Free The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan Page A

get a lot worse offered to you in this day and age. In the current climate as the fella says.
    I told my second-youngest fella I was thinking of selling the house. You should have seen the way his face fell. He’s shacked up inside in town with a doctor’s daughter, if you don’t mind. She’s studying for her Master’s inside in the university. He’s studying his options, thank you very much. I’d give him two options: a kick in the hole or a kick in the hole. He’s too used to being able to swagger in here, dragging in all sorts of muck and germs, with a puss on him like a slapped arse every time he fights with that wan. She was here one time. He’s so sensitive , Missus Connors. He is, I said, he’s a delicate little flower all right. She smoked fags into my face and looked down her nose at my house, and got the world of ash on my lovely clean carpet even though I actually put an ashtray on her lap . She hadn’t a pick on her. She doesn’t eat meat. Neither does Billy, now. He says it isn’t natural for humans to eat the flesh of other animals. It’s an evolutionary aberration , he says. I’ll give him an aberration into the mouth one of these days. If you saw the way he used to eat my roast beef – he hardly used to use a fork.
    Isn’t it a fright the way I get risen like that, so easily? And the poor boy still only feeling his way around the world. Sure, he hasn’t a clue how clueless he is. God help us, he’s still a child. I’m the same way with all of them: I can take the faces off of them with only the very slightest provocation. I changed when the sea took my Peter. I was never short-tempered or judgmental before it happened. I always encouraged people and forgave easily and laughed troubles away. But for years and years after it happened I used to hear them in the next room, my children, huddled together, whispering nervously, the odd stifled giggle breakingthe gloom, while I stomped around the house, shouting about nothing, about everything, about dust and dirt and dishes and attitudes and how none of them ever did a hand’s turn to help in the house and how it was a fright to God to say I had a big family and still and all I was left alone in the world. Then one day there was no more huddles in the front room and no more nervous whispering; they were all gone, as fast as their legs could carry them. They’d sooner pay sky-high rents inside in the city for little boxes of mouldy apartments than have me every day stripping the good out of their lives, ruining their fun, blocking their sun.
    I couldn’t ever get over it. I was never able to get around it. I never forgave my brother or my sons that were there that day or God or the sea or the wind. I never forgave myself. I could never get the light to go back on in my mind. I never found peace. I told John Cotter to go way and fuck off for himself one time. There aren’t too many have actually said that to a priest in spite of all the auld bile you hear people spouting these days. He got an awful shock: he’d been sitting there, in my house, talking gently the way he does, with those lovely words that most people would let rub gently against their wounded hearts, but I could only feel the anger building and building inside me until I knocked my tea off of the arm of my chair on purpose, I slapped it clean across the good room, and he jumped and looked at me and he must have seen the devil looking back at him because his face dropped and he hopped up from his chair and I told him where to go and where to shove his Scriptures and Michael rushed into the room and started apologizing and sure I blew the lid completely then and screamed and roared that no fucker had apologized to me , and I screamed on and on and on and there was no quieting me.
    I SAW that girl of the Cahills that married that boy of the Mahons below in the post office on Thursday. Triona, her name is. She had their little boy with them. He’s the pure solid cut head off of his