The Glorious Heresies (25 page)

What she was about to do frightened her. She walked through the mist, the knapsack dragging on her shoulders and her dress hanging limp, and considered running away blindly, or going to the Gardaí with her hazy lead or even jumping off a bridge and into the river, where the water might make a balloon from her skirt and take her out to sea. Her feet pushed her forward. From the mist before her loomed the footbridge. She walked over it, tracing her fingers against the steel, and stopped halfway to stare downriver at the choking white and the city that rose from the murk in blocks and sharp angles. She could clamber onto the parapet and no one would see her. She could flutter below and no one would stop her. It was a fine day for drowning and a fine bridge for jumping from.

What rest would Robbie have then, if the only one around to remember him dashed instead to meet him?

Across the bridge, she stood at the door to the old brothel and raised her hand.

A beat, a deep breath, and she rapped on the door.

She had felt the same fluttering terror when she'd knocked at the man Tony's door, back before Harmony, when she was closer to a whole person. What an experience that had been. Anger and accusation welded together in punch-drunk avowal and a stern direction to take complaints to the liar Duane. And then for her little dealer to arrive down the stairs and act as buffer between the noxious allegation and his father's declarations! It might well have proved the weirdest day of Georgie's life, if she'd followed the lead back to Tara Duane's front door and demanded an explanation. As it was she got out of there and hurried back to William and Clover, flushed at having fallen for Duane's ploy and equally so at disturbing her dealer in his own home and seeing how young he really was. There with a daddy and baby pictures on the mantelpiece and toys scattered on the living-room floor. Domesticity wrapped around a boy she'd done lines with in the middle of the day.

There was no answer now from the old brothel door. She breathed.

She stood back and watched the windows, and on getting no glimpse of life walked around and tried the back gate. It was locked, but there was a foothold on the brickwork beside it, and the lakeside air had made her agile. She climbed.

There were plenty of bits in the back yard to assist her return to the top of the wall: builders' rubbish in the process of being reclaimed by the ivy, a wheelie bin on the other side of the gate. She was about to drop down to check the back door when she noticed a toplight left open on a first-floor window.

No doubt she could be seen, easily too, if anyone were to take this moment to gaze out of their bedroom window. She reminded herself that no burglar went around wearing maxi dresses. She'd look more like a granddaughter attempting to help out after the doddering dear left her keys on the dresser. She padded along the top of the wall and reached the window, grabbed the toplight and hauled herself onto the sill. The room had no curtains, and it was as bare now as it had been the day she'd been told of the ghost.

She lifted the skirt of her dress, tucked it around her legs, kneeled on the sill holding on to the toplight and reached inside to open the casement.

Maureen still lived here. The downstairs apartment was warm and messy; she had gone out, and Georgie estimated it wouldn't be for very long. She went to the top floor and to the sill on which she'd spotted Robbie's name. The writing implements were gone, the pages missing. The rooms on the two upper floors were completely bare.

She returned to the ground-floor apartment. There was a bedroom at the front of the house, and she stood in its doorway and thought about ransacking it for a slip of paper that was likely scrapped or burned. It might have been the dregs of Christian charity clinging to sinner skin or the fact that Georgie felt deeply stupid considering looting an older woman's nest, but she knew she wouldn't be tearing the place asunder. She looked into the bathroom, in case she'd find a horror message written in steam on the mirror, and then in the kitchen, where she drummed her nails on the breakfast bar.

What now, after engaging in some light breaking and entering for the memory of a missing swain?

Georgie pulled out the kitchen drawers. In the first, cutlery, string, scissors, candles, all in a heap. In the second, tea towels and a roll of kitchen paper.

In the third, a tangle of relics.

A couple of pens, a couple of notebooks with faded names on the pages. The old phone from the desk upstairs. A necklace. A foundation compact. Two lipsticks. An old business card, blank except for a mobile number and a busty silhouette. A scapular.

Georgie closed her fingers around the brown cloth. A lipstick, wound in its bands, dropped back into the drawer as she lifted it; she bunched the scapular in her fist, shut the drawer, and leaned against the breakfast bar with her hand held against her breastbone.

Robbie O'Donovan. Did you know him? He died here.

Georgie sat upstairs in the middle of the old brothel floor.

On the ground floor, Maureen moved about, clinking cups, rustling newspaper.

Outside, the fog had lifted from the Lee in time for the night to fall down upon it.

Georgie thought,
Did he come back for this?

It was contentious in its absurdity, but when she spread it flat it made a kind of sense. She had pinned too much meaning to the scapular. She had complained about its loss. He was useless in almost every conceivable way, Robbie, but it would have been just like him to throw his weight into something as maudlin and pointless as recovering the bloody thing.

He died here.

He'd broken in. He'd arrived in the middle of the night and surprised Maureen, who had only just been installed by her wicked son, and she had called the gangster Phelan and he'd done away with Robbie because frightening his mother was a much bigger crime than stealing away a scrap of cloth.

Such a simple story. Alongside it, Tara Duane's tip-offs knotted into sinister futility. Knowing that Georgie had misplaced her dud boyfriend she'd taken the opportunity to implicate her neighbour in a crime predicted on an educated guess. Tara Duane had almost certainly seen shit like this before, and she wasn't the kind of person you could trust with an opportunity. Even alone, Georgie flushed. That she had played her part and upset her dealer's father for Duane's smirking benefit was its own ugly burden.

Downstairs, the front door opened and she heard a deep voice call out to its mother's low answer.

“Where?”

And then there were footsteps on the stairs.

Georgie didn't have time to make for the window. On Maureen's return she had chosen to stay still and wait for the woman's bedtime; she had nowhere else to go. Logic had intimated that no one would make for the bare rooms above. She had thought herself safe so long as she stayed silent.

Panicked, she slid behind the door, and when it opened it was with such force that the door slammed against her and rebounded on the intruder. She cried out as Jimmy Phelan rounded on her. He caught her arm and dragged her upright, and hit her, with an open palm, so hard it spun her almost out of his grasp.

“You're the whore,” he said. “Aren't you? There I was sending the whole of the city out hunting for you when all I had to do was wait for you to crawl back to me. What a fucking stupid bitch you are.”

His palm came round again and caught her between her jaw and throat. She spluttered and as her knees went from under her Phelan closed his fist around her neck and snarled, “You know, I get a hard-on from offing bitch messes and you, my girl, have caused me no end of trouble in the past year.”

Georgie choked and he slapped her again, and Maureen came into the room and said, “You'd want to stop that, Jimmy, or you'll regret it.”

“Stay the fuck out of this, Maureen.”

“This house has killed before and it's generally the stronger of the pairing that gets it. I'm only warning you.”

Georgie was allowed to crumple.

Through tears she saw her subjugators: Phelan, puce, wet-lipped and oh, so massive, taking up the whole middle of the floor, the span from shoulder to shoulder packing muscle and wrath. Beside him stood Maureen, only half his size, cold-eyed and calm. She crouched and plucked the scapular from the floor.

“I thought you were born again, my dear?”

Phelan pulled a phone from his pocket, but Maureen held her hand over it. “Who are you calling?”

“I'm getting rid of this whore, Maureen.”

“That's no way to speak about a woman, especially one that used to make you money.” She stared down at Georgie and said, “She's only looking for Robbie O'Donovan, aren't you?”

“Shut your mouth, Maureen.”

“You don't talk to your mother like that either.”

Phelan scoffed. “That's not likely to work on me, girl.”

“Ah, sure you were brought up by Una Phelan; no wonder you're the way you are. I'd not be happy to see you hurt this girl, Jimmy.”

“Your happiness, Maureen, is exactly why she needs to be gotten rid of.”

“I'll never be happy again, so.” To Georgie, she said, “You're not going to say anything, are you? Sure all you want to know is where Robbie O'Donovan went. And if I tell you, you won't breathe a word, will you?”

“Maureen, this is not how this is going to go,” stated Phelan, but his mother shushed him, and said, “Of course it is. There's one dead already because of me and I don't want that number added to.”

“She's going to die,” said Phelan.

“She won't die,” said Maureen. “And she won't disappear again either. Isn't that right, Georgie? Haven't you enough to be worrying about without telling great big secrets?” And she laid a kindly hand on Georgie's flat stomach, and smiled.

Oh, he wasn't an easy man to bargain with, James Dominic Phelan. He took after his stand-in mama in that sense—ignorant as the day was long and stubborn as an ass. Maureen worked a way around him, but only just. One ghost, she explained, was bad enough. Two? She'd never sleep again. Especially if they were thick as thieves. Robbie O'Donovan nodded mournfully from the corner. He didn't want Georgie's company.

Jimmy was all,
Oh Maureen, Oh Maureen, you don't understand.
The world was an orgy of disquiet once you'd killed someone. Those who might suspect you needed to be controlled. The penalties for lenience were harsh and so lenience was no option.

Era go on outta that,
said Maureen. What harm could Georgie do? She was hardly going to tell anyone. She had no influence in Jimmy's world; what was she, only a pisawn whore? Who would believe her? Was she not an addict and a victim? Did she not have a history of joining cults?

Was she not a mother?

“Where's the baby?” Jimmy asked. The girl cried and said the child was in care.

“No one,” said Maureen, “steps out of line once you're holding that over them.” Hadn't Jimmy been only a baby when she'd been banished? Maureen knew what Georgie would and wouldn't do, and she wouldn't be telling tales, no she wouldn't.

“If you step out of line,” Jimmy told the weeping slip, “I will kill you. And I'll take what I'm owed from the child.”

He made sure the windows were jammed tight and left the girl in the room, asked Maureen to join him in the kitchen, stood on Robbie O'Donovan's ebbing place and snarled, “Now, Maureen, d'you want to tell me how that whore knows your ould buddy Robbie is dead?”

Serendipity. Coincidence. Religious intercession.

One day, Maureen told James Dominic Phelan, when she was feeling the presence of Robbie O'Donovan with oh, very particular keenness, a fallen angel came to the door, looking to earn back her wings by paying strident homage to the Good Lord Almighty.

“What the fuck does that mean?”

It meant that she'd taken the form of a little Magdalene, with a bellyful of sins. The trickster God had directed her exactly where she needed to be. She came into the brothel, and she was right at home and in great misery because of it. Maureen had at first been taken by her mangling of the gospels and she'd invited her past the threshold for larks. Then she was charmed by the stench of the girl's past. It had been pushed beyond doubt when Maureen had mentioned her son the brothel keeper and the fallen angel had stood as if to bolt.

“Why the fuck would you tell her such a thing, Maureen? Jesus, are you in the habit of telling all your visitors that I'm so fucking specific a disappointment?”

That wasn't all Maureen had told her. The Magdalene had started to cry out the truth. She hadn't wanted to cross the threshold because she'd been a whore in that very building. She'd been plucked from grace by Maureen's bastard son. Maureen had invited her to retread the shadows and the girl had reluctantly complied. On the way up the stairs she'd met the ghost. He whispered in her ear and suddenly she was all-knowing. “Robbie O'Donovan was here!” she exclaimed. “Ah, it's true,” said Maureen. “He died here.” And the Magdalene had flown out the door, wings latched on to her by a truth bigger than either of them.

“Jesus Christ,” said Jimmy. He paced the floor of the kitchen and stabbed the air above his head. “You mean
you
told the whore O'Donovan was dead? Jesus Christ, Maureen. Why didn't you take a stroll down to the sty and tell the Law you'd knocked some junkie's block off while you were at it?”

Maureen said, “I'm not a fool, you know.”

“Oh, you're not, naw. Jesus, Maureen. I thought Cusack telling you the name of the corpse was a slip-up I could forgive but you soaked it up only to spit it out. Who else have you confessed your sins to?”

“I hope you're not going to barney with that nice Cusack man, Jimmy.”

“I'll rip his spine out his arse is what I'll do!”

“You probably wouldn't have known them, but he's John and Noreen's boy. She's a thundering bitch and he's a drunk but I wouldn't deprive either of them of their only son. That can do terrible things to a person.”

“You think,” said Jimmy, “you can punt at me all sly-like, but you don't have room to swing from, not this time. Have you told anyone else?”

Maureen said, “Indeed I have not.”

“Don't you understand what would happen? Not only would you be carted off to the loony bin, but I'd be done for disposing of your rubbish and my whole life here, Maureen, this whole fucking city, is built on a shoddy foundation. I'd be ruined.”

“Do you not think it'd be time for you?”

Jimmy stopped pacing. He welded his fingers round the corner of the breakfast bar.

“Do you think,” said Maureen, “it was wrong of you to bring me home?”

“Was it a mistake, you mean? Clearly it fucking was.”

“Not just a mistake, Jimmy. Wrong. A boundary broken. An action taken that you can never claw back from.”

“To take you home from London…”

“What's home, though?”

“This is home, Maureen. This is your city. To take you home again was the least I could do and I waited forty years to do it.”

“But who said I wanted to come home?”

“Isn't that how we sort anything out, Maureen? We come home?”

Maureen smiled. “What have I to sort out, Jimmy? Whether I die here or there makes no odds to me. You brought me home because you thought it'd make you feel better.”

“I brought you home because I thought it'd be one right in a history of wrongs.”

He leaned against the breakfast bar and his head lolled forwards. He sighed. Maureen studied his shape cut rough from the air. He was broad, grown-up James. There was nothing of Dominic Looney to him. He was instead the spit of her own father, in his bullish weight and the grey stubble creeping over the folds on the back of his neck…grey to pink in a strange soft frailty, like his baby head as she held him to her breast.

See how the world turns?

“What do I do with you, Maureen?”

It amazed her that he was talking at all. He'd popped out sticky and cribbing, and in the next instant he was a giant in a leather jacket with his very own lifetime of words learned. She picked up a cardigan from the back of the dining chair and pulled it over her shoulders. From the back window she said, “I don't want you to hurt the girl. It's my fault. I told her.”

“I know it's your fault. That's another cross for you to bear, you and your massive trap.”

“Would you do that to me, Jimmy?”

“I owe you nothing,” he said, “except my existence, but if I was missing that I wouldn't know it. You don't get a say, Maureen. All you did was squeeze me out.”

“A life for a life,” she said. “All she did was listen.”

“See how the world turns?” Maureen said to Georgie later that same evening. “All you wanted was your religious die-dee back. And now you owe Jimmy your life simply because he could be convinced not to take it from you.”

Georgie was sitting still in the middle of the floor. She had a fine purple blotch rising on her cheek and eyes swollen pink. Maureen had given her the cardigan and a blanket but she was still quaking like a bowl of jelly. Her hair matted down her back.

“Would you like a hairbrush?” Maureen offered.

The girl gulped.

“You can calm down,” said Maureen. “He's not going to kill you. I told him not to and you know, I'm his mother.”

Georgie said, “I didn't mean to frighten you.”

“Frighten me? It'd take something a bit bigger and bolder to bother me, girl.”

“I just wanted to know what had happened to Robbie.”

“You wanted your wee scapular back, sure.”

Maureen crossed the floor and sat facing Georgie, and leaned out and grasped her ankle, gave it a little shake.

“Why would a whore care about the Church?”

“It was my mother's…”

“Ah for feck's sake altogether. Another religious mother. You'd have to ask yourself what's wrong with this country at all that it can't stop birthing virtuous ould bags. And what would your mammy say, Miss Georgie, if she knew you'd done your time here?”

“I haven't seen her in years.”

“How many years?”

“Almost ten.”

“Almost ten? Sure if you landed home now it'd be like you'd never been away. I didn't see Jimmy for two decades before I came back to this hole. Can you imagine that? I came home one Christmas when he was twenty and he bought me a brandy. The next time I saw him he was forty and the size of a small shed.”

Georgie squeaked, brushed tears from her cheeks and wiped her hands on her dress. “Why didn't you see him in twenty years?” she asked. “What happened?”

Maureen paused. The bleached room provided nothing in the way of prop or inspiration, and it was such a massive story, a story too big for four walls.

“We'll go for a walk,” she said. “I have something I could do with showing you.”

“There were girls I knew in London,” Maureen said. “Girls like yourself. Strumpets with scarlet smiles.”

They were walking the night streets past students on the tear, eighteen-year-olds laughing in drainpipe jeans and wispy beards, crying revolution on their phone screens, through bottles of beer. Dominic Looney could well have been among them, in his beads, his head full of mutiny and lust. Fashion came round in cycles. Shitehawks, she guessed, stayed the same.

Georgie stared at the ground. Maureen felt her fear as keenly as the chill. She guessed the girl would stay docile through dread of vengeance, as if Maureen might turn around and snap her neck on bad-blood whim, and it irked her. She needed engagement for the lesson to work.

Ah, but could she blame her? The girl was a shell. The only thing left in her was fear.

“I'm not judging you,” Maureen said. “I know what made you.”

A laughing girl reeled round the corner and straight into Georgie. They both stumbled. The girl apologised. Her friends, following thick, shrieked in glee. The girl tottered on, bellowing her mortification to her posse.
Did you see her face,
one of them gasped.

“Most of them,” Maureen said, as one of the girls, yards away now, lurched on her heels and grabbed the arm of the dolly next to her, “most of them got out of the game, but only one I remember did so intact. The rest of them were hags after their stint. They trusted no one. They drank like sluts. They beat their children.”

“I'd have made a good mother,” Georgie said, but there was no conviction behind the proclamation.

“Well you might have,” Maureen said. “And I hope you get to find out. Me, it's not like I could have done a worse job, so they should have let me try. Look at the state of him!”

“Where are we going?”

Maureen clucked. “I told you. I need to show you something.”

“I can't face him again tonight.”

“Who? Jimmy? I'm not taking you back to Jimmy. Or back to anywhere. I'm taking you forward. Lookit.”

They turned the corner to face the church, and Maureen flicked a thumb at it and pressed forward locked arm in arm with her fellow pilgrim.

“You're taking me to Mass?”

“Mass? I am not.”

The church was hewn from rock and the city around it built from twigs. Maureen brought Georgie along the side of the building. Above them stained-glass windows dripped dark and the hush of consecrated ground heavied their steps and made prowlers of the pair of them.

“I've always hated these places,” said Maureen.

They went round the back of the church to the priest's house, a two-storey block for a celibate man and his ghosts. Maureen didn't approve. She had never approved. She had never understood, as a child, why the priest had a bigger house than she did. Surely Holy Intangible God left room enough to walk around?