Donal Ryan - The Spinning Heart

He drank out the farm to spite his father. It was the one thing Granddad said he knew my father wouldn’t do, so my father did it. At least I can trust him not to drink out the farm, Granddad would say. It was the at least that galled my father, I’d say. It meant nothing and everything: Granddad was saying he was good for nothing, every badness was possible with him, but he didn’t drink and never had, so at least there was that one thing, one thing only that could nearly be seen as a good thing. My father called his dead bluff. I walked him home from his last session. I haven’t a bob left now, he said, and if we went over this minute to my father’s grave and dug him up, he’d be face down inside in the coffin. And he laughed and coughed and laughed and pissed down the leg of his pants and laughed and fell in the cottage door and woke up sober the next day and was never drunk again a day in his life.

I can forgive him for turning piles of money into piss and for leaving my mother to her holy hell, too mortified to sit up past the back row in Mass; walking quickly, head down through the village, sneaking about her business for fear of being forced to talk to anyone; sitting crying tears of frustration out beyond Coolcappa in a crock of a car with a burnt clutch and a steaming engine and a screaming child in the back of it while he sat silently swallowing her claim to a life. I’ll never forgive him for the sulking, though, and the killing sting of his tongue. He ruined every day of our lives with it. Drunk, he was leering and silent and mostly asleep. Sober, he was a watcher, a horror of a man who missed nothing and commented on everything. Nothing was ever done right or cooked right or said right or bought right or handed to him properly or ironed straight or finished off fully with him. We couldn’t breathe right in a room with him. We couldn’t talk freely or easily. We were mad about each other, my mother and me, but he made us afraid to look at each other for fear he’d want to know were we conspiring against him again. We stopped looking at each other for good for a finish and stopped talking to each other a few years later and the day we buried her I wanted to jump into the ground and drag her back out and scream at her to come back, come back, we’ll walk to the shop and I’ll hold your hand and we won’t mind Daddy and I’ll pick a bunch of flowers and leave them on your locker for you and if he calls me a pansy we’ll tell him to feck off and we’ll give back all these years of ageing and dying and stupid, stupid silence and be Mammy and Bobby again, two great auld pals.

I ALWAYS KNEW Pokey Burke was a bit afraid of me. Triona says I exuded menace when she met me first. She has a lovely way of putting things. There was no one stopping her doing honours English. She says I stood against the bar inside in the disco in town and stared at her. Her friend said what the fuck is that freak looking at, but Triona knew the friend was only raging I wasn’t staring at her. Oh, don’t look back, for Christ’s sake, the friend said, he’s from an awful family, they live in a hovel, the father is a weirdo and the mother never speaks — but Triona looked back all the same and when I scowled at her she knew I was trying to smile, and when I hardly spoke to her on the way home she knew deep down that I was terrified of the lightness and loveliness of her, and when she said are we going to shift so or what, I thought I’d never again regain the power of movement.

Pokey Burke had been mad after her; she’d shifted him weeks before, and he’d been rough, biting her lip and clawing at her bra, and I’d never forgive him for having touched her. Even when he told me I was foreman, and was handing me an envelope every week with twenty fifties in it, he was afraid of me, and I was afraid I’d kill him. But still and all he needed me, and I sneered at him, and we all called him a prick, but now he’s beyond, sunning himself in God only knows where, hiding from the bank and the taxman and probably trying to ride foreign wans. And here am I, like an orphaned child, bereft, filling up with fear like a boat filling with water.

HAVING A WIFE is great. You can say things to your wife that you never knew you thought. It just comes out of you when the person you’re talking to is like a part of yourself. We went to a play inside in town one time; I can’t remember the name of it. You couldn’t do that without a wife. Imagine it being found out, that you went to see a play, on your own! With a woman, you have an excuse for every kind of soft thing. The play was about a man and wife; they just sat on the stage on either side of a table, facing the audience, talking about each other. Your man was like my father, only not as bad. The wife was lovely; she was dog-tired of your man’s auld selfish ways, but she persevered with him all the same. He sat there, drinking a glass of whiskey that was really red lemonade and smoking fag after fag, grinning back to his two ears as she read him to the audience. He had an auld smart reply for every criticism. They aged onstage, as they were talking. I don’t know how it was done. For a finish, they were both old and their lives were near spent, and at the very last, your man turned around and admitted he thought the world of her; he’d always loved her. He put his hand on her cheek and looked at her and cried. Christ, your man was some actor. On the way home in the car, tears spilled down my face. Triona just said oh love, oh love.

I LOVE MY first son more than my second son. I often wonder should I go to confession and purge that from my soul. But is it even a sin, to love one child more than another? It’s wrong, all right; I know that. I gave my second boy everything, to try to make up for it: my business, years of my time showing him what to do, enough working capital to allow for all sorts of balls-ups. Poor Eamonn only barely got the money to pay for his digs above in Dublin when he went to Trinity. There’s neither of them thick enough to not know where they stood, though. I was always stone cracked about Eamonn. I couldn’t understand how I never felt the same about poor Pokey. I even let Eamonn take his name from him. Pokey , he said, and pointed a fat little finger at the new baby, and we all laughed and told him he was great, and Seán Pól was lost forever. He never got a look in, the poor little darling boy.

I should have come down from the top step when Bobby Mahon came here the other day asking to know where was Pokey and what was going to be done about stamps and redundancy and what have you. I should have taken his hand and shook it and told him how sorry I was it was all gone wallop besides snapping at him; I should have apologized to that man on my son’s behalf. I snapped like that out of crossness with myself. I was too ashamed to look the man in the eye; Bobby Mahon, who never missed a day, who I was always so glad was foreman after Pokey took over — I thanked God there was a man there to keep Pokey from getting too big for his boots. Pokey was more than half-afraid of Bobby Mahon. He wished he was Bobby Mahon, I think. I have a feeling that he asked himself what Bobby would think of every decision he was making before he made it. It’s only a shame he told no one he was mortgaging everything on the building of one last massive estate of houses that no one was going to buy and a share in some monstrosity beyond in Dubai. I should have shook Bobby Mahon’s hand and thanked him, and apologized, besides leaving him walk off with his face red with anger and disappointment.

I think of Pokey and I feel disgust, with him and with myself. Wasn’t it I reared him? Or maybe that’s what went wrong; I left most of the rearing to Eileen. And isn’t it a sacred duty, to rear your children? I got that all turned around in my head, of course. I confused providing for them with rearing them. I got a fixation on work and having enough money that waxed and waned for my whole adult life, but was always there. I never even really went into a shop and bought anything. Eileen buys my pantses and shirts and shoes and socks and underwear. I give out stink to her if I open the hot press and there’s none at hand. I used to read her from a height at Christmas over the expensive presents. Lord God I’d take that back if I could. I’d give every single penny I ever had and more to go back to certain days and hours and change things just a little bit. I’d catch Pokey in time. I’d catch myself.