Donal Ryan - The Spinning Heart

WHEN I got older and started to do serious damage, I was always as careful as could be when it came to rubber johnnies. I always, always wore one, if not two. That Réaltín made an awful ape out of me. She told me she had an allergy to latex. She said she was on the pill. She scratched the back off of me. She went all night. She nearly killed me. I loved her. The first day I saw her, we were pulling a drain job inside in town, and she came out of an office across the way with her friend, that Hillary. She was shiny, dazzling, full of that scary confidence that some of them townie women have. Your wan Hillary looked like a browny-grey blob beside her. I was standing inside in a hole, gawking over at her like a redneck rapist when she actually pointed over at me. Then she turned to her friend and laughed, and the friend looked at me and smiled and looked away and I kind of knew then how girls must feel when we ogle them and pass remarks at them and laugh and whistle as they walk past us. She was in the Lobster Pot that night, talking to a right-looking wanker in a pair of slacks. I was full of bravery after a feed of pints and accidentally on purpose dropped a curried chip on his nice clean pants with the creases on them. Oh for Gawd’s sake, he said, in his posh accent. What? I said. Are you throwing shapes there, boy? No, the poor prick said, and ran off like a little bitch. I took her back to the digs Pokey had sorted out for us and by the next morning, I was in love.

I got her up the duff and all, not long into the whole miserable thing. I think she wanted me to, like, she done it on purpose. She asked me a rake of questions about my family’s medical history the night before the night she made me go bareback. Then she seemed to kind of get sick of me. She asked me to know if she moved out from town would I look after them and I said of course I will, and she bought one of Pokey’s houses and all and I was kind of happy for a while, calling to see the small boy, but she seemed to get sick of looking at me or something and she started sniping and picking away at me and for a finish she fucked me off altogether and next thing I found out Bobby was tapping her, the two-faced prick. Bobby denied everything; he said he only went up to the estate to see was there any C2 boys above finishing off because we heard a rumour the NAMA crowd were after giving Pokey’s da a rake of money back to do the rest of the houses and all, and she was there, and he hadn’t a clue who she was and she asked him to know would he do a few jobs for her and it was only after about the third time he went over there that he realized who she was, and sure by then the whole village had it that he was riding her and I could believe what I wanted. And what could I say to that?

Bobby was the only one of us used to always go home after work, in fairness. He’d never stayed in the digs. He was pure solid wrapped in Triona, always. He’d never met Réaltín. I’d never said too much about her moving out here or anything. I don’t know why I didn’t. Maybe I didn’t want to jinx it. My family was always into the whole mad Irish country thing of keeping secrets anyway. It’s nearly like a kind of embarrassment, not wanting to say anything about yourself for fear you’ll be judged or looked on as foolish.

I don’t know in the name of God which way is up now. Bobby is after doing away with his auld fella, and Réaltín won’t leave me inside the door, and her father, who’s a quare sound auld skin, says I’m as well off leave her be for a while. Fuck that, though. He’s my young fella too, like. I’m no good to him, though. What good am I?

I NEVER THOUGHT I’d ever be depressed, really. It’s quare easy fall into that hole. You can kind of lose yourself very quick, when all about you changes and things you thought you always would have turn out to be things you never really had, and things you were sure you’d have in the future turn out to be on the far side of a big, dark mountain that you have no hope of ever climbing over. I was never idle a day since I done the Leaving. I got just enough for the apprenticeship and done my time as a steel fixer and Pokey gave us all jobs when his da handed over the whole works to him. We done everything: roads and houses and formwork and plant and drainage and the whole lot. Pokey tendered for everything. He took on a rake of Polish subbies and screwed the poor pricks and we all thought it was a laugh. That whole subbie thing was a right con job. Then he screwed the rest of us and we laughed on the other side of our faces. I still went around laughing and messing and joking and all, though. I’d never let nobody see how I was panicking.

Everyone thinks I’m gas, that I don’t give a shit about anything. I never told anyone about the blackness I feel sometimes, weighing me down and making me think things I don’t want to think. It was always there, but I never knew what it was until every prick started talking about depression and mental health and all that shite. I’m not a mentaller, like. I’m not. I just can’t see for the blackness sometimes. It’s always there, waiting for a chance to wrap itself around me. I often wonder why I was born at all, why my mother had to suffer to give me life, why my father bothered his bollocks with me, working his arse off to pay for things for me, everything I wanted, just about. I think of the ma and the da and how good they always were, and how they always encouraged me, even though it was pure obvious I was the waster in the family, and how they were so let down when I got Réaltín up the duff and they not even having met her and how they met her then and thought her shit was ice-cream, and they were nearly proud of me for a while, and they even thought I might marry her, and how they’re solid heartbroken now over never seeing the child and all. It’s all gone to shit. That’s all my doing, how they’re upset like that. Sometimes I feel short of breath and my heart pounds and I feel a whooshing in my ears and I double over and put my head in my hands and a few times lately my hands have been wet with tears when I’ve taken them away from my face. No fucker knows that, though, nor never will. I’ll be grand in a while. I have no right to feel like this.

I think of the young fella, little Dylan, and how gorgeous he is, and how I always go about things the wrong way with Réaltín and accidentally look at her tits and she ends up pissed off with me and I always react like a right stones. I can’t hold myself together at all, I gets pure wicked with her and tells her to fuck off and I can’t tell her properly how I want things to be because I can’t really think under pressure, when she’s standing there, waiting for me to be a proper man. When I found out the other week that Bobby was above doing jobs for her I flipped the lid altogether; like, why couldn’t she have asked me to do them jobs? But by then Bobby was after flipping his own lid and lamping his auld fella with a plank of wood across the poll. Instead of being reasonable and asking her what was the story, I charged up like a bull and started roaring out of me like a jackass and I frightened the young lad and her auld fella had to get thick with me and I took off over as far as Castlelough and sat on the low wall in front of the grass before the little pebble beach and looked out at the dark lake and thought about the bottomless hole that’s meant to be out there in the middle of it.

A FEW years ago, a load of women from the same village up above in the back of beyond drove their cars to Castlelough and parked up and walked out into the lake. One at a time, over a few winter months. Them women all had husbands and children and all. I remember laughing about them women at the time, making stupid jokes about how all the boys up that side must be no use in bed and how I’d have cheered them up in no time and ha ha ha. Jesus. I laughed and I felt sick. I knew the feeling that drew them down from the mountain to the low, dark lake. There’s a tug from that water. There’s an end in it, under those little waves. Drowning is easy, I’d say. You only have to breathe in a lungful of water and you’re gone, floating away to nothing. How come I can’t be like everyone thinks I am? I’d love to really be Seanie Shaper. I’d love to not be here again, sitting looking at the water.