The Glorious Heresies (7 page)

So it was during a class on Newton's Laws of Motion that Ryan had an epiphany. Third Law, as it happened, and probably his third epiphany that month. Maybe even that day, if he was to scale epiphanies down to their basest elements. Small truths. Snatches of caught breath as playback skipped just enough for him to grab on to something new. Maybe that was just growing up, though no one around Ryan seemed to suffer the same sudden expansions of consciousness. He was a bright kid. A bit too fucking bright, it had been said.

There's no force in the universe, said his teacher (Mr. O'Reilly, whose designer spectacles were betrayed by a face mired in 1985), which doesn't have an opposing force to balance it. Action and reaction, push and pull. That's the Law, now, kids. Sir Isaac Newton came up with that one. That's knowledge that came before you and so defines your lives without as much as a by-your-leave. Shit happens, then more shit happens.

Ah, but shit happens right up to the point where it's happening in the face of someone who doesn't want to see it. That was the truth and the truth had fuck all respect for Sir Isaac Newton and his axioms. So here, Ryan realised, was a case of the pig-headedness of people versus the Laws of Physics, and while flesh and bones have to obey the push and pull of the universe the real meat of men, their thoughts and actions and utter arrogance, ignores the processes the universe has run on for aeons.

We're all gods when we fucking feel like it.

There were a number of tiny holes on the surface of his desk, made months or years ago by students with compass points and short attention spans. Ryan jammed his biro into one, pushed down on it, circled the crater with ballpoint ink and swept an awkward black trail across to the next.

Mr. O'Reilly liked to sing to the back of the room, and Ryan was right up the tippy-top, under his nose, where, it was said, he could do less damage. Ryan rested his thumb on the top of his pen, balancing it between his touch and the pre-punched holes in the desk, and looked up Mr. O'Reilly's snout. There was a wedge of soft grey gunk caught in the hairs at his left nostril.

Plenty of damage Ryan could do to people's noses, directly or through encouraging lack of self control. He wondered whether Mr. O'Reilly ever took a line of coke. He had a baggie in his pocket that he didn't yet have a buyer for. He wouldn't usually have brought it someplace like school, but his dad was mid-episode and hanging for trouble, so it had struck Ryan as being a better idea to take it hidden on his person than leave it where Greedyguts might get at it. And who knew, teachers might be a great market to tap into. God knows they needed an edge.

He let the biro rattle loose and Mr. O'Reilly's moustache twitched.

He picked up the biro again and moved on to another little hole.

Balanced it on its tip, let it fall…

Mr. O'Reilly leaned over his desk with his neck arched, like he was doing a push-up.

“Is there something
wrong
with you, Ryan?”

Ryan looked down at the biro. “Gravity I'd say, sir.”

His nearest neighbour sniggered. O'Reilly glanced over and the sniggering was sucked back behind pursed lips.

“Look at your desk! School property and it's covered in black marks…”

There were marks on Ryan's face this week. Not black. One, kind of greening, on his cheekbone, cradling his left eye like the organic sprouting of a superhero mask. The other, purple and red-dashed, across the top of his forehead where he'd had it whacked off the lip of a step four from the bottom of the stairs. He knew that there were marks on his face because he had felt them applied and he had examined them extensively in the three days he'd spent at home convalescing under the wide eye of a father both ashamed and peevish. They were gaudy blotches, not easily missed.

More Laws there too, he reckoned. The Law of Unavoidable Contusion, where blunt force trauma drew the blood from his capillaries into the tissue around them. The Law of Here, Have a Splash of Ugly that stated that every run-in with his father had to be recorded on his face. Yeah, the Law of Fuck You, Ryan that rendered everyone around him oblivious. Like, he wanted people to see, just for fucking once, and at the same time didn't want them to notice it at all, and it was the latter that people seized on, to the extent where a moustachioed keeper of the peace could stand not six inches from him and not see the fact that his whole fucking head was bawling out for someone to say, “Jesus, boy, whatever kind of little cunt you are I'm sure you didn't ask for that one.”

“Now that you've made that mess, what are you going to do about it?” snapped Mr. O'Reilly.

Ryan rolled his tongue around his mouth and looked down at the holes and the ink and spat on them.

He looked up at O'Reilly and O'Reilly had a head on him like a salmon rolled into a hot press.

“Wipe that up,” he said.

There wasn't much moisture there to wipe. Ryan's mouth was dry. It had been for days.

He dragged his sleeve off the desk.

“Office,” said O'Reilly.

Ryan's chair clattered to the floor and he kicked it backwards and marched out of the room, carrying his classmates' stares and O'Reilly's dogged impassiveness across his shoulders until the door slammed shut behind him. Another closed further down the corridor, and there was brief adult laughter from the assembly area, but otherwise there was no sound but that of his runners on the carpet. He was such a small thing here, like a marble rolling around in an empty bath.

He hovered outside Room 18. Annie Connelly in the front row spotted him through the glass rectangle over the door handle, and he mouthed “Karine” at her.

She didn't have to be a lip-reader. She knew what he was saying. Any of them would.

He ducked into one of the locker alcoves.

Karine came out a couple of minutes later, hair piled onto her head in lackadaisical perfection, the sleeves of her school jumper pulled down over her fists.

“Hey,” she whispered. She was shaken still. The revelations of the week had drawn tears enough to break her boyfriend's heart, and yet she only knew the half of it.

“C'mere,” he whispered back.

“I am here.”

“More here.”

He held her and pressed his lips to her neck and she hooked her hands around the back of his head.

“Let's go away,” he told her neck. “Deadly serious; let's take off.”

“Ah, I don't think that's going to work when I've just told Miss Fallon that I'm going to the toilet.”

“Era fuck her.”

She must have felt the heat building, because she pulled back and said, “What's up with you, boy? You're not all right.”

One spider-leg eyelash had fallen onto her cheek. He pressed his thumb against it and the lash cushioned itself in the warmth of his skin and came away with his hand.

“You shouldn't have come back to school yet,” she said.

“The choice wasn't there this morning.”

“Even so. You could have gone somewhere else. I'd have come to you.” She paused. “What did you do?”

“Now? Acting the maggot. I'm just in bad form. So I need to go to the office and get a stern talking-to.”

He rested his forehead against hers.

“Everything's wrong, Karine. I'm fucking sick of hiding it.”

She put her hand on his chest and pushed him back just enough to look into his eyes. Hers were sticky-lined with black pencil, smudged out at one corner by a stray yawn. “You know I'll tell someone if you want me to.”

“And why should you have to? Naw, fuck 'em. I don't want any of them knowing my…Ah fuck it.”

She winced as he dragged his knuckles off the wall. “Don't do that,” she said, and she caught his wrist.

“I think I'm cracking up, like. How can I be that good at hiding how fucked up I am?”

“You're not fucked up; shit around you is fucked up. I know that coz I know you. And you know me, and we have each other, right?”

He could have cried. “Right,” he said.

“And I'm here,” she said. “For you, like. And I will be, too. You don't need to worry about that.”

“D'you love me?”

“More than anything.”

“It's ‘everything' for me. More than everything. Like the whole lot put together.”

She kissed him. A proper kiss, too, one that would have gotten her into heaps of trouble if a teacher were to come along and interrupt her. “Maybe we
should
take off,” she told him. “What kind of girlfriend would I be if I left you feeling shit?”

“A sensible one.” He tightened his grip on her waist and swung her around. “Naw, it's OK. I'll face the music. I'll conduct the fucking orchestra.”

“I want you to be OK.”

“I will be. I'm just…Bad week.”

“Just don't…” She paused, and frowned. “…give them any excuse. In the office. Just say you're sorry. For once, Ryan. Please.”

“But I'm not sorry.”

“Pretend you're sorry.”

“Like they pretend my face is the right colour, yeah?”

He waited until she was back in her classroom before he continued on.

He imagined himself saying sorry. Imagined the run-up to it: the headmaster's sighs and solemn pontificating (he'd given up bawling him out long ago), the requests for clarification on motive and psychosis, and, worst of all then, the lecture on a lost future and oh, the miasma of potential he swore he could barely see Ryan through. Maybe that was the reason no one could see the clatter pattern on his face. His being too enveloped in opaque promise, choking the faculty with it. Eyes streaming and throats constricted with the noxious concentrate of Cork's great post-millennial hope. Oh God, that was it. Ryan was all tied up in nasty knots of his own smothering competence.

Don't you want to be an engineer? Or an architect? Or a scientist or a programmer or, God help us, a doctor? Don't you want to be something, Ryan? Oh go on. Fucking be something.

The apology would fit most naturally there, but Ryan knew the words wouldn't come, not even if they tried beating them out of him.

It was different with Karine. He had every reason to apologise to her, but she didn't know that. He'd mean every syllable but it wouldn't matter. Where he'd need forgiveness he wouldn't get it.

He turned into the final stretch before the principal's office.

Past the chaplain's room, and the first action in the chain.

It had started months back. One sticky, airless Saturday, dull as any clump of empty hours and charged with potential because of it.

He woke to muffled thumps and muttered direction.

He lay there for a bit, on his side, blinking at the wall, coming round to the cacophony. When he'd made sense out of it he galloped down the stairs and there was his dad and this other fella, hoisting his piano out the door.

“What are you at?” he asked, and his sister Kelly, inflated with knowledge and bobbing into sight from behind the piano case, said, “What does it look like?”

“Dad,” he said. “Dad, you can't. You can't take the piano.”

His father said, “You don't need it now your practical exam's done. You don't even play anymore.”

“I play when you're not here.”

“Oh, you do, yeah.” There was a pause as they stared each other down and his father blurted, “It's doing nobody any good having that thing here. Don't you tell me you still play!”

But he did. When there was no one around to hear him he did, even though it felt increasingly weird to sit on the piano stool and stretch his fingers and watch them fly over keys like they belonged to another boy entirely. A couple of times he'd played for Karine and that was even weirder, when they weren't his hands and his hands had done so much to her. And she'd said,
Oh my GOD Ryan, you're really good,
but he hadn't been; everything he'd played for her had been stilted, because he was so desperate for it to sound the way it did when he knew there was no one else in the house to hear it and nothing to prove even to himself because he already knew it was there, the music, in his head and in his belly and in his hands. And he'd presumed,
Well, one day I'll be able to do that for her, too, because I won't be freaking the fuck out about how she thinks of me,
but now that day wasn't going to come, was it, now that his useless cunt father had stolen his piano from him.