Donal Ryan - The Spinning Heart

I think sometimes it’s an affectation, all the angst and introspection and random lovesickness, but then I see her sometimes, when she thinks no one’s looking, and she just looks so sad. But she does draw sadness on herself, in fairness. I mean she’s all of a sudden madly in love with this new builder fella. I think Réaltín actually thinks he’s going to leave his wife and marry her or something. As far as I can make out he’s not even made a ghost of a move on her, but she seems convinced he’s besotted with her or something and it’s only a matter of time before he drops his hammer and asks if she wants to see his other tool. She went off and bought about forty new outfits to wear for when he calls to her. And she’s meant to be broke. She makes up reasons to get him to call. He charges her as well — nothing near what the cowboys in the city charge — but she couldn’t have money to be throwing around on trying to seduce married builders. She got a hammer of her own (she probably stole it from his toolbox, in fairness) and banged a load of plaster off her bedroom wall and got him to fix it; she broke a cupboard door in her kitchen and let on Dylan did it; she broke tiles on the en-suite bathroom floor and got him to take them all up and do the whole thing again. And then while he’s there she acts like she’s a fucking little tramp, which she is, at times. She flits around him in skin-tight jeans or little minis, trying to make him make a move. And he hasn’t, nowhere near, and probably never will now, because, you won’t believe this: he’s only after killing his own father .

First of all, she rang me about two weeks ago, crying her head off because old hatchet-faced Bridget, that married Réaltín’s daddy (her and Réaltín are a lot more alike than Réaltín would want to hear; they’d both do anything to get their man), heard at some mad forty-five drive or bridge festival or somewhere that they were all talking about Réaltín in that crazy village where she insisted on buying that house, saying that her and this Bobby the Builder fella were having a proper affair, and he was moving in with her, and his wife was distraught and yadda, yadda, yadda. Réaltín’s poor daddy got really upset; like, he must have known about the flirting, because he’s always out there, making sure she doesn’t get raped and pillaged by the mad villagers, cutting grass and trying to avoid Bridget the Midget probably, but he would have only rolled his eyes up to heaven and taken Dylan for a walk and left her at it, but those kinds of rumours going around would really make him feel terrible. He’s lovely. He’s really good-looking, too. He’s one of those men who get even more handsome as they get older, like Colin Firth or George Clooney. I had a little bit of a flirt with him, and I mean a demure, innocent flirt, at Réaltín’s twenty-first and she went mental. She called me a bitch and cried and everything. What a fucking hypocrite! She nearly raped my father at my granny’s funeral. His mother , like.

Anyway, as if that wasn’t bad enough, that the whole crazy village thinks she’s a brazen, home-wrecking hussy, now your man is after killing his own father. And you know there’s a kind of inevitability about Réaltín being stuck smack bang in the middle of any drama in her vicinity. His own father, though, can you imagine it? He’s been in Réaltín’s house, at the top end of that spooky, empty, three-quarters built estate, and she’s been bending over in front of him, wagging her little arse in his face, and all that time there was a murderer hiding inside in him. He just stove in the poor man’s head, I heard. Sure, if he was capable of that he would have been capable of driving off with Réaltín and little gorgeous Dylan in his boot, tied up and suffocated to death. Oh Christ, it doesn’t bear thinking about.

Some mad-looking cop, like your man out of Killinaskully , came up with a detective from town, asking her a load of questions. The Bobby fella had been up in her house only that morning, imagine. They wanted to know what her relationship was with him, what they talked about when he was in her house, what his behaviour was like. They frightened the life out of poor little Dylan, who thought his mummy was being taken to jail, and they even suggested she leave him with her father and go to the garda station to talk about it. Fuckers. Luckily Réaltín was well aware of her rights, on account of George being the scumbags’ solicitor of choice. Or he was, until the legal aid rates went down and George stopped being so available.

Oh lads, it’s great craic now. Réaltín is acting like she’s some kind of a victim of a miscarriage of justice. She’s crying over your man non-stop, like. I had to remind her that she isn’t his wife, she isn’t his mistress, she isn’t his friend — your relationship to him, I told her, is as follows: You are a fucking crazy single mother living in a freaky ghost estate who breaks things in her house and makes him fix them. That is not a relationship on the basis of which you have a right to be weeping at the foot of the gallows. He’s not Braveheart, I told her, and you’re not Braveheart’s girlfriend. Sometimes you have to be firm with Réaltín. You have to tell her the truth. She gets lost in the mists of imaginary romance.

And there’s more. As well as all of the above, it turns out your man Bobby the Murdering Builder knows Seanie well. Seanie is from that crazy village. She fucking knew that when she bought that house, but she never told me. It’s mad, the things Réaltín keeps secret. Like, she’d tell me all about the colour of her poo, but she won’t tell me something like that. And I’m serious about the poo. She went around the office one day in an unbelievable flap, convinced she had colon cancer or bowel cancer or something because her poo had turned green. It was the tannins from the bucket of red wine she’d glugged in my house the night before. But there was no telling her. Drama. Anything for drama.

She’s a weirdo at times. Imagine how her poor daddy feels now, having left her on her own in that house with a murderer! I wonder why he went and killed his father, anyway. A lot of those culchies are mad, though. They’re so repressed , like. They all spend their whole lives going to Mass and playing GAA and eating farm animals and cabbage and not saying how they’re feeling until it’s too late and then BANG! They kill someone. Or themselves. They’re just as mad as the city lunatics, except the city lunatics are honest about their scumbaggery. But anyway, Seanie the prickface is calling up now, roaring and shouting that she was riding his friend and crying like a baby and wanting to come in and staring down her top and licking his lips and sometimes, groping himself absent-mindedly. I only met him a few times, but I spotted that habit he had — it was disgusting — of talking to your tits and actually licking his lips at the same time. He’s okay-looking, I suppose, in a rough sort of way, and he has a great body (that’s how she met him, he was standing in a hole across the street from the office with no top on, just a skimpy luminous jacket thing over his jeans and a white helmet and Réaltín started acting like we were in a fucking Diet Coke ad or something), but he’s an animal, really. Like, he’s not civilized. He’s not even evolved .

It’s just like Réaltín to make everything about her, though. Someone gets murdered, and it’s all about Réaltín. How she feels, how she is being victimized, how she can’t go to the shop without people gawking at her with their big country mouths hanging open. That’s Réaltín. She always asks how I am by rote; she never actually wants to know. If I started saying something like God, I’m exhausted actually, Mam is still really sick and I had to go home and make Dad’s dinner, or God, I’m really pissed off actually, Darren never rang me since our row … her eyes would literally glaze over and she’d just say oh, aaaww, and tut-tut noncommittally a few times in mock sympathy, and get more and more impatient for the moment when she could start talking about herself. I mean, we’re best friends since our first day in the School of Commerce, but it really feels sometimes as though I’m just a receptacle for Réaltín’s thoughts and worries and complaints. I do love her, I really do, she has such a great heart, and she’d do anything for you, but she does think the whole universe revolves around her. Poor little Dylan, he’s an absolute dote, but I wonder if she even knows he’s there. Has she room enough in her head for a whole other human being, who’s dependent on her? Sometimes I doubt it.