Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

‘It’s not even possible to hate you, girl.’

‘They’ll think I’m a slut and I just want to be pretty for you.’

He got up, stepped over two of the pillows and the make-up case and held her.

‘You don’t need to be anything for me,’ he said, and she shied away from his kisses and flexed her shoulders and said, ‘I do, though, Ryan. I’m not good enough.’

‘Oh God, please don’t say that. Please.’

‘It’s true, isn’t it?’

‘None of it is your fault. None of it. I’m a dickhead who can’t believe his luck.’

‘Are you only saying that because you want me to leave half this stuff behind, though?’

‘No.’ He wrapped his arms tighter around her. ‘Bring all of it. Bring your whole fucking bedroom in a trailer if you like.’

She rubbed her cheek against his chest like a cat and said, ‘Tell Joseph.’

Elena. Sasha Carey who was friends with Joseph’s ex-girlfriend. Rachel O’Riordan; she worked behind the bar in Room, a nightclub in town. Christina whatever-the-fuck-her-surname was, at that party in Ballincollig; she of the lacklustre blowjobs. Triona Neville who booked session musicians down in the Union studios; she was at least twenty-three but what the fuck. Kasia… yeah, he didn’t know her surname either, back at Bobo’s gaff, and that was only last week. Was he finished yet? He didn’t know. He hoped so.

Betrayal was a miserable salve and he was not at all cut out for it. It had started with a beautiful tourist, a goddess come to his sphere specifically to grant him justice; it should have ended there too. Beautiful as Elena was, she wasn’t what he wanted. What he wanted was to go back in time and stop himself getting caught with Dan Kane’s coke so that Karine would never have cheated on him. Even if he could only go as far back as the night he met Niall Vaughan in The Relic, just to walk the fuck away when Karine told him to. What he wanted, Ryan Cusack, was Karine D’Arcy, all of her: body, soul and intent.

That denied to him, he tried revenge, and the more he pushed it the harder it punished him. The ease at which he coaxed opportunity was a gilded curse. His life had become a gauntlet run of parties, negotiations, car parks, VIP rooms. He’d done more cocaine in the last year and a half than he was comfortable thinking about, and that’s what it had come to: cocaine, money, pills, women.

Oh, very fucking glamorous. It wasn’t glamour that kept him sleepless and dry-mouthed, or prompted the big deals and the big reprisals. And what had he become, in his travels through the underworld? Just another cheating cunt in a city of cheating cunts. It had started when he was fifteen and he was stupid for thinking he could hold it back. The predictability of his transformation hurt him terribly. He hated it. He hated the girls who came on to him at parties and his inability to say no to a nice smile and a fresh slice. He hated it all, he hated himself, he hated Dan, he hated Karine; it was all just hate hate hate, a cacophony, a blizzard, line after line after line.

The first night was a dream, more than just figuratively. Having pitched tents and torn open slabs of lager, they dropped a few yokes and crowded around each other at the backs of the big tops that housed the star performances, dancing and drinking, shouting and wading chin-deep into conversations of a hazy and numinous quality.

The day after had been stuffed into a timetable and suffered for it. Ryan had acts he wanted to see and a girlfriend who wanted placating. They walked the breadth of the arena, their tempers slipping. Twice there was a proper, thunderous row which made shit of the moods of the people around them. Once, Joseph took him aside and told him to rein it the fuck in, but though Ryan took the words as wise and heartfelt, they weren’t gospel, and he couldn’t heed them. After the second row Karine said fuck it, she was going home, and had gotten halfway to the main gates before he caved in and dashed after her. But sure what could he do? They were now as they would always be: splintered but desperate, in love and worn out.

Karine retired just after midnight but he was nowhere near ready for sleep, thanks to the double-drop he’d sneaked only an hour back. There was a discussion at the door of Joseph’s tent. Joseph was mucky-stoned — ‘I couldn’t get up if I climbed your fucking leg, Cusack’ — but Ryan was itching for a distraction, and in the end he wandered off to the rave in the woods with Joseph’s friend Izzy, who played lead guitar in a punk outfit called Scruffy The Janitor and taught a contemporary dance class on Thursdays. She wore lots of eyeliner, but never any lipstick. Joseph was desperately in love with her, and proved it by pretending very badly that he wasn’t.

There was no dancing. Ryan blamed himself because the pills were the best he’d had all year and he’d known before he’d even arrived at the Picnic that he’d be blasted. He sat instead on the grass, back from the dancers, with his arms hooked round his shins and, from time to time, his forehead on his knees.

Izzy bounced over. ‘You’re no craic.’

‘I am usually. I’m just fffffucked .’

‘You’re no craic all day. You or Carly.’

‘Karine.’

‘That’s right,’ she said. She pulled her hair over her shoulders and started plaiting it. Around them the tree trunks blazed neon green and pink, and the beats crashed.

‘Why are you guys even together if you don’t like each other?’ she shouted.

Ryan was getting rushes up the inside of his arms, so he stretched, and put his hands flat on the ground behind him, and let his head loll backwards. Izzy sat beside him.

‘How long are you going out, like?’

‘Years and years. Since the night of my fifteenth.’

‘Oh right. So it’s a bad habit, hard to break.’

‘No, no.’

‘Look,’ yelled Izzy. ‘It’s kind of obvious. You keep her all the ways up here…’ She stretched an arm over her head and walked her fingers along the underside of the canopy far above. ‘And she doesn’t deserve it. I mean that with kindness and love, by the way. It’s a shit thing to be someone else’s religion. And you know, even you’ve got issues with it and it’s coming out in all sorts of shitty little ways. Like, Joseph was telling me the story. First she did the dirt on you and now you can’t stop doing the dirt on her. And still you’re wearing her like a hair shirt. It’s fucking tragic. As in, it’s sad and it’s pathetic.’

‘She didn’t.’

‘She didn’t what?’

‘She didn’t do the dirt on me first. I did it first.’ He didn’t leave Izzy time enough to soak it in. He turned to her and said, ‘Joe doesn’t know that and neither does she.’

‘Shit,’ she said.

As the beats ebbed into a breakdown, the voices around them came back to a roar. There was a chorus of whistles and cheers. Izzy moved closer.

‘You’re not to tell either of them,’ he said.

‘Obviously.’

‘Because it’d end me.’

‘Cross my heart and all that.’

He rolled out the confession. The yokes swam through him. He could see himself: sitting on the ground beside his nodding acquaintance, eyes perfect circles and jaw slipping in and out of alignment. He got to the end of his story and it meant nothing. No weight off. He still felt like a cunt.

‘You know what it is?’ shouted Izzy. ‘You set up this whole relationship as this picture-perfect penance for something stupid you did when you were fifteen and you’re pissed off now that Carly… Karine…’ She raised her eyes to the lights. ‘… didn’t follow the script.’

‘No. I love her. That’s all.’

‘So why’d you keep cheating on her?’

‘Because. I dunno.’ An epiphany. God, he remembered epiphanies. ‘Because I can.’