Donal Ryan - The Spinning Heart

The day it happened, our neighbour John English drove us out as far as Spanish Point where the search party was organized. I’ll never forget that drive; the last time I had hope. There were no mobile phones that time, so I kept thinking we’ll get there now and they’ll have him, wrapped in thick white towels, shivering and crying from the shock and the cold. If there had been a longer road, I’d have made John English take it. I’d have stayed in that car forever, safe with hope. I knew the minute we pulled up there was no hope for my boy — no one seemed to be hurrying . I screamed at them all to get back into the sea, to hurry, hurry, he’ll be halfway to America, but they only looked sadly at me and then out at the rolling blue and shook their heads. He was never got for a finish. The greedy Atlantic ate him and kept his little bones.

I charged like a madwoman off up along the coast road towards Quilty for miles and miles that day, looking out at the ocean, as if I might spot him, treading water and waving his little hand, waiting to be rescued. There was a second search party raised to find me . I came to a little church with a lovely name: Star of the Sea. I went in and knelt down and blessed myself and bowed my head and anyone looking on would have thought I was praying to God for my lost son. I wasn’t, I was cursing Him. You bastard, I was saying, you bastard, just because your son was killed, have we all to suffer forever? Have you not had enough revenge? And your boy only stayed dead three days. Will my boy be back on Sunday, the way yours was? I never went to Mass again. I stayed away from God and Clare for twenty years. Now I’m thinking of going to live in Clare, and not that far from where Peter was lost, in a new hotel as a live-in housekeeper. I’d be head of housekeeping, actually, if you don’t mind.

My husband blamed me for Peter’s death. It was my brother took him off fishing. It was I left him off that day with his little shorts on him, slathered with sun-cream, with his rod and his bag of sandwiches and sweets, hardly able to talk with the excitement of being allowed go fishing in the sea with his uncle and his brothers. If he’d been there, Michael said, he’d have warned him of the dangers, he’d have had my brother well told not to take his eyes off him for a second, he’d have done the world of things I didn’t do. The list of things he’d have done got longer and bigger over the years until we couldn’t see each other at either side of it, and he left and never came back and the only difference was the noise of him was gone. There was no more and no less pain. We pass each other every now and again; we only barely nod. The children don’t tell me what they talk about with him. I don’t care. He’s gone very old-looking lately.

I haven’t a penny left. Michael sent money every single week until the last one left home, and then the envelopes stopped. I worked for years and years below in Thurles in the Town End Hotel. I was let go last year and they gave my job to a skinny little young wan. I went in and said it to Mary Wills, the personnel manager. Oh, that wasn’t your job we gave that girl, Bridie, you were never a manager you see, she’s been taken on as an accommodation manager . It would have been against the law to make me redundant and then to give someone else my job, so they made up a new name for my job and gave it to that little strap. Next thing didn’t I see an ad in the paper for interviews for jobs in a new hotel that was opening. Anyone could go, all you had to do was go in as far as Nenagh to the Abbey Court and wait your turn to talk to some little madam in a short skirt who thought she knew it all. Your CV isn’t very varied Bridie, she smirked at me. I haven’t had a very varied life, I told her. I never missed a day of work though, or looked for a rise, or left a speck of dirt in a room. I didn’t even want their poxy job, but I have it got now, and the offer of living in and having all my meals there. You could get a lot worse offered to you in this day and age. In the current climate as the fella says.

I told my second-youngest fella I was thinking of selling the house. You should have seen the way his face fell. He’s shacked up inside in town with a doctor’s daughter, if you don’t mind. She’s studying for her Master’s inside in the university. He’s studying his options, thank you very much. I’d give him two options: a kick in the hole or a kick in the hole. He’s too used to being able to swagger in here, dragging in all sorts of muck and germs, with a puss on him like a slapped arse every time he fights with that wan. She was here one time. He’s so sensitive , Missus Connors. He is, I said, he’s a delicate little flower all right. She smoked fags into my face and looked down her nose at my house, and got the world of ash on my lovely clean carpet even though I actually put an ashtray on her lap . She hadn’t a pick on her. She doesn’t eat meat. Neither does Billy, now. He says it isn’t natural for humans to eat the flesh of other animals. It’s an evolutionary aberration , he says. I’ll give him an aberration into the mouth one of these days. If you saw the way he used to eat my roast beef — he hardly used to use a fork.

Isn’t it a fright the way I get risen like that, so easily? And the poor boy still only feeling his way around the world. Sure, he hasn’t a clue how clueless he is. God help us, he’s still a child. I’m the same way with all of them: I can take the faces off of them with only the very slightest provocation. I changed when the sea took my Peter. I was never short-tempered or judgmental before it happened. I always encouraged people and forgave easily and laughed troubles away. But for years and years after it happened I used to hear them in the next room, my children, huddled together, whispering nervously, the odd stifled giggle breaking the gloom, while I stomped around the house, shouting about nothing, about everything, about dust and dirt and dishes and attitudes and how none of them ever did a hand’s turn to help in the house and how it was a fright to God to say I had a big family and still and all I was left alone in the world. Then one day there was no more huddles in the front room and no more nervous whispering; they were all gone, as fast as their legs could carry them. They’d sooner pay sky-high rents inside in the city for little boxes of mouldy apartments than have me every day stripping the good out of their lives, ruining their fun, blocking their sun.

I couldn’t ever get over it. I was never able to get around it. I never forgave my brother or my sons that were there that day or God or the sea or the wind. I never forgave myself. I could never get the light to go back on in my mind. I never found peace. I told John Cotter to go way and fuck off for himself one time. There aren’t too many have actually said that to a priest in spite of all the auld bile you hear people spouting these days. He got an awful shock: he’d been sitting there, in my house, talking gently the way he does, with those lovely words that most people would let rub gently against their wounded hearts, but I could only feel the anger building and building inside me until I knocked my tea off of the arm of my chair on purpose, I slapped it clean across the good room, and he jumped and looked at me and he must have seen the devil looking back at him because his face dropped and he hopped up from his chair and I told him where to go and where to shove his Scriptures and Michael rushed into the room and started apologizing and sure I blew the lid completely then and screamed and roared that no fucker had apologized to me , and I screamed on and on and on and there was no quieting me.