John the Revelator (25 page)

I didn't care. They were only doing what they thought was best, stretching out her days the way a miser would count his money. But those days were too precious not to spend. I didn't want her whole life to become diminished by those last days of sickness. The way I saw it, her death couldn't come soon enough, all the better to preserve her memories of everything that happened in her life, even the dreams of what never came to pass.

Mrs Nagle had left for Mass by the time I got home. I checked every room in the house, even the backyard, but there was no sign, so I rang Har Farrell. Within minutes his van pulled up at the gate. He swaggered up the path dressed in a boiler suit, carrying a toolbox.

 

He grinned through the whiskers he'd grown since the summer, which gave him the appearance of a slightly deranged bear, and set the toolbox on the front step, a big blue monstrosity that opened into stepped shelves and secret compartments like some sort of Chinese puzzle.

‘Put the kettle on,' he said. ‘Two teabags, three sugars and a tooth full of milk.'

Har worked quickly, drilling and screwdrivering, pausing only to gulp his tea. He replaced the locks and installed a Chubb and fitted dead bolts to the back and front doors. When he was finished he packed up the toolbox and handed me a new set of keys.

‘Gather that earwig's belongings and dump them out the front,' he said, climbing back into the van. ‘And don't fall for that little-old-lady tripe. If you don't stand up to her now, you'll never be rid. She'll bury the both of us if we're not careful.'

I did as he instructed. Everything Mrs Nagle owned, her girdles and undergarments, her chocolates, I threw them into a rubbish sack deposited on the front lawn. The grass had grown long, the shrubs wild and tangled in the absence of my mother's hands.

I locked the doors and went through the house opening windows, as if to exorcise Mrs Nagle's presence from every room. I emptied the bin and cleaned out the kitchen cupboards. I even emptied out the cubbyhole under the stairs, and found the old crossbow and quiver full of arrows Har had given me for my tenth birthday. They were wrapped in an old coal sack, coated in bits of slack but free of rust. I clawed through the clutter that had accumulated under my mother's armchair, chocolate wrappers and newspapers and dust bunnies. And something else. A book.

I pulled it out.

 

Harper's Compendium of Bizarre Nature Facts

 

My mother had kept it all this time. I dusted off the cover and flipped through the pages. The plates and illustrations were like childhood flashbacks. The inscription on the flyleaf read:

 

To John
Phyllis Nagle

 

My scalp crawled. The book's pages felt like dead skin in my hands.

I took the book and the crossbow and quiver outside. I placed the book on the front path and touched my lighter to the corners of the pages. A slight breeze fanned the blue and orange flames. Pages withered and blackened into cinders that lifted into the air like moths. I sat on the step with the crossbow cradled across my lap and watched them burn.

‘You found your book then.'

Mrs Nagle stood at the front gate, surveying her belongings spilling out of the sack and onto the grass.

I hauled the bowstring back along the bolt groove and cocked it. Then I took an arrow from the quiver and placed it in the breech and stood to face Mrs Nagle.

‘Go home,' I said. ‘And stay there.'

 

That night I dozed in the armchair until the sound of raindrops splattering the windows and plonking in the empty fireplace woke me. The drizzle swelled to a monotonous deluge, hissing incessantly against the slates. Once I'd loved to listen to that sound while I snuggled under the covers, safe in the knowledge that the fire was crackling in the grate downstairs and my mother was reading in her armchair, but now the downpour just sounded like deranged voices, the music of madness. Rain, a sound I'd always associated with my mother's headaches, her Sunday afternoon lie-downs. The boredom, sitting alone in an empty house, trying to amuse myself. Now she was gone, but the feeling was the same.

When the rain stopped and the sun came up, I dragged myself upstairs, feeling shivery and disembodied, and I slept right through to the afternoon, when the phone woke me.

It was one of the nurses from St Luke's.

‘You'd better come in,' she said. ‘Your mother's failing.'

 

The sky over Kilcody was deep red, big-bellied clouds moving across its expanse like herds of woolly mammoths. I hurried towards the village, powerless to stop what was happening. It was as though all the moments that made up our lives had been set in sequence like dominoes, a succession of trigger events, each precipitating the next, the number of our days preordained and planned since the beginning of time, and we were all no more than creatures made of billions of specks of dust sucked into the collapsing stars of our fates.

I wanted to ask those fatalistic stars for a reprieve, a pardon. Lambs bleated in the fields, the plaintive vibrato of their cries weirdly human, as though they too were appealing for mercy. But there was no going back. I propelled myself forward until I reached St Luke's. The flowerbeds were all in bloom, white blossoms scattered on the grass like snowflakes. A sparrow perched on the trellis. I rang the buzzer and one of the nurses ushered me into a room filled with beds, sleeping women, dried-out husks, heads sunk into pillows, noses up like they were smelling something.

The curtains were three-quarters drawn around my mother's bed, tubes and catheters everywhere. Her chest rose and fell, each breath taking great effort. I sat beside the bed and brushed the hair from my mother's brow and took her scrawny hand. She opened her eyes and managed a wan smile. I gave her a sip from the glass of water on her bedside locker. She tried to speak, but it wasn't her voice, just the ghost of it, as though her own given voice had been sucked out by a succubus and this hoarse whisper was all that was left.

‘Remember the mixo hare?' she said. ‘When you were small?'

‘I remember,' I whispered, afraid that if I raised my voice her body would crumble like ash. She seemed about to say something else, but then her eyelids slowly closed.

Outside, the golden evening light faded to a washed-out yellow, then twilight, then darkness. I sat by the bed and kept vigil into the early hours, paralysed by the reality of what was happening, her dying,
she's dying,
that thought stuck on repeat, over and over until it became meaningless and I just wanted it all to be done, and then the opposite thought followed on its heels, I wanted my mother to stay with me, those contrary thoughts bound to each other, each chasing the other's tail, looping in circles for hours.

Shortly before dawn broke, she came back into herself. Her eyes were as bright as stars, fixed on an indistinct point, like those of a blind woman. She groped for my hand and asked me the time. I told her, and she seemed satisfied with my answer and fell back asleep. Soon her breathing grew more troubled and her body began to tremble. Something in me recognised those shudders, and I knew she was entering the throes. I called for the nurse. She examined my mother, became brisk and businesslike, and I realised she'd done this many times before.

‘I'll go for the priest,' she said. ‘I hope there's time. Do you have a cigarette?'

I took the box from my pocket and offered it to her, but she shook her head and opened the window.

‘Light one up. The smell might rouse her a bit. Might give her that last bit of pleasure.'

‘Will we get into trouble?'

‘Say nothing. Anyone asks, pretend you didn't know any better.'

I sat and breathed smoke over my mother. Her body shivered with movements like labour contractions. I thought of the night she gave birth to me, except now she was birthing herself, out of her life and into her death, and with each inhalation she drew in the smoke and with each exhalation she expelled the last of her breath. Her hand grasped my hand like it must have grasped the midwife's as she pushed me out of her womb, and I urged her towards what lay beyond.

The priest arrived, bleary-eyed and dishevelled. He patted my shoulder and sprinkled holy water over the bed and held up the crucifix and murmured a few words of a prayer.

And then we watched, the three of us, as the morning broke and the sun shone weakly through the window and my mother shuddered away, and the last sound she made was like no other sound I'd ever heard, a sigh, the stuff of her life released from between her lips.

The nurse pulled the curtains and left me alone for a few moments. I looked at my mother's eyes, frozen open as though everything she'd seen was still preserved there in the retina, trapped in the amber of her last second on the earth. My shoulders began to shake and water streamed down my face, and I closed my eyes and summoned her every moment, dredged up all the days of her being from the centre of my body. I cried her out of me until I was dry.

 

Har helped me sort out the funeral arrangements, the death notice in the paper, the local-radio announcement, the flowers, the Mass cards. I had no idea there were so many things to do. Har went into philosophical mode.

All this stuff is for the benefit of the living,' he said, ‘not the dead. It's to keep people busy so they don't have time to come apart. It's after the funeral you have to watch out for. That's when it'll hit you.'

He pressed a wad of notes into my hand. It was more money than I'd ever seen. He wouldn't brook any argument.

‘Take it, son.'

The night of the removals, I stood in the chapel yard and accepted hushed condolences and shook the hand of anyone who wanted their hand shook. Dee Corboy appeared out of the crowd. It was strange to see her all in black. She hugged me and waved her hands in front of her face, banishing invisible tears.

‘Sorry,' she said. ‘I'm useless at these things.' She waited beside me until everyone had gone and then she took my arm.

‘C'mon,' she said. ‘I'll buy you a drink.'

She brought me round the corner to The Ginnet. It was no bigger than a snug. Instead of Ladies and Gents signs on the toilet it had old Greek or Roman male and female symbols.

‘I like it here,' Dee said. ‘It's quiet. Mostly teachers and the drama-society crowd.'

‘Kilcody has a drama society?'

‘I was thinking of joining. I always wanted to act.'

She brought me a whiskey and a glass of wine for herself.

‘Your health, Mrs Corboy,' I said, raising my glass.

‘You'll really have to start calling me Dee. I won't be Mrs Corboy for much longer.'

She held up her bare ring finger. I didn't know quite what to say, so I just said I was sorry.

‘Don't be,' she said. ‘I'm not. Me and Ollie got a flat here in the village. I'm going back to college.'

She took a gulp from her glass and stretched her legs. She was wearing black boots that came to her knees. The heels were lethal.

‘Any word—'

‘Last night. I told him your mother was very sick. He was sad to hear it. Said he'd write. He's been run off his feet what with everything that's happened.'

The whiskey glass stalled halfway to my mouth.

‘Everything that's happened?'

She surveyed the blank look on my face.

‘You haven't heard? Of course you haven't. You've had enough on your mind. It was in today's
Sentinel.
'

She opened her handbag and removed a newspaper clipping and passed it to me.

 

Hip-Hop Star Collaborates with Local Youth
by Jason Davin, Staff Reporter

 

A 17-year-old local youth became the talk of the domestic music industry this week when it was revealed that he has contributed lyrics to the forthcoming album by multi-platinum-selling hip-hop act Cujo aka Lewis Dillon.

James Corboy, formerly a resident of Fairview Crescent, Ballo town, became friends with the 22-year-old Brooklyn-born rapper when they met in Morocco last year. The two subsequently collaborated on some half-a-dozen songs for the as yet untitled new album. Industry sources have speculated that the teenager's lyrical input is likely to net him a substantial sum in royalties.

However, in a bizarre turn of events, it transpires that local Gardai are anxious to determine the current whereabouts of the youth, who allegedly absconded from Balinbagin Boys' Home last August, where he was serving a year on remand for charges relating to a burglary incident in Kilcody chapel last year. When contacted by the
Sentinel,
the youth's mother, Deirdre Corboy, declined to comment.

 

I placed the clipping back on the table.

‘Is this a hoax?' I said.

Dee shook her head.

‘The record company contacted me. I have to sign loads of papers because of his age. Apparently there's uproar around the village. Can you believe it?'

‘I can,' I said, and smiled.

I handed Dee the clipping, but she waved it away.

‘Keep it,' she said. ‘I bought about ten copies to send to his aunts and uncles. God, I didn't even know he could write songs. I'm jealous.'

She took a sip of her wine.

‘It's funny, he's only been gone a few months and I've almost forgotten what he looks like. I have to dig out old photographs to remember. Isn't that awful?'

I knocked back the whiskey.

‘The same thing happened to me.'

We sat in silence. Dee looked at her watch.

‘Oh dear. I have to pick up Ollie from his father's.'

She drained her glass.

‘Walk me to my car.'

It wasn't exactly an order, but I got the feeling Dee was used to getting her own way. I guessed she was quite the princess when she was younger. Probably still was. Her new car was parked in the square.