John the Revelator (15 page)

 

 

 

 

A newsflash, a tickertape snake sidewinding across the bottom of the screen. The doe-eyed anchor, eyebrows plucked into pencilled arches, make-up flawless, abandons the autocue for a printout thrust on her desk.

‘We interrupt our scheduled news programming to bring you this bulletin.'

Her voice wavers. Tears bubble over kohl rims.

‘The final seal has been opened. This is not a hoax. We go live now to London.'

Cut to satellite phone feed rendered cubist by signal crack-up.

‘I'm sorry, but we seem to be encountering some technical difficulties. We now join our correspondent in Berlin.'

Cut to baby-faced boys packing Kalashnikovs, posted outside public buildings.

Cut to Sydney, digicam footage of riots and looters shot on sight.

‘More updates as they happen...'

Hong Kong: office blocks with shutters pulled (down, blue neon signs dying, curfews, queues for food, mobbed hospital wards.

‘24-hour rolling news, the world as it happens, in your home...'

Los Angeles: turnpikes jammed with rusting cars, fifty-mile gridlock in every direction. Black helicopters swarm
the skies like flies.

Cut to: Dead air at prime time.

A death's-head test card.

Cut.

The power goes out, the images shrink into a small white dot.

I get to my feet and walk out of the house and climb into a car. The car drives itself, merging with a torrent of tail-backed traffic, fleets of vehicles bound for the beach, converging on the seaside car park jammed with chip vans. Droves of people mill towards the waterline; some of them clutch bottles of iodine pills like religious icons, some drink from flagons, some smoke dope, anything to numb the panicky-euphoric feeling of
this is happening.

Two blokes wearing billabong hats carry a cross improvised from railroad girders to the shore and lay it flat on the sand. A third man in a too-tight suit lies across it, his comb-over unwinding like a turban in the sea wind. They nail him through the wrists and ankles and raise it up. He hangs like a side of beef, bawling his head off, but they haven't planted the cross deep enough and it tilts slowly forward and hits the wet sand, the sounds of his torment muffled, mouth clogged up with silt.

Everyone has that sweaty and elated look marathon runners get at the twenty-mile mark. Thousands of flushed faces face the sea, gasping spectators at a fireworks display. Breakers lash the sand, foaming beasts bolt the flaming city and here it comes, rearing across the sound like a mile-high wall of lava, like Krakatoa exploding, and you can feel the heat, the air so thick with flying ash
and chemicals and death you can barely breathe. We cant tear our eyes away.

We were never warned that it would look so beautiful.

The Patron was a big open-air concelebrated Mass that brought crowds from all over the parish every August. We'd been cleaning my grandparents' grave for hours, toiling under the stare of the great stone archangel that surveyed the buried dead from its vantage point on the raised plinth.

My mother doused the headstone using a squirt bottle filled with a solution of water and washing-up liquid. Elbows and foreams pumping, sweat shining on her brow, she scrubbed and scoured the headstone with a Brillo pad, pausing every so often to catch her breath. The summer heat had taken its toll. She placed her hands on her hips and scrutinised my face.

‘What's the matter, John?' She groaned as she straightened her back. ‘You're very quiet.'

I shrugged and said, ‘Nothing.'

She wrenched up a bunch of what looked like clover, bits of dirt dropping from the roots.

‘C'mon,' she said. ‘Don't make me get the pliers out.'

I looked blearily at the sun and said, ‘I had a weird dream last night.'

She dumped the weeds in a pile.

‘You and your dreams. What was it about?'

‘The world was ending.'

She picked up a bit of an old dishrag and wiped her hands, took out her cigarettes and lit one.

‘Tell me more. Maybe I can make sense of it.'

‘It doesn't matter. It was stupid.'

‘Tell me anyway. Just for pig iron.'

I described what I could remember of the dream. She listened and nodded, smoke seeping out her nostrils.

‘People have been seeing the end of time since time began,' she said. ‘After Our Lord was crucified and ascended to heaven, the apostles thought the world was about to end. When that didn't happen, they all started writing things down. If not for the end of the world never happening, there'd be no gospels. Same with the first millennium.'

I waited for her to continue, but she didn't.

‘What happened at the first millennium?' I said.

‘Nothing. They thought the world would end in the year one thousand, and when it didn't, they moved the date to the anniversary of the crucifixion.'

She tapped ash onto the pile of weeds at her feet.

‘By the Middle Ages, there were so many lunatics running around England predicting the end of the world, they made talking about the Second Coming a criminal offence. That's why so many of 'em hit off to America.'

She gazed at the inscription on the marble stone, obsidian flecked with white. People picked their way through the graves dressed in their best clothes, careful not to twist their ankles on sods of muck. In a couple of hours the cemetery would be thronged, the air ringing with decades of the rosary, the bishop's voice piped through loudspeakers rented from Brown's Electrical.

‘Aye,' my mother said, and reached for the bunch of gladioli she'd bound into a plastic shopping bag with a rubber band. She slipped the elastic off and placed the flowers on the pebbles, squinting through the smoke as her hands arranged the petals to her satisfaction.

‘Some dreams you'll never make head nor tail of,' she said. ‘I wouldn't put much pass on it. Anyhow—'

She removed the cigarette from her mouth, examining the indentation above the filter. ‘We may get out of here before the people start arriving.'

‘We're not staying for the Mass?'

She stubbed the fag out on an upturned sod, got to her feet and gathered the cleaning stuff.

‘No one in their right mind stays in town the day of the Patron.' She pronounced it
Pattern.
‘Once the pubs open people will be tearing scelps out of each other.'

We picked our way between the plots, passing through the shadow thrown by the great grey angel. My mother lowered her voice.

‘These goms come to town to pray for their dead,' she said, ‘and end up joining 'em.'

 

Jamey kept sending me letters, but the longer I put off replying the harder it was to write.

I thought of a story he told me about a guy who goes to his physician complaining of weight loss and a bellyache. The doctor refers him to a specialist, who decides they need to operate. When the sawbones opens him up they find sixty feet of tapeworm inextricably entwined with his intestines. They're afraid to remove it in case it starts to thrash about and damage his vital organs. So what do they do? They close him up and send him home and tell him to live with it.

One morning when I got up my mother was wearing her good clothes and her coat was draped over her arm.

‘You going somewhere?' I said.

‘Visiting.'

‘Who?'

‘Never you mind. I'll be back to make the dinner. Try and stay out of mischief.'

I sat cross-legged on my bedroom floor and re-read Jamey's most recent letter.

Balinbagin Boys' Home
7 Priory Road
Balinbagin

 

Hey John

As you can see from the address, I've been here a week now, and the bizarre thing is, it's not so bad. In fact, it's like Butlins compared to living in the same house as Dee and Maurice. The food's a bit crap and the work is boring and they take your phone away until the weekend, but there's an old prefab out the back where you can sneak a smoke between classes. Most importantly, nobody's tried to bugger me behind the bikeshed.

The staff are all softies. All you have to do is cough ABUSE! and they go running for fear of a solicitor's letter. The other lads are decent enough too. I'm the posh boy. This hard nut called Ger Tarp gave me a bit of a grueller the first week, but when word got round why I was here, he backed off. It didn't hurt to drop Gunter's name either. Turns out word of his exploits has penetrated even the inner sanctum of Balinbagin Boys' Home.

We have to do community service at the weekends, which means raking people's lawns or cleaning up Balinbagin Park, and we went on a sort of goodwill mission to the local mentaller the other day, brought these care packages of toiletries and stuff. That was a laugh and a half.

Weird thing is, I could walk out of here anytime. No big walls with barbed wire or searchlights or tracker dogs or any of that. But to tell you the truth, it wouldn't be worth the hassle. Maurice would frogmarch me straight back in.

Anyway, I've been coming up with loads of stories. There's nothing else to do at night except play cards or watch the telly, and that gets old fairly fast. I've enclosed one—more to follow later. All I ask is you don't show them to anybody else, at least not yet. The reason will become obvious once you read them. I'll get around to changing the names to protect the guilty at a later stage. Meanwhile, store in a safe place. This one's about your friend and mine, Garda Sergeant Jim Canavan, arresting officer in the case of The People versus Me. You might use it as bribe material should he give you more grief. Tell him a little bird named Corboy told you. If I'd known about some of this stuff before the court case, I might have blackmailed the bugger into dropping the charges.

They're talking about letting me out this weekend. To be honest, I think I'd rather stay put—at least until I've had a chance to straighten things out with Gunter. He keeps texting me these wonderful little haiku. YOU'RE DEAD, SNITCH that kind of thing. It'd be good to see you though, if you have the time. Want to meet up at the train station in Ballo? I'll be on the seven o' clock, Friday evening. I'll buy you a pint, just drop me a line.

Anyway,

Hope all's good on your end.

No danger of a letter I suppose?

Jamey

 

Free Love
by Jamey Corboy

 

Jim Canavan shut the front door. Loud music and gunshots and car crash sounds from the living room. He padded quietly to the lounge and eased the door open, thinking maybe he'd catch Conor on the hop with a cigarette, even a joint.

The curtains were drawn across the bay windows. The boy was sprawled on a beanbag. His face flickered in the light of the screen. Baggy jeans, T-shirt three times too big, trainers with laces undone. He wore his hair in brutal military cut and his jaw was fuzzed with beard. Fast becoming a man, big deep voice on him. Scary how fast.

‘You keep sitting like that,' Canavan said, ‘you're asking for back trouble.'

The boy looked at his father only to roll his red-rimmed eyes. He returned his attention to the shoot-'em-up.

‘All right,' Canavan said. ‘But don't come whinging to me if you're in a hoop by the time you're thirty. Where's your mum?'

‘Out. Her book club.'

A conspiratorial smirk passed between them. He felt the tiniest twinge of guilt as he shut the living-room door.

He climbed the steps to the landing and unlatched the hot-press door and felt the tank under the lagging jacket. The movement reminded him of his courting days, slipping the hand under a girl's shirt, warm skin, fumbling bra-strap catches. The tank was piping hot. He checked the immersion switch. On. All day, probably. Another hole in my pocket, dear Rita.

When the bath was halfway full he stepped in, slowly lowering his body into the hot water. Once submerged, he tensed his stomach muscles and surveyed his chest and belly.

‘Not too bad for an old lad,' he said, his voice spookily loud in the small tiled room.

He didn't feel like an old lad. He weighed about the same as the day he was married.

He smoothed his hair back and breathed in the warm bath vapours and sighed. Just like he could have predicted, the feeling came upon him, that unfathomable sadness, like a mourning for something he couldn't put a name on. He cursed this mood, like hangover guilt, but without the benefit of having gotten drunk in the first place.