John the Revelator (11 page)

‘Your dinner's in the oven,' she said, her speech slow and deliberate. I hung my jacket on the back of a chair.

‘You all right?'

Something flickered in her eyes. I couldn't read its meaning. She rubbed her face.

‘I was at the doctor's for a check-up.'

‘How'd that go?'

She looked away.

‘The usual. Give up the fags. Eat more fruit.'

I dipped my chin, indicating the bottle.

‘Thought you were a Pioneer.'

‘I was. I recovered.'

She took a mouthful from her glass and coughed.

‘Have one with me, why don't you?'

Her chair scraped the floor as she got up and took a glass from the draining board and tipped whiskey into it. She placed the drink before me like a dare.

‘Go on,' she said. ‘Don't tell me you never broke your pledge. I can smell the beer off you from here.'

I accepted the glass and took a sip, aware of her eyes on me. Uncharted territory. Whiskey burned all the way down to my stomach. She offered me one of her cigarettes. Again I wavered.

‘Oh take one ower that,' she snapped. ‘And sit down for heaven's sake. You're making me nervous standing there.'

I held my hair back from the candle's flame and lit the cigarette. My mother gazed out the window and contemplated whatever was out there for a few moments. When she spoke again her voice had softened.

‘I was just thinking about when I first went travelling.'

I took a chair and sipped the whiskey. I liked the warm feeling in my stomach, harsh but somewhat comforting. Candle shadows threw ju-jitsu shapes on the walls.

‘Where?' I said.

‘England. Scotland. I was following a man.'

I looked at the table, a bit embarrassed. She took a drag of smoke and chortled through her nose.

‘A musician, of all things,' She shook her head, close to smiling. ‘We met at one of the demonstrations they used to have at Ballo harbour when they were going to build a power plant or something down there. It was a kind of festival.'

The way she spoke was like I wasn't there. She gazed out at the dim shadows of the trees.

‘His band was camped out down the prom that night,' she said. ‘They sat up all hours round a fire playing music like a bunch of gypos. I stayed listening until the sun came up. I got into trouble for being out so late, but I didn't care. I was a grown woman. My brothers left me to stop home and mind our mother and father, like an old spinster. But that night put a longing on me. There must have been a bit of tinker in my blood. The night before they were due to go back to England, they asked me to come away with them. I said I would. I'd never been out of the county in my life.'

‘And did you?'

‘I did, faith.'

She looked at the window again, as if reading something in the condensation there.

‘We travelled all over England that summer. When we had a bit of money we stayed in B&Bs. If we were stuck, we'd all bunk down in the van, sleeping on big squares of foam rubber. Or if the weather was fine, we camped out.'

She paused to lift the bottle and top up our glasses, dribbling some on the table. She wiped the spillage with the sleeve of her cardigan.

‘They were some crowd, all right. Only young lads. The curse of being happy, John, is you never realise it at the time. As soon as you do, it's over.'

She swirled the glass, as though trying to decipher the liquid's quiddity, and knocked back a mouthful like it was water.

‘Come the end of the summer, we drove all the way up to the highlands. His people owned a bit of a farm near this little village in the Northeast. He came from money I think.'

‘What was his name?'

‘Never you mind.'

She looked out from under her eyebrows and hefted a sigh.

‘You were named after an old hymn he taught me. You wouldn't sleep as a baby. One night there was a storm warning on the radio, and I got frightened, and I sang to comfort you.'

‘What was the song?'

‘John the Revelator.'

She took a sip of whiskey, her face a scowl of concentration. And she began to sing.

‘
Who's that a-writing? John the Revelator.
'

Her voice was throaty and hoarse, but strong.

John the Revelator wrote the book of the seven seals!

She wiped her mouth with her sleeve and took a drink.

‘It worked,' she said. ‘It sent you off to sleep. So I named you John.'

She stubbed out her cigarette in the overflowing ashtray.

‘The plan was to set up camp in the farmhouse and make a record of his songs. He was handy with the equipment. Used to take amplifiers apart and put them back together again using nothing but pliers and a soldering iron and a roll of sticky tape.'

She shook a fresh cigarette from the box and lit it.

‘We travelled through the hilly country. Nothing only mountains and forests and whiskey distilleries. It was very near the coast. He said it was a holy place and in the old days people settled there because of the soil. The land was more fertile than any other part of the country. The cabbages were famous, big as bushes.

‘It was still bright at ten o'clock the night we arrived. The farm looked like the last place God made. There was a long lane from the main road up to a big stone house and a few barns and a haggart. The main building had an old potbelly stove and a black-and-white television set, but the reception was bad because of the mountains.

‘They set up the gear in one of the barns, and the boys would play all night and then sleep late. I was in charge of the cooking. Someone would hit off in the van and come back with crates of drink. There was a lot of drinking. But after a few weeks the boys started to get bored, stuck in the back of beyond, living on top of one another. The drink didn't help. There were rows. And he was taking these pills that kept him awake so as he could work. The record, that's all he talked about.

‘Some of the boys wanted to go back on the road and make money, but he was hell bent on finishing what he started. The pills and the drink were making him sick. He lost about a stone in weight, and there wasn't a pick on him in the first place.

‘Then the stove packed in, and we ran out of firewood and started using the furniture for kindling. The boys lit out, one by one, back to Glasgow or London. So now it was just him and me and one or two stragglers. They'd go into the village every couple of days and make a few shillings busking or doing odd jobs. But the whole thing was starting to come apart. He got very strange.'

Her hair fell in her face. She tucked the stray strands behind her ears.

‘Went into himself a-kinda. And one night he saw some programme on the telly and it gave him nightmares.'

‘Nightmares?'

‘Aye.'

‘Like the ones I had?'

She stared at me. Her pupils were huge.

‘His nerves went. He woke me up one night saying there was going to be a nuclear war that would wipe out most of the people on earth and those of us who were left would only be able to buy food or trade if we had a mark on our hands or foreheads. He said it was all foretold in the Bible, if you knew where to look.

‘That was the last straw for the stragglers. They said they got into music to escape all that tripe. One night when he was out in the barn with the headphones on, I caught the last two lads loading gear into the van. They asked me to come with them, but I wouldn't.'

‘Why not?'

‘I just couldn't. I thought things would get better when the spring came. But they didn't. They only got worse. He tore up all these rubbish sacks and hung them over the windows. He said the RAF Harriers flying overhead were sent from a base to spy on us because we knew the truth. That the government was in the employment of the AntiChrist. Then he changed his mind and said the pilots of the planes were angels sent to watch over us. Then he decided the Third World War had already happened and the planes were remote controlled and they had government people on board, and they would just keep on refuelling over the earth until it was safe to land again. He warned me not to leave the farm or I couldn't come back cos I'd be poisoned from the radiation.'

‘And you believed him?'

‘I didn't know what to believe. When you're locked up with a sick person, John, you lose your grip on what's real. It's like wandering into a forest, and you stray so deep into the trees you lose your bearings. You don't know where to even start looking for a way back.

‘Anyway, one night he was so crooked from the want of sleep he accidentally wiped a whole reel, weeks of work, and he came in and started throwing things around. He upended the table and a glass broke and nearly sliced my bare foot open. When I told him to calm down he raised his hand as if to strike me. That's when I decided to leave. If not for myself, for the baby.

‘I was about ten weeks gone. I was afraid that when I started to show, he'd never let me leave. The state he was in, he would've thought I was going to give birth to Our Lord.'

She shivered a bit and pulled her cardigan tight around her shoulders.

‘When I realised the condition I was in, I packed my bag and waited for the right time to make a move. He passed out one night after working about three days straight, so I took what money there was and sneaked out the door and ran down the lane. My heart was pounding. I was trying not to breathe too hard in case I took in poisonous gases. I sniffed the air for smoke and looked up at the sky to see if the world was covered with clouds of ash. I didn't meet a soul for ages and I was starting to wonder if the whole world was dead or not. Then I saw a man coming up the road, and half his face was covered in a big purple rash. I couldn't stop staring at it. I asked him was it from the fallout, and he said, “No, love, I've had it my whole life, it's just a birthmark.”

‘I stayed in the village that night and next day I hitched a lift south. I worked in a market in Edinburgh for a few weeks. I thought about him the whole time, wondering if he'd come after me. To tell you the god's honest truth, I was angry when he didn't. And I got vexed with myself and swore I'd never put my trust in another man again.'

Her face looked like it might crack into a hundred pieces.

‘I saved my money until I had my fare home. When I arrived back, the door was shut in my face. Here I was showing up large after not sending word in months. I was afraid. I didn't know the first thing about childbearing. So I took a job as a maid in the hotel near the strand. That's where I met Phyllis Nagle. She was a quare old bird, but she was the only one who'd help me. I told her the fix I was in and she said she wouldn't see me stuck and found a caravan for me to rent. I worked until I was too far along to work any more. And when the time came, I had you. You were the savings of me.'

She stubbed out her cigarette and nodded, as if agreeing with herself.

‘When you have a child, John, something changes in you. You're never free of worry. But you're never lonely neither.'

By now it was dark outside. The moon was huge and red. I drained my glass.

‘Why are you telling me all this now?'

She pulled her cardigan tight.

‘Because you're old enough. And because none of us know how much time is left.'

She poured us both another shot.

‘When you get to my age, you have no more use for secrets.'

***

I reeled out into the night, Powers bottle in my hand, the old hymn burning in my mind and the road lurching like a funhouse floor. As soon as my mother had gone to bed I'd rung Jamey's house.

‘What's up?' he said.

‘Too wired to sleep. You around?'

He told me to meet him on the road into the village. He sounded drunk. Which made two of us.

Now it was way past midnight, maybe going on for two o'clock. As I walked, I sang what I could remember of my mother's song to keep from getting spooked. The full moon burned inside its field of weirdly hued concentric rings, suspended like a huge balloon tethered to the chapel spire. The light it cast was bright enough for me to see Jamey coming from half a mile away. He was carrying a sports bag. We halted yards from each other, like duellists about to draw.

Jamey's clothes were rumpled and his hair was out of control.

‘You look destroyed,' I said. ‘Where've you been?'

The expression on his face was close to sheepish.

‘I was trying to keep up with Gunter.'

Being able to hold his drink was a point of honour with Jamey. He rubbed his hollow cheeks and shook his head.

‘I heard some stuff, man,' he said. ‘Scary. Think I'm out of my depth with those boys.'

‘What kind of stuff?'

‘You'd be better off not knowing.'

I took a slug of whiskey and offered Jamey some.

‘Jesus,' he said. ‘Where'd you get that?'

‘My mother.'

‘Your mother is a great woman.'

He took a mouthful, raised the bottle in a toast and handed it back, then unzipped the sports bag and pulled out a battered-looking camcorder.

‘Found this in the Superstores.' He fiddled with the lens cap. ‘Secondhand, but it works.' He put the camera to his eye, panning over the fields. It felt like we were the first colonisers of some remote, lonely planet.

‘Let's walk,' he said. ‘I want to shoot some stuff for my film.'

Now he was a filmmaker.

‘It'll be a whatchamacallit,' he said. ‘A bio-pic. You can play Verlaine. I'll be Rimbaud. We'll call it
Merde à Dieu.
'

We wandered the outskirts of Kilcody for ages, Jamey filming anything he found interesting, which was everything, and when our feet got sore we stopped for a smoke, passing the whiskey back and forth until it was gone. The moonlight was so strong it felt like a tractor beam that might suck us right up off the earth. I stepped into the gripe to fling the empty bottle over a ditch and in the process got something on my runners. I stood stork-like on the road and hopped a bit. My laces were stained with grass juice. A tapioca-like substance was smeared all over the patterned rubber soles.