The Spinning Heart

Brian’s father and mother are talking about some boys who went to Australia to drink and party. Brian—a young, sarcastic intellectual—insists that he is:

[…] going to Australia in the context of a severe recession, and therefore I am not a yahoo or a waster, but a tragic figure, a modern incarnation of the poor tenant farmer, laid low by famine, cast from his smallholding by the Gombeen Man, forced to choose between the coffin ship and the grave (57).

Brian adamantly tells his parents that he’s going to Australia for work; he hasn’t worked “since I finished my apprenticeship” (57). However, deep down, he’s also going because “every single person I know went over there for at least a year and had unreal craic” (57). Either way, his parents are upset about the thought of him leaving.

Lorna, Brian’s girlfriend, or “wan,” broke up with him because he’ll be meeting other girls and partying in Australia, and she’s not going to wait around for him (58). He cries when she breaks up with him but only because he’ll miss the sex: “That’s what all them wankers do be feeling when they’re going around crying over women. They’re only missing the ride” (58). He claims that he “won’t think about Lorna again after [he] start[s] tapping some fine blondie wan below in Australia” (59), plus, he doesn’t believe in love. In Brian’s mind, love is only a “physical mechanism that ensures humanity’s survival. It’s an abstract concept as well, for people to write songs and books and make films about” (59).

Because Brian was so smart in school, he was told that he should pursue education instead of construction, but he didn’t listen.

Brian’s friend Kenny, who’s moving with him to Australia, brings over “Es,” and they plan to be high until they leave.

It’s rumored that Bobby is having an affair with Réaltín. Brian believes the rumors, thinking that despite Bobby’s gorgeous wife, “Bobby is pure bull, though, so he is. […] Things come easy to guys like Bobby Mahon” (60). Brian wishes he were Bobby, but thinks, “I’m some loser. Why can’t I want to be me?” (61).

Trevor’s father had schizophrenia, and Trevor seems to have many of the same symptoms, although he’s never directly diagnosed. He has a daily routine of getting up before his mother and going somewhere in public to “look at girls’ legs all day long. […] I bought a pair of sunglasses that block the sides of my eyes so that they can’t see me looking at them” (62). His mother finds the sunglasses and takes them away.

Trevor is convinced he is dying and has random, strange physical symptoms:

I’ll die soon. I hope I don’t know it’s coming; I hope I’m asleep. I hope my lungs don’t constrict and burn for want of air. I hope my brain doesn’t show me scary pictures as it shuts down. I hope my life isn’t concentrated into seconds and flashed across my consciousness like a scream. I hope I just stop (63).

At the request of his mother, Trevor helps Dorothy—Réaltín’s only neighbor in the otherwise abandoned estate. At Dorothy’s, Trevor watches Réaltín playing with her young son. Trevor daydreams about killing Dorothy: He imagines that Réaltín accuses Trevor of killing Dorothy, but he claims it was necessary because Dorothy was a vampire, which compels Réaltín to “rush into [his] arms” (64).

Trevor is convinced he has skin cancer. His mother never used sunscreen on him as a child, and he’s convinced that she purposefully did it so that he’d get skin cancer as an adult. He believes his mother is evil because she interrogates him about being in the bathroom for so long, and she makes him feel little for not having done anything with his life. His mother thinks it’s strange that he has a “certificate in Montessori teaching,” which is normally a woman’s job (64). He swears his mother has a “black, forked tongue” (65) and views her and Dorothy as “creatures” who “feed on madness” (65). He daydreams about ways he can kill his mother and Dorothy without anyone knowing: He’ll have to steal Réaltín’s young son, Dylan; Trevor can explain to authorities that he killed his mother and Dorothy because they were about to sacrifice Dylan: “They’re witches, I’ll say. They’ve held me prisoner with a spell since I was a baby” (65). He is serious about this idea.

Sometimes he has “reveries,” or moments where he spaces out and becomes disoriented. His mother worries and says he’ll have to see the doctor: “You’ll have to get something to keep you together. I couldn’t bear it if you fell to pieces the way your father did” (66). Trevor wonders if his father’s schizophrenia is hereditary, but Trevor decides he doesn’t want to know.

He continues to spy on Réaltín while he paints Dorothy’s windows. He often sees Bobby going in and out of Réaltín’s house doing work. He daydreams about killing Bobby and rushing in to save Réaltín. 

Bridie “swore I’d never again set foot in County Clare” because her youngest son, Peter, drowned in a lake there many years ago. However, she is contemplating taking a job in the county because she was laid off from her former job, and jobs are currently scarce. She would be the live-in head of housekeeping.

Almost 20 years have passed since Peter drowned, but Bridie “never found peace” (72): “I think every hour of every day about him still. I think mostly about the last moments of his little life” (68). Peter was fishing with his uncle and brothers when it happened.

After Peter died, Bridie’s life fell apart. She blamed her brother and other sons for letting Peter drown. She blamed God and her husband. However, her husband blamed her because Bridie’s brother took Peter fishing. Bridie and her husband eventually break up. He stopped providing her with money after the children grew up, and now “I haven’t a penny left” (70). This is the reason the potential job in County Clare is so important to her.

Bridie changed after Peter’s death. She is prone to anger, especially with her children, and this eventually pushed them away. While she blames everyone else for Peter’s death, she blames herself the most: “I never forgave myself. I could never get the light to go back on in my mind” (72). The local priest had tried to comfort her, but she told him “to go away and fuck off for himself” (72).

She sees Bobby’s wife, Triona, at the post office. She thinks Triona looks bad and assumes it’s because of the rumors about Bobby’s affair. Bridie doesn’t believe the rumors. She remembers the sadness he had in his eyes during his mother’s funeral, how he looked like a lost little boy, and she knows he has a pure goodness in him. She’s reminded of her own son: “How is it at all that I let one child take my whole heart? It wasn’t fair on anyone” (75). 

Someone murdered Frank, and Jason was the only person to see the potential suspect. The cops have arrested Bobby for the murder, and Jason wonders if he should tell the police what he saw that night. He decides not to.

Jason thinks back to his youth: He was 18 and his girlfriend was 16 when she persuaded him to get a tattoo of a spider on one side of his face: 

The biggest mistake I made when I was younger was getting tattoos all over my face. The minute you get a tattoo on your face, the whole world looks at you different, even if it’s a real nice tattoo, like birds or flowers or something. I done it for a woman (77).

His girlfriend gets pregnant with his child on purpose to get money from the government; he’s only ever seen his son once. When Jason is older, he gets a tattoo of a snake on the other side of his face.

He gets disability money from the government for having “post-traumatic shock, attention-deficit hyper-activity disorder, manic depression, scoliosis, psoriasis, addictive personality and a few more things” (78). He attributes these disorders to past traumas: His neighbor molested Jason when Jason was young, and Jason witnessed a shooting.

He remembers Bobby fondly. Bobby tried to give Jason work once, but Jason declined because of everything wrong with him. Bobby was kind about it and fixed a wheel on Jason’s father’s car for free. 

Hillary is Réaltín’s best friend. She’s constantly mad at Réaltín’s selfishness and flirtatiousness, and she’s especially mad that Réaltín slept with their creepy boss, George. She says that Réaltín is “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” (83). Réaltín has been breaking things in her house on purpose so that Bobby will come fix them. She wears revealing clothing hoping to seduce him. Hillary doesn’t know how Réaltín affords his services, because Réaltín’s “meant to be broke” (83).

The rumor about Réaltín and Bobby’s affair—and Bobby’s arrest for allegedly killing his own father—upsets Réaltín’s father. Réaltín’s heartbreak over Bobby’s arrest annoys Hillary, because Réaltín means nothing to Bobby; Réaltín is not even his friend, let alone his lover. Hillary calls Bobby a “culchie”—a slang term for someone from rural Ireland (86). Hillary says culchies project a proper image but are repressed “until it’s too late and then BANG! They kill someone. Or themselves” (86).

Hillary doesn’t know why she spends “so much time talking about and thinking about Réaltín. She never bothers her arse to think about me, that’s for sure” (87). Though Réaltín is self-absorbed, Hillary still believes Réaltín is fun to hang out with. 

Seanie doesn’t know how he acquired his nickname “Seanie Shaper,” but he decides it’s because he has always loved women and was “forever fixing my hair and throwing auld smart shapes for fear there’d be girls along the road” (90). His friends started calling him that name one day, and it stuck; he decides it’s better than the much more cruel nicknames other men in town have inherited, like “Kiddyfiddler,” “Fishfingers,” and “Wankyballs” (90).

At 13 he touches his first breast; the girl is 16. This sets off a chain of sexual events for Seanie, who is never picky: “hunchbacks, lispers, smelly wans, lesbians, the whole lot. I went with a wan one day who had a hearing aid and no front teeth.” (92). Though he believes everyone deserves to have fun, he admits that his “lack of discernment” repelled the beautiful women, who viewed him as a “dirty pervert” (92).

He’s always been careful to use condoms, except with Réaltín—she was allergic to them and claimed she was taking birth control pills. He believes that she purposely got pregnant with his child: “She asked me a rake of questions about my family’s medical history the night before the night she made me go bareback. Then she seemed kind of sick of me” (93). The rumors about Réaltín and Bobby’s affair anger Seanie. Bobby is adamant that the rumors aren’t true. Secretly, Seanie is mad that Réaltín didn’t ask Seanie to help her instead.

Everyone perceives Seanie as an always happy, goofy comedian, but he admits he’s depressed: “I never told anyone about the blackness I feel sometimes, weighing me down and making me think things I don’t want to think. […] It’s always there, waiting for a chance to wrap itself around me” (95).

Seanie doesn’t feel good enough for Dylan because Seanie “always go[es] about things the wrong way with Réaltín and accidentally look[s] at her tits and she ends up pissed off with me and I always react like a right stones” (95). He often thinks about drowning and how he’d “love to really be Seanie Shaper. I’d love to not be here again, sitting looking at the water” (96).