Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

‘What the fuck does that mean?’

It meant that she’d taken the form of a little Magdalene, with a bellyful of sins. The trickster God had directed her exactly where she needed to be. She came into the brothel, and she was right at home and in great misery because of it. Maureen had at first been taken by her mangling of the gospels and she’d invited her past the threshold for larks. Then she was charmed by the stench of the girl’s past. It had been pushed beyond doubt when Maureen had mentioned her son the brothel keeper and the fallen angel had stood as if to bolt.

‘Why the fuck would you tell her such a thing, Maureen? Jesus, are you in the habit of telling all your visitors that I’m so fucking specific a disappointment?’

That wasn’t all Maureen had told her. The Magdalene had started to cry out the truth. She hadn’t wanted to cross the threshold because she’d been a whore in that very building. She’d been plucked from grace by Maureen’s bastard son. Maureen had invited her to retread the shadows and the girl had reluctantly complied. On the way up the stairs she’d met the ghost. He whispered in her ear and suddenly she was all-knowing. ‘Robbie O’Donovan was here!’ she exclaimed. ‘Ah, it’s true,’ said Maureen. ‘He died here.’ And the Magdalene had flown out the door, wings latched on to her by a truth bigger than either of them.

‘Jesus Christ,’ said Jimmy. He paced the floor of the kitchen and stabbed the air above his head. ‘You mean you told the whore O’Donovan was dead? Jesus Christ, Maureen. Why didn’t you take a stroll down to the sty and tell the Law you’d knocked some junkie’s block off while you were at it?’

Maureen said, ‘I’m not a fool, you know.’

‘Oh, you’re not, naw. Jesus, Maureen. I thought Cusack telling you the name of the corpse was a slip-up I could forgive but you soaked it up only to spit it out. Who else have you confessed your sins to?’

‘I hope you’re not going to barney with that nice Cusack man, Jimmy.’

‘I’ll rip his spine out his arse is what I’ll do!’

‘You probably wouldn’t have known them, but he’s John and Noreen’s boy. She’s a thundering bitch and he’s a drunk but I wouldn’t deprive either of them of their only son. That can do terrible things to a person.’

‘You think,’ said Jimmy, ‘you can punt at me all sly-like, but you don’t have room to swing from, not this time. Have you told anyone else?’

Maureen said, ‘Indeed I have not.’

‘Don’t you understand what would happen? Not only would you be carted off to the loony bin, but I’d be done for disposing of your rubbish and my whole life here, Maureen, this whole fucking city, runs on a cowboy’s foundation. I’d be ruined.’

‘Do you not think it’d be time for you?’

Jimmy stopped pacing. He welded his fingers round the corner of the breakfast bar.

‘Do you think’, said Maureen, ‘it was wrong of you to bring me home?’

‘Was it a mistake, you mean? Clearly it fucking was.’

‘Not just a mistake, Jimmy. Wrong. A boundary broken. An action taken that you can never claw back from.’

‘To take you home from London…’

‘What’s home, though?’

‘This is home, Maureen. This is your city. To take you home again was the least I could do and I waited forty years to do it.’

‘But who said I wanted to come home?’

‘Isn’t that how we sort anything out, Maureen? We come home?’

Maureen smiled. ‘What have I to sort out, Jimmy? Whether I die here or there makes no odds to me. You brought me home because you thought it’d make you feel better.’

‘I brought you home because I thought it’d be one right in a history of wrongs.’

He leaned against the breakfast bar and his head lolled forwards. He sighed. Maureen studied his shape cut rough from the air. He was broad, grown-up James. There was nothing of Dominic Looney to him. He was instead the spit of her own father, in his bullish weight and the grey stubble creeping over the folds on the back of his neck… grey to pink in a strange soft frailty, like his baby head as she held him to her breast.

See how the world turns?

‘What do I do with you, Maureen?’

It amazed her that he was talking at all. He’d popped out sticky and cribbing, and in the next instant he was a giant in a leather jacket with his very own lifetime of words learned. She picked up a cardigan from the back of the dining chair and pulled it over her shoulders. From the back window she said, ‘I don’t want you to hurt the girl. It’s my fault. I told her.’

‘I know it’s your fault. That’s another cross for you to bear, you and your massive trap.’

‘Would you do that to me, Jimmy?’

‘I owe you nothing,’ he said, ‘except my existence, but if I was missing that I wouldn’t know it. You don’t get a say, Maureen. All you did was squeeze me out.’

‘A life for a life,’ she said. ‘All she did was listen.’

‘See how the world turns?’ Maureen said to Georgie later that same evening. ‘All you wanted was your religious die-dee back. And now you owe Jimmy your life simply because he could be convinced not to take it from you.’

Georgie was still sitting in the middle of the floor. She had a fine purple blotch rising on her cheek and eyes swollen pink. Maureen had given her the cardigan and a blanket but she was still quaking like a bowl of jelly. Her hair matted down her back.

‘Would you like a hairbrush?’ Maureen offered.

The girl gulped.

‘You can calm down,’ said Maureen. ‘He’s not going to kill you. I told him not to and you know, I’m his mother.’

Georgie said, ‘I didn’t mean to frighten you.’

‘Frighten me? It’d take something a bit bigger and bolder to bother me, girl.’

‘I just wanted to know what had happened to Robbie.’

‘You wanted your wee scapular back, sure.’

Maureen crossed the floor and sat facing Georgie, and leaned out and grasped her ankle, gave it a little shake.

‘Why would a whore care about the Church?’

‘It was my mother’s…’

‘Ah for feck’s sake altogether. Another religious mother. You’d have to ask yourself what’s wrong with this country at all that it can’t stop birthing virtuous ould bags. And what would your mammy say, Miss Georgie, if she knew you’d done your time here?’

‘I haven’t seen her in years.’

‘How many years?’

‘Almost ten.’

‘Almost ten? Sure if you landed home now it’d be like you’d never been away. The Holy Ghost would have carted you back again. She could take a rest on the novenas. I didn’t see Jimmy for two decades before I came back to this hole. Can you imagine that? I came home one Christmas when he was twenty and he bought me a brandy. The next time I saw him he was forty and the size of a small shed.’

Georgie squeaked, brushed tears from her cheeks and wiped her hands on her dress. ‘Why didn’t you see him in twenty years?’ she asked. ‘What happened?’

Maureen paused. The bleached room provided nothing in the way of prop or inspiration, and it was such a massive story, a story too big for four walls.

‘We’ll go for a walk,’ she said. ‘I have something I could do with showing you.’

‘There were girls I knew in London,’ Maureen said. ‘Girls like yourself. Strumpets with scarlet smiles.’

They were walking the night streets past students on the tear, eighteen-year-olds laughing in drainpipe jeans and wispy beards, crying revolution from phone screens, through bottles of beer. Dominic Looney could well have been among them, in his beads, his head full of mutiny and lust. Fashion came round in cycles. Shitehawks, she guessed, stayed the same.