The Glorious Heresies (2 page)

He hated his bedroom marginally less than he hated the rest of the house. He shared it with his brothers Cian and Cathal, who were messier than he was. The space was laid out in a Venn diagram; no matter how loudly he roared or how gingerly he protected what was his from what was theirs, they always managed to arrange an overlap. She sat on his bed—gratifying that she knew which was his—and he kicked his way around the floor, sending Dinky cars and Lego and inside-out pyjama bottoms under beds and into corners.

She was sitting on her hands and so when they kissed it was as if they'd never kissed before and weren't entirely sure whether they'd like it. The second one was better. She reached to cradle his face. The side of her finger brushed against the back of his ear. He pushed her school jumper over her breasts and when she pulled back to take it off he copied her.

“Maybe,” she said, three buttons down, “like, we should close out the door. Just in case.”

“I could pull one of the beds in front of it?”

“Yeah.”

He pulled the curtains too. They lay on his bed and held each other, and kissed, and more clothes came off, and all the way along he kept thinking that she was going to withdraw her approval, that his hands would betray him here as he worried they would on the piano keys.

She didn't. She kissed him back and pressed against him and helped him. And he wondered if he could do this with her in every room would it sanctify the place, exorcise it of the echoes of words spat and fists thrown?

He wondered if he should stop wondering, when a wandering mind was heresy.

“Just be careful,” she whispered. “Oh please, Ryan, be careful.”

She clasped her hands around his neck and he found his right hand on her left knee, gently pushing out and oh fuck, that was it, he was totally done for.

Cork City isn't going to notice the first brave steps of a resolute little man. The city runs on the macro: traffic jams, All-Ireland finals, drug busts, general elections. Shit to complain about: the economy, the Dáil, whatever shaving of Ireland's integrity they were auctioning off to mainland Europe this week.

But Monday lunchtime was the whole world to one new man, and probably a thousand more besides, people who spent those couple of hours getting promotions or pregnancy tests or keys to their brand-new second-hand cars. There were people dying, too. That's the way of the city: one new man to take the place of another, bleeding out on a polished kitchen floor.

Maureen had just killed a man.

She didn't mean to do it. She'd barely need to prove that, she thought; no one would look at a fifty-nine-year-old slip of a whip like her and see a killer. When you saw killers on the telly, they always looked a bit off. Too much attention from handsy uncles, too few green vegetables. Faces like bags of triangles and eyes like buttons on sticks. Pass one on the street and you'd be straight into the Gardaí, suggesting that they tail the lurching loon if they're looking for a promotion to bring home to the mammy in Ballygobackwards. Well, not Maureen. Her face had a habit of sliding into a scowl between intentional expressions, but looking like a string of piss wasn't enough to have Gardaí probing your perversions. There'd have been no scandals in the Church at all, she thought, if the Gardaí had ever had minds honed so.

She looked at the man face-down on the tiles. There was blood under him. It gunged into the grout. It'd need wire wool. Bicarbonate of soda. Bleach. Probably something stronger; she wasn't an expert. She didn't usually go around on cat feet surprising intruders with blunt force trauma. This was a first for her.

She was shit at cleaning, too. Homemaking skills were for good girls and it was forty years since anyone had told her she was one of them.

He was definitely dead, whoever he was. He wore a once-black jumper and a pair of shiny tracksuit bottoms. The back of his head was cracked and his hair matted, but it had been foxy before that. A tall man, a skinny rake, another string of piss, now departed. She hadn't gotten a look at his face before she flaked him with the Holy Stone and she couldn't bring herself to turn him over. It'd be like turning a chop on a grill, the thought of which turned her stomach. She'd hardly eat now. What if his eyes were still open?

There was no question of ringing for the guards. She did think—her face by now halfway to her ankles—that it might be jolly to ring for a priest, just to see how God and his bandits felt about it. But she didn't think she'd be able for inviting one of them fellas over the threshold. Two invasions in a day? She didn't have the bleach.

She turned from the dead man to pick up her phone.

Jimmy had drawn priests down upon her like seagulls to the bridge in bad weather. He was sin, poor thing, conceived in it and then the mark of it, growing like all bad secrets until he stretched her into a shape no one could shut their eyes to.

If she'd been born a decade earlier, she reckoned giving birth out of wedlock would have landed her a life sentence scrubbing linens in a chemical haze, hard labour twice over to placate women of God and feather their nests. But there was enough space in the seventies to allow her room to turn on her heel and head for England, where she was, on and off, until the terrible deed she'd named James tracked her down again with his own burden to show her.

Some women had illegitimate babies who grew up to be accountants, or teachers, or heirs to considerable acres of good ground in the midlands. Not Maureen.

She frowned at the blood on the floor and dialled. Jimmy would know what to do. This was exactly the kind of thing he was good at.

The man on the street, the scut in the back corner of the pub, and the burnt-out girl on the quay all said the same: it was better to run alongside Jimmy Phelan than have him run over you. In short pants he was king of the terrace; in an Iron Maiden T-shirt he was Merchant General of the catchment area. He'd sold fags and dope and cans of lager, and then heroin and women and munitions. He'd won over and killed cops and robbers both. He'd been married. He'd attended parent-teacher meetings. He'd done deals and time and half the world twice over. There wasn't much left that Jimmy Phelan hadn't had a good go of and yet it was only very recently he'd owned up to the notion that inside him was a void kept raw and weeping for want of a family tree. It turned out, though, that Jimmy Phelan's eyes were bigger than his belly, and that applied to anything he had a yearning for: imported flesh, Cognac, his long-lost mother.

The bint had only gone and killed someone. He supposed it was appropriate carry-on for the block he was chipped from, but it didn't make it any less of an arseache. Jimmy liked to allow room for manoeuvre in his daily schedule, but “Clean up after your mother offs someone” was a much more significant task than he'd ever have thought to factor in.

He had set aside an apartment by the river for Maureen's use. With his being such a captain of industry, it had never been the plan to have her living with him, even if it hadn't turned out that she was crazier than a dustbin fox. It hadn't really been the plan to bring her home in the first place—all he'd aimed for was to track her down and give her the lowdown on her grandchildren—but he'd had to re-strategise when he'd found her living amongst shuffling addicts and weird bachelors in a London tenement. He'd heard enough nationalist rants to know that leaving an Irish person in poverty in England was leaving them behind enemy lines, and it had been well within his capacity to take her home. She'd dug her heels in, but there was no one who could draw away from Jimmy Phelan's insistence, no matter how much pride or how many limbs they looked set to lose.

He'd bought the building for a song because a bunch of Vietnamese had been using it as a grow house and the guards had left it with more holes in the walls than there were cunts down in Crosser. If there had been any Vietnamese left he might have sold it back to them, on the “lightning strikes” adage, but they'd gathered their skirts and scurried down to Waterford, or so he'd heard, so he'd used it as a brothel for a while, and might do again once he found somewhere less draughty to store his mother. He'd left her in the ground-floor flat, convalescing from her emigration, and had a few part-time part-tradesmen making structural improvements to the floors above, but he'd thought it had been secure. Maybe susceptible to punters lost and roaming, but she'd been under strict instructions not to open the door to anyone, and it had been a while since they'd begun redirecting appointments to the newer venue.

So how Maureen had managed to kill an intruder was beyond him. How did the weasel get in? Had the Vietnamese forgotten him? Had the guards not noticed him tucked away in the attic? Was he a john whose longtime kink was climbing in through skylights?

Whoever he was, he was dead now, and it turned out he probably wouldn't have been an open casket job even if he'd reached his natural expiration date. In fact, looking at him, he'd clearly been in the process of hurrying that along.

“What the fuck did you do to him?” Jimmy asked Maureen, as she sat at the kitchen table making faces at her cigarette. She was a dour little thing. Lacking height himself, he'd resorted to growing outwards to achieve the bulk demanded by his vocation. Even now at forty he was mostly muscle, softened only very lately by a habit of eating out and drinking well. Maureen was whittled straight and had a glare just as pointed. They didn't look alike.

“Belted him,” she said. “With the Holy Stone. I wasn't giving up the upper hand on the off-chance he was Santy Claus.”

“What Holy Stone?”

She gestured towards the sink.

For every Renaissance masterpiece there were a million geegaws cobbled together from the scrapheap, and this was awful even by that standard. A flat rock, about a fistful, painted gold and mounted on polished wood, with a picture of the Virgin Mary holding Chubby Toddler Jesus printed on one side in bright Celtic colours, and the bloody essences of the dead man on the kitchen floor smeared and knotted on top.

“Where the fuck did you get this?” If it wasn't for the fact it was mounted on that plinth, he'd have assumed some opportunistic crackpot had painted it for a car boot sale. He turned it over in his hand. The Blessed Virgin stared guzz-eyed back at him.

“I've had that a long time.”

“I didn't take you for a Holy Josephine.”

“You wouldn't want to, because I'm not.”

“You just collect religious souvenirs to use as murder weapons, is it? No one ever suspects the heavy hand of the Lord.
Repent, repent, or Jesus might take the head off yeh!
How did you even swing this thing, Maureen? Did you take a run at him from the front door?”

“The Lord works in mysterious ways,” she said.

“I know a few lords like that all right.” He ran the Holy Stone under the tap and looked back at the dead man. “You have no idea what he wanted?”

“Isn't it funny; I didn't think to ask.”

The body was weedy, its clothes shabby, even before the chap's blood had glued them to his frame. He had nothing in his pockets but a balled-up tissue and two-fifty in coins.

“Some junkie, maybe, looking for cash. I don't know the face. He looks Irish. Or maybe a Sasanach.”

She sniffed. “Dirty tramp. Robbing all around them. I'm just the type they target.”

“He's no one I know. And if he had any local knowledge at all he wouldn't have dared come near this house.”

He tossed the Holy Stone from one hand to the other. “Dame Maureen, in the kitchen, with the rock o' Knock. We'll get rid of him for you.”

“The floor will need scrubbing.”

“And someone to clean the floor.”

“The grout will need replacing.”

“We'll get you a new floor, then.”

“You'll get me out of here. Who'd want to stay in a place a man died?”

“Oh, you'd want to watch out for vengeful spirits. He'll be in every mirror now, Maureen. He'll be coming up at you from the floor when you're trying to make the tay.”

“You can grin all you like, boy,” she said, “but it's not right to leave a woman alone in a house like this.”

“It's you who made it like this,” he said. “But point taken. I'll get you a cat.”

She threw daggers.

“First thing's first,” he said. “I'll hire some hands. After that we'll look at living arrangements. I have nowhere else for you at the moment. I'll figure something out, but it won't be tonight.”

“It will. I'm not staying here.”

“You are until I find somewhere else for you.”

“I'm not. I'll sit outside for the night.”

“And you'll freeze and then there'll be two corpses and I tell you what, girl, I've only the patience for digging one grave.”

“You should have left me in London,” she said. “Poor interest you have in me, at the end of the day.”

“That's right, Maureen. Poor interest. That's why it's me standing here, being fucking munificent with my fingerprints, instead of the state pathologist and Anglesea Street's finest.”

“I'm not staying here,” she said.

“First thing's first, I said. Will you stay here till I get back? Will you at least do that much for me?”

She tipped ash onto the tabletop. “I'm not staying here with a corpse.”

“And whose fault is it that he's a corpse?”

“I don't know yet,” she said.

He met the challenge and it went right through him.

“Fine,” he said. “Fine. Come on. Sure Deirdre'll be thrilled to see you.”

Maureen wasn't officially living in Jimmy Phelan's building. The building didn't officially belong to Jimmy Phelan. Even so, he didn't want to use his nearest and dearest men for this job. There was something off about the whole thing. He wasn't convinced that the foxy-haired intruder was just some gowl hunting desperately for spare change. Jimmy Phelan trusted his gut, and now he felt it howling.

The job had to be done. There was a body on his mother's kitchen floor, and it wasn't going to get up and leave of its own accord. Ordinarily he'd have swiftly handpicked a few decent sorts—at the very least his right-hand man Dougan, whose brutish dexterity and wicked sense of humour would be just right for the occasion—but that would suggest that he had a designated clean-up crew, and he couldn't be sure how Maureen would take it.

Or how Dougan and the boys would take her. They knew scraps of the story: that he had tracked down his birth mother and brought her home. They didn't know she was such an odd fish as to be capable of impromptu executions. Their respect for him, and for his lineage, could well be mangled by news of her little rampage. He bristled at the thought of it. He was sore where he'd grafted on this brand-new past.

Deirdre Allen was as stubborn as she was tough, which may have sounded like an admirable mix, but as far as Jimmy could tell it simply meant she was too stupid to know when she was wrong and too slow to notice the consequences. She was still dyeing her hair jet-black, still smoking twenty a day, still insisting that if he funded her expedition into real estate, he'd get his money back and doubled again. Still thinking there was opportunity on the right side of the euro. Still believing the recession was a sag in Ireland's fabric, stretched as far as it could go and on the point of bouncing upwards.

That pig-headedness was what had taken her so long to leave him. She had sailed through nearly a decade of his debasing their marital vows before she'd run aground. He hadn't made a habit of affairs; there were plenty of girls he could fuck without having to fork out for extras. Even so, there were so many all-nighters, so many week-long absences that any other woman would have read the warnings. By the time Deirdre noticed, it was much too late to draw boundaries. Jimmy gave her the house and wondered if one day she'd chalk their collaborative fuck-up down to experience. For now, she still laid claim to the title of Jimmy Phelan's Wife. She didn't want him in her bed anymore, but she was too stubborn and too tough to give up what she thought were the perks of his infamy.

“I want to get the kids a piano,” she said, dispatching a cup of tea in Maureen's general direction, wrinkling her nose. She hadn't asked how Maureen took her tea, but Deirdre had long assumed, incorrectly, that she had a knack for hostessing. “I've always regretted not learning an instrument. I don't want them saying the same thing in ten years' time.”

“Are you having me on, girl? They'd have no more interest in learning the piano than they did in anything else you demanded I foist on them. It's you who wants the piano. A front-room centrepiece. Something to rest a vase on.”

“You can be a very thick man, Jimmy.”

“Maybe it's because I never learned to tickle the ivories. There's no art in me.”

“You'd deny your children the opportunity to learn a skill so? Just because there's a chance they might not stick with it? Is it depressed you are, or just plain mean?”

Maureen took her mug and walked out onto the back decking.

“Ah, she's thrilled you found her,” sneered Deirdre.

“I'm glad you know her so well, girl, because she's staying here with you tonight.”

“What?”

“The flat's getting cleaned. Industrial shit. No way can I have her stay there overnight, and I have too much on to offer her my bed. Long and short of it: you're stuck with her till tomorrow.”

“I am in me shit, Jimmy,” she hissed. “You can't leave that loon here.”