Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

He stopped at Urlingford for a coffee and a Moro and pulled off the motorway again just outside Mitchelstown for a slash and it was there, pissing onto the ditch off the hard shoulder, that he noticed the fire.

He went back to the car and said to Joseph, ‘D’you see that?’

They climbed the ditch and stared into the dark. It was a fire, no doubt about it. Maybe five, six miles in.

‘It must have been called already,’ said Joseph. ‘I’ll ring them just to be sure.’ He phoned 999 with one finger in his ear and relayed vague coordinates to the person at the other end as cars slid past them from one acre of pitch to another.

‘D’you reckon we could find it?’ Ryan said.

He did wonder why, as he exited the motorway and drove down winding regional roads, but what answer could he conjure, except he was curious and oddly loath to return home, tired and all as he was? Neither girl in the backseat stirred. Joseph went quiet and furrowed his brow, as invested in the mystery now as his cousin, though out of jovial drunken recklessness beside Ryan’s bitter focus. There was no Internet to get maps up and what were they marching towards anyway? They kept spotting the flare, losing it behind copses, twisting away from it as the road tangled like a knotted snake. As the clock crept to four, they shared a glance and silently agreed to let it go.

Ryan pulled over and got out. A gate led into a wide, thin field, bordered by a line of trees, then a low hill and beyond that, they could see the orange glow of the relinquished beacon and smell its acrid smoke.

‘If we made off now,’ joked Joseph, ‘over the hill there, like the intrepid bastards we are, we’d pin that gaff down in fifteen minutes. But who’d mind the women?’

‘I hope it’s not a house,’ Ryan said.

‘Nah.’ Joseph caught his shoulder. ‘It’s probably some barn or something.’

‘So fucking quiet here.’

‘It’d drive me mental living in a place like this. Sensory deprivation. No wonder the boggers are always seeing ghosts.’

‘Are they?’

‘Yeah. Shades of dead people on the sides of the road, lads there since the Rising. The devil picking his teeth at the crossroads. Weird shit. We’ve more history than we’re able for.’

Joseph turned to go back to the car but Ryan stayed where he was, watching the fire. His cousin came back, caught his shoulder again, knocked his head against his back and said, ‘What’s up with you, Cuse?’

‘Just coming down, is all.’

‘Dunno about that. Told you you shouldn’t have brought her, man. You need room to breathe, the pair of you.’

‘That’s not it.’

‘No? Coz it’s obvious you’re crumbling, you and her.’

‘Going up in flames, you mean.’

‘Maybe,’ said Joseph. ‘Maybe.’

‘And nothing grows from ashes.’

‘You’re going ending it?’

More lights now, more smoke. Wherever it was, someone was tackling it.

‘No,’ Ryan said. ‘I can’t.’

Unsettled by ghosts and confession, he went back to the car.

Georgie liked to compose letters to David she was never going to write.

Dear priggish David mama’s boy Coughlan,

How is my daughter? You don’t need to answer, so unzip your prissy mouth and let yourself breathe. I’m coming for her. I’m nearly there. I have more money now than you’d be able to fathom. How did I get it? Oh, nefarious ways. I was wicked as the wickedest woman, and you know how we are, David, wicked as wicked can be. But it’s all your fault. You made me a whore, so what harm charging premium rates for others to do the same? At least they won’t knock me up then condemn me for it. All the shuffling horns of the city are better than your limp prick. I hope your Christian girlfriend chokes on it.

Enjoy your never-ending poker tournament/wanking cycle, you bearded creep.

Your pal, Georgie.

She didn’t have half as much money as she wanted him to think she did, but it wasn’t as if he’d find out either way, if she never got round to writing those letters. She hoped the strength of her bitterness was enough to carry it back to him as an edge to the wind, or a nagging pain that kept him up at night. Fuck the letters. Fuck David. She owed him nothing. He owed her a universe.

The notion of debt had been pressed on her and she learned to open her hands and allow its weight to pull her down. J.P. had put her earning after the debacle with his mother; he said she owed him a favour. She did six months’ penance in a house where she was the only Irish girl. She reckoned she’d been brought in as a substitute for some unfortunate who’d run off or been offed. When there were better girls to choose from he let her go again. ‘Don’t get any ideas about telling tall tales, either,’ he said. ‘Coz in this world, girl, you’re just a scrapheap bit, and no one’s going to believe you.’

Scrapheap or not, she was the sergeant at last and this was the drill: she got up, made tea, sat around thinking of the money she’d made and lost and the money she’d make again, and did a bit of work, when she was able to.

In order to get Harmony back she needed money. In order to make money she needed to continue doing the only thing she was good for. In order to continue doing the only thing she was good for she needed medication. Living expenses, taken from her nest egg. She used the brothel contacts, even after they’d let her leave; the path of least resistance would do fine now that she had a destination. In her head she told David she was wiping her arse with fifty euro notes but the real world bled her. She was doing far too much, but she had to be muddled for the graft or the graft would never get done. She tried alternatives but nothing worked as well. There was reason in it, no matter how unpleasant the logic.

Night was when the trouble started. She didn’t sleep. She didn’t feel threatened as such, just restless, stuck in some cosmic halfway house, just a little out of whack and waiting for her number to be called and the process explained anew. Twenty-six was just like being twenty-one. It was nothing like being twenty-three. Georgie felt the dichotomy and it confused her. How could you be two people in five years? How could you undergo such a metamorphosis — whore to saint — and paint the slattern back over the scar tissue only a few short years later?

She lost interest in her detective novels. They were long-winded and she didn’t have the time for cheesy gasbaggery. Instead she sat up reading true crime files on the Internet, nauseous and lost, following link after link until the morning came and it was time to start over. Sometimes she went to the Missing Persons site because Robbie’s picture was still there, staring out of a photograph she hadn’t provided. Must have been his mother, if he had one. She’d pay her a visit one day. Tell her to quench the home fires.

‘You think you’d notify someone ,’ Robbie chastised. ‘After you telling the old woman I mattered, and all.’

‘Oh, you mattered,’ Georgie replied. ‘It’s your fault I’m in this mess. Bad habits you taught me. Bad habits from a bad man.’

‘Yeah, blame a man and not yourself, Georgie.’

‘Men are all the fucking same! Maybe you didn’t matter, Robbie O’Donovan. There’s a million more out there just like you.’

She never lost focus on the goal, even when her strategies shrivelled to husks of ideas, the residue of forgotten escape plans.

Though Maureen’s words circled, she kept the scapular knotted around her wrist.

One Saturday night in April, Georgie turned a trick with a bloke who dropped her at the wrong end of the city centre. She made her way back to her usual spot slowly, shaken — he had seemed like an OK chap until he’d finished and then his disgust was tangible. She swung into an off-licence that was just shutting and bought a naggin of vodka and drank a third of it in the toilets at McDonald’s before continuing on her way. The alcohol kicked in and circled the fear, gave it warmth and made it greater.