Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

‘Am I supposed to answer that?’

‘I heard he’s pure fond of you,’ said Phelan.

Ryan’s phone started buzzing in his jeans pocket. He assumed it was Karine. He was late. Very late. It was bedtime-late. There was the doghouse, and there was the cellar. He exhaled, quietly. Having practised now for years he knew his face was hard as the stone walls around him, and almost as blank as the man he was standing in front of. But behind it all he was crumbling, and desperate to get out of here, and mad to crawl back to the doghouse on his belly and wait for her to forgive him yet again. He didn’t think that edginess could break through. No. No, he knew it couldn’t. And that was nearly as bad.

Phelan said, ‘I hardly need to tell you that what happened between me and you and that broken fool who fucked your mother is no one’s business but ours. Dan Kane is not to hear of this.’

‘It isn’t my proudest moment,’ Ryan said.

‘Ah, but you’re a good boy. Dan Kane knows it. I know it. Let’s say I’m done with Tony Cusack. I am not done with you. Not by a long shot.’

‘You are,’ Ryan said.

Phelan smiled and caught his shoulders. ‘You don’t get to decide that, boy,’ he said.

Beneath the powder-blue sky of a new Sunday morning, Ryan sat smoking on someone else’s balcony. Behind the sliding door Joseph and a couple of other lads sat around a table, doing lines and drinking beer. Karine had gone for a snooze in one of the bedrooms. Ryan needed lungfuls of sharp air and a break from boisterous conversation. He had a head full of coke and thoughts as cold and clear and even as the new sky above him.

It wasn’t his fault. He knew it wasn’t his fault. It was something bigger.

His ‘job’ — nothing personal — entailed purchasing quantities of intoxicants, cutting them and selling them at a profit to people who were, as Georgie’s terminology stated, ‘dealing’. Taking precedent over how he made his money was how he proved his loyalty to Dan Kane: stepping in as his representative in cases where he deemed it necessary. Negotiations with fellas further down the chain. Retribution against those same fellas if the negotiations didn’t pan out. He’d gotten his fists bruised. He’d gotten his head around it. This was his part in the story. This was what he boiled down to, flesh, guts and bones.

‘I’m the bad guy,’ he said.

The city didn’t heed him. He looked down on rooftops, the corrugated shell of thousands of lives, all with their own part to play, fitting together like cogs, keeping the wheels turning. Doctors, dockers, dancers and dealers.

He’d been twenty years coming to this point. There probably hadn’t ever been another way.

From his back pocket, his business mobile rang. He shifted his weight and dug it out. He changed the SIM every few weeks. He had authority, at least, over which people he sold to. If there were any clients he needed to drop he simply didn’t give them his new contact. They faded from his life without protesting their relegation. Such things weren’t questioned. Ryan Cusack had that much autonomy.

He answered the phone. ‘Yeah?’

Donnelly’s voice. ‘I got that.’

‘Oh, good stuff.’

‘Yeah, hassle free. I’ll see you later so. What are we looking at?’

Ryan narrowed his eyes and took another drag. His mind was racing. He snapped it back. ‘Six G,’ he said.

‘No problemo.’

Ryan hung up. He opened the browser, screencapped a map and sent it on. Later he’d meet Donnelly at the mapped address, once he’d had a medicated snooze. He wasn’t coming down for a while. He’d been flying fucked for two days straight.

‘You’re a prick is all you are!’

She’s sitting on my bed in her knickers, and I’m standing at the foot with my jeans still unbuttoned, and the room’s saturated with the sweat and musk of what we’ve just done… How do we manage to fight in something that heady? This is how it ends? We’ve become so allergic, the smell of each other’s bodies is raising welts and driving us insane?

‘Yeah, I’m a prick, that’s what it is, Karine, I’m a fucking prick.’

We’ve been out since midday, had a couple of glasses of wine with the lunch, and pints after that. We came home for a snooze before heading out for the night, and when we woke there was murmuring and giggles and her turning round and pushing against me and asking me for it, and all of a sudden we have the spitting start of World War fucking III.

It’s Halloween, so that’s an excuse for her to go out wearing a ladybird costume that amounts to a spotty mini dress and black thigh-high stockings and a pair of glittery wings. The female population of the city will be baring their legs and their tummies and the very tops of their thighs and I’m not supposed to look at any of them because she knows I’m a pathetic twisted cheat. She can go out in a dress right up to her arse and just fucking ask to be groped but I’m to blind myself in case I accidentally exchange a look with one of her number. This is the kind of shit Karine can dredge up without even having to think about it: vicious hypocrisy dressed up in timidity and thrown back in my face if I dare question her. I’m so close now to walking out of here and getting my nose into a mound of coke and my cock up the first girl that smiles at me.

My shirt is on the floor beside her and I don’t want to lean over her to pick it up.

‘You don’t get to tell me what to do, Ryan. You’re a liar and you’re a cheat and you do not get the high ground here.’

‘I haven’t touched another girl in fucking God knows how long.’

‘Oh, yeah. God knows how long. Never mind all of them that you touched before God started keeping tabs, they’re not supposed to count.’

‘They don’t count any more than Niall Vaughan counts.’

She stomps over and jabs a finger on my chest.

‘Bring up Niall again,’ she says. ‘Go on, dig deeper. Because one minute you’re all “Oh, when I cheat it doesn’t matter but when you cheat it’s because you were infatuated,” so if you’re equating Niall Vaughan, who you believe I was madly in lust with, with your gamut of sluts, then you’re admitting that you were infatuated with all of them, aren’t you?’

She’s hurting my head.

Alongside the ugly little hangover, warming up for the relay as my lunchtime drunkenness collapses.

‘Are you for fucking real?’ I ask her.

‘Are you, boy? Are you for fucking real?’

I don’t know how this happened. One minute we’re coming together and the next she’s accusing me of emotional infidelity, and OK, listen, I’ve fucked other girls and I’m not proud of it. But it’s not like I loved any of them. It’s not like it’s even possible for me to love anyone else. It’s a deficiency and I know it. I feel it. It wrecks my head, it ties my tongue, it hobbles me.

‘Do you have to keep pulling me inside out with this shit, Karine? You know full well you’re the only one who’s ever meant anything to me and what did it matter when I couldn’t trust you as far as I could throw you?’

‘Oh my God,’ she says. ‘You’re so full of shit.’

‘How is that full of shit? You fucked Niall Vaughan when I was—’

‘In prison! You have no idea what that was like for me! You weren’t there and I needed you. I couldn’t trust you not to get banged up and you’re still doing the same thing, aren’t you? Yeah, talking shit about Australia and you and me leaving this dump and making something of ourselves when you know full well that’s not going to happen with your record. We’re stuck here and it’s all your fault.’