The Glorious Heresies (28 page)

This is what it boils down to: image. And not like wearing designer sunglasses and jeans so tight they melt your balls. Just in general. What you give out, what people see in you when they first meet you.

I don't play piano.

I haven't forgotten it; you don't forget something you've been doing since you were three years of age. No, it's like…I started dealing and I fucked it up. Doing what I do for a living in and around playing the piano would be fucking ridiculous; I'd either be seen as a precious cunt or worse again, I'd be transparent. So I don't play piano. Not so's you'd notice, anyway.

The music won't go away, though. You learn that language and you're pretty much stuck shouting in it. So I fake it. I put my fingers to a set of decks and I learned to mix. That image works. People are comfortable with stereotypes; they want to think they have a handle on their merchant. You gift them an image so you can keep earning and you jettison whatever bit of yourself doesn't fit. That's just how it is.

Me and Karine go off to a gig on Saturday night and when it wraps up we get invited back to a party. I get to talking technique with one of the DJs and he tells me to throw a couple of tunes together. So I do. And he goes a bit googly-eyed because he thought I was talking out my hole.

Mixing's easy to me. I'm a bit nerdy about the science of sound, and those few months of Leaving Cert Physics and Maths stood to me, I suppose. “Let the dealer DJ,” the partygoers think, and then it shifts to “Why's that DJ dealing?” I don't stay on that long. I want a bump.

Karine comes over before I've even taken the headphones off and she says, “I'm
bursting
.”

“I'm sure they have a toilet, like.”

“They do, but they don't have a lock.”

I go with her and keep the door shut and she hitches up the dress and sits down.

“D'you need another yoke?” I ask her.

She makes a face. “I don't want to be dying Monday morning.”

“Have half a one.”

She makes another face.

“Go on,” I tell her. “I need a top up anyway.”

I take a pill from my pocket and bite it in two and suck my half down. I wait for her to get up again. She washes her hands and takes her half from me.

I take a piss while she checks her fake eyelashes.

When we leave the bathroom there's another girl standing waiting and she smiles at me and says, “Do I know you from somewhere?”

Karine steps past to retrieve her drink and so I get to smile back. “I don't think so,” I say.

“I'm sure I do.” The other girl is tall, athletic, you know the type. She's wearing a tight, short dress and spike heels and she has a dark bob that swings when she cocks her head. She steams into a cascade of places she thinks she might know me from and you know what? They're all gig-related. Like, she sees me as the DJ, not as the dealer. She's wrong on every geographical guess and she's wrong about my professional position too but her attention is light and warm and, all right, a bit touchy-feely because she's fuckerooed but I could do with it, I'm swelling up in it, it's fucking lovely.

And of course she makes the mistake of touching my chest and Karine is catapulted back over.

“D'you mind?” she says to the athletic girl.

“Sorry?”

“D'you mind keeping your big orangutan hands to yourself?”

There's a quarrel that fizzles like a damp match because the athletic girl is too high to want to respond, apart from a short, “Girls like you give us all a bad name,” and because I'm catching Karine's wrists and pushing her gently backwards out of the front door, catching each spat accusation with a headshake and a smile. There's a car parked outside and I keep walking her backwards until her arse bumps against it, and she's protesting but I push up against her and put her wrists around my neck and then my hands on her thighs and ask her what in God's name she's doing.

“Oh, you know that Mister DJ,” she says. “All the girls love him.”

“Let's not do this now,” I say. I'm conscious of the top-up yoke, and the mood inside so essential to its success.

“Am I wrecking your buzz?” she says, accusingly.

“You
are
my fucking buzz, D'Arcy.”

“So on that basis I'm not supposed to mind you flirting Bigfoot's knickers off?”

“I'm not flirting.”

“You are flirting. And they all know in there that I'm your girlfriend and it's making me look, like, so tragic.”

“Bollocks,” I tell her. I slide my hands around under her arse cheeks and push harder against her. “Besides, wouldn't you rather be going out with Mister DJ than Mister Dealer?”

“I'd rather be going out with a fella who could keep his eyes on his girlfriend.”

It's funny, because I can actually hear a voice, ringing clear and true, as if it was someone else's trapped inside my own head, saying
Don't do it, Ryan, You'll only make things worse
, but it's too late, my mouth is opening and I'm saying “I'd rather be going out with an ould doll who could keep her knickers on at her Debs' and she slaps me, she fucking clatters me, and starts marching off down the footpath in her tiny dress and her wobbly heels and when I readjust my jaw and follow she spins around and screeches, “Oh my God, OH MY GOD, you have no right to say that to me after you fucked that tourist, Oh my God I had AN EXCUSE, you were IN PRISON” and well, that's shattered the shit, hasn't it? And I walk behind her and tell her I'm sorry, sorry, fucking sorry and the top-up comes up on me and catches her shortly afterwards and we end up shifting the faces off each other by a pebble-dashed wall at the side of the road at five o'clock in the morning, and whether that's something a dealer or a DJ does I don't fucking know.

“Ryan,” she says, “Ryan.”

“Mmm?”

“You know this is like, ‘it' for me?” Her jaw is going ninety.

“Mmm.” My teeth have Velcroed.

“Let's have a baby,” she says.

I go, “Ha?” but all of a sudden she's teared up, and where I thought I'd laugh and tell her to come down off her yoke before making any life-changing decisions, I end up pulling her onto my shoulder and rocking her back and forth and telling her,
Whatever you want and whenever you want it
, and usually I'd chalk this silliness down to the night, the shots and the Ecstasy, but there's something different this time, and even in my wastedness I can feel it. I hold on to her and tell her I love her and tell her I'll do anything she wants me to do but beyond my words and her weight in my arms there's the knowing we fucked this up. There was something beautiful here once.

Easier get a taste for arson than murder.

Maureen accidentally-on-purpose left the candles by the curtains and burned her house down. It had, at the time, been a means to an end but she'd really enjoyed the spectacle once it got going.

With murder she found a definite crossed line, and it was hairbreadth. One second there was life, the next it was gone. The ultimate in finality. Once you cross over you can never go back.

Arson was a different thing and a glorious thing. It was a monument to its own ritual. Once the fire caught it etched a statement into the sky. There was time to savour it and time, too, to quench it, if second thoughts were your thing.

She watched the brothel burn from a broken doorstep across the river. The fire brigade was almost as punctual as the amateur photographers. There was a reverent hush and she longed to cross the bridge to tell the rubberneckers that there was no one inside, no one had died, no one would die, but she had to stay still and discreet. Modest, even. It was her handiwork but there would be no medals.

She watched as Jimmy turned up in his car—even across the river he was conspicuous as an invading army—and sprinted towards the firemen, and felt a little warmth herself, from a safe distance. There was something in the way of regard for her, then. Maybe it wasn't fondness but the idea of her dying of smoke inhalation clearly perturbed him. It was either that or he was stricken at the loss of the kitchen tiles.

Of course, he was rather heated in his own way, once he realised she wasn't dead. He called her every name under the sun and nearly combusted listing all of the ways her insanity had inconvenienced him. To which she coolly replied, “Don't you have insurance?” and sent him spitting out the door.

He swore to her that she wouldn't get away with trying the same trick twice, but her new dwelling, a ground-floor apartment in a gated city centre development called Larne Court, didn't deserve the punishment meted out to its antecedent. It was a modest place and she slept better without all that history weighing her down.

Robbie O'Donovan hadn't come with her. She didn't like to think of him being trapped where he'd fallen by thick black smoke but sure, he was dead already and she could hardly kill him again. She did wonder where he had taken himself, but she didn't miss him.

The vagrant up at the Laundry, a year and a half ago now, had told her there was nothing as cleansing as a good fire. Maureen had assumed to test the hypothesis, but while ridding the city of the brothel had made her feel better, it hadn't resonated, at least not in the chords she was attuned to. She had done it for Robbie and for young Georgie, but, she realised, nine months afterwards and analysing her failings, she hadn't done it for herself.

So in the sunny September, she rectified that.

You couldn't go wrong with hippies. Their philosophy hinged on their empathy and Maureen had tried sons and priests and whores and had come away without a dash of castigation. Maybe her sinless exile really had depleted the universe's urge to shit on her. She wanted to be sure.

Out of her new gate and a hundred yards to the right there was a newsagent's, and outside of the newsagent's on most mornings sat a pasty beggar in baggy jeans and plastic runners. She usually bought him a cup of tea and a sandwich and stopped to ask how he was, because he fascinated her. He was young enough to have a mammy somewhere. There was a two-week period in August when he was missing from his pew, but he'd returned before anyone's worry could be moved to action, and told Maureen he'd gone to stay with some kindly dropouts outside Mitchelstown. It had been a bid to cleanse himself of smack and it hadn't worked. Still, he was appreciative of the dropouts' conviction.

“Mitchelstown,” she mused.

“Yeah. There's this girl called Ruby Dea. She's got a farm above and she has the gates open to any ould gowl she takes pity on. Place is full of caravans and wigwams. She used to be in one of those cults.”

Maureen sniffed. “The Catholic Church?”

He enunciated carefully. “No. A cult. She doesn't talk much about it, but she has more than a few ex-believers up there. Ex-believers of all sorts.”

And sure how could Maureen Phelan resist that? Only hours after gorging on the beggar's tale she converted, and became Mo Looney, wife to the man Dominic Looney would have been. She draped herself in sorrow and headed up to Mitchelstown to find the girl called Ruby Dea, who turned out to be less of a girl and more of a matron, all skirts and woolly cardigans.

At first Ruby Dea thought Maureen was an irate mammy coming to claim back a loafer and blanched accordingly, but it wasn't long before she accepted Mo Looney as another casualty of faith, and lent her a two-man tent to knock out a space in a fallow field.

There were, as the beggar had promised, others. There was one twentysomething with a couple of small children and a ramshackle mobile home, who kept to herself in the bottom corner of the same field. “Hiding from a husband,” Ruby Dea confided. There was a jittery youth whom Maureen was sure couldn't last the night from whatever longing had leached into his marrow. But the rest of the residents were friendly. Maureen was the oldest and they treated her as some Biddy Early come to set them straight. She took advantage, getting a man named Peadar to put up her tent and a girl named Saskia to make her some dinner.

It was her intent to stay only for the weekend, but come Sunday evening the hippies had spilled nothing but tobacco leaf and quinoa down their fronts, and Maureen wasn't in the mood for holding it against them.

She sat on the grass outside her borrowed tent and watched the sun set. Across the way, Saskia waved and eventually came to sit beside her, and Maureen gave her a beatific smile and patted her knee. As the dew formed they got to talking. Saskia told Maureen about her upbringing down in Kerry—“Not too different to this, if you can believe it”—and Maureen listened with polite patience as crane flies skimmed the blades in front of them and faraway engines swept the roads.

“It was so unstructured, so
sloppy,
my childhood,” said Saskia. “No rules, no pressure, and I rebelled in all sorts of oddly conservative ways. Everything my parents believed in, I condemned. Consider they believed in personal freedom and you get a snapshot of a real buttoned-up brat. I studied hard and went to university to spite them, not to suit myself. Graduated a virgin and found myself at a loose end because I had absolutely no interest in my law degree. So what did I do? Ran off and joined a cult.”

“A cult?”

There was something more on Saskia's face now, threaded through sun-darkened freckles and crows' feet. Disgust. It lit her up the way a smile should. Maureen winced in solidarity as the younger woman's voice continued, cracked, “Well, when you look at Christianity that's essentially what it is, isn't it? Sorry, Mo. I hope you're not offended by that, but it's what I really think.”

“I'm not offended,” Maureen said, mildly.

“I was baptised by a real shower of freaks. The kind that hate absolutely everything: men are masters to be obeyed, women are dangerous sluts, sexuality has to be controlled to the nth. I lived with them for a couple of years until I remembered that Jesus wasn't supposed to be a subjugating bastard. I ran, and ended up with another bunch of Christians, but the doddering, smiley kind. But they had money and they had space, so I stayed with them and tried to live the life and be a decent disciple. Five years. Would you believe that?”

“So what happened?”

“Sudden disillusionment. A whole life swept away in the blink of an eye. We're pretty fragile, you know?”

She was staring straight ahead. Maureen mimicked her. They divided the washed-out evening light between them. On the other side of the field, the hermit mother held one of the children at arm's length to brush burs off its back and legs.

“There was another girl down there with us for the last couple of years,” Saskia continued. “Had problems with alcohol, wandered into the light pissed. She had a relationship with one of the men and she got pregnant. All that Christian love just melted away. The guy's family muscled in and insisted on custody of the baby. Poor girl, she was distraught. The Christians refused to back her up. Told the guy's family that they were right to assume guardianship because the girl had been on the game before she'd turned to Jesus. They waited for their opportunity to stitch her up and by God, did they take it. She ran off; who knows where she is now. About a week later I took off too.”

Small world,
thought Maureen, but she said nothing.

“I hope she's OK,” said Saskia.

“And are you OK?”

“I'm getting there.”

“I thought I needed a confessor,” said Maureen. “One time. Took me a while to realise but in the end it came to me…” And she paused, let the thought permeate, like a bead of brilliant colour dropped into a glass of water. “There's nothing there. No confessor, no penitent, no sin, no sacrament. Just actions to be burned away.”

“Burned? Strong word.”

“Nothing as cleansing as a fire,” Maureen said.

Ryan knew it was going to be a disaster before they'd even packed the car. He stood in the sitting room with Joseph and stared down at the provisions with despair and affection; Karine, in the bathroom at the top of the stairs checking her festival braids, had stacked her life's effects in the middle of the floor. Two bags of clothes. An inflatable mattress. Three pillows. A mirror. A toiletries case in which you could fit half-a-dozen small appliances. A pair of pink wellington boots with a faux fur trim, her knock-off Uggs and two pairs of flats. A duvet.

“A fucking duvet, Cusack.”

“I know.”

“You're going to have to talk to her.”

“I know.”

She hadn't wanted to go in the first place, so the notion of having to chastise her before they'd even left the house struck him as counter-productive. Karine loved music but Ryan could imagine occasional furniture more outdoorsy. Joseph had demanded a wingman for Electric Picnic and Ryan had been more than happy to oblige, but Karine would be damned if she was letting him go drinking for a weekend without a chaperone. She didn't trust him. And he was glad she was coming with him because he didn't fucking trust her either.

She'd tried to persuade him to select one of the “glamping” options—some colossal wigwam that cost a grand to rent for the three days and came with its own monkey butler, he assumed—but he'd told her it wasn't right to two-tier their party. They'd camp in the main grounds with Joseph and his buddies. She had pouted. He had told her she didn't have to come at all. They had had an almighty row about it that had lasted a whole week.

“A fucking duvet,” Joseph said again.

Karine came down the stairs rooting in her bag and started when she saw them.

“What's the matter?” she said, brightly, but her eyes were steel-set. Half past eight in the morning and she was rearing for round two.

Joseph said, “We're going to look like we've been looting.”

“What?”

“Seriously, Karine. There's less shit in the Argos catalogue.”

“What do you propose I leave behind?” she said, folding her arms.

Ryan raised his eyebrows at Joseph, who met the challenge and scowled back.

“Tell her,” he said.

“Tell her what, boy?”

“Tell her this is too much stuff.”

Ryan sat back onto the couch and ran his hands over his head. Joseph took the car keys from the coffee table and bumbled around the installation and out of the room, tutting. Karine's nails, specially painted black with neon rainbow stripes, drummed against her upper arms.

“There's got to be some stuff you don't need,” Ryan said.

“What,” she enunciated, “do you. Propose. I leave behind?”

“I don't know. Most of the shoes? A metric tonne of the make-up? We're going to a festival, girl, not searching for Doctor fucking Livingstone.”