Donal Ryan - The Spinning Heart

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 just 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.

My father split in two, and then fell to pieces. That’s what I think schizophrenia is: splitting in two and then falling to pieces. Am I a schizophrenic? Is it hereditary? I could find out, but I don’t want to. Like I needed only to open the wardrobe door to find out if there was a monster waiting in there to kill me, but I never did. I might have woken him if I did. I’m not waking a monster. No way.

I WONDER if that girl that lives near Dorothy has a boyfriend. She has no husband anyway, Dorothy says. Dorothy obsesses about her. Three different men call to her. A scruffy-looking character who seems to be the child’s father; he takes him walking by the hand up and down the road. An older man who must be her father. He mows grass all up and down her road. He tidies up that whole road by himself. He’s a respectable-looking man, too, Dorothy says, very straight-backed and just handsome enough to not be too aware of it. He must be pure solid ashamed of that one, Dorothy says, with her brazen chest and her bastard child. And a tall, fair-haired chap with muscles and sunburn started to call to her a few weeks ago. He’s called at least three times now. He marches in and out with tools and pieces of wood. He could be just doing jobs for her, Dorothy says, but they’re very familiar with each other. She always touches him. There’s no knowing what way she pays him for his work. She has no job, that one. She probably was given that house by the County Council. Imagine that, Dorothy says, you get rewarded handsomely these days for being a little hussy!

I’m going to paint Dorothy’s window sills very, very slowly indeed. I need to see this tall, sunburnt, muscle-bound person for myself. I need to know what kind of relationship he has with the girl. He is a bogey, an unknown quantity. I can’t think of her without him creeping into my mind’s eye. She was wearing a denim skirt one day. Does he put a big, rough hand up her skirt? I’d like to think he is respectful of her, but there aren’t many respectful men in the world. He probably asks her to do things for him and she feels she has no choice, because she is afraid he won’t finish the jobs he has started. That’s what those fellows are like. I would have to intervene if I happened to see him forcing himself on her while I painted Dorothy’s upstairs window sills. I would kick in her front door and he’d turn towards me and I’d hit him with the heel of my hand full force into his solar plexus, killing him instantly. It’s okay, I’d tell the girl, while she sobbed in my arms. It’s okay, the monster is gone, the monster is gone. I hope my heart doesn’t stop before I get to save that girl. I don’t feel very well. I think I’ve been thinking too hard again.

I ALWAYS SWORE I’d never again set foot in County Clare. I don’t even like to look across at east Clare from the low shore at Castlelough. Ton Tenna mocks me from the Limerick road: it hides Clare behind it. We had a meal in a lovely restaurant in Ballina one time, but I kept my back to the river, because Clare was on the far bank. My second son went fishing with his uncle Jim and his brothers in Clare nearly twenty years ago and was swept off of a rock and drowned. I can’t bear the thought of that county since. I think every hour of every day about him still. I think mostly about the last moments of his little life: the shock he must have got when the wave grabbed him; the way he must have felt as he was dragged out and out and under. Could he hear the roars of Jim and his brothers? Could he feel the ocean tightening its hand around him? I know I shouldn’t think these things over and over again, but you may as well ask a bee to leave the flowers alone.