The Spinning Heart (11 page)

Kate

ONE AWFUL THING
that happened since the recession started was Dell closing. Like, it nearly finished us. They were bloody
all
Dell. Dad said a few times I had all my eggs in the one basket, but I only told him to shut up and mind his own business, laughing at his little worried face. It does be all scrunched up when he’s worried, the poor little pet. He was right to be worried, though – after Dell closed, I was paying more in wages than I was taking in for about three months – but I was never even close to giving in. You can’t give your time whingeing and blaming, you have to just fight back. I made up a load of flyers on the PC and went to every single door in every single estate on this side of town, and covered a big part of the rest of town as well. I went over as far as Castle-troy and Annacotty. Aren’t they only out the motorway now? I didn’t stop going for three weeks. My rates are the best anywhere. I promised to save people money. I prayed the HSE inspector didn’t call for the three weeks, because my child-to-minder ratio
was a bit off while I wasn’t there. I made it back every day for the parents, though. I’m always there for hometime.

One good thing that happened since the recession started is people will work for less than the minimum wage. The minimum wage is a joke, like. Who has the right to tell me what to pay someone? Dad says there’s no such thing as a free market while crazy laws tether employers to big huge salaries for their staff. He says Ireland is regulated into the ground. Like, the red tape! You wouldn’t believe it. So I called all the girls into the kitchen one evening a few weeks ago and I told them straight out they’d all have to take a cut or I’d have to leave two of them go. Nuala, the little bitch, started straight away with the bullshit: You can’t actually, you’re right down to the lowest ratio as it is – we can’t even take our
breaks!
That one. She spends most of her day on a break. I’d have given her the road last year but I know well she’d have me up in front of the tribunal. So I said, actually Nuala, I’d have to bring in my sister and my mother to help for a while, and you don’t have to pay family members
anything
, so … And that shut her up.

THINGS ARE GOING
great now again, thank God. This free childcare year is going to be the making of us. And better again, I got a Montessori teacher for feck-all – a fella walked in here with his CV and references who has a
degree
in childcare and a post-grad in Montessori teaching, with my ad in his hand. I know you’d never put a fella with that job, but he’s not very masculine; there’s a real soft look about him, and he has a lovely, gentle voice and nice blue eyes. Trevor, his name is. Imagine, I hadn’t even to pay to put an ad in the
Limerick Leader
. I decided to give my window-ad a week and it paid off. Once I have his references
checked, I’ll let him start. He whispered to me that he wouldn’t expect minimum wage, he’d do anything to be working, he’d take seven euro an hour, cash. I could gross up his wages to look right. He knew the lingo and all. Jesus, he’s a godsend. To top it off, the Trevor fella arrived only two days after a girl called Réaltín called in with a lovely quiet child called Dylan. She’s working in a solicitor’s office inside in Henry Street. It’s a big firm, too, and she said there’s a couple more from there out on maternity leave. Having their
firsts
. She’ll recommend me, surely. The way things are going I’ll have to start refusing people again shortly.

Denis thinks I’m mad for taking on a
fella
as a Montessori teacher. But then he realized he used to know your man’s father years ago; he was a dentist or something like that, near where Denis grew up, but they were real bigshots anyway, with a big high wall around their house. I’d say your man just wanted a job where he wouldn’t have to be near manly men, spitting and farting and talking about their balls and making each other feel like shit about themselves. Why do fellas do that? They’re always slagging each other and calling each other queer and trying to outdo each other like fools. Men working together shouldn’t be allowed. Anyway, it’s none of my business, I don’t care what happens, I have my lovely Montessori teacher and I can take on kids for the free preschool year and everything is rosy in the garden.

Sometimes I think Denis is a bit raging that my crèche took off like this. Isn’t that awful? Like, wouldn’t you think he’d be delighted? That’s men, though; they can’t bear to be second to a woman in
any
way. The time of Dell closing, Denis had nothing going on at
all
, there wasn’t an electrical job or a carpentry job to be got anywhere, but we lived off the profits I had built up in the crèche account, and it nearly killed him. I felt sorry for him at the start, I suppose it was weird for him, but for a finish I just
wanted to slap him and tell him to take the puss off him and just get on with it. He just has to do the small jobs again that he wouldn’t have dreamt of doing five years ago. Hard luck, like. Build a bridge and get over it. God, Denis hates that phrase. He’s some worker, though, I have to give him that. He just pretends there’s no crèche now, we can’t really talk about it. He doesn’t mind the money shoring us up, though. God, like, I have to
pick
my
steps
around him these days. Why has he to be so sensitive? We haven’t even had sex in about four months. He better not get any ideas about having a look around for himself. I’ll cut it off of him. I’ll cut it. Clean. Off.

The only thing pissing me off now is that little Nuala bitch. Like, if you saw her, the way she stomps around, acting like she owns the place. I caught her rotten the other week, hissing into a child’s face. Just eat it, just eat it, just
eat
it, she was saying in a vicious little whisper, with a spoon of food pushed up against the kid’s closed mouth. Jesus, she has a poisonous little temper on her. I pulled her on it and she was as bold as brass about it. What, she said, what am I meant to do? She wouldn’t bloody eat her bloody lunch. Are we meant to let them get malnourished? I told her to never do it again and I was making a note of it and she wanted to know where was the note going to be kept, could she have a copy of the note, what was it going to say, who else was going to see it … For a finish I had to say, look, there’ll be no note this time, but don’t dream of being nasty to a child like that again. So she bested me. Jesus, she makes my blood boil. She had some comment up on her Facebook page one Sunday night a few months ago about going to work the next day, and my friend Liz saw it, something like OMG, sooo hung over, have to go wiping shitty arses all day tomorrow, and she must have gotten nervous because Liz says she took it down again straight away. I’ve been checking all their
Facebooks regularly ever since. They all know well, but they can’t very well start blocking me now. Little witches.

WHEN DENIS
was really quiet he still went off in his van every day. I didn’t ask him where he was going. He was checking things out, he said. One day I asked him to put in some extra sockets in the kitchen and the nursery and he huffed and puffed and ummed and aahed about it. Can you imagine that? Oh, I said, Jesus, sorry, I thought you’d be delighted with the work! I was bitchy, I admit. Denis can be wicked when he wants. His father was a horrible bollocks; I’d say he gave Denis an awful time growing up. But wait till I tell you, that little bitch flounced in for her break and smoked a fag right outside the patio door, right beside where Denis was putting in a socket and I swear to God I saw the dirty prick looking up along her legs with his tongue hanging out like a dog on heat. And she wearing a little denim mini, which I specifically told her not to wear in work. Oh, it’s so
hot
, she goes. Can I not just wear it
this
week? I also specifically told her not to be smoking fags on her break – one or two of the posh mummies have noses for smoke like bloodhounds. But she reckons she has some kind of right to smoke fags as well as everything else. I’ll tell you what she has no right to do, though: wag her little arse in my husband’s face!

You know the way when you start going with someone first, and you don’t really mind if there’s a bit of a smell off them sometimes? Like, I used to think Den’s BO was sexy, because it meant he’d been doing physical work and was strong and manly. There’s something about that, like, it’s scientifically proven that women are attracted to men’s body odours when they’re in the first flushes of fancying a fella. But I’ll tell you one thing – it soon wears off. Sweat is fine when it’s fresh, on lovely hard muscle,
but when it’s dripping off a big flabby man-boob or dried into a filthy T-shirt it’s a different thing altogether. When BO is just there because someone would rather sit on their arse watching soccer matches than have a two-minute shower, it’s just repulsive. Although I suppose it was a bit lousy how I reacted the last time Denis tried it on with me.
Get your big sweaty arse away from me
. That
was
a bit harsh, thinking about it. He looked really hurt. He went off downstairs and put on the telly and watched his
Sopranos
DVDs for hours. I wonder if he cried? I think he thinks he’s a bit like Tony Soprano.

I HAD
a dream one night last week. Denis took Nuala for a spin in his van. I saw him stopping at the end of the cul-de-sac for her. I followed them down the road. I caught up with them in the car park outside the church. I crept up to the window of the van and looked in and they were in the back. She was straddling him with her little denim mini bunched up around her middle. The van doors were locked. I was shouting and screaming and slapping my open hands against the glass. It was like I wasn’t there; they just stayed doing it. I could see right up Denis’s hairy nose. He was lying on his back. He raised his head and looked straight at me and smiled. She turned around and smiled as well. Her teeth were small and sharp. The door suddenly gave way and I realized I had a hose in my hand. The hose streamed fire. I pointed it at them and they caught fire. I pushed the door closed and listened to them burning and screaming. When I woke up and realized I was dreaming I didn’t feel that sick relief that usually accompanies waking from a horrible dream. I actually felt a bit disappointed. Jesus. What kind of a weird bitch am I?

Lloyd

I KIND OF
thought actually that Trevor was gone completely mental when he called up here a few weeks ago. Like, why would he not text or email or Facebook? What’s with all the reality, I thought. Does he not know he’s a million times cooler in virtual form? God, he’s misshapen. He wanted me to help him to
kidnap
a
kid
. I thought he was pitching something to me, some concept or something, some angle to keep the Dryffids guessing in Warlock Universe – like the thing he thought of last year where we hacked into their harems and stole all their girls (and boys in Ming’s case) and totally screwed up the spec of all their sex slaves and made them into fat animal-headed creatures and wiped out millions of their cred points. But he wanted me to actually swipe a
living
child with him: he was going deep undercover as a goddamn
Montessori teacher
in some nursery or something and all I was meant to have to do was drive up, he’d hand over the kid and I’d keep him for like, a night or some shit.

Mom was here like three weeks ago. I let her in this time. She saw my bong. I watched her for ages while she glanced at it, again and again. I knew she knew what it was. She was alive in the sixties, for fuck’s sake. I hadn’t left it out on purpose, but this apartment is so goddamn small that shit just piles up everywhere and you lose your ergonomic perspective. The bong was torturing her. I saw beads of sweat lining themselves up along the skin between her nose and her upper lip. What’s that part of the body called? I can never remember. I started to really enjoy myself as her initial discomfort turned to pain and the pain wrote its signature across her stupid face. And I wondered what part of her was in me. Then I remembered. Every part. As she left she said please, Lloyd, please … and I said what, Mom? Please what? And I raised my eyebrows and half-smiled in a mock pleasantness that I know for a fact creeps her right out. Creeps
me
right out.

Just take care. I … I …

And she turned and scurried away, like a little white mouse, down the communal stairs and back to her terrified, dipsomaniac life.

MY DAD
fucked off when I was a kid. I think he just couldn’t stand to look at her any more. I remember the last time I ever saw him. He looked different, wearing a T-shirt and jeans and a jacket with the collar turned up. I remember thinking he looked really cool. He kissed me on the top of my head and said love you, kiddo. I didn’t say anything back, just stood looking at him from the hallway, wondering why my mother was taking giant breaths and covering her face with one hand while pulling at my dad’s arm with the other. Mom told me some bullshit story about how he had to go and do important work for the government to fix the
hole in the ozone layer. I made myself believe that for years, until I overheard her on the phone to one of her mental-case friends, talking about him. He’d had another kid with another woman. A boy. I started to grind my teeth that night, and didn’t stop for years, till finally I ground through to a nerve and the pain made me pass out.

I know now that all that shit was a series of tests I’d set myself. I think I failed some of them, that’s why I’m still groping around in the dark.

I DREAMT I
killed the kid. That kind of fucked things up, I can tell you. And not in the way you might think. I didn’t mean it; I only wanted to see how far I’d go before I made myself sick and stopped. Then I woke up and the kid was standing up looking at me over the edge of the travel cot with his big scared eyes and I shouted
thank fuck
and frightened the crap out of him, literally. But being a solipsist, I know the danger of crossing boundaries in the dream dimension. It’s a dream precedent; I know now it’s an actual possibility. It’s something my inner warrior wants to do and is not able to, being bound by the strictures of this false human reality. I still won’t allow myself to be fully immersed in the truth: I am alone in the universe; the universe is created by me and for me and nothing exists outside of my consciousness. I have to explore the edges of myself. I have to learn more before I can break through the barrier. I have to not care about the feelings I ascribe to my creations. Why did I do this to myself, cripple myself with conscience? It must have some meaning, the fact that I
worry
about doing certain things, when I know that nothing has any consequence outside of me. It’s another test I’ve set myself, obviously. But I don’t know how to pass it – am I overcoming an
obstacle by giving in to my urges to destroy, or by resisting them? What do I want from myself? Why am I so unknowable?