Donal Ryan - The Spinning Heart

Noreen had a baby who died after a few days. The doctor told her the baby wouldn’t live after it was born. Noreen didn’t believe it. She said the baby was beautiful, the baby was perfect, there was nothing wrong with the baby. The baby was brought home and all. All the nurses cried inside in the hospital as they left. They all knew well the little baby hadn’t a hope in the world. Noreen wouldn’t believe it, though. Sure look at him, Nana, look at him, he’s perfect so he is, he’s perfect . He was too, I seen him. There was something wrong with his heart; it wouldn’t stay beating. I stayed close to Noreen’s house the whole time after they brought him home so I did. I didn’t like to be going in, tormenting them and they busy worrying and hoping and praying. I stayed outside in the shade of the big weeping willow that hung out over their wall. I let on to be standing guard against death. He got in, though, in spite of me. I heard Noreen from outside, roaring crying. PJ came out as far as the garden wall and called me in. Noreen had the little baby in her arms. She pulled me in to her arms as well. I couldn’t hardly breathe with the flood of tears and the heat off of her and the little baby squashed into me. I knew you were outside the whole time, my love. I’m sorry, love, I’m sorry. I never minded you properly, love, and now aren’t I paying for it? I’m sorry my little love, my little love, my little love. I didn’t know for a finish was she talking about the baby or me. I think a lot about what Noreen said that day. I think she thinks it was my fault her baby died, like it was my fault Mammy died. I don’t know in the hell.

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.

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 …