The Glorious Heresies (34 page)

“And that's your lot,” grumbled Maureen. She stood by their seats as Jimmy retrieved the newspaper and their coats. “What are you giving out about?” he said. “You get to go home to bed now. If it had been broken they'd be setting it and you'd be here another four hours.”

“Sure amn't I institutionalised at this stage?”

“Well what did you expect with your messing?”

“Last time I try to clean anything, so,” she said. “You can get me a housekeeper.”

They moved towards the doors. Across the room, Maureen spotted a familiar dark mop, and she paused.

“Everyone's in this place tonight,” she said.

“That's just what I thought,” said Jimmy.

Tony Cusack looked up at them. Maureen raised her good hand, but he didn't acknowledge it.

“What's wrong with him?” she said.

Jimmy touched her arm and shrugged towards the door.

“What's he in for?” Maureen asked, to another shrug. “What?” she said. “You didn't ask?”

“Why would I ask?”

“That's a kind of sad way to be,” she mused.

“You don't mix business and pleasure,” Jimmy said. “It's as simple as that.”

Maureen frowned. “I'm going to ask him,” she said.

“Do no such thing, Maureen.”

She snorted. “Are you going to stop me? The man did a lot for us, Jimmy.”

“As I'm sure he's keen to forget.” He took her by the arm. “I get what you're saying, Maureen. Honest to God I do. But just because you have a tie to someone doesn't mean you have to double-knot it.”

The parallel was enough to render her pliant. She let him lead her into the car park.

He opened the car door for her. She settled in and took a deep breath; the interior smelled so very like him, the grown-up him, a long way travelled between the soft perfume of his baby head and the smoke and cologne and metal and leather she associated with him now.

He relented. “Tony Cusack was a decent sort,” he admitted, sitting in beside her. “Bit of a langer as a kid; I grew up with him. Sank into a bottle in his teens and never came out again. He's exactly the kind of person you'd use for such an awkward task as the one you set me, Maureen. In need of a few bob, innate mistrust of guards, too much to lose to consider talking.”

“What's ‘too much to lose'?”

“Kids,” he said. “A hape of them. He met an Italian girl in London, brought her home and had six smallies with her. Then she went off and died on him. Fucking car accident. His oldest is twenty now. Young fella, criminal record acquired already. Ryan. Tony was a Man United man.” He laughed. “His kids mustn't be so laddish, mind. I bought Ellie's piano from him. He had a house of little musicians. No wonder he didn't know what to do with them.”

“You threaten a man's kids?”

“No. The implication is enough. You ask how many he has. No more needs to be said.”

“It's a nasty way of holding someone,” she chided.

“It's a nasty world,” Jimmy said. “What else was I going to do? You went on a rampage with your Holy Stone. Someone had to clean it up. If you don't want to hear truths like that don't go around forcing them.”

She was silent. The city slid around them and Jimmy navigated as a bright-eyed captain on a sleeping sea.

Tony sent Kelly home with Joseph but Karine refused to leave, even after the doctor had insisted that Ryan was in no danger. It took her mother, arriving down bleary-eyed at four in the morning, to drag her away, and even then it was a slog.

“You don't understand,” she bawled. “It's my fault.”

“It's not your fault,” Tony offered, and Jackie D'Arcy glared at him, as if his input was detrimental to her daughter's return to sanity. He knew what the mother was thinking. She was a nurse too.
Histrionic bully boy making a point with a packet of painkillers
. Maybe she was right, but here wasn't the time or the place.

“Am I upsetting you?” Tony snapped, and she jumped. “She's crying but he's unconscious, so maybe just keep the high and mightiness to a minimum, all right?”

“I wasn't being high and mighty,” said Mrs. D'Arcy, feigning injury.

“It's all right, Mam,” said Karine. “We're just all a bit tired and stressed out.”

Jackie coaxed her down the corridor and out into the car, and that left Tony, alone in a thinning crowd, with no son yet to show for it.

Once they'd moved Ryan into the unit, he was allowed to go in. He hung back for just a moment before taking his place in the chair by the bedside.

He seemed fine. It would have made Tony feel a lot better if a nurse had popped her head around to say “He's only sleeping it off” or “He'll have some head in the morning” but they weren't treating this with comforting levity. He'd complicated everything, apparently. The alcohol was one thing, the cocaine another, the paracetamol a further. The treatment was a problem to be worked out. And then at the end of it they'd whistle and a psychiatrist would swoop down from the rafters with a prescription book and a big red stamp with which to brand Tony Cusack Cork's greatest fuck-up.

“What did you do that for, Rocky?” Tony whispered.

He rested his head against the mattress.

“What am I gonna do with you?”

Still with his forehead to the bed, he reached for his son's hand. His skin was warm. Tony ran his thumb over his knuckles and in his sleep Ryan took a deep breath.

“You're not going to die on me anyway.”

There was room and time to talk. Mouth pressed against hospital sheets in case anyone heard him, Tony confessed to his sleeping son. “I didn't mean it,” he said. “I didn't mean any of it. They said down in Solidarity House you lash out at the ones you love the most, you know? If you'd just talked to me more often…” He paused. Medical staff drifted past the cubicle. Murmured diagnoses were met with shaky questions.

“I know this is my fault,” he said. “I know I fucked up. I know you stepped in and I know I should have stopped you. So if this is a point you wanted to make, you've made it. You frightened me. Whatever about me; you frightened Karine. Karine doesn't know who you are anymore. D'you hear that, boy? Are you listening to me?”

He sat up straight and looked at his son. Dark lashes rested on dark circles. The bulb off his ould fella.

“And yet with all your mam's faults, yeah. It's not enough for you to feel, boy, no. You have to feel everything ten times harder.”

Time had smoothed out the chubby cheeks, straightened the curls, sharpened the jaw line, but he could see the baby still in his son's face.

“Your mam would never have let you do this.”

Tony was tired. He could do with a bottle of water, a couple of Solpadeine and his bed.

“I shouldn't have let you, either. It wasn't right. But fuck, Ryan. None of it was right. This city's fucking rotten, falling down around us.”

The dark pool around Robbie O'Donovan's head spread on the floor of the cubicle. The tiles he'd replaced for Maureen Phelan ran patterns through his vision. The deep throb of the boat engine under his seat made him gag.

“I killed her, Ryan. Oh God help me. I killed her.”

The tears were falling and his son was blind to them.

“You need to understand,” Tony said. “Whatever punishment comes for me I'll take it as long as you know…I did it for you. For the very same reason you did what you did: you do what you have to for family. How can I be sorry, then? How can I be sorry when I did it for you?”

There's a piano in the lobby. I spot it when we're walking in and then it grows and grows until it's all I can think about. I'm not usually waylaid by pianos on nights out. I don't spend every second social occasion fantasising about enormous inanimate objects that one time used to mean something to me. But I've been fucked these past three weeks. I've been sick, and tired, and dizzy, and dead. And so that fucking piano is taunting parts of me I kept well covered until temporary madness stripped back the skin and left me beaten and bleeding.
You couldn't play me now
, it says.
Your fingers have fused, your mind's gone grey, you're deaf, you're blind, you're dumb. You're nothing.

It's Karine's twenty-first birthday.

Her mam and dad have organised this serious shindig. Hotel, bar extension, DJ, canapés, cocktails, everyone she's ever met in her fucking life, this cake with white chocolate flowers all over it that I swear to God would kill someone if it fell on them. She's got everyone dressed in either black or white so she's the only one wearing colour. She's flitting about in this turquoise dress, making sure everyone's all right, that they're all having fun, that they know everyone they're supposed to know. And what am I doing? I'm stuck to the railing of the terrace outside, smoking over the river, dead to it all but that piano in the lobby.

Today is the first day I left the house since they discharged me from the hospital, three weeks ago. Karine had to cry to get me moving and even then I registered the tears with…I don't know. I don't want to make her cry. I'm sick of making her cry. But it's like I don't have any real will to stop it.

But I can breathe. I can move around. I can eat and sleep and watch telly. Sometimes I can't believe it. I'll be three spoons into a bowl of Weetabix and suddenly I'll ask myself,
Well, how'd you do that, boy? How'd you get here?

Y'know how many times I've fucked Karine since that night? Twice. In three fucking weeks. And only because she insisted that making me hard would cure me. She stripped for me, she sucked me, she whispered I could have it any way I wanted it…and it was grand, once I got going. But once it was done I was back underground.

Maybe it's guilt, for Georgie. Slow-burn kind of guilt. Maybe the adrenalin was always supposed to take six months to bleed me out.

Maybe it's just that I did so much coke I wasted all my feelings.

Maybe it's just that I'm so wrapped up in replaying the day I nearly hit my girlfriend that I can't feel anything else, like I've been rolled up in a bit of old carpet and dropped into the sea.

But then surely all she'd need to do to cure me is forgive me? And she has. She has because she thinks I tried to kill myself at Halloween, with a bottle of tablets and a bottle of Jameson, like an ould hag.

No. Coz if I'd wanted to kill myself I would have just shot myself.

Joseph comes out to me on the terrace.

“It's pussy central in there,” he gasps.

I might be a corpse but I've noticed him chatting up one of the other nurses for the past hour. Karine's best mate Louise is usually Joseph's fuckbuddy. There'll be drama there before long.

All I can say is “Yeah.”

“You all right, boy?”

“Yeah.”

“You don't look all right.”

“I'm OK,” I tell him, but he's hovering, so after I finish my smoke I go inside with him, and the place is hopping, really hopping. I go to the bar and order a beer.

Karine is back over beside me. “I thought you weren't drinking?”

I'm not supposed to be. I told her I'd knock it on the head for a while and see if that helps me stop making a total arse of myself in front of the entire city. I don't particularly want a drink, as it happens, but the whole place is staring at me. The whole fucking place.

“It's only one,” I tell her.

“Yeah, I know, but…” She's fixing the collar of my suit jacket, and I know there's nothing wrong with it. “Y'know, maybe you shouldn't. Maybe you should give yourself a chance to…I dunno, come back to yourself.”

Yeah, maybe. And in the meantime the vultures are circling and the eyes on Mammy and Daddy D'Arcy are turning into pinpricks of hate and the room is whispering
Poor Ryan, poor poor Ryan, don't you know he tried to top himself? Para-fucking-cetamol, like an amateur. But you know about him, don't you? You know his mother drove drunk into a ditch. Vehicular suicide. Imagine. Poor Ryan. Look at him not drinking, he can't drink anymore, like, can't be trusted with it, neither his dad nor his mam could be trusted with it.

“It's all under control now, though,” I tell Karine. “No difference anymore between me and the next man.”

“OK,” says Karine. “Just be careful, though.”

I take a sip and walk away.
Careful
, like. I know what she means. Don't lose the temper and don't lose hope. No chance of that now.

By the door I turn back. The dance floor is full. Joseph's shifting the nurse. Someone's rubbing Louise's back. Gary D'Arcy is watching me over his pint. Karine is twirling in her turquoise dress and her subjects are moving around her like dancers in formation, like snowflakes in the sky, like shitty little bangers around a falling star. And I don't deserve her. I can't feel sad about that, because I've broken myself, but I know it because it's that sharp and true.

I put the beer on the ledge behind me and walk out of the function room and down to the lobby and approach that vicious fuck of a piano as it goads me,
You couldn't do it, boy, the music's stopped
, and I walk past it as my throat closes up,
You waster, Cusack, you piece of shit, your girlfriend's twenty-first and you're walking out, she'll never forgive you for this,
and I get to the door and out into the winter.

I'm nearly home by the time she calls me.

“Where'd you go, boy?” She's worried.

“I just had to go, girl. I shouldn't have come at all. I can't do this.”

“But I need you here. Don't do this to me tonight, Ryan. Please!”

I could be back there in half an hour, at her side, holding her up when she got tipsy, giving her the first and the last of her twenty-one kisses. I could be there for her but I won't be. I can't. It's done. My city stretches in the dark, and I can no more go back than go forward.