The Glorious Heresies (3 page)

“You've got a spare room. And she's been wanting to spend more time with her grandchildren. At least until she starts knowing them from the next pair of spoiled brats.”

“The cheek of you, boy. That woman, wherever you found her, might have ties to you but she doesn't to
my
children.”

“That's a failure of the most basic concept of human biology, Deirdre.”

“You know what I mean, Jimmy. There's a lot more to family than…” She waved a hand and grimaced. “Fluids. Genetics. Whatever you want to call it.”

Maureen wasn't moving but to bring cigarette to mouth. She stared out across the lawn, serene as a cud-chewing cow.

“Well look, I'll tell you what I'll do,” Jimmy said to Deirdre. “I'll find you a piano and you can honky-tonk your musical regrets away to your heart's content. I won't even ask why Ellie and Conor's fingers are still pudgy as pigs' trotters in a year's time. And all you have to do is mind my mammy for the night.”

“Ah, in fairness, Jimmy…”

“You should try talking to her. She's got your children's history knotted up inside that wizened head of hers. She's got Ireland's history in there. She's a very interesting woman.”

“A bit too interesting. Don't you think I've had it up to here with how interesting you can be?”

“A piano for sanctuary,” he said. “You'd deny your children the opportunity to learn a skill just because there's a chance my dear mum will leave smudges on your furniture? Don't be plain mean, Deirdre. Aren't you better than me and my ancestry?”

He went out onto the deck and closed the door behind him.

“You're to stay with Deirdre tonight, Maureen. Say nothing about yer manno. We'll have him scooped up and out in no time. Who knows, you might even fall in love with the new floor.”

“I won't go back there,” she said. “It's not safe.”

“Yeah. Well. We'll talk about it after.”

He took care of some chores after leaving Maureen in the reluctant hands of the daughter-in-law she'd missed out on, but as day stretched into evening there was still a human sacrifice on his mother's kitchen floor, one with a dent in the back of its head made by Ireland's ignorance of fine art and penchant for cut-price religious iconography.

He wondered where Maureen had gotten the Holy Stone. Had someone pressed it on her when she was reeling from childbirth? Had they assumed that even that crude image of the world's ultimate single mother would provide solace in hard times? Were they just blind, deaf and dumb to style?

Jimmy Phelan was raised by his grandparents, not unwillingly, but awkwardly nevertheless. They brought him to the Marian shrine at Knock once and offered him up to the wall once favoured by apparitions as a living paradigm of their piety. He'd been very bored, but afterwards they'd taken a jaunt through the town and he remembered gift shop after gift shop, gift shops as far as an eight-year-old eye could see, stocked to the rafters with baubles. Rows of Virgin Mary barometers; her fuzzy cloak would change colour depending on the weather, which was very miraculous. Toy cameras with preloaded images of the shrine; you clicked through them, holding the flimsy yokey up to the light. And so many sticks of sugar rock. You could have built a whole other shrine out of sticks of sugar rock.

Maureen's Holy Stone wouldn't have looked far out of place. Maybe his grandparents had purchased it. Maybe it was his speeding around this wonderland of faith-based kitsch, jacked up on neon-pink rock and too many bags of Taytos, that advised them of its relevance.

And so supposing the Holy Stone symbolised something to Maureen. Repentance. Humility. New beginnings. Supposing smashing it off the skull of an intruder set her back forty years.

Evening was drawing in and there was a corpse drawing flies back in the flat, and no one yet nominated to move it.

He stopped at a Centra and bought himself a sausage sandwich and a coffee, and sat in his car to eat and think.

It felt wrong to be hiding from Dougan the source of a problem the man would have to fix. Jimmy wasn't used to this kind of isolation. His mother—the woman he tentatively thought of as his mother—had fucked up, and for once in his life, Jimmy felt a weak spot.

He was mulling this over when he spotted someone, ten feet away from his car. The figure was vaguely familiar. A navy hoodie and blue jeans that had both been through the wash ten-too-many times. A dark, tousled head bent over an outstretched palm, opposite fingers picking through coins as one would for a parking meter. Jimmy balled up the sandwich wrapper, stuck it in his empty coffee cup, and stepped out of the car. Between the bin and his mark, he chanced, “Cusack?”

The other looked up. It was him all right. More than a few years older, though Jimmy would have sworn it had been only months since they last spoke.

“J.P., boy,” he said, still with his palm out.

“Cusack. You're looking well.”

It was a disingenuous greeting but the only alternative was the most brutal honesty.
The absolute state a' yeh, Cusack! If there's a whore you've been visiting, it might be worth sprinkling her with holy water and commanding her back to the fiery depths, because you look like someone's tapped you for fluids.

The desiccated accepted the salutation with a mournful nod.

“It's been a while,” said Jimmy.

“I suppose it has.” His voice was thick. Drunk? It looked more possible than anything else that had demanded his analysis today.

Back when Jimmy was in Iron Maiden T-shirts, Tony Cusack had been the useful kind of scamp, eager to prove he could hang around with the big boys by virtue of his keen eye and malleable morals. He'd been Jimmy's messenger when he was small enough to be fleet, but as he got bigger they'd drink together, or get stoned, and shoot the breeze about easy women and anarchy. When Jimmy was twenty-four, a coagulation of bad luck convinced him to head to London for a while, where he could carry on as before only with a shiny coat of anonymity, and, having fuck all else to do, Cusack had gone with him.

London had been good to Jimmy. It had given him cause to aim high. London had been good too to Tony, in its own way. He'd met a beour, impregnated her and brought her home with him, instead of staying put where the sun was shining.

His path had seldom crossed Jimmy's since. Christmases, here and there, they'd spotted each other in pubs. Jimmy had been known to send over a drink, but he'd taken care not to be too inviting. The charming laziness that had once defined Tony Cusack had morphed into dusty apathy; as a thirtysomething he was clumsy and morose, taxidermy reanimated. It was no secret that Cusack had pissed away what good London had given him. Even while his wife—had he even married her?—had been around, he had been steadily eroding his liver and the goodwill of every vintner in the city.

Which made him a good man for secrets, for who'd believe him if he talked? Who'd even listen to him?

“Are you busy?” Jimmy asked, though he'd already anticipated the answer, and had already settled on the bribe.

Cusack wasn't busy. He wasn't a man used to being busy, and took the detour as a short holiday from whatever freeform tedium was routine to him. Jimmy gave him the bones of the brief—frightened woman, dead burglar, no suitable hands to complete the deed—and Cusack flinched, and puffed out his cheeks as if he was considering bolting, but Jimmy was OK with that. Fear was a quality he looked for in part-timers, though it was strange to encourage that attribute in a man he might once have called his friend, back, way back, when Jimmy had neither mother nor need for one.

When they got to the flat Cusack needed a minute on his haunches with his back turned, but after the rebellion inside him had been quashed, he dutifully found a ratty carpet on one of the upper floors, pulled up as part of the redecoration project, and helped Jimmy roll the dead man like a cigar. The tradesmen had left behind some cleaning tools; Jimmy and Tony scrubbed up as best they could, given the length of time the stranger had had to tattoo the floor. Maureen was right; they'd need to lay a new one. There was more to this job than the lick of a mop.

“How are you with tiling?” Jimmy asked.

“I did the bathroom of my own gaff,” said Tony. He'd sobered up, of course. “Floor to ceiling. Put down tiles in the kitchen too, but that was a while ago.”

“Do a job here for me and I'll give you a few bob. I don't want to have to bring anyone else in on this now. What are you at tomorrow?”

“Nothing.”

“I'd a feeling you'd say that.”

In the absence of another vehicle, Jimmy drove his Volvo around to the back gate, at one end of a weathered brick alley garlanded deliberately with creepers and weeds. They flattened the back seat and lay the carpet cigar on a diagonal line: what once had been a breathing, thinking head to the back of the passenger seat, what once had been trespassing feet to the opposite corner. They arranged empty paint cans and a ladder on one side, and on the other the double-bagged rags and brushes they'd used to clean up the blood.

Jimmy handed Tony a set of keys and notes enough to buy tiles and bleach.

“You've a car?”

“I do,” said Tony.

“Go with quarry tiles.” And then, because custom suggested, he said, “What have you been up to anyway, Cusack? You're not working?”

“Here and there. Best anyone can manage now, I think.”

“You're probably right, boy. Even this is a one-off; I have more than enough mouths to feed.”

“I know that.” Tony shifted his weight. “I know that, boy.”

“Speaking of mouths, how many little Cusacks are there?”

There was a ghost of a smile; it set on and escaped Tony's mouth in a snap second. It was the first time in a long time Jimmy had noticed something approximating life in the old dog.

“Six.”

“Six? You'd want to tie a knot in it.”

Six made leverage plenty.

They stood by the back of the car, still enough to let birds continue their evening rituals in the greenery around them, flitting in and out of bushes, darting shadows moving on walls the height-and-a-half of Jimmy.

“There's one job I'll have coming up,” said Jimmy. “Nothing big and certainly nothing worth what I'll pay you, but you've done me a turn today. I'll be getting my hands on a piano sooner or later. The ex is looking for one for the kids. If you're around you can help move it in.”

“What kind of piano?”

“Worried for your back, are you? Not one of them long ones, if that's what you mean.”

“No, I mean what kind are you looking for? I have one I'm trying to get shot of.”

“You? Where'd you get your grabbies on a piano, boy?”

Tony clucked and shook his head. “Not like that,” he said. “I own one. It's a few years old but it was bought new. It's a beauty, but all it's doing in my gaff is taking up space.”

“Is that the kind of thing that has to go, Cusack, when a man's got six kids?”

Tony shrugged. “I can't play,” he said, though it sounded petulant, a tone not right for business deals, even on a day when reason had made way for blood.

Before they locked up Jimmy retrieved the Holy Stone and laid it carefully on the rolled-up shape of his mother's second greatest mistake.

“I'm just saying,” she says, “that it's weird, like, that you can be so distant with someone you're actually in a proper relationship with.”

God though, tell you what but she's fucking beautiful when she's pissed off, even if it's pissed off with me. She's gone pink-cheeked and her eyes are flashing hazel to black and she's even standing with her arms folded and her chin sticking out. And all around her you get people moving from here to there in the school yard like dancers in formation, like snowflakes in the sky, like shitty little bangers around a falling star.

She's all like “My friends think it's mean” and “My friends say it's a really bad sign” and it's not like I'm whipped or nothing but what her friends think means a fuck of a lot more to me than she knows because you know the way ould dolls are, it's all fucking crowdsourced. But I go, “Look, it shouldn't matter what your friends think, it should matter only what you think,” and she goes, “Well it
is
about what I think, Ryan, and I think it's awful because I've done everything for you, you know?” By “everything” she means she's let me fuck her and she's not even being over the top with that; it was everything, it was the whole world. She doesn't know that though. She only says “everything” because she doesn't want every Tom, Dick and Harry hearing her say the word “sex” coz you don't get away with words like that in the middle of the yard in the middle of lunchtime with every kid in this school sporting ears the size of Leitrim. Which is funny because what she's pushing me to say is a whole lot bigger.

I say, “You know how I feel about you, though.”

She says, “How would I know it?”

I say, “Coz don't I show you?”

And she says, “Eh, the only thing I see shown is how much I let you get away with and what if it's all for nothing, like?”

And I smile and she goes, “It's not funny, Ryan!” and looks like she might cry, and the thing is I know exactly what to do and I want to do it, believe me, I'm gagging to, only sometimes you have the right words in your mouth in the right order but it's such a big thing and a big fright that you're not sure if you can open up wide enough to get it out.

She says, “Coz this is
such
a big deal, Ryan,” and looks away and shakes her head. “And if you don't, well, it just means I'm stupid for letting you after only a couple of weeks. And I wouldn't ever again then.”

“That's not the way it is,” I tell her.

“What way is it?”

I get all mortified and look at the tarmac between my feet and she says, “Oh my God. Fine so,” and turns away and I know she doesn't realise what a weird thing this is for me, because this isn't shit I've heard or said since I was a small fella, and I wince and she gets further away from me and I call, “Hey, D'Arcy,” and she turns around, blazing, and I shrug and say, “I loves yeh,” and the whole yard reels with her and shouts
Oooooh!
and I go bright. Fucking. Red.

But she smiles, and brings her hand to her mouth and gives me the eyes, because she knows there's no way I would have made a total gobshite of myself in front of everyone if I didn't totally mean it.