Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

‘You couldn’t have done much better for yourself without a hanky soaked in chloroform,’ said Jimmy. ‘Are you going to shack up with her?’

‘I’m going home with her.’

‘Home to Italy? With your pasty Irish arse?’

‘No, boy. Home to Cork.’

‘Home to Cork ? Jesus Christ, Cusack, you’re only just out of it!’

‘My son’s gonna be born in Cork, boy. Wouldn’t be mine otherwise.’

Jimmy laughed. ‘When are you heading, so?’

‘Dunno. A couple of months, probably. It’s early yet.’

‘And have you told your mam?’

‘Eh, I’ll arrive home “for a visit” and I’ll tell her then.’

‘One cute hoor, aren’t you?’ Jimmy beckoned a barmaid and said, ‘A couple more there, love. And a couple shorts too. What’s your best Scotch? This fella here is going to be a daddy in the spring.’

‘Oh wow!’ she said. She was carrying a tower of glasses that reached from her belly to her chin. She shifted its weight and tilted her head round it and smiled. Her eyes were heavily made up and the colours coagulated in the heat. ‘Congratulations!’

Tony smiled back and she gave him an extra shot in his Scotch.

‘It’s a boy so, is it?’ asked Jimmy, his nose in the tumbler.

Tony shrugged. ‘Too early to tell officially, like, but it’s a small fella, of course it is.’

‘What the fuck do you want now?’

Tara Duane was momentarily and lavishly upset. Her eyes swung toward the ceiling. Her jaw dropped. ‘Is that any way to greet your next-door neighbour?’ she gasped.

‘That’s not a connection by choice,’ Tony snapped.

‘You think I like living beside you when every kindness I brought to your door was met with scorn and fury?’

‘I don’t give a fuck what you like or don’t like,’ he said. ‘If that’s why you stopped me, let’s cut this short. I have better things to be doing.’

‘Oh I know you do.’ She gestured. ‘They come in cans.’

He turned away, but there were a couple of young men at the till, holding slabs and pointing at naggins. He was captive.

‘I didn’t stop you just to insult you,’ she said, alongside.

‘Oh, brilliant.’

‘I stopped you because I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. About J.P., and how he’s made pawns of the pair of us, and how we both need to move on.’

‘You think we need fucking counselling?’

She grabbed his arm with a hand that had made shit of his relationship with his son, and he shook her off with an energy reserved for pests he chased around the kitchen to crush between the tiles and the sole of his shoe.

‘Don’t touch me, Duane!’

‘Why not? What do you think you could possibly catch?’

‘It’s not about catching something,’ he said. ‘It’s about not wanting to give you the satisfaction—’

‘What, of laying my hands on a nasty, violent drunk? You have a swollen opinion of yourself, don’t you?’

‘What did you call me?’

‘I know,’ she whispered, ‘that you beat your kids.’

One of the men at the till broke into raucous laughter. Oblivious to the conversation that had winded Tony, he slapped the top of his lager slab.

Tara said, ‘It’s a skit, isn’t it? You’re full sure I had something with Ryan and you go on about it and on about it as if you actually cared about him. When the reality is you beat him. You humiliated him. He used to sit out on the back garden wall in the cold and the dark waiting for you to go to bed so he’d be safe in his own home. You’re obsessed with the idea that I might have slept with him. Why’s that, Tony? Would that make you jealous, Tony?’

He said, ‘You’re crazy. Fuck you, fuck J.P.—’

‘Fuck Ryan.’

He inhaled, let his body go still, pushed the poison out through his lips in a cool, wordless stream.

‘Cards on the table, Tony. I think you’re a piece of shit. I tried and tried with you but the only way you deal with people is abuse them. I know you hate me, because you think there was more to my asking your little boy black-and-blue into my home so he could sleep off the pain of your discipline. Whatever way you used to dole it out.’

The jovial men cleared the counter and walked out of the shop, their arms full. The assistant looked towards Tony and Tara, then down at a clipboard by her till. She started marking words off with a black pen. There was an ink smudge marking her thumbprint, and another smear across two of her knuckles.

‘Remember Georgie?’ Tara said.

Tony swapped the cans to his other hand. He didn’t reply.

‘Of course you do,’ Tara said. ‘I couldn’t find her for love nor money—’

‘That’s nothing to do with me.’

‘Please. It’s everything to do with you.’

The girl at the till began to sing a song. In an uneven jumble of breath and flat melody she forced on Tony a broken musical accompaniment.

‘I couldn’t find her,’ Tara went on, ‘but she turned up of her own accord. A few months back. J.P.’s done whatever he had to do—’

‘What’s that mean?’

She scoffed. ‘She’s fine. I’m not. Do you realise how useless we look to J.P. now?’

‘I don’t look like anything to J.P. I’ve got nothing to do with him.’

‘Oh Jesus, give it up! I do a bit for him myself. I know the score.’

‘You know nothing, Duane.’

‘Fine. I know nothing, you know nothing.’ She rolled her eyes and mimed chattering jaws with her hands. ‘But while you’re convincing me of your ignorance, J.P. is realising what a pair of losers we are. If there’s one thing worse than being the go-to for favours, it’s becoming the go-to for framing. I need to get out of the city. Go down West Cork or something, start again.’

‘Go then.’

‘You might not have noticed, Tony, but I’m not exactly rolling in it.’

‘If you’re trying to convince me that that’s my problem—’

She cut him off. ‘I went to the Council. Told them I was sick from stress. I asked them to move me. They wouldn’t. My issues with you weren’t serious enough, even though you smashed my window and intimidated me. It’s classed as antisocial behaviour and the Council would be playing rounds of musical chairs all day and night if they gave a shit about that.’

She looked away, adjusted her jacket and exhaled.

‘Don’t think I’m not aware of how dangerous you are. You beat your son and you kill your drinking buddies.’

‘You’re crazy, I said.’

‘Save it, she can’t hear us.’ She brushed hair from her face. ‘I don’t want to live beside you anymore, Tony. I don’t want J.P. knowing my address. Help me get out of here. That way we’re both happy. Pay for your medicine. I’ll meet you outside. I want to tell you something and you will hear it.’

In the early afternoon brilliance of high summer, on a day earmarked for fond reminiscence, she relayed to him the details of a plan concocted over high and white spirits. She wanted him to burn her out.

This was the plan, pulled from the addled head of the lunatic, imparted on the path outside the off-licence in matter-of-fact tones broken of emotion and repellent to passing snoops. She had determined that the best way for the Corporation to take her seriously would be to demonstrate a serious problem. She wanted Tony the Drunk to serve up a Molotov cocktail and throw it through her back door some prearranged night. The authorities would move her on. As for Tony Cusack, she’d vouch for him. He’d hardly try and smoke her out when his house joined hers.

‘You’re fucking serious,’ Tony said, and Duane joined her hands and said, ‘I know it sounds mad, but I’ve thought about it and thought about it and it really does seem like the right solution for both of us. I’ll say I’ve had trouble with Jimmy Phelan and the cops will drop it fierce fast. They’re scared of him.’