Donal Ryan - The Spinning Heart

One of the lads told me your man Bobby went down every single day to his home-house where his father still lived, away off down past the weir. I said I’d corner him on the road and ask him to know where was Pokey and what was happening with the sites and did he know anything about the finances. I thought I’d get it all out of him; he’s a fella like me, we were forever smirking over at each other during them meetings Pokey used to love having. We were on the same level, I thought. I knew the father’s house straight away; Andy said there was a couple of acres of briars and brambles alongside it and a slatted house with a hole in the roof. I drove the van a half a mile down the road and up a boreen and crossed back through fields to the stone wall across from the cottage. Andy told me your man Bobby often walked down for his visit. I said I’d wait and watch across for him. Then I thought about him knowing where Pokey was and protecting him to feather his own nest and I got vexed and impatient and went in along the yard. I had it in my mind to ask his father where was he, the way the auld fella would think there was people looking for him and he mightn’t be thinking he had a grand boy for a son whose shit didn’t stink. I wanted the father to know his son fraternized with rats. I wanted to frighten him. I wanted to frighten someone, anyone , so I wouldn’t be the only one feeling this way.

There was a red metal heart, spinning in the breeze in the centre of the low front gate. The hinge was loose but rusty, it squeaked and creaked but still allowed that little heart to spin. It reminded me of my palpitations. I drew a kick at it as I passed in. I pushed the front door; it was solid and heavy. I pushed again and it opened. He was expecting his son. I didn’t know until then that I had a length of timber in my hand, I swear on my life. He was standing inside in the dark kitchen, in that crooked-legged, bent-back way that some auld boys have of standing, like they don’t know whether to take a step forward or fall down on their arse. He looked at the timber and then up at me, and he laughed. His laugh reminded me of my own father, the time I came home with my eyebrow split and my collarbone broke after we lost to Roscrea in the under-sixteen championship. My father looked at me that day and my face streaked with blood and muck and tears and he laughed that same shrill laugh and he told me I was nothing but a useless cunt.

Are you going robbing me? Bobby Mahon’s father wanted to know. He was pure matter of fact about it. He asked the question the very same way you might ask a lad is he going making a mug of tea. You’re a fine boy, he said. And he laughed again. His laugh made my eardrums vibrate, the way a child’s cry would. Go on away, you prick, there’s fuck all to rob here. Unless you like cornflakes: I have rakes of them. Is that what you’re at? Robbing cornflakes off of old men? Then he smiled at me and his eyes shone and in a soft voice he said you’re nothing but a useless cunt, and I nearly fell backwards, back out the kitchen door. Did he really say it, or did I imagine it? You’re nothing but a useless cunt, he said. Or did he? I’ll never know now. He started laughing again, and my eardrums vibrated again, and my eyes went a kind of blurry. I took two or three steps forward and I saw him bracing himself and he spat sideways and looked straight into my eyes just before I lamped him as hard as I could into the fucking bald old poll.

GOD HELP ME, I thought I was killing my own father, just for them two or three seconds, just for that time that’ll be the rest of time for me, I swear to almighty God. I killed Bobby Mahon’s father, a man I’d never before in my life laid eyes on and I’m lying here ever since, curled up like an unborn child, with my murdering hands between my knees and my guilty heart pounding, pounding, pounding in my ears.

I OFTEN WATCH Dad feeding those chickens. He has pure fools made out of them. They go crazy when they see him coming; they know well he’ll have a fistful of caterpillars for them. They flap up and down and nearly fly over the wire. Dad stands with his back to the house, facing the chicken run, talking to them. I’d love to know what he says. I’ve often thought to try and sneak out along behind him and listen, but I know I’d only embarrass him. He’d turn around and catch me creeping along his carpet of grass and he’d jump and be embarrassed and I’d laugh like an idiot and he wouldn’t know what to say to me and I’d ask was he having a nice chat with the chickens and he’d just mumble something back at me and we’d have to walk back into the house together and every step would be a torment to him. If I stand at the kitchen window and just look out at him, I can imagine that if I went out to him that he’d be delighted to see me and he’d put his arm around me and we’d look at the chickens and he’d tell me about how Henrietta is a real old bossy-boots and how she bullies the rest of the fatsos around the place and how he spotted an old sneak of a fox the evening before, looking in over the stile behind the workshop. The way he talks to Eamonn and my niece and nephew.

A CHILD went missing a few days ago from a crèche inside in town. The little boy’s mother is living out here, in one of the houses in Pokey’s famous nearly empty estate. Mam says Dad is taking it awfully hard, as though he’s responsible by proxy for the girl living out here and having her child in a crèche inside in town because she has to work so hard to pay her huge big mortgage. And what about Bobby Mahon, killing his father! Well, he’s supposed to have, anyway. That girl whose child was taken from the crèche is a blow-in, Mam says. Blow-in . That phrase is used so derisively. As if to say it’s a failing to not have been born and bred here, to have settled in a place outside of the place of your birth. Mam doesn’t mean anything bad by it, though. It’s hard to shake your prejudices, I know. The guards are all over the place; it’s putting everyone on edge. Someone just pulled up outside that crèche and drove away with the little boy. There was a Montessori teacher with the children at the time, and four or five qualified childminders in a room next door. The Montessori teacher was taken in and questioned. He’s at least guilty of criminal negligence. It doesn’t seem natural for a young man to be a Montessori teacher. Jesus, imagine if Ger heard me saying that! Prejudice, how are you.

I OBSESS about the moment that I knew Dad was gone from me, where that delicate balance between love and shame tipped in favour of shame. I was working for a charity that sunk artesian wells in developing countries stricken by drought. We built the wells and instructed people in the construction process. I loved it. I still love it. I was home for a weekend and Mam had invited their best friends for dinner. I knew she wanted them to hear about my work; she was so proud of me. I’d graduated with a first and was working as an engineer and was helping people. And because I’d worked in Africa, it was almost as if I was on the missions . Mam never mentioned or seemed to notice the steady seeping away of my femininity. She always seemed interested in what I was saying. She smiled at me and nodded in agreement while I galloped around the kitchen on my hobby horses: Palestine, global warming, oil-motivated wars, child soldiers. She seemed to really like Ger; I presumed she knew; I was impressed by her forbearance, her acceptance. I kind of thought Dad was the same, just less obviously so.

Then, at the infamous dinner that weekend nearly three years ago, while I talked about the potential for wiping out cancer using viruses that can be modified to locate and destroy cancer cells, Dad started to tut-tut and roll his eyes up to heaven. I thought he was tutting about the pharmaceutical giants that I was blaming for curtailing research into virus-cures. I was mostly quoting Ger. Thank God she wasn’t there. Man has such huge potential, I was saying. Man holds the key to the wiping out of disease, in his enquiring mind and insatiable appetite for knowledge, man has …