The Spinning Heart

by Donal Ryan

  But that Montessori teacher is awful suspicious if you ask me. I can’t understand why the crowd inside in Henry Street aren’t making more of that. He says he let the young fella out the door two steps ahead of him and the car was waiting near the door and the lad climbed into the back seat and even as the car drove off his only thought was that it was very rude of Dylan’s dad to just take him without saying anything, then in the next second he thought maybe it was a snatch by a father refused access, and in the third second he realized all hell was going to break loose and he was after fucking up rightly. And he can’t properly explain why it was only little Dylan going out the door to the play area at that second – why wasn’t there a swarm of kids going out the door together the way there always is at playtime? Why was Dylan so far ahead? I don’t know, I don’t know, it all happened so fast, Philly says he keeps saying, and putting his fat fingers over his face and snotting and crying like a child.

  That boy of the Hanrahans isn’t half as thick as people make out. And better again, people don’t edit themselves around him, thinking him to be an out and out God-help-us. That’s how he picked up on that boy’s words. The likes of Timmy do be invisible. I’ll have to start putting these feelings into words properly soon. Philly will have a right laugh at me. Good man Jim, he’ll say, come on so and we’ll jump at the word of a halfwit and a feeling in your gut. He’ll tell me get back into my box the very same way he told me the time years ago when the rapid response lads were called out to that lad of the Cunliffes and he above in the farmhouse waving his shotgun at the neighbours. I’d have handled that the finest. He’d have done a few months wrapped up in a nice warm blanket above in Dundrum.

  Them armed response lads blew that poor boy to Kingdom Come the very minute he set foot outside his front door. I’d have gotten that gun off of him no bother. That was nearly ten years ago and there was hardly a peep around here since. Madness must come around in ten-year cycles. That time, there was two shootings and a fatal car crash in the space of two months. Now we have another murder and a snatched child; well, a child from here snatched, and you can sense the potential for more. It’s in the air, in the way people are moving around each other with grim faces and shining eyes, either all frantic activity or standing in tight groups, talking quietly and looking at the ground. This must be how things were the time of the war against the British, when a crowd outside of Mass would suddenly explode into a flying column, guns appearing from under overcoats, killers appearing from inside of ordinary people. They were good killings, though – the Tans burned churches and creameries, interfered with women and shot little children. That was a time when killing was for good, for God and country. That time is long gone. But aren’t we still the same people?

  Frank

  THE FUTURE IS a cold mistress. You can give all your life looking to her and trying to catch a hold of her but she’ll always dance away from your fingertips and laugh back at you from the distance. Them that says they know her are liars and thieves. What was ever wrote down on paper that came true, that could be checked? Not one thing since the Scriptures. That’s what I was thinking about, sitting over there beside the stove on my old green chair when I heard the door going and that fucking hairy ape burst in here and walloped me with a plank of wood, proving my point in fine style. I hadn’t time to know I was dying before I was dead. I went quare easy in the end, all the same. I thought I was in for a messy, drawn-out affair; I had visions of the county home and the Regional Hospital and oxygen masks and tubes sticking out of me and Paki doctors poking me with their bony, brown fingers. And Bobby sitting looking at me and not knowing whether to read me the newspaper or put a pillow over my face and smother me. I should be thankful for that big lad that lamped me, I suppose. I fairly lit his soul on fire that day. I stung him like a dying wasp. I always had a knack for hitting people where it hurt. Sometimes it was as if the words were whispered into my ear by the devil himself.

  There was plenty around here thought they knew the future, thought they had her number, took her fully for granted. I even knew, long before that gorilla arrived in and did for me, that no man could be assured of what the next day would hold. There’s no man on this earth can even be assured he’ll have a next day. I often thought to tell Bobby that, especially a few years ago when he was going around cock of the walk about the place, acting like he was God’s gift to the world on account of his being Pokey Burke’s number one lapdog. What a thing to be proud of. I watched him when he arrived in that day and found me dead and dirty in a puddle of blood and shit. You lose control of yourself at the moment of your death; that’s something I didn’t know. He stood looking down at me and I stood beside him looking down at myself and I said: Good man Bobby. You’re a good man, Bobby. You sees things more clearly too, through dead eyes. He flinched. I’d nearly swear he felt my dead breath on his face; he might have even heard my silent words. He picked up the plank of wood that the big lad had flung away from him. It was lying in the blood near my head. Then he rang that thick fucker Jim Gildea to come down and ballsed himself right up. That boy got his mother’s brains. He hasn’t a dust of sense.

  I’M NEARLY SURE I’ve been dead about a month. I haven’t got out past the front door yet. It’ll be a fair old while before I’m left leave this limbo, I’d say. They probably don’t know what to do with me. I’m stuck here while they wonder about it, them that does the deciding about who gets sent where. They’d want to get the finger out now, in all fairness. I’d say I’m meant to be contemplating my life and feeling sorry for my wrongdoing. The Vatican done away with Purgatory, I’d say that’s why I’m being left here to haunt my own house. Ha! There’s too much going on around here to allow for much contemplation. That blondie lady of the Cassidys with the fine big chest waltzed in to poke at me. I often seen her on the telly, going in to shitholes to look at dead wasters with her pink lipstick. She’s a fine cut of a woman, so she is. I wish they could have tightened me up a bit before they left her in here. Then they carried me out in a pine coffin and I was nearly lonesome after myself. Bobby was back down after a few days looking like a kicked pup. They left him out on bail. The thick bollocks never told them he didn’t do me in, obviously. Christ, if you saw him, the cut of him, when Jim Gildea arrived in here belly-first, looking at me out of his mouth and the plank of timber in his hand and my blood dripping off of it onto the floor. Jim Gildea asked him straight out was he after killing me and he told him he didn’t know. I don’t know, he said. Imagine that! What a stupid prick.

  I WONDER am I meant to be having revelations. Or epiphanies. Or both. I wonder is this meant to be a punishment, to be confined to this cottage where I lived my whole life and where my father lived before me. I was full sure he’d still be knocking around here, you know, watching to make sure I wasn’t getting notions. Maybe he was sent below. Ha! I wouldn’t be surprised if he was, he’d have gave the devil himself a good run for his money on his best days. Most men would have built a big two-storey or a nice dormer bungalow on the land and made the old place into a slatted house. Wasters. Why would a man leave a house with walls as thick as a fortress to be a toilet for cattle and go and live in a cardboard box? To impress women, that’s the only reason men ever did that. Imagine giving them cowboy builders thousands and thousands of pounds to scratch their arseholes for six months and make you a house out of bits of wood and blocks made of foreign stones! Bobby was talking out through his hole one time about building an extension onto the back. I told him the only extension that was needed around here was to the end of his mickey. Himself and that girl that married him were trying to have a child that time and his seed wasn’t taking. The devil’s whispers again.

  I was never able to talk to that boy without upsetting him. His mother had a fool made out of him, kissing him and telling him he was beautiful every two minutes. I was forced to bring balance. I had to prepare him for the hard world. Where light shines a shadow is cast; that’s an elementary thing that every boy must be taught,
especially boys that are mollycoddled by their mothers. He’d have gotten some hop if I’d left him off out thinking he was the boy his mother told him he was. She only ever had eyes for him from his first day on this earth. She forgot about me the very minute she squeezed him out of herself. He fell out with her for a finish, though. That shook her! She had an awful complex about herself, anyway. A superiority complex. She was full sure she was a few cuts above me, that lady. She looked down through her nose at me every day we were wed until the very day she died. I often asked her to know how was it she married me in the first place. She never answered me, only went off sulking in one of the back rooms for herself, or stood in front of me with her eyes like two pools of wet, blue sadness. I couldn’t ever stop at her. The sadder she looked the faster the brutal sharp words flowed from me; some making tiny little nicks, more tearing deep into her. Her soul suffered death by a thousand million cuts. I knew I was doing it and I couldn’t stop. God help us, I could never stop at either of them.

  Still and all though, when my grandchild’s eyes first met mine, a powerful weakness overtook me. I caught myself looking into the wispy-looking little basket they had him in and saying words of thanks inside in my head for him. I was afraid to open my mouth for fear my voice would betray me. I knew I hadn’t it in me not to sound false or foolish or a kind of hollow, somehow. I turned my face away and left. I hardly saw that child again. Bobby called him after himself, you know. It wasn’t off of me he got that vanity.

  I LEARNT my lessons faster than Bobby. My father was a better teacher than me. I ran into the milking parlour straight from school one time when I was only a small boy. I had news bursting out of me that I thought would make him praise me. We were given a test in school today Daddy, I told him. Were ye now? He never turned around to look at me, only kept on pumping away at the old Dairymaster that he always said was only a balls of a yoke that he was tricked into buying by a Godless fuckin Proddie. Ya, the master gave us forty questions on history and geography and maths and all that. Did he now? Ya, and I was the only one got every single one of them right so I was. The cigire was there today, you see, and Sir didn’t know he was coming at all and he was told give us the test and he was pure solid delighted with me for getting all the questions right on account of the cigire being there out of the blue. My father still didn’t face me, but he went kind of still and his back straightened and he turned his face a little bit around so I could see his red cheek and his glistening eye. So you know it all, do you? A lead ball dropped into my stomach. I didn’t know what answer to give to that question. Before I could open my stupid little mouth again my father had a length of Wavin pipe in his hand that he used to use to shcoo-up the cattle along the yard and it was going swish, whack, swish, whack, swish, whack against my little scrawny body and I couldn’t see out through my eyes for the shock and the sudden pain of it; I fell out backwards through the parlour door onto the hard, mucky ground and my father was roaring: You. Know. NOTTEN. You. Know. NOTTEN. You. Know. NOTTEN. By the time my mother crept out to the yard and said stop it Francie in her mousy little voice there was no part of me not covered in pinky-white welts. My father stood back and spat on the ground and admired his handiwork. Bejaysus, you know something now, though. You know something now, boy. You know that pride is a deadly sin. And he threw the Wavin pipe on the ground and walked over me back into the parlour, the very same way as your man threw down his plank of wood and walked off after he pole-axed me.

  THEY SAY violence begets violence, but that’s not always true. I had no stomach for violence my whole life. I had to bluff my way out of a few tight spots. I often thought to take a stick to Bobby when he was losing the run of himself, but I wasn’t able to tighten my fingers around any weapon I ever put my hand on to beat him with. That’s an awful affliction for a man to have. Not even drink could lift that paralysis from me. I only ever done violence to things. I could only ever wound a person with my words. I practised for years and years until it was as natural to me as breathing. When I used to drink I used to have imaginings of killing men with my bare hands, fantasies of strength I knew I didn’t have. I used to swallow whiskey like a dry, weary man slugging flat lemonade in a summer hayfield and I’d picture myself with my two hands around my father’s throat, watching his face turning purple while his soul was squeezed out of him through his ear holes. Then I’d go pure solid mad and wreck all before me: chairs, tables, doors, windows. I’d leave holes in plaster running with my own blood. Imagine the waste of it, thinking about killing a dead man. I wonder will I see him again. I wonder does he know already there’s only two acres left of his stinking, precious land, wild with briars and brambles, or will I have the pleasure of telling him how a share of the worth of his life’s labour was gave in over the counter to every fat publican in five parishes. I wonder how is it I was able to do to Bobby exactly what was done to me, even with my useless hands bound by cowardice. I wonder how will I ever be reconciled to myself. I wonder how will I look upon the face of God.

  Triona

  MY AUNTIE BERNADETTE liked things to be unadorned and liturgically correct. Like the rough cross she had my cousin Coley carve from a limestone block. Coley wanted to smooth it and add Celtic rings and swirls to its front. He spent a whole day with his bony arse in the air as he chipped and hacked and sanded, an acute angle of unnatural adolescent concentration. Bernadette put a halt to his artisan’s gallop with a savage flourish: she smacked him into the side of his head, sending his chisel flying from his hand and his sinful pride flying from his heart. It’s fine as it is, she said. Leave it over at the top of the path by the front door, let you, so that all who enter here know we are followers of Christ. Fucking old c-cunt, spat Coley when she’d returned to baking her unleavened bread. I suddenly saw the beauty in him, as the darkness of anger and frustration threw his angular jaw and blazing eyes into sharper relief. I’ve always needed to be shocked into awareness.

  Bobby was the first person ever to remind me of Coley. Like Coley, he’d never have said the things the other lads around here would say. He stood with but was never a part of the herd of donkeys. Hee-haw, hee-haw, look at the knockers on your wan! Hee-haw, hee-haw, Jaysus lads I’m red from riding! Hee-haw, hee-haw, fuck it lads, I’d bate it into her! Bobby was silent, tall, red-faced in summer and ghost-white in winter. I always knew him, years and years before he first spoke to me, standing on the sticky floor in front of the bar of the Cave inside in town. His nervousness shocked me; I’d always thought he’d thought he was too cool to talk to us. Then I was suddenly aware of all the other things behind his eyes: fear, doubt, shyness, sadness. I was wrapped in him from that minute. I’d never look at another man again. Mobiles were still fairly new in those days. Pokey Burke must have been one of the first to get dumped by text.

  Bernadette would fry pieces of chicken in their own juice and serve them with boiled green beans and unleavened bread. When my parents dropped me over there to be minded I ate the Communion of the Faithful at every meal. Bernadette never went to Mass; she was a fundamentalist Christian. Mother often said she only used religion as a framework for her craziness. She could just as easily have been a Muslim or a Buddhist or a white witch. She hung around with some group of Bible-bashers inside in town. They met in a leaking, groaning flat and read all the best bits from Genesis to Revelations, slowing down to a near stop at Leviticus. Bernadette used The Word to torture Coley, just as Frank used his own spiteful words to torment Bobby. Coley didn’t survive Bernadette’s terrible reign over his childhood. At a tender, gangly fourteen he hung himself from the branch of an elder in their back garden that looked hardly stout enough to hold his weight. Bobby only barely survived Frank. Every time I met Frank I got the ghostly smell of unleavened bread baking; I could almost taste its thin dryness in my mouth. There was a spinning heart on the gate at the front of their house, a mocking symbol, Bobby’s rough cross.

  I WOULDN’T CARE if Bobby never again brought a cent into this house. Earlier in the
summer, when the whole village had it that he was going with that girl from Pokey’s ghost estate, I couldn’t have cared less; I knew he wouldn’t betray me in a million years. When he wouldn’t talk to me after they left him out on bail, though, I could have killed him. I screamed at him, into his face, over and over again to just talk, please, please just talk to me. I don’t even care if he did kill Frank. I wouldn’t love him any less. I’d perjure myself for him without breaking a sweat. I’d swear on a Bible and lie through my teeth in a heartbeat. Why wouldn’t I? I’d use the same Good Book that Bernadette used to bruise poor Coley’s soul.

  Bobby hated his father and never got over his mother and thought of himself as a failure for not protecting her properly from his father’s cruel tongue. His putdowns put her in the ground. It took me three years to get that much from him. I asked Bobby early on why he’d fallen out with his mother. He said they stopped talking, not to be drawing his father on them, and they just got stuck in that auld way. Stuck in that auld way? Well that makes no sense, I said. He just said I know it doesn’t, I know it doesn’t. Bobby whispers when what he’s saying upsets him. Then he stops. I learned quickly. I never pressed him to say anything until after the Frank thing. All of our years together, I never pushed, I just let him feel that I knew his pain was there and that I’d help him with it and there was no rush, no need to tell me anything until he wanted to. He had the words; I knew that. Bobby always read a lot.