Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

‘It’s not like I want this,’ Georgie said.

‘Remember…’ he said, slowly, and then he took her arm again, and escorted her to the edge of the path and the cold stone walls of their city centre. ‘Remember the time I came down to you in that weird chapel place?’

The prayer hall. ‘Yeah.’

‘Remember you told me never to buy a prostitute?’

She remembered.

‘But if I ask you to stop buying coke it wouldn’t work.’

‘That’s sweet,’ she said. Her voice cracked.

‘If I told you that lads like me end up inside over shit you buy, would that stop you?’

There was nothing earnest to his expression. He seemed pained, impatient and resentful, all in one oddly beautiful tic.

She faltered. ‘You don’t know my life…’

‘You don’t give a fuck for mine,’ he said, and took his hand away. She pushed her fingers over the spot he’d held, instinctively. And for the beat before he wordlessly left her she grasped something of what he was trying to say. And that it might have been nice to have someone like him, someone on the outside too, someone who got it, someone who might have stood by her and bawled her out of it when she stepped out of line.

When she made it home, two tricks later, she went online and deleted the bookmark for Robbie’s Missing Person page, but found herself visiting him again later that night, and again, three times in total as the clock ticked on and she sat in her rented room, looking deep into Robbie’s frozen eyes for something they might once have shared, but all she found was resentment, coming from inside her, rising up her throat.

‘You are fucking joking me,’ Jimmy choked, one day in the coldest April the city had seen in decades.

Maureen was like a lunatic. Not ‘like’, he thought. Was a lunatic. Right now, in her kitchen in the new apartment at Larne Court, she was doing a very passable impression of a maniacal beast, spitting, tutting, pacing.

‘I’m not joking you,’ she said.

Beside them, on the polished pine table, lay a copy of the Echo . Its front-page headline read ‘Repairs Completed On North Cork Church’ and underneath, ‘ No arrests made in nightmare arson attack ’.

‘Well then why the fuck aren’t you joking me?’

She stopped pacing and crinkled her nose as if she’d caught a whiff of decay. ‘It was a statement,’ she said.

‘What kind of statement? “I’m off my fucking meds?” “I don’t think my son’s suffered enough?” “I’m suffering delusions of demonic grandeur?”’

‘That’s the problem with your generation,’ she said. ‘You’re politically apathetic.’

‘Oh? And what damn purpose does this kind of madness serve, Maureen? You burn a country church down? Up in fucking Mitchelstown, of all places?’

She slapped the table. ‘It’s a pyre, isn’t it? For that Ireland. For their nonsense. For the yoke they stuck round our necks.’

‘Jesus Christ, what are you on about? What, you wanted to make a metaphor of the horizon, was it? And you expected the buffers above to get that? Jesus, Maureen, have you any idea what they could have done over this? You’re damn lucky they didn’t root out some black-pantsed fourteen-year-old twerp and nail him to a fucking cross!’

‘Well they didn’t, did they?’ she said. ‘They did nothing. Why would they, sure? They’ve taken so much from me there’s nothing left of me to see. I can do what I like and go where I like and all I get is a blind eye turned. It’s ridiculous.’

‘You want to get caught, Maureen? You want to spend a few years above in Limerick?’

‘I can’t get caught,’ she said. ‘Churches and brothels and Robbie O’Donovan, and not a climbing wisp of fault for any of them.’

‘Oh, mother of Jesus.’ He hung on to the back of the nearest kitchen chair and pinched his forehead. ‘Maureen. Listen to yourself. You’re not nine years old. You know this shit. Nothing goes unnoticed. You might think you got away with this and that, but people paid, and paid fucking dearly, for your messing.’

‘Your insurance premium went up, I suppose.’

‘You think you can burn buildings and kill gawky bayturs with impunity? Oh fuck me. Just because you don’t see the stains doesn’t mean you didn’t make shit of things!’

There wasn’t much more he could say. She refused to be moved. He couldn’t tell whether anything was getting through, and in her madness he saw his city snap and tumble down and in the long years of his complicity he saw his weakness, as man and monster.

She felt she could do what she liked now. That much was clear to him. In burning down the brothel he had thought she’d made her decisive point and once he’d exhibited his rage he’d decided he could stand to grant her that last folly. He had stupidly assumed that was that. But the headline proved he couldn’t trust her around loose ends. If a name lost from the lips of Tony Cusack could catch fire, then what could Maureen do with a living whore and a dented know-all like Duane?

Jimmy had watched the city long enough to know that it would right itself, sooner or later, and that the silence following Robbie O’Donovan’s death was just a long, caught breath.

He extracted her promise that she wasn’t going to get up to divilment as soon as the door shut behind him, and hurried to reinforce what he could before she got mind to break it.

Months back he’d been brought a mystery.

He hadn’t had reason to bring the boat out in a while, but at the end of the summer he’d taken a day down at the yard, where he’d rolled up his sleeves and engaged in some therapeutic maintenance.

There was an ould fella who lived a couple of miles from the opposite end of the quay — Mike Costello, a gentleman bachelor, whose face was scored from coastline winds and disapproval at the unremitting advance of ‘feckin’ Japanese’ technology. He had his own boat, though Jimmy rarely saw him do anything with it. More often he engaged in the lightly infuriating habit of sitting around on the quay with his Border Collie, smoking Players and offering unsolicited advice on the sea and sky. On this day, with the sun making sheets of blinding light from the puddles on the concrete, he approached Jimmy with customary solemnity, and asked after his plans for the vessel.

‘I’ll dock it this winter,’ Jimmy said. ‘It took a bit of a hammering last year.’

‘Of course it did,’ said Mike. ‘And bringing it out in all weather, too. What you were at in January I don’t know. Lucky you weren’t mangled.’

‘When was that?’

‘January. In the rake of bad weather. Only the one time I saw you, in the early morning, but wasn’t once enough? Ah sure, you do it for pleasure and you don’t know what you’re at; aren’t you only a city boy? Dock it this winter and don’t go making a widow of your good lady.’

Jimmy took this first exactly as he was tempted: he assumed Mike was mistaken. Hallucinating, even. Poking the ashes out of boredom and the malice boredom can call up. The image wouldn’t leave him, though, and Jimmy wouldn’t be where he was and who he was if he wasn’t open-minded to cloaked dangers. He made delicate enquiries amongst his own, and no one had taken the boat out. He checked the dinghy and the boat itself for signs of mischief, and concluded there was no one tapping him for fuel and kicks on the high seas.

He didn’t immediately suspect Tony Cusack, because suspicious as Jimmy was, he wasn’t bloody insane. But there was an inkling, one day, driving into the wretch’s terrace on unrelated business. Alongside Cusack’s pile was Tara Duane’s, boarded up. Jimmy asked his boys: Did Duane take off? It got back to him that she’d gone wandering, and that no one had any clue where; cops, drifters or the motherless chicks that lay for their sins under him.