John the Revelator (22 page)

All day long and most of the night she slept, and each slow and sickly hour that passed seemed to suck the life from her body until she shrank beneath the sheets. Sometimes her coughing woke the whole house, painful hacking sounds. Each morning I tidied away the crumpled origami shapes of tissues from her bedside dresser and examined the ugly slugs of phlegm for specks of blood, but there were none. Sometimes after she'd drifted off to sleep, I put the books away and told her about the goings-on in school, or things I'd seen or heard in the village on the way home. The sound of the wind and rain outside reminded me of when I was small and she read to me. Now the roles were reversed. The world was completely out of kilter.

The nights grew longer and colder. Every night when she dozed off I talked until I'd grown weary of the sound of my own voice. I told her about the day I first met Jamey in the market square, and about the trick Jamey and Ollie played on me when I visited their house. I told her about the night Jamey and me went to the Rugby Club. I told her what really happened in the chapel, and about the morning Guard Canavan took me to the Barracks in Ballo. I described what I saw on the camcorder tape. I even told her about the day I hitched to Ballo (leaving out the bit about Miss Ross) and what happened at the old slaughterhouse. And one night I told her that when Jamey walked away, it felt as though something inside me died, like I was a twin whose body had absorbed that of its brother, and now he lived in me. I looked off into space as I spoke, and I didn't see that her eyes had opened until I felt her cold fingers close around my wrist.

‘Labhra Loingseach's got donkey's ears,' she whispered.

 

Christmas was a dismal affair. I gave Mrs Nagle a box of chocolates, which she grunted at and spirited away to the fridge. She was too mean to buy a turkey and would've burned it anyway, so we spent dinner glowering at each other over a miserable little chicken and a plate of soapy spuds and sprouts boiled to mush. I brought a plate up to my mother, but she wouldn't so much as look at it. I couldn't blame her.

New Year's Eve ushered in another year on earth. I lay awake until midnight when the radio squawked Auld Lang Syne. It sounded like a bitter joke. Sometimes when my mother woke, she had trouble remembering who or where she was. Dr Orpen couldn't help. Eat, he said. Rest. Cut down on the fags. Any time I tried to discuss money, he said we'd settle our account at a later date.

One day when he called to check on what he called her ‘progress', he glanced at Mrs Nagle, who was scrubbing out a burnt pot in the sink, head cocked, earwigging as usual. He put his arm around my shoulder and took me outside.

‘You and Phyllis have been doing Trojan work,' he said, squinting against the light. ‘But at this stage I think your mother would be better off in St Luke's.'

‘The home?'

He fixed me with clear blue eyes.

‘This house is perishing, son. She stays here the rest of the winter, she'll get her death.'

He glanced at his wristwatch. I visualised a pendulum being set in motion.

‘I'll make all the arrangements,' he said. ‘Call me in the morning.'

I watched him walk down the path and into the cold, bright afternoon, his shadow scissoring the hard ground, then I went inside and repeated what he'd said.

‘Nonsense,' Mrs Nagle scoffed. ‘We're doing our level best here, John. I'm sure your mother would much rather be in her own house than some old knacker yard of a home.'

I desperately wanted to believe her.

That night as I was trying to get to sleep, I heard the landing creak and saw Mrs Nagle standing in my bedroom doorway, grey hair slithering down her shoulders. She stood for what seemed like a very long time, just watching, before she turned away and softly closed my door. I was disquieted by her uncharacteristic stillness, as though the daytime Mrs Nagle, the thick-necked here's-me-head-me-arse-is-coming Mrs Nagle, was some kind of act, a front for an even colder, steelier creature. My mother was getting feebler, and here was this old hatchet growing taller and stronger with every passing day, like there was some queer transfusion of energies taking place.

I turned on my side and tried to sleep, struck by a terrible feeling of being displaced, homesick, even though I was home. I kept trying to imagine what life would be like without my mother, and my chest ached.

Some time later I awoke with a jolt. The night was very still, disturbed only by the sound of branches fingering the slates and the bones of the old house groaning. I got out of bed and went to check on my mother.

Her bed was empty, the covers thrown back. For a moment I thought perhaps her sickness had lifted and her senses had returned and maybe she was downstairs making breakfast or reading the paper, but there was no one in the kitchen except for Mrs Nagle, dozing beside the crumbling embers of the fire. I pulled my boots on and threw a coat over my thermals and checked the backyard and the surrounding fields.

Everywhere was white, so white it almost hurt to look at. Icicles hung from the gates and the grass was covered in what looked like pale moondust. Frost had petrified the nettles and the puddles on the ground were cracked panes of glass. I called out for my mother, and the chill turned my breath to plumes of white.

The sky in the east began to brighten as I searched around our house as far as Lambert's land. I hurried across the frozen fields, scanning the landscape for my mother's form, kept going until the ground deteriorated into marsh. Rabbit droppings pebbled the clumps of grass. Ferns curled from the ground, delicate spiderwebs strung from dock-leaf fronds, briars and brambles intertwined in weirdly pornographic tableaux. The edge of Lambert's shallow pond was jellied with frogspawn, dead tadpoles preserved in cryogenic ice.

The ground grew spongy and uncertain beneath my boots, threatening to suck me under, and I imagined creatures writhing below the subsoil, hideous squids with saucer eyes and birds' beaks and sucker-studded tentacles. Panic began to rise in my chest. I was lost. My mother was lost.

Daybreak spread across the earth, bleak light that promised neither warmth nor hope, merely its own inevitable self. Then I saw her, still and bewildered amidst the gorse bushes. She was wearing only her nightdress, violently shivering.

‘Ma,' I called out. ‘You'll get your death.'

She turned and stared at me, eyes urgent, teeth clicking.

‘I have to c-collect the children's allowance.'

I took off my coat and wrapped it around her shoulders and helped her home through the merciless winter dawn. I put her to bed and then hurried into the bathroom to run her a hot bath.

Mrs Nagle was bent over the sink—she still hadn't gotten into the habit of locking the door. At first I thought she was washing her hands. She murmured in a low voice, like a chant. Her right hand was held palm down over a bowl of milk. A length of twine dangled from her wrist, knotted at intervals like a rosary. She'd placed a lit candle on the soap dish. The draught from the open door made its flame flicker. She glanced up at the mirror, saw my face and whirled around.

‘You put the heart across me,' she said, leaning her back against the rim of the sink, blocking my view. She was wearing one of my mother's dresses, but it didn't fit; the sleeves came down to her elbows and the hem stopped above her knees.

‘What are you doing?' I said.

‘Nothing. Go back to bed. You're still half asleep. You must have been dreaming.'

 

 

 

 

Old Crow knows his lives have been no more than dream stories the soul tells itself at the second of death, that delicious alchemical rush as transfiguration occurs and the whatever-it-is essence converts into black light, kinetic heat, and you tilt your wings and slip and shape-shift through to the somewhere-else, transcending absolute black in a death-defying virtuoso act, and all the assembled souls in the halls of eternity go Wow! and Bravo! and Who Is That Daring Flying Machine? and applaud the sight of animate matter transmuted into streams of electrons and—weeeee!—streaking through power lines and telex systems, a strobe of dark lightning slashing the fabric of the sky, senses laser sharp, eyes like Zeiss lenses set to turbo-zoom, its body's rhythms and mind's melodies transposed into the thrilling drone of power pylons, the stuff of thermonuclear dreams, an electric ghost whose presence can be divined sometimes by the living, manifest as background radiation in their cell memories, insinuated into their analogues, an inkling, slightly acrid, a sudden pressure drop as its form flits through the white mist of television interference, just about glimpsed when a heavy fall of rain splits the screen into component pixels, its presence faintly sensed as the living dead slouch in their sweats in front of the box, biorhythms at lowest ebb, a hair's breadth
from death, the last metabolic stop before terminus est, the white-noised no-man's-land where the dead and the living dead intermingle and become one.

To enter St Luke's Hospital, you passed through a trellis embroidered with creepers and hydrangeas that gave onto a modest little garden bisected by a paved path, benches placed around the grass verge, grey blocks of buildings looming on three sides. Inside the main dining room the radio piped incongruously chirpy pop music. A television sat on a shelf bolted to the wall about ten feet off the floor, the sound turned down, Doris Day flouncing around in her pyjamas. Bath chairs and wheelchairs were stacked and folded in corners. The floor smelled scrubbed and carbolic.

The residents were mostly perplexed-looking women, all elbows and angles, like wooden dolls propped awkwardly in their chairs. Some clutched soft toys in hands that were mostly knuckle, and muttered to their shoes when they weren't casting furtive glances at the pastel-painted walls.

Some were scrawny and spindly, others double-chinned and flabby, their arms and legs as soft muscled as those of infants. A spindly stick-figured woman with bifocals padded around in repetitive paths, her slippers describing complex bee patterns, a security anklet periodically activating the front-door lock with a loud click.

In the couple of weeks she'd been there, my mother had lost even more weight and seemed to retreat to the back of her mind. Her speech became hard to decipher, and what I could make out was vague and befuddled. The nurses tut-tutted to each other about her bloods being like water and speculating as to whether or not she needed to be put on a drip. She spent most of her time strapped into a chair like a toddler at a restaurant, a cup of mush in her trembling hand, eyes dull and glazed.

On the days it wasn't raining the nurses encouraged me to take her out into the garden. I helped her into a coat and guided her down the narrow corridor, baby steps, stopping every so often as her body was racked with shuddering fits, and the birdwoman with the glasses bumped against our backs like some malfunctioning automaton as we shuffled in slow motion towards the door. One of the nurses came out to poke a code into the keypad on the wall, and when the buzzer sounded she shoved the door and held it open until we were outside.

We'd sit on a bench and watch small birds settle on the trellis. I'd light my mother's cigarettes and take them from her fingers when they'd burned down to the butt, blathering about the weather, uncomfortably aware that she'd be vexed with me for speaking to her like she was a slow child. Truth was, I didn't know how to act. I was acutely aware of the nurses watching me, like they were gauging my performance as a son.

Sometimes as I was leaving, my mother would try to manoeuvre herself onto the nurse's blind side and slip out the door. ‘C'mon,' she'd mutter, ‘we'll go home,' the careful enunciation of each word seeming to require all her energy and concentration. For a moment I'd indulge the fantasy of the two of us sneaking off and maybe stealing a car and holding up petrol stations and living out the rest of our lives as fugitives from the law. But instead I took her gently by the arm and parked her at the nurse's station.

‘I can't bring you with me,' I'd say, feeling like she must have felt when she left me in the classroom on my first day of school. And I'd force myself to walk away, aware of her clear, watery eyes staring after me, burning through my back, my ribcage, right into my rotten little heart.

 

All I wanted to do after those visits was go out and get drunk, to feel numbed from what was happening. One evening I stopped by Hyland's off-licence instead of going home. The old man was in the back room watching the soaps as usual. I eased the door open a crack, just enough for me to squeeze through, not enough to rattle the bell, and grabbed a six-pack of beer from the fridge and stuck it under my coat. I crept out and hurried across the square to the cemetery and prised the lid off a bottle using the edge of a headstone.

Soon it began to batter down with sleet, one of those vicious, vindictive squalls that make your ears and teeth ache. I stuffed the remaining bottles into my coat. Weighed down and clinking, I ducked into Donahue's and ordered a glass and brought it out into the empty beer garden where I could top it up without getting caught. The big gas heater made my face feel sunburned. Sleet battered the perspex canopy overhead.