The Glorious Heresies (9 page)

The city isn't going to notice the first brave steps of a little freeman, especially one emancipated only by tearing down all around him, but all the same, Ryan Cusack walked on like he was being watched.

That was an easy strut. Chest out, shoulders back, the heavy gatch of a lad whose balls hung low. Locomotive chicanery for after the tears had dried up. Once school had finished for him he'd had one last run-in with his father, anticlimactic in that there wasn't room in his throat, past the gawks and the hot mass of babyish misery, to force the words up from his belly. Then he'd left home, followed (courtesy of his cousin Joseph) by his hobo's kerchief of personal effects: socks and jocks and a toothbrush. A brief spell of sleeping on strange couches and, twice, town centre doorways, and he conceded and approached his boss for extra work.

“I'm just saying that if you need any bit more, boy, I'm at a loose end.”

Hanging from it.

His boss's name was Dan Kane. He was a well-turned-out brute in his early thirties: mild-eyed, going grey, accent dampened, intentionally featureless up to the point his hands closed round your throat and his spit bubbled through a growl only an inch from your empty pleas. He was an anomaly in the underworld, a little monolith in a city held on blood bonds. Ryan had been selling for him indirectly before Kane copped on and decreed it hilarious; there weren't many teenagers who could move quantities. Dan had made kind of a pet of him—gave him product on credit and engaged him in grinning debate on ethics and best practices—but better a pet than the leech that drew blood from Tony Cusack's knuckles.

Dan had work for him. More than he could spare. He possessed the keys to a couple of apartments which he used as walk-in safes for stashes of shifting size. He installed Ryan in one to keep an eye on things—the four walls, mostly. On the first night they sat at the bare kitchen table and talked fathers, and Dan slapped him on the back and grimaced in sympathy. He had an arctic disposition punctuated by explosions of lurid temper, but a heart too, when it suited him.

Ryan didn't bother trying to make himself at home. He knew he'd be moved on soon enough. Dan Kane's flat was a place to sleep: that would have to be sufficient.

He wasn't fond of being alone. This apartment, climate-controlled for the benefit of the stash, was as clean and as cold as the cavity in his chest. He had a telly, an Xbox and a laptop, and a fridge for beer, and a double bed with a duvet heavy enough to keep his girlfriend warm. That only helped a little. He missed home and this failing kept him up at night. He missed the terrace and the green outside it and the shortcuts and gatting spots that had marked the boundaries of his world. He missed his brothers' snoring and the banging on the bathroom door and the blaring of non-stop
Simpsons
episodes from the sitting room. A couple of times he thought he might miss his father, kind of like you'd miss a bad tooth, or a gangrenous arm.

He guessed that it was just the hangover of being from a big family. And like any hangover, he could only deal with it by getting through it and avoiding the source until he forgot how much it hurt.

Beside his father's house was the scene of the crime, tended by a treacherous curator, preserved without his collusion. One day he knew he'd want to see his dad again, and that shame would line the path home. He'd seen enough of Tara Duane to last him till perdition, in her sickly back garden come-ons, in her half-dressed admonishment, in the crippling late-night replays he conducted alone in his borrowed apartment. She had turned him on to turn him in, and though he'd folded up the memory and folded it again, it flared on dark occasion, and he couldn't get his head around it.

It was April. A surf of cloud broke grey over the streets and Ryan walked through a city where debris stuck in damp clumps in every dirty corner. He was alone, still feeling out the expanse of it. There was hint of Dan coming around later on to evaluate his reserves, which wouldn't take long with a bit of luck, because Karine had a dance class she intended to ditch so she could come up to the flat and get naked.

They had celebrated their first anniversary in March, on his sixteenth birthday. There was another anniversary today, and he wasn't sure whether it'd be a good idea to mention it. It had been a year since they'd first had sex. Would she go for that, he wondered? Some alcohol, maybe a smidge of Dan Kane's coke, and fuck right through the everyday and into something new to make another anniversary of?

He trotted on, chest out, shoulders back, for an audience oblivious.

He was headed for a service station, which by a perverse twist would probably employ the people with the fewest fucks to give, but there was an off-licence on the way, and it was worth a shot. He ducked in out of the drizzle and stood back from the counter, behind a half-sized, snuffling woman intent on procuring a kind of liquor that neither he nor the thin-smigged clown at the till had ever heard of.

“This is the only ice wine we stock,” said the fella behind the counter. “It's Canadian. That's probably the one.”

The woman spun her wrist like she was winding a crank.

“That's not it either,” she said. Her voice was thick and deep; she cleared her throat. “Maybe it's like a schnapps thing? Or a brandy even.”

“What fruit?”

“I can't remember. I'll know it when I see it.”

Ryan picked a couple of bags of Taytos from a lopsided display and gawped at the ceiling. It made sense to cloak himself in the inertia of a musty shop interior if his success depended on his not looking like he was on a great adventure. No adventure to doing the shopping, was there? Grabbing a naggin, heading home, doing the washing or his taxes or whatever the fuck. Ryan Cusack was a grown-up and grown-ups were always bored.

That left just one person in the off-licence who wasn't a grown-up, and she appeared to be the dithering woman's child. A doonshie girl of no more than four stood back by the beer fridge, her baby finger in her mouth. Her mother postulated that the alcohol she sought was cherry-based. The assistant turned to the shelves behind him and the child stuck her paws into the beer fridge and picked up four tins and ran out the door of the off-licence as quick as her matchstick legs would carry her.

“D'you know what?” said the scrawny woman. “I'll leave it. I'll check the name of it and be back to you.”

She didn't look at Ryan as she went past. Through the window he watched her join the tiny thief and a man as bony as she was, and the man picked up the cans and she picked up the child, and they darted over the wet streets like the city was being ripped out from under them.

“Can I help you?” said the guy behind the counter.

If there had been a bit more enthusiasm in his offer, Ryan might have warned him to look out for repeat visits. Instead he threw the Taytos on the counter and said, “A naggin of Smirnoff and a naggin of Jameson.”

“Have you ID?” snapped yer man.

“Nope.”

“Well, what age are you?”

“Sixteen, boy.”

The sarcastic feigning of sarcasm proved too dense a barrier to cut through and, besides, it was during the school day, and Ryan was in civvies. The vendor twitched and turned.

“Bring some ID next time,” he said, knocking the bottles off the counter, and Ryan gathered his purchases and went in the direction the matchstick trio had taken.

Here's your trick, Junior.
When Mammy's in her hour of need and the guardian's back is turned, you stick your hands into the icebox and retrieve the medicine. When Daddy needs it and he can't drag his arse out of bed to get it, you dash down to the offy with your blankest-ever face and wait till Missus Horgan's cleared her weepy eyes enough to hand over the whiskey. And maybe Matchstick Mammy will drink up and get warm and happy, and cover you with cuddles and confirmation of your preciousness, or maybe Splintered Daddy will turn on you and accuse you of judging him or having the wrong kind of face, and maybe all you'll get from it is a clatter headache. Either way just do the trick and shut up.

He found them preparing to cross the road. The man's eyes met Ryan's as he approached, but there was no flicker until Ryan said, “C'mere, what d'you think you're doing?”

At which the man said, “What?”

“I said what the fuck do you think you're doing?”

The man stood in front of the woman and the child—more by accident than instinct. He was wearing a baggy green hoodie. He looked like he'd shrunk in the wash; Ryan knew his sort.

“Getting a small wan to steal your drink for you while your ould doll throws fairy stories at the shopkeeper. And you outside with your hands down your trousers. Aw stop, aren't you the fucking berries?”

“Listen—” said the man.

“You fucking listen,” said Ryan, “because people obviously don't tell you you're a scumbag half enough.”

“Sorry, who died and made you Chief Inspector?”

“I couldn't give two shits if you went in there and cleared the gaff, boy. What you do with your grubby paws is nawthin' to me. But you get a kid to do it for you, that's low, boy. That's creepy low.”

“Here, mind your own business,” said the woman, gesturing heatedly from behind her fella.

“If you were doing the same we wouldn't be having this rírá,” said Ryan.

“You'd want to scoot on,” said the man.

“Or what? Or what, boy? You going to take me on, yeh little mockeeah man, yeh? You are, yeah.”

“And you're hardly going to swing for me if you're so worried about the small wan, are you?” the man sneered. “Isn't that right? So keep walking.”

“Yeh brat, yeh,” said the woman.

Ryan grinned. It'd be all too easy to take this pair by the scruff and toss them onto the street. They wouldn't have weighed fifteen stone between them. They were right, though; he'd bound his fists on this one.

“I'm not going to swing for you,” he said, “unless I see you again, like. Though that said, I'd say you bring the small wan with you everywhere, do you? Stand behind her out of harm's way, right? Is she yours, boy? Because you're some waste of a pair of testicles.”

The child looked put out, but not as much as either of her guardians. She had a long way to go before she hit sixteen and was able to take off from home and find herself a safehouse stash to babysit. Ryan winked at her.

“Tell your mam and dad to steal their own tins. Do.”

“Don't you dare talk to my daughter,” said the woman.

“I hope she's taken off you,” Ryan said, and crossed the road ahead of them.

He tried to think of other things on the way home—whiskey, anniversaries, his girlfriend's tits—but something like that happens and it fucks up your innards, belly to brain. He sated his temper with fantasy, and beat the man in the green hoodie to a pink and cream pulp between the river and Dan Kane's flat, and when the door shut behind him he put the naggins and the Taytos on the table and sat on the leather two-seater opposite and stared at them, and then at his watch.

After a while he thought,
I'm never going to be like that.

It was a year to the day since he'd become a man and already he'd progressed beyond Green Hoodie's sorry state.

He rolled a joint and looked at his watch again.

Maureen was seeking redemption.

Not for herself. You don't just kill someone and get forgiven; they'd hang you for a lot less. No, she was seeking redemption like a pig sniffs for truffles: rooting it out, turning it over, mad for the taste of it, resigned to giving it up.

Robbie O'Donovan,
said her conscience.
Poor craitur. Had a name once, and a body, before you offered both to the worms.
How easy it was to kill someone, really, much easier than it had any right to be. One day they're occupying space in a living city and the next they're six feet under—or wherever it was Jimmy stowed his leftovers—and out of sight, out of mind. Because no one came looking for Robbie O'Donovan. No guards, no wives, no mammies. Poor craitur.