by Peter Murphy
‘Who you meeting?’ I said.
‘Gunter Prunty. Biker type. Works in Waxon. Remember I told you about the fags and booze I ripped off from The Ginnet? His idea.’
I never understood why Jamey got involved in this kind of stuff. He was capable of doing the dumbest things.
‘I kept lookout while he went in the skylight,’ he said. ‘Gunter cut me in.’
We were just getting stuck into our second round when the main door opened. Sunshine flooded the room and backlit three tall men in wax jackets and heavy boots. The biggest of them wore elaborate sideburns and a goatee and had an oversized head like a St Bernard’s. His hair was done in a sort of greaser pompadour, tapering off in an aerodynamic spoiler at the collar.
‘Speak of the devil,’ Jamey said under his breath.
Gunter strode over to the bar and put his elbows on the counter and his right boot on the foot rail. He was well over six feet tall. As though sensing he was being stared at, he scanned the room. His eyes stopped at our table. Jamey raised his glass and dipped his head. Gunter nodded back. His friends climbed onto the high stools.
‘The one with the ponytail is Fintan,’ Jamey said, barely moving his lips. ‘He works in the glass factory in Ballo. The ferrety-looking lad in the denim jacket is Davy. Acid casualty. Scrambled his medulla oblongata.’
Gunter bought a pint of stout and took a gulp. He hitched up his baggy-arsed jeans and lurched towards our table. He moved like a man who’d spent time inventing a whole new way of walking. You could feel the impact of his motorcycle boots as they clodded off the wooden floorboards.
Jamey slid over in the seat.
‘Boys,’ Gunter said, and put his stout on the table. ‘Mind if we join you?’
He beckoned the other two over without waiting for an answer.
The musician came in from the beer garden, strapped on his mandolin and plucked out a melody. He closed his eyes, put his lips to the microphone and began to sing in a nasal, reedy voice rendered metallic by the dinky PA.
‘Well, the cuckoo,’ he whinnied, ‘she’s a pretty bird, and she wobbles as she flies.’
We all huddled in the snug like shaggy beasts. It was hard to hold a conversation, so we watched the singer until he took another break. Gunter bought us a round. He removed a match from between his teeth as one of the bar girls set the drinks down.
‘So, Jay,’ he said. ‘You still writing them yarns?’
‘On and off.’
‘Tell us one.’
‘What, now?’
‘Aye. No such thing as a free drink, ever hear that said?’
I could imagine the conflict in Jamey’s mind. He wouldn’t appreciate being talked at like he was a performing monkey. But at the same time, he loved the attention.
‘Ever hear the one about Philip Divilly?’ he said after a few moments’ consideration.
Gunter gulped from his glass.
‘I did not,’ he said, wiping foam from his lip. ‘Tell me.’
Jamey cleared his throat.
About fifty years ago, Philip Divilly was considered the finest tenor in the whole county. The sound of his airs used to put people in a trance. Women fell in love with him on the spot.’
Fintan raised his head and glowered, a dog disturbed from its thoughts.
‘Pishróg,’ he muttered.
‘Go on, son,’ Gunter said to Jamey. ‘Don’t mind him.’
‘Well,’ Jamey continued, ‘the men of Balinbagin didn’t like that one bit. So they got together and went to see an old tinker witch famous for curing warts and shingles and shit. Long story short, they asked her would she put a hex on him.’
Fintan tightened his ponytail and yawned.
‘Pish,’ he said, ‘róg.’
‘Shut your cake-hole, Fin,’ Gunter snapped.
Jamey ignored the interruption and continued with the story.
‘She refused at first,’ he said, ‘but they kept driving up the price until she couldn’t refuse any longer and she went to work with her rabbits’ feet and bowls of milk and eye of newt and toe of frog and all that jive.’
Jamey’s voice grew louder, gaining confidence in the story. His speech patterns had begun to mimic Gunter’s gruff tones, and I wondered if Gunter noticed.
‘One morning Philip Divilly woke up and his voice was gone. All the boys of Balinbagin were delighted. But they made a bad mistake. When it came time to pay the witch, they reneged on the deal and offered her half what they’d agreed on. She told them to shove their money and sought out Philip Divilly. She told him about how all the men of Balinbagin were set again him. Well, he went apeshit. He vowed revenge, and the witch was only too glad to help. She told him that come the next full moon, he was to stand on the crossroads and at the stroke of midnight begin to sing. Didn’t matter what, so long as he opened his mouth.
‘So he went out to the crossroads and when midnight struck he drew in an almighty breath and let it out and a great wind rose up and sparks flew around him like a bonfire, and a spirit flew into his gob and he was changed from a man into a sort of wraith.’
‘What’s a wraith?’ Gunter said.
‘A demon. Y’know, like a ring-wraith. His face grew long and a goat’s smeg grew on his chin and he stretched to twelve feet tall and he looked a right mad bastard.’
‘A bit like Fintan here,’ Gunter said, and planted a slow-motion punch on his friend’s jaw. Fintan affected a horrible parody of a grin that vanished from his face as quickly as it appeared. Jamey went on talking, his voice as portentous as a preacher’s.
‘So he wreaked a terrible vengeance on the men of Balinbagin. He broke into their houses while they slept and slit their throats and pulled out their tongues and ate their hearts and drank their blood.’
He paused for breath and a sip of his drink and then continued.
‘He still walks the roads at night, and anyone who hears his voice is lulled asleep. And he takes out a slash-hook blade and slits their throat and puts his mouth to the wound and sucks their soul out through their windpipe. And he keeps those souls in his pocket and sells one to Old Nick every Halloween in exchange for another year on earth.
‘They say if you put your ear to the ground any summer’s night you can hear his boots on the road no matter where he is in the county, and the only protection from him is to sing at the top of your voice so you can’t hear his magic airs.’
Jamey took another slurp of his beer, sat back and folded his arms.
‘Is that it?’ Gunter said.
‘That’s it.’
The musician in the corner started tuning up his mandolin for another song.
Gunter said, ‘How come you never spin yarns like that, Fintan?’
Fintan shrugged and said, ‘You ever hear the one about Snow White and Pinocchio?’
‘I think I’ve been spared that one,’ Gunter said.
‘Aye,’ Fintan continued. ‘Snow White is sitting on Pinocchio’s face moaning tell-a-lie-tell-the-truth-tell-a-lie-tell-the-truth.’
Gunter cackled and threw more stout down his throat.
There was a bad feeling in the room, squalid and muggy. Somehow, the beer had soured in my mouth.Dust motes danced in the shafts of window light; everything had taken on an amber cast. I got to my feet.
‘What’s up?’ Gunter said. ‘The company not to your liking?’
‘I may go,’ I said. ‘I’ll see you later, Jamey.’
Jamey nodded, but wouldn’t meet my eye, only a quick sidelong glance, as if I’d seen something I wasn’t supposed to see.
‘Later,’ was all he’d say.
A harvest moon rose in the mackerel sky as I walked home, alcohol buzzing in my head like background radiation.
My mother was sat at the kitchen table. Before her was a bottle of Powers, a glass and a Silk Cut Blue burning in the seashell ashtray. A tallow candle gouted in a saucer, its aquarium light playing across her face.
‘Your dinner’s in the oven,’ she said, her speech sl
ow and deliberate. I hung my jacket on the back of a chair.
‘You all right?’
Something flickered in her eyes. I couldn’t read its meaning. She rubbed her face.
‘I was at the doctor’s for a check-up.’
‘How’d that go?’
She looked away.
‘The usual. Give up the fags. Eat more fruit.’
I dipped my chin, indicating the bottle.
‘Thought you were a Pioneer.’
‘I was. I recovered.’
She took a mouthful from her glass and coughed.
‘Have one with me, why don’t you?’
Her chair scraped the floor as she got up and took a glass from the draining board and tipped whiskey into it. She placed the drink before me like a dare.
‘Go on,’ she said. ‘Don’t tell me you never broke your pledge. I can smell the beer off you from here.’
I accepted the glass and took a sip, aware of her eyes on me. Uncharted territory. Whiskey burned all the way down to my stomach. She offered me one of her cigarettes. Again I wavered.
‘Oh take one ower that,’ she snapped. ‘And sit down for heaven’s sake. You’re making me nervous standing there.’
I held my hair back from the candle’s flame and lit the cigarette. My mother gazed out the window and contemplated whatever was out there for a few moments. When she spoke again her voice had softened.
‘I was just thinking about when I first went travelling.’
I took a chair and sipped the whiskey. I liked the warm feeling in my stomach, harsh but somewhat comforting. Candle shadows threw ju-jitsu shapes on the walls.
‘Where?’ I said.
‘England. Scotland. I was following a man.’
I looked at the table, a bit embarrassed. She took a drag of smoke and chortled through her nose.
‘A musician, of all things,’ She shook her head, close to smiling. ‘We met at one of the demonstrations they used to have at Ballo harbour when they were going to build a power plant or something down there. It was a kind of festival.’
The way she spoke was like I wasn’t there. She gazed out at the dim shadows of the trees.
‘His band was camped out down the prom that night,’ she said. ‘They sat up all hours round a fire playing music like a bunch of gypos. I stayed listening until the sun came up. I got into trouble for being out so late, but I didn’t care. I was a grown woman. My brothers left me to stop home and mind our mother and father, like an old spinster. But that night put a longing on me. There must have been a bit of tinker in my blood. The night before they were due to go back to England, they asked me to come away with them. I said I would. I’d never been out of the county in my life.’
‘And did you?’
‘I did, faith.’
She looked at the window again, as if reading something in the condensation there.
‘We travelled all over England that summer. When we had a bit of money we stayed in B&Bs. If we were stuck, we’d all bunk down in the van, sleeping on big squares of foam rubber. Or if the weather was fine, we camped out.’
She paused to lift the bottle and top up our glasses, dribbling some on the table. She wiped the spillage with the sleeve of her cardigan.
‘They were some crowd, all right. Only young lads. The curse of being happy, John, is you never realise it at the time. As soon as you do, it’s over.’
She swirled the glass, as though trying to decipher the liquid’s quiddity, and knocked back a mouthful like it was water.
‘Come the end of the summer, we drove all the way up to the highlands. His people owned a bit of a farm near this little village in the Northeast. He came from money I think.’
‘What was his name?’
‘Never you mind.’
She looked out from under her eyebrows and hefted a sigh.
‘You were named after an old hymn he taught me. You wouldn’t sleep as a baby. One night there was a storm warning on the radio, and I got frightened, and I sang to comfort you.’
‘What was the song?’
‘John the Revelator.’
She took a sip of whiskey, her face a scowl of concentration. And she began to sing.
‘Who’s that a-writing? John the Revelator.’
Her voice was throaty and hoarse, but strong.
John the Revelator wrote the book of the seven seals!
She wiped her mouth with her sleeve and took a drink.
‘It worked,’ she said. ‘It sent you off to sleep. So I named you John.’
She stubbed out her cigarette in the overflowing ashtray.
‘The plan was to set up camp in the farmhouse and make a record of his songs. He was handy with the equipment. Used to take amplifiers apart and put them back together again using nothing but pliers and a soldering iron and a roll of sticky tape.’
She shook a fresh cigarette from the box and lit it.
‘We travelled through the hilly country. Nothing only mountains and forests and whiskey distilleries. It was very near the coast. He said it was a holy place and in the old days people settled there because of the soil. The land was more fertile than any other part of the country. The cabbages were famous, big as bushes.
‘It was still bright at ten o’clock the night we arrived. The farm looked like the last place God made. There was a long lane from the main road up to a big stone house and a few barns and a haggart. The main building had an old potbelly stove and a black-and-white television set, but the reception was bad because of the mountains.
‘They set up the gear in one of the barns, and the boys would play all night and then sleep late. I was in charge of the cooking. Someone would hit off in the van and come back with crates of drink. There was a lot of drinking. But after a few weeks the boys started to get bored, stuck in the back of beyond, living on top of one another. The drink didn’t help. There were rows. And he was taking these pills that kept him awake so as he could work. The record, that’s all he talked about.
‘Some of the boys wanted to go back on the road and make money, but he was hell bent on finishing what he started. The pills and the drink were making him sick. He lost about a stone in weight, and there wasn’t a pick on him in the first place.
‘Then the stove packed in, and we ran out of firewood and started using the furniture for kindling. The boys lit out, one by one, back to Glasgow or London. So now it was just him and me and one or two stragglers. They’d go into the village every couple of days and make a few shillings busking or doing odd jobs. But the whole thing was starting to come apart. He got very strange.’
Her hair fell in her face. She tucked the stray strands behind her ears.
‘Went into himself a-kinda. And one night he saw some programme on the telly and it gave him nightmares.’
‘Nightmares?’
‘Aye.’
‘Like the ones I had?’
She stared at me. Her pupils were huge.
‘His nerves went. He woke me up one night saying there was going to be a nuclear war that would wipe out most of the people on earth and those of us who were left would only be able to buy food or trade if we had a mark on our hands or foreheads. He said it was all foretold in the Bible, if you knew where to look.
‘That was the last straw for the stragglers. They said they got into music to escape all that tripe. One night when he was out in the barn with the headphones on, I caught the last two lads loading gear into the van. They asked me to come with them, but I wouldn’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘I just couldn’t. I thought things would get better when the spring came. But they didn’t. They only got worse. He tore up all these rubbish sacks and hung them over the windows. He said the RAF Harriers flying overhead were sent from a base to spy on us because we knew the truth. That the government was in the employment of the AntiChrist. Then he changed his mind and said the pilots of the planes were angels sent to watch over us. Then he decided the Third World War had already happened and the planes
were remote controlled and they had government people on board, and they would just keep on refuelling over the earth until it was safe to land again. He warned me not to leave the farm or I couldn’t come back cos I’d be poisoned from the radiation.’
‘And you believed him?’
‘I didn’t know what to believe. When you’re locked up with a sick person, John, you lose your grip on what’s real. It’s like wandering into a forest, and you stray so deep into the trees you lose your bearings. You don’t know where to even start looking for a way back.
‘Anyway, one night he was so crooked from the want of sleep he accidentally wiped a whole reel, weeks of work, and he came in and started throwing things around. He upended the table and a glass broke and nearly sliced my bare foot open. When I told him to calm down he raised his hand as if to strike me. That’s when I decided to leave. If not for myself, for the baby.
‘I was about ten weeks gone. I was afraid that when I started to show, he’d never let me leave. The state he was in, he would’ve thought I was going to give birth to Our Lord.’
She shivered a bit and pulled her cardigan tight around her shoulders.
‘When I realised the condition I was in, I packed my bag and waited for the right time to make a move. He passed out one night after working about three days straight, so I took what money there was and sneaked out the door and ran down the lane. My heart was pounding. I was trying not to breathe too hard in case I took in poisonous gases. I sniffed the air for smoke and looked up at the sky to see if the world was covered with clouds of ash. I didn’t meet a soul for ages and I was starting to wonder if the whole world was dead or not. Then I saw a man coming up the road, and half his face was covered in a big purple rash. I couldn’t stop staring at it. I asked him was it from the fallout, and he said, “No, love, I’ve had it my whole life, it’s just a birthmark.”
‘I stayed in the village that night and next day I hitched a lift south. I worked in a market in Edinburgh for a few weeks. I thought about him the whole time, wondering if he’d come after me. To tell you the god’s honest truth, I was angry when he didn’t. And I got vexed with myself and swore I’d never put my trust in another man again.’