John the Revelator (26 page)

‘I made Maurice buy me that the week before I left him,' she said, neutralising the alarm with her zapper. ‘Might trade it in though. I'm not used to an automatic. I don't know what to do with my hands.'

She gave me a squeeze.

‘Don't stay out too late. You've a funeral to go to tomorrow.'

I watched her drive off and went back inside The Ginnet and sat at the bar, but no matter how many drinks I threw down my throat, I couldn't seem to get drunk.

The next morning I woke early and forced myself to wash and dress in the cleanest clothes I could find. The radio was forecasting storms, but still the weather held. There was a huge turn-out at the funeral. I did what was expected: walked behind the hearse and shouldered the coffin with Har and a few pallbearers from the funeral home. We set it down on slats placed over the open grave, gaping like a wound in the raw earth.

As the priest began to say the final words, Har slipped a hip flask of whiskey into my pocket.

‘Medicinal purposes,' he muttered.

I took a swig on the sly and wondered where on earth Jamey was. At that moment, his absence was more acute than ever. I looked around at all the downcast faces.

‘I didn't know she knew so many people.'

Har chuckled.

‘She used to clean every house in Kilcody. These people told your mother things they wouldn't tell a priest.'

The breeze whispered through the leaves of the evergreens surrounding the graveyard. The priest finished with the prayers. We grabbed the straps and a couple of the men pulled away the boards. We lowered the coffin. When the pine box was settled in the pit and the straps had been retracted, I picked up a white wreath someone had placed at my feet and threw it into the open grave. As the first spade of dirt dissipated on the lid of the casket, I said goodbye, my mother among the flowers.

 

But it is written in the dream that at the end of time, the crows will regain their voices, and will praise their god, and sing.

Blowhole Cove felt like world's end, the last mapped part of the atlas, beyond which the sea might evaporate revealing monsters beached in the shallows, big-bellied mutations, lugworms the size of tree trunks.

Surf roared in my ears. The sky grumbled thunder, silencing the gulls. I gazed out across the sloblands and took a slug of whiskey from Har's hip flask, so bone-weary I feared I'd faint. The light had a brittle quality that made the eyeballs ache; fingers of blue electricity played about the glinting, flinty stones scattered on the strand.

Hours had passed since the funeral. I couldn't face an empty house so I took the road out of town, following my nose seaward, lulled into a sort of sleepwalk by the tattoo of my boots on tarmac. I just kept going until my feet ran out of land, by which time I was good and drunk.

I crested the hill and stumbled down the sandy slope to the water's edge. I stumbled over jellyfish slither and dead seaweed, following the shoreline through spits of rain and clouds of midges, and the fine white sand turned to mudflats strewn with rotten kelp. Combers foamed at the shore. That big old sea-hag bared her gums at me. The wind rippled my shirt and made panpipe sounds in the hip flask.

I pushed on, falling forward into my footsteps, until finally I rounded the curve of the coastline and came upon the inlet.

Sheltered from the wind and rain, I huddled in the mouth of Blowhole Cave and sipped whiskey. My chest was tight with phlegm and my ribcage ached and I realised that for the first time in days I was hungry, starving, digestive glands like thousands of hungry mouths.

Raindrops began to mottle the sand. I pulled my coat tight and watched as the sky darkened and the drizzle intensified until the sand ran like wounds. Lightning flared and thunderclaps rumbled like kettledrums across the jagged lower jaw of the horizon. The rain became a deluge, but inside the cave was dry. The blowhole sang, and in its keening I thought I could discern strains of the old hymn, my mother's lullaby.

Who's that a-writin?

I curled up on the sand and closed my eyes and buried my head in the crook of my arm like a tired bird. And I passed out, out of myself and into the bottomless fall of sleep, my body sinking like a stone in murky water, falling until I opened my eyes and realised I wasn't falling at all, but lying spreadeagled on the sandy floor of some silent dream, staring at the inevitable sky.

And I saw him, winging towards me across the sea.

The old crow.

He glowed, huge and luminescent, moving over the waves, casting a vast galleon shadow on the sea. He drew closer still, wings beating, then hovered in a holding position and glowered and his head eclipsed the setting sun; he brought the night down with his wings and set his claws upon the sand, and whiteness spread all over his body, spread until every last feather gleamed. Then he took wing again, his great beak pointed toward the mountains.

Into the crags' jagged shadows he soared, over barren steppes of limestone stubbled with scutch unfit for goats, where the hill-fields reared up like great green-backed krakens, up, up, up he flew through the altitudes where the stratosphere darkened from pale blue to ink-dark, and foundling stars peeped through the sky like the faces of the dead, and his wings seemed to peel the heavens back, exposing a new heaven and a new earth beneath. The black sky cracked, hatching the sun; light dopplered out towards eternity as it crowned through the waters of the sound.

The storm had subsided. Scattered around me, streels of seaweed, bits of driftwood, jellyfish, crabs, gunk the sea chucked up.

The tide was coming in.

I got to my feet.

Above in the sudden blueness, gulls wheeled and whirled, and the sound they made was like bowed wood-saws, and their feathers were many-coloured. The sea was made of sky, the sky of sea.

Someone spoke my name. I turned and saw her walking towards me across the strand, and I stared, amazed at her face, her body restored to its fullness, her dress billowing in the wind, a single braid whipping about her shoulders.

She unlaced her boots and stepped out of them and walked into the sea that was the sky, and the blueness pooled around her feet.

She waded further in until it rose to her waist, and her dress floated out in a water flower shape and rose up to her shoulders, her neck, and she went under, her hair spreading like a fan, and she was gone.

 

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P
ETER
M
URPHY
's first novel,
John the Revelator,
was a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick and was shortlisted for a 2009 Costa Book Award. Murphy is a founder of the spoken-word/music ensemble the Revelator Orchestra, and his journalism has appeared in
Rolling Stone,
the
Irish Times,
and other publications.