Donal Ryan - The Spinning Heart

I have one memory of Frank that will always abide, though, when all the other memories are faded to a series of blurred impressions, the way memories of a book will fade, even one that gripped you so much that you couldn’t sleep until you finished it. It was the club awards ceremony the year the lads were robbed of the county championship. One of the old boys from Ciss Brien’s front bar had written a song of never-ending verses called ‘The Ballad of Bobby Mahon’. It was just a silly thing, really, a bit of craic to raise people’s spirits, the kind of thing that’s been done a thousand times for a thousand village heroes. He set the words to the tune of ‘The Wearing of the Green’. After Bobby had been given his shield for being the club’s player of the year and had mumbled his pride and apologies, apologies imagine, into the microphone on the little stage against the back wall of the Munster, the words he’d learned by rote drowned out by the cheers of the parish, the old boy and a few session players struck up the song. I could see that Bobby was mortified. He didn’t know where to look. But I knew by his smile and his eyes that he was happy, too, as if it was only in that moment that he’d realized how much people thought of him and how no one blamed him for losing the final, and how all these rowdy, clapping, laughing people knew he’d drawn and shed and sweated blood for them, more than anyone. And then he looked along the length of that packed room, over the heads of the half-drunk, bellowing crowd, and his face changed. In a way that only I could see. And when I turned and followed his gaze, I saw Frank, and he was just inside the door, wearing an expression of contempt; a twisted half-smile that plainly said: You fool. This is a room full of fools, and you’re chief among them. And I hated him in those seconds more than any other time. More even than when he’d looked into baby Robert’s crib and said not a word. I felt like jumping up from my seat and throwing myself on him and wringing his mangy old neck, scratching the blackness from his eyes. But afterwards, after thinking and thinking about it, I wondered: why was he there at all? What brought him in to stand just inside the door of the Munster Tavern and watch his son? And even though I was so raging with him for casting a shadow on Bobby’s moment, I started for the first time to think that there was more inside in Frank than just spite.

I tried to never do it, but I constantly compared Frank to my own father and felt an awful, hollow bitterness at Frank’s continued existence, festering in the dark inside of that cottage, tormenting Bobby daily still, after all the years lived and all the words said and not said. Some people, like Bobby, take on the troubles of others and others can’t see anything past their own. Isn’t there something to be said all the same for everyone just minding their own business? When my father got really sick all he worried about was me and my mother and whether I was able to keep up my work and study and whether I was worrying about him and no one was to worry about him and there was no fear of him and did Joe Brien drop up that load of blocks and make sure your mother knows to pay Joe from the money in the locked drawer on the left-hand side of the desk and the key is at the back corner of the drawer on the right-hand side and tell her not to use money from her purse and was she checking the slips every month to know was the ESB paying out his proper pension and was the health insurance still being paid automatically. He was a constant worrier, and never about himself. Thank God it was Bobby I fell for, and not someone who would have added to his worries. He was stone mad about Bobby. They could sit in a room together and watch a match and not even talk, except for a few bits of shouts and cheers and tuts and sighs here and there. They never felt the need to make idle conversation, to talk for talk’s sake. Bobby loved just sitting in the same room as him. I think they were an ease to each other.

My father told me once, not long before he died, that he couldn’t keep the passing days straight in his mind. That was the first time I was really frightened for him, that I got a sense of what was coming. Bobby and I weren’t married long. He’d been to see a new GP in the village and she’d told him to do all the things he enjoyed doing, to not think about what food was good for his health and what wasn’t, to have a drink if he felt like it. She was being kind, and she smiled at him and touched his hand gently, but her words frightened the life out of him, more than any of the talk from the doctors inside in the Regional Hospital about the size of tumours and their rapid growth and the pressure they exerted on organs and their explanations of how the machine worked that he lay down inside in, with his eyes closed tight and his fists clenched as if to fight against the fear he had of being in that hollow tube, nearly naked and fully alone, closed in on all sides.

My goose is cooked, he said, on the way home from the village, as he looked out the passenger side window at the Arra Mountains in whose vale he’d lived his whole life. Ah boys. And he laughed gently. And that was as much as he ever said of his fear or his sadness. I was afraid to open my mouth to speak. I should have said no Dad, there’s loads of fight left in you yet, you have years and years, come on, please, don’t just give up. But those words would have been for me and not him. For all my talk, I had nothing to say.

Frank shook my hand at Daddy’s funeral and looked straight into my eyes and said he was very sorry for my trouble. And he kind of smiled at me. I couldn’t even say thanks to him. God forgive me, all I could think was: why couldn’t you have died instead, Frank?

BOBBY WAS never able to see how he affected people. People always saw what they wanted to see in Bobby. He could never see the way people reacted to him. The adoration of the young lads, the respect of the builders, the misty-eyed devotion of the old codgers who roared themselves raw from the sidelines while he led a team of committed losers to the gates of glory. But still and all, songs and pints and backslapping nights of praise and speeches aside, some people will hate you for your goodness. They’ll revel in your undoing. They’ll rejoice at the news of your downfall. It felt to me as though that was the way everyone was this summer. I couldn’t see the good in anyone. I stood one day in the post office queue and Robert was wriggling and whining and I hadn’t showered and my roots were in shit and the story about Bobby having the affair was flapping around like a crow with a broken wing and I saw one of the Teapot Taliban staring at me with rapture on her face.

People say things like we shouldn’t complain lads, look at that poor girl whose child was stole. People say things like shouldn’t we be counting our blessing lads that we at least have our health? People say things like look at that poor girl of the Mahons, Bobby’s wife, and he after doing the dirty on her and killing his father and she still with him. Bobby Mahon done the dirt. He killed his father. The girl he done the dirt with is after having her child snatched. How many of them really cared about the little boy? He was only young Seanie Shanahan’s bastard. That lady is only a blow-in from town, a right-looking little rap. Everyone talked about him and looked all sad and serious in Mass when he was prayed for and joined in the search and made sandwiches and shook their heads mournfully and asked how in God’s name that girl was coping, but deep, deep down some of them were more worried about their pensions and medical cards and wages and profits and welfare payments and what they haven’t that their neighbours have and who’s claiming what and how many foreigners were allowed in to the country and the bottom line is the bottom line as far as I can see; if we were all in the black we’d all be in the pink. The air is thick with platitudes around here. We’ll all pull together. We’re a tight-knit community. We’ll all support each other. Oh really? Will we?