The Spinning Heart (7 page)

I SAW
Bobby Mahon this morning, over beyond at the Height. I was up with the da, pulling weeds and letting on to be praying for the souls of the Faithful Departed. I might as well humour him another while, in fairness. Bobby was coming over the stile beside the locked gate as we came to it. He’s meant to be tapping a flaker of a wan from town that used to go with Seanie Shaper that bought one of the houses in Pokey Burke’s estate of horrors. There’s war over it. You should see his wife as well, your wan Triona – she’s a ride and a half. Bobby is a pure bull, though, so he is. He probably rides the two of them every day. Things come easy to guys like Bobby Mahon. He’s not the brightest star in the firmament, but he’s a proper man. He has nothing to prove. Kenny reckons he’s like Paul Newman in Cool
Hand Luke;
no fucker could break him. He wore his hurley off of the McDonaghs’ full forward at the end of The County Final We Nearly Won. Then he flung it away and lamped five or six fellas before Jim Gildea the sergeant and about twelve other bollockses
got between him and the McDonaghs’ boys. I was only a small boy at the time. I wanted to be Bobby Mahon. I still do, imagine. I’m some loser. Why can’t I want to be me?

Trevor

I’M NOT SURE
what time Mother gets up. I’m always gone before she stirs. I drive as far as Galway some days. I still get scared crossing the bridge in Portumna, like I used to as a child. The planks on the wooden stretch still clank loosely, as though they could break under the car. On a sunny day in Eyre Square you can sit and look at girls’ legs all day long. Some of those girls wear skirts so short you can almost see their underwear. I bought a pair of sunglasses that block the sides of my eyes so that they can’t see me looking at them. The trick is not to let your head move as you follow them with your eyes. I tried to hide my wraparound shades from Mother. She found them, though; she must have been rooting around in my car. She asked me what I was doing with them. She said they were plastic rubbish. She said she hoped I didn’t wear them going through the village. She said people would think I was gone mad. She said I’d look a show wearing those things. She looked at me and shook her head. I
didn’t know what to say, so I just looked at the ground. I saw her putting my shades into the pocket of her apron.

I’m dying. I’m sure of it. One day soon my heart will just stop dead. I sometimes have a striking pain in my left hand. It could be a blockage in an artery. Sometimes I feel light-headed, sometimes I feel a pounding in my temples; my blood speeds and slows, speeds and slows. Last night, just as I was drifting off to sleep, I started violently. My heart must have stopped and then kick-started itself again. I’ll die soon. I hope I don’t know it’s coming; I hope I’m asleep. I hope my lungs don’t constrict and burn for want of air. I hope my brain doesn’t show me scary pictures as it shuts down. I hope my life isn’t concentrated into seconds and flashed across my consciousness like a scream. I hope I just stop.

I saw that girl again yesterday afternoon. She was standing outside her house, watching a child playing on a plastic tractor. The child was shouting, loudly and almost absentmindedly; long shouts with a rising note at the end. He looked like he was two and a half or maybe three at the oldest. He looked happy. Her house is painted white and there are flowers planted in the borders of her small front garden. It’s like one good tooth in a row of decaying ones. Mother’s friend Dorothy lives in the only other house that’s occupied in that estate. She seems to think I’m her houseboy. Mother says she paid through the nose for that house, way more even than the market value at the time. She was desperate to downsize from her draughty old lodge. She got rightly stuck above in that place, Mother says. She thought she’d be right swanky!

Dorothy asked me to paint her window sills last week. I came on Saturday with white paint and a brush. I brought a flat-head screwdriver to open the tin. That’s not emulsion, she screeched
at me. You need
emulsion
. I imagined myself plunging the screwdriver into one of her milky eyes. Would she die straight away, I wonder? Maybe she’d spin and scream and claw at the protruding screwdriver. A fine mist of blood would spray in a widening arc as she spun. The blood would be pink, full of oxygen. That girl might run down to see what was going on. Dorothy would have finished gurning by then. You
killed
her, she’d say. I had to, I’d tell her. She wasn’t really a human. She was a vampire. Dorothy would explode into dust, then. And that girl would rush into my arms.

I FEEL
a pain in my lower back lately, if I stand still for too long. The pain travels around to the front sometimes. It could be my kidneys failing, shutting down, stopping. It could be testicular cancer, too. The pain from that often manifests in disparate body parts; it can travel down your leg, up your spine, into your stomach. I could be riddled with tumours. I probably am. I definitely have skin cancer. Mother never used sun block on me when I was a child. She murdered me when I was a child by giving me skin cancer. A slow, undetectable murder, a pre-emptive strike, a perfect crime. She’s a genius, the way she makes evil seem so normal. She can be evil while making a cake, without even blinking. She flaps around in a cloud of flour so that her sharp old head seems to float, disembodied, above it, and says things like: What were you doing for so long in the bathroom? Or: Dorothy’s son is a
captain
in the army now, you know. Or: Who ever heard of a young
man
with a certificate in Montessori teaching? Or: You’re gone as fat as a fool.

Sometimes I just catch a glimpse of her black, forked tongue as it flicks back in. I wonder if she knows I’ve seen it. I think she thinks I see it but don’t believe it to be real. I think she thinks
I think I’m going mad. She’s trying to drive me mad. These creatures feed on madness, obviously. Dorothy is one as well. I could easily just kill them both, but I need a way of making sure everyone knows what they are before I move against them. If I just kill them, I’ll be sent away to prison, or to the Central Mental Hospital in Dundrum if I plead insanity. If I kill them and expose them for what they are, I’ll be a hero. They smell the same; they look more or less the same; they are concomitant in evil. I’m going to have to take that child from the girl who lives near Dorothy. Lloyd will help me. I won’t let Lloyd hurt him or anything. We probably will have to put some marks on him, though. Then I’ll kill Mother and Dorothy and tell everyone that I apprehended them just as they were about to sacrifice the child. They’re witches, I’ll say. They’ve held me prisoner with a spell since I was a baby. Don’t touch their bodies, I’ll say, they may not be really dead. The authorities might require my services as a consultant. I am probably the only living soul who knows how to spot these creatures and deal with them.

SOMETIMES I
sit and think for hours about things. And then I fall into a sort of a reverie. After the reverie abates, I don’t remember what I was thinking about before it, I just know that I was thinking too hard. My head pounds dully. It happened last evening, while I was sitting on the couch, watching through the kitchen door as Mother baked a cake. After it, I was slumped forward. My head was almost resting on my knees.
Judge Judy
was nearly over. Mother was shaking me. I had a strange picture in my head of Mother with a forked snake’s tongue. Trevor, Trevor, oh Trevor, she was saying as she shook me awake. Her eyes were wet with tears. I’m okay, Mother, I told her. You’re not, she said,
you’re not okay at all. We’ll have to send you over to Doctor Lonergan. You’ll have to get something to keep you together. I couldn’t bear it if you fell to pieces the way your father did.

My father split in two, and then fell to pieces. That’s what I think schizophrenia is: splitting in two and then falling to pieces. Am I a schizophrenic? Is it hereditary? I could find out, but I don’t want to. Like I needed only to open the wardrobe door to find out if there was a monster waiting in there to kill me, but I never did. I might have woken him if I did. I’m not waking a monster. No way.

I WONDER
if that girl that lives near Dorothy has a boyfriend. She has no husband anyway, Dorothy says. Dorothy obsesses about her. Three different men call to her. A scruffy-looking character who seems to be the child’s father; he takes him walking by the hand up and down the road. An older man who must be her father. He mows grass all up and down her road. He tidies up that whole road by himself. He’s a respectable-looking man, too, Dorothy says, very straight-backed and just handsome enough to not be too aware of it. He must be pure solid ashamed of that one, Dorothy says, with her brazen chest and her bastard child. And a tall, fair-haired chap with muscles and sunburn started to call to her a few weeks ago. He’s called at least three times now. He marches in and out with tools and pieces of wood. He could be just doing jobs for her, Dorothy says, but they’re very
familiar
with each other. She always
touches
him. There’s no knowing what way she pays him for his work. She has no job, that one. She probably was given that house by the County Council. Imagine that, Dorothy says, you get rewarded handsomely these days for being a little hussy!

I’m going to paint Dorothy’s window sills very, very slowly indeed. I need to see this tall, sunburnt, muscle-bound person for myself. I need to know what kind of relationship he has with the girl. He is a bogey, an unknown quantity. I can’t think of her without him creeping into my mind’s eye. She was wearing a denim skirt one day. Does he put a big, rough hand up her skirt? I’d like to think he is respectful of her, but there aren’t many respectful men in the world. He probably asks her to do things for him and she feels she has no choice, because she is afraid he won’t finish the jobs he has started. That’s what those fellows are like. I would have to intervene if I happened to see him forcing himself on her while I painted Dorothy’s upstairs window sills. I would kick in her front door and he’d turn towards me and I’d hit him with the heel of my hand full force into his solar plexus, killing him instantly. It’s okay, I’d tell the girl, while she sobbed in my arms. It’s okay, the monster is gone, the monster is gone. I hope my heart doesn’t stop before I get to save that girl. I don’t feel very well. I think I’ve been thinking too hard again.

Bridie

I ALWAYS SWORE
I’d never again set foot in County Clare. I don’t even like to look across at east Clare from the low shore at Castlelough. Ton Tenna mocks me from the Limerick road: it hides Clare behind it. We had a meal in a lovely restaurant in Ballina one time, but I kept my back to the river, because Clare was on the far bank. My second son went fishing with his uncle Jim and his brothers in Clare nearly twenty years ago and was swept off of a rock and drowned. I can’t bear the thought of that county since. I think every hour of every day about him still. I think mostly about the last moments of his little life: the shock he must have got when the wave grabbed him; the way he must have felt as he was dragged out and out and under. Could he hear the roars of Jim and his brothers? Could he feel the ocean tightening its hand around him? I know I shouldn’t think these things over and over again, but you may as well ask a bee to leave the flowers alone.

The day it happened, our neighbour John English drove us out as far as Spanish Point where the search party was organized. I’ll never forget that drive; the last time I had hope. There were no mobile phones that time, so I kept thinking we’ll get there now and they’ll have him, wrapped in thick white towels, shivering and crying from the shock and the cold. If there had been a longer road, I’d have made John English take it. I’d have stayed in that car forever, safe with hope. I knew the minute we pulled up there was no hope for my boy – no one seemed to be
hurrying
. I screamed at them all to get back into the sea, to hurry, hurry, he’ll be halfway to America, but they only looked sadly at me and then out at the rolling blue and shook their heads. He was never got for a finish. The greedy Atlantic ate him and kept his little bones.

I charged like a madwoman off up along the coast road towards Quilty for miles and miles that day, looking out at the ocean, as if I might spot him, treading water and waving his little hand, waiting to be rescued. There was a second search party raised to find
me
. I came to a little church with a lovely name: Star of the Sea. I went in and knelt down and blessed myself and bowed my head and anyone looking on would have thought I was praying to God for my lost son. I wasn’t, I was cursing Him. You bastard, I was saying, you bastard, just because
your
son was killed, have we all to suffer forever? Have you not had enough revenge? And your boy only stayed dead three days. Will my boy be back on Sunday, the way yours was? I never went to Mass again. I stayed away from God and Clare for twenty years. Now I’m thinking of going to
live
in Clare, and not that far from where Peter was lost, in a new hotel as a live-in housekeeper. I’d be
head
of housekeeping, actually, if you don’t mind.

My husband blamed me for Peter’s death. It was my brother took him off fishing. It was I left him off that day with his little
shorts on him, slathered with sun-cream, with his rod and his bag of sandwiches and sweets, hardly able to talk with the excitement of being allowed go fishing in the sea with his uncle and his brothers. If
he’d
been there, Michael said, he’d have warned him of the dangers, he’d have had my brother well told not to take his eyes off him for a second, he’d have done the world of things I didn’t do. The list of things he’d have done got longer and bigger over the years until we couldn’t see each other at either side of it, and he left and never came back and the only difference was the noise of him was gone. There was no more and no less pain. We pass each other every now and again; we only barely nod. The children don’t tell me what they talk about with him. I don’t care. He’s gone very old-looking lately.