The Glorious Heresies (13 page)

They held it up as a Get Out of Jail Free card when it was just another yellow star. Tony lay in the dark in a residential treatment centre in the middle of a vast nowhere. Here, he was to be crumbled to dust and put back together. Here, he was to admit his failings and submit to something of greater import and headier influence. He'd be sober; the Law decreed it. Inside, he succumbed to the horrors doled out by their programme and sobriety stretched in front of him like miles of broken glass.

It had been a stipulation of his admittance that he completed detox before they began his re-education. Even so, his frailty punished him. Getting to sleep was no longer something accomplished by design, but by some Fates' trick: he lay sweating and watching shadows, harrowed over fleeting agonies until he began to dream. The dreams were vivid to the point of cruelty, and he would wake up and have to start all over again. His shell cracked and splintered. His stomach heaved; his muscles sagged; toxins oozed from every pore.

Every time he broke the bottle the period of adjustment was longer and harsher. They kept hanging him out to dry before he was ready to come out of the brine. Next time round it would probably be the DTs. Hallucinations, fever and death. But that'd suit them fine, wouldn't it? They always lumped for the option least bothersome to them. If they'd really given a fuck about his drinking they'd have asked him,
Why? Why, Mr. Cusack, did you feel the need to medicate yourself into such a state?

He turned on his side. His watch, flung onto his bedside table two days ago when it had begun to itch, flashed 3:17. He had been sleeping. He'd dreamt he was drinking again. In therapy sessions he had kept that recurrence to himself, thinking it a sign of ill intent the staff would take badly, but his fellow inmates had mentioned similar delusions. Horrors to them; they were in it for the long haul.

Well, the why is an interesting thing, Mr. Bleeding Heart Bastard. Maybe not everyone in here drinks out of Neanderthal instinct.

Interesting, Mr. Cusack. Do go on.

She denied it, the venomous bitch. She struck her chest and made a speech about trust and breach of trust and how she had offered his son nothing but a shoulder to cry on. “And why the fuck would you think he'd need to cry?” Tony snapped, to which Tara cocked her head and wept through narrowed eyes, “Oh, we both know you're struggling, Tony, there's no shame in admitting that you're struggling.”

He attempted to hound the truth out of her by demonstrating his rage on her windowpane, but all he'd ended up with was a legal obligation to reimburse her and a neighbour who spent her days by the new glass with her curtains bunched into her fist and who skittered up and down her driveway like a spider making a dash across the kitchen floor.

Ryan, then. Tony might have asked him about the night in Duane's, his half-confession, about what perversion had prompted his sharing his home-made porn with the pasty witch, but he'd been so fucked from pilfered flashbacks the thought of holding a conference had riled him into atrophy. He stewed for days. Then he let the boy go to school in an attempt to win back breathing space. The boy threw a bag of cocaine at his headmaster.

Too much to ask for Ryan to have explained this act of self-sabotage before he took off from home. Temper. Revenge. Something foreign and intangible. When threatened, the boy went mute as Father Mathew's statue.

So why did you threaten him at all, Mr. Cusack? Don't you think The Demon had something to do with that?

Tony didn't ever set out to lose the rag with Ryan but in no way did the young fella ever quell the rising tide; God forbid he use the term “asking for it”…

Asking for it would be entirely the wrong turn of phrase.

Well, far be it from him, then, to suggest the boy was asking for it but they certainly seemed to have locked themselves into rounds. Tony would attempt to admonish the lad, the lad would go still as a rock, and the boy's silence drove Tony like a whip.

That he was driven to drink by a taciturn child was as good a reason as being defective in spirit and in genetics, but the counsellors preferred internal triggers and vague spiritual shortcomings to logical grounds for needing the poison. In one of last week's sessions he'd explained it: the cruelty of his progeny was what had left him in this shitheap.

“I got into trouble because the woman next door was up to no good with my kid. If that wouldn't drive you to drink then I don't know what would.”

“Did you not find your drinking to be an issue before this?”

“It's not an issue at all,” Tony said. “I'm here because the court would rather punish me than prosecute that psychotic whore.”

“Jesus, what age is your kid?” said one of his fellow losers.

“Fifteen at the time. And she's my age. And I put her window in and suddenly the problem is my relationship with alcohol and not her relationship with my bloody child.”

He could have killed her. He had practice now in getting rid of bodies, didn't he? He could have killed her and then J.P. would have been obliged to help him turn her to fertiliser, owing him a favour and all. He could have kicked her door in and bludgeoned her, literally knocked the smile off her face, smashed her to pieces. But didn't she have the devil's own luck; he wasn't that kind of man. His rage manifested in muttered oaths. He took out her window instead. He could have killed her but instead he was stuck here, gelded, talking shit in circles so that vultures with clipboards could pick over his compulsions while his children were fed and watered by better people and his son was out there alone being fucked and fucked over.

There were no locks on the windows or doors. Part of the insidiousness of this dungeon was that the only thing keeping him there was torpor. But they didn't make it easy for you; oh no. They had built their covered hellhole in the middle of a postcard vista: miles from the main road and miles from there to anywhere else.

It was boldly functional. White block walls, blue carpet, big windows which left the place airy and bright and cold and exposed. He supposed the intent was to provide a stark alternative to whatever stuffy sets they'd come from, but he was the participant with the most children—the next to him had only three—and so the contrast hurt him worst of all. He yearned for all of it: the crusts on the worktop, the empty toilet roll tubes, the plates under beds and on shelves and, one time last month, on the bathroom windowsill. The triumphant complaints from Kelly on yet another infringement of her teenage right to languor. A mound of socks tumbled onto the kitchen table for Ronan and Niamh to match into pairs. The modish disdain for schoolday outerwear. Him in the middle of it all, dazed sometimes by the whirligig colours and cacophony, but operating nonetheless, handing out lunches, putting on dinners, emptying bins. He couldn't think of home as a space that demanded his reconstruction. There was nothing wrong with it. He was not in here because once in a while he forgot to empty the washing machine or get up on time on Mondays.

He turned again and eyed his bedroom window. Where would he go, if he cranked it open and made a run for it? Even if it was, defiantly, to one of the pubs peppered over the countryside, he'd be waiting until late morning for them to open. Even if it was back to the city, he'd be sitting in the shell of his home, taunted by echoes and prepping himself for Garda custody. The choice was no choice at all.

From the outside world he heard someone cry.

Such sounds had no right to be anomalous in the dry asylum. Tony stared at the window. The cries were faint, but tormented; this was no fellow inmate indulging themselves with a sneaky wah, but someone further afield, across the lake, in one of the bordering copses. There were other buildings viewable from his window with a daytime squint, but they were either farms or piles of stone and glass belonging to Cork's upper crust. These cries could not have belonged in those places.

No words he could make out.

He got out of the bed and stood by the window with his palms against the glass.

It had been a while since he'd had mind for ghost stories.

The wind rushed the plaintive sounds over the water toward him. He thought about closing the window. Some childhood memory warned him to put the eras between himself and the echo, to make a barrier of modern glazing, or window locks, or a set of headphones. Or was it that you were fucked altogether if you heard the banshee's wail?

Shrieking, then silence.

Maybe she had come for someone else and he hadn't been meant to hear it.

It was an unusual curse and he only barely had room to nestle it with all the others. He stood at the window looking into umbral immensity, waiting for the screech that confirmed his surveillance had been noted, but he heard no more after that.

“I don't think you should go in,” said Joseph, “but that's only me, and I'm a lot less forgiving than you are. Whatever I think, I know for a cold hard fact that if you don't go in, you'll regret it.”

They were sitting in the teeming car park of Solidarity House on a Wednesday morning in August. There were vans making deliveries, official sorts carrying folders, visitors doing what Ryan was doing now—hesitating behind their windscreens and tying their fingers up in knots. Ryan's legs were leaden. His shoulders were fused to the back of the seat.

He'd been badgered into attending by his aunt Fiona, Joseph's mother. His dad's twin was as coolly insincere as her counterpart was reckless and thick; the evidence pointed towards her having requisitioned more than her share of nutrients in utero. Her having bullied him into turning up at Solidarity House's “family day,” in which loved ones were roped into the rehabilitant's long-term recovery plan, had been recognised and assuaged by Joseph, who offered to cadge a car so that Ryan wouldn't have to suffer Fiona's pontificating on the journey down. It was a small comfort.

“What d'you think is going to happen in there?” Ryan asked.

“What did they tell you? You get a chance to talk about how his drinking affects you, and then you all learn coping strategies.”

“How his drinking affected me,” Ryan grunted. He doubted they'd welcome the answer:
Physically.

“And then you all hug or some shit and Tony goes home to resume gargling himself into the ground. Great craic.”

“If I don't show up though I'll be the biggest cunt on the planet.”

“You shouldn't care whether anyone else thinks you're a cunt. What are they going to say to you, anyway?
Oh Ryan, you're a bold, bold boy with no regard for your daddy's disease.
Fuck off. Like six weeks in the country's going to cure Tony.”

“Stranger things have happened.”

From the corner of his eye Ryan saw Joseph consider him.

“Maybe you're right, boy. He's your dad. I get it, you know. I have a dad too.” And then, “Are you going to have that joint or what?”

Ryan had crafted a fat spliff before they had set off from the city. First, he was going to smoke it on the way down—it'd provide a nice rollover from the one he'd had at breakfast—and then he changed his mind and decided he'd smoke it when he got there. Now he didn't want it at all.

“Feels wrong,” he said. “Can't go into a place like this stoned, can you?”

“Why not? It's not you making a hames of clean living. They'd probably spot it, mind you. Deprivation can make you very fucking perceptive.”

Ryan shook his head. “It's just wrong.”

“It's not a church, boy.”

“It's not far off it.”

Fiona's car glinted across the gravel. It was empty, because it was five past the hour and the session had already started.

“I better go in,” Ryan said.

“You know you don't have to, boy? You know he doesn't deserve the steam off your piss?”

“I know that.”

“So why're you doing it, then? What's making you go through that door and into a meeting that's just going to wreck your head? Fifteen minutes, boy, and we could be in Clon, buying a box of beer for a day at Inchydoney. Give this a couple of hours and it'll be baking. Fucking bikini weather and all the lashers down sunning themselves. How bad?”