The Glorious Heresies (27 page)

“That's nothing to do with me.”

“Please. It's everything to do with you.”

The girl at the till began to sing a song. In an uneven jumble of breath and flat melody she forced on Tony a broken musical accompaniment.

“I couldn't find her,” Tara went on, “but she turned up of her own accord. A few months back. J.P.'s done whatever he had to do—”

“What's that mean?”

She scoffed. “She's fine. I'm not. Do you realise how useless we look to J.P. now?”

“I don't look like anything to J.P. I've got nothing to do with him.”

“Oh Jesus, give it up! I do a bit for him myself. I know the score.”

“You know nothing, Duane.”

“Fine. I know nothing, you know nothing.” She rolled her eyes and mimed chattering jaws with her hands. “But while you're convincing me of your ignorance, J.P. is realising what a pair of losers we are. If there's one thing worse than being the go-to for favours, it's becoming the go-to for framing. I need to get out of the city. Go down West Cork or something, start again.”

“Go then.”

“You might not have noticed, Tony, but I'm not exactly rolling in it.”

“If you're trying to convince me that that's my problem—”

She cut him off. “I went to the council. Told them I was sick from stress. I asked them to move me. They wouldn't. My issues with you weren't serious enough, even though you smashed my window and intimidated me. It's classed as antisocial behaviour and the council would be playing rounds of musical chairs all day and night if they gave a shit about that.”

She looked away, adjusted her jacket and exhaled.

“Don't think I'm not aware of how dangerous you are. You beat your son and you kill your drinking buddies.”

“You're crazy, I said.”

“Save it, she can't hear us.” She brushed hair from her face. “I don't want to live beside you anymore, Tony. I don't want J.P. knowing my address. Help me get out of here. That way we're both happy. Pay for your medicine. I'll meet you outside. I want to tell you something and you will hear it.”

In the early afternoon brilliance of high summer, on a day earmarked for fond reminiscence, she relayed to him the details of a plan concocted over high and white spirits. She wanted him to burn her out.

This was the plan, pulled from the addled head of the lunatic, imparted on the path outside the off-licence in matter-of-fact tones broken of emotion and repellent to passing snoops. She had determined that the best way for the Corporation to take her seriously would be to demonstrate a serious problem. She wanted Tony the Drunk to serve up a Molotov cocktail and throw it through her back door some prearranged night. The authorities would move her on. As for Tony Cusack, she'd vouch for him. He'd hardly try and smoke her out when his house joined hers.

“You're fucking serious,” Tony said, and Duane joined her hands and said, “I know it sounds mad, but I've thought about it and thought about it and it really does seem like the right solution for both of us. I'll say I've had trouble with Jimmy Phelan and the cops will drop it fierce fast. They're scared of him.”

Tony said, “I left school when I was sixteen and I haven't read a book since, but I know a stupid notion when I hear one. You're warped, Duane. You're either trying to trick me because you think I'm thick as the hairs on a gorilla's hole or you actually think that I'll commit arson to get you a country cottage.”

“Right.” She fell back. “So you're not going to help me.”

“Will I put my kids in danger because you've lost the plot? Let me think now. No.”

“I'll do it anyway,” she said. “I'll do it without your input and how are you going to know when to get out then?”

“You think I'm not going to go right to the guards about this?”

“No. Because if you do I'll tell them you killed Robbie O'Donovan. And then when my house goes up in flames I'll tell them Ryan did it. Spurned lovers at that age. You just don't know what they're capable of.”

He reached for her but she leapt back and wagged her finger, gasping, “Ah ah ah!” Tony pushed back against the wall. The streets were alive, even in the heat. Across the road, a girl pushing a bare-legged toddler in a buggy stared.

Tony said, “I'll have to bring this back to J.P. then, won't I?”

“But you won't,” said Tara Duane. “Even if he cared enough to do something about it, you know if anything happens to me he'll just pin it back on you, because that's what dopes like you are there for.”

In her shorts pocket, her phone trilled.

“Have a think about it,” she said, taking out the handset. “I wouldn't want to move on it for a while yet, anyway. Melinda's going off to live with her dad soon. No date set but she can't stay in Ireland much longer, sitting on her bum. The country's banjaxed, sure she's as well off out of it.”

She smiled. “I suppose yours will move on soon enough too. Nothing hurts as much as losing a child, though.”

She left him speechless and blinking in the sun.

Joseph goes into the bedroom with the other wan so I'm left in the kitchen with the green-eyed girl and she's approaching like a tsunami.

Look, don't get me wrong. She's unreal. She's wearing this black and gold patterned dress that sets off her olive skin, she's got long wavy hair just made for bunching in your hand while you shift her, she's got the absolute lot. We've been cordoned off in a corner talking all night because I'm that starved of Italian I'd wear a wire for la Guardia di Finanza if all they were promising was stammered conversation with camorristi. Her name's Elena. She's from Salerno. She keeps finishing my sentences. It's the fucking berries.

But I know she's expecting something in return. She's dead right, of course. I mean, me and Joseph came all the way back to their apartment to do more than admire a pair of living dictionaries. The other wan, Sofia, started mauling the face off Joe as soon as he got in the door; they're heading home in couple of days and I guess she's mad to go out on a high. The bedroom door closes. So there's me and Elena and she's giving me eyes and stroking her cleavage and here she comes, across the tiled floor, and I'm gonna have to, you know.

First girl I ever kissed was Lauren Sheehan. I was eleven. She was twelve. It was two days before my mam died.

I haven't kissed anyone but Karine in years, and I hadn't planned this.

Elena flicks her tongue against mine and all the blood rushes out of my face and down.

She pulls back with her hands on my chest, and says she won't tell my girlfriend if I don't.

Only last night me and Karine were out for a munch and then to one of her fancy pubs so she could drink cocktails and tell me how hot I am as I screwed up my eyes and tried to drink Niall Vaughan out of my head. She tells me there's nothing to forgive so I have to focus on forgetting. Her actions beg my pardon, though. She's so attentive. She's so fucking into me. She wants to spoil me and the truth is she's wasting her energy. I'm carrying anger around like a sack of wailing kittens; I'm not able to drown it. Like, this thing we have is so deep, and so brittle because of my mistakes, and my mistakes are so massive and glowing so bright I'm scared to set them down. And it turns out Karine's a reprobate too. I can't get my head around it. I'm angry, and relieved, and angry again because I'm relieved, and it's in my head, fucking pulsating, day and night, no matter what I do and I've room only for that and for nothing else so I don't even feel like me anymore. And I'm putting myself through that because I love Karine D'Arcy and it's no good, I can't bear to be without her.

Elena kisses me again, longer, softer, and my hands move down over the hill of her arse to the hem of her dress.

It's like…I dunno. Like something's pulling me forwards but it's splitting me in two doing it because there's a part of me completely unwilling to go with it. My fingers push her dress up and reach in and there's just this damp piece of fabric between me and her cunt. I'm pushing against her with my cock and she moans and goes for the top button of my jeans and I can hear bone splintering and wind howling and my whole entire soul shouting at me to
stop, stop, two wrongs don't make a right, boy, stoppit!
but I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna fuck her, why shouldn't I fuck her? That's how it goes, isn't it? I'm out with friends and I got drunk and I'm coked up nicely and my dick's gonna do whatever it wants to do. What's the point fighting it if Karine won't bother either?

Elena backs onto the table, pulls her dress over her head, clasps her heels around my waist and pulls me over. She slides her hands over my shoulders and I wince because she's gone straight onto the scar.

There's a brushstoke dragon across my shoulders, flicking down onto my arms. It's a week old. It hurt like hell for seven days and now it's a burning ache. Probably because it was inked on bone but maybe too because I got the artist to add an extra stroke, a K at the bottom of my dragon's tail, right on my spine.

It hurt, but it didn't stop me.

Across the skyline of his city, the modest heights other men's ambitions had carved from the marshy hamlet, Tony tracked his losses and kept watch for his damnation.

Sobriety became a memory that glimmered only in his children's disappointment. Ronan and Niamh stretched past the point of coddling. Cathal turned thirteen and moody. Cian talked of pursuing an apprenticeship. Kelly entered her Leaving Cert year. Their father's failures weighed on them less and less as they fixed on their own futures. His home was peopled by the shades of the one life he had worth living. His one-time assertion that he was a father above all things burned in Tara Duane's fluorescent vision. He hid in his front room and conjured resolutions; they crisped up and withered into ash with the first lungful breathed into them.

He watched the boy Ryan burn himself out. From a distant plain he tried calling armistice but whatever it was that Ryan had become didn't need it.

One dank November morning he arrived up in a ten-year-old Golf and Tony went out to kick tyres and mutter approvingly. He didn't know from whom Ryan had learned to drive. It wasn't lost on him that the teaching was a task for a boy's father.

“Are you set for Christmas?” Ryan asked, one hand clasped to the back of his neck and wincing like he'd cupped a wasp. “D'you need a few quid, like.”

Tony barely jibbed. His son gave him a roll of notes. He closed his hands around the gift and said, “Where did you get this?” and his son stared into the distance like a mariner mourning the fleet and said, “A bit of work, that's all,” and Tony knew then what he'd birthed.

Briefly, he considered asking this new Ryan what to do about Tara Duane, but wouldn't that give wings to an ugly truth? The conversation turned back to the car. Tony thought of histories etched on his son's skin and felt sick. He watched Duane's house, imagining her peeking from behind the sitting-room curtains, plotting how she was going to stitch them both up. Ryan said, “I'm saving for a GTi but this'll do for getting Karine to and from the shops in the meantime,” and his father patted the bonnet and laughed weakly.

As Christmas rushed him he thought of Jimmy Phelan's visit the year before, the half-drained bottle of whiskey he'd brought as a fuck you. Three December evenings in a row he contemplated picking up the phone and asking J.P. for help. Each time he stopped himself with bitter rationale. Jimmy Phelan wasn't his friend. He had slung his sins around Tony's neck and Tony had bowed and let him.

Two days before Christmas, the house from which he and Jimmy had removed poor Robbie O'Donovan went up in flames.

He only realised when he saw the photos on the front of the
Echo.
Two engines blocking the quay, the dampened smoke smothering the river, the sky above, stained. He read the report and was relieved to find there had been no one in the house at the time and no one hurt in the buildings around it. Preliminary investigations suggested faulty wiring—the property was ancient, after all—so the guards had ruled out foul play. Tony knew better. He had grown cynical enough to assume that the guards knew better too.

He supposed the fire turned the page on a black chapter of his life.

But he wasn't the same man who had stumbled onto J.P.'s path nearly four years before. The tidy removal of the crime scene couldn't draw a line under what had happened. Robbie O'Donovan was still dead. Tony Cusack had still washed his blood off the floor. Tara Duane had still used the wound as leverage.

On Christmas Day young Linda came over to compare presents with Kelly. Can in hand, Tony asked after her plans for the new year. She said she'd organised to continue her training in a salon in Glasgow, where her dad lived. She said she'd be leaving in the second week of January.

Kelly said, “Think of all your mam can get up to with you out from under her feet,” and Linda shuddered treacherously.

Pallid in the glow of the Christmas tree lights, Ryan stared straight at the telly, feigning apathy.

Tony made up his mind.

The day before the scheduled blaze Tara Duane was all zest and merriment, as if she was relaying instructions for a supermarket sweep.

“So what'll happen,” she said, placing a mug of milky tea on the table in front of him, “is that I'll leave the house at six o'clock, and take care to be seen here and there in town, and I won't come home until you phone me to tell me that there's been a terrible incident, or…” and she winked, “that the job is done.”

Tony hooked his fingers around the handle of the mug. He'd watched her make the tea and was satisfied she'd neither drugged nor spat in it. Still didn't make it any way appetising.

They were sitting in her kitchen. Efforts had been made to emphasise its owner's nonconformity—colourful, mismatched crockery, tea towels with cheeky slogans, holiday knick-knacks arranged on the windowsill—but the baubles didn't mask the decay. Piles of clothes had been set on the table and left for so long they'd become musty. The wall behind the dustbin was streaked brown and grey. The top of the cooker was thick with old grease. It was as if the resident had died months ago. Tony watched Tara Duane prep her own tea. She could easily have been a shade, remembering nothing but the most twisted flashes of what she once was.

“You don't need to worry at all,” she enthused, sitting across from him. “I've thought of absolutely everything. I've sold off some valuables because Melinda's just left and I've taken that opportunity to sort my stuff out. See? Makes total sense. You're going to throw the bottle into the kitchen leaving the key in the door behind you—I'll give it to you now, so we won't be seen together tomorrow—and it'll be like I simply forgot to lock it before going out. You know what a bad idea that is in a neighbourhood like this. You call me straight away because we're neighbours and you noticed the smell of smoke. And if anyone sees you leaving by my back door it's really easy to say,
Well yeah, I stuck my head in and realised the fire was out of control and I immediately called Tara and then the fire brigade,
yeah? And then I tell the council I was right all along and they move me out of here. And that's that!”

No bother on her at all that she was explaining an elaborate ruse to a man only involved because of his incurable hatred.

“Best for all of us, I think you'll agree,” she said. “This house has always been too big for me and Melinda. There are families who need it more than I do. So! Any questions?”

Tony remembered the banshee by the lake. He shook his head.

“Great!” she said. “Oh, have a biscuit, for God's sake. Do me a favour. I'm watching my figure!”

He hadn't planned to have a couple beforehand but he was no more able to stop himself drinking than he was to stop the act itself.

He lay in his bed and wept the poison out in preparatory ritual. Thought,
Am I even able to see this through? Will I get caught?
and then,
What will my kids think of me?
They wouldn't understand. What's a father to them, except someone who makes their dinners and ensures the house doesn't fall down around their ears?
Not even that, Tony Cusack.
What's a father to them, except someone who boozes and stumbles and fights and spews? They wouldn't understand that this was something he had to do, and he could never make them.

Every now and then he picked up his mobile and checked the hour and at 3 a.m. he slid out of the bed and stood by the front window and looked out at the estate.

It was raining. Wind shook the shrubs and hedges in neighbouring gardens, banged a gate somewhere across the way, slapped the windowpane. There were no lights on in the houses directly across the green. Nothing stirred but the night's own breath.

He stood there for ten, maybe fifteen minutes, then found his feet.

Even if one of his children woke up they would pay no mind to his nocturnal roving; it wouldn't be the first time insomnia had tortured him. He dressed and went downstairs to the kitchen, opened the back door, and looked out. No lights in the houses backing onto his, either, except the usual glow from some of the neighbours' bathrooms.

It was the kind of night that could go on forever.

The key turned in Duane's back door. He stood for a moment in her kitchen, inhaling the scent of air freshener coiled through stale smoke and grease. Then he picked his way through the darkness into her hall, the layout identical to his own heap, checked the sitting room for signs of life, and crept up the stairs. The bathroom light was on and its door left ajar.

A creak on the step third from the top. He wondered what he'd say if she woke and caught him. If he claimed to have been overcome by night-time fervours and desperate for the loving touch of a spindly bitch, would she believe him? Would she cast him aside, his being all grown up and therefore way too fucking old for her?

He tried the door to the front bedroom and was momentarily bewildered by the decor, fittings and fragrances. His eyes tuned into the dark and he made sense of the shapes around him. Posters, perfumes on the dressing table, the Playboy bunny on the bedclothes. The bed was empty. This was the daughter's room.

He stepped back out into the landing and considered the mistake as a lifeline. How easy it would be to skulk back down the stairs and return to his own home without having left anything but his uneven breath.

But what of tomorrow? What of her rage once he backed out of her plan? What of her informant's mouth?

He slipped into the back bedroom and closed the door out silently behind him as quickly as he could, and Duane stirred in the bed, sighed and turned onto her back.

He wiped his mouth with his sleeve and stepped over to stand by her body, and bit down on his lip so that the pain would chase away thoughts of this bedroom having hosted his boy, and crossed himself for a god he didn't really believe was there, and straddled her and put his hands to her neck and leaned down and closed his eyes. She thrashed and gurgled. Her hands flapped against his. Her knee curled behind him, he felt her thigh against his back and then nothing, but he kept pushing down and kept his eyes closed and afterwards told himself she'd barely been conscious at all.

He remembered the way more from his journey home than his own death march, so he had to navigate in reverse.

He had no torch in the car but he told himself he'd be better off, not wanting to be noticed from land or from sea. It was an awkward task. He found a sheet of tarpaulin and tucked her up tight. She looked light as a feather but dead weight was dead weight.

The walk along the overgrown path to the old quay, pointed out by J.P. on Tony's first visit, was harder than he had imagined. The ground was wet, the flora overgrown, the light non-existent and his burden enormous. He imagined himself losing footing and sliding into the black water below to be found alongside his enemy's body three or four days later. He imagined what his children would think. He imagined the traitor Jimmy Phelan, livid as the scandal threw light on his butcher's yard. He imagined his investigation. He imagined him coming face-to-face with Ryan and trying to bleed out the boy's ignorance.

The water churned as he rowed out to J.P.'s fishing boat. He didn't think he'd make it. It was dark, the wind was vicious, his arms sang as soon as he set them to work, and he thought he might not deserve to make it either, no matter his reasons, no matter how far he was backed into the corner…But he got there. He sat for ten minutes in the bobbing dinghy wondering how in Christ's name he was going to get her into the boat. He managed it through the devil's favour. He found rope and trussed the dinghy tight to the stern and dragged her into the fishing boat through strength of desperation. And then he left the rowing boat to its buoy and set sail, believing with every passing second that he was heading to his doom, to the unforgiving open sea, to the end maybe, but at least he was taking her with him.