The Spinning Heart

Josie is the father of Eamonn, his first son, and Pokey, his second son. Josie admits that he loves Eamonn more than Pokey, and wonders whether this is simply wrong, or a sin that requires confession. Feeling guilty, Josie gives Pokey everything to make up for this difference (2). Pokey’s name was supposed to be “Sean Pol,” but Eamonn called him “Pokey,” and the nickname stuck.

Bobby visited Josie’s house to talk about Pokey skipping town without paying the men their pensions. Josie regrets how he treated Bobby and says:

I should have apologized to that man on my son’s behalf. I snapped like that out of crossness with myself. I was too ashamed to look the man in the eye; Bobby Mahon, who never missed a day, who I was always so glad was foreman after Pokey took over—I thanked God there was a man there to keep Pokey from getting too big for his boots (22).

Josie feels guilt and shame for the way Pokey turned out. Josie acknowledges he was absent for much of Pokey’s childhood, letting his wife Eileen raise Pokey. Josie also feels regretful of his only daughter; they were once very close, but now he can’t stand to be around her because she talks about “poverty and Palestine and carbon dioxide and Tibetan monks,” and she has a girlfriend (23).

Josie has always been a self-made man who “never stopped working” (24). Unlike Josie, Pokey is a liar, a cheater, and a man who takes advantage. Josie wonders how Pokey and Eamonn turned out so differently: “That Bobby Mahon and my Eamonn are very alike in ways. They’re both men you’d be proud of, who you’d be embarrassed opposite, having to tell of the failings of other men and feeling as though those failings are your own” (26). 

When Lily was younger, she was the town prostitute. After giving birth to her fifth child, she revealed to a nurse that the father was one of her clients named Bernie; once he found out, he punched Lily in the face and mouth until her front teeth fell out, called her names, and threatened to kill her (27).

Lily thinks about all the men she’s slept with: “I’d never blame a man for calling to me. Men have to do what they have to do. Nature overpowers them” (28). She hardly ever turned a man away, unless they repulsed her, which rarely happened. However, she once turned away a man because he was too good, and she “was afraid of blackening his mind against himself” (29). Men first started noticing her when she was 11 years old, which Lily attributes to her “wanton look” (28). However, she is now crippled from rheumatoid arthritis, and many people think she resembles a witch.

Lily no longer has any male visitors, and her children never visit: “They’re pure solid ashamed of me, after all I done for them” (30). Her oldest son, John-John, only “visits” to steal money or yell at her. Bobby is her only semblance of company: He passes by her house every day on his way to visit Frank, smiles and waves at her, and treats her like a fellow human being. She thinks, “Oh, he’s solid gorgeous, so he is. I’d have married a boy like that if I hadn’t been so busy going around being wanton, so determined not ever to be bound by a man” (31). Once, when Bobby was little, he and his mother came to Lily’s to escape Frank’s anger, and Lily thinks it’s terribly sad that Bobby and his mother weren’t close at the end of his mother’s life.

Lily once had real feelings for Bernie—a “fat mongrel of a man” (32)—and would have done whatever he wanted her to, despite his abuse. Lily and Bernie’s son lives in the city working as a solicitor. She paid for his education, but her son never invited her to the graduation ceremonies. She admits that she can’t help but love all her children, and she cries “over them in the dark of night. […] I don’t know why they all ran from me” (33). She has a plan to kill herself when she’s too old to care for herself, rather than make her children care for her. 

Vasya is from Siberia, from a family of reindeer herders. His family’s herds were too small to support the entire family, so he and his brother “journeyed south to a city that was spreading outwards like a dirty puddle” to find work (37). However, his brother drinks a bad batch of homemade vodka, gets into a fight, and is found dead in an alley.

After the death of his brother, Vasya moves to Ireland, and Pokey hires him: “In this country I speak in sentences of two words or three. I nod and smile often and I feel redness in my face when spoken to” (35). Everyone refers to Vasya as Russian and makes fun of his foreignness. When Pokey skips town, Vasya begins working under Bobby. Vasya likes Ireland’s landscape, and he knows that he can never go back home to his family in Siberia without his brother. 

Réaltín is a young single mother who lives in one of the 44 houses in Pokey’s otherwise abandoned and half-finished estate. Réaltín reflects:

It was a few months before we copped on to what was after happening. The builder was gone bust. My house and the old lady’s were the only ones he could finish, because we were the only ones who’d paid. We heard he’d put all his money into some stupid thing to do with a fake island or something out in Dubai. Now he’s made a run for it (43).

Réaltín’s father is at her house nearly every day, cutting the grass of every empty house on the block: “He does it to make my life seem more normal, to see can he make the place look like a proper estate” (44). He dumps the lawn waste at Josie’s house to make a statement, but Josie never says anything about it.

Réaltín’s young son is named Dylan, and Seanie is the father. Réaltín and Seanie aren’t together, but Réaltín’s father wishes they were: “It kills Daddy not to be able to talk to him about hurling and cars and machinery and whatever men do be fascinated by when they’re not ruining women’s lives” (45). She would never admit it, but Seanie might not be Dylan’s biological father. Around the time she got pregnant, she also slept with her “creepy old pervert” boss, George, at a business party (45). Having sex with George was an awful mistake, but she blames it on her grief: her mother passed away, and Réaltín is jealous of her father’s new girlfriend, Bridget.

One morning, Réaltín is concerned to see strange men on her front lawn: Bobby and some of his workers have come to Pokey’s unfinished estate to see if any “C2 boys” had come by; these are “[s]elf-employed workers […] sub-contractors, foreign workers who were only taken on by builders if they registered as self-employed. That was the builder hadn’t to pay the proper rates; stamps, tax, pensions or what have you” (48). They haven’t been by, and Réaltín doesn’t have much money to fix her home’s construction problems. Bobby offers to fix them for her at a discounted rate. This makes her happy because she’s attracted to him, thinking he’s “really good-looking, tall and fair-haired and weather-beaten in a lovely way” (47).