by Peter Murphy
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.’
Thumb.
I hawked and cleared my throat. My lungs still felt clogged with watery oatmeal.
‘Ma,’ I said, ‘you sound like Mrs Nagle.’
I went back to spooning porridge, but she rapped the table to get my attention.
‘If any mans seed of copulation go out from him, then he shall wash all his flesh in water, and be unclean until the even. And every garment, and every skin, whereon is the seed of copulation, shall be washed with water, and be unclean until the even. Deuteronomy. Or Leviticus. I forget which.’
She stared into the infinity over my left shoulder.
‘A good honeycomb sponge bath would sort you out.’
She sipped her tea and peered slyly over the rim of the mug.
‘Sure I remember you used to spray like a hose when I changed your nappy.’
There was an almost wistful smile playing about her lips. A porridge blob plopped from my mouth into the bowl. I couldn’t tell whether or not this whole routine was some kind of joke. I wasn’t sure she knew herself. She sighed, fingers twisting her hair, and said, ‘John, are you having fantasies? About girls?’
‘No.’
‘Boys?’
‘Maaaa!’
That came out as a bleat. She raised an eyebrow and smirked.
‘A sheep?’
Whenever my mother suspected something astray, her cure tended to be more painful than the ailment. Like the time she prised a splinter from my hand with a sewing needle sterilised over her lighter. Or when I got a blister on my heel from wearing new shoes and she burst it with her fingernails and sprinkled the tender new skin with salt.
‘Did I ever tell you the story of Labhra Loingseach,’ she said, ‘the king with donkey’s ears? According to the legend, any barber who cut the King Labhra’s hair was put to death afterwards so they couldn’t reveal his secret. But this one barber begged to be spared for the sake of his wife and children. The king took pity on him and agreed to let him live so long as he didn’t breathe a word. The barber agreed, but as the days went by, he was driven mad by the thought of what was under Labhra Loingseach’s hair, so he went out into the woods and threw his arms around a tree and whispered his secret into a knot in the wood. But one of the court musicians asked a tree-cutter to chop the tree down for wood to make a harp, and when he played the harp in the court of the king, a voice rang out: “Labhra Loingseach’s got donkey’s ears.” Then all the trees of the forest joined in and the king fled his castle in mortification.’
She patted the back of my hand.
‘Y’know, secrets have a way of coming out in their own time. So tell me. What’s keeping you up at nights?’
I couldn’t put up with any more. I told her.
‘I have bad dreams sometimes, that’s all.’
She blinked. That’s all she did. Her face zoomed in so close I could smell the smoke on her breath.
‘About what?’
I shook my head and lifted spoonfuls of cold slop and let them gloop into the bowl.
‘Nothing. Just stupid stuff.’
My mother’s eyes blazed across the room. They took in the fire, the coal bucket, the sacred-heart lamp, Haircut Charlie. They peered through the window at the trees outside. And they lit on the television set on the counter.
‘That fecken thing,’ she said, her face stony with resolve. ‘The devil’s teat.’
I had no idea what she was on about.
She crossed the kitchen, yanked the plug from the socket, grappled the television off the counter and wobbled across the floor.
‘Open the door,’ she grunted.
‘What are you doing?’
‘What I should’ve done long ago. Now open the door and do as you’re bid.’
I got up and pulled the door open wide. She staggered outside and set the television down on the front path, the flex coiled on the ground like a three-pronged tail.
‘I’m selling that thing. And no more about it.’
She made good on her threat. Later that afternoon, Har Farrell came to collect it. Money changed hands. But it didn’t cure me of the dreams.
The church steeple looms over the village of Kilcody, God’s lightning rod. The old crow’s claws are clamped to the weathervane at its summit. He prances about, a child doing the wee-wee dance, ruffles the black boa of his feathers and glowers at the people below as they shuffle through the chapel arch.
A gust rotates the weathervane slowly through four points of the compass. West across The Holla, the mountains stand shoulder to shoulder like ogre brothers. Up north, the Waxon factory discharges gaggles of haggard, fag-lipped girls and denim-jacketed hard chaws. Southerly, The Ginnet, the library, Tyrell’s bike shop. And then beyond the river and the railway tracks, the east road runs seaward through five miles of fields, headlong into the waves.
The crow’s sonar sweeps the nearabouts. A flap of black and he glides over the headstones jutting from the gummy loam, over the head of the great stone angel set on a plinth at the centre of the cemetery, and he leaves the humans to their human doings.
III
Most boys are all balls and elbows and bad moods when they turn fifteen, and I was no exception. My mother sometimes expressed misgivings that I had no friends my own age, but I was content with my own company, kept my head perpetually buried in comics and paperbacks poached from the stall outside the secondhand shop on Barracks Street.
Sometimes I spent the after school hours at the library reading encyclopedias and old religious books remaindered from St Patrick’s Seminary in Ballo. It was hushed as a church in that sterile library light, and time passed easily among the dusty yellowed pages and faded ink. I read until my eyes felt dried and cracked and I wished there was a chip you could get implanted in your brain that would store the gist of every book ever written and you could call up the text at will, scrolling the pages down your mind’s eye.
But when the weather grew hot and sticky and everywhere the sap was rising it was harder to concentrate, so I killed time hanging around the mini-arcade in Fernie’s shop where spotty, goggle-eyed lads pumped coppers into the old Space Invaders. Or else I mooched around the market square where country chaps waited for their bus, ties off and sleeves rolled up. Those were the last days of term, the doss days just before the summer exams when the heat was intimate and the air sweet with mowed grass.
That’s when I met Jamey.
‘Hoy.’
I heard the voice before I caught sight of the face, whirled in a 180-degree pan trying to pinpoint the source. He was parked like a big barnacle at the base of the Father Carthy monument. There was a book balanced on his lap, and an unlit fag jutted from his mouth.
‘You with the head,’ he said, placing his book on the ledge. ‘Got a light?’
I wasn’t in the habit of buying cigarettes, not yet, but I carried matches for chewing on, or skewering woodlice. He detached himself from Father Carthy’s shadow and stood to take them from me. His shape’s molecules, his very stuff, seemed to shift and recombine in the sunlight.
‘I’m Jamey Corboy,’ he said.
He offered me a smoke. I wavered a bit, but he insisted.
‘I’ve loads. I broke into The Ginnet a couple of weeks ago. Came out with four bottles of vodka and six cartons of fags.’
That was a lot to tell someone you’ve just met, but I put no pass on it. I took the cigarette and he lit us both. The taste of smoke was sour in my mouth and its effects made me feel a bit nauseous.
Jamey had on a Crombie coat that came to his shins. Black jeans and army boots, floppy hair raked back from a high forehead and a somewhat beaky nose. His eyes were intensely blue, almost frightened, and if you touched him, he’d jump.
‘I hope we don’t get the weather you’re expecting,’ I said. ‘You must be roasted.’
He flicked ash on the ground.
‘I don’t dress for the weather.’
He was a blow-in from Ballo town, a year ahead of me, just about to start his Junior Cert. Like all transplants he was something of a loner, the only boy who sat in the school shelter writing in a spiral notebook instead of stampeding around the yard after a bursted football. He lived in one of the nice houses on Summer Hill, the ones with the trimmed lawns and palm trees.
The teachers said he had brains to burn but couldn’t be motivated. When I got to know him a bit better he told me he was adopted and that when his younger brother came along it was like he didn’t exist any more. People always thought he was older than he was. That got him served in pubs; the confident way he carried himself.
Across the road in front of Brown’s Hardware, barelegged heifers from the Mercy were playing arses and kicks. Mister Brown came out and ran them. Jamey watched all this, a smile tempting the corner of his mouth.
I nodded at his book.
‘What you reading?’
He picked it up and flipped the pages.
‘Rimbaud in Africa!’
‘Who’s Rimbaud?’
‘A writer.’
He clawed hair out of his eyes.
‘Brainy bugger. Revolutionised poetry by the time he was twenty-one, then jacked it all in and bunked off to Africa and made a fortune running guns and slave-trading.’
He waved his hands around as he spoke, the smoke describing swirls and spirals in the air.
‘Him and his buddies used to drink absinthe in a kip called The Dead Rat in Paris. One time Rimbaud climbed up on the table, dropped his pants and took a dump and painted a picture in it. Big into blasphemy too, used to carve graffiti into park benches. Merde á Dieu.’
‘What’s that mean?’
‘Look it up.’
‘I will.’
I stooped and plucked Harper’s Compendium from my schoolbag.
‘Here’s what I’m reading.’
Jamey took a pair of glasses from his shirt pocket and perched them on his nose. They were round and wire-rimmed and completely transformed his face, made him look more owlish. He thumbed through the pages.
‘Man,’ he said, eyes glowing behind the lenses, ‘this is some strange.’
He flipped to the plates and gawped at an illustration of a tapeworm exiting a snail.
‘Oh Jesus, that’s fucking repulsive.’
Then he pointed to a picture of a maggot curled up in some brain.
‘What is this? Worm porn? You like this stuff?’
I shrugged.
‘Nature’s pretty twisted.’
He shut the book and thrust it back in my hands.
‘I’m sorry, man, I can’t look at that.’
He shuddered like he had to pee, dropped his cigarette and squashed it beneath his boot.
Outside Brown’s Electrical a gypsy-looking bloke in a porkpie hat began to play the accordion, the instrument case open at his feet. A few youngsters clustered around and began to flick coins at him. Somebody grabbed the case and started to drag it down the path. The musician shouted and made a grab for it. Someone else picked it up and ran, and the musician chased after him awkwardly, the accordion still strapped around his chest.
Jamey rubbed his chin. There was a ring on the fourth finger of his right hand. Some kind of stone, maybe garnet.
‘Hey,’ he said, ‘want to hear something? It’s right up your alley.’
I was starting to feel conspicuous talking to this weird kid in the middle of the market square, but it wasn’t like I had anything else to do.
‘Go on then.’
‘This girl, Annie.’ He plucked a flake of tobacco from between his tongue and teeth and flicked it away. ‘One morning she woke up with an itch that she couldn’t quite scratch, right down in the basement of the ladies’ department. An irritation. It got so bad she had to make an appointment to see her doctor. Next thing she was sitting in the waiting room looking at the eye chart and the two letters V and D started glowing at her.’
‘Why?’
‘Venereal Disease. The clap. But she was thinking that couldn’t be the trouble, cos she and the boyfriend were using protection. Besides, he was a virgin when they met. His name was Gavin and his big ambition was
someday he’d become the state pathologist. She had a thing for nerds. A lot of girls do, you’d be surprised.’
‘I know.’
I didn’t know.
‘Anyhow, they were at it like rabbits at first, but the sex life cooled off a bit when he took a second job. Stress, man. It’s a killer. So she was thinking it must be something harmless, like a yeast infection.’
His eyes shone as he spoke, that half-smile on his lips. Watching the way his whole body seemed to engage with the telling of the story provided as much amusement as the story itself.
‘So she arrived into the waiting room, dreading the examination. She’d known the doctor since he gave her the BCG. Pure melt. But she told him the problem, and the doctor had a good poke around, and when he was finished he said, ‘Annie, do you have a regular sexual partner?’
Jamey was getting so into the story now, bubbles of spit had begun to form around the corners of his mouth.
‘When she said yes, he asked where this boyfriend could be found. She told him: “Park Road Funeral Home.” The doc nodded his head, as if that explained everything. And Annie said, “Doctor, what’s that louser given me?” And the doc just said, “You don’t need to know that right now.” But she insisted. “Whatever it is, I need to know,” she said. “I mean, is it terminal?” And the doc closed his eyes a second and said, “No, Annie. Not for you anyway.”’
‘And?’ I said.
‘Ah?’
‘What did she have?’
‘Maggots.’
My mother was scrubbing potatoes at the kitchen sink, placing the clean ones in a colander on the draining board. She scoured the skins and gouged out the eyes with a knife, then began to slice onions on a chopping board. When she sensed my presence, she turned, and her eyes were red and filled with water from the stinging onion juice. She wiped her face with the rolled-up sleeve of her cardigan.
‘What’s for dinner?’ I said.
‘Pig’s feet and hairy buttermilk.’
She sounded tired. She filled the big saucepan to the halfway mark from the tap, hefted it onto the cooker with a grunt and wiped her hands on the tea towel.
‘Saw you in town today,’ she said.