The Glorious Heresies by Lisa McInerney Page B

jocks and a toothbrush. A brief spell of sleeping on strange couches and, twice, town centre doorways, and he conceded and approached his boss for extra work.
    “I’m just saying that if you need any bit more, boy, I’m at a loose end.”
    Hanging from it.
    His boss’s name was Dan Kane. He was a well-turned-out brute in his early thirties: mild-eyed, going grey, accent dampened, intentionally featureless up to the point his hands closed round your throat and his spit bubbled through a growl only an inch from your empty pleas. He was an anomaly in the underworld, a little monolith in a city held on blood bonds. Ryan had been selling for him indirectly before Kane copped on and decreed it hilarious; there weren’t many teenagers who could move quantities. Dan had made kind of a pet of him—gave him product on credit and engaged him in grinning debate on ethics and best practices—but better a pet than the leech that drew blood from Tony Cusack’s knuckles.
    Dan had work for him. More than he could spare. He possessed the keys to a couple of apartments which he used as walk-in safes for stashes of shifting size. He installed Ryan in one to keep an eye on things—the four walls, mostly. On the first night they sat at the bare kitchen table and talked fathers, and Dan slapped him on the back and grimaced in sympathy. He had an arctic disposition punctuated by explosions of lurid temper, but a heart too, when it suited him.
    Ryan didn’t bother trying to make himself at home. He knew he’d be moved on soon enough. Dan Kane’s flat was a place to sleep: that would have to be sufficient.
    He wasn’t fond of being alone. This apartment, climate-controlled for the benefit of the stash, was as clean and as cold as the cavity in his chest. He had a telly, an Xbox and a laptop, and a fridge for beer, and a double bed with a duvet heavy enough to keep his girlfriend warm. That only helped a little. He missed home and this failing kept him up at night. He missed the terrace and the green outside it and the shortcuts and gatting spots that had marked the boundaries of his world. He missed his brothers’ snoring and the banging on the bathroom door and the blaring of non-stop
Simpsons
episodes from the sitting room. A couple of times he thought he might miss his father, kind of like you’d miss a bad tooth, or a gangrenous arm.
    He guessed that it was just the hangover of being from a big family. And like any hangover, he could only deal with it by getting through it and avoiding the source until he forgot how much it hurt.
    Beside his father’s house was the scene of the crime, tended by a treacherous curator, preserved without his collusion. One day he knew he’d want to see his dad again, and that shame would line the path home. He’d seen enough of Tara Duane to last him till perdition, in her sickly back garden come-ons, in her half-dressed admonishment, in the crippling late-night replays he conducted alone in his borrowed apartment. She had turned him on to turn him in, and though he’d folded up the memory and folded it again, it flared on dark occasion, and he couldn’t get his head around it.
    It was April. A surf of cloud broke grey over the streets and Ryan walked through a city where debris stuck in damp clumps in every dirty corner. He was alone, still feeling out the expanse of it. There was hint of Dan coming around later on to evaluate his reserves, which wouldn’t take long with a bit of luck, because Karine had a dance class she intended to ditch so she could come up to the flat and get naked.
    They had celebrated their first anniversary in March, on his sixteenth birthday. There was another anniversary today, and he wasn’t sure whether it’d be a good idea to mention it. It had been a year since they’d first had sex. Would she go for that, he wondered? Some alcohol, maybe a smidge of Dan Kane’s coke, and fuck right through the everyday and into something new to make another anniversary of?
    He