John the Revelator (2 page)

She switched off the torch and tapped my backside with it, the signal for me to pull up my pyjama bottoms.

‘Do people die from worms?'

‘It's been known to happen.'

She ran her fingernail along the teeth of a fine-toothed comb. It made a sound like Chinese music.

‘But Our Lord said it's not what goes in your mouth that does the damage.'

She began to scour my hair for hoppers.

‘It's what comes out.'

I plagued my mother with so many questions about worms she banned the subject. But one day she came home with a book—
Harper's Compendium of Bizarre Nature Facts
—containing loads of facts and figures about lizards and squids and duck-billed platypuses, and a whole chapter on worms entitled ‘The Secret Life of Parasites'. The illustrated plates made my scalp tingle, like the time my head got ringworm. Mrs Nagle told me that ringworm is not actually a worm; it's a fungal infection. The medical name for it is dermatophytosis. You can get it on your body, your groin, your feet, your nails, even your beard. The kind I got was called
Tinea capitis.

My mother started in on dinner and asked me to read aloud from the book, said the big words were good practice for school. I flipped straight to the part where it explained that a parasite is an organism that lives on or in another organism, known as the host. Big parasites can grow to dozens of feet in length. Some of the little ones are so tiny you can only see them under a microscope. Some parasites lay eggs; others duplicate themselves like bacteria.

Hunched over the sink, my mother unwrapped grease paper from around a gutted fish. I continued reading.

In ancient Asia and Africa, the book said, the cure for guinea worms was to lie down for a day, or two days, or a week, as long as it took, and slowly wind the worm around a stick to get it out alive. If you jerked it out, it'd break in half and die, infecting your insides. This is where the symbol for medicine comes from, two serpents wound around a staff, the
Caduceus.
In the Bible, serpents plagued the Israelites, but some people thought that was a poetic way of saying they had worms. In Edwardian times, they laid out the infirm and the consumptive in a room alongside troughs of flesh-fed maggots, believing the smell of ammonia and methane to have healing properties. They called this room the Maggotorium.

‘That's the smell that came off St John's grave and healed people,' I said.

Peeling spuds, my mother grunted. I read on.

According to Harper, a nineteenth-century doctor called Friedrich Kuchenmeister tried to demonstrate the evolution of the bladderworm into the tapeworm by feeding infected blood sausage to a convicted murderer four months before the man's execution. After the convict was put to death, they cut him open and found five-foot tapeworms in his stomach.

Eyes squeezed tight, my mother removed a slug from the heart of a cabbage and dropped it into the pedal bin. She plucked the cigarette from her mouth and looked at it.

‘You know,' she said, squinting through fag-smoke, ‘people say what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Don't believe a word of it. What doesn't kill you just makes you sick. And what makes you sick—'

She ran a tap over her cigarette. It sizzled out.

‘—Kills you.'

 

One school day Guard Canavan came to the Presentation Convent to tell us what happens to bad children when they die. He was a big tree-trunk of a man, dressed all in the same shade of navy blue, a voice so deep you felt rather than heard it.

‘Do you know where bad boys and girls go, boys and girls?' he said.

No one answered except for Danny Doran, who put his hand up and said, ‘England?'

Guard Canavan shook his head.

‘No, but you're close. They get picked up and thrown in the back of a big Black Maria that drives them down to hell, where the devil sticks them on the end of his toasting fork and roasts them over the hot coals and eats them alive, and what comes out his other end gets flushed down the drain and into a lake of everlasting fire. The only way to stop this from happening is to go to confession every Saturday. That means saying sorry to God when you do bad things.'

 

‘God save all here.'

Mrs Nagle's benediction at the doorstep was my mother's cue to shoo me upstairs so I wouldn't be putting in my spake where there was grown-ups talking. As they supped tea in the kitchen, I bellied down on the landing and earwigged on the gossip. There were biscuits down there; I could hear them.

My mother heaved a great sigh.

‘What am I going to do with him, Phyllis?'

Because we had a visitor, she was using her telephone voice, pronouncing all her -ings. I crept all the way downstairs and peeped around the door.

‘He won't come out of himself. I'm afeared he'll grow up morbid.'

Mrs Nagle made sympathetic throat noises. She was a tall mannish woman with a loud hee-haw of a voice. Always went by Mrs, even though she'd never married. She lived in a draughty stone cottage about a quarter-mile down the road, right next to the freshwater well, the ownership of which was the subject of some dispute. Mrs Nagle maintained it was on her property and erected a
Keep Out—Private
sign at the mouth of the narrow lane that led to the pump. This didn't go down well with the locals, particularly Harry Farrell.

At that time, Harry was an impudent jack-of-all-trades who could be seen riding his Honda 50 around the back roads at all hours of the day or night. He took a shine to my mother and was always offering to do jobs around the house. Every birthday without fail he sent me a tenner in an envelope. As I got bigger, it became a twenty. My mother made me put most of it in the post office. Said he was like the godfather I never had.

Harry was a hard worker when he was sober. My mother sometimes got him to chop logs or strim the hedge or take clippers to the overhanging trees. But when he hit the drink he'd hock his bike and tools and chainsaw and stay in the pubs until he ran out of money, at which point he'd sleep for a week, straighten up and go looking for work all over again.

Harry—or Har The Barrel as he became known when his weight ballooned after finally giving up the drink for good—was livid when he saw Mrs Nagle's hand-painted
Keep Out
sign. He could be heard arguing in Donahue's that the well had been public property since god was a boy and that old biddy had no claim on it. And when he was really jarred he'd brag that since the day that sign went up, he never passed the well without availing of the opportunity to tap his bladder, polluting its crystal waters with his own off-yellow tributary. When Mrs Nagle got wind of this affront, she flew into a rage and, according to my mother, requisitioned a hurling stick from some young lad on the way home from school, stalked into the village and prowled from pub to pub until she found Har, whereupon she bet him from one end of the street to the other, bet him scaldy. Since that day, a savage grudge festered in Har's heart.

‘What age is the chap?' Mrs Nagle brayed, adjusting her wool knit hat, the one that looked like the base of an acorn turned upside down.

‘Seven,' my mother replied. ‘No, eight.'

‘The age of reason.' Mrs Nagle dunked a digestive and took a bite. Maybe a Marietta.

‘Put him out in the fresh air,' she said, biscuit pulp bulging her cheek. ‘Sunlight is nature's tonic. It cures rickets, goitre, skin conditions, ulcers and certain cancers. He'll grow feeble if he stays inside all day. Simple-minded.'

The sibilance sprayed soggy crumbs on the good tablecloth.

‘He should be
vigorous.
'

‘Vigorous,' my mother repeated, tearing the filter off a Major.

Mrs Nagle nodded.

‘Mm-hm. The young men now are not like the young men in our time, Lily. They're pure fools in comparison.'

The rasp of a match.

‘You're not wrong, Phyllis.'

My mother had her humouring voice on, like when I'd gab her ear off but she wasn't really paying attention.

‘Know what I put it down to, Lily?'

‘Tell me, Phyllis.'

‘Porter. Drink is the proven causation of dropsy, jaundice, gout, colic, peevish irritability, catarrhs of the mouth and stomach. It's the ruination of young men. The reason they won't do a tap of work, god blast 'em for chaps.'

And my mother said:
How much more abominable and filthy is man, which drinketh iniquity like water.
'

But Mrs Nagle always had to get the last word in.

‘The devil has no end of work for those hands.'

 

So after that I got rooted out of bed early to help weed the flowerbeds and pick blackberries and all kinds of outside stuff. At that hour it was so cold the air tasted like it was doused with mint. Berry juice stung the briar cuts and nettle welts on my hands. And because the sky had been rumbling like a big belly during the night, my mother had mushrooms on the brain.

‘The three things you need for mushroom picking,' she said, ‘are thunder, rain and cow-dung.'

We struck off for the far bog. My mother took great yard-long strides across the wet grass and clutched a punnet to her chest. I hurried in her footsteps, hair cowslicked with morning mist. We squelched across marshy wallow ground, circumnavigating a still pond filmed with green scum and circled by midges and gadflies. My mother pointed out all the different kinds of moss and fungus, puffballs and toadstools, lichen and liverwort, reeds and rushes and bulrushes, wrack and bladderwrack. She grasped the top rung of a five-bar gate, about to mount it, but just before pulling herself up she stopped and cocked her head.

‘Whisht.'

We took root, listening.

‘I don't hear anything,' I whispered.

‘Shhht.'

Some sort of mewling. She put her punnet down.

‘A kitten maybe.'

Her eyes searched the humps of grass. Again, that sound, small and hurt and pitiful.

She peered into the gripe and pointed to a bed of briars. A hare, stretched out, its eyes swollen and suppurating, like soft wounds.

‘Is it sick?' I said.

‘Mixo.'

She took out her fags, cupped a match and sucked in smoke and contemplated the hare. Its hindquarters were caked with dried scutter.

‘We may put it out of its misery,' she said. ‘Break its neck.'

Her hand rested on my shoulder.

‘You may do it, son. My nerves are not up to it.'

I stepped back, shaking my head.

‘I can't.'

‘You have to. It's not fair to let it suffer.'

My fingers were sweaty. I wiped them on my trousers.

‘I thought killing was a sin.'

‘Not if it's a mercy killing.'

I didn't want to go anywhere near the sick hare, but I had to obey my mother.

‘All right,' I said.

She squeezed my shoulder.

‘Good man. Do it quick.'

I crouched down beside the hare, peering deep into the bleeding wells of its eyes. I lunged and snatched it up by the scruff. It bucked weakly as both my hands closed around its neck.

‘Not like that.' My mother rolled her eyes. ‘I said
break
its neck, not choke it.'

She mimed snapping a stick of kindling.

I adjusted my grip and squeezed my eyes shut. I drove my knee into the back of the hare's neck and pulled the head and belly towards me simultaneously. There was a sound like a knuckle crack. The hare took fit. I tossed it on the grass and watched its body twitch and finally go limp. My mother got the toe of her boot under the belly, hefted her leg and sent the hare's corpse arcing into the ditch.

‘C'mon,' she said. ‘Those mushrooms won't pick themselves.'

 

 

 

 

The big old crow invaded my dreams. I didn't know where he'd come from or what he was supposed to mean.

He spirals out of a hole in the belly of heaven from which the angered gods cast him, to helicopter-hover, bone tired and hungry and scanning for carrion.

See how far he has fallen. Once there was wind and thunder when he flapped his wings. Huns and heathens feared him. He heralded the sun into the sea and down through the underworld, and lent his form to Morrigan, goddess of war and fate and death, who wore his cloak as she flew low over the battlefields, spurring her warriors to berserker fits and spasms.

What happened, Old Crow?

Maybe it was as St Golowin said: once upon a time you sported brightly coloured wings, but after Adam and Eve's banishment from Eden you took to eating the flesh of dead things and it turned your feathers black. Is that it?

But the old black crow (doesn't answer, merely fixes me with baleful yellow eyes, beats his wings against the walls of my dream until the walls fall down, and, stretched to the full of his span, he flaps and cackles and then he's gone.