The Glorious Heresies (22 page)

“I had nothing to do with that, Tony, I swear.”

“If you had nothing to do with it, Duane, then why was the girl so sure that you did? Where'd she get your name? She string it out of her arse? Must be the same place she got my son's name when she was looking for a bit of dope, isn't that right?”

“I resent that. All I told Georgie, who I've known for
years,
was that you may have seen her boyfriend before he went missing. He was a drinker.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“You know,” she said, lowering her voice, “like yourself.”

“The day,” he said, “that I take lifestyle pointers from you…” He shook his head and dug his fingernails into his palms. “You stay away from me, Duane. I don't know what you've done or said to that poor girl but I'm sticking to what J.P. tells me and he can deal with you.”

“How are you so cosy with J.P. anyway?” she said.

“None of your fucking business.”

“Because if you had nothing to hide you wouldn't have involved him, would you? I tell Georgie that you knew her boyfriend and the next thing I know Jimmy Phelan is at my door looking for Georgie's address. Why is that, Tony?”

He exhaled.

Shit,
he thought.
Fuck. Fuck shit fuck.

The therapist down at Solidarity House once said, in a moment of rare candour, that the problem with functioning on even low, steady levels of alcohol was that it makes you thick as shit. For J.P. to have dealt with Duane as he'd said he did would have meant explaining to the bitch that namedropping Tony Cusack in conversation with the dead man's ex-girlfriend was inadvisable. Therefore, that there was a real connection between Tony Cusack and the dead man, forged in steel by J.P.'s insistence that Duane forget all about it. To have missed that could only be attributed to the Demon. Ta-dah. A couple in the morning and three afternoon cans made him thick as fucking shit.

Same as thinking about the night his wife's drunken stubbornness killed her off on the day their firstborn gets out of juvenile detention. Same as getting involved at all with Phelan, who he'd run with as a kid, for fuck's sake, who'd dragged him as a grown-up into murder after murder and Jesus, what was Tony Cusack, only a grown-up with the cop on of a twelve-year-old?

He tried to exude menace but his voice came out croaking.

“You need to stop talking, Tara.”

“I see. The shady bully thinks I'm not good enough to be his ally.”

“Get fucked.” How he wished he hadn't said that.
Get fucked,
as she stripped off in front of his kid and worked at him till he was able for her bony thighs to straddle his. Now he jabbed both elbows backwards, on the chance that it might maim the bitch; it fucking didn't.

“I've hit a nerve,” she marvelled. “Call Tony Cusack a lot of things, but don't call him a bully, even when the evidence stacks. Even when he's running around after Jimmy Phelan.”

She grabbed his wrist and dragged back, and he whirled around, fist in the air and ready, so close to it he could feel the air thicken between his fist and her head.

“Or running to him!” she gasped. “Setting him on me. Is that because when Georgie got up here she said Robbie was dead? Is he dead? That's it, isn't it, Tony? Robbie O'Donovan's dead. Don't worry; I'm not going to tell. Why would I drop you in it on the day Ryan's home from prison?”

“You don't fucking mention my son!”

“Kelly just texted Melinda and said he was coming home—that's why I thought now would be the time to make peace.”

“Stay the fuck away from him.”

“It's funny, you kill someone and he goes to gaol.”

She dropped his wrist and put her face in her hands. Beneath the tresses, underneath her fingers, from the utter depths she made a gurgling sound that could have been laughter or tears or some mad chant. Tony jumped away and she came to again, smiled and said, “Don't worry, Tony. J.P. asked me to track down the girl. See, I'm just as close to J.P. as you are. We're on the same team, for God's sake.”

What did he expect? That he wouldn't need a drink?

He arrived down at twenty past and ducked into the pub across from Kent station for a pint of Guinness—medicinal, respectable—and a short, straight Jameson.

He took a seat by the window and when the traffic in and out of the station evened he asked the barman to watch his pint and jogged across the road.

There had been one open visit, one opportunity to hold his son in nine months, and that had passed with a kind of apologetic awkwardness, the boy taciturn perhaps because of the screw sitting there all eyes and ears, or maybe because he'd decided, in the long hours of lockdown, to try holding a grudge for a change.

So it had been a while. And there was no guarantee that there would be any contact now, awkward or otherwise, with all that had gone between them, with the courtroom betrayal, and the drink, and the fact that he'd grown way up and all behind Tony's back…

He was standing at the door of the station with his bag on the ground beside him, wearing his court date clothes. Tony saw it now: the courtroom, the polished wood of the row ahead that he'd gripped when the judge had called him to speak, the black and white checked shirt…Funny how you forget shit, even when it's something like that, even when it involves your own baby.

Ryan tried a smile when he spotted his father, in fairness to him.

Tony pulled the hooded jacket out from under his coat and held it out.

“Thanks, Dad.”

“No bother. How are you, boy?”

A shrug.

“How was the…” Tony started, and then, by dint of that shot of whiskey, broke off and found a lump in his throat and reached out and pulled his son into an embrace, caught the back of his neck and pressed his head onto his shoulder and held on until he felt him exhale, until the rigidity across his back and down his arms melted into brief, beautiful amnesty.

He held Ryan then at arm's length, gritted his teeth and said, “You've grown again, I'd swear.”

The boy smiled in bitter defeat. He looked over his father's shoulder and said, “You've been drinking.”

“Only a splash. Only coz you're home. It's a celebration, isn't it? I've a pint sitting across the road; come on over, I'll get you one. Bet you were mad for one, weren't you?”

“But you're not supposed to be. I thought.”

Tony swung into step beside his son, one arm around his shoulder, and said, “It's all under control now, though. No difference anymore between me and the next man,” and they walked together towards the entrance, back in the direction of his pint, towards an interlude in which Tony swore there'd be no thinking about J.P., none at all about Duane, not while this harmony lasted.

Joseph wants to cart me over to his gaff the night I come home and I'm all for it, because my dad's half cut and it's weird to see him like that after he's been dry so long. In fairness, I'm half cut too. Two pints and my knees are going like the Shaky Bridge. We leave my dad nodding in the blue glow of the telly and we swing by the bottom of Karine's road to pick her up.

I get out of the car when I see her approaching.

Nine months. She's more beautiful than she was when I left her. She's in college now so maybe that's it. She's eighteen. She's a grown-up. I dunno, she's just delicious. And I get weirdly shy, and it's as if we have to start all over again because I feel like a stranger in front of her.

“Hey girl.”

She slams into me and puts her arms around my neck and presses her head against my shoulder. I put my arms around her waist and fold over enough to bury my head against her neck, and after a few minutes she pulls away and looks up at me, and places a silk soft hand either side of my face and I kiss her, and she opens her mouth to me, and I'm so relieved I think I could cry.

“You can breathe now,” she whispers.

We go back to Joseph's. He's only just broken up with his ould doll, so the house is kind of scanty. He's got some grass and a box of Corona in the fridge. I sit on the couch, and Karine sits beside me with her legs over mine, and we listen to him blether on about his new band, and how my god-daughter's doing, and what's been on telly, and what albums have been out and on and on and on and you'd think I'd be bored off my nut but you'd be wrong. Spend nine months inside and you come out just starved for your mates, for the banter.

For your girlfriend.

It's kind of coming up to it and I don't know what to do.

In the end Joseph very mildly says he's going to hit the hay and that if we want to stay over that's grand, there's a duvet on the bed in the second bedroom.

I go all shy again. We kind of hang around for fifteen minutes after Joseph goes to bed, talking around it, and then I say, “D'you want to stay here, like?” and she shrugs; she's shy too. So I take her hand and lead her up to the second bedroom and we sit on the bed.

There's nothing in the way of mood lighting up here; there's the overhead or the dim glow of the city outside the curtains. I move against her until she lies back and she hooks her hands around my neck and brings me with her. The bulb's like a million watts and the room is practically bare. It's not too far off a cell, I guess.

So we do it, eventually. It takes ages because we're both kind of waiting to see where the other leads; I only want to do what she seems to want me to do, and she's very quiet and very timid, and so we get undressed in fits and starts, and I've still got my jeans on when we get under the covers. All the way through I'm thinking she'll stop me and tell me she doesn't want this now that I've done time; I'm so scared I'm fingering her like I'm trying to pull a hair out of a bowl of soup.

And it's the strangest thing. Like it's probably the worst fuck we ever had because we're both so anxious, but at the same time it's the best feeling in the world, better than the first time even. Despite the pure awkwardness she's so wet I slide right in and pretty much come straight away. It's a mixture of having a nine-month horn and being overwhelmed with relief. She doesn't mind.

Once I've come it's immediately better. Like there's a weight off. She snuggles onto my chest and doesn't ask for tissue or a T-shirt or anything. I get used to the air in my lungs and she talks to me till I'm ready to go again.

Dan Kane might as well have carried him out of the prison on his shoulders. The day after he'd come home, Ryan had contacted him, nervous as fuck, really, coz the man might have thought he was tainted or something now, who knew? But Dan had been even more pleased to see him than his father was, and that was saying something. It was nice to get a welcome home. Blew Ryan's mind, if he was honest.

On the second night of freedom Dan brought him out to dinner. It seemed a rather formal gesture, the mere notion of it pompous and off-putting, but once they were there it was grand. Dan had lumped for a bistro filled with large, loud groups. There was nothing out of place about the pair of them. Ryan wore a T-shirt and a new pair of jeans. He had grown, only an inch or so, but enough to air his ankles in his pre-prison clothes. Funny really; he would have sworn he'd shrunk in there, hunched down to maybe half the size he should have been, homunculus to his own sentence.

Dan said, “Order anything you want, boy. Order the fucking lot if you like.”

Ryan grinned and Dan said, “I mean that. You did nine months for me, little man.”

“What else was I gonna do, boy?”

“Lot of things you could have done and didn't; you're a fucking lion, d'you know that? Do you drink red? I'm getting a bottle. Have the steak, for fuck's sake.”

Ryan ordered lasagne and went through it like a chainsaw through chopsticks. He'd been ravenous since he'd left Saint Pat's. When Fiona had collected him she'd brought him for a Big Mac and a milkshake, which he'd been hanging for all week. When he arrived home, he'd had a couple of pints with his father that left him vexingly woozy, eaten three Tayto sandwiches and a jar of pesto, washed that down with a bottle of Coke and then almost gawked the lot out the back door. Hunger had been one prison universal; he ate everything he was given, but there was never enough. He'd thought the liberty to make a pig of himself might take some getting used to. He was wrong. Wrong and famished.

“Yeah, yeah, put it away,” said Dan. “You'll hit my age and suddenly everything over a ham sandwich will give you a paunch.”

Ryan sat back and rubbed his belly.

“It's the odd time I remember you're only a cub,” smirked Dan.

“It's just nice to get a bit of decent grub, is all.”

Dan leaned back, arms folded, and smiled.

“So,” he said. “How bad was it?”

Around them the hubbub continued. Birthday shout-outs slapped the air; cakes went past, sparkling; girls tugging at ambitious hemlines trooped to the toilet in twos and threes; ould fellas, their faces wrinkled with mirth, howled.

“Worse than I thought it'd be,” Ryan said. “And I thought it was gonna be hell.”

He hadn't said this to his father when he'd been asked. He'd said,
It was grand, Dad,
or
It was doable, like, you keep your head down.
Joseph, on the doorstep as soon as Ryan had crossed it, had pried but Ryan had pleaded with him to change the subject; he wasn't ready for stories, his thoughts were fucked as far as the rafters.

“I was there myself,” said Dan. “Just before the millennium. I did three months for nicking a car. It was shit then; I can't imagine it's changed much since the nineties.”

“I don't think it's changed since the 1890s.”

“So what was so bad? The other fellas? The screws? The boredom?”

“Everything. The whole fucking lot.”

The screws had placed him first night in one of the committal cells. He'd stood waiting for the sound of the door slamming shut behind him, expecting some significant, gut-wrenching crash. It was quieter than he'd predicted and then he stood wondering if that was it, and if he shouldn't holler out at them to do it again, because he hadn't felt it hard enough the first time. He didn't cop right away but realised eventually that he was playing out the echo in his head. The door shut behind him. And shut behind him again. It looped and looped and he was sitting on the bed staring at the wall with his hands in his pockets, retching with the bleak and absolute scale of it.

The screw who processed him in the morning had asked, “Did you phone home?”

Ryan hadn't been given the option.

“You could have,” the screw had shrugged. “You probably should have. Called your mam at least.”

The seventeen-year-olds had been kept separate from the older lads and the screw had said he was lucky. There were only twenty-one other seventeen-year-olds in there with him. No overcrowding in their wing, separate facilities, spoiled little bastards.

The first month they'd had him on lockdown for, they said, his own protection. He was only a couple of days clear of that when one of the Dubs had volunteered to cut his throat. Ryan had told him to just fucking try it. Back on lockdown. Three months in, and back on the wing, he'd realised that he'd done only a third of his time, and the enormity had crushed him. You didn't tell them if you were feeling in any way down, whether it was because you'd stubbed your toe or wanted to hang yourself—you just fucking didn't, not in a fit, you kept your mouth shut because you knew what was waiting for you otherwise. One morning had come around when he just couldn't get out of bed. The screws had pulled him out, dragged him to the observation cell, stripped him and left him there.

How do you tell your dad something like that?

The other prisoners were cretinous or vicious or in most cases, both. When he was on the wing he hung around with a couple of lads from Waterford. One of them was due to hit eighteen and would be transferred down to Cork, and Ryan assumed he was looking for influence to bring in there with him; Ryan being banged up for possession with intent was, yer manno hoped, a bankable connection. Ryan had little time for either of them, and less time for the Dublin jackeens, and though Dan had various connections in the capital he didn't wish to find where to plant an affiliation. The Dubs spent most of the time throwing shapes and attempting to kill one another. Ryan was too busy gasping for air to want in on that.

Now, back in the real world, Dan said, “It's no joke, I know that.”

“It's grand.”

“We both know it's not. Shit like that you don't forget in a hurry. That's a burden you carried for me.”

“Well look…It's over now.”

Dan grimaced. “Hard to say this to you now, Ryan, but it's not over until you get your head around it. It stays with you. You'll think of it when you're meant to be doing anything but thinking of it. That's what the system's for—to break you down. And it works. Believe me.”

A girl, maybe Ryan's age, maybe a bit older, came in from the smoking area. She was wearing a royal-blue dress that wrapped around her fleshy thighs and barely covered her arse. She smiled at him, and he felt an urge to jump up, follow that smile to the back of the restaurant and convince her to cross her ankles behind his waist. He supposed if you've been surrounded by nothing but smelly, dopey fellas for nine months it whet your appetite for the ould dolls.

“I'm just glad to be home,” he told Dan, who leaned forward.

“I'm just saying to you, little man, the methods they use inside are designed to control you even after you get out. They want to fuck you. They want to fuck you so hard you forget what it was like to live without a cock up your arse. Don't let them take your autonomy from you. Don't bury Pat's. Because this won't be the last time the Law will look to lube you up and remembering how they work is the first step to fighting them off.”

He sat back again, sucked his teeth and sighed.

“This is only the start of it, little man.”

Joseph had broken up with his girlfriend and she'd gone home to her mam and dad with their baby daughter and left him in need of a housemate. On Dan's promise of more lucrative employment, Ryan volunteered, so only a week after coming home he was out of there again, hobo's kerchief and all.

Tony went over for an ineffectual root around.

“I didn't think you'd leave again so soon,” he mumbled and Ryan, halfway in behind the television with the Xbox cable bunched in his fist, matched the wounded tone and said, “I'm eighteen, Dad.”

“Not for a couple of months you're not.”

Ryan came out from behind the telly and concentrated on pointing the remote at the screen.

“So much shit you don't know yet,” Tony said.

“So much shit I do, as well. I've been to prison for fuck's sake.”

“You were too young for that, too.”

Ryan could have turned to face his father. What harm? Accept the hint and stare him down. Instead he put the remote on the couch and hunted around for something that wasn't there.

“You're still only a kid.”

“I'm not.”

“You should be at home.”

Ryan pulled out the couch and looked behind it.

“I don't want to see you making any more stupid mistakes, Rocky.”

Ryan sank to his haunches and rested his head against the back of the couch, giving himself the chance to exhale, to close his fists, to screw up his eyes.

Are you going back to school, boy?

Ryan wasn't. Not in twenty fits. Where would he be going at almost eighteen? Back into another fucking uniform to sit under the gaze of another fucking moron who knew nothing about anything? It was all bollocks anyway. They'd said he could do school in St. Pat's and there was nothing even like a fucking school up there: arts and fucking crafts and fucking cooking, what good was that to anyone? He'd learned more sitting on his arse staring at the four walls. Some of the lads he'd been in with couldn't count to twenty without taking off their socks. Learning? No fucking learning in there, unless you were learning how to watch your back or how to get out of a fucking headlock.

So if he went back to school now, at almost eighteen, back into fifth year with all the sixteen-year-olds as his girlfriend danced through university, yeah, well, he'd find himself on the scrapheap before long, wouldn't he?

Oh Karine, where's your boyfriend tonight?

He couldn't come out, girl, he had homework to do.

Not a fucking hope. If he was old enough to throw in a padded cell, he was old enough to make his own way.

What could they teach him anyway? The country was fucked. If he took the straight decision it would be between the airport or the dole queue.

What hadn't they fucking taught him already? How to be fucking blind and deaf, how to apply the rules that suited them, how to deal with awkward problems: lock them the fuck away.
Oh, having trouble with your dad, Ryan? Having trouble with this jackeen scrote? Having trouble with your fucking brain, tangled up in thoughts that your girlfriend, the one fucking good thing in this whole fucking world, is out there finding a better man to fuck? Ah, we have solutions for you, boy.
Clang. Another fucking door locks behind you.

Fuck the lot of them.

Dan Kane's main man was nicknamed Shakespeare, because he was as verbose a thug as you could find. His real name was Shane O'Sullivan, though it had taken Ryan two and a half years of dealing with him to figure that out. He was absurdly wiry for an enforcer; his success stemmed from the fact that there was barely enough of him to punch back. Ryan had heard it intimated that Dan Kane kept him in a spaghetti jar.

The first time Ryan had met him, it was because the order he'd placed with his usual contact was too big to proceed without notice. Shakespeare had come to investigate. Ryan was fourteen, pre-Karine, quick-tempered and unafraid to pay the price for it. Shakespeare hadn't looked very amused but had apparently reported back that the whole thing was quite the hoot. Kane hadn't been looking for a protégé but the opportunity to take one had tickled him too much to turn down.

And of course there were parallels. Dan Kane had had a shit time with his own father. Dan Kane had been to St. Pat's.