Read The Spinning Heart for Free Online Page B

wears that horrible, watery, flowery old-lady perfume. It smells like somebody took a bottle of okay perfume and poured out half the bottle and filled it up again with pee and then sprayed it all over her. She tries to talk to me about Daddy. I feel like screaming like a child at her to mind her own business, to leave me alone, to leave Daddy alone. When I don’t engage she starts on about cards. Bridge. Forty-five. Whist. Jesus.
    SEANIE CALLED UP last week. Hello Tom, he said to Daddy. Daddy only nodded at him, but he stopped mowing and followed him with his eyes up to the door. He came in with a bag of crappy plastic shit for Dylan. I let him stay for five minutes. Dylan smiled at him, the little turncoat. Daddy thinks Seanieis great, underneath it all. Would ye not try to make it up, love, he says. 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. Make it up? Make it up? We didn’t have a row; I scream at poor Daddy, he’s just useless, useless, useless . All he’s good for is drinking and shagging floozies . Daddy starts looking at the ceiling and humming and scratching his chin. He tries to block my shrill, crazy voice from his poor old ears. He tries to keep my horrible words out. They settle around his heart and weigh it down. His blood quickens. His cheeks turn a livid purple.
    Little star, my name means. Some star I am. I’m not sure if Seanie is even Dylan’s father. Imagine if Daddy knew that! I had sex with my boss, George, just once. The horny old bastard brought us all out to celebrate his firm’s thirtieth year. He said he was having a special do, just for us. Really, he was having a special do for himself, hoping and praying that if one of us girls got pissed enough, we’d start to think he was more debonair than wrinkled, more witty than embarrassing. I shouldn’t ever drink. The old biddies all went home early; the apprentices took it easy of course, the cute arses – and I drank sticky-sweet fake champagne and laughed at every inane thing the creepy old pervert said. Two days later when I finally got over the nausea Hillary said that it was so obvious we were going to shag when he offered to share a taxi home with me. He got all business like afterwards, and wouldn’t meet my eye. His willy was tiny, his balls were wrinkled and uneven. When I told Hillary that, she nearly choked on her rice cake. Dylan looks like nobody except my father. Thank God, thank God; he’s the absolute image of Daddy.
    George charged a flat rate of four grand for conveyancing all through the maddest part of the property boom. If you addedup the hours of work for the average house purchase, and multiplied by our hourly rate, he could have made a good profit if he charged seven hundred. He never looked at those files, we did everything. George wasn’t even the most expensive. A guy rang one day in a panic; the builders of some crappy estate had put his house back on the market. For some reason, George had his file in his office. The contracts hadn’t been sent back in time, the builders were backing out of the original deal and wanted another ten thousand to go ahead. He sounded young. His voice was cracking and shaking. George was in court. The guy had to get the promise of ten grand off the Credit Union in the end. Those builders were chancing their arm, but I couldn’t say that. I know now what I should have told him: tell the builders to piss off, stay in your flat with your girlfriend, wait two or three years and buy the same house for half the price. Hopefully he at least has other humans in his estate.
    MY HEAD was all over the place. That’s one phrase that I detest. It’s a miserable excuse for doing miserable things. What does it even mean? I hear the scumbags saying it all the time in work, through George’s door: Aw, my head was all over the place, I didn’t mean to hit him with the iron bar,