The glorious heresies, p.26
The Glorious Heresies, page 26
He supposed the fire turned the page on a black chapter of his life.
But he wasn’t the same man who had stumbled onto J.P.’s path nearly four years before. The tidy removal of the crime scene couldn’t draw a line under what had happened. Robbie O’Donovan was still dead. Tony Cusack had still washed his blood off the floor. Tara Duane had still used the wound as leverage.
On Christmas Day young Linda came over to compare presents with Kelly. Can in hand, Tony asked after her plans for the new year. She said she’d organised to continue her training in a salon in Glasgow, where her dad lived. She said she’d be leaving in the second week of January.
Kelly said, “Think of all your mam can get up to with you out from under her feet,” and Linda shuddered treacherously.
Pallid in the glow of the Christmas tree lights, Ryan stared straight at the telly, feigning apathy.
Tony made up his mind.
—
The day before the scheduled blaze Tara Duane was all zest and merriment, as if she was relaying instructions for a supermarket sweep.
“So what’ll happen,” she said, placing a mug of milky tea on the table in front of him, “is that I’ll leave the house at six o’clock, and take care to be seen here and there in town, and I won’t come home until you phone me to tell me that there’s been a terrible incident, or…” and she winked, “that the job is done.”
Tony hooked his fingers around the handle of the mug. He’d watched her make the tea and was satisfied she’d neither drugged nor spat in it. Still didn’t make it any way appetising.
They were sitting in her kitchen. Efforts had been made to emphasise its owner’s nonconformity—colourful, mismatched crockery, tea towels with cheeky slogans, holiday knick-knacks arranged on the windowsill—but the baubles didn’t mask the decay. Piles of clothes had been set on the table and left for so long they’d become musty. The wall behind the dustbin was streaked brown and grey. The top of the cooker was thick with old grease. It was as if the resident had died months ago. Tony watched Tara Duane prep her own tea. She could easily have been a shade, remembering nothing but the most twisted flashes of what she once was.
“You don’t need to worry at all,” she enthused, sitting across from him. “I’ve thought of absolutely everything. I’ve sold off some valuables because Melinda’s just left and I’ve taken that opportunity to sort my stuff out. See? Makes total sense. You’re going to throw the bottle into the kitchen leaving the key in the door behind you—I’ll give it to you now, so we won’t be seen together tomorrow—and it’ll be like I simply forgot to lock it before going out. You know what a bad idea that is in a neighbourhood like this. You call me straight away because we’re neighbours and you noticed the smell of smoke. And if anyone sees you leaving by my back door it’s really easy to say, Well yeah, I stuck my head in and realised the fire was out of control and I immediately called Tara and then the fire brigade, yeah? And then I tell the council I was right all along and they move me out of here. And that’s that!”
No bother on her at all that she was explaining an elaborate ruse to a man only involved because of his incurable hatred.
“Best for all of us, I think you’ll agree,” she said. “This house has always been too big for me and Melinda. There are families who need it more than I do. So! Any questions?”
Tony remembered the banshee by the lake. He shook his head.
“Great!” she said. “Oh, have a biscuit, for God’s sake. Do me a favour. I’m watching my figure!”
—
He hadn’t planned to have a couple beforehand but he was no more able to stop himself drinking than he was to stop the act itself.
He lay in his bed and wept the poison out in preparatory ritual. Thought, Am I even able to see this through? Will I get caught? and then, What will my kids think of me? They wouldn’t understand. What’s a father to them, except someone who makes their dinners and ensures the house doesn’t fall down around their ears? Not even that, Tony Cusack. What’s a father to them, except someone who boozes and stumbles and fights and spews? They wouldn’t understand that this was something he had to do, and he could never make them.
Every now and then he picked up his mobile and checked the hour and at 3 a.m. he slid out of the bed and stood by the front window and looked out at the estate.
It was raining. Wind shook the shrubs and hedges in neighbouring gardens, banged a gate somewhere across the way, slapped the windowpane. There were no lights on in the houses directly across the green. Nothing stirred but the night’s own breath.
He stood there for ten, maybe fifteen minutes, then found his feet.
Even if one of his children woke up they would pay no mind to his nocturnal roving; it wouldn’t be the first time insomnia had tortured him. He dressed and went downstairs to the kitchen, opened the back door, and looked out. No lights in the houses backing onto his, either, except the usual glow from some of the neighbours’ bathrooms.
It was the kind of night that could go on forever.
The key turned in Duane’s back door. He stood for a moment in her kitchen, inhaling the scent of air freshener coiled through stale smoke and grease. Then he picked his way through the darkness into her hall, the layout identical to his own heap, checked the sitting room for signs of life, and crept up the stairs. The bathroom light was on and its door left ajar.
A creak on the step third from the top. He wondered what he’d say if she woke and caught him. If he claimed to have been overcome by night-time fervours and desperate for the loving touch of a spindly bitch, would she believe him? Would she cast him aside, his being all grown up and therefore way too fucking old for her?
He tried the door to the front bedroom and was momentarily bewildered by the decor, fittings and fragrances. His eyes tuned into the dark and he made sense of the shapes around him. Posters, perfumes on the dressing table, the Playboy bunny on the bedclothes. The bed was empty. This was the daughter’s room.
He stepped back out into the landing and considered the mistake as a lifeline. How easy it would be to skulk back down the stairs and return to his own home without having left anything but his uneven breath.
But what of tomorrow? What of her rage once he backed out of her plan? What of her informant’s mouth?
He slipped into the back bedroom and closed the door out silently behind him as quickly as he could, and Duane stirred in the bed, sighed and turned onto her back.
He wiped his mouth with his sleeve and stepped over to stand by her body, and bit down on his lip so that the pain would chase away thoughts of this bedroom having hosted his boy, and crossed himself for a god he didn’t really believe was there, and straddled her and put his hands to her neck and leaned down and closed his eyes. She thrashed and gurgled. Her hands flapped against his. Her knee curled behind him, he felt her thigh against his back and then nothing, but he kept pushing down and kept his eyes closed and afterwards told himself she’d barely been conscious at all.
—
He remembered the way more from his journey home than his own death march, so he had to navigate in reverse.
He had no torch in the car but he told himself he’d be better off, not wanting to be noticed from land or from sea. It was an awkward task. He found a sheet of tarpaulin and tucked her up tight. She looked light as a feather but dead weight was dead weight.
The walk along the overgrown path to the old quay, pointed out by J.P. on Tony’s first visit, was harder than he had imagined. The ground was wet, the flora overgrown, the light non-existent and his burden enormous. He imagined himself losing footing and sliding into the black water below to be found alongside his enemy’s body three or four days later. He imagined what his children would think. He imagined the traitor Jimmy Phelan, livid as the scandal threw light on his butcher’s yard. He imagined his investigation. He imagined him coming face-to-face with Ryan and trying to bleed out the boy’s ignorance.
The water churned as he rowed out to J.P.’s fishing boat. He didn’t think he’d make it. It was dark, the wind was vicious, his arms sang as soon as he set them to work, and he thought he might not deserve to make it either, no matter his reasons, no matter how far he was backed into the corner…But he got there. He sat for ten minutes in the bobbing dinghy wondering how in Christ’s name he was going to get her into the boat. He managed it through the devil’s favour. He found rope and trussed the dinghy tight to the stern and dragged her into the fishing boat through strength of desperation. And then he left the rowing boat to its buoy and set sail, believing with every passing second that he was heading to his doom, to the unforgiving open sea, to the end maybe, but at least he was taking her with him.
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.
