Read Online The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan - Free Book Online Page A

that place, Mother says. She thought she’d be right swanky!
    Dorothy asked me to paint her window sills last week. I came on Saturday with white paint and a brush. I brought a flat-head screwdriver to open the tin. That’s not emulsion, she screechedat me. You need emulsion . I imagined myself plunging the screwdriver into one of her milky eyes. Would she die straight away, I wonder? Maybe she’d spin and scream and claw at the protruding screwdriver. A fine mist of blood would spray in a widening arc as she spun. The blood would be pink, full of oxygen. That girl might run down to see what was going on. Dorothy would have finished gurning by then. You killed her, she’d say. I had to, I’d tell her. She wasn’t really a human. She was a vampire. Dorothy would explode into dust, then. And that girl would rush into my arms.
    I FEEL a pain in my lower back lately, if I stand still for too long. The pain travels around to the front sometimes. It could be my kidneys failing, shutting down, stopping. It could be testicular cancer, too. The pain from that often manifests in disparate body parts; it can travel down your leg, up your spine, into your stomach. I could be riddled with tumours. I probably am. I definitely have skin cancer. Mother never used sun block on me when I was a child. She murdered me when I was a child by giving me skin cancer. A slow, undetectable murder, a pre-emptive strike, a perfect crime. She’s a genius, the way she makes evil seem so normal. She can be evil while making a cake, without even blinking. She flaps around in a cloud of flour so that her sharp old head seems to float, disembodied, above it, and says things like: What were you doing for so long in the bathroom? Or: Dorothy’s son is a captain in the army now, you know. Or: Who ever heard of a young man with a certificate in Montessori teaching? Or: You’re gone as fat as a fool.
    Sometimes I just catch a glimpse of her black, forked tongue as it flicks back in. I wonder if she knows I’ve seen it. I think she thinks I see it but don’t believe it to be real. I think she thinksI think I’m going mad. She’s trying to drive me mad. These creatures feed on madness, obviously. Dorothy is one as well. I could easily just kill them both, but I need a way of making sure everyone knows what they are before I move against them. If I just kill them, I’ll be sent away to prison, or to the Central Mental Hospital in Dundrum if I plead insanity. If I kill them and expose them for what they are, I’ll be a hero. They smell the same; they look more or less the same; they are concomitant in evil. I’m going to have to take that child from the girl who lives near Dorothy. Lloyd will help me. I won’t let Lloyd hurt him or anything. We probably will have to put some marks on him, though. Then I’ll kill Mother and Dorothy and tell everyone that I apprehended them just as they were about to sacrifice the child. They’re witches, I’ll say. They’ve held me prisoner with a spell since I was a baby. Don’t touch their bodies, I’ll say, they may not be really dead. The authorities might require my services as a consultant. I am probably the only living soul who knows how to spot these creatures and deal with them.
    SOMETIMES I sit and think for hours about things. And then I fall into a sort of a reverie. After the reverie abates, I don’t remember what I was thinking about before it, I just know that I was thinking too hard. My head pounds dully. It happened last evening, while I was sitting on the couch, watching through the kitchen door as Mother baked a cake. After it, I was slumped forward. My head was almost resting on my knees. Judge Judy was nearly over. Mother was shaking me. I had a strange picture in my head of Mother with a forked snake’s tongue. Trevor, Trevor, oh Trevor, she was saying as she shook me awake. Her eyes were wet with tears. I’m okay, Mother, I told her. You’re not, she said,you’re not okay at all. We’ll