Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

‘There’s a problem your father and I share. I want it gone. It has a name: Georgie Fitzsimons. It shouldn’t be hard to find because it circles this town like a bad penny. Take the thing out of circulation and I’m square with your piece-of-shit father. Let this go one step further and I’ll make orphans of your siblings and hang you over the Lee in a fucking gibbet. You got that?’

He smiled.

‘Bet you’re sorry you asked now, aren’t you?’

The boy said, ‘Is that it?’

‘It’s in the smart mouth you betray yourself, kid. You have till Friday.’

He got back into his car unimpeded and drove out of the estate.

Mission accomplished, he supposed.

The nights were getting shorter, and once the weather cleared they’d see the sky, the lot of them, and feel the vastness above the city; the air, the wind and the world. They just had the April to suffer first. The walls of Jimmy’s city inched towards the sides of his car as he drove. The lamp posts bent over him.

It would right itself, sooner or later. He just needed to be prepared.

Tony was at the kitchen sink, one hand on the draining board, the other in a tight fist by his side, bled out from his forehead to his knuckles, but still standing.

His father used to be a giant but as Ryan had stretched he’d shrunk to frailty, and his stature was only part of the story. All those rages, distilled by time down to petty tantrums. The good moods Ryan used to pray for, reclassified as desperate shows of learned affection. And that fucking strength, ha? Where was the bruiser now? Ryan could take him. He could do more than take him. He could kill him. Even with his bare hands. Catch him by his mop, knock his head off the wall, slam his face off the draining board, run him onto the stairs, slip his belt off, whip the old fucker.

Instead he walked over to the table and picked up the electricity bill.

‘Ouch,’ he said.

He counted out the fee, then a fifty on top of it, and put it on the table. He’d brought an eighth of grass too, a good poky smoke, and as such one he was considering leaving in his pocket and laying into with extreme prejudice once he got home. He left the baggie by the bill.

‘Better for you,’ he said.

He looked back at his father and Tony swallowed and looked at the floor.

‘Rocky…’

‘And you say I make stupid mistakes, Dad.’

‘You don’t understand.’

‘No.’ For a moment his stance matched his father’s, and then he tossed his head and looked up again and said, ‘Make me understand.’

Tony came over to the table. He sat down, awkwardly pulled a packet of cigarettes from his jeans pocket, and slit one open. Ryan put his Rizla on the table. Tony rolled a joint. His hands were shaking.

‘What did he say to you?’ he mumbled, once he’d sparked up.

Ryan sat down. ‘Nothing that made any sense.’

Tony exhaled and rested his forehead on his wrist. His fingers scratched at his hairline.

‘He wants that girl killed,’ Ryan said. He coughed out a laugh. ‘Like, fucking hell.’

‘That’s the long and short of it,’ Tony said.

‘Eh, no it fucking isn’t, Dad. That’s the bare bones. The girl who came up here asking after her fella is a problem you share with Jimmy Phelan. And somehow he thinks you’re capable of pulling shit like that and you’re not, Dad. How could you be? What the fuck is he on?’

Tony looked up. ‘I couldn’t,’ he said. ‘You know that. See? You know that but he doesn’t. Or he does and he doesn’t care. But you’re right, Rocky — I couldn’t be like that and I’m not.’ There were tears in his eyes.

‘How’s Georgie a problem you share with Jimmy Phelan?’

‘I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. I was walked into it. That young wan’s fella… he was killed.’

‘Oh, fuck me.’ Ryan leaned back in his chair.

Georgie had said as much the previous Saturday. Did you find your fella? No. He died.

There were threads of dusted web drifting gently round the shade above him.

‘I met her in town, last Saturday,’ he said. ‘First time since she was here in your sitting room, Dad. She looked like shit, y’know. Like a skeleton in a dress. She said the feen was dead. I guess that’s why Jimmy Phelan’s taking out contracts on her.’

‘She’s a buddy of yours—’

‘No. I fucking told you she wasn’t. She’s someone I used to sell dope to.’ He gestured at the baggie in front of his father. ‘See? Just like that. Aw, fuck me!’

He pushed the chair back and paced over to the worktop, and brought a fist to the surface between the hob and the dirty mugs.

It needed saying.

‘Did you kill him, Dad?’

‘No,’ Tony said.

He was staring at the table. ‘Phelan crossed my path one day, five years ago now. He said he needed a favour. I had no clue what it was until I was landed in front of it — the fella, dead on the floor up in one of Phelan’s gaffs. A total accident, he said. I was to help him clean it up. And I did it. You don’t say no to Jimmy and at that stage… I couldn’t have said no. That’s Jimmy. He shoves you off the cliff and as you’re falling he shouts after you: No way back now, boy! I didn’t know the girl’d come looking for him and I didn’t know she’d come up here. I don’t know why she never learned to shut her mouth. Whatever madness drove her to piss him off, it’s done now. And because I’m the only one who knew about the first one, he says I have to… to do the second.’

‘How do you even know Jimmy bloody Phelan?’

‘From years back. Before you were born. Before I was your age, even. We went to London together.’

‘That’s how he knew about my mam, so.’

‘What did he say about your mam?’

‘Oh, fuck all, for Jesus’s sake.’

Ryan’s phone beeped. He took it out of his pocket and stared down at the screen. It was a text from Karine. She’d be on her lunch break by now, back there in the real world. He turned the phone over in his palm and closed his fingers round it.

‘So what did Tara Duane know about all this?’

Tony inhaled, sharply, making a sound somewhere between a hiccup and a bleat.

‘What d’you mean, boy?’ he said.

‘She sent Georgie up here, didn’t she? Telling her you’d know where her fella went?’

‘Twist of fate, I suppose. She was late remembering that I knew the poor fella.’

‘So you did know him.’

Tony closed his eyes. ‘Yeah.’

‘How’d you know him?’

‘Pub. That’s all. I couldn’t tell her that, though, not after what had happened.’

‘And Tara just landed on that one, did she?’

‘Why couldn’t she? We both know, don’t we? The world marked that wan for divilment. Why else would she have…’ He flinched. ‘… With you.’

‘Are you still going on about that?’ Ryan snapped.

‘You were fifteen, Ryan.’

‘Yeah, well. Fifteen-year-olds are all dick, aren’t they?’

He put his phone on the worktop, placed both hands flat on either side, then sank onto his elbows and covered his head with his hands.

‘I didn’t have a choice,’ his father stressed feebly, from behind him.

‘There’s always a choice,’ Ryan said.

‘If it makes you feel better to believe that.’

Ryan straightened.

‘Right,’ he said.

He put his hands on his head and moved to the window, and let his eyes drift from clothesline to back wall to lawn.

‘Rocky, listen—’

‘Don’t fucking talk to me a minute!’

He’d seen it splashed and screaming on her face: Georgie was fucked anyway. Her cheeks, sunken; her eyes like holes punched in paper; fated to expire in a gutter after ODing or being choked out by the wrong punter and there was nothing Ryan Cusack could do about that. Child already taken off her. Slipping from salvation to the street. Hanging.