Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

What now, after engaging in some light breaking and entering for the memory of a missing swain?

Georgie pulled out the kitchen drawers. In the first, cutlery, string, scissors, candles, all in a heap. In the second, tea towels and a roll of kitchen paper.

In the third, a tangle of relics.

A couple of pens, a couple of notebooks with faded names on the pages. The old phone from the desk upstairs. A necklace. A foundation compact. Two lipsticks. An old business card, blank except for a mobile number and a busty silhouette. A scapular.

Georgie closed her fingers around the brown cloth. A lipstick, wound in its bands, dropped back into the drawer as she lifted it; she bunched the scapular in her fist, shut the drawer, and leaned against the breakfast bar with her hand held against her breastbone.

Robbie O’Donovan. Did you know him? He died here.

Georgie sat upstairs in the middle of the old brothel floor.

On the ground floor, Maureen moved about, clinking cups, rustling newspaper.

Outside, the fog had lifted from the Lee in time for the night to fall down upon it.

Georgie thought, Did he come back for this?

It was contentious in its absurdity, but when she spread it flat it made a kind of sense. She had pinned too much meaning to the scapular. She had complained about its loss. He was useless in almost every conceivable way, Robbie, but it would have been just like him to throw his weight into something as maudlin and pointless as recovering the bloody thing.

He died here.

He’d broken in. He’d arrived in the middle of the night and surprised Maureen, who had only just been installed by her wicked son, and she had called the gangster Phelan and he’d done away with Robbie because frightening his mother was a much bigger crime than stealing away a scrap of cloth.

Such a simple story. Alongside it, Tara Duane’s tip-offs knotted into sinister futility. Knowing that Georgie had misplaced her dud boyfriend she’d taken the opportunity to implicate her neighbour in a crime predicted on an educated guess. Tara Duane had almost certainly seen shit like this before, and she wasn’t the kind of person you could trust with an opportunity. Even alone, Georgie flushed. That she had played her part and upset her dealer’s father for Duane’s smirking benefit was its own ugly burden.

Downstairs, the front door opened and she heard a deep voice call out to its mother’s low answer.

‘Where?’

And then there were footsteps on the stairs.

Georgie didn’t have time to make for the window. On Maureen’s return she had chosen to stay still and wait for the woman’s bedtime; she had nowhere else to go. Logic had intimated that no one would make for the bare rooms above. She had thought herself safe so long as she stayed silent.

Panicked, she slid behind the door, and when it opened it was with such force that the door slammed against her and rebounded on the intruder. She cried out as Jimmy Phelan rounded on her. He caught her arm and dragged her upright, and hit her, with an open palm, so hard it spun her almost out of his grasp.

‘You’re the whore,’ he said. ‘Aren’t you? There I was sending the whole of the city out hunting for you when all I had to do was wait for you to crawl back to me. What a fucking stupid bitch you are.’

His palm came round again and caught her between her jaw and throat. She spluttered and as her knees went from under her Phelan closed his fist around her neck and snarled, ‘You know, I get a hard-on from offing bitch messes and you, my girl, have caused me no end of trouble in the past year.’

Georgie choked and he slapped her again, and Maureen came into the room and said, ‘You’d want to stop that, Jimmy, or you’ll regret it.’

‘Stay the fuck out of this, Maureen.’

‘This house has killed before and it’s generally the stronger of the pairing that gets it. I’m only warning you.’

Georgie was allowed to crumple.

Through tears she saw her subjugators: Phelan, puce, wet-lipped and oh, so massive, taking up the whole middle of the floor, the span from shoulder to shoulder packing muscle and wrath. Beside him stood Maureen, only half his size, cold-eyed and calm. She crouched and plucked the scapular from the floor.

‘I thought you were born again, my dear?’

Phelan pulled a phone from his pocket, but Maureen held her hand over it. ‘Who are you calling?’

‘I’m getting rid of this whore, Maureen.’

‘That’s no way to speak about a woman, especially one that used to make you money.’ She stared down at Georgie and said, ‘She’s only looking for Robbie O’Donovan, aren’t you?’

‘Shut your mouth, Maureen.’

‘You don’t talk to your mother like that either.’

Phelan scoffed. ‘That’s not likely to work on me, girl.’

‘Ah, sure you were brought up by Una Phelan; no wonder you’re the way you are. I’d not be happy to see you hurt this girl, Jimmy.’

‘Your happiness, Maureen, is exactly why she needs to be gotten rid of.’

‘I’ll never be happy again, so.’ To Georgie, she said, ‘You’re not going to say anything, are you? Sure all you want to know is where Robbie O’Donovan went. And if I tell you, you won’t breathe a word, will you?’

‘Maureen, this is not how this is going to go,’ stated Phelan, but his mother shushed him, and said, ‘Of course it is. There’s one dead already because of me and I don’t want that number added to.’

‘She’s going to die,’ said Phelan.

‘She won’t die,’ said Maureen. ‘And she won’t disappear again either. Isn’t that right, Georgie? Haven’t you enough to be worrying about without telling great big secrets?’ And she laid a kindly hand on Georgie’s flat stomach, and smiled.

Oh, he wasn’t an easy man to bargain with, James Dominic Phelan. He took after his stand-in mama in that sense — ignorant as the day was long and stubborn as an ass. Maureen worked a way around him, but only just. One ghost, she explained, was bad enough. Two? She’d never sleep again. Especially if they were thick as thieves. Robbie O’Donovan nodded mournfully from the corner. He didn’t want Georgie’s company.

Jimmy was all, Oh Maureen, Oh Maureen, you don’t understand . The world was an orgy of disquiet once you’d killed someone. Those who might suspect you needed to be controlled. The penalties for lenience were harsh and so lenience was no option.

Era go on outta that , said Maureen. What harm in the sparrow? She was hardly going to tell anyone. She had no influence in Jimmy’s world; what was she, only a pisawn whore? Who would believe her? Was she not an addict and a victim? Did she not have a history of joining cults?

Was she not a mother?

‘Where’s the baby?’ Jimmy asked. The girl cried and said the child was in care.

‘No one’, said Maureen, ‘steps out of line once you’re holding that over them.’ Hadn’t Jimmy been only a baby when she’d been banished? Maureen knew what Georgie would and wouldn’t do, and she wouldn’t be telling tales, no she wouldn’t.

‘If you step out of line,’ Jimmy told the weeping slip, ‘I will kill you. And I’ll take what I’m owed from the child.’

He made sure the windows were jammed tight and left the girl in the room, asked Maureen to join him in the kitchen, stood on Robbie O’Donovan’s ebbing place and snarled, ‘Now, Maureen, d’you want to tell me how that whore knows your ould buddy Robbie is dead?’

Serendipity. Coincidence. Religious intercession.

One day, Maureen told James Dominic Phelan, when she was feeling the presence of Robbie O’Donovan with oh, very particular keenness, a fallen angel came to the door, looking to earn back her wings by paying strident homage to the Good Lord Almighty.