Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

She reported him missing, and the guard taking her statement leaned back with his biro tapping out a march on the fleshy bit between his thumb and first finger, and stared as if she’d invented Robbie from scraps of punters and a fever-dream of wishful thinking. He sent her on her way with undisguised disgust and a flimsy promise to keep her updated.

If there had been a body, her grief wouldn’t have felt so formless. As it was, the fact that Robbie had been there one day and gone the next, leaving behind nothing but second-hand jumpers and foodstuffs she didn’t like, left her suspended between mourning and wired impatience. He was there, then he was gone, and wherever he’d gone to he’d taken six years of Georgie with him.

The practicalities inherent in suddenly finding herself independent were many and unfortunate. She could support herself — there was money in prostitution, not a huge amount, but enough to make up the rent and keep her smashed — but… Well, there had been things she hadn’t had to worry about when Robbie was around. Like he’d make sure the heating was on, or he’d go do the various errands that kept the coke and smoke topped up, or whatever. And now there were all of these whatevers and Georgie without the wherewithal to get through them.

Maybe I’m depressed , she wondered, idly, as she stood in the shower, thirty minutes at a time and sometimes noticing at the end that she was still in her knickers or that she’d forgotten to take her hair down. What little peace she had made with her circumstances when he was around to encourage it disappeared. She supposed the sudden six-year gap was making her sick. She was sick of the brothel and sick of the pimp and neither the promise of a roof over her head nor having someone to handle her appointments was doing it for her.

She could have just walked out, but that would have created more problems than it solved; the pimp could have had her for loss of earnings and might have insisted she stay on to work off debts he’d conjured out of bloated waffle. Instead she drank her way out. Punters arrived for appointments and she belched her disapproval at them, which they tried to pound out of her. Then the pimp tried to beat it out of her. He tried to hammer her straight, when being hammered was her problem. He wasn’t a very smart man, in fairness. He was running the brothel for someone else, which was all in all a pretty stupid career move.

A few days of belching and beatings and Georgie was out on her ear. She went home and cleaned herself up and was back on the streets the next day. Sure, she had to worry now about the guards, but that seemed very much the lesser of two evils, especially when she could point out to them that they should have been searching for Robbie, and not stunting her earnings by booking her for solicitation or taking blowjob bribes in a back street off the quay. Oh yeah, a man was a man, when he was there.

And so that led her, in the week after her gin-soaked dismissal, to search for another kind of man.

Georgie had felt Tara Duane was a construct from the first day she’d met her, though of a positive sort, back then, a slice of luck given form by some propitious celestial alignment. Tara had found her around the back of the college, pockmarked by pebbledash and bad weather. She’d brought her a sandwich and a coffee and, later on, a vodka in one of the pubs off Oliver Plunkett Street; Georgie couldn’t remember which. Sixteen years old and getting into cars with married men, and yet Cork City remained a mystery, the expanse of it forbidden to people like her, a soirée to which she held no invitation.

Tara swore she’d done her time in sex work, and that after having brazened out her trials she felt it her duty to offer support to the girls still involved in the trade. Winningly she implied she understood better than anyone the circumstances pinning Georgie down. It quickly became apparent that being pinned down was, in Tara’s opinion, nothing to be ashamed of in these recessionary times. Ireland in a tailspin? Who could blame the girls on the street for their choices! Georgie didn’t remember making a choice and she felt uncomfortable having it so neatly abridged by this uninvited proponent, if it was there at all.

As a rule the other girls in the trade were as supportive as they had room to be. The oldest women — the ones too far gone with booze or smack to operate on anything but instinct — were best avoided. They had quicker fists than a cast eye would assume. But, in general, Georgie found she had little to fear from her peers, and that there were times when it was wisest to trust them, and when more than one of them told her she was better off ignoring the wandering affections of Tara Duane, she listened.

The more she listened, the more cracks appeared on that alabaster mug. Tara always knew where the pimps and the dealers were, which knocking shops were looking for staff, who was facilitating the cam work. Some of the girls whispered that she was the city’s most devious madam, taking pay from all manner of third parties as she spun the streets. Georgie wasn’t sure Tara was practical enough to be a madam. Instead she wondered if she wasn’t just a creep, feigning aid like she feigned smiles.

The activism Tara Duane purported to fill her time with usually amounted to handing out home-made sandwiches to the destitute. So it was tonight. Georgie spotted her on the opposite end of the quay, filling plastic cups for a couple of the old junkies from a flask out of the boot of her car.

It was just after ten, and between the street lights and the river, damp shadows ran up Georgie’s limbs and pressed springtime chills against her chest; every breath was a gasper.

Tara noticed her from fifty yards away, and broke into one of her cracked-mirror smiles as soon as she was sure Georgie was close enough to get the full-frontal benefit.

‘Georgie! Hey, girl, how are you? I haven’t seen you in so long; what have you been up to, hon?’

Georgie said, ‘I need a dealer.’

Tara pursed her lips and tried out a couple of different faces until she settled on one approaching concern, but the flickers of the sides of her eyes, and the twisting to-and-fro of her lips, betrayed the connections whirring through her head. She pulled her ponytail tighter. ‘Well, you know I wouldn’t condone it, Georgie. I mean God knows you have enough on your plate.’

‘My plate’s swept clean,’ Georgie said. ‘That’s the problem, Tara.’

Hmm . ‘Would Robbie not know someone?’

‘Robbie’s not home yet.’ She felt that one. Unexpected, a pang in her abdomen like a knifepoint, or the warning signs of a life about to be lost on a public bathroom floor.

Tara made another face.

‘Not yet?’ she sighed. ‘Oh, poor Robbie. I hope he’s OK, girl, I really do. I mean even if he’d left you; to know is to heal, pet.’

Georgie pulled her jacket across her belly. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘In the meantime, though…’

‘A dealer,’ said Tara, thoughtfully. ‘Of course, I don’t like to enable it.’

‘Oh sure yeah. You don’t partake at all, do you, Tara?’

Stern now, Tara said, ‘Well, there’s a difference between a smoke and the class As, Georgie.’

‘Who said I’m after class As?’

‘I’m not insinuating anything. Just history, Georgie, you know yourself. What about…’ She lowered her voice, though the old junkies had shuffled on, and there was no one to hear them. ‘Work? Would they not provide?’

‘I’m not working there anymore, Tara. I thought you’d have heard?’

Of course she would have heard. Tara Duane heard everything. She knew the city like a spectre of many hundreds of years, even though she couldn’t have been more than thirty-five; she wafted into lives, poking and prodding, and listening, mostly listening. Maybe the toll due for a coffee was a rumour and a sandwich cost a story half verified. Maybe she did relief work around the city’s brothels — not in the bedrooms, but answering their phones, keeping the doors locked, washing the towels, peeping through keyholes…