Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

‘Ryan, that really hurt!’

He’s curled up at one end of the couch, gasping and swallowing like he’s had a desperate nightmare.

‘That was not very nice,’ she chides, back on her feet and fixing her dress.

He stands up, and she feels too wounded to offer an arm as he wobbles and pulls his tracksuit pants back up and peeps like a baby bird.

She folds her arms. ‘What’s wrong?’

And sure he can barely speak, the stupid boy. ‘No,’ he says. ‘Coz it’s not… I have a girlfriend.’

‘Well, you better not tell her, so!’

He’s very, very drunk, because he starts crying.

‘Oh for God’s sake,’ says Tara. She’s careful to look stern because in his foolish, showy blubbering she sees trouble enough to catch in her throat.

‘You can’t tell her,’ Ryan says.

Tara moves towards him but he backs away, and knocks against the sitting-room door frame, and has to grab the banister to keep himself upright. ‘Why would I tell her?’ Tara says, carefully, trying out a smile, finding a foothold. ‘She wouldn’t understand. It’s OK, I get what you’re telling me. This’ll be our secret, I promise.’

She watches him fumble with the front door lock.

She frets about it the next day. She really likes Ryan. He’s a pleasant young man. She doesn’t want to fall out with him. But she can’t be so complacent as to trust his perception of the previous night’s events; he drank too much, and he’d clearly been stoned before he’d even come onto her property. No, she’ll have to do a little damage limitation. She can’t risk him broadcasting his half-remembered misgivings, not with her history. People are far too quick to judge these days.

In the early evening she spots his father walking up the driveway and she steels herself and runs out to catch him.

Tony Cusack hates her. She doesn’t mind that; he’s pathetic, the kind of man whose favoured publican lives for Children’s Allowance day. ‘What?’ he says. Tara’s not at all bothered by his tone. Weak-kneed malingerers don’t frighten her.

‘Just a quick word,’ she says. ‘Ryan was around at mine last night. I don’t think he was entirely sober.’

‘What was he doing at yours?’

‘He says he came by to see Melinda, but… Well look, Tony. I really don’t like to get him into trouble, but his behaviour was inappropriate. It became rather clear that he has… well, fixated on me. He seems to think there’s something between us.’

‘Does he now? And where would he get that idea?’

She bristles. ‘I’m hardly leading him on!’

‘So you’re telling me that my fifteen-year-old, who can’t go ten fucking minutes without texting his girlfriend, is suddenly infatuated with you? What the fuck are you getting at?’

She scowls. He’s pronounced it ‘infactuated’.

‘You’re being needlessly hostile,’ she says. ‘I’m only trying to help. I’m so aware of the fact that he lost his mother and so it’s hardly surprising that he’s acting out with older girls, is it? He showed me a video, on his phone. I think you need to watch it,’ she smiles, ‘and just inform yourself as to what he’s up to.’

The frame around which one builds one’s life is a brittle thing, and in a city of souls connected one snapped beam can threaten the spikes and shadows of the skyline.

Robbie O’Donovan died hunting for sentiment to bring home to a girl he refused to save and in his expiration made shit of structures he’d never seen. Small houses. Small sanctuaries. Small lives. The city runs on the macro, but what’s that, except the breathing, beating, swallowing, sweating agonies and ecstasies of a hundred thousand little lives?

Cork City isn’t going to notice the last faltering steps of a lost little man. All those lives, all those beams, crisscrossed into the grandest of structures… the city won’t see the snapping sticks, or feel the first sparks.

So scale it down. Zoom in. Look closer.

Fighting cats in the courtyard outside woke Maureen at 4 a.m. She couldn’t get back to sleep so she travelled through time.

She was well aware that she lived in the past but, she decided, it was because she’d been left there. Decisions taken on her behalf forty years ago had anchored her to a moment doomed to repeat itself, over and over. Here’s the piss-licking face of Una Phelan. Here’s her husband, a sheep in wolf’s clothing. Here are the clergy, gathered outside the maternity ward like an unkindness of ravens, grasping every perch they were and weren’t entitled to. Ireland, the clouds outside. And shame on you, Ireland , thought Maureen, four full decades later. You think you’d at least look after your own?

She got out of bed and stood at the window. The cats were well gone. In the apartment directly across from hers, a Christmas tree twinkled between heavy curtains. Bad idea , she thought idly. The place could go up in flames .

Her own vengeance lay festering under piles of sodden ash in Mitchelstown, and what use was it, at the end of the day? Without a perpetrator the Gardaí had no motive and without the platform of culpability Maureen had no audience at which to shout it. The papers had said the Gardaí were looking for a woman to assist with their enquiries, so that hoyden Saskia had obviously blabbed. They hadn’t found this woman because she’d never existed. In the meantime people blamed unruly youths and assumed no political motivation.

She wrote a letter to the Indo hinting that the person who’d set fire to the church up in Mitchelstown had, perhaps, been making a bold statement, and that maybe Ireland should expect more in the way of this kind of carry-on if it wasn’t going to learn its history lessons. The Indo hadn’t published it. What kind of Ireland had she inherited at all, when the Indo wouldn’t even publish crackpot woe-betides?

She put the kettle on.

In Holles Street four decades past a midwife lay a wriggling mound on her stomach.

And that was all she got.

She didn’t miss Robbie O’Donovan and though at the time she’d been sure it had been the flames that had taken him, she wondered now, wringing out a teabag in the middle of the winter dark, if it hadn’t simply been time for him to feck off. Hadn’t his demise been his own fault? He had crept in through a window on the latch and skulked though her home looking for relics, and had been knocked into his grave by the kind of woman no one thought still worthy of blame.

She sat at her kitchen table. Around her the debris stacked. She hadn’t done any housework in the six weeks since she’d sprained her wrist. That was Jimmy’s job and he’d failed to provide a decent solution. She assumed his interest in his mother had waned now that she was no longer causing him trouble. The girl Georgie had disappeared off the face of the earth, her lips sealed and her mind at last honed by Maureen’s generous wisdom. The man Tony had been threatened to keep his mouth shut. Robbie had gone up in smoke. Maureen had been left redundant and Jimmy had other things to worry about, in his line of work.

Spraining her wrist had slowed her down, and she’d stopped hunting for redemption, or what measure of it the charlatans sold wrapped in hymn and waffle. She was finished toying with swindlers, either by laughing at their convictions or burning down their temples. She had no energy left for divilment, not now she knew how much her son got up to on her behalf, behind her back.

She went for a walk.

It was just before five when she left the house and the city was a pyre too damp to take the flame. She wandered towards the Lee. Its forked tongue was probably the reason the place wouldn’t burn.