The Glorious Heresies (33 page)

“See, that's what happened to the decent kid,” she said. “He turned into a man.”

“But you'd let him fuck you, though.”

“It's a job, Ryan. It's not personal.”

“No,” he said. “It's not.”

He had to contact his father afterwards for Jimmy Phelan's number, and he could only do so via text; he didn't want to talk to Tony. He didn't want to talk to anyone, but he managed it with Phelan. A quick introduction and a quick confirmation. Phelan wasn't satisfied.

“Come meet with me,” he said.

So Ryan did, down in the cellar of a Barrack Street pub with a facade that had not so much seen better days as decayed the street on which it stood. They weren't alone down there, though he doubted a man like Jimmy Phelan was used to being alone. There were a number of lads in the far corner playing cards, one of them Tim Dougan, whose legend had long served Ryan both as warning and inspiration. Though Phelan kept him standing near the door and talking to the floor, he had no doubt the men around them were all ears. They glanced up at intervals, sniffing, scowling, sucking their teeth.

The room was lit by two low, bare bulbs. This was for function and for show, and Ryan was just as scared as he should have been.

“You had two days,” said Phelan.

“Couldn't put something like that off,” Ryan said.

“No? Plenty who would. Though I don't recommend it myself.”

Phelan's words, low, smooth and cold, crept up on him like a trippy pill. Two of the card players turned to stare. Ryan looked away. There was a point of pain, suddenly, on each side of his nose. He pinched the bridge.

“Am I supposed to just take for granted that you came through for me?” Phelan said.

“Pretty much.”

“What if I ask you for proof?”

“What d'you want, a fucking photograph? Are you assuming I wasn't taking you seriously in the first place? With my father's neck on the line?”

Phelan smiled thinly. “Did you ever ask yourself, Ryan, if he doesn't deserve you?”

Ryan said, “Are we done here?”

Phelan looked away. “I did my research a long time back, of course. How's the apprenticeship going? How's Dan Kane treating you?”

“Am I supposed to answer that?”

“I heard he's pure fond of you,” said Phelan.

Ryan's phone started buzzing in his jeans pocket. He assumed it was Karine. He was late. Very late. It was bedtime-late. There was the doghouse, and there was the cellar.

Phelan said, “I hardly need to tell you that what happened between me and you and that broken fool who fucked your mother is no one's business but ours. Dan Kane is not to hear of this.”

“It isn't my proudest moment,” Ryan said.

“Ah, but you're a good boy. Dan Kane knows it. I know it. Let's say I'm done with Tony Cusack. I am not done with you. Not by a long shot.”

“You are,” Ryan said.

Phelan smiled and caught his shoulders. “You don't get to decide that, boy,” he said.

Beneath the powder-blue sky of a new Sunday morning, Ryan sat smoking on someone else's balcony. Behind the sliding door Joseph and a couple of other lads sat around a table, doing lines and drinking beer. Karine had gone for a snooze in one of the bedrooms. Ryan needed lungfuls of sharp air and a break from boisterous conversation. He had a head full of coke and thoughts as cold and clear and even as the new sky above him.

It wasn't his fault. He knew it wasn't his fault. It was something bigger.

His “job”—nothing personal—entailed purchasing quantities of intoxicants, cutting them and selling them at a profit to people who were, as Georgie's terminology stated, “dealing.” Taking precedent over how he made his money was how he proved his loyalty to Dan Kane: stepping in as his representative in cases where he deemed it necessary. Negotiations with fellas further down the chain. Retribution against those same fellas if the negotiations didn't pan out. He'd gotten his fists bruised. He'd gotten his head around it.

“I'm the bad guy,” he said.

The city didn't heed him. He looked down on rooftops, the corrugated shell of thousands of lives, all with their own part to play, fitting together like cogs, keeping the wheels turning. Doctors, dockers, dancers and dealers.

He'd been twenty years coming to this point. There probably hadn't ever been another way.

From his back pocket, his business mobile rang. He shifted his weight and dug it out. He changed the SIM every few weeks. He had authority, at least, over which people he sold to. If there were any clients he needed to drop he simply didn't give them his new contact. They faded from his life without protesting their relegation. Such things weren't questioned. Ryan Cusack had that much autonomy.

He answered the phone. “Yeah?”

Donnelly's voice. “I got that.”

“Oh, good stuff.”

“Yeah, hassle free. I'll see you later so. What are we looking at?”

Ryan narrowed his eyes and took another drag. His mind was racing. He snapped it back. “6 G,” he said.

“No problemo.”

Ryan hung up. He opened the browser, screencapped a map and sent it on. Later he'd meet Donnelly at the mapped address, once he'd had a medicated snooze. He wasn't coming down for a while. He'd been flying fucked for two days straight.

“You're a prick is all you are!”

She's sitting on my bed in her knickers, and I'm standing at the foot with my jeans still unbuttoned, and the room's saturated with the sweat and musk of what we've just done…How do we manage to fight in something that heady?

“Yeah, I'm a prick, that's what it is, Karine, I'm a fucking prick.”

We've been out since midday, had a couple of glasses of wine with the lunch, and pints after that. We came home for a snooze before heading out for the night, and when we woke there was murmuring and giggles and her turning round and pushing against me and asking me for it, and all of a sudden we have the spitting start of World War fucking III.

It's Halloween, so that's an excuse for her to go out wearing a ladybird costume that amounts to a spotty mini dress and black thigh-high stockings and a pair of glittery wings. The female population of the city will be baring their legs and their tummies and the very tops of their thighs and I'm not supposed to look at any of them because she knows I'm a pathetic twisted cheat. She can go out in a dress right up to her arse and just fucking ask to be groped but I'm to blind myself in case I accidentally exchange a look with one of her number. Christ, I'm so close now to walking out of here and getting my nose into a mound of coke and my cock up the first girl that smiles at me.

My shirt is on the floor beside her and I don't want to lean over her to pick it up.

“You don't get to tell me what to do, Ryan. You're a liar and you're a cheat and you do not get the high ground here.”

“I haven't touched another girl in fucking God knows how long.”

“Oh, yeah. God knows how long. Never mind all of them that you touched before God started keeping tabs, they're not supposed to count.”

“They don't count any more than Niall Vaughan counts.”

She stomps over and jabs a finger on my chest.

“Bring up Niall again,” she says. “Go on, dig deeper. Because one minute you're all ‘Oh, when I cheat it doesn't matter but when you cheat it's because you were infatuated,' so if you're equating Niall Vaughan, who you believe I was madly in lust with, with your gamut of sluts, then you're admitting that you were infatuated with all of them, aren't you?”

“Are you for fucking real?” I ask her.

“Are you, boy? Are you for fucking real?”

“Do you have to keep pulling me inside out with this shit, Karine? You know full well you're the only one who's ever meant anything to me and what did it matter when I couldn't trust you as far as I could throw you?”

“Oh my God,” she says. “You're so full of shit.”

“How is that full of shit? You fucked Niall Vaughan when I was—”

“In prison! You have no idea what that was like for me! You weren't there and I needed you. I couldn't trust you not to get banged up and you're still doing the same thing, aren't you? Yeah, talking shit about Australia and you and me leaving this dump and making something of ourselves when you know full well that's not going to happen with your record. We're stuck here and it's all your fault.”

“Aw yeah, see, I'm your prison, am I?”

“Something like that, Ryan. You cheat on me and lie to me and I'm stupid for letting you and the absolute kicker? You haven't a notion of ever quitting. I've never been as important to you as Dan Kane. The next time you get caught you'll get ten years and where will I be then?”

“I'm not going to get fucking caught.”

“How do you know? You were stupid enough to get caught in the first place.”

“All right, so I'm a cheat and a liar and I'm a cage and I'm fucking stupid. Anything else you want to say?”

“Oh,” she hisses, “there's plenty else I could say.”

“Fucking say it, then!”

I can see the poison rising, filling her out as it climbs, a wave of hatred coming from her belly to her jaw. “You have no idea what you put me through when you got caught with Dan Kane's coke,” she says. “And I am going to make you suffer for it.”

“Fucking Niall Vaughan wasn't revenge enough, then? In a fucking car park? Like a fucking whore?”

She thumps my chest so I push her, all the way back to the wall. I stand over her and she struggles and kicks out and gets my shin with her bare foot and this is the thing, it doesn't even hurt, but it doesn't have to hurt because this is just a reflex: I lift my fist to her.

I lift my fist to her.

And she shrieks, “Oh my God! Oh my God, you were going to hit me! You pig, you were going to hit me!” and I can't stop it, I lash out and knock my fist off the wall beside her head and then again, and again, and I've got my hand on her throat beating the fuck out of the wall and her legs go from under her.

I let her fall and she crumples to the floor and I stagger backwards and end up on my arse.

“Oh my God,” she says.

“I didn't touch you,” I say, but whatever it was has been knocked out of me; all I can do is whisper.

“I knew this would happen someday,” she sobs. “I've been watching this coming for months.”

My chest's hammering. “I'm sorry,” I say. “I'm really sorry. I didn't mean to scare you, girl. I fucking love you; I'd never hurt you.”

“No?” Her eyes are red, her hair teased rough from sweat and sex and now this, oh Jesus Christ, where did this come from? “Then what the fuck was that?”

It was the worst time to be in the A&E—Saturday drinking time, when the city's youth drowned standing up. It was compounded by the coming bank holiday, and the place was predictably packed. Pale girls in their weekend finery sat dumb with swollen knees, drunks bellowed at nurses who carried the scars of their vocation on their faces…ould fellas, ould wans, stern mammies holding teenage boys who looked like they might burst into tears, trolleys, coffee cups, televisions no one could hear…Jimmy took it all in with the astonishment of a child who'd pulled a rock off the soil to see the woodlice scatter underneath.

He had other things to be doing, but—the realisation was made luminescent by the white lights of the waiting room—Maureen didn't have anyone else to accompany her. It was late in his life to feel a son's duty. His stand-in siblings had been so much older than him that he'd never felt pressure to obey, tend to or bolster. This was new, and what positive novelty did he expect to find in life at his age?

Maureen sat on the plastic chair beside his, surly under the lights and the pain of her injured wrist. She had climbed up on the worktop in her apartment that afternoon to clean cupboard shelves, and had fallen. After two cups of tea and a few hours grumbling didn't cure her, she called the doctor, who sent her into A&E for an X-ray. She didn't appear to have wanted to call Jimmy. She did anyway. And so they sat together.

He tried, though where the compulsion came from he wasn't sure. “D'you want a cup of tea?” he said. “D'you want a newspaper?” In between staring at the weekend casualties and fantasising about getting head from that one good-looking nurse, he provided what his mother needed.

“How the A&E in this piddling hole is slower than the ones in London I'll never figure out,” Maureen groused. She had given up on her newspaper, having found it difficult to turn pages with only one hand. Now she sat with her legs crossed, holding on to her paper cup, making evil eyes at the opposite wall. A man who'd taken the seat below the spot she was directing her attention squirmed.

“Every A&E is the same on Saturday nights,” Jimmy offered.

“Bloody government,” she responded.

Jimmy smiled.

“D'you need to go out for a cigarette or anything?” he asked.

“And what if they call me? And what if I miss it and they end up sticking me back on the arse of the queue?”

“Sure I'll go out and get you.”

“Oh, stop fussing.”

To this he couldn't help but laugh. “Fussing? Me? You're off your fucking game if you think that's fussing.”

“You're like an old hen,” she said.

Jimmy cast his eye round again, and caught jaded porters, and threadbare corners, and footage of county floods scrolling on the TV screen on the wall. This was outside of his usual trajectory and yet home to all of these lifeforms who snapped and bled and shattered and had nothing but their country to fix them again.

A nurse stood at the corridor and called, “Maureen Phelan?”

Maureen rose and Jimmy rose alongside her. “Are you coming too?” she asked, surprised, and he said, “Why wouldn't I, Maureen? Is that not what I'm here for?”

They sat outside of the X-ray room and what he'd said obviously nagged at her, because she came out with, “I'm probably not what you expected in a mother.”

He shrugged. “I'm probably not what you expected in a son,” he said, but only because he felt he had to. That he wasn't what anyone would expect in a son was not a revelation. She was right, though. Maybe you get the mother you deserve.

He examined his hands and looked from there down the length of his legs. Alien or not, he was most certainly here, and he wouldn't have been if it wasn't for her youthful indiscretion. He glanced at Maureen and wondered how it was even possible to have come from her body and to have grown up into…whatever he was. It was an unpleasant sensation. His just being alive had ruined her life.

She got her wrist X-rayed and was directed back to the waiting room. Their seats had been taken, so they walked around to find another pair.

Tony sat in the shadow of an enormous doctor as an exhausted climber with half a mountain yet to go. The doctor was young, calm and distracted. He had the chart in his hand but even as he spoke he was looking around at other notes, at his computer screen, at some diagnosis he had yet to make a call on. Tony felt light-headed. He held on tight.

“You'll keep him in, then?” he asked.

“Oh God, yeah,” said the doctor. “For observation, first of all. We've cleaned him out but, y'know, we're still talking alcohol intoxication, cocaine intoxication…” He squinted down at the chart. Tony flinched. “Preliminary bloods suggest he didn't get as much paracetamol into him as we feared, but hepatotoxicity is still a concern. We'll do bloods again in two, three hours. When he's back with us I'd like someone from Psychiatry to speak to him.”

“Psychiatry?”

“Yes, Mr….ah. Cusack?”

“Cusack,” said Tony, miserably.

“Combined drug intoxication is usually accidental but both you and his…ah, housemate have indicated that this was deliberate. Better safe than sorry, eh? We don't want him in here again.”

“No.”

“So we'll move him to the unit in a bit and you can see him then, all right? I'll send a porter out to you.”

The doctor rose, and as he turned to hold the door open Tony took his hand and squeezed it.
Jesus,
he thought.
I'm like those gobshites who clap when the plane lands
.

“Thank you,” he said. “I know these young fellas must break your melt. I know you have better things to be doing.”

The doctor furrowed his brow and smiled. “It's what we're here for. Don't worry about it.” He allowed Tony to hold his hand for another second. “He'll be fine,” he said.

Tony went back out to the waiting room. Kelly, Joseph and Karine were where he had left them. Joseph had draped an arm around Karine, who'd folded herself into a ball. There had been a fight earlier, apparently. She'd left Ryan and had gone into town to her friends. He'd followed, and it had culminated in a screaming match on the Grand Parade, “…but there's no way I thought he'd do something like this,” she wept. “I'd never have fought with him if I'd have known…Oh God, this is all my fault.”

She'd confessed a variety of incidents and run-ins in the hours they'd sat in the waiting room. The past six months had exhausted her. She'd told Ryan three times that she couldn't do it anymore and each warning had developed into nothing more than a short detox: they spent a week apart and faltered, and after the second time their friends stopped remarking on it. In the meantime there were parties. “He's DJing more,” she said and, almost as if it wasn't his father she was talking to, blurted, “and you know what that means. Coke isn't as forgiving as we are.”

She'd stopped crying. Tony stood in front of her and she looked up, red around the nose and panda-eyed. She was a beautiful thing, still, and he thought that Ryan must be fucked altogether if he could hurt her time and time over.

He relayed the doctor's update. “He'll be fine,” he said. None of them believed it.

“How could he be fine,” Karine squeaked, “when I don't know who he is anymore?”

Joseph squeezed her arm. “Hey,” he said. “This is where it starts getting better, OK? You'll see.”

Tony went outside for a cigarette. He curled his hand around the flame of the lighter; the wind got at it anyway. He turned to the wall and tried again. An ambulance pulled into the bay to his left and paramedics removed a creature on a stretcher. They were joking. Just another night for them. Just another fucking casualty.

Jimmy Phelan stepped up beside him and said, “Jesus, the whole of Cork City must be in A&E tonight.”

Tony's cigarette caught. He had little mind for running.

“What do you want?” he asked.

J.P. scowled. “Is that any way to greet an old friend?” he said.

It had been months. J.P. was as good as his word. It had been months between visits before, too, but this time was different, and Tony felt it in his son's distance. The girl was gone and his association with Jimmy Phelan consigned once more to history, but the cost was all around him tonight, in white faces and Karine's tears.

“Probably not,” he said, “but we haven't been close in a while, have we, Jimmy?”

“I suppose we haven't,” J.P. conceded. He lit his own cigarette and raised his eyebrows.

“You didn't have to involve my young fella,” Tony said. The cigarette smoke was noxious as his very first lungful; he was nauseated, dizzy. “Whatever he said to you. He's only a boy.”

J.P. said, “He involved himself, Tony.”

“Are you trying to tell me he knew what he was doing? He's twenty years of age, Jimmy.”

J.P. took a drag and shook his head. “You're dredging up some old shit there, Cusack,” he warned.

“So what?” said Tony. “We're old shit. Aren't we?”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning we were buddies one time. Meaning you were the first person to buy me a drink when I found out he was on the way.”

Tony finished his cigarette and stood with the butt between his fingers. In front of them, the car park hosted a drowsy light show as vehicles inched in and out, swung around tight corners, searched for space in the cramped dark.

“Who told you I was the sentimental type?” said J.P., mildly.

“Yeah. That's a mistake I made, for thinking there was still a man in there underneath the bullshit.”

Phelan turned. He backed Tony up against the wall.

“No one talks to me like that, Cusack.”

“I fucking know that,” Tony snapped. “I know it better than most! Bear that in mind, will you, boy? I know what you're capable of. I've seen it and I've fucking felt it. You took my son from me. You've nothing left to take.”

“I'm sure I could find something.”

“Let me save you the trouble of looking—you couldn't. If you're going to kill me, fucking kill me. I've had enough. It's all coming away under me.”

“Why would I want to kill you, Cusack? You're not dangerous.”

Tony thought,
I didn't used to be
.

J.P. said, “Are you finished?”

Tony exhaled.

J.P. said, “Our friend Robbie…Well, it wasn't you I was worried about talking, Cusack.”

The automatic doors opened to their right and a couple came out. They stood at the other side of the doors and lit up. J.P. looked over, gauged intent and spoke again, so quietly that Tony had to strain to hear him over the autumn wind and the car park hum.

“Consider yourself told only because we are old shit, Cusack, very old shit indeed. If it had come out about our friend Robbie, what d'you think would have happened? She's an old woman. She keeps putting herself in harm's way and it's my job to keep pulling her back again. You do what you have to for family. Absorb that one, and let the old shit go.”

“You ruined my family while you were saving your own.”

“No,” said J.P. “I didn't. The state of you, Tony. I didn't do that to you, and you know it. You can stand here in the dark harping on about your family and your boy and your badly faked innocence, but it's just me and you here, and I see right through you. You can whinge about what needed doing, but it was nothing new to your young fella.”

“You don't know that,” said Tony.

“Yeah I do. Open your eyes, Cusack. Your young lad was well able for it. He's already twice the man you are.”

“Good news,” said the doctor. “It's just a sprain. You'll be hurling again before you know it, Maureen.”

“Oh, mighty,” she sniffed. “And I here all night.”

The doctor brushed off the gibe. “Could be worse,” he said, looking over his glasses at the waiting room. He presented her with a prescription. “Painkillers,” he said. “Three a day, with food. Look after yourself.”