Donal Ryan - The Spinning Heart

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 intellectual 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?

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!