Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

Georgie stared at the ground. Maureen felt her fear as keenly as the chill. She guessed the girl would stay docile through dread of vengeance, as if Maureen might turn around and snap her neck on bad-blood whim, and it irked her. She needed engagement for the lesson to work.

Ah, but could she blame her? The girl was a shell. The only thing left in her was fear.

‘I’m not judging you,’ Maureen said. ‘I know what made you.’

A laughing girl reeled round the corner and straight into Georgie. They both stumbled. The girl apologised. Her friends, following thick, shrieked in glee. The girl tottered on, bellowing her mortification to her posse. Did you see her face , one of them gasped.

‘Most of them,’ Maureen said, as one of the girls, yards away now, lurched on her heels and grabbed the arm of the dolly next to her, ‘most of them got out of the game, but only one I remember did so intact. The rest of them were hags after their stint. They trusted no one. They drank like sluts. They beat their children.’

‘I’d have made a good mother,’ Georgie said, but there was no conviction behind the proclamation.

‘Well you might have,’ Maureen said. ‘And I hope you get to find out. Me, it’s not like I could have done a worse job, so they should have let me try. Look at the state of him!’

‘Where are we going?’

Maureen clucked. ‘I told you. I need to show you something.’

‘I can’t face him again tonight.’

‘Who? Jimmy? I’m not taking you back to Jimmy. Or back to anywhere. I’m taking you forward. Lookit.’

They turned the corner to face the church, and Maureen flicked a thumb at it and pressed forward locked arm in arm with her fellow pilgrim.

‘You’re taking me to Mass?’

‘Mass? I am not.’

The church was hewn from rock and the city around it built from twigs. Maureen brought Georgie along the side of the building. Above them stained-glass windows dripped dark and the hush of consecrated ground heavied their steps and made prowlers of the pair of them.

‘I’ve always hated these places,’ said Maureen.

They went round the back of the church to the priest’s house, a two-storey block for a celibate man and his ghosts. Maureen didn’t approve. She had never approved. She had never understood, as a child, why the priest had a bigger house than she did. Surely Holy Intangible God left room enough to walk around?

She and her brothers and sisters often played in the grounds of churches after Masses, celebrations, funerals, the litany of a faithful life. You could stretch your legs as the adults congratulated or commiserated or condemned, but every so often you’d run round the corner and get collared by the holy man white-lipped with rage over your impudence. It seemed a shame to grant such a pretty garden to the whims of a miserable old goat. It seemed a shame to tend such a pretty garden in the shadow of a grim theatre. There were always tidy lawns, flower beds, maybe even a grotto if you were lucky. It was the one green spot she’d never seen the tinkers graze their horses.

Now she brought Georgie to the shrubbery which looked onto the priest’s side door. Georgie murmured protest but Maureen shushed her, and tucked her between plants with confident hands. Georgie was confused. In the weak orange light from the side door, she seemed ready, again, to cry.

‘See the cars?’ Maureen pointed.

‘Yeah…’

‘There are people meeting with the priest. Every night. They’re always working, the priests.’

‘What kind of people?’

Maureen studied her.

‘Boys and girls getting married. Mammies getting Mass cards. Daddies looking for validation. Just the flock.’

‘Why are we here? I don’t get it.’

Maureen crouched and turned. Behind her, Georgie’s eyes, downcast, searched the dirt for sense. She wouldn’t find it there, but it wasn’t a bad start. Born of dust and raised in stony soil, wasn’t that it? The girls had no more changed than the beaded boys, one enabling the other.

‘It was a wheyface by the name of Dominic Looney that led me into sin and left me there,’ Maureen said. ‘I had Jimmy when I was nineteen. My parents wouldn’t let me keep him. It was far too shameful, you see. Those were the days. I lived in England and he grew up here. I worked in offices for a while, but I could no more hold a job than a hot poker. Did a bit of housekeeping. Worked in kitchens. Drank in the clubs with the rest of the Irish, made a few friends and stepped out with a few fellas but I wouldn’t settle down. Couldn’t, I think sometimes. What was the point? How do you build a life from bones? I only came home when Jimmy got the whim to bring me. There’s too much passed now for us to be anything but strangers. That’s why I know what’s bothering you, and you having lost your little baby.’

Georgie let out a sob. She left her hands on the dirt to steady herself.

‘Your Robbie O’Donovan,’ Maureen said, soft as the light from the door, ‘wasn’t meant to die. It was an accident.’

‘He meant something, you know. He might not have looked it but he did. And you had no right… You had no right to take him and no right to hide him then.’

‘I know that,’ said Maureen.

‘What did you do with him?’

‘Because it was an accident, Jimmy made it go away. And so Robbie’s body was taken from the brothel floor, but there’s the rest of him still there. I guess I’m stuck with him. You don’t believe in ghosts, do you?’

Georgie said nothing.

‘I wouldn’t blame you,’ Maureen said. ‘I wouldn’t believe in them but they’ve been following me around all my life. He came for your mother’s scapular, wasn’t that it? What if I told you you’re not all that different to your mother?’

‘What, because we’re standing in a shrubbery outside a church? Is that going to cleanse me, is it?’

Maureen said, ‘Do you like being a prostitute?’

Georgie stiffened. A flash of umbrage crossed her broken face, just a flash, but enough for Maureen to grasp.

‘Do you think I’d do it if I didn’t have to?’ Georgie said. ‘Do you think anyone would?’

‘So why do girls do it?’

‘Money.’

‘They’re fond of money?’

‘They need money.’

‘Exactly. They’re in need of something and so they’ll fold up under a spoiled man to stay alive, isn’t that it?’

Georgie dabbed her eyes with the inside of her wrist.

‘So they divide up the women into categories,’ said Maureen. ‘The mammies. The bitches. The wives. The girlfriends. The whores. Women are all for it too, so long as they fall into the right class. They all look down on the whores. There but for the grace of God.’

‘God had nothing to do with it.’

‘The point is there’s a class of women put aside for the basest of man’s instincts. That’s your type and by Jesus you better play to it.’

‘All men? Are they all like that?’

‘Ha! They’re divided up just as neatly, didn’t you know? Saints and sinners. Masters and slaves. The good guys and the bad guys. Like my Jimmy. Hasn’t he a role too? No one gets to the top if he hasn’t a mound of bodies to climb.’

‘What’s that got to do with my mother?’

‘She’s religious, isn’t she? They don’t sell scapulars in Tesco.’

‘Yeah…’

‘She’s on her knees for the higher power. The Church craves power above all things, power above all of the living. The Church has an ideal and it’ll raze all in its way to achieve it. The Church needs its blind devout. Your mother, my mother, the people in there plumping Father Fiddler’s ego, they’re all for it. They’ve been given a class and they’re clutching it. The Church creates its sinners so it has something to save. Your mother’s a Magdalene for her Christ.’