John the Revelator (14 page)

I tried to shake off the mood and get back to work.

When my bucket was full I lugged it to the top of the drill and dumped its contents into a blue plastic tray, and when that was full—three buckets did the job—I slotted a second tray on top. My backside was soggy from squatting in mashed fruit. My back ached and I had to keep changing posture to get any relief.

Pickers moved steadily down the drills, grubs working on a carcass. The plants dried out as the sun crawled up the sky's curvature. The first break was at eleven. Nicky's wife Greta brought the teapot and we all lined up with our mugs. I sat on my coat and ate my ploughman sandwiches and listened to the other pickers discuss the weather, and if it would hold, and if it rained what kind of rain would it be, because a shower would mean we'd wait in the haggart and drink tea until it passed and then get back to work, but anything heavier meant we'd be rained off altogether and have to come back another day. Nicky was always loath to let that happen; he had a harvest to bring in. No matter how dismal the downpour he'd stand in the doorway of the haggart and look off into the sky say, ‘I think it's clearing up, lads,' and a chorus of voices would assure him that no, he was seeing things, it was down for the day.

The other pickers were a motley lot. The Flynn twins were only nine or ten but could pick more buckets per day than I could manage in a week. I made a point of stacking my trays as far away from them as possible in order to minimise the humiliation. And there was Larry Mythen, a red-headed giant, six foot plus in his socks. They said he got violent when he was jarred and that he'd done time in gaol. I looked at his open face and gentle eyes and couldn't picture it. Then there was Carol Cassidy, tall and coltish, with sparkling eyes and long brown hair, skin-tight jeans tucked into her wellingtons. I was village-idiot smitten, but she only lasted a week before she found better things to do with her summer. And then there was Trigger Quigly, a squat little sparkplug of a man who sprayed spittle when he spoke. He seemed harmless enough, but all the women gave him a wide berth and said he was a dirty bugger.

After I'd eaten my sandwiches at break I swapped my bourbon creams for two cigarettes from a chap with a harelip and smoked them an inch at a time, carefully dousing the tips with spit and placing the butts in my shirt pocket.

The pickers filed back into the drills. Towards the last part of the day my mind wandered and I got careless, filling my bucket with hard white berries that hadn't ripened yet and soft mushy ones that came apart in balls of must.

Around five o'clock Nicky appeared on the headland to tally up the numbers in a ledger. He went through my trays plucking out the bad berries and asked me to take a bit more care in the quality-control department. We stacked the trays in the trailer for delivery to the fruit factory. It was hard work.

When I got home in the evenings I was fit for nothing but dinner and bed. My hands were permanently stained with grime and juice. I slept deep and dreamless and when the alarm went off I put my filthy clothes back on and packed my lunch and waited at the gate. Every morning I prayed for a rain-off. Two more weeks passed, and then the drills would yield only shrivelled kernels. Nicky Gibbons dropped round to the house with my cheque and told me it had been a pleasure and if I was interested he'd hired a bus to take us to the amusements at Ballo harbour for a day out and would I come. I told him that sounded like fun and he could count me in.

The morning the bus was due to take us to Ballo, another letter arrived for me. I stuffed it in my jacket and hurried to the crossroads. The regulars were barely recognisable in their clean T-shirts and pressed pants, faces scrubbed and hair washed. Their excitement was infectious. We boarded the bus, the younger kids already getting stuck into their sweets and bags of crisps, the rowdy ones horsing around in the back seats. As the bus pulled out, I opened Jamey's letter and began to read.

15 Fairview Crescent
Ballo Town

 

John,

I had this dream, this really trippy dream where I was in hell, then I woke up and I was in hell, dreaming. Anyway, the dream started with me in court. The judge passed sentence and the stenographer typed and the cops clapped me in irons and took me down into a sort of an ante-room and stripped me, and the gaoler came, a no-faced man with yellow fangs, and he pulled on a rubber glove, made a fist, ordered me to touch the floor and said, ‘Spread 'em like jam, son.' And when he was finished having his evil way with my innards the guards brought me to the showers, blasted me with hoses and powdered me with delousing powder and disinfectant and made me carry my kit around and around until we paused at a kind of vestibule and the gaoler said, ‘Read it and weep, son.'

I read it—
Abandon hope ye who enter here
—and we kept walking until we came to a door.

‘This is the hellovator,' said the gaoler. A computerised voice droned,
Going down.
The lift lurched and I watched the light above the door, counting off the levels, one to nine. There were yellow Post-Its stuck to each number, and the door opened at each floor.

 

1—
the virtuous pagans and unbaptised children
We saw feral brats rummaging in rubbish.

 

2—
the carnal

Leprous beggars in drag wriggling through the gutters, mewling for alms.

 

3—
the gluttonous
Jabba The Hut munching a moneyburger.

 

4—
the hoarders and the wasters
An amputee stuffed in a box in someone's basement, a stick of yellow chalk gripped between its teeth, scrawling
kill me
on the wood.

 

5—
the wrathful and the sullen
A television crew moving through empty rape rooms.

 

6—
the heretics
A pig walking upright through a shopping mall, the horrified shoppers recoiling.

 

And then, when we got to Level 7—
the bestial and the violent; the murderers and mongers of war; the suicides and sodomites, the blasphemers, perverts and usurers
—the gaoler said, ‘This is your floor. They're gonna love you here.'

We stepped into a gleaming corridor and the air went shrill with whistles. Beady eyes glared from the cells. In one cubicle a young fellow was taking blasts from an inhaler and trying to staunch bleeding from his you-know-where with wet toilet paper.

‘My first Penitentiary period,' said the kid.

We moved on. A snivelling little gom came along pushing a laundry cart full of yarns. He stopped, looked left and right, and said, ‘Story?'

‘What price?' the gaoler asked.

‘Half notten, boss,' the gom answered, so the gaoler put a coin in a slot in the gom's forehead, and the gom began to recite by rote.

‘This is about a fat boy called Roy Caulfield,' he said, ‘who on his first day inside, caught the eye of Paws O'Rourke. Paws took a fancy to this lovely little cutlet, but Roy made the mistake of putting up a fight, kicking and squealing and calling Paws dirty names. So Paws, he says, “If you're going to talk like a potty-mouth, we'll use you for one.” And they dragged the lad to the infirmary, strapped him into the dentist's chair, pulled every tooth from his head and fitted his jaws with a clamp. And for three days and three nights every man and jack on level seven mounted that dentist's chair and used the chap's gummy gob for a scumbag.'

The gom winked and gimped off with his cart.

The gaoler spat on his cigarette, and it hissed.

‘Come on,' he said. ‘You should meet the boss before I swipe you in.'

Wilting with the heat, we got back in the lift.

 

Going down.

 

Level 8—
the fraudulent and malicious, panderers and seducers, flatterers, simoniacs, fortune-tellers and diviners, hypocrites, thieves, evil counsellors, falsifiers: alchemists, counterfeiters and false witnesses
A politburo meeting.

 

Going down.

 

Level 9—
Mongers of compound fraud, the treacherous to kinsmen and to country, and to their guests and hosts and masters
The belly of hell.

 

Said the gaoler, ‘Warden's been expecting.'

But I knew already, by the smell: Brother Bubba Ze Bel.

Bubba stood, arms open wide, his pits wafting, big fat smiley head on him.

‘Welcome, son,' he said, rubbing the chalk from his hands. We shook. He tickled my palm with his pinky and gave me a playful slap across the cheek.

This is the part where I wake for real, in a slick of sweat. I have this dream a lot, John.

What do you think it means? More to the point, why have you forsaken me?

Your friend,

Jamey

 

All day I wandered aimlessly from Ferris wheel to ghost train to paddle boats. Speakers blared horrendously distorted rinky-dink music, generators belched fumes and everything smelled of smoke and diesel. I drifted through the arcade, flinching at the pandemonium, and pumped coppers into one-armed bandits and shot a few games of pool with people I didn't know. The dodgems banged crazily into each other and the waltzers lurched, and for a moment I thought I saw Mrs Nagle's face, contorted with g-force, eyes wide and mouth opened and shrieking like a banshee, but when I looked again she was gone.

People milled along the promenade. Rows of stalls and tables laden with cheap jewellery, gimcrack stuff, necklaces and rings and charms and amulets and stones. Caravans with signs in the windows advertising Tarot and palm and crystal-ball readings. I counted my money and went up the steps to one of the caravans and knocked on the open door. A woman in a baggy jumper and a pair of sweatpants was watching a portable television blaring some sort of game show. She turned the sound down and waved a hand at an armchair beside a flimsy table.

‘Fiver for your palm, tenner for the cards,' she said.

I gave her a tenner. She donned a pair of glasses and took my hand and pulled my fingers apart and peered at the lines. Her head jerked up. She stared at my face.

‘Out,' she said.

‘What?'

‘Out.' She pushed the tenner across the table. ‘And take your money with you.'

I stood and backed out the doorway and stumbled down the steps and into the night. The door slammed and the blinds came down. The funfair whirled around me. Lights seemed to liquefy into luminous streaks as I blundered down the promenade under the glimmering big wheel. Figures loomed out of darkness and vanished, skeletons prancing through a Mardi Gras carnival. Young men chatted and flirted with sassy-faced girls with ponytails and bangle-sized ear-rings as they locked safety bars across the seats on the Skyrider. A black goatee-bearded man in a bright yellow shirt and snazzy shoes did card tricks for a small crowd, gaudy rings gleaming on his quick fingers.

Then I saw Miss Ross, the replacement English teacher, all dolled up in mascara and eye shadow, her hair teased out, and she was walking arm in arm with a boy barely older than me, and they were laughing, faces aglow. They stopped and kissed. The boyfriend felt the cheeks of Miss Ross's bottom through her mini-skirt and I watched, gobsmacked, couldn't look away until they were swept downstream by the crowd's current.

I wandered through the commotion. A young clean-shaven man was handing out pamphlets, trying to keep his cool as he was pestered and harangued by crop-haired little toughies. He handed me one of the leaflets and moved on. The cover said:
ARE THESE THE LAST DAYS?
The pages were filled with admonitions about men becoming lovers of money and pleasure, children disobeying parents, nations rising up against each other, earthquakes, food shortages, pestilences. The centre spread showed images of juvenile delinquents packing Uzis. Bible quotes. Global climate changes and markets crashing. This stuff was called the Good News. I put the pamphlet in my pocket beside Jamey's letter and hurried back to the car park.

The blue-tinted lights were on in the coach, and its engine was running. I climbed on board and took a seat at the back, away from the wired, white-faced children and jarred adults staggering in the aisle. Somebody had thrown up; you could smell it. As the bus revved and shuddered and pulled off, I put my head against the window and gazed into the gloom and wished I were far away.

I must have dozed off, lulled by the vibration of the engine, because when I opened my eyes Nicky Gibbons was stood in the aisle calling my name.

‘John,' he said, ‘we'll let you off at the crossroads.'

The coach hissed to a stop. Nicky shook my hand.

‘See you next year,' he said.

I got off the bus and stood on the roadside and looked up at the sky and thought for a second I saw Jamey's face, wan and haunted, mapped in the pitted topography of that summer moon.