Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

What keeps this bloody city alive at all? she wondered.

It wasn’t Jimmy; wasn’t he too busy ruining it?

There was no stopping him now, and even if she found a way to vocalise it, to explain that he’d done his bit but her revenge was ultimately an empty thing, so he could stop now, and rest… Well, someone else would take his place. Some other scoundrel bent out of shape by the twisted streets of this pirate’s city. Jimmy’s fall would birth another, and another, and another, and Maureen would be matriarch of all.

Too late for Jimmy. That’s why she time-travelled. If she could have caught him that Christmas he bought her a brandy, when he was twenty and she was dismissed as no longer threatening by the baseless piety of her stupid parents, who’s to say what she could have done?

She walked along the Lee and towards the old brothel. On the water the reflections of street lights shimmered like sinking lanterns, golden and red on the black, and beautiful.

On the iron bridge across from the gutted brick there was a figure on the parapet, standing still and staring down.

Maureen wondered first, Robbie O’Donovan? , because the figure was tall and skinny and definitely male, and more again, because it was so frozen and so quiet that it seemed otherworldly. She managed to walk all the way onto the bridge without disturbing him.

The likeness was startling. For a moment she fancied she had time-travelled, but had managed to land beside the wrong son, John and Noreen’s, the one whose fragility had been shaped to fit under her own boy’s turpitude. But the fancy dissipated; this wasn’t Tony. This one was taller and thinner, quite the wrong shape, but the dark hair, the jaw, the chin, the mouth, the bloody everything else was just the same. She whistled under her breath. Another boy who wasn’t his mother’s son.

Now that she was this much closer she realised he wasn’t so silent. He was singing something in tuneful whispers, something to which he didn’t know the words. He was quite lost in it, and lost in the will-o-the-wisp colours in the black water beneath them. No light to his song. She realised with a sickening start that he was set to jump, and so she snapped,

‘What do you think you’re doing?’

And he turned, and her breath caught as she saw him lose his balance, but he fell the right way, just a few feet away from her, whacking his head off the concrete.

She stood over him. His eyes met hers. Big black pools, as much as the river was below them.

He sat up, suddenly, against the parapet, and she sighed and repeated, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

He pushed himself upright, dragging his back against the parapet, and when he was on his own two feet he dug into his pockets and produced a lighter and a cigarette, and three goes later he managed to drag deep enough to keep it lit.

‘Well?’ she snapped.

‘Well what?’

‘Well, what do you think you’re doing?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Oh yes. Great times we’re having, when you meet young fellas making eyes at the Lee in the early hours. Doing nothing . What would your mother say?’

The Italian girl, the prematurely departed. Maureen wondered how happy she could have been in this city, surrounded by the insular and the suspicious, and their faith, and their fallen.

Her son stood with one hand clasped to the back of his head. His jaw rolled. Maureen assumed that he’d knocked it on his graceless descent, but moments passed and he didn’t speak up, so she peered closer, though the night, through the ancestry fixed on his features, and wondered if it wasn’t half out of his tree he was, and if his balancing act hadn’t been born of synthetic bravado rather than the despair she thought she could spot in his stance. She didn’t know the ins and outs of inebriation, outside of being able to diagnose every stage of drunkenness as dictated by her nationality; he was inebriated, though, and not pissed. It was in the size of his eyes, and she’d mistaken it for character.

‘What’s your name?’ she asked.

He complied. ‘Ryan,’ he said, after a while gnawing the air in what seemed to her to be terror churned with a slight concussion, and she waited for him to elaborate until he followed up with ‘Cusack.’

Of course it is , she wanted to say. Isn’t it nearly dripping off you?

‘What in God’s name are you at, Ryan Cusack?’

Again, silence. He blew out his cheeks and looked over her shoulder. She cocked her head.

Under his breath, she thought she heard, ‘Grandmaw, what big teeth you have…’

She scowled.

‘Come on,’ she said, turning around and walking back towards the city centre, away from the hollowed landmark, along by the indolent water, and she looked back twice and he was following her, as she knew he would, as she knew his father would too, once given a command voiced with appropriate authority, and she thought that this was how it should be. The parents cast the mould for the little ones and the little ones curved to fit.

Between the opera house and the gallery she found a stone block bench and waited for him to approach, and when he got close enough for her to see the fear and the loss she directed him to sit beside her and said,

‘What are you on, then?’

He folded up and laid his head on his crossed arms. ‘I dunno,’ he said.

‘You don’t know? And what d’you think your mother would say to that? Winking at the river, having gobbled goodness knows what. Is that so you’ll drown easier? Your poor father, Ryan Cusack.’

‘Fuck him.’ He rubbed his forehead off his forearm and raised his head.

‘You look tired,’ she said.

‘I am tired.’

‘How could you be tired? Fine lad like you. What must you be, twenty?’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Twenty-one in March.’

‘Are you that afraid of twenty-one?’

‘Maybe I just wanted to go swimming.’

‘Aw, shite.’ She leaned closer. ‘Why are you afraid of twenty-one?’

‘I’m not,’ he said, and stared over the square, and she gave him time to figure out his mouth, and after a while he said, ‘I am. I dunno. I dunno.’

‘All these young fellas,’ Maureen chided. She looked across the river. The Northside rose dotted in white and yellow lights, and she wondered how many of those lights denoted a young life yet to be dammed and diverted? How many of them could be another Jimmy?

She looked back at Tony’s son and furrowed her brow.

‘I think it’s sad,’ she said. ‘You have a child and your child is the whole world. What did your father ever do that you’d want to take that from him?’

Ryan mumbled, ‘Why does it have to be about him?’

‘He made you, didn’t he?’

‘You don’t know him. He doesn’t give a fuck.’

‘Of course he does.’ If he didn’t, Jimmy wouldn’t have spun his noose so easily.

‘He doesn’t,’ said Ryan. He leaned back and looked up at the sky. ‘If you knew him you’d know that. He’s a prick and that’s where I got it from.’

‘Ah. You’re suffering from something inherited, is it? Something that makes you want to take to the Lee only days before Christmas?’

Decades ago, a twenty-year-old Jimmy Phelan offered his mother a Christmas brandy and she took it and closed her hand briefly around his and smiled.

‘What if I cured you?’ she said, but Ryan didn’t answer. She shuffled closer to him and held her hand out and he looked at it, blinked, and frowned. There was a light sheen on his face, even in the chill. She jerked her hand, and he sat up and held out his own and she grabbed it.

‘Yours aren’t workers’ hands,’ she said.

She turned his hand over in hers and traced from the tip of his index finger to his wrist.