John the Revelator (3 page)

Another year on earth.

Winter melted under drizzle and gave way to the first fine day of spring. My mother pulled on her work boots, sleeves rolled up, hands sheathed in rubber gloves.

‘For once and for all,' she said, flexing her fingers, ‘I'm going to put manners on this garden.'

She attacked the overgrowth with a slash-hook, decapitating pismires, cut stalks oozing the white ichors of wart treatment. She squatted, skirt bunched up, rocked back on her haunches and wrenched up weeds. She planted her foot on the blade of a spade and overturned the borders, scoured the marl for earthworms and slugs, tossed their bodies onto squirming, itching piles. And when the garden was divested of weeds, and the soil smitten and chastised beneath her boots, she planted a clay-smeared hand against the small of her back and lit a fag and appraised her day's work.

Next morning she arrived back from Purcell's Nurseries with a box of shrubs and cuttings and planted them in the ground, her hands as precise as an artist's.

‘Now,' she said.

‘Now what?'

‘We wait.'

Spring bloomed, the world exploding with wildflowers, and our garden glowed, as though incensed. My mother shaped and tended it and sat out after work as the soil exhaled vapours breathed into its pores by the daylong sun. She plucked four petals from the rose bush and placed them in cruciform across her palm.

‘Look,' she said. ‘The rosy cross.'

My mother among the flowers.

 

One stark morning, colder than usual, we looked out and saw the flowers were stricken by a late fall of frost, their frail remains preserved in sepulchral white. My mother pulled a coat on over her nightgown and walked through the deathly petals, her garden's garlands turned to shrivelled wreaths. Disappointment pained her face for a moment, but she banished it with a throw of the head.

‘That's the way,' she said, and fumbled for her packet of fags. ‘Things die so things are born.'

A flick of lighter flint.

‘We'll plant more shrubs in the morning.'

 

One day soon after my tenth birthday Har Farrell called to the back door.

‘Is your mother around?'

He had on an oilskin coat over baggy pants tucked inside green Wellington boots, a big brawny man with a muttonhead on him, smelling of sweat and yeast or hops.

‘She's still at work,' I said.

He tipped his head in the direction of the back yard.

‘C'mere a second.'

Outside, he'd placed a vicious-looking implement on the chopping block. Propped beside it, a quiver full of arrows.

‘Know what this is?'

His breath reeked of the pub, a grown-up smell that suggested a world of unshaven men and darts tournaments and late-night lamping expeditions.

‘It's a bow and arrow,' I said.

A smile creased his coarsely stubbled cheeks.

‘Close enough. What you're looking at is a hundred and sixty-five pounds of crossbow rifle.'

He picked the weapon up and lovingly ran thick fingers over its various mechanisms.

‘Here you've got your trigger,' he said. ‘Here you've got your string and cable system. And heeeere—this is the cherry on top, John—an adjustable rifle sight. In theory, she should fire a couple of hundred feet with reasonable accuracy, depending on who's using it of course. Those are alloy arrows. Keep the quiver waxed and you'll get indefinite use out of her. Happy birthday, son.'

He placed the crossbow in my hands. It felt like a very important moment. Like he was bequeathing me some sacred artifact in a tribal rite of passage.

‘You're giving this to me?'

He nodded and beamed.

‘How does it work?'

He took the crossbow, braced the stock against his shoulder, hauled the bowstring back along the bolt groove with both his hands and cocked it evenly on the latch. Then he plucked an arrow from the quiver and placed it in the breech.

‘Like that,' he said, a bit unsteady on his feet. ‘Pick a target.'

I scanned the yard and pointed to a tree sticking out of the back ditch.

Har thrust the crossbow back into my hands. He got behind my shoulder and helped me take aim.

‘The string centre has to align with the track,' he said, ‘otherwise the shot will be off. Remember, the arrow obeys the string, not the bow.'

He arranged my arms like he was Geppetto.

‘For best shooting stance,' he said, ‘tuck your elbow against your hip, left hand supporting the bow here at the trigger end. You have to lean backwards a bit in order to achieve what's called the point of optimum balance. Safety off. And hold it tight.'

He patted my right pectoral.

‘There's a kick off that thing'll break your shoulder if you're not careful. Ready?'

‘I think so.'

‘Shoot.'

I pulled the trigger. The recoil threw me off balance. The arrow left the track with an exclamatory thunk, sliced through one of my mother's slips hanging from the washing line and sailed into the next field.

‘Fuck,' Har said. ‘Sorry. Never mind, you'll soon get the hang of it.' He clapped me on the back. ‘Just don't point it at anyone.'

As soon as he left, I wrapped the crossbow and quiver in a coal sack and hid it in the cubbyhole under the stairs.

There was a caterpillar and a wasp inside the jamjar. The wasp was ramming his stingers, what Harper called
ovipositors,
into the caterpillar, injecting eggs through the gaps in its exoskeleton. The caterpillar went into shock. When the wasp finished its business I screwed the lid off and let it fly off. It body-swerved into my mother, returning from the clinic. She swatted at the wasp and continued moving unsteadily up the front path, picking her steps like she was fording a stony stream. Her face was a fright. I'd never seen her look so shook. I asked her what was for dinner, not because I wanted to know, but because I wanted her to return to her normal self. She shook her head and stepped around me and went into the kitchen, moving like she was in a trance. The kettle went on, then the wireless. I shook the jar to try and get a rise out of the caterpillar. No response.

My mother set the fire and made the dinner and called me inside when it was on the table. I ran upstairs and stashed the jar in my bedroom and went to wash my hands.

My mother sipped from her teacup and looked out the window while I ate. She left her own plate mostly untouched. The fire crackled and the sacred heart glowed on the mantelpiece.

‘Son,' she said, ‘we need to talk.'

I shovelled food in. Hot. I fanned a hand in front of my mouth.

‘Uh-huh?'

‘I have to go away for a little while soon.'

‘Where to?'

‘The hospital.'

My fork went down. It was getting dark outside and the wind moaned in the chimney. Winter was coming.

‘Why?'

‘I have to go for a little rest. It won't be long. Only a week or so.' ‘A
week?
'

An awful empty feeling spread through my stomach. Beside the potted geraniums, Haircut Charlie idiot-grinned atop the windowsill, bizarre tufts of green hair shooting upwards from his perforated skull.

‘Why don't you just go upstairs for a lie down?' I said. ‘Why do you have to go to the hospital?'

She shook her head, set down her cup.

‘Listen. I've arranged for Mrs Nagle to come and mind you. While I'm gone, I need you to be good. It won't be long. When I come home everything will be the way it was.
An dtigeann tú?
'

‘
Tigim.
'

 

My mother took a taxi to the hospital. I went to school as per normal and Mrs Nagle came in the afternoons to make dinner. The food was the same, but it tasted different, slightly burnt. Plus, she left the door open when she used the toilet, and I could see her old lady tights puddled around her veiny ankles and thick brown brogues. The same brogues I heard creaking outside when it was my turn to use the bathroom.

Mrs Nagle sent me to bed early most nights so she could watch the telly and shovel chocolates in her mouth. I lay awake and stared at the ceiling and thought about what they could be doing to my mother in the hospital. Every so often I checked the jamjar glass and watched for signs of what was happening inside the caterpillar's body cavity. I waited for the wasp eggs to hatch, imagining the larvae as they tapped into the caterpillar's energy sources, draining it of the will to live, or reproduce, making its little testicles shrivel so it wouldn't want to have any more caterpillar sex. Drinking its blood and devouring everything but the vital organs. If I waited long enough, I'd get to see the larvae burrow out and turn into baby wasps. I'd see the caterpillar's body crumble like the ash on a gone-out fag. And I'd throw open the window and let the baby wasps escape, the caterpillar's death unrevenged by Mother Nature, because Mother Nature doesn't care.

 

When my mother came home she moved like an old woman and had to take salt baths every evening. One time she called me into the bathroom, I was mortified, but her female parts were all covered with towels, except for where the scar rose up from her lower belly, white-lipped like a Nazi's smile.

‘That's from the operation,' she said.

I grunted something in response and made my excuses and left her to her bath.

Even though my mother was on the mend, Mrs Nagle insisted on staying on a bit longer.

‘Just till you get back on your feet,' she said. ‘I insist.'

That whole time, the house hissed with women's whispering. I hid out in my room and read comics and drew pictures of crows or worms. After a couple of weeks my mother got well enough to go back to work, but Mrs Nagle showed no sign of leaving. No matter how many hints my mother dropped, it didn't seem to register, until one morning there was a row and Mrs Nagle stormed out, complaining that people don't appreciate a good turn any more, and bad luck to the lot of us.

After she left, things got back to normal.

But nothing felt the same.

 

One night I dreamed there was a nuclear war that blackened and charred the earth. Everything went medieval and the few humans left alive were terrorised and preyed on by giant mutant crows the size of pterodactyls. They plagued the skies like flocks of swastikas, pestering the heavens with their questions.

Cá? Cá?

My native name was Crow Killer John and it was my job to keep the giant birds from preying on the people of my tribe. All day long I stalked the fields around our settlement, keeping watch from the tops of cairns and crannógs, Har's crossbow in hand, protecting the little ones from circling scaldcrows and daws and magpies as big as aircraft cawing
where-where-where
over and over, their beady eyes trained on us juicy humans, peepers peeled for easy pickings.

Hunger got the better of one fat jackal-eyed boyo. He spotted me and swooped in low. I braced the crossbow stock against my shoulder, closed one eye and focused.

Remember: the arrow obeys the string, not the bow.

The crow loomed huge in the crosshairs.

Closer still, beak open wide, crazy-brained with hunger.

I counted off the seconds.

One.

Two.

Two and a half.

My trigger finger whitened.

Pull!

The arrow took flight, a lightning bolt, skewering the crow. He plummeted to the earth and twitched and flapped and spurted weird green blood as if he were a lawn sprinkler.

‘Ha!' I said.

The rest of the pack scattered in panic, but it took them only a moment to regroup. The sky blackened. Some of the crows fell on their fallen comrade and ripped his carcass apart, entrails dripping from their beaks. Others jeered and mocked and prepared to attack.

I dipped into the quiver, extracted another arrow, pulled back the bowstring. Through the crossbow's scope I saw a big black bastard of a hobo crow, bigger than the rest. My finger froze on the trigger. His eyes were huge, like twin kaleidoscopes, whirling and turning and glowing like yellow coals. He opened his beak, and when he spoke it was as if his voice was alive inside my mind.

Sometimes the worm turns, John. Sometimes it turns into a serpent.

Hypnotised, I couldn't tear my eyes away. My hands wouldn't obey me. They turned the crossbow around until its cold muzzle was in my mouth, my thumb curled around the trigger.

Pull.

***

Slumped at the table, humidified by porridge steam, I saw my face in the glass milk jug, sullen, squinty eyes underscored by blue shadows. Skin erupting with angry black-and-whiteheads. The first growth of stubble struggling on the upper lip and chin. My voice had broken and returned an octave deeper. I was thirteen. The world didn't like me.

‘John.' My mother's voice was megaphoned by her mug. ‘Are you familiar with Leviticus 15?'

I shovelled porridge into my mouth.

‘Not off the top of my head.'

‘It says,
When any man hath a running issue out of his flesh, because of his issue he is unclean.
' She put her cup down and cleared her throat. ‘Tell me son, have you been given to certain acts of, ah, self-pollution.'

A lump of oatmeal went down wrong. I coughed and wheezed and spluttered. She reached over and thumped my shoulders.

‘Only you've lately developed symptoms of the chronic self-abuser.'

I brought up the lump. She stopped with the thumping. The forefinger of her right hand depressed each digit of the left in turn.

‘You've taken to shunning company.'

That was the pinkie.

‘I hear you wandering around the house at all hours.'

Ring finger.

‘You have saddlebags under your eyes, and you won't so much as look at me.'

Middle.

‘Your hands do be shaking.'

Index.

‘And you've gone away to nothing.'