Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

When they got to the flat Cusack needed a minute on his haunches with his back turned, but after the rebellion inside him had been quashed, he dutifully found a ratty carpet on one of the upper floors, pulled up as part of the redecoration project, and helped Jimmy roll the dead man like a cigar. The tradesmen had left behind some cleaning tools; Jimmy and Tony scrubbed up as best they could, given the length of time the stranger had had to tattoo the floor. Maureen was right; they’d need to lay a new one. There was more to this job than the lick of a mop.

‘How are you with tiling?’ Jimmy asked.

‘I did the bathroom of my own gaff,’ said Tony. He’d sobered up, of course. ‘Floor to ceiling. Put down tiles in the kitchen too, but that was a while ago.’

‘Do a job here for me and I’ll give you a few bob. I don’t want to have to bring anyone else in on this now. What are you at tomorrow?’

‘Nothing.’

‘I’d a feeling you’d say that.’

In the absence of another vehicle, Jimmy drove his Volvo around to the back gate, at one end of a weathered brick alley garlanded deliberately with creepers and weeds. They flattened the back seat and laid the carpet cigar on a diagonal line: what once had been a breathing, thinking head to the back of the passenger seat, what once had been trespassing feet to the opposite corner. They arranged empty paint cans and a ladder on one side, and on the other the double-bagged rags and brushes they’d used to clean up the blood.

Jimmy handed Tony a set of keys and notes enough to buy tiles and bleach.

‘You’ve a car?’

‘I do,’ said Tony.

‘Go with quarry tiles.’ And then, because custom suggested, he said, ‘What have you been up to anyway, Cusack? You’re not working?’

‘Here and there. Best anyone can manage now, I think.’

‘You’re probably right, boy. Even this is a one-off; I have more than enough mouths to feed.’

‘I know that.’ Tony shifted his weight. ‘I know that, boy.’

‘Speaking of mouths, how many little Cusacks are there?’

There was a ghost of a smile; it set on and escaped Tony’s mouth in a snap second. It was the first time in a long time Jimmy had noticed something approximating life in the old dog.

‘Six.’

‘Six? You’d want to tie a knot in it.’

Six made leverage plenty.

They stood by the back of the car, still enough to let birds continue their evening rituals in the greenery around them, flitting in and out of bushes, darting shadows moving on walls the height-and-a-half of Jimmy.

‘There’s one job I’ll have coming up,’ said Jimmy. ‘Nothing big and certainly nothing worth what I’ll pay you, but you’ve done me a turn today. I’ll be getting my hands on a piano sooner or later. The ex is looking for one for the kids. If you’re around you can help move it in.’

‘What kind of piano?’

‘Worried for your back, are you? Not one of them long ones, if that’s what you mean.’

‘No, I mean what kind are you looking for? I have one I’m trying to get shot of.’

‘You? Where’d you get your grabbies on a piano, boy?’

Tony clucked and shook his head. ‘Not like that,’ he said. ‘I own one. It’s a few years old but it was bought new. It’s a beauty, but all it’s doing in my gaff is taking up space.’

‘Is that the kind of thing that has to go, Cusack, when a man’s got six kids?’

Tony shrugged. ‘I can’t play,’ he said, though it sounded petulant, a tone not right for business deals, even on a day when reason had made way for blood, ties and tide.

Before they locked up Jimmy retrieved the Holy Stone and laid it carefully on the rolled-up shape of his mother’s second greatest mistake.

‘I’m just saying,’ she says, ‘that it’s weird, like, that you can be so distant with someone you’re actually in a proper relationship with.’

God though, tell you what but she’s fucking beautiful when she’s pissed off, even if it’s pissed off with me. She’s gone pink-cheeked and her eyes are flashing hazel to black and she’s even standing with her arms folded and her chin sticking out. And all around her you get people moving from here to there in the school yard like dancers in formation, like snowflakes in the sky, like shitty little bangers around a falling star.

She’s all like ‘My friends think it’s mean’ and ‘My friends say it’s a really bad sign’ and it’s not like I’m whipped or nothing but what her friends think means a fuck of a lot more to me than she knows because you know the way ould dolls are, it’s all fucking crowdsourced. But I go, ‘Look, it shouldn’t matter what your friends think, it should matter only what you think,’ and she goes, ‘Well it is about what I think, Ryan, and I think it’s awful because I’ve done everything for you, you know?’ By ‘everything’ she means she’s let me fuck her and she’s not even being over the top with that; it was everything, it was the whole world. She doesn’t know that though. She only says ‘everything’ because she doesn’t want every Tom, Dick and Harry hearing her say the word ‘sex’ coz you don’t get away with words like that in the middle of the yard in the middle of lunchtime with every kid in this school sporting lugs the size of Leitrim. Which is funny because what she’s pushing me to say is a whole lot bigger.

I say, ‘You know how I feel about you, though.’

She says, ‘How would I know it?’

I say, ‘Coz don’t I show you?’

And she says, ‘Eh, the only thing I see shown is how much I let you get away with and what if it’s all for nothing, like?’

And I smile and she goes, ‘It’s not funny, Ryan!’ and looks like she might cry, and the thing is I know exactly what to do and I want to do it, believe me, I’m gagging to, only sometimes you have the right words in your mouth in the right order but it’s such a big thing and a big fright that you’re not sure if you can open up wide enough to get it out.

She says, ‘Coz this is such a big deal, Ryan,’ and looks away and shakes her head. ‘And if you don’t, well, it just means I’m stupid for letting you after only a couple of weeks. And I wouldn’t ever again then.’

‘That’s not the way it is,’ I tell her.

‘What way is it?’

I get all mortified and look at the tarmac between my feet and she says, ‘Oh my God. Fine so,’ and turns away and I know she doesn’t realise what a weird thing this is for me, because this isn’t shit I’ve heard or said since I was a small fella, and I wince and she gets further away from me and I call, ‘Hey, D’Arcy,’ and she turns around, blazing, and I shrug and say, ‘I loves yeh,’ and the whole yard reels with her and shouts Oooooh! and I go bright. Fucking. Red.

But she smiles, and brings her hand to her mouth and gives me the eyes, because she knows there’s no way I would have made a total gobshite of myself in front of everyone if I didn’t totally mean it.

Georgie met Robbie when she was fifteen and he was twenty-two. He admitted to twenty-two; she admitted to nothing, not age nor origin nor the fact that she didn’t have a fucking clue what she was doing. She was a runaway and he was wandering, and it happened that they found each other.

She lost him abruptly one April week, six years later. She couldn’t say what day because there were often absences. She’d be working or he’d be climbing a wall somewhere, trying to come down before he fell down. So she didn’t panic when she arrived home one day and he wasn’t there, or start chewing her nails when he didn’t pick up his mobile; he lost phones in perpetuity, sometimes quite intentionally. She phoned around the few friends they had but no one had seen him. On the third day she started to worry.