Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

Tony said, ‘I left school when I was sixteen and I haven’t read a book since, but I know a stupid notion when I hear one. You’re warped, Duane. You’re either trying to trick me because you think I’m thick as the hairs on a gorilla’s hole or you actually think that I’ll commit arson to get you a country cottage.’

‘Right.’ She fell back. ‘So you’re not going to help me.’

‘Will I put my kids in danger because you’ve lost the plot? Let me think now. No.’

‘I’ll do it anyway,’ she said. ‘I’ll do it without your input and how are you going to know when to get out then?’

‘You think I’m not going to go right to the guards about this?’

‘No. Because if you do I’ll tell them you killed Robbie O’Donovan. And then when my house goes up in flames I’ll tell them Ryan did it. Spurned lovers at that age. You just don’t know what they’re capable of.’

He reached for her but she leapt back and wagged her finger, gasping, ‘Ah ah ah!’ Tony pushed back against the wall. The streets were alive, even in the heat. Across the road, a girl pushing a bare-legged toddler in a buggy stared.

Tony said, ‘I’ll have to bring this back to J.P. then, won’t I?’

‘But you won’t,’ said Tara Duane. ‘Even if he cared enough to do something about it, you know if anything happens to me he’ll just pin it back on you, because that’s what dopes like you are there for.’

In her shorts pocket, her phone trilled.

‘Have a think about it,’ she said, taking out the handset. ‘I wouldn’t want to move on it for a while yet, anyway. Melinda’s going off to live with her dad soon. No date set but she can’t stay in Ireland much longer, sitting on her bum. The country’s banjaxed, sure she’s as well off out of it.’

She smiled. ‘I suppose yours will move on soon enough too. Nothing hurts as much as losing a child, though.’

She left him speechless and blinking in the sun.

Joseph goes into the bedroom with the other wan so I’m left in the kitchen with the green-eyed girl and she’s approaching like a tsunami.

Look, don’t get me wrong. She’s unreal. She’s wearing this black and gold patterned dress that sets off her olive skin, she’s got long wavy hair just made for bunching in your hand while you shift her, she’s got the absolute lot. We’ve been cordoned off in a corner talking all night because I’m that starved of Italian I’d wear a wire for la Guardia di Finanza if all they were promising was stammered conversation with camorristi . Her name’s Elena. She’s from Salerno. She keeps finishing my sentences. It’s the fucking berries.

But I know she’s expecting something in return. She’s dead right, of course. I mean, me and Joseph came all the way back to their apartment to do more than admire a pair of living dictionaries. The other wan, Sofia, started mauling the face off Joe as soon as he got in the door; they’re heading home in couple of days and I guess she’s mad to go out on a high. The bedroom door closes. So there’s me and Elena and she’s giving me eyes and stroking her cleavage and here she comes, across the tiled floor, and I’m gonna have to, you know.

First girl I ever kissed was Lauren Sheehan. I was eleven. She was twelve. It was two days before my mam died.

I haven’t kissed anyone but Karine in years, and I hadn’t planned this.

Elena flicks her tongue against mine and all the blood rushes out of my face and down.

She pulls back with her hands on my chest, and says she won’t tell my girlfriend if I don’t.

Only last night me and Karine were out for a munch and then to one of her fancy pubs so she could drink cocktails and tell me how hot I am as I screwed up my eyes and tried to drink Niall Vaughan out of my head. She tells me there’s nothing to forgive so I have to focus on forgetting. Her actions beg my pardon, though. She’s so attentive. She’s so fucking into me. She wants to spoil me and the truth is she’s wasting her energy. I’m carrying anger around like a sack of wailing kittens; I’m not able to drown it. Like, this thing we have is so deep, and so brittle because of my mistakes, and my mistakes are so massive and glowing so bright I’m scared to set them down. And it turns out Karine’s a reprobate too. I can’t get my head around it. I’m angry, and relieved, and angry again because I’m relieved, and it’s in my head, fucking pulsating, day and night, no matter what I do and I’ve room only for that and for nothing else so I don’t even feel like me anymore. And I’m putting myself through that because I love Karine D’Arcy and it’s no good, I can’t bear to be without her.

Elena kisses me again, longer, softer, and my hands move down over the hill of her arse to the hem of her dress.

It’s like… I dunno. Like something’s pulling me forwards but it’s splitting me in two doing it because there’s a part of me completely unwilling to go with it. My fingers push her dress up and reach in and there’s just this damp piece of fabric between me and her cunt. I’m pushing against her with my cock and she moans and goes for the top button of my jeans and I can hear bone splintering and wind howling and my whole entire soul shouting at me to stop, stop, two wrongs don’t make a right, boy, stoppit! but I’m gonna do it, I’m gonna fuck her, why shouldn’t I fuck her? That’s how it goes, isn’t it? I’m out with friends and I got drunk and I’m coked up nicely and my dick’s gonna do whatever it wants to do. What’s the point fighting it if Karine won’t bother either?

Elena backs onto the table, pulls her dress over her head, clasps her heels around my waist and pulls me over. She slides her hands over my shoulders and I wince because she’s gone straight onto the scar.

There’s a brushstoke dragon across my shoulders, flicking down onto my arms. It’s a week old. It hurt like hell for seven days and now it’s a burning ache. Probably because it was inked on bone but maybe too because I got the artist to add an extra stroke, a K at the bottom of my dragon’s tail, right on my spine.

It hurt, but it didn’t stop me.

Across the skyline of his city, the modest heights other men’s ambitions had carved from the marshy hamlet, Tony tracked his losses and kept watch for his damnation.

Sobriety became a memory that glimmered only in his children’s disappointment. Ronan and Niamh stretched past the point of coddling. Cathal turned thirteen and moody. Cian talked of pursuing an apprenticeship. Kelly entered her Leaving Cert year. Their father’s failures weighed on them less and less as they fixed on their own futures. His home was peopled by the shades of the one life he had worth living. His one-time assertion that he was a father above all things burned in Tara Duane’s fluorescent vision. He hid in his front room and conjured resolutions; they crisped up and withered into ash with the first lungful breathed into them.

He watched the boy Ryan burn himself out. From a distant plain he tried calling armistice but whatever it was that Ryan had become didn’t need it.

One dank November morning he arrived up in a ten-year-old Golf and Tony went out to kick tyres and mutter approvingly. He didn’t know from whom Ryan had learned to drive. It wasn’t lost on him that the teaching was a task for a boy’s father.

‘Are you set for Christmas?’ Ryan asked, one hand clasped to the back of his neck and wincing like he’d cupped a wasp. ‘D’you need a few quid, like.’