The Spinning Heart (16 page)

Still and all though, when my grandchild’s eyes first met mine, a powerful weakness overtook me. I caught myself looking into the wispy-looking little basket they had him in and saying words of thanks inside in my head for him. I was afraid to open my mouth for fear my voice would betray me. I knew I hadn’t it in me not to sound false or foolish or a kind of hollow, somehow. I turned my face away and left. I hardly saw that child again. Bobby called him after himself, you know. It wasn’t off of me he got that vanity.

I LEARNT
my lessons faster than Bobby. My father was a better teacher than me. I ran into the milking parlour straight from school one time when I was only a small boy. I had news bursting out of me that I thought would make him praise me. We were given a test in school today Daddy, I told him. Were ye now? He never turned around to look at me, only kept on pumping away at the old Dairymaster that he always said was only a balls of a yoke that he was tricked into buying by a Godless fuckin Proddie. Ya, the master gave us forty questions on history and geography and maths and all that. Did he now? Ya, and I was the only one got every single one of them right so I was. The
cigire
was there today, you see, and Sir didn’t know he was coming at all and he was told give us the test and he was pure solid delighted with me for getting all the questions right on account of the
cigire
being there out of the blue. My father still didn’t face me, but
he went kind of still and his back straightened and he turned his face a little bit around so I could see his red cheek and his glistening eye. So you know it all, do you? A lead ball dropped into my stomach. I didn’t know what answer to give to
that
question. Before I could open my stupid little mouth again my father had a length of Wavin pipe in his hand that he used to use to shcoo-up the cattle along the yard and it was going swish,
whack
, swish,
whack
, swish,
whack
against my little scrawny body and I couldn’t see out through my eyes for the shock and the sudden pain of it; I fell out backwards through the parlour door onto the hard, mucky ground and my father was roaring: You. Know.
NOTTEN
. You. Know.
NOTTEN
. You. Know.
NOTTEN
. By the time my mother crept out to the yard and said stop it Francie in her mousy little voice there was no part of me not covered in pinky-white welts. My father stood back and spat on the ground and admired his handiwork. Bejaysus, you know something now, though. You know something now, boy. You know that pride is a deadly sin. And he threw the Wavin pipe on the ground and walked over me back into the parlour, the very same way as your man threw down his plank of wood and walked off after he pole-axed me.

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.

Triona

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.

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.