The Spinning Heart (9 page)

I didn’t stop at the spider on my cheek. I was in a bad way over that wan that had a child for me and then slammed the door of her brand-new apartment in my face. I didn’t want the spider reminding me of her the whole time so I got it turned into a sort of a fat Celtic cross, but it ended up taking up nearly a whole half of my face and then I looked unbalanced only having shit on the one side so your man done a snake up the other side, sort of looking over at the cross with its tongue sticking out. It looked rapid at the start but now I think my face must’ve gotten fat because the snake is all wavy in the wrong way and flat and crappy-looking. It was fair sore getting it done, though. Your man has a wan working in the shop with him, I’d say she’s Polish or something, and she’d put a horn on a dead man. Your man knows well no prick is going to chicken out of getting his tattoo while she’s waving her tits into his face or walking past slowly, smiling, with her long legs and her beautiful arse.

Them apartments they give to slappers do be fair nice. They do kit them out and all for them, and not shite – proper stuff from Reids and all. The wan that had the child for me got a leather couch, two leather armchairs, a chandelier, a microwave, a fridge-freezer, the whole lot. I seen it all in through the door that time. I should of bursted in through the door and slapped the head off her and had a proper go at playing around with the young fella, but she told me fuck off, the welfare pricks were all over them like flies on shite that time, and I said ah come on, the
cops
are all over
me
and she roared
WHAT! THE COPS? JESUS! FUCK OOOOOFFFFF!
And the door of that rapid apartment nearly split in two she slammed it so hard in my face. Shite, I thought, I shouldn’t of told her about the cops and stuff until after I’d the hole rode off her. Women do be less uptight after a ride. Especially off me – I’m fair good at it.

Like, they’re all going mad off their heads around here, all the boggers, acting like the world is ending just because your man Bobby Mahon smashed his auld fella’s head in. Their faces are all red and worried-looking. Your man that’s dead was on the way out anyway. I often seen him out at his door, coughing his lungs up when I’d be passing down with the dogs. He was a freaky-looking bollocks. He’d never salute, only pull on his fag if he wasn’t coughing and stare at me and I’d stare back and I’d have something smart all ready to shout over at him and then some feeling would come over me and tell me not to bother my hole and he’d hawk and spit and so I wouldn’t. You have to trust your instincts when you’re a dopey fuck like me. A sort of a cold wave came off that auld fella. He looked dark, even last week, when the evenings were shiny bright. No wonder your man Bobby killed the fucker. I’d say he did his head in.

Your man Bobby is fair sound all the same. He tried to give me a job one time all right, but I’m not holding that against him. I think he thought he was doing me a favour. My auld fella brung me out to your man Bobby’s house and all, the night before I was meant to start work on some mad lunatic building site or something. I’d look fuckin pretty on a building site, wouldn’t I? State of me. But them FÁS cunts were making me seeing as I done a construction skills course and a Safe Pass yoke and the whole lot. I only done them to keep them happy at the hatch, I thought that was understood. I told your man Bobby, Jaysus sorry mate, I suffers awful from my back, and my head is all over the place, and he only laughed and said fair enough and thanked me and all for letting him know. Then he looked over at my auld fella’s shiteheap of a Corolla and said Christ lads, that front wheel is buckled to bits and I said I know bud, it’s like getting a spin in the Flintstones’ car, ha ha ha, and fuck me if he didn’t tell me
hang on there a minute and went over to his big shed and rooted around and pulled out a fourteen-inch, four-stud wheel with a fair decent tyre on it and all and jacked my auld lad’s car up and put it on and my auld lad was a fucking embarrassment saying ah, you’re a decent skin, you’re a decent skin, I’ll pay you for it and all when I’m flush, and your man Bobby knew for a fact that was bullshit but he didn’t give a shit. Yerra, it was only lying around here, he said, I don’t even know where it came out of.

That’s the way he was. The auld fella’s car went sweet as a nut with that new wheel. Your man Bobby done that turn for fellas that was as good as strangers to him and looked for nothing back and nearly made it sound like it was us doing
him
a favour. I felt like some cunt after it. I wasn’t even sure why.

Hillary

YOU KNOW, I
don’t think Réaltín realizes the trouble she causes half the time. Every single person in work knows about her going off with George at the anniversary party, but still it’s me that has to get the evil eye off all the old bitches all day every day. It’s grand for Réaltín, off on her so-called special career break. That was a new one for Georgie Pervy, the chickenshit bastard. Jesus, how are all men the exact same? George leches all over everyone, well, all the young ones anyway, and no one gives it a second thought, but Réaltín has to take it to the next level and actually shag him. But Réaltín doesn’t care; she just does anything she wants. I’m not saying I don’t love her, I really do, she’s
gorgeous
, and she’s brilliant craic and everything, but – I’d never say this to anyone – she’s going to have to cop herself on. She’s going to have to decide what she’s doing with her life and stop being such a disaster.

I think sometimes it’s an affectation, all the angst and introspection and random lovesickness, but then I see her sometimes,
when she thinks no one’s looking, and she just looks so sad. But she does draw sadness on herself, in fairness. I mean she’s all of a sudden madly in love with this new builder fella. I think Réaltín actually thinks he’s going to leave his wife and marry her or something. As far as I can make out he’s not even made a ghost of a move on her, but she seems convinced he’s besotted with her or something and it’s only a matter of time before he drops his hammer and asks if she wants to see his other tool. She went off and bought about forty new outfits to wear for when he calls to her. And she’s meant to be broke. She makes up reasons to get him to call. He charges her as well – nothing near what the cowboys in the city charge – but she couldn’t have money to be throwing around on trying to seduce married builders. She got a hammer of her own (she probably stole it from his toolbox, in fairness) and banged a load of plaster off her bedroom wall and got him to fix it; she broke a cupboard door in her kitchen and let on Dylan did it; she broke tiles on the en-suite bathroom floor and got him to take them all up and do the whole thing again. And then while he’s there she acts like she’s a fucking little tramp, which she is, at times. She flits around him in skin-tight jeans or little minis, trying to make him make a move. And he hasn’t, nowhere near, and probably never will now, because, you won’t believe this: he’s only after
killing
his own
father
.

First of all, she rang me about two weeks ago, crying her head off because old hatchet-faced Bridget, that married Réaltín’s daddy (her and Réaltín are a lot more alike than Réaltín would want to hear; they’d both do anything to get their man), heard at some mad forty-five drive or bridge festival or somewhere that they were all talking about Réaltín in that crazy village where she insisted on buying that house, saying that her and this Bobby the Builder fella were having a proper affair, and he was moving
in with her, and his wife was distraught and yadda, yadda, yadda. Réaltín’s poor daddy got really upset; like, he must have known about the flirting, because he’s always out there, making sure she doesn’t get raped and pillaged by the mad villagers, cutting grass and trying to avoid Bridget the Midget probably, but he would have only rolled his eyes up to heaven and taken Dylan for a walk and left her at it, but those kinds of rumours going around would really make him feel terrible. He’s lovely. He’s
really
good-looking, too. He’s one of those men who get even more handsome as they get older, like Colin Firth or George Clooney. I had a little bit of a flirt with him, and I mean a demure, innocent flirt, at Réaltín’s twenty-first and she went mental. She called me a bitch and cried and everything. What a fucking hypocrite! She nearly
raped
my father at my granny’s funeral. His
mother
, like.

Anyway, as if that wasn’t bad enough, that the whole crazy village thinks she’s a brazen, home-wrecking hussy, now your man is after killing his own father. And you know there’s a kind of inevitability about Réaltín being stuck smack bang in the middle of any drama in her vicinity. His own father, though, can you imagine it? He’s been in Réaltín’s house, at the top end of that spooky, empty, three-quarters built estate, and she’s been bending over in front of him, wagging her little arse in his face, and all that time there was a murderer hiding inside in him. He just stove in the poor man’s head, I heard. Sure, if he was capable of that he would have been capable of driving off with Réaltín and little gorgeous Dylan in his boot, tied up and suffocated to death. Oh Christ, it doesn’t bear thinking about.

Some mad-looking cop, like your man out of
Killinaskully
, came up with a detective from town, asking her a load of questions. The Bobby fella had been up in her house only that morning, imagine. They wanted to know what her relationship
was with him, what they talked about when he was in her house, what his behaviour was like. They frightened the life out of poor little Dylan, who thought his mummy was being taken to jail, and they even suggested she leave him with her father and go to the garda station to talk about it. Fuckers. Luckily Réaltín was well aware of her rights, on account of George being the scumbags’ solicitor of choice. Or he was, until the legal aid rates went down and George stopped being so available.

Oh lads, it’s great craic now. Réaltín is acting like she’s some kind of a victim of a miscarriage of justice. She’s crying over your man non-stop, like. I had to remind her that she isn’t his wife, she isn’t his mistress, she isn’t his friend – your relationship to him, I told her, is as follows: You are a fucking crazy single mother living in a freaky ghost estate who breaks things in her house and makes him fix them. That is not a relationship on the basis of which you have a right to be weeping at the foot of the gallows. He’s not Braveheart, I told her, and you’re not Braveheart’s girlfriend. Sometimes you have to be firm with Réaltín. You have to tell her the truth. She gets lost in the mists of imaginary romance.

And there’s more. As well as all of the above, it turns out your man Bobby the Murdering Builder knows Seanie well. Seanie is
from
that crazy village. She fucking knew that when she bought that house, but she never told me. It’s mad, the things Réaltín keeps secret. Like, she’d tell me all about the colour of her poo, but she won’t tell me something like that. And I’m serious about the poo. She went around the office one day in an unbelievable flap, convinced she had colon cancer or bowel cancer or something because her poo had turned green. It was the tannins from the bucket of red wine she’d glugged in my house the night before. But there was no telling her. Drama. Anything for drama.

She’s a weirdo at times. Imagine how her poor daddy feels
now, having left her on her own in that house with a murderer! I wonder why he went and killed his father, anyway. A lot of those culchies are mad, though. They’re so
repressed
, like. They all spend their whole lives going to Mass and playing GAA and eating farm animals and cabbage and not saying how they’re feeling until it’s too late and then BANG! They kill someone. Or themselves. They’re just as mad as the city lunatics, except the city lunatics are honest about their scumbaggery. But anyway, Seanie the prickface is calling up now, roaring and shouting that she was riding his friend and crying like a baby and wanting to come in and staring down her top and licking his lips and sometimes, groping himself absent-mindedly. I only met him a few times, but I spotted that habit he had – it was disgusting – of talking to your tits and actually
licking his lips
at the same time. He’s okay-looking, I suppose, in a rough sort of way, and he has a great body (that’s how she met him, he was standing in a hole across the street from the office with no top on, just a skimpy luminous jacket thing over his jeans and a white helmet and Réaltín started acting like we were in a fucking Diet Coke ad or something), but he’s an animal, really. Like, he’s not civilized. He’s not even
evolved
.

It’s just like Réaltín to make everything about her, though. Someone gets murdered, and it’s all about Réaltín. How
she
feels, how
she
is being victimized, how
she
can’t go to the shop without people gawking at her with their big country mouths hanging open. That’s Réaltín. She always asks how I am by rote; she never actually wants to know. If I started saying something like God, I’m exhausted actually, Mam is still really sick and I had to go home and make Dad’s dinner, or God, I’m really pissed off actually, Darren never rang me since our row … her eyes would literally glaze over and she’d just say oh, aaaww, and
tut-tut noncommittally a few times in mock sympathy, and get more and more impatient for the moment when she could start talking about herself. I mean, we’re best friends since our first day in the School of Commerce, but it really feels sometimes as though I’m just a receptacle for Réaltín’s thoughts and worries and complaints. I do love her, I really do, she has such a great heart, and she’d do
anything
for you, but she does think the whole universe revolves around her. Poor little Dylan, he’s an absolute dote, but I wonder if she even knows he’s there. Has she room enough in her head for a whole other human being, who’s dependent on her? Sometimes I doubt it.

I don’t know why I spend so much time talking about and thinking about Réaltín. She never bothers her arse to think about
me
, that’s for sure. Like, I had to invite
myself out
to see her house. Then she tried to pick a day when her father wouldn’t be there, in case I jumped on him or something, and then she rang to cancel because Mad Bobby the Murdering Builder was calling to suck sludge from her pipes or something, and I had the day booked off and everything, but she didn’t give a shit. She suits herself, always. Mam was really sick last year, but I wasn’t allowed to mention it, because her mother is
dead
, so that meant I couldn’t be upset about my mother just being sick. When Darren broke it off with me, I couldn’t get out of bed for about four days, but it was lousy of
me
to text
her
to tell George I wouldn’t be in. I mean I was barely capable of speech, and absolutely incapable of coherency. Then she called up after about three days and all she could say was, ah Hillary, come on, he was a fucking
prick
, he didn’t even have an
arse
, just a hole in his back! It was funny, and I did start to feel a bit better, but actual empathy is just impossible for Réaltín.