The Glorious Heresies Read Online Free Page A

the deck and closed the door behind him.
    “You’re to stay with Deirdre tonight, Maureen. Say nothing about yer manno. We’ll have him scooped up and out in no time. Who knows, you might even fall in love with the new floor.”
    “I won’t go back there,” she said. “It’s not safe.”
    “Yeah. Well. We’ll talk about it after.”
    —
    He took care of some chores after leaving Maureen in the reluctant hands of the daughter-in-law she’d missed out on, but as day stretched into evening there was still a human sacrifice on his mother’s kitchen floor, one with a dent in the back of its head made by Ireland’s ignorance of fine art and penchant for cut-price religious iconography.
    He wondered where Maureen had gotten the Holy Stone. Had someone pressed it on her when she was reeling from childbirth? Had they assumed that even that crude image of the world’s ultimate single mother would provide solace in hard times? Were they just blind, deaf and dumb to style?
    Jimmy Phelan was raised by his grandparents, not unwillingly, but awkwardly nevertheless. They brought him to the Marian shrine at Knock once and offered him up to the wall once favoured by apparitions as a living paradigm of their piety. He’d been very bored, but afterwards they’d taken a jaunt through the town and he remembered gift shop after gift shop, gift shops as far as an eight-year-old eye could see, stocked to the rafters with baubles. Rows of Virgin Mary barometers; her fuzzy cloak would change colour depending on the weather, which was very miraculous. Toy cameras with preloaded images of the shrine; you clicked through them, holding the flimsy yokey up to the light. And so many sticks of sugar rock. You could have built a whole other shrine out of sticks of sugar rock.
    Maureen’s Holy Stone wouldn’t have looked far out of place. Maybe his grandparents had purchased it. Maybe it was his speeding around this wonderland of faith-based kitsch, jacked up on neon-pink rock and too many bags of Taytos, that advised them of its relevance.
    And so supposing the Holy Stone symbolised something to Maureen. Repentance. Humility. New beginnings. Supposing smashing it off the skull of an intruder set her back forty years.
    Evening was drawing in and there was a corpse drawing flies back in the flat, and no one yet nominated to move it.
    He stopped at a Centra and bought himself a sausage sandwich and a coffee, and sat in his car to eat and think.
    It felt wrong to be hiding from Dougan the source of a problem the man would have to fix. Jimmy wasn’t used to this kind of isolation. His mother—the woman he tentatively thought of as his mother—had fucked up, and for once in his life, Jimmy felt a weak spot.
    He was mulling this over when he spotted someone, ten feet away from his car. The figure was vaguely familiar. A navy hoodie and blue jeans that had both been through the wash ten-too-many times. A dark, tousled head bent over an outstretched palm, opposite fingers picking through coins as one would for a parking meter. Jimmy balled up the sandwich wrapper, stuck it in his empty coffee cup, and stepped out of the car. Between the bin and his mark, he chanced, “Cusack?”
    The other looked up. It was him all right. More than a few years older, though Jimmy would have sworn it had been only months since they last spoke.
    “J.P., boy,” he said, still with his palm out.
    “Cusack. You’re looking well.”
    It was a disingenuous greeting but the only alternative was the most brutal honesty.
The absolute state a’ yeh, Cusack! If there’s a whore you’ve been visiting, it might be worth sprinkling her with holy water and commanding her back to the fiery depths, because you look like someone’s tapped you for fluids.
    The desiccated accepted the salutation with a mournful nod.
    “It’s been a while,” said Jimmy.
    “I suppose it has.” His voice was thick. Drunk? It looked more possible than anything else that had demanded his