The Glorious Heresies (16 page)

“And yet something's telling you it's not worth taking seriously. Maybe that's a thing with us short women: hands too small to grasp at straws.”

“You sound like a preacher yourself.”

Maureen snorted. “Oh, I wouldn't know a soapbox if it was bubbling. I have as much time for the Man Upstairs as he does for me. Take a breather and finish your tea; you'll do no converting here.”

The mention of the Man Upstairs made Georgie start and glance upwards, and Maureen noticed and smiled a thin smile.

“Did you know,” she said, leaning conspiratorially, “this house was once a brothel?”

Georgie's feet were sore, her back ached, she hadn't taken a full breath in weeks. If she had been just a bit further along, just a bit more drained, she might have come clean to the supernatural quickness of her hostess. Instead she swallowed and feigned interest.

“I didn't know that,” she said. “Like, in a historic sense?”

“Try a couple of years.”

“Oh, are you serious?”

“The lines are coming easier now, aren't they?” said Maureen, and she straightened. “Yes, I am serious. A place of vice in twenty-first century Ireland. Have you ever heard the like?”

Georgie wanted to ask
What lines?
She took a sip of her tea and scalded out the objection.

“It might have been a brothel historically too,” Maureen continued. “But not to my knowledge. You don't need the eras echoing to feel the weight of this place.”

Georgie rested her chin on a trembling hand. “Did you buy it cheap, so?”

“Indeed I did not. It belongs to my son. It's belonged to my son this long time.”

“How long?”

“Long enough,” Maureen said, “for him to direct its activities.”

Georgie stood up, prompting groans of discord from her feet, her thighs, her back. “C'mere, thanks so much for the tea. You're really kind, but I better be going now.”

Maureen said, “Would he even recognise you?”

Georgie sat down again.
I don't know what you mean,
she tried, but the statement struggled to leave her mouth, and what words she managed wilted in the air.

“I'm guessing he wouldn't,” Maureen said. “He doesn't strike me as the kind who shits where he sleeps.”

Georgie said, “I owe nobody anything,” and started to cry, quietly; she brushed the tears away with a brittle sweep. “Don't think you've caught a runaway because you haven't. That was a long time ago.”

“There's a shadow on you,” said Maureen. “Dripping black and miserable. It was there when I opened the door. I knew you didn't want to come in and that you hadn't a clue what you were supposed to be doing and that some sanctimonious prig had convinced you that you had something to atone for. You either need to accept the past as the building blocks that brought you right up to today, or you need to be a better liar. The world is full of girls like you.”

“You're J.P.'s mother? He puts his mother in a place like this?”

“I'd like to think your tears are for pitying me. Yes, he put me in a place like this. He's a bit too pragmatic, that boy. Hollow with it. I didn't want to stay here at first, but once I learned the history of the place, something told me it was my duty to remain, in case he drowned it again in squalor. Now he can't get me to move. I'm sure it'll come to his barging in and wheeling me out one of the days, but for now I'm happy. It has whispers, like I said. It has ghosts.”

Georgie gulped and hung on to the tabletop. Maureen brought over a roll of kitchen paper. It was beyond Georgie to ask what the ghosts were doing.

“Do you think,” Maureen said, when Georgie had calmed, “that this will save you?”

She gestured towards Georgie's belly, and Georgie clasped her hands over the bump and said, “Why do you think I need saving?”

“I don't. I figured you thought it, seeing as you're in the company of zealots. Whatever way you want to look at it, I hope it works for you. Take it I have an interest. Take it that you're the anti me. Take it pregnancy's awful transformative.”

“I didn't think it was even possible,” Georgie said.

“Then you were probably in the wrong line of work.”

“I mean…I didn't think I was…entitled to this. This is my second. I lost the first.”

“I'm sorry,” Maureen said.

“You don't get it. It was my fault. I was on drugs, I was drinking…”

“Maybe that's so, maybe it's not. You don't know with these things. Pointless to work yourself into a lather wondering about it.”

“I keep thinking this one'll leave me as well.”

“Yeah, well it might if you don't put your feet up and stop trying to cure the lepers. You tell your Nazarenes that; their path to Heaven isn't flattened out by you shoving your boulder in front of them.”

“They're not bad people.”

“How very gracious of them.”

Maureen took Georgie's mug from the table, brought it over to the counter and refreshed it. Georgie sniffed and wiped her eyes and straightened in her seat. She looked towards the kitchen door and at the ceiling. She strained for the whispers and the ghosts.

“You can look around if you like,” Maureen said.

“I don't think I want to.”

“Maybe it'll be good for you. You can scrub the shit off absolutely anything, maybe. This can be your metaphor. Maybe.”

Trying to find something of hopeful meaning in this dark pile of bricks didn't appeal to Georgie, but neither did the idea of entering into another conversation with the seer Missus Phelan. Caught between gratitude and flesh-rucking unease, she chose gratitude, accepted the topped-up mug, smiled weakly at Maureen and skittered into the hallway, where she stood by the banister and stared up at the landing.

“Go ahead,” Maureen said, from the kitchen door.

The rooms upstairs had been gutted. Where there was once the colour of lazy decay were clean walls and restored wooden floors. The beds and furniture were gone, as was the telephone on the wall. The makeshift kitchen where the girls had stashed their inebriants had been ripped out and smoothed over.

Maureen was standing behind her. Georgie turned and said, “Did you find things here? Were you here when they were doing the work?”

“I was in once the downstairs flat was done. They were working away up here after that. Why, what are you missing?”

“Nothing. It's just that the place looks so empty.”

“There were a couple of trinkets. I have them in a drawer downstairs. Let me go and look; you'd never know. That said, if it's a bra you lost I have them well fecked out.”

Georgie frowned, but Maureen had turned away.

She continued through the other rooms, but they were pretty much the same: their darkened corners ripped away, insignificant to the quest Maureen had given her. She tried to reconcile this shell with flashes of a past she had mind for only late at night: being shoved onto her belly, hot breath on her cheek, semen on her breasts, on her face, in her hair, like they were dogs pissing all over their territory. These flares made her shrink into herself—her nails dug into her palms and she hunched her shoulders—but they were still very far away, as if they had taken place not just in her past, but in another country. A lick of paint and she felt no connection to this place.

In one of the rooms on the second floor, there was a small pile of paper and a notebook on the window ledge. A pen made up the accoutrements of the writing space. The ledge was deep, and the room looked onto the Lee. Today the river was swollen, with cars idling on both sides. But on sunny days, when the light was glinting from the water and the steel, she was sure it would have made a much more inspiring perch. She moved the papers towards the pane, carefully, and sat down with her back to the wall, looking over her shoulder and onto the street.

Two storeys down, she could hear Maureen opening drawers.

She picked up a couple of sheets of the paper on the sill. It was hardly likely that the beast Jimmy Phelan had come from a mother sharpened on art; she had had no run-ins with him, for he had directed their movements only through the pimp, but his legend was monstrous both in reach and report.

The first page appeared to be the start of a letter to a priest.

Bless me father for I have sinned. Or is Dear Father alright with you, pitter-pater?

Georgie slid this sheet under the other, and read:

Robbie O'Donovan was here.

She should have dropped it. In doing so she'd have given the poor guy some sort of regard, after the fact. Instead she turned it over, as if on the back she'd find an explanation of how his name had scrawled its own clue into the palm of her hand, but the rest of the page was blank. She turned it over again, and reread it:
Robbie O'Donovan was here.
in the same hand as the priest letter. Her breath caught. She sat suspended in voicelessness, as if the sudden stasis of her lungs could make her float, bounce off the walls, up to the ceiling.

Maureen came back into the room with an armful of leftovers.

“Robbie O'Donovan was here,” said Georgie. The air escaped her throat.

“Oh, him?” Maureen clucked. “Don't mind
him.
He won't touch you. He just stands around.”

“He just stands around?”

Maureen's eyes narrowed, and she smiled. “Did you know him? He died here.”

Georgie dropped the paper and darted past the woman and down the stairs. Her shoes slipped on the last step; she grasped the banister, and cried out, and scrambled for the door. The lock wouldn't budge on her first go. She found the clasp and the bolt sprang back and she ran out onto the street, where Clover was approaching, only a few yards to her left.

“What's wrong, Georgie?”

“I'm just feeling sick, Clover, really sick. Please let's go.”

“OK,” Clover said. “We can do that.” She put her arm around Georgie, and Georgie clung to her, sniffing and retching. They had gone only a couple of hundred metres when Georgie heard a voice behind her, calling her name, and Clover slowed but Georgie begged, “I'll be sick, Clover, I'll be sick!,” but it wasn't the matriarch Maureen closing in on them. The voice had that unmistakable ringing whine, the musicality of shattering glass. Georgie turned and Tara Duane waved at her, hurrying forwards on stiletto boots that cast her to the left and right as if she was dancing on a listing deck.

“Georgie! Wait up! Oh my God, it's so great to see you! Where have you been?”

“This one's not a good one,” Georgie said to Clover, who nodded and squeezed her arm, but stayed otherwise stupidly solid to watch the scrag advance.

Karine arrived over with a bag stuffed with goodies: two chicken salad rolls, four packets of Taytos, handfuls of chocolate bars, tobacco and Rizla, a two-litre bottle of Coke and, best of the lot, a bag of pick “n” mix as big as a baby's head.

Ryan said, “You absolute lasher, D'Arcy,” and she rolled her eyes and said, “You better remember this when you're rich and famous.”

The curtains were closed, because there wasn't light worth letting in. It was damp and miserable and balls-shrinkingly chilly. There wasn't much to look at, in any case; Ryan was in his father's house, and all he could see from his bedroom window was other people's back gardens, sodden from the pitiless April march. Next door and almost a week ago, Tara Duane had dragged a plastic airer outside and draped a number of towels over it, either from desperation or bloated optimism.

He hadn't meant to spot her, afraid that if she looked up and saw him watching she'd take it as a favourable sign. It was anything but. He'd sank behind the curtain and sat on his bed, elbows on knees, hands joined and eyes to the floor. There were tons of drawbacks to being home again, but none that frightened him like she did. Two years might have diluted her story to the point where it would sound, to Karine's ears, reedy and fanciful. That was the best possible scenario and even that could ruin him. Karine might not want to share him, even in secret thought, with someone like Tara Duane.

“Ew, like she was hollowed out and sewn back together,” she'd whispered one time, years back, when Duane had offered to do an off-licence run for the underagers.

Tara's airer had toppled and the towels had fallen to the ground. They were still there today, rumpled in the mud.

Karine slipped her shoes off, smoothed her school skirt and climbed onto the bed beside him.

“Pass me my roll there,” she said, and he retrieved the tobacco and started rolling a joint as she tucked in.

“Where'd you get the smoke?” she asked.

“Dan the Man posted it to me.”

“He
posted
it to you?”

“Swear to God. He has me spoiled.”

“Eat your roll first,” she said. “There's warm chicken in that.”

“All right, Mammy.”

He finished rolling the joint and tucked it behind the curtain on the windowsill. They cosied up and munched their way through their picnic. When he was a couple of bites from the end of his roll she reached into her schoolbag and produced a pen, pad and her maths book.

“Where are you supposed to be, anyway?” he asked.

“Maths grind,” she said, and placed the things on his lap.

“You're funny.”

She buried her head in the bag again. “Come on, Ryan,” she said, once she emerged. “Be sensible. The sooner I get my homework done the sooner we can relax.”

“I'm already relaxed.”

“Unrelax yourself, then. Page 57, questions 11 to 20. And I'll do my French while you're doing that and if you're really, really good, you might even get a blowjob at the end of it.”

“I'll get a blowjob anyway.”

“And you're haunted, aren't you?” she said. “You think you'd be more inclined to help your girlfriend out with her homework, so? When she's so nice to you?”

She placed her French book primly on her lap and brushed a strand back from her face and he started laughing and she said, “What?” in mock indignation.

“It's just funny.”

“What's just funny?”

“You're just funny.”

“D'you know what's not funny?”

“What?”

“The fact that you haven't started my homework.”

He opened the book. “You can't keep doing this to me,” he said.

“Yeah? What are you going to do about it?”

He
was
haunted; plenty of fellas would confirm it. His girlfriend liked giving him blowjobs. There was only the fact of his required passivity to sully the act. As a precursor to sex a blowjob was a hundred per cent awesome, but occasionally—only very occasionally, he wasn't a total loss—if she was going down on him just for the hell of it, there was a shade of submission that maybe knocked that hundred per cent down to ninety-five. He tried to reframe it as something which put him in the driver's seat, but it wasn't easy to claim control when he was putting his cock in someone else's mouth. There was something of la Bocca della Verità about it.

He knew what was wrong. He knew that on the occasions that last five per cent was taken from him it was because of a flashback, not to a scene—there was little of the memory left—but to a feeling of losing the run of himself, and making stupid mistakes for no good reason.

There was a time they filmed it and it was a hundred and ten per cent, fucking perfect.

Now there was a half-hour of quiet, punctuated by the odd remark about something that had happened in school, various text messages, the sounds of his father opening and shutting the living-room door, of Niamh and Cathal bickering about who had authority over the remaining Coco Pops. He finished the maths before she'd done her French and lay back on the bed, and when she'd caught up she put away the books and pens and lay with him.

As was custom in the years before, he had pushed Cian's bed in front of the door after she'd come in. It was a strange thing to be back where every second was bloated with the possibility of ambush. They kissed for a while; she was fine with removing her school jumper and letting him unbutton her shirt but when he went to remove it she hunched her shoulders and whispered, “Oh God, Ryan, I'm so scared he's going to come up the stairs. I don't know how we ever did it like this.”

“Necessity is the mother of invention.”

“Eh, you'd want to invent something more convincing than that!”

“He won't come up,” Ryan said. “He's been avoiding me like the fucking plague since I got here. Like he thinks I'll drive him back to drink.”

“I guess it's awkward because you were away so long.”

“It's awkward coz he doesn't know what to do with me. I came back here and I wasn't a kid anymore…He knows anyway.”

She winced in agreement. “I know that video was more than a year ago, boy, but I'm still cringing.”

“Me and all, but…It means he knows. And that, plus the fact that he spends his days pretending there's nothing wrong from his fort in the sitting room, means he's not coming near us, girl. And even if he did come up, he can't get in.”

“I suppose not.”

“Are you gonna let
me
in then?” He kissed the spot where her neck joined her shoulder and she arched her back and sat up with him. He slid her shirt from her shoulders and she pulled his T-shirt up and off and when they were a lot less decent they dived under his duvet.

He framed her against the sheet, skin-blush to blue shadow. She kissed his neck and traced his spine but both as reactions to his actions, because that's what he wanted, today and anymore. After a while she put her hands on his shoulders, wordlessly suggesting he roll onto his back to accept the promised blowjob. He kissed her; she pushed at him again and he resisted again, and she pulled back and smiled and whispered, “Don't you want me to go down on you?”

“It's just…I dunno…I could go down on you?”

She gave him her most pained smile, the kind she usually reserved for instances where she had to cry off on a date, or guilt him into a shopping trip, or indeed, turn down his offer of cunnilingus.

“I don't
know,
” she sighed, which generally meant
Not in a fit, but I don't want you to feel bad about it.

“You go down on me all the time,” he said.

“I know, but you love it.”

“But you might love this.”

“I don't
know.
”

“We're two years together, like. I don't know anyone who's been together longer than we have. And I've never gone down on you.”

“You might not like it.”

“It's supposed to be about you, though.”

“Why are you so mad for it, then?”

“Coz I want to do it for you.”

She sighed again, and smiled and looked away, and he inched back the duvet and said, “Seriously, girl, you're the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life,” and she tutted and he said, “You're the most beautiful place I've ever been in my life, too.”

“Ryan!”

“It's true.”

He traced his finger from her mouth over her neck, between her breasts, down her belly, between her legs.

“You let me do that,” he said.

“That's your finger.”

“You like my finger, and my finger's all rough and I bite my nails and it's not nice, really.”

She giggled. “It's not the same and you know it.”

“Yeah…I think my mouth'd be better.”

“Ryan!”

“Seriously though. Seriously. What is it about this that's putting you off?”

“I'd be embarrassed.”

“Why? With me? After two years you'd be embarrassed?”

“Look,” she said. “You're probably thinking it's going to be a certain way and then it mightn't be and you might hate it and then I'd die.”

“What d'you mean, a certain way?”

“Like…you know. Like in porn.”

“You been watching porn, D'Arcy?”

She stroked his neck. “No. You have.”

“No I haven't.”

“Have.”

“Haven't.”

“ 'Course you have! All boys do. And you're probably thinking it'll be bland and rubbery like…like plastic fruit and you'll get a terrible land.”

“You must think I'm an awful gom.”

“No…I just think…I don't
know.
”

“You think this is something you're doing for me?”

She frowned. “What?”

“Sex.”

“No. Of course not. Don't even think that.”

“It's just…I want you to love it, like.”

“I do.”

“Well…if you love it, and you're not embarrassed when I lie here and look at you, or when I kiss you or finger you or when you come or when you go down on me, why should you be embarrassed about me going down on you?”

“It's different for boys,” she said.

He felt his shoulders tighten. He said, “No it's not. Why should it be?”

She looked away and smiled, and he watched the smile twitch at the corners of her mouth like a living thing, growing, fading, taking root.

“Haven't you ever thought about it?”

She didn't answer.

“Listen,” he said. “We're together two years. And we'll be together two more. And another two after that and on and on and on because I'm that sure that this is it for me and you, that this is it entirely. So I don't want you to hold anything back because you're afraid of what I might think; that's just wrong, girl. I love you. That's what love is supposed to be.”

She said, “You say the deepest things when you're trying to get your own way,” but she was teasing, and she reciprocated when he kissed her.

“Please, Karine.”

She threw the playful smile back out into the expanse of their sanctuary.

“Please?”

Still no reply. He kissed her breasts, back up to her neck, along her jaw and said, “I'm not going to do it until you tell me yes, girl. Has to be a yes, not just a
not no.
”

“If you don't like it, it's all your own fault, though. OK?”

“Totally.”

“
Mmm
…Yes, then.”

She wouldn't kiss him afterwards. She made him brush his teeth. He went for a piss while he was in the bathroom and leaned one hand flat on the tiles to keep himself upright.

Weak at the knees for my girlfriend's cunt.

As an attempt at a statement of fact, it felt ridiculous, but intoxicating. It was something new. It constituted a nail in the coffin of the memory.