Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

Maybe she had lovers in the criminal fraternity, though Georgie wondered who’d have her. She was wraith-like in stature, with long, pale hair and eyes wide as open graves. And the forged sincerity. Couldn’t you just see it? Tara Duane’s tongue circling some gangster’s distended cock, imbibing his rage and the shapes he threw at the city from his back, his massive belly rising and falling against her forehead as he blathered all his secrets into her ears. Maybe they passed her around like a virus, and that’s how she harvested specifics and conjecture both.

‘Have you moved on?’ Tara frowned, and then smiled widely and suddenly like she’d possessed another woman’s face. ‘Would you like a coffee?’

‘I’m grand for coffee. And yeah. Moved on. Back on the street.’

‘That’s very dangerous,’ said Tara, who had started to pour a coffee anyway. ‘You know you’re better off indoors. Clean, no Gardaí, vetted clients…’

Georgie took the coffee. ‘That doesn’t always work out as it should,’ she said, carefully.

‘Were you drinking?’ asked Tara. Her face had turned solemn.

‘And how would you know that?’ Georgie said.

‘I don’t know that. At least I didn’t.’

‘Ah no,’ said Georgie. ‘Lucky guess.’

‘I might have heard something,’ Tara conceded.

‘Have you heard, then, where I can find a dealer who’s not up to his bollocks in the same swamp I was just fucked out of?’

‘All right,’ said Tara. ‘I might know someone who’d suit. A young fella. We’re close, so he’ll look after you if I tell him to.’

This delivered with a sickening simper, an invitation to empathise that was ill-advised but unchecked; Tara was too pleased with herself. She might well take lovers from the criminal fraternity but rumour had it that she preferred younger men, and eyewitnesses suggested the effect intensified with every lay. Certainly she didn’t discriminate between genders when it came to extolling the benefits of sex work. Georgie had been on the game for six years and in that time she’d learned plenty about the stranger tastes men developed. She had theories: that sex was everywhere, and so what was once titillating was now everyday and so men required boosters personal to them. Or that the entitlement natural to purchase of service made them savage with unchecked lust. Or that they’d all been diddled by priests. Whatever the reason, she’d seen plenty outside the remit of the freakiest girlfriend, but even so, she couldn’t get her head around a young fella wanting to get close to Tara Duane, no matter how overpowering his MILF fantasies. The woman wore hunger like a second skin.

‘You know young fellas,’ Tara went on. ‘They can be so very keen.’

‘Yeah,’ Georgie said, weakly. ‘Take what you can get.’

‘What’s that mean?’

She was frowning. Georgie shook her head.

‘That came out wrong,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean you’d have to take what you were given, only, like, seizing opportunities or whatever.’

Tara relaxed. She gestured for Georgie’s mobile and entered a number.

‘Be gentle with him,’ she said. And though the joke begat a smirk, Georgie flinched, and felt unease swell and break from her belly to the hot points at the back of her ears and the fine tips of the hair on her arms.

See, people are afraid of dealers. Prostitutes are objectionable; you wouldn’t want them tottering in their knee-highs for trade on your street. But dealers? Oh no. Abject terror, then. Dealers have guns and vendettas. They might target your children and kick down your door.

Georgie couldn’t deny that there was some validity in that, though she wasn’t afraid of the merchants, not as a general breed. Some of them were too keen to get into other forms of capitalism and looked working girls up and down the way you would a horse at a town fair. They were obvious as landslides and a clever girl kept her distance. Most of them, though, were but a slightly sharper edge on pathetic. A lot of them stocked up only to feed their habits, and lost a little up their noses and into their veins with each transaction, buying their way into slavery.

The smart ones fell somewhere between both categories; their efforts at expansion stayed within the realms of pills and powder, and their noses remained intact. When Georgie had worked indoors, there hadn’t been a shortage of inlets for numbing substances, all but essential when you were fucked for a living. Otherwise it had been Robbie’s responsibility, and he had hooked into the same network in recent months. Breaking away from brothel employment didn’t mean that she was forbidden to tap her sources for coke, but there were within that network people that she never wanted to see again for the rest of her life.

Tara Duane’s own dealer was not the ideal. Georgie went down to the corner and asked a couple of the other girls for contacts, but the market they frequented was practically a monopoly, and every avenue led Georgie back to ground she’d walked before.

Eventually it came to an impasse, so she buried Tara’s smirk, and dialled.

‘Yeah?’

‘Hey. I got this number from a friend of yours. I’m looking for a bit; can you help?’

‘What friend?’

‘A girl named Tara.’

‘Tara who?’

Obviously this one had little regard for the lugs of the law. Georgie hesitated. ‘Tara Duane.’

‘Oh,’ he said. And there was a pause and then, ‘I dunno. Where are you?’

‘In town.’

‘Coz I’m not.’

‘I can go to you if needs be but “needs be” right now is a need-to-know,’ she said.

‘That’s fucking poetry,’ he said. ‘You’re lucky I’m stoned. All right. What is it you’re after?’

In the lull between placing her order and making the collection, she managed to turn over a couple of punters, one fearful and unfit and sweating like a pig because of both, the other after a blowjob which failed to cure his boredom. That gave her enough to pay for what she wanted from the merchant, but not enough to go home on. Provided he was a decent skin who wasn’t about to rip her off with ground up aspirin wrapped in tinfoil — and who knew what kind of person she was foisting upon herself on Tara Duane’s recommendation — she would at least get a bump before getting herself back out there. Maybe conjure the scapular from behind closed eyes, and hope she didn’t gush blood onto the client’s neck.

It’s stigmata, baby. I just blew my lord.

She didn’t see him at first. She got back to the end of quay and he was a little ways in behind a parked car, sitting on a bollard. He made her jump and she really hated that.

‘You Georgie?’ he said.

‘Jesus.’

‘Naw,’ he said. ‘Not even close. Ryan.’

He was sitting with his legs insolently stretched, but his shoulders were hunched and his hands deep into his pockets. He was feeling the cold. No wonder; he was wearing a school uniform, no jacket, just a thin maroon V-neck over a grey shirt it wouldn’t have become him to button up.

First it occurred to Tony Cusack that he needed to track down Robbie O’Donovan’s family and tell them that the poor divil was dead. Then it occurred to him that behaving anywhere approximating worthy would only land him in a hell of his own making. There’d be guards. The plaintive wailing of sisters and mothers. Above all there’d be Jimmy Phelan. Above all, looming like Godzilla, with a face on him like an old quarry.

Tony hadn’t had much regard for Robbie when he was alive, but then it was rare Tony attracted the kind of company that demanded or deserved it. Robbie used to drink in the same local. Another daytime guzzler, he’d come in with his betting slips and a Star folded under his arm and his mobile phone, and he’d sit at the bar, looking up at the telly, and down at his slips, and then to the paper and then to his phone. Not much of a conversationalist, even when steaming, but Tony had never been concerned with that. He knew of him more than he knew him, even with hours spent on parallel stools, drinking in sync in the afternoon hum.