The Glorious Heresies (17 page)

When he returned to the bedroom she was wearing her skirt and his Napoli jersey, rummaging through the bag of pick “n” mix.

“D'you think your dad would twig it if I had a shower?”

He lay on the bed and put an arm around her waist. “No. Yes. Maybe. Who cares?”

“I care.”

“I don't. It's none of his business.”

“Yeah I know, but…D'you wanna white mouse?”

“I've just brushed my teeth, remember?”

“All part of my diabolical plan.”

“Here, if you eat all the cola bottles I'll kill you.”

She chewed, and stuck a finger in her mouth to dislodge a jelly, and said, “Well? Was it OK?”

He sat up with her and she gave him a stern look, one more suited to
Did you just write with my eyeliner again?
than
Did you enjoy the act of oral pleasure, you selfless tongue champion?

“I loved it,” he said.

“Really, though?”

“Really. You have no idea. Did you like it?”

She made a face.

“I know you did,” he said. “I could taste it.”

“Oh my God, you're so disgusting.”

“Why is that disgusting?”

She made a big deal out of dismissing the question—clucking, rolling her eyes, giving him a playful slap—but she understood, she accepted it, she was fucking delighted.

She went off to have her shower and while he waited he opened the bedroom window and started on the joint. Beneath the clouds his estate lay still as the rain uncovered brilliant shades of green on the trees, and the ivy, and the weeds growing along the back wall.

She came back in with her hair in a towel turban and he handed her the joint. She took his place by the window and shivered dramatically, so he got one of his hoodies and she snuggled into it.

“That's tasty,” she said, exhaling.

“Yeah. It's handsome.”

“I can't believe he posted it to you.”

“Yeah. He's not such a bad guy, really.”

“And yet here you are…”

“You know what I mean, girl. I was shitting bricks. I thought he was going to kill me. And yeah, for a while he was pissy beyond, and I thought
That's it, boy, he is gonna batter you,
but he knows I'm not going to say anything and…Like, he trusts me not to blab and it's not even because I know he'd slaughter me otherwise.”

“Maybe he realises you wouldn't be in this mess if it wasn't for him?”

“But I probably would be, girl. I have two previous convictions and they were before I even met Dan.”

“Yeah, but…” She passed the joint back. “It was his coke. This is his mess. And you're the one in trouble for it.”

He shrugged.

“I don't know how you can be so OK with it, Ryan.”

“I'm not OK with it.”

“You are. And you don't seem to realise you don't have to be. Sometimes it really is someone else's fault.”

“It's how things go, is all. Risks and stuff. You make an educated guess as to whether you'll get away with something but at the end of the day it's just a guess. It got me out of the house for a year and it got me out from under my dad's feet, so it was worth it.”

“I don't mean to take that from you,” she said. “I know you had to get away from your dad. But this shouldn't be the price you pay.”

“It probably won't work out all that pricey.”

“What if it does, though? I mean, who gets a twenty-four-hour curfew? That's off the wall; you said so yourself.”

“I guess coz I wasn't living at home, they thought this was the best way of keeping tabs on me. If I had been living at home I'd probably have gotten your common-or-garden bail.
Turn up on April twenty-first for your hearing, sonny Jim. And no drugging while you're waiting.
”

She picked the joint from between his fingers.

“Well, it sucks,” she said.

“I know it sucks. Being here with him sucks. I mean, he's on the dry and he's trying not to be a prick but…I dunno. Too much water under the bridge. For both of us.”

“Oh my God, whatever about Dan, everything that happened with your dad is his fault only.”

“Is it, though?”

“Jesus! Yes!”

She handed back the last drag, and he turned to watch her return to the bed. She slid her legs under the duvet and pulled his hoodie across her chest.

He knocked out the joint on the sill outside and closed the window.

“Look, there's more to what went on between me and my dad than…”

“Abuse?”

“Don't say that.”

“Is there a better word or something?”

“Look,” he said. “I don't want to talk about my dad. Not now. Not after what we just did. Coz that was lovely and…amazing and…”

“Yeah well, I'm scared, Ryan.”

“What are you scared of?”

“Ah, the judge? The judge doesn't know you, like.”

“It'll be grand. Honestly. The solicitor said. I'm pleading guilty, I'm not going to break the curfew, I'm being good as gold. We tell the judge that, y'know, I did OK at school and that I'm looking into going back and stuff.”

She considered him. “Are you serious?”

“Why wouldn't I be?”

“You're gonna stop dealing.”

“If I tell the judge I'm going back to school, I'll have to go back to school, right?”

He slipped into bed beside her and she rested her head on his chest. Her towel turban scratched his cheek and flopped open on the pillow behind them.

“It'd mean more of this, though,” he whispered. “Me living here with my dad, me and you having to do it all stuffy-quiet in the middle of the day. The last year of freedom, it'd be gone.”

“It'd be worth it in the end, wouldn't it?”

She slid a hand underneath his T-shirt and thumbed the skin around his bellybutton.

“I like the idea of Ryan going back to school,” she said. “And Ryan going to university. And then Ryan getting a nice job and buying me lots of shoes.”

“Hey! Buy your own shoes.”

“I never said I wouldn't buy you shoes too. A pair of Cons for every day of the week.”

He stroked her shoulder, and she nestled in the crook of his arm.

“You think we'll still be together then?” she said.

“Told you that earlier, didn't I?”

“Really though?”

“Yeah. I can't imagine it any other way. If I had another joint right now I'd see the whole decade out before me and every minute would have you in it.”

“And what would we be doing?”

“The usual, I suppose. Buying a gaff. Getting married. Popping sprogs.”

“How many sprogs?”

“Dunno. Four or five?”

“Jesus, I hope you can buy them in Tesco by then or you're going to be very disappointed.”

“I won't be disappointed. There's no disappointment in it. It's all good. Every second of it.”

He raised his head. Her eyes were closed. He kissed her forehead, and stared up at the ceiling as she started dreaming, and he watched the world spread out in front of him, corner to corner, flush with colour and glowing like the sunrise.

Downstairs, there was a gentle knock on the front door, as if even the visitor was wary of interrupting them.

The next step was getting a job. It wasn't a step of his own design, but shaped by so many gloating well-wishers that Tony was stuck with it.

The woman at the Social was as helpful as he wanted her to be. He brought up youthful summers working on fishing boats, with pointed references to cutbacks at the Port of Cork. She passed him the details for a deli assistant position. He told her he had six children under eighteen and frying builders' rashers at 6:30 a.m. was a welcome impossibility. She recommended he try an internship. He asked her if she thought he was fucking crazy.

Springtime held another challenge when the Law, consistent as it was in its pointed cruelty, dropped Ryan back into his lap. Silly gosser had only gotten himself caught with enough cocaine on him to be done for possession with intent. Again.

He'd run from them. That was his undoing. The guards had stopped him on the street when he had a couple of baggies on him, and once he felt their questions were snowballing, he bolted.
Stupid thing to do,
Tony had groaned; the boy had responded tetchily that they would have searched him anyway, and so he had to chance flight. If one of the guards hadn't been a young mucksavage swift as he was zealous, he might well have gotten away with it.

The amount they'd caught him with wasn't enough to threaten him with gaol; he was small fry, and they were trying to squeeze names and dates out of him. Tony noted wryly that the last thing on God's green earth Ryan Cusack was likely to do was talk. The cops didn't know that. His capture had been a waste of their time and when they cottoned on to that there might well be hell to pay. Tony didn't mind that. A bit of intimidation might do the lad good. Maybe the guards would find, through spite, a way to bully him straight.

At the first hearing the judge had imposed a twenty-four hour curfew, remanding the kid in the custody of a father newly dry and squeaky clean. Between himself and Cian there wasn't room to swing a cat, but Ryan seemed content to shut himself off in his bedroom, black buds jammed in his ears and a laptop screen as his mask.

An effervescent liar from the phone company had sold Tony a broadband subscription, which had had the effect of lobotomising his three teenagers and giving him the cold comfort of meditative silence. Once a week Kelly commandeered the laptop and went through the jobs website with her father, and between them they figured out which posts were worth procuring rejection letters from. Sometimes he got an email back that thanked him for his efforts but denied the existence of suitable positions. When he was so blessed he showed them to his probation officer. The job hunt was going well.

April had come around in a vicious funk, summoning snowstorms in Dublin and floods in Fermoy. Tony ordered home heating oil earlier than he'd presumed he'd need to, and he'd handed over the fee before it had occurred to him that he'd done, without wheedling procrastination, something of equal import and expense. It was a fine thing to be sober, sometimes. It hadn't been pointed out in rehab:
When you're sober, you'll buy home heating oil when you actually need it and it'll feel like a fucking miracle.
It was the small things.

It was the big things that threatened him, though: the loss of routine and the awkward jettison of bad habits and old pals, the boredom, the claustrophobia. Small victories he stockpiled, and yet the barricade was flimsy and dangerously stunted. Sometimes he sat halfway up the stairs when the kids were in school and watched the world warp through the frosted sidelight of the front door. On occasion he rested his head against the wall that separated his territory from the grabby púca Duane's, and listened with dour intent as one would to penance given as the world outside splintered his front door and chipped away at the plaster. Even purer than that, sometimes: he really wanted a drink. The physical addiction had been dismantled, but the compulsion grew unchecked without its frame.
I want a drink,
he thought.
I want a drink.
He would grip the armrests on his living-room furniture as the longing threw a whirlwind around him.
Just one. Just one, for Jesus's sake. I want a fucking drink.

That's why they were so keen on jobs, the therapists and the probation officers and the mammies and the sisters. They kept telling him: a job to replace an addiction.

Cian brought the
Echo
home from school and Tony sat in the living room, in front of the telly, and went through the jobs page for opportunities for which he was underqualified. The kitchen, designated as a homework hub, shook with his squabbling brood. Young Karine had arrived over a couple of hours ago and made great haste to wall herself up with Ryan in the back bedroom, where, no doubt, they were getting into divilment, though he'd take that over Duane's insinuating guilt any day of the week.

Through a lull in the kitchen mayhem he caught the last taps of a half-hearted knock on his front door, and he rose. Too feeble for any of the kids' friends, and far too gentle a sound for anyone trying to flog a leather three-piece suite.

He opened the door to a young woman blatantly pregnant.

Without protection from the rain, her hair had sprung into a wiry halo; she clasped one hand to her forehead and squinted.

“Tony?”

“That's right.” He thought she might be a new caseworker. They had a habit of shapeshifting, though he'd never had one come to the door wearing her incompetence on her head before.

She was dressed in a denim jacket and some measure of patterned tent, befitting her fecundity if not the miserable weather.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I don't know how to say this but…Do you know Robbie O'Donovan?”

The name pushed past Tony and into his hall, wheeled around his head, clung to and coloured his walls.

“Who are you?” he asked. “Sorry, what's this about?”

“My name's Georgie,” she said. “I was told you knew Robbie O'Donovan. I'm sorry, this is…Do you think I could come in?”

“I don't know any Robbie O'Donovans,” he said.

“Maybe if you think back? He was my boyfriend, and he went missing a couple of years ago…Look, if I could come in? I'm pregnant, you see.”

“After a couple of years?”

“I'm tired. And it's raining. I'm really sorry to ambush you like this but I think maybe if I go through a few bits with you, you might remember him?”

“There's a lot of kids in the house.”

“I'm only six months gone,” she said. “I won't be adding to them.”

Behind him, the kitchen door opened and Niamh's dark head popped out to pry. Over his shoulder, he said, “Get back in there a minute.”

An offended tut from his nine-year-old busybody and the door was closed again.

Outside, the young woman stood, pained and wringing.

Tony moved aside and she accepted the invitation gratefully. He gestured towards the living room and she stepped in and sat at the edge of the sofa.

“D'you need a towel?” He nodded at her hair.

“Oh! That would be so great.”

He climbed the stairs and retrieved a towel from the hot press. The break didn't provide time enough to think.
Robbie O'Donovan—how do you know him?
Drinking buddy? Gambling buddy? You don't know him at all?
Jesus Christ, Cusack; pick one.

Who'd think he knew Robbie O'Donovan? Had the lass gone sniffing out bones in the pub they used to drink in? Had Maureen Phelan sent her?

His blood fizzed. The balls of his feet found dips in the carpet beneath him.

He'd given J.P.'s mother the gift of a name and she'd accepted it like a child accepts a mound of sweets and the promise of sticky hands. Had he thought, in the months of eerie silence that followed, that she'd forget his slip-up, or clutch it jealously? No. Sure why would she?

Stupid fucker, Tony. Stupid. Stupid.

He closed the hot press as the door next to it opened and his firstborn gawped out at him.

“Who's that, Dad?”

“Just someone looking for someone. It's nothing.”

“Looking for who?”

“No one, Ryan.”

Back in the living room the sodden visitor accepted the towel and attempted a smile. Tony stood by the fireplace and said, “Georgie who?”

“Fitzsimons. I don't think I've met you before.”

He shook his head. “You're looking for some ex-boyfriend?”

“Robbie O'Donovan. I know this sounds very strange. He disappeared just over two years ago now. I reported him missing at the time but the guards have had no luck. He was kinda hard to miss, though. He was around six foot two, red hair, really skinny.”

“I don't know anyone like that. Someone's after telling you I do, though.”

“Yeah, there's a girl that lives up around here, she said that you might be the man to ask. Her name is Tara. Tara Duane?”

Tony bit his cheeks and rubbed his palms off his thighs. Georgie turned the towel over and ran it through her hair again.

“She's my next-door neighbour.”

“Oh. I didn't know that.”

“Why the fuck would she tell you I'd know where your ex ran off to?”

The expletive hit hard. “I don't know…I met her in town the other day. She flagged me down and said if I was still in the dark as to where Robbie went that you might know.”

“She flagged you down?”

“Yeah…”

“I don't get along with her. Suppose she neglected to mention that. She's trying to drop me into something. She's a vindictive bitch.”

Georgie clutched the towel.

“Drop you into something? No, she just said you were a mate of his, and I thought maybe…”

Too late, Tony found the meagre details in the girl's few statements and concluded she had little reason to be suspicious before he'd opened his mouth. He sagged and the mantelshelf pushed into his lower back.

“Look,” stammered Georgie. “I'm not usually in the habit of annoying strangers over something as dodgy as one of Tara Duane's notions. I wouldn't have come up here, not in a fit, but it wasn't like Robbie to run off. If I told you half of it you wouldn't believe a quarter—”

“Listen, girl, I don't know any fella called Robbie O'Donovan. I'm sorry but there you go. I do know a woman called Tara Duane and I've had my run-ins with her. I'm thinking maybe she's stitched you up to stitch me up or something but I had nothing to do with your fella going walkabout. I've enough of me own problems!”

“I just want to know where he is,” she whimpered. “I would have been grand but only a few days ago this started up again. Someone told me he was dead…”

“Duane?”

“No, not Tara. Meeting Tara was a coincidence…”

Tony thumped his fist on the mantel. Coincidences followed Duane like rats after the piper. Once he tore through the conspiracy he'd tear through her, consequences or no consequences.

“Well ask whoever told you, then!” he barked.

“I can't. You don't understand…” Georgie's countenance had changed; her chin was quivering. “I can't bring it up with them again, I can't go to the guards…Tara just told me you knew Robbie. I really didn't think I'd be upsetting you like this, or I'd never have come here…Oh God!”

“Here,” Tony said, desperate as the tears intensified and the hubbub from the kitchen died down. “I feel for you, girl, don't get me wrong, but I don't know the fella you're on about, and I've a house full of kids and a working pair of ears on all of them. You're going to have to take this up with Duane.”

The girl wiped her cheeks with the flat of her hand. She was short and raven-haired, pudgy around the cheeks, and, it seemed, in the process of completely losing it right there on his couch. Tony endeavoured to make sense of her fit. Tara Duane's name rose a fog in him. He sank into the armchair across from the crying woman and blinked.

How the fuck would Tara Duane know he had anything to do with Robbie O'Donovan? How the fuck, how the fuck…He found himself mirroring Georgie's actions, pinching the corners of his eyes, running his hands over his head.