Donal Ryan - The Spinning Heart

THEY SAY violence begets violence, but that’s not always true. I had no stomach for violence my whole life. I had to bluff my way out of a few tight spots. I often thought to take a stick to Bobby when he was losing the run of himself, but I wasn’t able to tighten my fingers around any weapon I ever put my hand on to beat him with. That’s an awful affliction for a man to have. Not even drink could lift that paralysis from me. I only ever done violence to things . I could only ever wound a person with my words. I practised for years and years until it was as natural to me as breathing. When I used to drink I used to have imaginings of killing men with my bare hands, fantasies of strength I knew I didn’t have. I used to swallow whiskey like a dry, weary man slugging flat lemonade in a summer hayfield and I’d picture myself with my two hands around my father’s throat, watching his face turning purple while his soul was squeezed out of him through his ear holes. Then I’d go pure solid mad and wreck all before me: chairs, tables, doors, windows. I’d leave holes in plaster running with my own blood. Imagine the waste of it, thinking about killing a dead man. I wonder will I see him again. I wonder does he know already there’s only two acres left of his stinking, precious land, wild with briars and brambles, or will I have the pleasure of telling him how a share of the worth of his life’s labour was gave in over the counter to every fat publican in five parishes. I wonder how is it I was able to do to Bobby exactly what was done to me, even with my useless hands bound by cowardice. I wonder how will I ever be reconciled to myself. I wonder how will I look upon the face of God.

MY AUNTIE BERNADETTE liked things to be unadorned and liturgically correct. Like the rough cross she had my cousin Coley carve from a limestone block. Coley wanted to smooth it and add Celtic rings and swirls to its front. He spent a whole day with his bony arse in the air as he chipped and hacked and sanded, an acute angle of unnatural adolescent concentration. Bernadette put a halt to his artisan’s gallop with a savage flourish: she smacked him into the side of his head, sending his chisel flying from his hand and his sinful pride flying from his heart. It’s fine as it is, she said. Leave it over at the top of the path by the front door, let you, so that all who enter here know we are followers of Christ. Fucking old c-cunt, spat Coley when she’d returned to baking her unleavened bread. I suddenly saw the beauty in him, as the darkness of anger and frustration threw his angular jaw and blazing eyes into sharper relief. I’ve always needed to be shocked into awareness.

Bobby was the first person ever to remind me of Coley. Like Coley, he’d never have said the things the other lads around here would say. He stood with but was never a part of the herd of donkeys. Hee-haw, hee-haw, look at the knockers on your wan! Hee-haw, hee-haw, Jaysus lads I’m red from riding! Hee-haw, hee-haw, fuck it lads, I’d bate it into her! Bobby was silent, tall, red-faced in summer and ghost-white in winter. I always knew him, years and years before he first spoke to me, standing on the sticky floor in front of the bar of the Cave inside in town. His nervousness shocked me; I’d always thought he’d thought he was too cool to talk to us. Then I was suddenly aware of all the other things behind his eyes: fear, doubt, shyness, sadness. I was wrapped in him from that minute. I’d never look at another man again. Mobiles were still fairly new in those days. Pokey Burke must have been one of the first to get dumped by text.

Bernadette would fry pieces of chicken in their own juice and serve them with boiled green beans and unleavened bread. When my parents dropped me over there to be minded I ate the Communion of the Faithful at every meal. Bernadette never went to Mass; she was a fundamentalist Christian. Mother often said she only used religion as a framework for her craziness. She could just as easily have been a Muslim or a Buddhist or a white witch. She hung around with some group of Bible-bashers inside in town. They met in a leaking, groaning flat and read all the best bits from Genesis to Revelations, slowing down to a near stop at Leviticus. Bernadette used The Word to torture Coley, just as Frank used his own spiteful words to torment Bobby. Coley didn’t survive Bernadette’s terrible reign over his childhood. At a tender, gangly fourteen he hung himself from the branch of an elder in their back garden that looked hardly stout enough to hold his weight. Bobby only barely survived Frank. Every time I met Frank I got the ghostly smell of unleavened bread baking; I could almost taste its thin dryness in my mouth. There was a spinning heart on the gate at the front of their house, a mocking symbol, Bobby’s rough cross.

I WOULDN’T CARE if Bobby never again brought a cent into this house. Earlier in the summer, when the whole village had it that he was going with that girl from Pokey’s ghost estate, I couldn’t have cared less; I knew he wouldn’t betray me in a million years. When he wouldn’t talk to me after they left him out on bail, though, I could have killed him. I screamed at him, into his face, over and over again to just talk , please, please just talk to me. I don’t even care if he did kill Frank. I wouldn’t love him any less. I’d perjure myself for him without breaking a sweat. I’d swear on a Bible and lie through my teeth in a heartbeat. Why wouldn’t I? I’d use the same Good Book that Bernadette used to bruise poor Coley’s soul.

Bobby hated his father and never got over his mother and thought of himself as a failure for not protecting her properly from his father’s cruel tongue. His putdowns put her in the ground. It took me three years to get that much from him. I asked Bobby early on why he’d fallen out with his mother. He said they stopped talking, not to be drawing his father on them, and they just got stuck in that auld way. Stuck in that auld way? Well that makes no sense, I said. He just said I know it doesn’t, I know it doesn’t. Bobby whispers when what he’s saying upsets him. Then he stops. I learned quickly. I never pressed him to say anything until after the Frank thing. All of our years together, I never pushed, I just let him feel that I knew his pain was there and that I’d help him with it and there was no rush, no need to tell me anything until he wanted to. He had the words; I knew that. Bobby always read a lot.

Every now and again, and with no trigger that I could ever figure out, Bobby would start to tell me things. A few times I was just asleep when he started talking, in that kind of dozing where you’re not fully unconscious but still able to dream, maybe even with your book still in your hand. Bobby’s soft voice, as gentle as it is, would be shocking in its suddenness in the silent room, and I’d try not to move so as not to put him off. Even a start of alarm, or sitting up too quickly, or putting my hand out to him, or trying to encourage him would snap him out of whatever spoken daydream had overtaken him to allow him to speak to me about the things I wanted him to so badly. Thinking about it now, the dead stillness I’d assume, the way I’d almost hold my breath while he spoke, it was the very same as when I’d be trying not to startle a wild animal that had wandered into the garden. That’s the only way I could help him with his pain, imagine. To lie there in silence, not moving a muscle.

It’s not like he even said anything that would sound to someone from outside as being all that terrible. I mean to say, Frank never laid a finger on him or his mother. It was just the life of awful, awful coldness, and the constant wearing down of their spirits, a gloomy, nervy slog of a life, punctuated by days and nights of mad rage when he’d wreck the house and Bobby’s mother would grab him and run for it, just in case he forgot himself altogether and took at them as well as the furniture and the crockery. But it was always all too far down in Bobby for it not to cut and wound on the way out. I sometimes believe on those nights that he spoke about things that he was forcing himself to do it just for my benefit, that he was suffering the reliving of that keen-edged sadness and regret because he thought I wanted him to say it out, because of some notions he thought I had of the healing and redemptive power of talking things out. But all I could really do was lie there and listen and think: this is Bobby, this is my husband.