The Glorious Heresies (26 page)

She and her brothers and sisters often played in the grounds of churches after Masses, celebrations, funerals, the litany of a faithful life. You could stretch your legs as the adults congratulated or commiserated or condemned, but every so often you'd run round the corner and get collared by the holy man white-lipped with rage over your impudence. It seemed a shame to grant such a pretty garden to the whims of a miserable old goat. It seemed a shame to tend such a pretty garden in the shadow of a grim theatre. There were always tidy lawns, flower beds, maybe even a grotto if you were lucky. It was the one green spot she'd never seen the tinkers graze their horses.

Now she brought Georgie to the shrubbery which looked onto the priest's side door. Georgie murmured protest but Maureen shushed her, and tucked her between plants with confident hands. Georgie was confused. In the weak orange light from the side door, she seemed ready, again, to cry.

“See the cars?” Maureen pointed.

“Yeah…”

“There are people meeting with the priest. Every night. They're always working, the priests.”

“What kind of people?”

Maureen studied her.

“Boys and girls getting married. Mammies getting Mass cards. Daddies looking for validation. Just the flock.”

“Why are we here? I don't get it.”

Maureen crouched and turned. Behind her, Georgie's eyes, downcast, searched the dirt for sense. She wouldn't find it there, but it wasn't a bad start. Born of dust and raised in stony soil, wasn't that it? The girls had no more changed than the beaded boys, one enabling the other.

“It was a wheyface by the name of Dominic Looney that led me into sin and left me there,” Maureen said. “I had Jimmy when I was nineteen. My parents wouldn't let me keep him. It was far too shameful, you see. Those were the days. I lived in England and he grew up here. I worked in offices for a while, but I could no more hold a job than a hot poker. Did a bit of housekeeping. Worked in kitchens. Drank in the clubs with the rest of the Irish, made a few friends and stepped out with a few fellas but I wouldn't settle down. Couldn't, I think sometimes. What was the point? How do you build a life from bones? I only came home when Jimmy got the whim to bring me. There's too much passed now for us to be anything but strangers. That's why I know what's bothering you, and you having lost your little baby.”

Georgie let out a sob. She left her hands on the dirt to steady herself.

“Your Robbie O'Donovan,” Maureen said, soft as the light from the door, “wasn't meant to die. It was an accident.”

“He meant something, you know. He might not have looked it but he did. And you had no right…You had no right to take him and no right to hide him then.”

“I know that,” said Maureen.

“What did you do with him?”

“Because it was an accident, Jimmy made it go away. And so Robbie's body was taken from the brothel floor, but there's the rest of him still there. I guess I'm stuck with him. You don't believe in ghosts, do you?”

Georgie said nothing.

“I wouldn't blame you,” Maureen said. “I wouldn't believe in them but they've been following me around all my life. He came for your mother's scapular, wasn't that it? What if I told you you're not all that different to your mother?”

“What, because we're standing in a shrubbery outside a church? Is that going to cleanse me, is it?”

Maureen said, “Do you like being a prostitute?”

Georgie stiffened. A flash of umbrage crossed her broken face, just a flash, but enough for Maureen to grasp.

“Do you think I'd do it if I didn't have to?” Georgie said. “Do you think anyone would?”

“So why do girls do it?”

“Money.”

“They're fond of money?”

“They need money.”

“Exactly. They're in need of something and so they'll fold up under a spoiled man to stay alive, isn't that it?”

Georgie dabbed her eyes with the inside of her wrist.

“So they divide up the women into categories,” said Maureen. “The mammies. The bitches. The wives. The girlfriends. The whores. Women are all for it too, so long as they fall into the right class. They all look down on the whores. There but for the grace of God.”

“God had nothing to do with it.”

“The point is there's a class of women put aside for the basest of man's instincts. That's your type and by Jesus you better play to it.”

“All men? Are they all like that?”

“Ha! They're divided up just as neatly, didn't you know? Saints and sinners. Masters and slaves. The good guys and the bad guys. Like my Jimmy. Hasn't he a role too? No one gets to the top if he hasn't a mound of bodies to climb.”

“What's that got to do with my mother?”

“She's religious, isn't she? They don't sell scapulars in Tesco.”

“Yeah…”

“She's on her knees for the higher power. The Church craves power above all things, power above all of the living. The Church has an ideal and it'll raze all in its way to achieve it. The Church needs its blind devout. Your mother, my mother, the people in there plumping Father Fiddler's ego, they're all for it. They've been given a class and they're clutching it. The Church creates its sinners so it has something to save. Your mother's a Magdalene for her Christ.”

The door opened. Maureen placed a hand on Georgie's back, willing her still.

A young couple came out into the yard, turned back and shook the priest's hand. There was laughter. The hall glow spilled onto the steps and cast an amber circle on the ground beneath the disciples and, from the shadows, the Magdalenes watched their heaving backs.

“Look at him,” spat Maureen. “Look close. Handing out indoctrination, keeping them faithful, keeping them hooked.”

She had hair black as outer space and eyes startling and dark blue. The only thing about her that wasn't magazine perfect was her long nose, of which she was ashamed, but he loved that too, and the flashes of humility it provoked in front of mirrors; he used to kiss it when he thought he could get away with it.

She was supposed to get a white shirt for work but was too vain for anything functional. Instead she wore one that hugged her waist and barely covered her midriff and had to be held together with safety pins if she didn't want a button taking anyone's eye out halfway through her shift. She'd told him to meet her at the cafe. She made him a BLT when he arrived and as he munched she poked at a salad and made faces.

“I have something to tell you,” she said.

He thought she was getting rid of him. She said she loved his eyes and his up-and-down accent—“Just like the hills at home,” he told her—but there was only so far you could go on that, and he didn't have much to offer otherwise. He had been labouring on a site off White Hart Lane but everything he earned he spent on Ecstasy and booze. She was supposed to be putting herself through Goldsmiths but still seemed to be spending the GNP of an island nation on weekend parties and shopping trips. If they made a good couple it was gauged entirely on lack of financial cop on.

The BLT stopped two inches from his mouth.

“This is such a surprise to me,” she shrugged.

It was the middle of August and sweltering. London hadn't slept in days and it showed. Small children poked about in patches of melting tar. Old women slumped on park benches as their Scottish terriers panted beneath the slats. There were two fans going in the cafe with the door wide open. Everyone was sticky and sluggish.

“You're surprised why?” he asked.

Behind them, an enormous man in a wifebeater dropped his teaspoon onto his newspaper and swore.

“You see,” she said, “it turns out…I…am pregnant.”

The man in the wifebeater hadn't noticed but Tony Cusack had just been turned inside out.

“You're what?”

She shrugged again.

A wasp drifted towards them and he batted it away. It persisted. Tony grabbed a discarded
Sun
from the table closest the door and crushed the insect against the windowpane. Maria Cattaneo cocked her head and ran her fingers through her hair and when he came back to the table she raised her eyebrows as if to say
Your move, bucko.

He looked down at the half-eaten BLT.

“Well,” he said. “That's…ah…What d'you want to do about it?”

She raised eyes to heaven. “God, you're romantic,” she said.

When Tony was eighteen a girl he'd been with said she thought she was pregnant, but it turned out she wasn't, news so good it knocked his knees from under him because she'd been his first, he'd pulled out and he didn't really like the beour in the first place. This was different. He was four years older. He was crazy about Maria Cattaneo. He prodded at the toast with studied indifference but in his head there was a brass band and a parade of tumbling cheerleaders.

“Just making sure you're OK with it, like,” he said.

“I love babies. You're handsome…” She made a popping sound with her mouth. “…handsome babies.”

“OK then.”

“OK.”

“Have you been to the doctor?”

She nodded. “It looks like March. Springtime. Like the lambs.”

He jumped up and leaned across the table and kissed her and the man in the wifebeater said, “Steady on, son, I'm trying to eat here.”

Nineteen years later Tony Cusack occupied himself in sluggish reminiscence. There was sunlight snaking through the curtains in his sitting room, showing up a carpet flecked with loose tobacco and cracker crumbs. The hoover was on the blink.

He was out of booze and in no shape to get more; he was logey from the heat and too caught in the kaleidoscope of memories to want to leave the house. The kids had scattered in the sunshine. The small ones were out on the green playing. Cian had headed off in high spirits and would no doubt return trying to hide his drunkenness behind his mobile phone. Kelly had folded up a couple of towels and said she was heading to Myrtleville with her buddies. They had lives, the little Cusacks, more than he'd given them. They left their father sifting through scenes beginning to wilt around the edges.

He'd come back to Cork with a pregnant nineteen-year-old whose desire to isolate herself from her middle-class lineage had spotted her vision. Friends and family alike had asked
How in fuck's name did you get your paws on her?
and he couldn't answer them, because he sure as shit didn't know.

They lived with his mam and dad for a while and when they got the house they got married and once they got married they started killing each other in earnest and the casualties—oh! the fucking casualties—they were piled high but it was worth every last bruise.

He had proved shit at absolutely everything except giving her beautiful children. She was no different. They both drank. Neither had worked with any regularity. They had matching tempers. They lived in a fleapit and fought on the street. But at the end of the day he had six children out of it, six dark-haired, dark-eyed wonders with his blood in their veins and maybe that was enough.

He watched the minutes die on the Sky menu and the thirst spread until he could bear it no more.

He kept his head down in the off-licence, aware, just below the surface of his single-mindedness, that he was one of the idiots who kept the place open seven days a week. He grabbed a six-pack from the display at the back, where they stocked the cheap shit. The shop interior was lit by strip fluorescents and fridges; on display, he blinked and hurried. He made for the till, a tenner bunched damp in his fist.

His name snaked after him.

“Tony! Tony, stop a sec!”

The sunshine had brought out the slut in Tara Duane. She was in a yellow bolero and black shorts so small they'd have scarcely made underwear. She'd piled her hair on her head and off her neck. From there down it was all bones. No tits at all. She was a mother and she couldn't have looked less like one. She'd starved herself back to her teens.

His having holed himself up while his children ran out into the world meant he'd escaped seeing too much of Duane. Occasionally he'd spotted her from the windows. A couple of times they'd narrowly missed each other hanging out clothes in the back garden. She seemed to have lost interest in orchestrating encounters since Ryan had come home only to move straight out again; Tony grasped the correlation, substantiated it and then hoped his logic was faulty. The last time she'd collared him, in the driveway, months ago now, had been to tell him that J.P. had enlisted her to conduct the hunt for the doomed girl. Tara Duane was made an ally without his consent. You'd think that'd be a thing worth challenging. It wasn't. It was a thing to be accepted and shelved.

Sure what could he do about it? Confront the bastard?

Two days after Maria Cattaneo had changed his life, Tony sat in a pub with Jimmy Phelan. Surrounded by wood panelling and echoing football commentary, he was getting congratulated and smashed with equal aplomb.

“You couldn't have done much better for yourself without a hanky soaked in chloroform,” said Jimmy. “Are you going to shack up with her?”

“I'm going home with her.”

“Home to Italy? With your pasty Irish arse?”

“No, boy. Home to Cork.”

“Home to
Cork
? Jesus Christ, Cusack, you're only just out of it!”

“My son's gonna be born in Cork, boy. Wouldn't be mine otherwise.”

Jimmy laughed. “When are you heading, so?”

“Dunno. A couple of months, probably. It's early yet.”

“And have you told your mam?”

“Eh, I'll arrive home ‘for a visit' and I'll tell her then.”

“One cute hoor, aren't you?” Jimmy beckoned a barmaid and said, “A couple more there, love. And a couple shorts too. What's your best Scotch? This fella here is going to be a daddy in the spring.”

“Oh wow!” she said. She was carrying a tower of glasses that reached from her belly to her chin. She shifted its weight and tilted her head round it and smiled. Her eyes were heavily made up and the colours coagulated in the heat. “Congratulations!”

Tony smiled back and she gave him an extra shot in his Scotch.

“It's a boy so, is it?” asked Jimmy, his nose in the tumbler.

Tony shrugged. “Too early to tell officially, like, but it's a small fella, of course it is.”

“What the fuck do you want now?”

Tara Duane was momentarily and lavishly upset. Her eyes swung toward the ceiling. Her jaw dropped. “Is that any way to greet your next-door neighbour?” she gasped.

“That's not a connection by choice,” Tony snapped.

“You think I like living beside you when every kindness I brought to your door was met with scorn and fury?”

“I don't give a fuck what you like or don't like,” he said. “If that's why you stopped me, let's cut this short. I have better things to be doing.”

“Oh I know you do.” She gestured. “They come in cans.”

He turned away, but there were a couple of young men at the till, holding slabs and pointing at naggins. He was captive.

“I didn't stop you just to insult you,” she said, alongside.

“Oh, brilliant.”

“I stopped you because I've been doing a lot of thinking. About J.P., and how he's made pawns of the pair of us, and how we both need to move on.”

“You think we need fucking counselling?”

She grabbed his arm with a hand that had made shit of his relationship with his son, and he shook her off with an energy reserved for pests he chased around the kitchen to crush between the tiles and the sole of his shoe.

“Don't touch me, Duane!”

“Why not? What do you think you could possibly catch?”

“It's not about catching something,” he said. “It's about not wanting to give you the satisfaction—”

“What, of laying my hands on a nasty, violent drunk? You have a swollen opinion of yourself, don't you?”

“What did you call me?”

“I know,” she whispered, “that you beat your kids.”

One of the men at the till broke into raucous laughter. Oblivious to the conversation that had winded Tony, he slapped the top of his lager slab.

Tara said, “It's a skit, isn't it? You're full sure I had something with Ryan and you go on about it and on about it as if you actually cared about him. When the reality is you beat him. You humiliated him. He used to sit out on the back garden wall in the cold and the dark waiting for you to go to bed so he'd be safe in his own home. You're obsessed with the idea that I might have slept with him. Why's that, Tony? Would that make you jealous, Tony?”

He said, “You're crazy. Fuck you, fuck J.P.—”

“—Fuck Ryan.”

He inhaled, let his body go still, pushed the poison out through his lips in a cool, wordless stream.

“Cards on the table, Tony. I think you're a piece of shit. I tried and tried with you but the only way you deal with people is abuse them. I know you hate me, because you think there was more to my asking your little boy black-and-blue into my home so he could sleep off the pain of your discipline. Whatever way you used to dole it out.”

The jovial men cleared the counter and walked out of the shop, their arms full. The assistant looked towards Tony and Tara, then down at a clipboard by her till. She started marking words off with a black pen. There was an ink smudge marking her thumbprint, and another smear across two of her knuckles.

“Remember Georgie?” Tara said.

Tony swapped the cans to his other hand. He didn't reply.

“Of course you do,” Tara said. “I couldn't find her for love nor money—”