The Spinning Heart

by Donal Ryan

  WHAT WILL I DO for a job, I don’t know? Imagine if Bobby went out on his own and gave me a job working for him! Jaysus, it’d be brilliant so it would. I’d work like a dog for him so I would. I have all the house painted below and I got a lend of a hedge trimmers off of Noreen’s husband and done all the hedges up along the sides. I made a new panel for the back fence to replace the one that got blown down and busted up. I have every single weed pulled up from the roots the way they won’t grow back. Nana would be delighted with me. My brother Peadar said I can go way and shite now if I think I’m having that cottage. He says we’re all the same and equal in the eyes of the law when it comes to who owns the cottage. He says even if Nana wrote a will and left me the cottage, and she didn’t, I’d have to pay a fortune in inheritance tax. You’d be a fine man now below in the Credit Union looking for thirty or forty grand with your no job and one arm as long as the other, Peadar says to me. There isn’t a job to be got anywhere. Peadar wants Nana’s house sold. He has to think of his own children, he says. He came down a few nights ago with a lad from the auctioneers. He had a right cool yoke that you have only to press against one wall inside in a room and it measures the whole room for you. It’s like magic. Lasers, your man said, and winked at me. He was a sneaky-looking fucker.

  You’d want to buck your ideas up, Peadar says. I’d love to say ah go way and have a shite for yourself. He’d probably go mad and puck the head off of me, though. He has a fierce short fuse so he does. Noreen told me I could live in their house. I don’t want to; they might look at me and think of how their little baby was took off of them because Noreen didn’t mind me. That’s not true, but if it’s what Noreen thinks, it’s as true as it needs to be. I’d never upset Noreen. She’s lovely, so she is.

  I WENT IN as far as the new hotel in town because they rang me from the dole office to say I had to. I done an interview and all. Your man said it was for to be a kitchen porter. I’d have to wash the pots and stuff. It’s a demanding position, your man said. He had a pink tie on him. Nana would’ve called him a right-looking dipstick. I couldn’t stop looking at his pink tie. He showed me the place where I’d have to wash the pots and all. There was a foreign fella inside in it; he was bent over a big sink, scrubbing like mad. His britches was drownded wet and all. He looked at me as much as to say he’d slit my fuckin throat for me if I went near his potwash. Some of them foreign boys do have a fierce dark eye. Your man with the pink tie asked to know who was my referee. I looked at him with my mouth open until he asked who could he ring for a reference. Oh ya, Bobby Mahon, I said. Is he a former employer? Ya, I said. Then No. Ya. No. Ya. Sort of.

  Jesus Christ, your man said and shook his head. Look, I’ll let you know.

  He will I’d say.

  Brian

  I REMEMBER THE mother and father talking about Matty Cummins and the two Walshes and Anselm Grogan and all them boys when they went to Australia a few years ago. A right shower of wasters they called them. Imagine fecking off to the far side of the world to drink their foolish heads off and the power of work to be had here! Context is everything. Pawsy Rogers used to be always saying that. Context is the first thing to examine in a statement. Aboy Pawsy, you were bang on on that score, boy. I’m fecking off to Australia now, and my mother keeps crying and my father won’t talk about it. He’s in denial. (He reckons if he doesn’t acknowledge something, it doesn’t really exist, like gayness, drugs or Marilyn Manson. When they were all on about Donal Óg coming out of the closet below in Cork, the father would only hum and look out the window when anyone mentioned it. Jaysus, what about your man of the Cusacks, Paddy? Dee dee dee dee …)

  So I’m going to Australia in the context of a severe recession, and therefore I am not a yahoo or a waster, but a tragic figure, a modern incarnation of the poor tenant farmer, laid low by famine, cast from his smallholding by the Gombeen Man, forced to choose between the coffin ship and the grave. Matty Cummins and the boys were blackguards; I am a victim. They all left good jobs to go off and act the jackass below in Australia; I haven’t worked since I finished my apprenticeship. He has to go to the far side of the planet to get work, imagine, the mother does be saying to her ICA crowd. How is it at all we left them run the country to rack and ruin? How’s it we swallowed all them lies? You can be certain sure there’s no sons of bankers or developers or government ministers has to go off over there to get work. After all the trouble we had to get him through his exams and all.

  What trouble? It was I had to do the bloody things. Boo hoo hoo, like. And the da’s eyes glaze over and he starts to suck his false teeth and squint out the window at nothing if anyone mentions it. If I was leaving a good job to go, he’d be every day telling me I was a yahoo and a blackguard and getting right thick. I could cope with that a lot easier. At least I could tell him to shut the fuck up and we could have a row and I could feel anger instead of guilt. I can’t tell him shut up if he says nothing. I wouldn’t say he even knows he’s humming.

  I was only ever thinking about going to Australia because every single person I know went over there for at least a year and had unreal craic. Could the parents not just get over it, like? Jaysus, you’d think I was going to Afghanistan to take on the Taliban. I heard the mother giving out stink to the father about it the other night; she was doing the old shout-whisper: He’s too young, Paddy, he’ll drink his head off and spend all his money trying to keep up with the boy of the Farrells and he’ll get no job or anything. He won’t ever go to Mass out there, you can be certain sure. The Aussies is all turning against the Irish, too – didn’t they kick a crathur to death outside a pub over there only a few months ago? Dee dee dee dee, the father said. She was fairly torturing him. Paddy, will you talk to him about it? Will you tell him it doesn’t matter about the ticket, sure what about it if he loses the money, we’ll put it back in his Credit Union for him, Paddy, will you Paddy, will you? Paddy? Doo doo doo doo …

  My young wan broke it off with me two weeks ago. She said there’s no way she’s going to have me riding all around me below in Australia while she waits here like a fool. She seen the lads’ Facebooks; in every single photo they were pawing girls in bikinis. Forget that, she said. Then she started looking at me really closely, and sort of laughing nervously, and asking was I crying. Are you crying? Jesus Bri, are you actually crying? I was in my hole. Dopey bitch. As if I’d cry over her. She’ll be crying the next time she sees me; I’ll have got rid of the belly, I’ll have an unreal tan, and I’ll be home for a visit only before heading back out to my beach house and my job making four or five grand a week. Slapper. Is that it so, she wanted to know as I put my runners back on, are you just going to go? Have you nothing to say to me? I hadn’t. I kicked her bedroom door before I left, though. JESUS, she went. Then I met her auld fella on the stairs, with his big manky tacher like Joseph fucking Stalin and his little beady eyes full of suspicion. I should have gave him a slap. Bollocks.

  You know the way you get used to getting the ride? And then you’re cut off, like, all of a sudden? That’s what all them wankers do be feeling when they’re going around crying over women. They’re only missing the ride. Love is a physical mechanism that ensures humanity’s survival. It’s an abstract concept as well, for people to write songs and books and make films about. Either way, it’s nothing but a construct. That’s the kind of auld shite I used to write in English. Pawsy used to cream himself over it. You have a keen mind, Brian. I do, ya. In me hole. You should look at arts or humanities, Brian. Avoid construction, Brian. Don’t be tempted by the high wages, Brian, they won’t last. Don’t waste your brain, Brian. All right, Pawsy, leave it go, in the name of all that’s good and holy, let it go.

  I won’t think about Lorna again after I start tapping some fine blondie wan below in Australia, that’s what I’m getting at. It’s only the want of a ride is making me all emotional at the moment. That’s the pervasive influence of popular culture: I think I’m sad over Lorna. It’s all this shite on MTV. On an intelle
ctual level, I couldn’t give a shite about her. It’s a strange dichotomy, so it is; feeling and knowing; the feeling feels truer than the knowing of its falseness. Jaysus, I should write this shite down and send it to Pawsy before I go.

  Kenny came over earlier. He has a load of Es bought, and we heading off in less than a week. He’s some spa. We’ll be off our heads all week youssir, he says, we won’t hear the auld wans bullshitting. Kenny is afraid of his shite of the flight; I know well. He’s also afraid of upsetting his parents. We’re all afraid of our lives of upsetting our parents. Why is it at all? Why have we to be bound by this fear of the feelings of others? Is it because my actions will always affect them? Am I the anti-matter particle to their matter particle, always having a direct effect on each other, even with a galaxy between us? Will the Earth’s largest ocean be deep enough to drown my guilt? Whoo boy, I have to stop thinking. I’ll be writing in a diary next, like a right prick.

  I know for a fact now it’s going to be a big huge ordeal going to the airport. The mother will want to come. She’ll mither the whole way. She’ll roar and scream at the father. He’ll drive along at about forty, hunched over the wheel, knuckles white, teeth gritted. If I see him crying, I’ll start crying too. Kenny will snigger and slag me the whole way to Australia. He’ll probably find the sexiest airhostess to tell all about it. Well gorgeous! Hey, you should a seen this lad the whole way to Shannon! Crying like a child! Will you give him a lend of your make-up there hey, it might fuckin cheer him up a bit! Fwahahahaaaa! Put on a bleedin chickflick for him there, hey! Fwahahaha! Sometimes I’d love to box Kenny in the face. But I’m getting thick over things he might say, which is a tad unfair on the chap, in all fairness. I’m living on my nerves. I’m like a young wan on a heavy period. Let me out of here, for Christ’s sake.

  I SAW Bobby Mahon this morning, over beyond at the Height. I was up with the da, pulling weeds and letting on to be praying for the souls of the Faithful Departed. I might as well humour him another while, in fairness. Bobby was coming over the stile beside the locked gate as we came to it. He’s meant to be tapping a flaker of a wan from town that used to go with Seanie Shaper that bought one of the houses in Pokey Burke’s estate of horrors. There’s war over it. You should see his wife as well, your wan Triona – she’s a ride and a half. Bobby is a pure bull, though, so he is. He probably rides the two of them every day. Things come easy to guys like Bobby Mahon. He’s not the brightest star in the firmament, but he’s a proper man. He has nothing to prove. Kenny reckons he’s like Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke; no fucker could break him. He wore his hurley off of the McDonaghs’ full forward at the end of The County Final We Nearly Won. Then he flung it away and lamped five or six fellas before Jim Gildea the sergeant and about twelve other bollockses got between him and the McDonaghs’ boys. I was only a small boy at the time. I wanted to be Bobby Mahon. I still do, imagine. I’m some loser. Why can’t I want to be me?

  Trevor

  I’M NOT SURE what time Mother gets up. I’m always gone before she stirs. I drive as far as Galway some days. I still get scared crossing the bridge in Portumna, like I used to as a child. The planks on the wooden stretch still clank loosely, as though they could break under the car. On a sunny day in Eyre Square you can sit and look at girls’ legs all day long. Some of those girls wear skirts so short you can almost see their underwear. I bought a pair of sunglasses that block the sides of my eyes so that they can’t see me looking at them. The trick is not to let your head move as you follow them with your eyes. I tried to hide my wraparound shades from Mother. She found them, though; she must have been rooting around in my car. She asked me what I was doing with them. She said they were plastic rubbish. She said she hoped I didn’t wear them going through the village. She said people would think I was gone mad. She said I’d look a show wearing those things. She looked at me and shook her head. I didn’t know what to say, so I just looked at the ground. I saw her putting my shades into the pocket of her apron.

  I’m dying. I’m sure of it. One day soon my heart will just stop dead. I sometimes have a striking pain in my left hand. It could be a blockage in an artery. Sometimes I feel light-headed, sometimes I feel a pounding in my temples; my blood speeds and slows, speeds and slows. Last night, just as I was drifting off to sleep, I started violently. My heart must have stopped and then kick-started itself again. I’ll die soon. I hope I don’t know it’s coming; I hope I’m asleep. I hope my lungs don’t constrict and burn for want of air. I hope my brain doesn’t show me scary pictures as it shuts down. I hope my life isn’t concentrated into seconds and flashed across my consciousness like a scream. I hope I just stop.

  I saw that girl again yesterday afternoon. She was standing outside her house, watching a child playing on a plastic tractor. The child was shouting, loudly and almost absentmindedly; long shouts with a rising note at the end. He looked like he was two and a half or maybe three at the oldest. He looked happy. Her house is painted white and there are flowers planted in the borders of her small front garden. It’s like one good tooth in a row of decaying ones. Mother’s friend Dorothy lives in the only other house that’s occupied in that estate. She seems to think I’m her houseboy. Mother says she paid through the nose for that house, way more even than the market value at the time. She was desperate to downsize from her draughty old lodge. She got rightly stuck above in that place, Mother says. She thought she’d be right swanky!

  Dorothy asked me to paint her window sills last week. I came on Saturday with white paint and a brush. I brought a flat-head screwdriver to open the tin. That’s not emulsion, she screeched at me. You need emulsion. I imagined myself plunging the screwdriver into one of her milky eyes. Would she die straight away, I wonder? Maybe she’d spin and scream and claw at the protruding screwdriver. A fine mist of blood would spray in a widening arc as she spun. The blood would be pink, full of oxygen. That girl might run down to see what was going on. Dorothy would have finished gurning by then. You killed her, she’d say. I had to, I’d tell her. She wasn’t really a human. She was a vampire. Dorothy would explode into dust, then. And that girl would rush into my arms.

  I FEEL a pain in my lower back lately, if I stand still for too long. The pain travels around to the front sometimes. It could be my kidneys failing, shutting down, stopping. It could be testicular cancer, too. The pain from that often manifests in disparate body parts; it can travel down your leg, up your spine, into your stomach. I could be riddled with tumours. I probably am. I definitely have skin cancer. Mother never used sun block on me when I was a child. She murdered me when I was a child by giving me skin cancer. A slow, undetectable murder, a pre-emptive strike, a perfect crime. She’s a genius, the way she makes evil seem so normal. She can be evil while making a cake, without even blinking. She flaps around in a cloud of flour so that her sharp old head seems to float, disembodied, above it, and says things like: What were you doing for so long in the bathroom? Or: Dorothy’s son is a captain in the army now, you know. Or: Who ever heard of a young man with a certificate in Montessori teaching? Or: You’re gone as fat as a fool.

  Sometimes I just catch a glimpse of her black, forked tongue as it flicks back in. I wonder if she knows I’ve seen it. I think she thinks I see it but don’t believe it to be real. I think she thinks I think I’m going mad. She’s trying to drive me mad. These creatures feed on madness, obviously. Dorothy is one as well. I could easily just kill them both, but I need a way of making sure everyone knows what they are before I move against them. If I just kill them, I’ll be sent away to prison, or to the Central Mental Hospital in Dundrum if I plead insanity. If I kill them and expose them for what they are, I’ll be a hero. They smell the same; they look more or less the same; they are concomitant in evil. I’m going to have to take that child from the girl who lives near Dorothy. Lloyd will help me. I won’t let Lloyd hurt him or anything. We probably will have to put some marks on him, though. Then I’ll kill Mother and Dorothy and tell everyone that I apprehended them j
ust as they were about to sacrifice the child. They’re witches, I’ll say. They’ve held me prisoner with a spell since I was a baby. Don’t touch their bodies, I’ll say, they may not be really dead. The authorities might require my services as a consultant. I am probably the only living soul who knows how to spot these creatures and deal with them.

  SOMETIMES I sit and think for hours about things. And then I fall into a sort of a reverie. After the reverie abates, I don’t remember what I was thinking about before it, I just know that I was thinking too hard. My head pounds dully. It happened last evening, while I was sitting on the couch, watching through the kitchen door as Mother baked a cake. After it, I was slumped forward. My head was almost resting on my knees. Judge Judy was nearly over. Mother was shaking me. I had a strange picture in my head of Mother with a forked snake’s tongue. Trevor, Trevor, oh Trevor, she was saying as she shook me awake. Her eyes were wet with tears. I’m okay, Mother, I told her. You’re not, she said, you’re not okay at all. We’ll have to send you over to Doctor Lonergan. You’ll have to get something to keep you together. I couldn’t bear it if you fell to pieces the way your father did.