The Glorious Heresies (4 page)

Georgie met Robbie when she was fifteen and he was twenty-two. He admitted to twenty-two; she admitted to nothing, not age nor origin nor the fact that she didn't have a fucking clue what she was doing. She was a runaway and he was wandering, and it happened that they found each other.

She lost him abruptly one April week, six years later. She couldn't say what day because there were often absences. So she didn't panic when she arrived home one day and he wasn't there, or start chewing her nails when he didn't pick up his mobile; he lost phones in perpetuity, sometimes quite intentionally. She phoned around the few friends they had but no one had seen him. On the third day she started to worry.

Georgie, small-town wild child and intermittent claustrophobe, self-styled, was into drugs well before she met Robbie. She wouldn't have met him at all if it wasn't for that shared interest: they kept bumping into each other on the same couches, doing the same drugs to the same end. He had sea-grey eyes and hair the colour of a muted sunset. Coasting on borrowed intelligence, they spoke about all manner of insubstantialities.

At one party, he told her that he had a room in a flat, and that she could sleep there, if she wanted.

“It's only a mattress on the floor,” he said. “But it's better than couch-surfing or…” He blinked. “…moving from party to party, if you know what I mean.”

She went with him and twenty minutes later lay staring at the flaking wood on the inside of a white sash window, wincing as he shoved and stuck inside her, an invasion she'd sanctioned because she was spiralling and indebted. That was how Georgie lost her virginity: in a negotiation for mattress space.

After that he produced some more coke.

“You can stay as long as you like,” he said. “I mean…that was really good of you.”

“No problem,” she replied.

His dick looked smaller than it had any right to feel when it had been inside her. He handed her his T-shirt and she bunched it between her legs.

She did another line and when she straightened up she noticed he was staring at her tits, gawping, like he hadn't seen a naked girl in years.

“No, it was really, really good of you,” he said.

Silence for a moment, and then, “Do you like me?”

“Yeah. 'Course I do.”

He didn't believe her. “I like you,” he said. “Have done, too. For ages. You can stay as long as you like. I mean it.”

You can stay for six years,
he could have said, and Georgie would have believed his offer but not in her ability to put up with him for that long. But that was it, wasn't it? You don't know your own strength till you need it.

Outside of their appetite for inebriation, Georgie and Robbie had little to hold them together, and there were more photogenic couples. He looked jointed enough to be folded away when not in use, and it wasn't often anyone had use for him. She was short and freckled, prone to weight where it wasn't wanted. The size of her breasts had made her barrel-like in her school jumper; ould fellas had breathed rough suggestions when they passed her on the street.

First she told Robbie that she'd moved to the city after her Leaving Cert to party. The longer she slept on his mattress, the heavier the lie felt, until she was too exhausted by its heft to be comfortable under it. She told him when she was sure he wouldn't baulk: she was fifteen and she'd run away but no one was looking for her because she'd told her parents she was just fine. Rang them every fortnight, actually, and evidently the guards weren't interested in tracking down a girl who was doing just fine. She was still here to party, she insisted.

Robbie took it exactly as she'd predicted. He scratched the back of his neck and puffed his cheeks out. “Whoa,” he said, and reached no further than that. By then it was too late for him to demur, even if he had the guts for it. He had already walked her into an agreement with the guy he rented the room from; the landlord fucked her, now and then, in part-payment for another month of indoor binges and insubstantialities.

After that it was their dealer, and then a night's worth of punters around the back of the college while Robbie patrolled and parleyed, maybe once a week, maybe more than that. And Robbie, of course, though that was for free.

Birthdays passed, coke passed, crises passed. He patched her up when she needed it, she put her body against his debts when he needed it. She got pregnant but it didn't work out. They stopped going to parties. They sat in, where he suffered death after death on his Xbox, and she sank into novels about dogged detectives and murderers who hid in plain sight.

She went to work indoors, at his insistence. Maybe he was just ridding himself of the responsibility of minding her, but he swore it was because the men who bought her in brothels would be less worrisome than the ones who trawled the streets.

He was wrong.

Up to that point she'd defined her time with Robbie in lively terms:
fighting, fucking, breathing, being.
After that point she was mostly concerned with death. The men who prearranged their time ensured that she was aware, every moment, of how many moments she might have left. By and large they were vicious, much more so than the last-minute trawlers. Maybe it was that these punters had time to stew in their contempt; it was often bubbling over by the time they got to their ordained girl. When she wasn't working she took solace in serial killers, and watched Robbie bleed out on the TV screen a hundred times a day, until at last the irony started to sting.

One Sunday she got Robbie to borrow a car and drive her to her parents' house, where she waited, parked up the hill, until they'd gone to Mass.

Between brown walls, behind windows too close to sagging trees, underneath the tick-tock of wall clocks in sync, Georgie took in the scent of marrowfat peas and wet clay. She knew now how much worse things could be, and yet she still felt it: the hours lost and opportunities turned stale in the country air, the feeling that if she didn't get up and march out she'd grow roots down through the thin carpet, down through the foundations, down into the soil, the dirt, the rock, and trap herself there until her brain turned to jelly and thick hairs sprouted on her chin. Her parents were born of the land and stalled by the land, and Georgie was an alien. She'd taken off because there didn't seem to be any other way to go. Similarly, there was no way back now.

She stole one of her father's shirts from the back of the wardrobe and from the bedroom windowsill her mother's scapular. Because Home was something denied to her, she took only what bits of it wouldn't be missed. They served as bittersweet reminders of how badly she'd fucked up.

After that, every time she went to work she wound the scapular around the handle of the bedside table drawer. She eyed it as if to challenge it to produce salvation. Bleed out an angry Jesus. Call forth the wrath of his da.

These ecstasies kept her preoccupied, and it was a rare punter who noticed. Punters weren't equipped to notice such things, though they were clear-eyed enough when it came to her worldly being. Lack of enthusiasm for their libido usually provoked punishment in the form of thrusting hips or fists clenched around her hair, but sometimes they'd be passive aggressive and only take it out on her afterwards, sitting prim in front of their laptops, reviewing her performance, typing her into a hiding:
She'd a face on her like a slapped arse and an arse on her like a bag of Doritos
…

The brothel moved to new premises about a month before Robbie disappeared, and when the men came with the furniture the bedside table and its scapular was missing, and Georgie was too mortified by the shape of her sentimentality that she said nothing, except deep into Robbie's shoulder back in their flat.

So it wasn't that she feared that Robbie might be dead, because his death was the first logical conclusion. He wouldn't have run away because he had no one left to run to; they were, in all sorts of ways, the last two people on earth.

She looked for his corpse with determined detachment. If she found him bloodied or bloated that'd be something to deal with, but right now all she needed to do was her duty. She hunted for him. Alleyways, doorways, up the ways, down the ways. Nothing. It was like he'd been plucked out of existence, the way you'd flick a crumb off your shirt.

She reported him missing, and the guard taking her statement leaned back with his biro tapping out a march on the fleshy bit between his thumb and first finger, and stared as if she'd invented Robbie from scraps of punters and a fever-dream of wishful thinking. He sent her on her way with undisguised disgust and a flimsy promise to keep her updated.

If there had been a body, her grief wouldn't have felt so formless. As it was, the fact that Robbie had been there one day and gone the next, leaving behind nothing but second-hand jumpers and foodstuffs she didn't like, left her suspended between mourning and wired impatience. He was there, then he was gone, and wherever he'd gone to he'd taken six years of Georgie with him.

The practicalities inherent in suddenly finding herself independent were many and unfortunate. She could support herself—there was money in prostitution, not a huge amount, but enough to make up the rent and keep her smashed—but…Well, there had been things she hadn't had to worry about when Robbie was around. Like he'd make sure the heating was on, or he'd go do the various errands that kept the coke and smoke topped up, or whatever. And now there were all of these
whatevers
and Georgie without the wherewithal to get through them.

What little peace she had made with her circumstances when Robbie was there to encourage it disappeared.
Maybe I'm depressed,
she wondered, idly, as she stood in the shower, thirty minutes at a time and sometimes noticing at the end that she was still in her knickers or that she'd forgotten to take her hair down.

She could have just walked out of her job, but that would have created more problems than it solved; the pimp could have had her for loss of earnings and might have insisted she stay on to work off debts he'd conjured out of bloated waffle. Instead she drank her way out. Punters arrived for appointments and she belched her disapproval at them, which they tried to pound out of her. Then the pimp tried to beat it out of her. He tried to hammer her straight, when being hammered was her problem. He wasn't a very smart man, in fairness. He was running the brothel for someone else, which was all in all a pretty stupid career move.

A few days of belching and beatings and Georgie was out on her ear. She went home and cleaned herself up and was back on the streets the next day. Sure, she had to worry now about the guards, but that seemed very much the lesser of two evils, especially when she could point out to them that they should have been searching for Robbie, and not stunting her earnings by booking her for solicitation or taking blowjob bribes in a back street off the quay. Oh yeah, a man was a man, when he was there.

And so that led her, in the week after her gin-soaked dismissal, to search for another kind of man.

Georgie had felt Tara Duane was a construct from the first day she'd met her, though of a positive sort, back then, a slice of luck given form by some celestial alignment. Tara had found her around the back of the college, pockmarked by pebbledash and bad weather. She'd brought her a sandwich and a coffee and, later on, a vodka in one of the pubs off Oliver Plunkett Street; Georgie couldn't remember which. Sixteen years old and getting into cars with married men, and yet Cork City remained a mystery, the expanse of it forbidden to people like her, a soirée to which she held no invitation.

Tara swore she'd done her time in sex work, and that after having brazened out her trials she felt it her duty to offer support to the girls still involved in the trade. Winningly she implied she understood better than anyone the circumstances pinning Georgie down. It quickly became apparent that being pinned down was, in Tara's opinion, nothing to be ashamed of in these recessionary times. Ireland in a tailspin? Who could blame the girls on the street for their choices! Georgie felt uncomfortable having her choice so neatly abridged by this uninvited proponent. She wasn't sure she remembered making a choice at all.