Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

‘I’d rather be going out with a fella who could keep his eyes on his girlfriend.’

It’s funny, because I can actually hear a voice, ringing clear and true, as if it was someone else’s trapped inside my own head, saying Don’t do it, Ryan, You’ll only make things worse , but it’s too late, my mouth is opening and I’m saying ‘I’d rather be going out with an ould doll who could keep her knickers on at her Debs’ and she slaps me, she fucking clatters me, and starts marching off down the footpath in her tiny dress and her wobbly heels and when I readjust my jaw and follow she spins around and screeches, ‘Oh my God, OH MY GOD, you have no right to say that to me after you fucked that tourist, Oh my God I had AN EXCUSE, you were IN PRISON’ and well, that’s shattered the shit, hasn’t it? And I walk behind her and tell her I’m sorry, sorry, fucking sorry and the top-up comes up on me and catches her shortly afterwards and we end up shifting the faces off each other by a pebble-dashed wall at the side of the road at five o’clock in the morning, and whether that’s something a dealer or a DJ does I don’t fucking know.

‘Ryan,’ she says, ‘Ryan.’

‘Mmm?’

‘You know this is like, “it” for me?’ Her jaw is going ninety.

‘Mmm.’ My teeth have Velcroed.

‘Let’s have a baby,’ she says.

I go, ‘Ha?’ but all of a sudden she’s teared up, and where I thought I’d laugh and tell her to come down off her yoke before making any life-changing decisions, I end up pulling her onto my shoulder and rocking her back and forth and telling her, Whatever you want and whenever you want it , and usually I’d chalk this silliness down to the night, the shots and the Ecstasy, but there’s something different this time, and even in my wastedness I can feel it. I hold on to her and tell her I love her and tell her I’ll do anything she wants me to do but beyond my words and her weight in my arms there’s the knowing we fucked this up. There was something beautiful here once.

Easier get a taste for arson than murder.

Maureen accidentally-on-purpose left the candles by the curtains and burned her house down. It had, at the time, been a means to an end but she’d really enjoyed the spectacle once it got going.

With murder she found a definite crossed line, and it was hairbreadth. One second there was life, the next it was gone. The ultimate in finality. Once you cross over you can never go back.

Arson was a different thing and a glorious thing. It was a monument to its own ritual. Once the fire caught it etched a statement into the sky. There was time to savour it and time, too, to quench it, if second thoughts were your thing.

She watched the brothel burn from a broken doorstep across the river. The fire brigade was almost as punctual as the amateur photographers. There was a reverent hush and she longed to cross the bridge to tell the rubberneckers that there was no one inside, no one had died, no one would die, but she had to stay still and discreet. Modest, even. It was her handiwork but there would be no medals.

She watched as Jimmy turned up in his car — even across the river he was conspicuous as an invading army — and sprinted towards the firemen, and felt a little warmth herself, from a safe distance. There was something in the way of regard for her, then. Maybe it wasn’t fondness but the idea of her dying of smoke inhalation clearly perturbed him. It was either that or he was stricken at the loss of the kitchen tiles.

Of course, he was rather heated in his own way, once he realised she wasn’t dead. He called her every name under the sun and nearly combusted listing all of the ways her insanity had inconvenienced him. To which she coolly replied, ‘Don’t you have insurance?’ and sent him spitting out the door.

He swore to her that she wouldn’t get away with trying the same trick twice, but her new dwelling, a ground-floor apartment in a gated city centre development called Larne Court, didn’t deserve the punishment meted out to its antecedent. It was a modest place and she slept better without all that history weighing her down.

Robbie O’Donovan hadn’t come with her. She didn’t like to think of him being trapped where he’d fallen by thick black smoke but sure, he was dead already and she could hardly kill him again. She did wonder where he had taken himself, but she didn’t miss him.

The vagrant up at the Laundry, a year and a half ago now, had told her there was nothing as cleansing as a good fire. Maureen had assumed to test the hypothesis, but while ridding the city of the brothel had made her feel better, it hadn’t resonated, at least not in the chords she was attuned to. She had done it for Robbie and for young Georgie, but, she realised, nine months afterwards and analysing her failings, she hadn’t done it for herself.

So in the sunny September, she rectified that.

You couldn’t go wrong with hippies. Their philosophy hinged on their empathy and Maureen had tried sons and priests and whores and had come away without a dash of castigation. Maybe her sinless exile really had depleted the universe’s urge to shit on her. She wanted to be sure.

Out of her new gate and a hundred yards to the right there was a newsagent’s, and outside of the newsagent’s on most mornings sat a pasty beggar in baggy jeans and plastic runners. She usually bought him a cup of tea and a sandwich and stopped to ask how he was, because he fascinated her. He was young enough to have a mammy somewhere. There was a two-week period in August when he was missing from his pew, but he’d returned before anyone’s worry could be moved to action, and told Maureen he’d gone to stay with some kindly dropouts outside Mitchelstown. It had been a bid to cleanse himself of smack and it hadn’t worked. Still, he was appreciative of the dropouts’ conviction.

‘Mitchelstown,’ she mused.

‘Yeah. There’s this girl called Ruby Dea. She’s got a farm above and she has the gates open to any ould gowl she takes pity on. Place is full of caravans and wigwams. She used to be in one of those cults.’

Maureen sniffed. ‘The Catholic Church?’

He enunciated carefully. ‘No. A cult. She doesn’t talk much about it, but she has more than a few ex-believers up there. Ex-believers of all sorts.’

And sure how could Maureen Phelan resist that? Only hours after gorging on the beggar’s tale she converted, and became Mo Looney, wife to the man Dominic Looney would have been. She draped herself in sorrow and headed up to Mitchelstown to find the girl called Ruby Dea, who turned out to be less of a girl and more of a matron, all skirts and woolly cardigans.

At first Ruby Dea thought Maureen was an irate mammy coming to claim back a loafer and blanched accordingly, but it wasn’t long before she accepted Mo Looney as another casualty of faith, and lent her a two-man tent to knock out a space in a fallow field.

There were, as the beggar had promised, others. There was one twentysomething with a couple of small children and a ramshackle mobile home, who kept to herself in the bottom corner of the same field. ‘Hiding from a husband,’ Ruby Dea confided. There was a jittery youth whom Maureen was sure couldn’t last the night from whatever longing had leached into his marrow. But the rest of the residents were friendly. Maureen was the oldest and they treated her as some Biddy Early come to set them straight. She took advantage, getting a man named Peadar to put up her tent and a girl named Saskia to make her some dinner.

It was her intent to stay only for the weekend, but come Sunday evening the hippies had spilled nothing but tobacco leaf and quinoa down their fronts, and Maureen wasn’t in the mood for holding it against them.