Spinners

The first time he saw a spinner; the sky had been blue grey, tinged with orange on the street corners. For two days he’d walked along the whisked beach, passed the intense holidaymakers outside their shivering chalets and walked up and down every street, a two-stool pub in almost every second front room, optimistic signs for vacancies waving at him; sticks of rock and Belleek souvenirs glinting from shop windows.

His Aunt Bridget had told to stay out of the slot machine places and she would bring him to the pictures on Thursday or earlier if it rained.

“It’s a carnival in a field,” he persuaded himself. “Just because you could possibly gamble in there, doesn’t make it a slot machine place.”

He owned a dozen machines now. At big English resorts people wored for him. But it was Maximus he took with him to Donegal. The fair ground was still tucked behind the parade of shops. It had a roof now and a concrete floor. The toilets were a lot more than a hole in the ground, but the electricity was still generated by a smoky diesel monster.

He had no trouble getting a stall. Though she was long dead, his aunt’s old house was still taking guests and he asked for his childhood room. He was remembered by some of the other stallholders, and he knew others from English sites. But he kept to himself. He spent his mornings walking on the beach and the rest of the day at his stall. He stood in the background, watching, as country boys threw balls at coconuts or shot air rifles at moving targets to impress themselves or their country girlfriends. Something about them made him hope he would never behave like.

He edged closer to the penny slide stall and almost had a go. He was pushed by a gang of older boys he’d seen earlier stalking the beach for girls sunbathing. He escaped to the end of the field. Here were the less busy stalls, hopeful local women with home knitted jumpers and a brave foreigner with carved wooden trinket boxes.

He enjoyed being back. It filled him with a moody glow and a slight ache for his unspent youth. Business was mixed. The new roof encouraged people in when it was cold but put them off when the sun shone. There were more day-trippers. Bus loads of pensioners one day and Americans the next. There was even a party of school children supposedly doing a project on fairground life. Most of them were more interested in sampling than understanding and the cheekier ones asked him to mind their clipboards while they went off looking for adventures.

One stall attracted a larger crowd than the rest and he went up close to understand what was happening. A small but heavy man with huge hands was holding tiny thimblefuls of paint. He was encouraging people to pour drops of the different colours onto a sheet of white card in a frame. Ernest wanted to, instantly. People were looking dubious, it was a trick, it would cost money, something would happen.

Ernest picked the blue and the red filled thimbles and dribbled them out over the white. Frightened immediately that he had done a terrible thing in destroying this lovely clean card. But the man smiled and thanked him and made him stand to one side. Then he put the frame in the centre of something shaped like half a big oil drum. The inside surface a multicoloured cosmos; the work of a thousand painters having shaken the dripping excesses from their brushes.

One youth was taking his school project more seriously. Ernest watched him move slowly round the fairground, asking questions of each stallholder, ticking his clipboard with each answer before moving on. A new page started for each stall. When it was Ernest’s turn the boy stood for several minutes examining the stall without speaking. He peered at the sample pictures tacked to the canvas sides and laid under glass on the table. His long stare at Ernest had him rearranging the paint containers  into their place on the spectrum.

‘My name is William,’ he said. ‘I’m going to ask you some questions.’ His voice was factual and clipped. But when he’d finished asking about place of origin and working life; instead of moving on, he stood and watched Ernest as he encouraged people to have a go at creating their unique picture.

‘Do you want to try one?’ Ernest asked William during a quiet period, ‘On the house.’

Then the man pressed a button and the card started to spin and Ernest’s blue and red drops melted into a dark blur that spread out to the edges and spun off to join the thousands of drops that had gone before.

After a minute or so, during which time the man shouted to the crowd above the whirr of the machine about Yeats and Picasso and other famous artists, he switched it off. Ernest watched the blur slow to a stop, and reveal itself as a work of art. The man lifted the card out and touched the paint and invited the disbelieving to test its dryness, to examine its uniqueness and most of all to imagine it framed on the wall above their mantelpiece.

But the people drifted away; too sensible for such extravagance or thinking a ride on the chair-o-planes would be more exciting. Ernest waited to be given it. He had created art, it was his, and if he had to pay, he would.

The man reminded him of one of his aunt’s matinee idols, all sweet and gentle in one film and rough and grimy in the next. Except he was both at the same time. He put the card into a golden frame and handed it to Ernest.

‘A shilling,’ he said, ‘and it’s yours.’

He went back to his aunt’s guest house, carrying the prize, avoiding the gang of rough boys in case they took it from him.

‘Thank you,’ clipboard clutching William said, ‘but no. The process is bogus. It’s not art. It’s cacophony; like a monkey playing the piano. There’s as much meaning in it as in the random smatterings of the dead flies on the front of the bus that brought me here today.’

He spoke in a cold flat monotone, more like a speaking machine than a person. But he wasn’t finished.

‘However, I am fascinated by you as a specimen. I’m going to be a psychologist. Studying people’s mistakes gives me great satisfaction. It’s obvious from the way you answered my questions that yours is a loveless life. You’re closer to this machine than to any human being alive. You’re very interesting,’ he said, and then he was gone.

Ernest shared a room with his aunt. He went to bed early while she stayed talking to the paying guests and waited until he was asleep. When the pubs closed his parents came in, but that night was the first time he heard them.

‘I hope he was no trouble,’ his father said. ‘None at all,’ Aunt Bridget replied, ‘he’s enjoying his holiday and so should you.’

He turned towards the wall when his aunt came to bed. He was glad she didn’t turn on the light because she would know he wasn’t asleep. This had never happened to him. Something had changed. Some sort of secret had been shared with him, but so secretly, that he didn’t know what it was.

It was related to the painting, but he didn’t know how. He listened to the rustle of his aunt’s dress being returned to the wardrobe and the squeak of the door as she closed it. He fell asleep thinking of himself standing very near the machine and when the man pressed the button he was covered from head to foot in drops of paint. He thought it was funny and smiled as he drifted off.

William moved to the next stall and then on to those remaining and out into the street. He could dismiss the boy’s words as just cheek but he’d heard people say: “out of the mouths of innocents.” Perhaps he should walk on the beach and get some air free of the diesel generator's fumes and the smell of frying. But instead, he swept everything off the counter and dropped the tarpaulin cover over the front. From the outside the stall would look closed. He unplugged the lights and sat on his coat to think. This was why he had come to Donegal. Returning to the scene of the crime. This was the place to examine his life: to assess it usefulness, perhaps to see if it was still worth living it.  

Except at meal and bedtimes, no one cared that he was missing all day. He went off each morning while his parents slept late, clutching the money his aunt gave him along with her warning about gambling. Except for the mornings when the fairground was closed, and Thursday, when it rained and he was taken to the pictures in the afternoon; he spent the week watching the machine performing. He stood by the stall and waited for people to step forward to drop paint onto the white card, and then to stand back while the machine was spinning out its message.

 ‘Maximus,’ the man called it, because it went so fast and because it tormented his life. It was mostly girls who took part and if not it was girls who carried the pictures away after their boyfriend, briefly fascinated, manfully handed over their embarrassing creation.

He sat in the dark and wept for his wasted years, surrounded by the noise of holidaymakers having a good time, and the calling stallholders vying with other to attract more customers. He fell asleep on the floor inside his stall, sobbing, and when he woke up, the security guard was just leaving with the woman who owned the doughnut van. They were discussing something about a missing teenager.

He plugged in his lights and lifted the tarpaulin front, the blank canvas faces of the other stalls facing him out of the gloom, seemed to be peering at him, his top half illuminated by the eerie naked bulbs. He examined each sample pictures as he pinned them back up. He’d spent more than half his life searching them for clues. It had all been a waste.

On the Tuesday Ernest had stood well away from Maximus. But by Wednesday he was close enough to touch it. The man paid him no mind and by Thursday had begun to speak when they were alone as if he had always been there. The man cursed people who looked interested and then moved on. He criticised the weather, the other stallholders, the fairground, and his location in it. But his worst invective was saved for the Irish people, who were mean or sly or stupid or not interested in art.

Ernest put up with the man’s chatter for the sake of the paintings. Just as Maximus was slowing down, he darted forward to lean in and stare at each work as it slowed, hoping it would be to him that it released its meaning. And if he wasn’t able to see the meaning in this picture, by learning their language he soon would, unless they were part of a jigsaw and he would only understand when it was complete and ….... He didn’t know what the nature of the message would be. What it would relate to, his future perhaps, something about his parents, how long he was going to live, would it be from god or the devil. But for now, he had to watch and trust that Maximus, the paint, and the spinning, were working together to prepare him for their secrets.

He wanted a dramatic gesture, a magnificent final throw of the dice, grand enough to validate the years he might have wasted. It would all be flipped so it became clear; not to him, but to those who witnessed or examined whatever they found in the morning. Max would be central, they were bound together and together they could make the final all-revealing work. But no paint, not this time, he would use himself; he would be the colours, and whatever was produced would be the answer. He would be a part of it. The onlookers would peer at the picture and understand.

Although the man sounded Scottish, his father had been from the fishing village of Killybegs, just a few miles up the coast. He came to Donegal every year for the summer in the hope that his father’s people would recognise him. But they hadn’t, so far. They had other children and that was enough. They didn’t need him. But he came back each summer in hope, sacrificing better pitches in the resorts in Wales and England. Ernest half listened, but mainly he was waiting for the next random drops, Max’s aggressive whirr, and the hope of a message.

He knew he had to be naked and stripped off. A supplier had given him some samples of extra good quality card and he chose an onionskin sheet. He would have difficulty reaching the switch and put on a coat to go for the communal sweeping brush. He felt elated walking back to his little stall in the eerie light. A gentle rain was falling on the tin roof which reminded him of applause and he bowed in three directions, before squatting down in his place on the clean card in the centre of his machine.

By the end of the week he didn’t want to go home. At Sunday dinner he announced that he would like to stay for another week. His parents looked at him and then at his aunt. There was a hint of questioning on their faces. Gossip must have been carried to Bridget about him hanging around the stall occupied by the Cosmic Art man, as he called.

‘The fair closes to-night,’ she said. ‘They’ll all be gone first thing in the morning. Come next year for the whole season.

He tried a few positions for his arms, but after so many years he knew enough about centrifugal force to know that they would end up at right angles to his body as soon as he lost consciousness. He stretched the brush handle to the switch, pressed and dropped the pole, his hands clasping his shins as tightly as he could, while Maximus hesitated.

How he survived those nine months he never knew. His only consolation were the few pictures he’d bought cheaply when people who had agreed to buy reneged after seeing what they’d produced. Every night before going to bed he took one out and looked at it, examining each extended dried dribble for a hint of something he could recognise. He wrote regularly to Aunt Bridget, committing them both to his return. And despite his doubts his parents handed him the fare at the end of the school year.

Maximus finally whirred into life, tearing the card and burning the soles of his feet as it spun. The pain moving him off his heals and pitching his spinning-self onto the concrete floor that had been a wet field when he first walked on it.

The Cosmic Art man made Ernest his assistant the following summer. He was allowed to fill the thimbles and carefully hand them to those having a go. By the next year he was instructing people to stand well back and mind the lady’s pretty dress and giving himself unrestricted access to any message emerging from the picture as it slowed to a stop. 

His shoulder hurt and his feet were on fire, and he wanted to cry again. In his fall he had somehow caused the power to fail.

‘I thought you might do something silly,’ a voice said to him out of the darkness. It sounded like the schoolboy William. ‘I spent the evening thinking about your case and came back to give you my conclusions. When I saw your stall was closed I hid in the toilet knowing you would come back eventually.’

But Ernest wanted to be in charge. He wished the Cosmic Art man would go off for a drink and not come back. And he obliged one afternoon, although it was late evening when the Garda came to tell his aunt.

‘The show will have to go on,’ Ernest said, and the Garda said:

‘No doubt his relations will turn up to claim the machinery.’

 His feet were too sore to walk on. William helped him to crawl back into the stall. Then the boy broke into the adjoining stall and took the bucket of water they used to fill plastic bags for the goldfish prizes for a rigged gamble and put Ernest’s burns into the refreshing liquid.

William covered his bare shoulders with his jacket, and using his own packet of tissues, wiped the man’s tears. Then he stood beside him and looked at him more gently.

The body went back to Scotland and Maximus became Ernest’s when no one claimed it.

‘I’m not just an analyst of human behaviour,’ William said, ‘I’m a healer as well.’

The pain in Ernest’s feet and the humiliation of sitting almost naked in the cold eerie light pressed in on him from all sides, and yet he felt unbelievably better.

A version of this story was first published by Tees Valley Writer.

 “Spinners created a surreal world. Its alternation of present and past builds up to a climax which is outside our normal experience and yet [is] totally convincing in terms of the world the writer has created.” Pat Barker