Let the Great World Spin Read Free Page A

out in a grin that seemed to pain her. “Come here.” She kissed us both on the cheek, tapped our bottoms. “Now run along.” We slipped out of our father’s old clothes, left them puddled on the floor.
    Later that night we heard the clang of the coat hangers as she hung and rehung the suits.
    Over the years there were the usual tantrums and bloody noses and broken rocking- horse heads, and our mother had to deal with the whispers of the neighbors, sometimes even the attentions of local widowers, but for the most part things stretched comfortably in front of us: calm, open, a sweep of sandy gray.
    Corrigan and I shared a bedroom that looked out to the water. Quietly it happened, I still don’t recall how: he, the younger one by two years, took control of the top bunk. He slept on his stomach with a view out the window to the dark, reciting his prayers—he called them his slumber verses—in quick, sharp rhythms. They were his own incantations, mostly indecipherable to me, with odd little cackles of laughter and long sighs. The closer he got to sleep the more rhythmic the prayers got, a sort of jazz, though sometimes in the middle of it all I could hear him curse, and they’d be lifted away from the sacred. I knew the Catholic hit parade—the Our Father, the Hail Mary—but that was all. I was a raw, quiet child, and God was already a bore to me. I kicked the bottom of Corrigan’s bed and he fell silent awhile, but then started up again. Sometimes I woke in the morning and he was alongside me, arm draped over my shoulder, his chest rising and falling as he whispered his prayers.
    I’d turn to him. “Ah, Jesus, Corr, shut up.”
    My brother was light- skinned, dark- haired, blue- eyed. He was the type of child everyone smiled at. He could look at you and draw you out.

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    People fell for him. On the street, women ruffled his hair. Workingmen punched him gently on the shoulder. He had no idea that his presence sustained people, made them happy, drew out their improbable yearn-ings—he just plowed along, oblivious.
    I woke one night, when I was eleven, to a cold blast of air moving over me. I stumbled to the window but it was closed. I reached for the light and the room burned quickly yellow. A shape was bent over in the middle of the room.
    “Corr?”
    The weather still rolled off his body. His cheeks were red. A little damp mist lay on his hair. He smelled of cigarettes. He put a finger to his lips for hush and climbed back up the wooden ladder.
    “Go to sleep,” he whispered from above. The smell of tobacco still lingered in the air.
    In the morning he jumped down from the bed, wearing his heavy anorak over his pajamas. Shivering, he opened the window and tapped the sand from his shoes off the sill, into the garden below.
    “Where’d you go?”
    “Just along by the water,” he said.
    “Were you smoking?”
    He looked away, rubbed his arms warm. “No.”
    “You’re not supposed to smoke, y’know.”
    “I didn’t smoke,” he said.
    Later that morning our mother walked us to school, our leather satchels slung over our shoulders. An icy breeze cut along the streets.
    Down by the school gates she went to one knee, put her arms around us, adjusted our scarves, and kissed us, one after the other. When she stood to leave, her gaze was caught by something on the other side of the road, by the railings of the church: a dark form wrapped in a large red blanket.
    The man raised a hand in salute. Corrigan waved back.
    There were plenty of old drunks around Ringsend, but my mother seemed taken by the sight, and for a moment it struck me that there might be some secret there.
    “Who’s that, Mum?” I asked.
    “Run along,” she said. “We’ll sort it out after school.”
    My brother walked beside me, silent.
    “Who is it, Corrie?” I thumped him. “Who is it?”

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