the social welfare, enough to put down a deposit on a flat. Each dream slid with the encroaching midnight stupor into stark prophesies of straddling punters in the back seats of their cars, and Robbie O’Donovan was a shroud over it all.

She had tried to put his insinuated demise out of her head, she really had. It was difficult to draw up murder mysteries in the last trimester, and after that she’d been distracted, wholly, by David’s invasion and conquest. Robbie’s ghost hadn’t followed her down to the West Cork lakeside. Now she was back in the city and his memory jabbed at her.

She left the hotel on the third morning.

Her sums were sound and they told her that if she chose another night in a rented bed she’d be cutting her newfound sovereignty short. She had no wish to rush back to William and Clover’s awkward embrace and, really, what were the odds they’d even want her to? She’d burnt bridges in dashing off under moonlight. In the daytime this shore was inhospitable, but she was stuck here.

What she was about to do frightened her. She walked through the mist, the knapsack dragging on her shoulders and her dress hanging limp, and considered running away blindly, or going to the Gardaí with her hazy lead or even jumping off a bridge and into the river, where the water might make a balloon from her skirt and take her out to sea. Her feet pushed her forward. From the mist before her loomed the footbridge. She walked over it, tracing her fingers against the steel, and stopped halfway to stare downriver at the choking white and the city that rose from the murk in blocks and sharp angles. She could clamber onto the parapet and no one would see her. She could flutter below and no one would stop her. It was a fine day for drowning and a fine bridge for jumping from.

What rest would Robbie have then, if the only one around to remember him dashed instead to meet him?

Across the bridge, she stood at the door to the old brothel and raised her hand.

A beat, a deep breath, and she rapped on the door.

She had felt the same fluttering terror when she’d knocked at the man Tony’s door, back before Harmony, when she was closer to a whole person. What an experience that had been. Anger and accusation welded together in punch-drunk avowal and a stern direction to take complaints to the liar Duane. And then for her little dealer to arrive down the stairs and act as buffer between the noxious allegation and his father’s declarations! It might well have proved the weirdest day of Georgie’s life, if she’d followed the lead back to Tara Duane’s front door and demanded an explanation. As it was she got out of there and hurried back to William and Clover, flushed at having fallen for Duane’s ploy and equally so at disturbing her dealer in his own home and seeing how young he really was. There with a daddy and baby pictures on the mantelpiece and toys scattered on the living-room floor. Domesticity wrapped around a boy she’d done lines with in the middle of the day.

There was no answer now from the old brothel door. She breathed.

She stood back and watched the windows, and on getting no glimpse of life walked around and tried the back gate. It was locked, but there was a foothold on the brickwork beside it, and the lakeside air had made her agile. She climbed.

There were plenty of bits in the back yard to assist her return to the top of the wall: builders’ rubbish in the process of being reclaimed by the ivy, a wheelie bin on the other side of the gate. She was about to drop down to check the back door when she noticed a toplight left open on a first-floor window.

No doubt she could be seen, easily too, if anyone were to take this moment to gaze out of their bedroom window. She reminded herself that no burglar went around wearing maxi dresses. She’d look more like a granddaughter attempting to help out after the doddering dear left her keys on the dresser. She padded along the top of the wall and reached the window, grabbed the toplight and hauled herself onto the sill. The room had no curtains, and it was as bare now as it had been the day she’d been told of the ghost.

She lifted the skirt of her dress, tucked it around her legs, kneeled on the sill holding on to the toplight and reached inside to open the casement.

Maureen still lived here. The downstairs apartment was warm and messy; she had gone out, and Georgie estimated it wouldn’t be for very long. She went to the top floor and to the sill on which she’d spotted Robbie’s name. The writing implements were gone, the pages missing. The rooms on the two upper floors were completely bare.

She returned to the ground-floor apartment. There was a bedroom at the front of the house, and she stood in its doorway and thought about ransacking it for a slip of paper that was likely scrapped or burned. It might have been the dregs of Christian charity clinging to sinner skin or the fact that Georgie felt deeply stupid considering looting an older woman’s nest, but she knew she wouldn’t be tearing the place asunder. She looked into the bathroom, in case she’d find a horror message written in steam on the mirror, and then in the kitchen, where she drummed her nails on the breakfast bar.