The Glorious Heresies (20 page)

“Let's go fishing,” he said.

Cusack phoned him up two days after.

“She's home,” he said.

“Since when?”

“I dunno. The last half hour or so. I didn't see her come back but I can hear her moving around in there.”

Like a rat in the walls. Jimmy went straight over. He parked at the bottom of Cusack's driveway, blocking him in for the divilment of it, and hopped the wall to Duane's front door, where he knocked with polite restraint and waited, one hand resting on the sidelight.

Her bottom lip started quivering as soon as she opened. Her hair was arranged in two childish plaits hanging over her shoulders; he reached out and tugged one, and said, “What's wrong, Tara; aren't you pleased to see me?”

“I'm only just home,” she said. “What, I don't even get an hour's peace?”

He stepped in and she stepped back.

“How was your holiday, Tara?”

“I was only in Dublin,” she said. “Visiting my sister. She's not well.”

“Is she not? Ah, Jesus, that's awful.”

He closed the door behind him and she said, “I don't even have milk in the house or anything.”

“It's OK. I'm not after tea.”

“Well what do you want, then?”

“Oh, just to follow up on the last time I saw you. Remember? I asked whether you knew of a fella called Robbie O'Donovan.”

She held on to the banister and pursed her lips. “Yeah. You said he was a buddy of Tony Cusack's.”

“Did I?”

“Yeah. And like I told you, he's on the missing list, so I—”

“You told his girlfriend and now the whore's been up here nosing around. Did I fucking ask you to befriend his fucking next-of-kin, did I?
Tara, will you ever go and tell Robbie O'Donovan's ould doll that Tony Cusack knows where he is.
Did I say that at any stage, did I? Did you hear me do it?”

“You didn't tell me I wasn't to say anything about it!”

“Well fuck me, I didn't think I'd have to spell out to you that you weren't to give the floozie the idea O'Donovan was dead!”

“He's dead?”

“The only person who seems to know for sure is the fucking call-girl, and you're the only one who's been talking to her.”

“I didn't tell her he was dead!”

“Well, how'd she get the idea then?”

“Maybe because he looks the sort?”

“He looks the sort to die?”

“He looks like a junkie! Junkies die! Junkies die all the fucking time! I didn't make him overdose; it's not my fault!”

He reached for her, but she ducked and dashed into her kitchen, where she avoided his second grasp by swinging a chair between them and then diving under the table, to which he could only stand and laugh.

“Come out from under the table, Tara.”

She was bawling. “Leave me alone! Leave me alone!”

“Do you really think I can't get in there after you?”

“I tried to help you! It's not my fault you didn't make clear it was a huge big secret!”

“It is your fault, Tara. You're a fucking cretin.”

“I have a daughter!” she shrieked.

“What is it with assholes trying to hide behind their offspring when they think they're getting a clatter?”

He sank to his haunches and made a grab for her, and she batted his hand away and cried out.

“Jesus Christ, it really is like trying to catch rats in the walls.”

He grabbed again and managed to catch one of her plaits, and he pulled her across the floor as she kicked out behind her. She ended up faceplanting in front of her fridge; he stood over her and pulled her upright, and she whined and spat like a small child throwing down in the biscuit aisle.

“Why is it so far past your grasp, Tara, that you shouldn't be sticking your nose where it isn't wanted?” he growled. “Why are you so fucking dense that in asking you a simple question I run the risk of you summoning apocalyptic shit-storms?”

“How was I to know?” she gasped.

“Well you can forget you knew, or I'll have more than words to batter you with next time. But before you scrub your broken brain clean, tell me where I can find this whore who's so desperate to tell the city her boyfriend's dead.”

“I don't know where Georgie is! She's not around anymore. I was shocked to run into her.”

“If anyone can track the drifting bitch, it's you. You like to suckle the lifeless, don't you?”

He let her go.

“Find the whore,” he told her. “Get an address and deliver it straight to me. Don't talk to the whore and don't talk to Cusack. Don't even talk to your fucking self if you can manage it. Does that make sense?”

“I was only trying to help,” she cried. The lasso plait had come loose into a soft kink. Her face burned red with the exertion of playing wounded.

“Sure that's you all over, Tara. Only trying to help when you stir up shit that didn't need stirring. Only trying to help when you herd the whores. Only trying to help, I bet, when you stuck your rickety claws down the front of Tony Cusack's young fella's jocks. Is he the one in prison? I assume so.”

“In prison? What?”

“Didn't he tell you he was going away, Tara? Did he not put your name down on the visitor's scroll so you could go press your tits against the Plexiglas for him every fortnight?”

“You're not funny,” she said.

“Fucking remember that,” he replied. “I'm not.”

There was a piano recital that evening. Deirdre had phoned him twice to ensure he didn't forget, and so he showed up in the stuffy auditorium of the old community hall and sat with Deirdre and smiled encouragingly at Ellie as she spread her fingers and plodded over the keys. Ellie looked worse than her exertions sounded. She frowned all the way through the piece and then turned and faced her audience like she'd been instructed to do so by a voice in her head which intended later to encourage her to burn down an orphanage.

And how they clapped, those munificent blenchers, tucked into their bitter rows, thinking about
EastEnders
or the match or the tubby lovers whose grunts they were missing to cosset the egos of their neighbours' dumplings. They clapped like their escape depended on the rhythm. Swollen with forged pride, they jostled each other and muttered in empty approval as one bored child after another took to the stage to play out their dues. The smell was intolerable; perspiration, ancient stage curtains, slippery arse cheeks, perfume.

Jimmy Phelan was not at home in such a crowd, but who was? Some of their number looked more comfortable than others—the women, mostly, whose painted smiles hid well their boredom—but they were not happy to be here. There was no camaraderie, no real regard. Jimmy's parents had enjoyed a sense of community. The city was a smaller place then, and the people's expectations matched. Now the world had burst its banks and no one had anything in common with anyone anymore.

All day he'd had that anxiety festering again at the back of his skull: that his mother's streak of madness took him out of the society he'd built, that the lads he turned the clock with would catch wind of his genetic defects and abandon him, betray him, give tribute to a new chief. They were not tied to his character, only to the qualities they found use for.

He would give Tara Duane a chance to quietly find the whore. But he thought he'd have to make it all disappear then: the whore, Duane, and Cusack too, whether or not he wanted to.

When Maureen was small, they said she liked to toy with things. That she enjoyed making babies of dogs, people of woodlice, pets of dying birds. That things existed for her amusement, whether they were lacquered wood or flesh around a beating heart.

Maureen's mother had been brainwashed beautifully. There had never been a question of Una Phelan choosing her gender over her church. Her own daughters she saw as treacherous vixens. Puberty marked their descent. She hated the hair under their arms, their sloping waists, the blood that confirmed they were ready for sin.

Una's parents lived just up the hill from the Industrial School and Laundry, where, she told her daughters, all the bad girls went. She seemed both deathly afraid of the place and satisfied it was there at all, in the same way she was full sure of Hell and content that it wasn't for the likes of her. She announced that the Laundry's inmates would therein learn the humility they were sorely lacking. Every girl with a fashionable hemline, every girl who had notions about herself, was fit for nowhere but
behind the high walls.
Boys she had less of a problem with; they were dumb creatures whose animal whims were to be carefully managed.

Maureen was the middle child of seven; despite her efforts, Una's management of her husband's impulses hadn't followed her austere ideal.

Una Phelan was comfortable in a dying Ireland. For her there was no authority but the Holy Trinity: the priests, the nuns and the neighbours. Hers was the first generation of the new Republic, the crowd hand-reared on Dev and Archbishop McQuaid, the genuflectors.

When Maureen figured out that not only was she pregnant, but pregnant and abandoned by a coward, it was both horrifying and perversely freeing. She considered her options: the stairs, the coat hanger, the boiling baths. It didn't take her long to reject them. There was something to be said for fulfilling the destiny her mother had kept harping on about.

So she flounced into the kitchen and announced her misdeed with the bravado of scientific detachment. She watched the colour drain from her parents' cheeks, and the emotions that betrayed their humanity cross their faces like clouds on an October sky. She was nineteen but they were still the authority; she prepared for their punishment with frosty curiosity. One thing she knew: she wasn't doing her penance up to her elbows in soap and steam in the Laundry. She would have killed them both first.

She had brought the devil into the family home and so all Hell broke loose.
Behind the high walls
seemed her mother's preferred choice, but in the 1970s the tide was turning. Giving up a daughter to appease sour-faced nuns no longer seemed the only thing to do, and the third leaf of Una's Holy Trinity was beginning to wilt and fall. A second cousin was found in Dublin willing to take in the slattern.

James Dominic Phelan was born in Holles Street and clutched to his mother's breast “like a doll,” according to the scowling grandmother, while the grown-ups debated what to do with him. In the end they decided the shame of raising him themselves was the lesser shame. He was taken from Maureen, whose childish wont would otherwise have been to make a plaything of him, and this was no time for games. He was installed as the baby, twelve years younger than his youngest uncle, and Maureen was sent to a hastily procured position in a London office.

She started three weeks after giving birth.

“No toys there,” Una announced, triumphantly. She was wrong. There were plenty of things to toy with in London, but the joy had been taken right out of it.

Ten minutes walk from her front door and she was at the entrance to the old Laundry. If there was someone at the gate lodge, or the newer building near the entrance, they didn't bother her. She walked up the path. Overgrown now, the city reclaiming its darker monuments.

There were cracked stone steps leading up to the building, but the building itself was only a shell, the red brick, the arches, the iron crosses on its towers, all stained and falling down. She walked a little way along the front of the place, and spotted the space behind the facade; it had been gutted.

Statues everywhere. Some of them defaced. Here was a shepherd with a twirling black moustache, a lichened maiden with an alien name daubed on her robes. They stood in silent guard, oblivious to the unchecked march of the branches, grasses and fronds. Oblivious to Maureen. Relics of the past, swallowed by a world expanding.

Christ, it was silent. Maureen stood, her back to the barren brick, and looked out towards the river.

There were plenty of other Irish exiles in London back in the 1970s. Maureen had met her share; they rushed together like droplets of mercury. She'd known a number of women who'd spent their girlhoods in places like this, two who had been right here. Both had had baby boys. One of them had reared hers until he was twenty-one months old. The nuns had come in one day and informed her that he was being adopted, and that was it; she said her goodbyes and never saw him again. The other had only had five months with hers before he was taken away at an hour's notice; she had sat on her cot, she told Maureen, her breasts still heavy with milk, clawing at her face, rocking, sure now that this was the end, that she'd never be out of the place. There was talk of surrendering her to the asylum, but the action was abandoned when she came to her senses and her elbow grease became profitable again. Born only around the corner, Una Phelan was damn glad of the nuns' service.

To think of the babies, when they grew old enough to wonder! James Phelan had been told with dignity stiff and cold that Maureen-in-London was his real mother, and that he should think no more of it, but still he'd come after her once Una had given up her grip on the world and expired in her marital bed for an audience of effeminate printed Jesuses. So many other boys and girls grew up with similar gaps in their histories. Maureen had read about it in recent years, once the tabloids had tested the value of Magdalene anguish. Hordes of Irish children—American, too; the exported generation—digging through Catholic detritus to find out who they were. Their searches were, more often than not, fruitless. Natural mothers had died, returned unto dust by the chemicals in the laundries. Documentation had been scant and useless. Women who'd moved on refused to remember and denied their flesh and blood their closure. Sometimes the mothers had just disappeared, as their country had designed.

In the shadow of the landmark, Maureen Phelan picked her way through thickets and thorns, enduring memories, even the ones that were not hers.

When she rounded the corner at the end of the building there was a man sitting in the grass, more interested in the weight of his bottle than he was in the walls before him. He spotted her but seemed indifferent, but as she approached he brought the bottle to his lips testily.

He was a vagrant, much younger than her, though his beard hid it well. He wore jeans and scuffed boots and was sitting on a pair of waterproofs. His baseball hat displayed the name of a Florida golf club; underneath its peak he scowled.

“D'you want something?” he said. He wasn't American.

“What do you know about this place?” she asked.

“What? G'way with you.”

“Just how you can sit here getting merry and looking up at that ruin. Admirable.”

“Do I look merry?” he said.

“No. I assumed you were giving it a lash, though.”

“Fuck off.”

“I'm about to. I didn't come up here to talk to you, sunshine.”

“Grand, so…” His wit failed him. He took another drink. “Jog on.”

“D'you know this place used to be a Magdalene Laundry?”

“ 'Course I did.”

“D'you know what happened to it?”

He considered the bottle, then frowned at her. “It burned down. Twice.”

“Twice?”

“Grudges everywhere, up here,” he said. “One for every brick.”

“Is it possible to get in?”

“Missus, the grudges stuck because it's impossible to get out. Why the fuck would you want to get in?”

“To set another fire,” she said.

He smiled. He was missing a tooth on the top, right in the middle. “You don't look like a woman who'd set fires, in fairness.” He raised the bottle again, and stared at her between the peak of his cap and the slope of the glass. When he'd finished, he said, “Are you one of them?”

She looked back up at the crumbling brick. “No.”

“So you're not going to set any fires, then.”

She grimaced.

“Me neither,” he said. “There's not much left of it to burn. Still, though. Nothing as cleansing as a fire. This heap turned the air black but d'you know what? Everyone felt cleaner after it.”

“That so?”

“That's the job, I'm telling you.”

She found a tenner and gave it to him and he thanked her for not fucking off sooner. And even knowing he was there watching the walls for her, she felt uneasy walking away, like the heat of a pointed stare was burning up her shoulders, like the bitterness soldered to the past and to the ground the past was built on had touched her, and marked her. There were places this city wanted no one to tread.