The Glorious Heresies (11 page)

“He's with one of the…working girls,” she said. “You know.”

“One of the whores? Which whore?”

“I don't know what she calls herself but I know her as Georgie Fitzsimons.”

“Irish?”

“They do exist,” she said.

“And where does she work? What does she look like?”

“Oh, she's one of the unfortunates. She's on the streets. Not hard to miss; she's usually down the quay. She's short but, y'know, chesty.” She gestured extravagantly. “Dark hair down her back. Skinny now, like, but she was pretty once. I think the term is ‘gone to shit.' ”

“I know the sort.”

“She used to work for you,” she said. “In the house at the end of Bachelor's Quay.”

“Really.” Well, now the langer's being there made sense. The insignificant other of one of the whores, probably a junkie, probably thinking the house was empty, probably looking to rip the copper out of the walls or the carpet up. Probably the kind of company that eejit Tony Cusack was used to keeping. The issue of the corpse's exposed identity quickly shrivelled.

“Does he owe you money or something?” Tara asked.

“Who?”

“Robbie O'Donovan. I get the feeling he skipped town, is all.”

Jimmy chewed the air.

“You ask too many questions, Tara.”

“I'm just trying to help…”

“It'd be more in your line to try zipping your trap, because the day will come when someone will solder it shut for you.”

“OK. Jesus,” she said, and held on to the wall dividing her property from Cusack's, and put her other hand to her chest.

“Just a pointer.” He dismissed her with a casual wave and returned to his car.

She reappeared at her front window, peeked out from behind the curtain, disappeared as soon as she saw him watching. He snorted.

One of the squabbling girls pushed her companion off her scooter. The deposed one screamed. Tara Duane glimpsed out again. Jimmy considered another wave.

The distraught girl's screams were met and matched by a yowl from one of the gardens across the way. A man with gym-sculpted shoulders pitched towards them, snarling at Sarah or Sasha or whoever she was. Jimmy couldn't tell whether it was the victim or the perpetrator that had drawn out the yowls, but the chap was coming for them, hard, and when he reached them he picked up the screaming one with one hand and slapped the offender with the other. The one who'd been pushed was set upright. The culpable one was spun around by her wrist. She went white with shock. The judgement kept coming.

Hot day, though. Short tempers.

A woman in lilac with a stretched-out seahorse tattoo waddled towards the scene. She stood back from the spitting man, the bawling children, and threatened to call the guards. The man raised his hand.

Still there was no rain. Jimmy smiled out at the olive light and the drama and drew Tony Cusack's indiscretion from catastrophe to conspiracy to clanger.

We're going out later. Nothing much happening, but we're going to get some cans and go gatting with Joseph and the lads, have a few smokes, a bit of a laugh. Karine, though, she'd get dolled up for the opening of an eye. We're up in Dan Kane's stash house and she's “getting ready.” Getting ready, like. So that if she pulls a whitey at least she'll look gorgeous gawking all over my runners.

I'm at the bottom of the bed, rolling a joint, and she's sitting up against the pillows watching telly and painting her toenails baby-blue.

It's one of them dancing competition shows that's on. She loves them. She does hip-hop twice a week and enters competitions with a proper crew and everything. She can do the splits. She can rest her calves on my shoulders. Yeah, it's fucking awesome.

“Your manno's amazing,” she says, all goo-eyed at this fella lepping around in front of the judges in a pair of leggings.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, he's got moves like.”

She's completely gripped. She finishes her toenails and leans back, a finger in her mouth as she stares at the screen. I hold the joint up in invitation but she pays me no heed.

Her toes are splayed in case she ruins the paint job.

I take a pinch of tobacco and slowly, slowly stretch over.

She sighs as the judges give a standing ovation. She gets very wrapped up in the feelgoods.

I sprinkle some of the loose tobacco over the nails on her right foot and it sticks to the polish, flecking it baby-blue and bog-water brown.

She doesn't notice.

I do the other foot. She pulls her knees towards her just as I finish.

“He is like super talented,” she says.

I spark up.

She looks over at me, mouth open, ready to tell me something else mind-blowing about the steamer on the screen when she lamps her piebald toes.

“Oh my God! Ryan!”

I'm breaking my hole laughing.

“Ryan Cusack, you are fucking LOUSY!” She jumps up and throws a pillow at me and practically has a fit right there on the floor. “You gowl! I don't even have varnish remover with me, like. They're ruined! What am I gonna do? Oh my God, you break my melt, d'you know that?”

She is beetroot with fury but I can't say anything, I'm choked.

She stomps into the bathroom and just before she slams the door she screams, “I wish I was a fucking LESBIAN!”

On the screen yer man in leggings is standing with his hands joined in a silent prayer. I wipe the tears from my eyes. The judges call yer man's name and he jumps out onto the stage like he's got a wazzie down his drawers.

She comes out again a couple of minutes later.

“Your boyfriend got through,” I tell her.

She scowls. “My boyfriend better get his jacket on coz he's going to get me nail polish remover right now. I honestly don't know why I put up with you, Ryan. You're such a child.”

It was beautiful down at the lakeside in the early morning. The air was cold, stripped of the fragments it had picked up the day before, though it would be stale by midday and offering mouthfuls of flies by dusk.

Georgie had made a habit out of coming down to the water before breakfast. In the great expanse of hill and sky, it stayed early for longer. Back in the city there was traffic and torment from dawn. Out here, so long as the air held that chill, the limbo between then and now stretched as far as she needed.

She sat on a flat rock by the water's edge and closed her eyes to the milky-blue sky, and the breeze that coaxed tresses onto her cheeks and over her lashes. The birds could be raucous near the water, but this morning their song was spiralling light. Beyond that, nothing. Later, when duties began, there'd be car engines and noises of cooperation as people grouped off to deny the devil idle hands.

David's voice, behind her: “You weren't wrong.”

She neither turned nor opened her eyes. “You're so negative, David.
You weren't wrong.
You could have said instead,
You were right.
Turn the negative into the positive, remember? Break free of sour processes. Turn that frown. Upside down.”

His shoes crunched on the shingle. When she opened her eyes, he was standing at the water's edge, his back to her, hands on his hips.

“You look like you're appraising the plantation,” she said. “Lord and Master of all you survey.”

“Only one Lord,” he said. “And no possessions. Isn't that right?”

She laughed, and he turned to smile. He was neatly proportioned, moulded by good fortune rather than hard work. He had a trimmed beard, which tickled, and eyes blue as the mountain sky.

“I didn't think you were one for getting up early,” she teased.

“You said it would be worth my while,” he said.

Gambling was David's vice. He used to hole himself up for entire weeks, just him and his laptop, losing shirt after shirt in landscapes of flashing lights and vivid green. You wouldn't think it to look at him. He seemed more like the lead in an IKEA ad. When his parents got divorced, his father had turned to pastors new, and this rekindling of faith led him to deposit his youngest son at a lakeside refuge run by Christian soldiers whose military tactics amounted to communal porridge pots and long walks in the woods.

Georgie's first thought had been that it was all very American, but the mission leader was Irish. William Tobin was his name and he called his organisation CAIL, which she had since discovered, with a hastily stifled snigger, stood for Christians Active In Light. Try as she might she couldn't find an ulterior motive to William's decency; he was too gentle a soul for trickery. He had a grey ponytail and a wife called Clover to whom he displayed a very non-cultlike monogamous devotion. He had found Georgie in need and had given freely.

What that need had been was nobody else's business. William had told her that what she disclosed to his knot of volunteers was entirely up to her. So she'd told them she was an alcoholic, which was probably true, even if it was the least of her problems.

It wasn't rehab in the traditional sense. William Tobin's West Cork property was more drop-out than check-in. Bed and board in exchange for a little light farming and daily sermons about the loving grace of Jesus Christ. Georgie hadn't yet found the Lord—in His defence, she hadn't been looking very hard—but they seemed an honest bunch, she had always liked porridge and she loved the lakeside air.

“You're sure you're set for later?” David said.

“Oh yeah. That won't be a problem.”

“I guess it's handy they're bringing you.”

“They must trust me not to run off into the nearest pub, screaming for a Jägerbomb.”

“You think they're right to trust you?” he smiled.

“Please. Booze is so last month.”

He sat beside her on her boulder perch and as he stretched an arm around her he looked back, in the direction of the centre, just in case.

William and Clover didn't like to make rules not already enshrined in the teachings of Himself, but He probably wasn't keen on fraternisation and, if Georgie remembered her religion classes correctly, thought fallen women only handy for washing His trotters. The fact that she had embarked on a quiet affair with David would no doubt have been a deal-breaker, at the very least an incitement to proper spluttering Bible-thumping.

But there was something so perversely pure about it. Georgie hadn't told David about the career path that brought her to William's door, and his blind attraction was quite the aphrodisiac. And though she had long lost the notion that she would be dragged out of perdition by the clammy hands of a man, there was something therapeutic in the nature of their bond. The secrecy reminded her of the first few stolen kisses as a girl back at home; furtive pecks at the back of the hurling pitch, the fluttering excitement of a hand sliding under her top. So there was a kind of rebirth to it, she supposed.

She leaned into David's shoulder and they kissed.

The first time had been a revelation. They had been talking late in the common room about his converted father and her stubbornly pious mother. Without warning he'd lurched forward, an action as clumsy as its resulting kiss was tender, and as his mouth worked hers open she'd felt heat spreading, belly to hips to thighs. Like a blossoming, a poet might have said, but at the time she had linked it to the idea of an opening tomb. Something that would stir a pharaoh's wrath and unleash a plague of locusts. It had been a diversion from genuine butterflies.

That night they'd had sex on the bench Clover used to fold sheets. She thought afterwards that she probably shouldn't have, on the basis that it wasn't good for her rehabilitation, but actually wanting to was novelty enough to carry her.

If Robbie were to come home now, would he find her willing and born anew?

If Robbie were to come home now he wouldn't find her at all.

David slipped his hand down the front of her dress, teasing taut a nipple.

“D'you think we have time…” he said.

“I doubt it.”

But David was a gambling man.

She had leaned against a parked car and heaved.

You could never be safe, even though you'd be so careful and smart, leaning in through car windows to slyly sniff their breath for signs of riled drunkenness, reading the tics and faces pulled to gauge violent intent. A few would always get through, and the ones you couldn't interpret were the worst of the lot, the real evil bastards, the ones who hid behind stony facades the rage, the frustration, the deep-seated mammy issues they were only dying to take out on you. You, the dirty whore. You, representing in living, breathing audacity everything that was wrong with them.

This one had accepted the terms of the sale, then decided, once she was in his car, that the terms of the sale were unacceptable.

When she protested, he punched her. When she shouted, he walked around the side of the car to the passenger door, took her hair in his fist and dragged her out. He pushed her onto the bonnet and raped her. Then he punched her again and spat into her face and hair and told her that she disgusted him, and left her at the side of the road, and from there she began walking back into town, and a host of the oblivious walked and drove past until by luck or as he might have put it, divine intervention, William Tobin found her.

He was driving home from the hall he maintained in the city for prayer services and Bible study groups.

“You poor child!” he exclaimed, tearfully. “God is here for you. You have only to let him in.”

She had been asked to return to the prayer hall in the city now with William and Clover and a couple of the converted: Saskia, a girl of near thirty who'd been raised in bohemian carelessness down in Kerry by her German parents and all of their hangers-on; and Martin, a bearded giant in his forties who had spent years in prison for some crime only darkly alluded to. William drove the minibus, and Georgie balanced her chin in her hand and watched the countryside drift by as Saskia wondered aloud if Ireland was, in its heathenism, doomed to suffer the fate of ancient Rome.

The four were to attend some public meeting about political non-compliance, or the threat of feminism, or knitting jumpers for Jesus or something. Her role was to prep the hall for their return; sweep the floor, arrange the chairs, make the sandwiches.

She had been looking forward to the excursion since William had mentioned it, three days before. It wasn't just because of the plan she'd hatched with David to bring back some goodies for a midnight feast, though that was most of it; giggling with David behind the backs of the brethren made her ache for childish pursuits. She had also been looking forward to some time away from the serenity of the lakeside. To feel something real again, and in its contact make certain that she was entitled to this time out. Because sometimes she felt that the earnest faith of William and his disciples, the cleansing chill of the lakeside air, even the sanctified secrecy of her encounters with David—all were fragments of someone else's bedtime story, lost in the aether and erroneously granted her.

The “hall” was a poky thing. There was a keyboard by the back wall, and a few books of sheet music, and enough faux-leather-bound Bibles to make a fort. Once she'd set up the circle of plastic chairs and the trestle tables, and pulled out the lectern from the corner, there seemed a dangerous shortage of the room necessary to keep breathing an assembly of Christians all equally afire with the faith. Still, the first part of her job was done. She locked the door behind her and walked to the Centra on the next street over. She had sliced pan to buy, and a plan to put in motion.

“I'm sorry to ask,” she said, as the girl behind the counter scanned the provisions, “but is there a phone I could use?”

There was no provision given for call credit at the centre. Mobile phones were a distraction, William said, a link to the outside world that had chewed them up and puked them out. That had made perfect sense at the time, because Georgie had been sure that nobody needed or wanted a call from her while she was getting sober or realigning her principles or whatever you fancied calling it. She hadn't taken her phone out of the bedside table drawer in weeks.

She remembered his number, all the same. It was one of those numbers you never forgot. 999, your parents' house, your dealer.

“
What
is going on with you?” he asked, in charmed incredulity, when she opened the door.

“What, the rig out?” She twirled. “Better than freezing your arse off in a greyhound skirt, isn't it?”

“It's a bit wholesome, like.”

“It's a long sleeved maxi dress, not a burqa! Modesty is the whore's kryptonite. Besides, it's kind of a condition of this whole thing.” She gestured at the hall, and he stepped in and looked around and said, “Jesus Christ, Georgie. You're hardly trying to convert me.”

“Could you be converted, Ryan?”

“Not without a skinful of acid.”

“Well
phew
for the pair of us, coz they haven't gotten me yet either.”

“Clearly not if you're calling me down. Where've you been anyway, girl?”

“Getting saved,” she said, and he smiled at her, and she was pleased to note that his smile lacked the mercantile cunning she had worried the missing months would give him. “Down in West Cork. They have this commune.”

“A cult, like?”

“No! Unless you mean it in the Christian sense. But I bet you're a good Catholic boy so you can't really talk.”

She handed over the money she'd put together with David, and Ryan produced a couple of wraps, one of which she tucked into her bra.

“Don't get them wet,” he said.

“I'm not lactating, for God's sake.”

He looked put out. “If they get damp they're fucked altogether.”