The Glorious Heresies (30 page)

Three days of Carling cans, dropping nodges, woodland confessions and curry cheese chips left Ryan in a haze bordering incoherence, but Joseph was working on the Monday evening and so he'd promised to drive him home immediately after the closing gigs. They packed up their gear on the Sunday afternoon and Ryan and Joseph carried it back to the car park, twenty minutes away, in two trips, while Karine went gatting in the dell with a bunch of college friends. They all met up again, Joseph got off with one of the college girls, Karine had a minor meltdown over having left her facial wipes in the wrong bag, and Ryan popped his final yoke from the stash tucked down his balls and lay back on the grass and tried, gamely but unsuccessfully, to visualise each hassle floating off and popping in the sticky autumn air.

They made for the arena a couple of hours later to catch the last of the big-hitters. Joseph had some experimental guitarist he wanted to see; he brought Karine's college friend with him. Ryan and Karine headed to the main stage. They found a patch of grass near the back and away from the main thoroughfare, and sat down, and she positioned herself in front of him so as to secure rueful cuddles without having to speak to him. He put his arms around her, pulled her back against his chest, put his nose against her bare shoulder and closed his eyes as the sediment of his last pill settled onto the pit of his stomach.

How they had managed to barney away the sweet evenings of the dying summer he didn't know. It felt like they'd been fighting forever. Stuff he'd said, stuff she'd said, wound upon wound ripped of their stitches. He remembered something of Niall Vaughan, and something of Elena from Salerno whose scent Karine had identified on her boyfriend's body after he'd laid stammered clues at her feet, like a cat bringing corpses to its mistress. He remembered his conversation with Izzy.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

She turned her head. “What are you sorry for?”

“Everything.”

Directly across from him a mammy wearing face paint and fairy wings held a joggling toddler at arm's length and brushed unseen contaminants off its back and legs.

Karine waited until he took his head from her shoulder and let him kiss her. A quarter of a mile away, a figure lost on a mammoth stage invited a thunderstorm of approval. Karine took a sip from her drink. “Is it sad that I just wanna go home now?” she asked, and he kissed her again and told her no, 'course it wasn't, it had been a crazy weekend, he was just as keen for a shower and his bed.

They set off from the car park at two in the morning, with Joseph's new squeeze in tow. Ryan had a fag coming back through Stradbally, another when he hit the motorway. In the back seat the girls nodded. Joseph, still buzzing, blethered on about the experimental guitarist, the inspiration he was bringing home with him, the whole experience. “We're
definitely
coming back next year,” he said. In the rear-view mirror Ryan watched Karine's nose twitch and her mouth fall open. Mist dashed the window behind her and for a moment it felt like there was something in pursuit. His luck catching up with him, maybe. The moment washed over him and dissipated before he could get a handle on it. Maybe the only thing following him was a mighty hangover. He shook his head.

He stopped at Urlingford for a coffee and a Mars bar and pulled off the motorway again just outside Mitchelstown for a slash and it was there, pissing onto the ditch off the hard shoulder, that he noticed the fire.

He went back to the car and said to Joseph, “D'you see that?”

They climbed the ditch and stared into the dark. It was a fire, no doubt about it. Maybe five, six miles in.

“It must have been called already,” said Joseph. “I'll ring them just to be sure.” He phoned 999 with one finger in his ear and relayed vague coordinates to the person at the other end as cars slid past them from one acre of pitch to another.

“D'you reckon we could find it?” Ryan said.

He did wonder why, as he exited the motorway and drove down winding regional roads, but what answer could he conjure, except he was curious and oddly loath to return home, tired and all as he was? Neither girl in the backseat stirred. Joseph went quiet and furrowed his brow, as invested in the mystery now as his cousin. They kept spotting the flare, losing it behind copses, twisting away from it as the road tangled like a knotted snake. As the clock crept to four, they shared a glance and silently agreed to let it go.

Ryan pulled over and got out. A gate led into a wide, thin field, bordered by a line of trees, then a low hill and beyond that, they could see the orange glow of the relinquished beacon and smell its acrid smoke.

“If we made off now,” joked Joseph, “over the hill there, like the intrepid bastards we are, we'd pin that gaff down in fifteen minutes. But who'd mind the women?”

“I hope it's not a house,” Ryan said.

“Nah.” Joseph caught his shoulder. “It's probably some barn or something.”

“So fucking quiet here.”

“It'd drive me mental living in a place like this. Sensory deprivation. No wonder the boggers are always seeing ghosts.”

“Are they?”

“Yeah. Shades of dead people on the sides of the road, lads there since the Easter Rising. The devil picking his teeth at the crossroads. Weird shit. We've more history than we're able for.”

Joseph turned to go back to the car but Ryan stayed where he was, watching the fire. His cousin came back, caught his shoulder again, knocked his head against his back and said, “What's up with you, Cuse?”

“Just coming down, is all.”

“Dunno about that. Told you you shouldn't have brought her, man. You need room to breathe, the pair of you.”

“That's not it.”

“No? Coz it's obvious you're crumbling, you and her.”

“Going up in flames, you mean.”

“Maybe,” said Joseph. “Maybe.”

“And nothing grows from ashes.”

“You're going ending it?”

More lights now, more smoke. Wherever it was, someone was tackling it.

“No,” Ryan said. “I can't.”

Georgie liked to compose letters to David she was never going to write.

Dear priggish David mama's boy Coughlan,

How is my daughter? You don't need to answer, so unzip your prissy mouth and let yourself breathe. I'm coming for her. I'm nearly there. I have more money now than you'd be able to fathom. How did I get it? Oh, nefarious ways. I was wicked as the wickedest woman, and you know how we are, David, wicked as wicked can be. But it's all your fault. You made me a whore, so what harm charging premium rates for others to do the same? At least they won't knock me up then condemn me for it. All the shuffling horns of the city are better than your limpid prick. I hope your Christian girlfriend chokes on it.

Enjoy your never-ending poker tournament/wanking cycle, you bearded creep.

Your pal, Georgie.

She didn't have half as much money as she wanted him to think she did, but it wasn't as if he'd find out either way, if she never got round to writing those letters. She hoped the strength of her bitterness was enough to carry it back to him as an edge to the wind, or a nagging pain that kept him up at night. Fuck the letters. Fuck David. She owed him nothing. He owed her a universe.

The notion of debt had been pressed on her and she learned to open her hands and allow its weight to pull her down. J.P. had put her earning after the debacle with his mother; he said she owed him a favour. She did six months' penance in a house where she was the only Irish girl. She reckoned she'd been brought in as a substitute for some unfortunate who'd run off or been offed. When there were better girls to choose from he let her go again. “Don't get any ideas about telling tall tales, either,” he said. “Coz in this world, girl, you're just a scrapheap bit, and no one's going to believe you.”

Scrapheap or not, she was the sergeant at last and this was the drill: she got up, made tea, sat around thinking of the money she'd made and lost and the money she'd make again, and did a bit of work, when she was able to.

In order to get Harmony back she needed money. In order to make money she needed to continue doing the only thing she was good for. In order to continue doing the only thing she was good for she needed medication. Living expenses, taken from her nest egg. She used the brothel contacts, even after they'd let her leave; the path of least resistance would do fine now that she had a destination. In her head she told David she was wiping her arse with fifty euro notes but the real world bled her. She was doing far too much, but she had to be muddled for the graft or the graft would never get done. She tried alternatives but nothing worked as well. There was reason in it, no matter how unpleasant the logic.

Night was when the trouble started. She didn't sleep. She didn't feel threatened as such, just restless, stuck in some cosmic halfway house, just a little out of whack and waiting for her number to be called and the process explained anew. Twenty-six was just like being twenty-one. It was nothing like being twenty-three. Georgie felt the dichotomy and it confused her. How could you be two people in five years? How could you undergo such a metamorphosis—whore to saint—and paint the slattern back over the scar tissue only a few short years later?

She lost interest in her detective novels. They were long-winded and she didn't have the time for cheesy gasbaggery. Instead she sat up reading true crime files on the Internet, nauseous and lost, following link after link until the morning came and it was time to start over. Sometimes she went to the Missing Persons site because Robbie's picture was still there, staring out of a photograph she hadn't provided. Must have been his mother, if he had one. She'd pay her a visit one day. Tell her to quench the home fires.

She never lost focus on the goal, even when her strategies shrivelled to husks of ideas, the residue of forgotten escape plans.

Though Maureen's words circled, she kept the scapular knotted around her wrist.

One Saturday night in April, Georgie turned a trick with a bloke who dropped her at the wrong end of the city centre. She made her way back to her usual spot slowly, shaken—he had seemed like an OK chap until he'd finished and then his disgust was tangible. She swung into an off-licence that was just shutting and bought a naggin of vodka and drank a third of it in the toilets at McDonald's before continuing on her way. The alcohol kicked in and circled the fear, gave it warmth and made it greater.

Alcohol was not going to fix this, but God never closed a door without opening a window.

For a moment she couldn't think who he was. Plenty of familiar faces crossed her path, of course. All day and night she spotted ones who'd paid for her, and for a moment she assumed he was another; punters were as likely to be tall and dark and good-looking as they were to be sweaty, squat clichés. He was walking down the street with a couple of other guys, all in their early twenties or so, jostling, lively types. Ryan. She hadn't seen him in such a long time. He was a grown-up now, all legs and cheekbones. She called after him and one of his companions jogged his arm and gestured backwards and he waited, God bless him, as she hurried over.

“Ryan. It's been a while.”

“Jesus fucking Christ, Georgie.”

She flushed. She had lost weight, she knew. It might have been what she was wearing: a mini dress, black heels, but in that there was no difference between her and the chattering girls out dancing tonight, except intent. Maybe not even that.

“It's good to see you,” she offered.

It was cold for April. There was frost settling while the city partied; it clarified the air, outlined the orange street lights, the glow from pub windows, the neon signs outside of the nightclubs. He was wearing a heavy jacket, dark jeans and thick white skate shoes, and even so he had rammed his hands into his pockets and was throwing his weight from foot to foot.

“I wish I could say the same thing,” he said. “What the fuck happened to you?”

There was no point in pretending she'd simply found her thighs again after a few years of Christian body-policing. She shook her head.

“Really?” she joked, feebly. “I got that old-looking?”

“Have you even been eating?”

“You're not a bit saucy! Of course I've been eating.”

“When? Last fucking summer? Jesus.”

She was needled.
What if I'd had an eating disorder,
she thought.
Or cancer? Or lost a parent and was wasting away with grief?
She chose to ignore his tetchiness. “How are you keeping?” she said. “I think the last time I saw you was…”

Up at his father's house. When she was pregnant with Harmony, and searching for Robbie, hormones backed into her brain, making her brave and crazy. Up in that poky council house, only a paper wall between them and Tara Duane. She tried to put it out of her mind, and Ryan picked up on the pitch and cut her off: “Did you find your fella?”

“No,” Georgie said. “He died.”

She might have expected commiseration under different circumstances. Instead she got exactly what she expected; he flinched, and changed the subject.

“You had your kid, then.”

“Yeah,” said Georgie. “A little girl. Harmony. Isn't that pretty?”

He nodded and looked over her shoulder and down the street.

Off his discomfort she conceded, “I didn't just stop you to say hello.”

“No?”

“No.” She asked his shoes, “Are you still dealing?”

“Are you still on the game?”

“Why?” she snapped; the force of his rejoinder had surprised her. “Are you up for doing a swap?”

“Funny,” he said. He slouched and there was an echo of compromise to the action, but she wasn't finished, freewheeling on the vodka burn and the echoes of their last meeting. “What business is it of yours?” she said. “Are you going to save me?”

He neither answered nor moved.

“Judgey bollocks,”
she quoted. “Isn't that what you said?”

“What d'you want, Georgie?”

“I need something,” she said. “I just wanted to know if you're still in the habit of selling.”

“Not on the fucking street I'm not.”

She felt the statement for an edge, but couldn't determine if he meant to cut her. “What's that mean?”

“It means I've moved up in the world, girl. I don't carry shit around with me.”

“You don't deal anymore?”

He paused. “Just what I said, girl. I don't carry shit around with me.”

“Oh.” The chance of instant gratification faded into another night of hurried phone calls and bitten nails. “I'm kinda hanging, like.”

A group of girls skirted around them. Ryan moved back against the wall and Georgie stepped towards him; he put his hand up.

“Hanging,” he said. “Back fucking hanging again.”

“It's just a turn of phrase, for God's sake. Fine, I'm not hanging. It's Saturday. I'm just a bit bored, OK?”

He gestured tersely at the moving streets. “That's Saturday boredom, Georgie. You're wasting away. You're not asking me for help with your night out.”

“I'm not wasting away!”

“Fucking look in a fucking mirror!”

“What's it to you? It's not like you know me at all, is it?”

He remembered the words. “I don't know you from Adam,” he said, head back against the wall, staring again over her shoulder, like a bouncer, she thought, or a guard. “That doesn't mean I'm stockpiling the crazy shit just to spite you.”

“A dealer with a conscience,” she said. “That's rich. You weren't so bothered about selling me shit when I was supposed to be in recovery.”

“You weren't doing such a good impression of a corpse at the time.”

“Judgey bollocks,” she said, stepping away, backwards for a few beats to watch for signs of concession, turning when she saw nothing of the sort. “You've changed,” she said, over her shoulder. “What happened to you? What happened to that decent kid?”

“You killed him off with your custom,” he barked. “Get your fucking act together, Georgie.”

She marched between groups of revellers and strolling couples, holding her arms tight against the chill. Then he was beside her again. He caught her arm, she yelped, and it must have looked bad, it must have, he was bearing over her, one fist bunched around her arm and the other at an angle as if he was going to swing for her, but she knew that even on the street on a Saturday night he wouldn't be challenged on it, no one wants to interfere, never fucking interfere…

“Where's your kid?” he said.

Her lips moved to whimper and he snapped, “Where's your kid, Georgie?” and she didn't dare snap back, she cried, “I don't have her, she doesn't live with me, OK?”

“Who has her then?”

“Her dad. All right?”

He dropped her arm and stood chewing air and she took a chance on his new demeanour and pleaded, “Look, I'm gagging, Ryan, if you can even give me a number…”

“I told you, that's not me anymore.”

“Like, even someone in your network or whatever, even someone from another crew, I don't mind.”

“Can't help you,” he said, and then, softer, “Jesus, Georgie, you had your shit together.”

“What, hanging out with Cork's slackest cult?”

“Yeah, and now? It's like an episode of
The Walking Dead,
Georgie!”

“Look, I know I've slimmed down a bit…”

“It's not that. You look like shit.”

“This coming from a guy who makes people look like shit for a living?”

It wasn't a worthy comeback but it seemed to have done the trick. He fell back. “There's a difference,” he said, and she replied, “You'd hardly do what I do sober.”

“I'd hardly do what you do full stop.”

“And aren't you lucky you were born a boy, then? All you have to do is sell drugs.”