Free The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan Page B

father. He’s solid gorgeous. She looked wretched. She was three or four ahead of me in the queue. The queue wraps around in an S, so the coven of auld bitches that are forever standing in that queue got a fine view of her. They’d look at her and then look back at each other with mock sympathy, their eyes glistening with delight, with triumph. The whole place has it that Bobby is doing a line with a little strap of a wan from town that bought one of Pokey Burke’s houses. Ha ha, them auld biddies are thinking, that shook her! I wonder is it true. I normally wouldn’t care a bit; only that Bobby is a lovely boy. I’d hate to think he was just a rotten auld faithless yoke like so many more. There’s something in that boy; the way he looks at you while he’s talking, sort of embarrassed so that you nearly want to hug him, and with a distance in his eyes even when he’s looking straight at you, that makes you think there’s a fierce sadness and a kind of a rare goodness in him. So, if that boy is off doing a line with some little piece of fluff I’ll eat my hat. Maybe it’s because I always think of him the day of his mother’s funeral, and he fully grown at the time but still and all he had the eyes and the expression of a small boy and to look at him that day, anyone else bar me would have asked God for some of his pain so he hadn’t to bear it all alone. I was out with God though, for good and glory, and was finished asking Him for anything.
    I went mad doing things to the house one time. Michael didn’t argue. The drilling and hammering drowned out the sound of me, I suppose. We got a delivery of blocks early one morning, for the bottom wall of a sunroom we were putting up at the back of the house, stretching into the garden. Michael wanted to be certain sure the lorry wouldn’t be spotted by toomany, the way there wouldn’t be too much auld talk out of the neighbours about planning permission or what have you. You’d never know what way people are going to react to changes in their surroundings or to a bit being gone from their view of a field they never looked at in the first place. But we were spotted taking in our blocks anyway: Frank Mahon walked down along past us just as the two boys in the lorry were jumping down out of it. He had an auld scraggy-looking yoke of a dog with him and it collared with a piece of twine and a bolt or something shoved in through the knot so as to stop the poor creature from being choked by a tightening of it if he pulled against the mean twine too hard.
    This was a fair few years ago now and that man’s wife wasn’t long dead. And there I was, and Michael only a step or two behind me, and the only noise to be heard was a ticking from the lorry as the heat left it. I can hardly think of words to describe what I saw, or the strange feeling of it. Frank Mahon stopped across from our gate, against the far ditch and stood looking up along the gable end of our house. And I suddenly knew why: one of the two boys doing the delivery was Bobby, his son. The world and his wife knew those two had had a big falling out.
    Bobby was facing me, coming in the gate. His mate was foostering with the controls on a panel attached to the lorry’s flat bed. And Frank was standing still, looking across, and it was for all the world as though Bobby sensed him there and he froze. And he couldn’t have known he was going to be there; they’d arrived at our gate from opposite directions. I saw with my own eyes the colour draining from that boy’s cheeks. His face never changed, but I swear a sadness you could nearly touch came down over it, and he turned slowly. There was nothing said for long seconds, and Michael and myself stood rooted to the spot. And then Bobby Mahon said: Well Dad.
    Just that. Well Dad. And his father just stood looking at him and his eyes were an ordinary blue like any man’s but still and all, as dark as night. And he raised his arm and pointed across at his son with the