Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

‘And that’s your lot,’ grumbled Maureen. She stood by their seats as Jimmy retrieved the newspaper and their coats. ‘What are you giving out about?’ he said. ‘You get to go home to bed now. If it had been broken they’d be setting it and you’d be here another four hours.’

‘Sure amn’t I institutionalised at this stage?’

‘Well what did you expect with your messing?’

‘Last time I try to clean anything, so,’ she said. ‘You can get me a housekeeper.’

They moved towards the doors. Across the room, Maureen spotted a familiar dark mop, and she paused.

‘Everyone’s in this place tonight,’ she said.

‘That’s just what I thought,’ said Jimmy.

Tony Cusack looked up at them. Maureen raised her good hand, but he didn’t acknowledge it.

‘What’s wrong with him?’ she said.

Jimmy touched her arm and shrugged towards the door.

His world wasn’t something his mother had a great interest in sharing, but across from Tony Cusack she felt a connection to Jimmy’s deeds. ‘What’s he in for?’ she asked Jimmy, to another shrug. ‘What?’ she said. ‘You didn’t ask?’

‘Why would I ask?’

‘That’s a kind of sad way to be,’ she mused.

‘You don’t mix business and pleasure,’ Jimmy said. ‘It’s as simple as that.’

Maureen frowned. ‘I’m going to ask him,’ she said.

‘Do no such thing, Maureen.’

She snorted. ‘Are you going to stop me? The man did a lot for us, Jimmy.’

‘As I’m sure he’s keen to forget.’ He took her by the arm. ‘I get what you’re saying, Maureen. Honest to God I do. But just because you have a tie to someone doesn’t mean you have to double-knot it.’

The parallel was enough to render her pliant. She let him lead her into the car park.

He opened the car door for her. She settled in and took a deep breath; the interior smelled so very like him, the grown-up him, a long way travelled between the soft perfume of his baby head and the smoke and cologne and metal and leather she associated with him now.

He relented. ‘Tony Cusack was a decent sort,’ he admitted, sitting in beside her. ‘Bit of a langer as a kid; I grew up with him. Sank into a bottle in his teens and never came out again. He’s exactly the kind of person you’d use for such an awkward task as the one you set me, Maureen. In need of a few bob, innate mistrust of guards, too much to lose to consider talking.’

‘What’s “too much to lose?”’

‘Kids,’ he said. ‘A hape of them. He met an Italian girl in London, brought her home and had six smallies with her. Then she went off and died on him. Fucking car accident. His oldest is twenty now. Young fella, criminal record acquired already. Ryan. Tony was a Man United man.’ He laughed. ‘His kids mustn’t be so laddish, mind. I bought Ellie’s piano from him. He had a house of little musicians. No wonder he didn’t know what to do with them.’

‘You threaten a man’s kids?’

‘No. The implication is enough. You ask how many he has. No more needs to be said.’

‘It’s a nasty way of holding someone,’ she chided.

‘It’s a nasty world,’ Jimmy said. ‘What else was I going to do? You went on a rampage with your Holy Stone. Someone had to clean it up. If you don’t want to hear truths like that don’t go around forcing them.’

She was silent. The city slid around them and Jimmy navigated as a bright-eyed captain on a sleeping sea.

Tony sent Kelly home with Joseph but Karine refused to leave, even after the doctor had insisted that Ryan was in no danger. It took her mother, arriving down bleary-eyed at four in the morning, to drag her away, and even then it was a slog.

‘You don’t understand,’ she bawled. ‘It’s my fault.’

‘It’s not your fault,’ Tony offered, and Jackie D’Arcy glared at him, as if his input was detrimental to her daughter’s return to sanity. He knew what the mother was thinking. She was a nurse herself. Histrionic bully boy making a point with a packet of painkillers . Maybe she was right, but here wasn’t the time or the place.

‘Am I upsetting you?’ Tony snapped, and she jumped. ‘She’s crying but he’s unconscious, so maybe just keep the high and mightiness to a minimum, all right?’

‘I wasn’t being high and mighty,’ said Mrs D’Arcy, feigning injury.

‘It’s all right, Mam,’ said Karine. ‘We’re just all a bit tired and stressed out.’

Jackie coaxed her down the corridor and out into the car, and that left Tony, alone in a thinning crowd, with no son yet to show for it.

Once they’d moved Ryan into the unit, he was allowed to go in. He hung back for just a moment before taking his place in the chair by the bedside.

He seemed fine. It would have made Tony feel a lot better if a nurse had popped her head around to say ‘He’s only sleeping it off’ or ‘He’ll have some head in the morning’ but they weren’t treating this with comforting levity. He’d complicated everything, apparently. The alcohol was one thing, the cocaine another, the paracetamol a further. The treatment was a problem to be worked out. And then at the end of it they’d whistle and a psychiatrist would swoop down from the rafters with a prescription book and a big red stamp with which to brand Tony Cusack Cork’s greatest fuck-up.

‘What did you do that for, Rocky?’ Tony whispered.

He rested his head against the mattress.

‘What am I gonna do with you?’

Still with his forehead to the bed, he reached for his son’s hand. His skin was warm. Tony ran his thumb over his knuckles and in his sleep Ryan took a deep breath.

‘You’re not going to die on me anyway.’

There was room and time to talk. Mouth pressed against hospital sheets in case anyone heard him, Tony confessed to his sleeping son. ‘I didn’t mean it,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean any of it. They said down in Solidarity House you lash out at the ones you love the most, you know? If you’d just talked to me more often…’ He paused. Medical staff drifted past the cubicle. Murmured diagnoses were met with shaky questions.

‘I know this is my fault,’ he said. ‘I know I fucked up. I know you stepped in and I know I should have stopped you. So if this is a point you wanted to make, you’ve made it. You frightened me. Whatever about me; you frightened Karine. Karine doesn’t know who you are anymore. D’you hear that, boy? Are you listening to me?’

He sat up straight and looked at his son. Dark lashes rested on dark circles. The bulb off his ould fella.

‘And yet with all your mam’s faults, yeah. It’s not enough for you to feel, boy, no. You have to feel everything ten times harder.’

Time had smoothed out the chubby cheeks, straightened the curls, sharpened the jaw line, but he could see the baby still in his son’s face.

‘Your mam would never have let you do this.’

Tony was tired. He could do with a bottle of water, a couple of Solpadeine and his bed.

‘I shouldn’t have let you, either. It wasn’t right. But fuck, Ryan. None of it was right. This city’s fucking rotten, falling down around us.’

The dark pool around Robbie O’Donovan’s head spread on the floor of the cubicle. The tiles he’d replaced for Maureen Phelan ran patterns through his vision. The deep throb of the boat engine under his seat made him gag.

‘I killed her, Ryan. Oh God help me. I killed her.’

The tears were falling and his son was blind to them.

‘You need to understand,’ Tony said. ‘Whatever punishment comes for me I’ll take it as long as you know… I did it for you. For the very same reason you did what you did: you do what you have to for family. How can I be sorry, then? How can I be sorry when I did it for you?’