The Glorious Heresies (8 page)

Oh, you fucking gom, boy, for fuck's sake, it's only a fucking piano, it wasn't your knob you lost.

Now he crossed the assembly area, taking care to plant a foot on the thin blue cushion of the nearest of the benches laid out in rows, pushing off each to land with mock jubilant grace in front of the next.

Only hours after the theft he told Karine, even though he knew what would happen once he lost the confession from his gritted teeth to her ears. He told her up in his bedroom as she lay happy and naked on top of him; he always got chatty Afterwards, in a stupid
Here's my soul, why don't you shit on it?
kind of way.

“My dad sold the piano.”

That bit was easy, but then she raised her head from his chest and he realised that none of the other things he wanted to tell her—how the piano meant this much to him and fuck all to his father, how it wasn't fair that they didn't just sell the telly if they needed the money, even though he knew the telly was worth a fraction of what his dad got for the piano, proceeds he was probably soaking in right now, having followed the piano out the door—that none of those things had to be pushed past his throat because she already knew. Instead he fought to keep his eyes unfocused and fought to not look at her and started losing the fight and feeling that horrible juddering weakness begin in his tummy and work its way up to his face. So he pulled his arm over his eyes and sucked air through his teeth.

“Aw, baby boy,” she said.

Still with his eyes screwed up, he put his arms back around her and pressed her against him so that she'd stop his heart leaping out of his mouth, and she lay there until he was able to breathe again.

She lifted her head, and said, “I'm sorry.”

“It's all right.”

His phone was on the floor beside the bed. He reached down to get it, and started thumbing the screen, blinking at menus.

She smoothed the corners of his eyes with a fingertip.

“I want to make you feel better,” she said. “Will I give you a blowjob?” and he thought how lucky he was, really, no matter what else kept landing on him, and he said, “Yes please.”

He didn't bother announcing his transgression when he got to the office. He sat himself in a grey plastic chair facing the secretaries and the saggy one, Mrs. Cronin, looked up at him and said, “For God's sake, Ryan.”

He folded his arms and stretched out his legs and stared at the floor beyond his runners.

Karine had heard plenty warning about allowing a boy to keep compromising images of her on his phone, because boys are cruel and the moment any of them see your tits is the moment you lose all value in their piggy eyes. Yeah, yeah. But she trusted Ryan, and he trusted her, and the two-minute video of her looking up doe-eyed while she sucked him off was something he knew he would never show to anyone else. Never. It would have ruined it.

He watched it a couple of times late at night, with the lights off and his dad passed out and his brothers snoring. OK, a fuck of a lot more than a couple of times, but he didn't feel anyone could blame him. Even Karine was OK with it still being on his phone weeks and weeks after. Any time she'd texted him something sexy before, she insisted on nominating use-by dates, and went through his phone afterwards just to be sure. The video was different. Maybe it was that she could see the same thing in her upturned eyes that he could. Maybe it was because she knew that there was something missing from his life now, but something he chose to think of as a necessary loss as he transitioned to a better future. No piano, but who needs pianos anyway? That was something he did as a boy. At night he looked at the nymph on the screen and let his hand close tighter and his chest rise and fall and thought,
Yeah, well, she's something I do as a man, isn't she?

The thief's guilt was manifest. There'd been more drink taken than usual; Tony Cusack clearly felt the loss of the piano in the back of his mouth. He was irritable and when he was irritable he was to be avoided—everything was everyone else's fault when he was on the skite.

The neighbours knew. Why wouldn't they know? It takes persistence and dedication to remain oblivious to violent noise in a small terrace, and if there was work in the bed Ryan was sure most of his neighbours would sleep on the floor.

Last Saturday night he got a nice black eye over something Kelly had done. God forbid his dad would ever smack Kelly—Tony didn't hit girls, oh sure girls were precious altogether—so Ryan had to take it like a good big brother, a puck into the left eye administered after closing time.

The shiner was a map left for Tony to read on the Sunday morning, and it put him in even worse form. He went out in the afternoon and Ryan stayed in his room, tripping between seething and sadness and smoke. When Tony arrived back that night his son counted his steps and paid heed to the drumbeat of cabinets and doors, and when Tony settled in the sitting room Ryan pulled his runners on and went out into the back garden and sat on the wall. He did that plenty, on the nights he knew that even a glance could nudge his father back onto the warpath. Tony would be asleep soon enough.

And then out scuttled Tara Duane.

With only a hollow wall between her house and theirs, Tara knew the score better than anyone, and she never pretended otherwise. Sometimes Ryan sold her a bit of dope and sometimes she invited him to come in and skin up with her and sometimes if it was raining he complied, because sometimes anywhere was better than home, even if sometimes the stupid bitch tried to pay him in prescription drug leftovers and sometimes she even tried it on with him, with her dainty bone-fingers climbing up his leg to see if they could charm a hard-on.

“You don't have to go through this alone, pet,” she said.

It wasn't raining but he took her up on the offer anyway.

Afterwards he asked the mirror,
What the fuck were you thinking, boy?
His reflection suggested, Well, maybe the loss of the piano had shattered his common sense. Or maybe the video had made him cocky. Maybe this, maybe that, maybe the other. Whatever it was he was desperately sorry.

See, there was a cup of tea and a shot of whiskey in the cup of tea. Then there were a couple of joints and a couple of cans of lager and the fact that he'd been smoking earlier on made him especially susceptible to being blasted, he supposed, though wasn't hindsight twenty-twenty?

All he knew was that he'd drunk too much and smoked too much and lost control, which was the wrong thing to do because c'mon, fucking hell, he knew she had a bit of a thing for the young fellas, everyone knew she had a bit of a thing for the young fellas. He remembered her telling him the back story to the show she was watching on the telly, and he remembered her laughing at some piss-weak anecdote he couldn't give two shits for, and then he remembered…

He didn't feel like remembering it even now, days after the fact and not even the worst thing that had happened that week.

The principal's name was Mr. Stephen Barry. He came out into the corridor, in his shirtsleeves, like he was going to have a go and all.

“I was planning on having a chat with you today, Ryan,” he sighed, “but not like this.”

He remembered waking up in his own bed on Monday morning, the house mercifully still, his siblings long dragged off to school. He was sick as a small hospital. He sent Karine a text, telling her he had caught the flu or something, got up and puked his ring out, went back to bed and put his head under the pillow and watched what was left of the night before jump and fade and bleed in over his eyes.

Piss-weak anecdotes and carefully pitched laughter, and Tara Duane standing then with her arms folded as he pulled his tracksuit pants back up, saying: “You have a girlfriend.” Putting him straight, with her knickers crumpled on the floor beside the couch.

Tony called up the stairs around midday, saying that he was heading out but that he'd be back soon, and Ryan couldn't answer except under his breath:
I don't care if you never come home, you prick; look what's after happening.
He curled into terror and tears.

Tara
fucking
Duane.

If Karine found out, she'd never forgive him.

But I'm sorry,
he told her, and she a mile away in a classroom and utterly oblivious.
I'm so fucking sorry. I fucked up. I didn't mean it.

Kelly came home at half past four and popped her head in the door and screeched, “You must be
dying,
boy. You were a mess last night. I'd to let you in at three in the morning and you fell down twice and it was un. Fucking. Real.”

“Yeah,” he said. He rolled onto his belly and closed his eyes; the sheet smelled of sweat and sick. “I pulled a whitey I guess.”

“Where were you, anyway?”

“Nowhere,” he said. “Leave me alone.”

“You've been out for three days, Ryan. Is it too much to ask that you sit quietly for three hours on your return?” said Mr. Stephen Barry, Principal.

Ryan said, “I might as well. I'm fucking invisible anyway.”

The penance was swift and as deserved as its supplier was ill-chosen. When his dad got back on Monday evening he let a roar out of him that ricocheted off each of the four walls in turn.

“Ryan!”

He inched into the kitchen. Tony was leaning on the sink, his lips and eyes bulging. “Gimme your phone.”

Ryan handed it over.

He assumed his dad needed the phone to make a call, because Tony was as often lacking credit as he was lacking everything else. He stood waiting for it to be handed back; that's why he was only an outstretched arm away when the phone played out the soundtrack to Karine's salve. The floor plunged under his feet and his blood pushed through pallor; Tony said, “What the fuck, Ryan? What the
fuck
?” and the first slap landed, on his left cheek, and he breathed in the shock and the whiskey stench and willed himself hard not to cry.

“I'm sorry.”

“You're sorry? You're fucking sorry?”

“It's just a video, Dad. Just a stupid thing.”

“You're proud of it, aren't you?”

There was nothing new in his father's intent to wreck his head inside and out; whiskey had never agreed with Tony, no matter how convincing his arguments. Ryan puckered his brow. “What?”

“Who else has seen this?”

“No one.”

“Then why the fuck did Tara Duane just tell me to go looking for it?”

“What?” Ryan said again.

Didn't matter how many whats he managed; those bits of the night before he needed to access had been erased by shots and dope and bile. Gone. Slipped down the back of Tara Duane's couch, on which he'd spent just one too many nights getting stoned for the sake of having something to do. Had he shown her the film he was so privately proud of? Had his traitorous dick been fuelled by her reaction? There was no room for remembering in any case; he was being slapped back out into the hall, pinned to the wall by the front door, cuffed between accusations.

“How did that bitch know it was there?”

“I don't know.”

“You don't know? Is she fucking psychic, is she?”

“I don't know.”

“Ryan…Do you think I'm fucking stupid?”

This is how he knew he was in the biggest trouble of his life; his dad was crying. He grabbed Ryan's neck and slid two clammy thumbs up to his cheekbones. “Where were you last night?” he howled.
Nowhere
wouldn't do; Ryan started into it by loose instinct, and Tony shook him. “Where!”

“Next door,” Ryan whimpered.

“What were you doing next door?”

Hiding out coz you were fucking langers, you useless, bitter prick.

None of the truth for Tony Cusack. Instead Ryan blubbered, “I'm sorry, Dad. I didn't mean to. She started it. I was really, really drunk.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

Ryan was pushed onto the stairs. His forehead clattered the fourth step. His father continued the interrogation with one knee between his son's knees and both hands down hard on his back.
You didn't mean to what?
Ryan shut his eyes and coughed out brackish remorse. Tony wasn't happy with rescinded answers from a spineless child. And sure why would he be? Why should he be?

“What the fuck do I do with you, boy? What the fuck else can I do?”

“You are going to have to calm down,” said Barry. “Into the office here. We'll talk over it.”

“We'll talk over it, will we, boy?” Ryan said. “What'll we talk over?”

Mrs. Cronin wasn't even bothering to hide her interest. She stood by the photocopier with her outrage hung on the set of her mouth.

“We'll talk over your behaviour,” said Barry. “We'll talk over what it is that's compelling you to spit in the face of your potential, Ryan. And the best place to do it is behind closed doors, don't you think?”

“Fuckton that happens behind closed doors, don't you think, sir?”

“Watch your language.”

“I will,” said Ryan. “When you start watching. When you start opening your fucking eyes.”

“Fill me in, then. I'm on your side, Ryan. Tell me what I'm missing.”

Ryan's fingers, which had the grace for concertos so long as there was no one there to hear them, closed around the baggie in his pocket and he flung it at his headmaster, and it fluttered to his feet, inconsequential and shining bright.

“You see that, I bet. You see that all right.”

Mr. Barry looked down at the offering and said, “What. Is that?”

“That's cocaine, sir.”

The principal looked up again, and for once in his eyes, proper fury; not disappointment, but something Ryan could deal with.

“You're a fucking stupid boy, Ryan Cusack,” he said.