The Spinning Heart (15 page)

God knows where this child is too, and I wish God would tell me. I wish I could sleep and dream of where he is and wake and go and lead him by his little hand back into his mother’s arms.

I’ve been on the search party every day. The forensics lads put us into a line and tell us to link arms and take slow steps, looking down, looking left and right. Each person has his own arc, but they should overlap. We’ve covered every bit of ground in twenty square miles. But he was taken in a car. He could be anywhere. Now I’m told stay put in the village, the village needs an operational hub. A pure public relations stunt is all that is. Young Sean Shanahan is little Dylan’s father. It was the end of the first day before anyone knew that. Everyone thought that girl was a blow-in, no one knew she had such a solid link to the place. Not that it’d make any odds or anything. Young Shanahan is tearing around the place like a madman. He roared in the window of the squad car at Philly that we were only a pack of wasters. Philly said the tears had tracks made down his face the very same as scars made by a knife. The child’s mother was with him, pulling him back by the arm and telling him calm down. She’s a tough yoke, that lady. Réaltín, her name is. That’s a lovely name. I’d have given my daughter a name like that if we’d had one, if the universe hadn’t to have its symmetry. Her father is a grand man as well, he’s as pale as a ghost going around, but he’s been going non-stop since the first hour. He’s being pragmatic and realistic and hopeful, just the way you have to try and get people to be in
these situations. That’s what the Civil Defence boys say anyway. He was an accountant I think. He’s not losing it the way young Shanahan is. Young Shanahan now would want to catch a hold of himself.

It doesn’t seem right to even be in a bed these days, not to mind sleeping. Since midsummer things are gone pure haywire. I wouldn’t have said Bobby Mahon killed his father any more than the man in the moon. But he rang me that day and asked me in a soft, flat voice to come down to the house and when I got there he was standing in the kitchen, looking down at his father in a puddle of blood with a piece of timber in his hand that was wet with red. When I asked him was it he did it, he told me he didn’t know. He didn’t
know
, you know. He didn’t say another word, only sat inside in the interview room inside in Henry Street as pale as a ghost and as silent as the grave. And the whole place has it he was doing a line behind his wife’s back with the mother of the girl whose child is gone missing. I said to Mary it’s the very same as something you’d see happening in one of them programmes on the television. Mary says I’m raving through my arse saying young Mahon didn’t do away with his father. I can see her point of view. But I know in my heart and soul he didn’t do it. I wish I knew how I knew, and then I might be able to figure out what really happened. I wish Bobby would snap out of this waking coma he’s after falling into and start talking properly. Josie Burke put up his bail. Josie might get sense out of him.

YOUNG TIMMY HANRAHAN
walked in here not long after the mad roaring biddy. He looked at me out of his mouth for at least a half a minute while a tide of red rose in his face. He scratched himself a couple of times before he spoke. Finally, he said he
heard a lad saying awful quare things on a mobile phone the day before at the very back of the search-party meeting where he thought he couldn’t be heard and he was on about going to jail for twenty years and he asked the person on the other end to know had he been watching the fucking telly and did he realize how many was looking for clues about the child and what have you and isn’t that fierce funny auld talk, Timmy wanted to know.

Timmy described the boy he’d heard talking on the phone and I felt a kind of a burning in the pit of my stomach. There’s one twitchy-looking little fucker does be around every day, mooching around the edge of the tape and trying to talk to the forensics boys. He was in a few of the parties that went in around the forestry over around Pallas where a car was seen like the one described by the children that were looking out the window that day. I might be clutching at straws now, but I have another strong feeling, the very same as I have the feeling about Bobby Mahon not having killed his father. I have a feeling that that twitchy prick and the Montessori teacher are kind of, I don’t know even how to put it – the
same
, sort of, like they’re the same
type
of a fella, kind of brainy and a bit odd and
outside
of things, even when they’re in the middle of goings on. Who ever heard of a young lad doing that job, anyway? Your lady that owns the crèche says she had him checked out and all before he started, but there’s no record on the PULSE of any check being done. She’s a quare hawk, that one; you wouldn’t know what to make of her. She’s finished in the childminding business anyway, that’s for sure.

But that Montessori teacher is awful suspicious if you ask me. I can’t understand why the crowd inside in Henry Street aren’t making more of that. He says he let the young fella out the door two steps ahead of him and the car was waiting near the door and the lad climbed into the back seat and even as the car drove
off his only thought was that it was very rude of Dylan’s dad to just take him without saying anything, then in the next second he thought maybe it was a snatch by a father refused access, and in the third second he realized all hell was going to break loose and he was after fucking up rightly. And he can’t properly explain why it was only little Dylan going out the door to the play area at that second – why wasn’t there a swarm of kids going out the door together the way there always is at playtime? Why was Dylan so far ahead? I don’t
know
, I don’t
know
, it all happened so
fast
, Philly says he keeps saying, and putting his fat fingers over his face and snotting and crying like a child.

That boy of the Hanrahans isn’t half as thick as people make out. And better again, people don’t edit themselves around him, thinking him to be an out and out God-help-us. That’s how he picked up on that boy’s words. The likes of Timmy do be invisible. I’ll have to start putting these feelings into words properly soon. Philly will have a right laugh at me. Good man Jim, he’ll say, come on so and we’ll jump at the word of a halfwit and a feeling in your gut. He’ll tell me get back into my box the very same way he told me the time years ago when the rapid response lads were called out to that lad of the Cunliffes and he above in the farmhouse waving his shotgun at the neighbours. I’d have handled that the finest. He’d have done a few months wrapped up in a nice warm blanket above in Dundrum.

Them armed response lads blew that poor boy to Kingdom Come the very minute he set foot outside his front door. I’d have gotten that gun off of him no bother. That was nearly ten years ago and there was hardly a peep around here since. Madness must come around in ten-year cycles. That time, there was two shootings and a fatal car crash in the space of two months. Now we have another murder and a snatched child; well, a child
from
here snatched, and you can sense the potential for more. It’s in the air, in the way people are moving around each other with grim faces and shining eyes, either all frantic activity or standing in tight groups, talking quietly and looking at the ground. This must be how things were the time of the war against the British, when a crowd outside of Mass would suddenly explode into a flying column, guns appearing from under overcoats, killers appearing from inside of ordinary people. They were good killings, though – the Tans burned churches and creameries, interfered with women and shot little children. That was a time when killing was for good, for God and country. That time is long gone. But aren’t we still the same people?

Frank

THE FUTURE IS
a cold mistress. You can give all your life looking to her and trying to catch a hold of her but she’ll always dance away from your fingertips and laugh back at you from the distance. Them that says they know her are liars and thieves. What was ever wrote down on paper that came true, that could be checked? Not one thing since the Scriptures. That’s what I was thinking about, sitting over there beside the stove on my old green chair when I heard the door going and that fucking hairy ape burst in here and walloped me with a plank of wood, proving my point in fine style. I hadn’t time to know I was dying before I was dead. I went quare easy in the end, all the same. I thought I was in for a messy, drawn-out affair; I had visions of the county home and the Regional Hospital and oxygen masks and tubes sticking out of me and Paki doctors poking me with their bony, brown fingers. And Bobby sitting looking at me and not knowing whether to read me the newspaper or put a pillow over my face
and smother me. I should be thankful for that big lad that lamped me, I suppose. I fairly lit his soul on fire that day. I stung him like a dying wasp. I always had a knack for hitting people where it hurt. Sometimes it was as if the words were whispered into my ear by the devil himself.

There was plenty around here thought they knew the future, thought they had her number, took her fully for granted. I even knew, long before that gorilla arrived in and did for me, that no man could be assured of what the next day would hold. There’s no man on this earth can even be assured he’ll
have
a next day. I often thought to tell Bobby that, especially a few years ago when he was going around cock of the walk about the place, acting like he was God’s gift to the world on account of his being Pokey Burke’s number one lapdog. What a thing to be proud of. I watched him when he arrived in that day and found me dead and dirty in a puddle of blood and shit. You lose control of yourself at the moment of your death; that’s something I didn’t know. He stood looking down at me and I stood beside him looking down at myself and I said: Good man Bobby. You’re a good man, Bobby. You sees things more clearly too, through dead eyes. He flinched. I’d nearly swear he felt my dead breath on his face; he might have even heard my silent words. He picked up the plank of wood that the big lad had flung away from him. It was lying in the blood near my head. Then he rang that thick fucker Jim Gildea to come down and ballsed himself right up. That boy got his mother’s brains. He hasn’t a dust of sense.

I’M NEARLY SURE
I’ve been dead about a month. I haven’t got out past the front door yet. It’ll be a fair old while before I’m left leave this limbo, I’d say. They probably don’t know what to
do with me. I’m stuck here while they wonder about it, them that does the deciding about who gets sent where. They’d want to get the finger out now, in all fairness. I’d say I’m meant to be contemplating my life and feeling sorry for my wrongdoing. The Vatican done away with Purgatory, I’d say that’s why I’m being left here to haunt my own house. Ha! There’s too much going on around here to allow for much contemplation. That blondie lady of the Cassidys with the fine big chest waltzed in to poke at me. I often seen her on the telly, going in to shitholes to look at dead wasters with her pink lipstick. She’s a fine cut of a woman, so she is. I wish they could have tightened me up a bit before they left her in here. Then they carried me out in a pine coffin and I was nearly lonesome after myself. Bobby was back down after a few days looking like a kicked pup. They left him out on bail. The thick bollocks never told them he didn’t do me in, obviously. Christ, if you saw him, the cut of him, when Jim Gildea arrived in here belly-first, looking at me out of his mouth and the plank of timber in his hand and my blood dripping off of it onto the floor. Jim Gildea asked him straight out was he after killing me and he told him he didn’t know. I don’t
know
, he said. Imagine that! What a stupid prick.

I WONDER
am I meant to be having revelations. Or epiphanies. Or both. I wonder is this meant to be a punishment, to be confined to this cottage where I lived my whole life and where my father lived before me. I was full sure he’d still be knocking around here, you know, watching to make sure I wasn’t getting notions. Maybe he was sent below. Ha! I wouldn’t be surprised if he was, he’d have gave the devil himself a good run for his money on his best days. Most men would have built a big two-storey or
a nice dormer bungalow on the land and made the old place into a slatted house. Wasters. Why would a man leave a house with walls as thick as a fortress to be a toilet for cattle and go and live in a cardboard box? To impress women, that’s the only reason men ever did that. Imagine giving them cowboy builders thousands and thousands of pounds to scratch their arseholes for six months and make you a house out of bits of wood and blocks made of foreign stones! Bobby was talking out through his hole one time about building an extension onto the back. I told him the only extension that was needed around here was to the end of his mickey. Himself and that girl that married him were trying to have a child that time and his seed wasn’t taking. The devil’s whispers again.

I was never able to talk to that boy without upsetting him. His mother had a fool made out of him, kissing him and telling him he was beautiful every two minutes. I was forced to bring balance. I had to prepare him for the hard world. Where light shines a shadow is cast; that’s an elementary thing that every boy must be taught, especially boys that are mollycoddled by their mothers. He’d have gotten some hop if I’d left him off out thinking he was the boy his mother told him he was. She only ever had eyes for him from his first day on this earth. She forgot about me the very minute she squeezed him out of herself. He fell out with her for a finish, though. That shook her! She had an awful complex about herself, anyway. A
superiority
complex. She was full sure she was a few cuts above me, that lady. She looked down through her nose at me every day we were wed until the very day she died. I often asked her to know how was it she married me in the first place. She never answered me, only went off sulking in one of the back rooms for herself, or stood in front of me with her eyes like two pools of wet, blue sadness. I couldn’t ever stop at her.
The sadder she looked the faster the brutal sharp words flowed from me; some making tiny little nicks, more tearing deep into her. Her soul suffered death by a thousand million cuts. I knew I was doing it and I couldn’t stop. God help us, I could never stop at either of them.