Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

The door opened. Maureen placed a hand on Georgie’s back, willing her still.

A young couple came out into the yard, turned back and shook the priest’s hand. There was laughter. The hall glow spilled onto the steps and cast an amber circle on the ground beneath the disciples and, from the shadows, the Magdalenes watched their heaving backs.

‘Look at him,’ spat Maureen. ‘Look close. Handing out indoctrination, keeping them faithful, keeping them hooked.’

She had hair black as outer space and eyes startling and dark blue. The only thing about her that wasn’t magazine perfect was her long nose, of which she was ashamed, but he loved that too, and the flashes of humility it provoked in front of mirrors; he used to kiss it when he thought he could get away with it.

She was supposed to get a white shirt for work but was too vain for anything functional. Instead she wore one that hugged her waist and barely covered her midriff and had to be held together with safety pins if she didn’t want a button taking anyone’s eye out halfway through her shift. She’d told him to meet her at the cafe. She made him a BLT when he arrived and as he munched she poked at a salad and made faces.

‘I have something to tell you,’ she said.

He thought she was getting shot of him. She said she loved his eyes and his up-and-down accent — ‘Just like the hills at home,’ he told her — but there was only so far you could go on that, and he didn’t have much to offer otherwise. He had been labouring on a site off White Hart Lane but everything he earned he spent on Ecstasy and booze. She was supposed to be putting herself through Goldsmiths but still seemed to be spending the GNP of an island nation on weekend parties and shopping trips. If they made a good couple it was gauged entirely on lack of financial cop on.

The BLT stopped two inches from his mouth.

‘This is such a surprise to me,’ she shrugged.

It was the middle of August and sweltering. London hadn’t slept in days and it showed. Small children poked about in patches of melting tar. Old women slumped on park benches as their Scottish terriers panted beneath the slats. There were two fans going in the cafe with the door wide open. Everyone was sticky and sluggish.

‘You’re surprised why?’ he asked.

Behind them, an enormous man in a wifebeater dropped his teaspoon onto his newspaper and swore.

‘You see,’ she said, ‘it turns out… I… am pregnant.’

The man in the wifebeater hadn’t noticed but Tony Cusack had just been turned inside out.

‘You’re what?’

She shrugged again.

A wasp drifted towards them and he batted it away. It persisted. Tony grabbed a discarded Sun from the table closest the door and crushed the insect against the windowpane. Maria Cattaneo cocked her head and ran her fingers through her hair and when he came back to the table she raised her eyebrows as if to say Your move, bucko .

He looked down at the half-eaten BLT.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘That’s… ah… What d’you want to do about it?’

She raised eyes to heaven. ‘God, you’re romantic,’ she said.

When Tony was eighteen a girl he’d been with said she thought she was pregnant, but it turned out she wasn’t, news so good it knocked his knees from under him because she’d been his first, he’d pulled out and he didn’t really like the beour in the first place. This was different. He was four years older. He was crazy about Maria Cattaneo. He prodded at the toast with studied indifference but in his head there was a brass band and a parade of tumbling cheerleaders.

‘Just making sure you’re OK with it, like,’ he said.

‘I love babies. You’re handsome…’ She made a popping sound with her mouth. ‘… handsome babies.’

‘OK then.’

‘OK.’

‘Have you been to the doctor?’

She nodded. ‘It looks like March. Springtime. Like the lambs.’

He jumped up and leaned across the table and kissed her and the man in the wifebeater said, ‘Steady on, son, I’m trying to eat here.’

Nineteen years later Tony Cusack occupied himself in sluggish reminiscence. There was sunlight snaking through the curtains in his sitting room, showing up a carpet flecked with loose tobacco and cracker crumbs. The hoover was on the blink.

He was out of booze and in no shape to get more; he was logey from the heat and too caught in the kaleidoscope of memories to want to leave the house. The kids had scattered in the sunshine. The small ones were out on the green playing. Cian had headed off in high spirits and would no doubt return trying to hide his drunkenness behind his mobile phone. Kelly had folded up a couple of towels and said she was heading to Myrtleville with her buddies. They had lives, the little Cusacks, more than he’d given them. They left their father sifting through scenes beginning to wilt around the edges.

He’d come back to Cork with a pregnant nineteen-year-old whose desire to isolate herself from her middle-class lineage had spotted her vision. Friends and family alike had asked How in fuck’s name did you get your paws on her? and he couldn’t answer them, because he sure as shit didn’t know.

They lived with his mam and dad for a while and when they got the house they got married and once they got married they started killing each other in earnest and the casualties — oh! the fucking casualties — they were piled high but it was worth every last bruise.

He had proved shit at absolutely everything except giving her beautiful children. She was no different. They both drank. Neither worked with any regularity. They had matching tempers. They lived in a fleapit and fought on the street. But at the end of the day he had six children out of it, six dark-haired, dark-eyed wonders with his blood in their veins and maybe that was enough.

He watched the minutes die on the Sky menu and the thirst spread until he could bear it no more.

He kept his head down in the off-licence, aware, just below the surface of his single-mindedness, that he was one of the idiots who kept the place open seven days a week. He grabbed a six-pack from the display at the back, where they stocked the cheap shit. The shop interior was lit by strip fluorescents and fridges; on display, he blinked and hurried. He made for the till, a tenner bunched damp in his fist.

His name snaked after him.

‘Tony! Tony, stop a sec!’

The sunshine had brought out the slapper in Tara Duane. She was in a yellow bolero and black shorts so small they’d have scarcely made underwear. She’d piled her hair on her head and off her neck. From there down it was all bones. No tits at all. She was a mother and she couldn’t have looked less like one. She’d starved herself back to her teens.

His having holed himself up while his children ran out into the world meant he’d escaped seeing too much of Duane. Occasionally he’d spotted her from the windows. A couple of times they’d narrowly missed each other hanging out clothes in the back garden. She seemed to have lost interest in orchestrating encounters since Ryan had come home only to move straight out again; Tony grasped the correlation, substantiated it and then hoped his logic was faulty. The last time she’d collared him, in the driveway, months ago now, had been to tell him that J.P. had enlisted her to conduct the hunt for the doomed girl. Tara Duane was made an ally without his consent. You’d think that’d be a thing worth challenging. It wasn’t. It was a thing to be accepted and shelved.

Sure what could he do about it? Confront the bastard?

Two days after Maria Cattaneo had changed his life, Tony sat in a pub with Jimmy Phelan. Surrounded by wood panelling and echoing football commentary, he was getting congratulated and smashed with equal aplomb.