The Glorious Heresies by Lisa McInerney

Author:Lisa McInerney [McInerney, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Mystery, Crime
Publisher: John Murray
Published: 2015-04-08T21:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

When she was small, they said she liked to toy with things. That she enjoyed making babies of dogs, people of woodlice, pets of dying birds. That things existed for her amusement, whether they were lacquered wood or flesh around a beating heart.

Maureen Phelan’s mother had been brainwashed beautifully. There had never been a question of her choosing her gender over her church; she pandered to the vestments as if by debasing herself she could avoid the stain of her sex. Her own daughters she saw as treacherous vixens. Puberty marked their descent. She hated the hair under their arms, their sloping waists, the blood that confirmed they were ready for sin. She was a vicious and stupid woman. Some combination. Her name was Una.

Una’s parents lived just up the hill from the Industrial School and Laundry, where, she told her daughters, all the bad girls went. She seemed both deathly afraid of the place and satisfied it was there at all, in the same way she was full sure of hell and content that it wasn’t for the likes of her. She announced that the Laundry’s inmates would therein learn the humility they were sorely lacking. Every girl with a fashionable hemline, every girl who had notions about herself, was fit for nowhere but behind the high walls. Boys she had less of a problem with; they were dumb creatures whose animal whims were to be carefully managed.

Maureen was the middle child of seven; despite her efforts, Una’s management of her husband’s impulses hadn’t followed her austere ideal.

Una Phelan was a frightened hag, comfortable in a dying Ireland and snapping feverishly at its future. For her there was no authority but the Holy Trinity: the priests, the nuns and the neighbours. Hers was the first generation of the new Republic, the crowd hand-reared on Dev and Archbishop McQuaid, the genuflectors.

When Maureen figured out that not only was she pregnant, but pregnant and abandoned by a coward, it was both horrifying and vaguely freeing, like hitting bedrock. She considered her options: the stairs, the coat hanger, the boiling baths. It didn’t take her long to reject them. There was something to be said for fulfilling the destiny her mother had kept harping on about.

So she flounced into the kitchen and announced her misdeed with the bravado of scientific detachment. She watched the colour drain from her parents’ cheeks, and the emotions that betrayed their humanity cross their faces like clouds on an October sky. She was nineteen but they were still the authority; she prepared for their punishment with frosty curiosity. One thing she knew: she wasn’t doing her penance up to her elbows in soap and steam in the Laundry. She would have killed them both first.

She had brought the devil into the family home and so all hell broke loose. Behind the high walls seemed her mother’s preferred choice, but in the 1970s the tide was turning. Giving up a daughter to appease sour-faced nuns no longer

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