The Glorious Heresies (5 page)

As a rule the other girls in the trade were as supportive as they had room to be. The oldest women—the ones too far gone with booze or smack to operate on anything but instinct—were best avoided. They had quicker fists than a cast eye would assume. But, in general, Georgie found she had little to fear from her peers, and that there were times when it was wisest to trust them, and when more than one of them told her she was better off ignoring the wandering affections of Tara Duane, she listened.

The more she listened, the more cracks appeared on that alabaster mug. Tara always knew where the pimps and the dealers were, which knocking shops were looking for staff, who was facilitating the cam work. Some of the girls whispered that she was the city's most devious madam, taking pay from all manner of third parties as she spun the streets. Georgie wasn't sure Tara was practical enough to be a madam. Instead she wondered if she wasn't just a creep, feigning aid like she feigned smiles.

The activism Tara Duane purported to fill her time with usually amounted to handing out home-made sandwiches to the destitute. So it was tonight. Georgie spotted her on the opposite end of the quay, filling plastic cups for a couple of the old junkies from a flask out of the boot of her car.

Tara noticed her from fifty yards away, and broke into one of her cracked-mirror smiles as soon as she was sure Georgie was close enough to get the full-frontal benefit.

“Georgie! Hey, girl, how are you? I haven't seen you in so long; what have you been up to, hon?”

Georgie said, “I need a dealer.”

Tara pursed her lips and tried out a couple of different faces until she settled on one approaching concern, but the flickers of the sides of her eyes, and the twisting to-and-fro of her lips, betrayed the connections whirring through her head. She pulled her ponytail tighter. “Well, you know I wouldn't condone it, Georgie. I mean God knows you have enough on your plate.”

“My plate's swept clean,” Georgie said. “That's the problem, Tara.”

Hmm.
“Would Robbie not know someone?”

“Robbie's not home yet.” She felt that one. Unexpected, a pang in her abdomen like knifepoint, or the warning signs of a life about to be lost on a public bathroom floor.

Tara made another face.

“Not yet?” she sighed. “Oh, poor Robbie. I hope he's OK, girl, I really do. I mean even if he'd left you; to know is to heal, pet.”

Georgie pulled her jacket across her belly. “Yeah,” she said. “In the meantime, though…”

“A dealer,” said Tara, thoughtfully. “Of course, I don't like to enable it.”

“Oh sure yeah. You don't partake at all, do you, Tara?”

Stern now, Tara said, “Well, there's a difference between a smoke and the class As, Georgie.”

“Who said I'm after class As?”

“I'm not insinuating anything. Just history, Georgie, you know yourself. What about…” She lowered her voice, though the old junkies had shuffled on, and there was no one to hear them. “Work? Would they not provide?”

“I'm not working there anymore, Tara. I thought you'd have heard?”

Of course she would have heard. Tara Duane heard everything. Maybe the toll due for a coffee was a rumour and a sandwich cost a story half verified.

“Have you moved on?” Tara frowned, and then smiled widely and suddenly like she'd possessed another woman's face. “Would you like a coffee?”

“I'm grand for coffee. And yeah. Moved on. Back on the street.”

“That's very dangerous,” said Tara, who had started to pour a coffee anyway. “You know you're better off indoors. Clean, no Gardaí, vetted clients…”

Georgie took the coffee. “That doesn't always work out as it should,” she said, carefully.

“Were you drinking?” asked Tara. Her face had turned solemn.

“And how would you know that?” Georgie said.

“I don't know that. At least I didn't.”

“Ah no,” said Georgie. “Lucky guess.”

“I might have heard something,” Tara conceded.

“Have you heard, then, where I can find a dealer who's not up to his bollocks in the swamp I was just banished from?”

“All right,” said Tara. “I might know someone who'd suit. A young fella. We're close, so he'll look after you if I tell him to.”

This delivered with a sickening simper, an invitation to empathise that was ill-advised but unchecked; Tara was too pleased with herself.

“You know young fellas,” she went on. “They can be so very keen.”

“Yeah,” Georgie said, weakly. “Take what you can get.”

“What's that mean?”

She was frowning. Georgie shook her head.

“That came out wrong,” she said. “I didn't mean you'd have to take what you were given, only, like, seizing opportunities or whatever.”

Tara relaxed. She gestured for Georgie's mobile and entered a number.

“Be gentle with him,” she said. And though the joke begat a smirk, Georgie flinched, and felt unease swell and break from her belly to the hot points at the back of her ears and the fine tips of the hair on her arms.

See, people are afraid of dealers. Prostitutes are objectionable; you wouldn't want them tottering in their knee-highs for trade on your street. But dealers? Oh no. Abject terror, then. Dealers have guns and vendettas. They might target your children and kick down your door.

Georgie couldn't deny that there was some validity in that, though she wasn't afraid of the merchants, not as a general breed. Some of them were too keen to get into other forms of capitalism and looked working girls up and down the way you would a horse at a town fair. They were obvious as landslides and a clever girl kept her distance. Most of them, though, were but a slightly sharper edge on pathetic. A lot of them stocked up only to feed their habits, and lost a little up their noses and into their veins with each transaction, buying their way into slavery.

The smart ones fell somewhere between both categories; their efforts at expansion stayed within the realms of pills and powder, and their noses remained intact. When Georgie had worked indoors, there hadn't been a shortage of inlets for numbing substances, all but essential when you were fucked for a living. Otherwise it had been Robbie's responsibility, and he had hooked into the same network in recent months. Breaking away from brothel employment didn't mean that she was forbidden to tap her sources for coke, but there were within that network people that she never wanted to see again for the rest of her life.

Tara Duane's own dealer was not the ideal. Georgie went down to the corner and asked a couple of the other girls for contacts, but the market they frequented was practically a monopoly, and every avenue led Georgie back to ground she'd walked before.

Eventually it came to an impasse, so she buried the memory of Tara's smirk, and dialled.

“Yeah?”

“Hey. I got this number from a friend of yours. I'm looking for a bit; can you help?”

“What friend?”

“A girl named Tara.”

“Tara who?”

Obviously this one had little regard for the lugs of the law. Georgie hesitated. “Tara Duane.”

“Oh,” he said. And there was a pause and then, “I dunno. Where are you?”

“In town.”

“Coz I'm not.”

“I can go to you if needs be but ‘needs be' right now is a need-to-know,” she said.

“That's fucking poetry,” he said. “You're lucky I'm stoned. All right. What is it you're after?”

In the lull between placing her order and making the collection, she managed to turn over a couple of punters, one fearful and unfit and sweating like a pig because of both, the other after a blowjob which failed to cure his boredom. That gave her enough to pay for what she wanted from the merchant, but not enough to go home on. Provided he was a decent skin who wasn't about to rip her off with ground up aspirin wrapped in tinfoil—and who knew what kind of person she was foisting upon herself on Tara Duane's recommendation—she would at least get a bump before getting herself back out there.

She didn't see him at first. She got back to the end of the quay and he was a little ways in behind a parked car, sitting on a bollard. He made her jump and she really hated that.

“You Georgie?” he said.

“Jesus.”

“Naw,” he said. “Not even close. Ryan.”

He was sitting with his legs insolently stretched, but his shoulders were hunched and his hands deep into his pockets. He was feeling the cold. No wonder; he was wearing a school uniform, no jacket, just a thin maroon V-neck over a grey shirt it wouldn't have become him to button up.

First it occurred to Tony Cusack that he needed to track down Robbie O'Donovan's family and tell them that the poor divil was dead. Then it occurred to him that behaving anywhere approximating worthy would only land him in a hell of his own making. There'd be guards. The plaintive wailing of sisters and mothers. Above all there'd be Jimmy Phelan. Above all, looming like Godzilla, with a face on him like an old quarry.

Tony hadn't had much regard for Robbie when he was alive, but then it was rare Tony attracted the kind of company that demanded or deserved it. Robbie used to drink in the same local. Another daytime guzzler, he'd come in with his betting slips and a
Star
folded under his arm and his mobile phone, and he'd sit at the bar, looking up at the telly, and down at his slips, and then to the paper and then to his phone. Not much of a conversationalist, even when steaming, but Tony had never been concerned with that. He knew of him more than he knew him, even with hours spent drinking on parallel stools in the afternoon hum.

Finding the craitur all caved in on the floor of Jimmy Phelan's flat, though, had turned Tony's gut inside out. There was, of course, the ugliness of it, in a practical sense. Smashed egg physics, enough to turn all the stomachs of a cow. Then there was the fact that Tony knew the bloke, and that he hadn't expected to, and that he needed to yank tight his instincts in front of J.P. before that recognition gushed right out of him and all over the floor. That was physically exerting; Tony wasn't cut out to be an actor.

But more than that again. There was something of sickly camaraderie between Tony Cusack and the faces he saw, blurred and blubbering, haloed around him on a daily basis. Robbie O'Donovan got it on the back of the head and Robbie O'Donovan wasn't all that different to him. And what was the difference, really, if a man was going to meet a sticky end? The universe didn't care whether he was a gangly ginger or a dusty-haired chunk, if it was in the mood for killing off wasters. Fuck, like. It could have been him. It could have been any of them.

And if it had been him, would he not want his mother to know about it?

He'd gone home from the clean-up with a roll of J.P.'s money in his pocket and a headache that started somewhere below his shoulders and pulled a hood of churning colours down over his eyes. Sat in the kitchen with a bottle of Jameson and an empty glass. He'd wanted the drink, but it had taken him time and effort to get the whiskey from the bottle to the glass and then from the glass past his teeth. A few hours in the company of a corpse would do that to a man still living. And that state was hardly guaranteed, with his having duped J.P. into thinking he didn't know who the dead man was.

Maybe he should have told him. Maybe it would have worked out.
Eh, Jimmy boy, I know this feen.

And maybe J.P. would have taken it as an invitation to drive Tony's head back into his shoulders. You don't go around telling wrought-iron hard men that you know who they've been offing. Otherwise they go around wearing your skin as a cravat.

It was such an insignificant thing, when he thought about it. He knew a guy, and he neglected to disclose it. That's all. A small fucking thing to be in fear of your life over. Forget to move your tongue and suddenly you're driven to drink with piddle dribbling down your trouser leg at your kitchen table.

He dragged himself between each conclusion for days stretching into weeks: read the death notice on the O'Donovan doorstep, or bend under Jimmy's shadow and wait for the guilt to wither. He was harsher with the kids because of it. Everything they did wrecked his head. He hid in the kitchen when they were watching TV, in his bedroom when they were eating, in the pub when he could afford it. He went over his potential revelation from various angles, and from each perspective it ended badly—with O'Donovan's family riotously questioning and him at a gaping loss.

Missus O'Donovan? I'm sorry to catch you unawares
…Poor bitch….
but your son is dead as a fucking dodo.

And how would you know that, you bedraggled old fuck?

Cue J.P. screeching in just as the guards finished their questioning and blowing him out of this life and into the next, as if Tony Cusack's existence held only the durability of plastic sheeting stretched tight on an old door frame.

Tony and Maria had gotten married as a postscript; weren't they already bound together by offspring and his parents' disapproval? Maria had mentioned it as something that ought to be done at some stage after they got the keys to the house. Tile the bathroom. Adopt a puppy. Get hitched, I suppose, in fairness like.

He brought her home to Naples so that they could say their vows. The reception was held on the terrace of a restaurant chosen, decorated and, more importantly, paid for by her parents. He hadn't a clue what any of them were saying but they looked relatively jolly. Keen to provide an alternative to the Italians' frolics, his parents had spent the day wrinkling their noses as if, roused by foreign tradition, each of their new in-laws had lined up to cordially shit on the cake.

It got to him; first that the Irish party was so scrubby-thin, and then that it was in such foul form. The language barrier wasn't helping. Nor was Maria, floating around the place as Princess Mammy, a toddler under each arm while her décolletage was muddied with sugary thumbprints and white chocolate. She let the Italians monopolise the baby talk and kept her tanned back to her old enemy, her new mother-in-law. Who sat, sipping her G&T, scowling, sour, making a holy show of Tony right there on the edge of the dance floor.

Maria put down their small fella to adjust her neckline and Tony scooped him up again, walked with him to the bar, and bought a Nastro Azzurro and a Coke.

“You having fun, Rocky?”

His son looked at him with the dopey, Disney-brown eyes the Italians had tried to claim credit for, and Tony pressed his lips against the curls on his little forehead and said, “Coz I'm fucking not.”

He cowered between choices until the decision was made for him.

It was midday on a Thursday, some Thursdays after the deed. He'd been on the go since seven, and not for entirely wholesome reasons; the ugly favour he'd done Phelan had left him with episodic insomnia and an unwelcome tendency to rise early. This morning there had been copybooks to locate, shoelaces to tie, slices of toast to butter, teenagers to bellow out of bed. Once the brood had loped off to school he'd tidied away the topmost stratum of jumble, put on the first of two loads of washing, and made his way to the supermarket for milk, bread and whiskey. He was on his way home again when his mobile rang.

The thing with Cork having been built on a slope was the further out you got from the hub, the better the views were. Tony put the bag of groceries on the footpath and reached into his jeans pocket for the phone. Below him, his city spread in soft mounds and hollows, like a duvet dropped into a well.

The breeze and the elevation made the city feel emptier than it had the right to feign. Less than a mile further out the estates would lose to green fields and hedgerows; it was calm here, as if the residents had flowed sleepily down the hill to pool in the streets around the Lee. Else they were indoors drinking tea and quietly dying. Tony leaned on a dustbin sporting three of the same sticker: a guide in aggressive bold letters to rejecting the authority of the Irish courts and the banks they slyly served. Not for the first time, he was glad he'd never bought a house. The country had gone to shit and the desperate were growing mad.

When he turned his phone over in his hand there was J.P.'s number, fresh in his contact list from their collaboration, bright and brash on the screen.

Tony Cusack felt a bolt of fear shoot down his throat and out his arse.

He hit the answer button.

“Are you busy, Cusack?”

“No,” Tony said. “No, boy. No, I'm not.”

There was a gap, as J.P. considered the triplicated guarantee and Tony caught his tongue between his teeth.

“D'you remember that tiling job you did for me?” J.P. said.

“I do.”

“You're going to have to redo it.”

At the end of the quay, where the river curved and the traffic quietened and the grand Georgian facades were smudged and flaking and tagged black and blue in unsure, ugly hands, stood the house in which Tony was expected to replicate his own hard work.

He knocked and the door was opened by an ould wan, about his mother's age, dressed like a chilblained scarecrow with a face that would have reversed the course of the Grand National.

“You're Tony?” she asked.

“Yeah. I understand there's a problem with the floor?”

“I bet you do,” she said. “You understand more than you're letting on.”

She stalked down the hall, and Tony picked his way after her like he was stepping around landmines, which, fuck it, he might as well have been, considering she was capable of knocking the stuffing out of him.

He watched her narrow back for signs of pole-shift. Fuck, he watched her narrow back for signs of brutality of any depth, for how could a pisawn the size and shape of a bog wisp kill someone? And how then could a stout man of thirty-seven, a father of six with the courage to roll up a corpse in a carpet, feel afraid of her?

He followed her into the kitchen and she gestured at the tiles with a floppy wrist and a childish lip.

She'd made a mosaic out of them. The squares he'd put down in rows neater than any he'd thought his own home worthy of had been scattered in overlapping clumps, broken into shards, maybe by a hammer, maybe by the same force that had smashed Robbie O'Donovan's head like a jam jar.

“Holy fuck,” he said.

She sniffed.

He didn't want to ask. Afraid of the answer, maybe, but something beyond that too, basic as the gawks rising in his throat; he didn't want to acknowledge the presence of this ghoul in a cardie. In this space occupied by just the pair of them he felt his body seize up; first his neck, then the backs of his arms, then his waist. Like the horror-movie victim who'd just noticed the shadow at his elbow.

“What did you do?” The arse of the question formed a tuck in his throat; he swallowed, but it bobbed there, and grew.

“Ha?” she said.

He coughed.

“What did you do?”

“I told him I wasn't staying here. And his answer is to throw down a new floor and tell me that makes a new house?”

He didn't know what to say so he let her statement hang there, counted solemn breaths and said, “D'you have black bags, or…”

She produced a roll of flimsy bin liners.

“That won't do,” he said. “I'll look upstairs.”

He left her by her protest piece and hastened to the next floor. He went from room to room—shells of rooms now, bare floorboards and stripped-down walls. The floor echoed under each footfall. Here, he was alone. Downstairs, everything was wrong. The pall of the act and its cover-up. The little lady with the violent streak.

One of the rooms had been set aside as a store for the workmen's rubble. Tony spotted a dustpan and brush with a roll of bin bags on top of an old bedside table.

He moved to the window and looked down to the street. J.P. had phoned in his orders over an hour ago. He was surely on the way over.

Outside, the Lee lay still and glistened green.

Tony turned his back to the river and looked at the piled furniture.

There was something knotted around the handle of the bedside table from which he'd plucked the clean-up tools. He ran his fingers over it. Fabric. Like a shoelace, only with square cloth tags bound up in it at intervals.

He unwound it from the handle for want of something else to do.

Tony made a home with Maria once they were given four walls to contain it, and he spread out and grew older around the clutter of a life lived in sweeping strokes and splash damage. One night, and one fight too many, she drove away from it all, cursing it loud enough for the whole terrace to hear, leaving Tony on their landing with the colour rushing to his stinging left cheek.