Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

‘Aw yeah, see, I’m your prison, am I?’

‘Something like that, Ryan. You cheat on me and lie to me and I’m stupid for letting you… and the absolute kicker? You haven’t a notion of ever quitting. I’ve never been as important to you as Dan Kane. The next time you get caught you’ll get ten years and where will I be then?’

‘I’m not going to get fucking caught.’

‘How do you know? You were stupid enough to get caught in the first place.’

‘All right, so I’m a cheat and a liar and I’m a cage and I’m fucking stupid. Anything else you want to say?’

‘Oh,’ she hisses, ‘there’s plenty else I could say.’

‘Fucking say it, then!’

I can see the poison rising, filling her out as it climbs, a wave of hatred coming from her belly to her jaw. ‘You have no idea what you put me through when you got caught with Dan Kane’s coke,’ she says. ‘And I am going to make you suffer for it.’

‘Fucking Niall Vaughan wasn’t revenge enough, then? In a fucking car park? Like a fucking whore?’

She thumps my chest so I push her, all the way back to the wall. I stand over her and she struggles and kicks out and gets my shin with her bare foot and this is the thing, it doesn’t even hurt, but it doesn’t have to hurt because this is just a reflex: I lift my fist to her.

I lift my fist to her.

And she shrieks, ‘Oh my God! Oh my God, you were going to hit me! You pig, you were going to hit me!’ and I can’t stop it, I lash out and knock my fist off the wall beside her head and then again, and again, and I’ve got my hand on her throat beating the fuck out of the wall and her legs go from under her.

I let her fall and she crumples to the floor and I stagger backwards and end up on my arse.

‘Oh my God,’ she says.

‘I didn’t touch you,’ I say, but whatever it was has been knocked out of me; all I can do is whisper.

‘I knew this would happen someday,’ she sobs. ‘I’ve been watching this coming for months.’

My chest’s hammering. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you, girl. I fucking love you; I’d never hurt you.’

‘No?’ Her eyes are red, her hair teased rough from sweat and sex and now this, oh Jesus Christ, where did this come from? ‘Then what the fuck was that?’

It was the worst time to be in the A&E — Saturday drinking time, when the city’s youth drowned standing up. It was compounded by the coming bank holiday, and the place was predictably jointed. Pale girls in their weekend finery sat dumb with swollen knees, drunks bellowed at nurses who carried the scars of their vocation on their faces… ould fellas, ould wans, stern mammies holding teenage boys who looked like they might burst into tears, trolleys, coffee cups, televisions no one could hear… Jimmy took it all in with the astonishment of a child who’d pulled a rock off the soil to see the woodlice scatter underneath.

He had other things to be doing, but — the realisation was made luminescent by the white lights of the waiting room — Maureen didn’t have anyone else to accompany her. It was late in his life to feel a son’s duty. His stand-in siblings had been so much older than him that he’d never felt pressure to obey, tend to or bolster. This was new, and what positive novelty did he expect to find in life at his age? From here on in it should be nothing but challengers and traitors.

Maureen sat on the plastic chair beside his, surly under the lights and the pain of her injured wrist. She had climbed up on the worktop in her apartment that afternoon to clean cupboard shelves, and had fallen. After two cups of tea and a few hours grumbling didn’t cure her, she called the doctor, who sent her into A&E for an X-ray. She didn’t appear to have wanted to call Jimmy. She did anyway. And so they sat together.

He tried, though where the compulsion came from he wasn’t sure. ‘D’you want a cup of tea?’ he said. ‘D’you want a newspaper?’ In between staring at the weekend casualties and fantasising about getting head from that one good-looking nurse, he provided what his mother needed.

‘How the A&E in this piddling hole is slower than the ones in London I’ll never figure out,’ Maureen groused. She had given up on her newspaper, having found it difficult to turn pages with only one hand. Now she sat with her legs crossed, holding on to her paper cup, making evil eyes at the opposite wall. A man who’d taken the seat below the spot she was directing her attention squirmed.

‘Every A&E is the same on Saturday nights,’ Jimmy offered.

‘Bloody government,’ she responded.

Jimmy smiled.

‘D’you need to go out for a cigarette or anything?’ he asked.

‘And what if they call me? And what if I miss it and they end up sticking me back on the arse of the queue?’

‘Sure I’ll go out and get you.’

‘Oh, stop fussing.’

To this he couldn’t help but laugh. ‘Fussing? Me? You’re off your fucking game if you think that’s fussing.’

‘You’re like an old hen,’ she said.

Here in the vivid light, he was exposed and wrong-footed. On a Saturday night he might otherwise have been holding court in the síbín he ran on Barrack Street. Shadows might have cloaked him and kept him on his track.

‘This is odd,’ he told Maureen.

‘What’s odd?’

‘This place, and me in it. This isn’t usually my scene.’

‘What? D’you think it’s out jiving you are? This isn’t anyone’s scene.’

‘That’s not what I meant,’ he said, and he cast his eye round again, and caught jaded porters, and threadbare corners, and footage of county floods scrolling on the TV screen on the wall. He meant normality. This was outside of his usual trajectory and yet home to all of these lifeforms who snapped and bled and shattered and had nothing but their country to fix them again. He got a sudden vision of a doppelgänger walking around, shaking hands, accepting their welcomes, like one of America’s rock star presidents come to grace the spud-gobblers with his urbane presence.

His guide said, impatiently, ‘Well, what did you mean?’

A nurse stood at the corridor and called, ‘Maureen Phelan?’

‘They’d shame you,’ Maureen muttered. She rose and Jimmy alongside her. ‘Are you coming too?’ she asked, surprised, and he said, ‘Why wouldn’t I, Maureen? Is that not what I’m here for?’

They sat outside of the X-ray room and what he’d said obviously nagged at her, because she came out with, ‘I’m probably not what you expected in a mother.’

He shrugged. ‘I’m probably not what you expected in a son,’ he said, but only because he felt he had to. That he wasn’t what anyone would expect in a son was not a revelation. She was right, though. Maybe you get the mother you deserve.

He examined his hands and looked from there down the length of his legs. Alien or not, he was most certainly here, and he wouldn’t have been if it wasn’t for her youthful indiscretion. He glanced at Maureen and wondered how it was even possible to have come from her body and to have grown up into… whatever he was. It was an unpleasant sensation. His just being alive had ruined her life.

Well, he’d been called the Antichrist more than once.

She got her wrist X-rayed and was directed back to the waiting room. Their seats had been taken, so they walked around to find another pair.

Tony sat in the shadow of an enormous doctor as an exhausted climber with half a mountain yet to go. The doctor was young, calm and distracted. He had the chart in his hand but even as he spoke he was looking around at other notes, at his computer screen, at some diagnosis he had yet to make a call on. Tony felt light-headed. He held on tight.