by Peter Murphy
4—the hoarders and the wasters
An amputee stuffed in a box in someone’s basement, a stick of yellow chalk gripped between its teeth, scrawling kill me on the wood.
5—the wrathful and the sullen
A television crew moving through empty rape rooms.
6—the heretics
A pig walking upright through a shopping mall, the horrified shoppers recoiling.
And then, when we got to Level 7—the bestial and the violent; the murderers and mongers of war; the suicides and sodomites, the blasphemers, perverts and usurers—the gaoler said, ‘This is your floor. They’re gonna love you here.’
We stepped into a gleaming corridor and the air went shrill with whistles. Beady eyes glared from the cells. In one cubicle a young fellow was taking blasts from an inhaler and trying to staunch bleeding from his you-know-where with wet toilet paper.
‘My first Penitentiary period,’ said the kid.
We moved on. A snivelling little gom came along pushing a laundry cart full of yarns. He stopped, looked left and right, and said, ‘Story?’
‘What price?’ the gaoler asked.
‘Half notten, boss,’ the gom answered, so the gaoler put a coin in a slot in the gom’s forehead, and the gom began to recite by rote.
‘This is about a fat boy called Roy Caulfield,’ he said, ‘who on his first day inside, caught the eye of Paws O’Rourke. Paws took a fancy to this lovely little cutlet, but Roy made the mistake of putting up a fight, kicking and squealing and calling Paws dirty names. So Paws, he says, “If you’re going to talk like a potty-mouth, we’ll use you for one.” And they dragged the lad to the infirmary, strapped him into the dentist’s chair, pulled every tooth from his head and fitted his jaws with a clamp. And for three days and three nights every man and jack on level seven mounted that dentist’s chair and used the chap’s gummy gob for a scumbag.’
The gom winked and gimped off with his cart.
The gaoler spat on his cigarette, and it hissed.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘You should meet the boss before I swipe you in.’
Wilting with the heat, we got back in the lift.
Going down.
Level 8—the fraudulent and malicious, panderers and seducers, flatterers, simoniacs, fortune-tellers and diviners, hypocrites, thieves, evil counsellors, falsifiers: alchemists, counterfeiters and false witnesses
A politburo meeting.
Going down.
Level 9—Mongers of compound fraud, the treacherous to kinsmen and to country, and to their guests and hosts and masters
The belly of hell.
Said the gaoler, ‘Warden’s been expecting.’
But I knew already, by the smell: Brother Bubba Ze Bel.
Bubba stood, arms open wide, his pits wafting, big fat smiley head on him.
‘Welcome, son,’ he said, rubbing the chalk from his hands. We shook. He tickled my palm with his pinky and gave me a playful slap across the cheek.
This is the part where I wake for real, in a slick of sweat. I have this dream a lot, John.
What do you think it means? More to the point, why have you forsaken me?
Your friend,
Jamey
All day I wandered aimlessly from Ferris wheel to ghost train to paddle boats. Speakers blared horrendously distorted rinky-dink music, generators belched fumes and everything smelled of smoke and diesel. I drifted through the arcade, flinching at the pandemonium, and pumped coppers into one-armed bandits and shot a few games of pool with people I didn’t know. The dodgems banged crazily into each other and the waltzers lurched, and for a moment I thought I saw Mrs Nagle’s face, contorted with g-force, eyes wide and mouth opened and shrieking like a banshee, but when I looked again she was gone.
People milled along the promenade. Rows of stalls and tables laden with cheap jewellery, gimcrack stuff, necklaces and rings and charms and amulets and stones. Caravans with signs in the windows advertising Tarot and palm and crystal-ball readings. I counted my money and went up the steps to one of the caravans and knocked on the open door. A woman in a baggy jumper and a pair of sweatpants was watching a portable television blaring some sort of game show. She turned the sound down and waved a hand at an armchair beside a flimsy table.
‘Fiver for your palm, tenner for the cards,’ she said.
I gave her a tenner. She donned a pair of glasses and took my hand and pulled my fingers apart and peered at the lines. Her head jerked up. She stared at my face.
‘Out,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Out.’ She pushed the tenner across the table. ‘And take your money with you.’
I stood and backed out the doorway and stumbled down the steps and into the night. The door slammed and the blinds came down. The funfair whirled around me. Lights seemed to liquefy into luminous streaks as I blundered down the promenade under the glimmering big wheel. Figures loomed out of darkness and vanished, skeletons prancing through a Mardi Gras carnival. Young men chatted and flirted with sassy-faced girls with ponytails and bangle-sized ear-rings as they locked safety bars across the seats on the Skyrider. A black goatee-bearded man in a bright yellow shirt and snazzy shoes did card tricks for a small crowd, gaudy rings gleaming on his quick fingers.
Then I saw Miss Ross, the replacement English teacher, all dolled up in mascara and eye shadow, her hair teased out, and she was walking arm in arm with a boy barely older than me, and they were laughing, faces aglow. They stopped and kissed. The boyfriend felt the cheeks of Miss Ross’s bottom through her mini-skirt and I watched, gobsmacked, couldn’t look away until they were swept downstream by the crowd’s current.
I wandered through the commotion. A young clean-shaven man was handing out pamphlets, trying to keep his cool as he was pestered and harangued by crop-haired little toughies. He handed me one of the leaflets and moved on. The cover said: ARE THESE THE LAST DAYS? The pages were filled with admonitions about men becoming lovers of money and pleasure, children disobeying parents, nations rising up against each other, earthquakes, food shortages, pestilences. The centre spread showed images of juvenile delinquents packing Uzis. Bible quotes. Global climate changes and markets crashing. This stuff was called the Good News. I put the pamphlet in my pocket beside Jamey’s letter and hurried back to the car park.
The blue-tinted lights were on in the coach, and its engine was running. I climbed on board and took a seat at the back, away from the wired, white-faced children and jarred adults staggering in the aisle. Somebody had thrown up; you could smell it. As the bus revved and shuddered and pulled off, I put my head against the window and gazed into the gloom and wished I were far away.
I must have dozed off, lulled by the vibration of the engine, because when I opened my eyes Nicky Gibbons was stood in the aisle calling my name.
‘John,’ he said, ‘we’ll let you off at the crossroads.’
The coach hissed to a stop. Nicky shook my hand.
‘See you next year,’ he said.
I got off the bus and stood on the roadside and looked up at the sky and thought for a second I saw Jamey’s face, wan and haunted, mapped in the pitted topography of that summer moon.
A newsflash, a tickertape snake sidewinding across the bottom of the screen. The doe-eyed anchor, eyebrows plucked into pencilled arches, make-up flawless, abandons the autocue for a printout thrust on her desk.
‘We interrupt our scheduled news programming to bring you this bulletin.’
Her voice wavers. Tears bubble over kohl rims.
‘The final seal has been opened. This is not a hoax. We go live now to London.’
Cut to satellite phone feed rendered cubist by signal crack-up.
‘I’m sorry, but we seem to be encountering some technical difficulties. We now join our correspondent in Berlin.’
Cut to baby-faced boys packing Kalashnikovs, posted outside public buildings.
Cut to Sydney, digicam footage of riots and looters shot on sight.
‘More updates as
they happen...’
Hong Kong: office blocks with shutters pulled (down, blue neon signs dying, curfews, queues for food, mobbed hospital wards.
‘24-hour rolling news, the world as it happens, in your home...’
Los Angeles: turnpikes jammed with rusting cars, fifty-mile gridlock in every direction. Black helicopters swarm the skies like flies.
Cut to: Dead air at prime time.
A death’s-head test card.
Cut.
The power goes out, the images shrink into a small white dot.
I get to my feet and walk out of the house and climb into a car. The car drives itself, merging with a torrent of tail-backed traffic, fleets of vehicles bound for the beach, converging on the seaside car park jammed with chip vans. Droves of people mill towards the waterline; some of them clutch bottles of iodine pills like religious icons, some drink from flagons, some smoke dope, anything to numb the panicky-euphoric feeling of this is happening.
Two blokes wearing billabong hats carry a cross improvised from railroad girders to the shore and lay it flat on the sand. A third man in a too-tight suit lies across it, his comb-over unwinding like a turban in the sea wind. They nail him through the wrists and ankles and raise it up. He hangs like a side of beef, bawling his head off, but they haven’t planted the cross deep enough and it tilts slowly forward and hits the wet sand, the sounds of his torment muffled, mouth clogged up with silt.
Everyone has that sweaty and elated look marathon runners get at the twenty-mile mark. Thousands of flushed faces face the sea, gasping spectators at a fireworks display. Breakers lash the sand, foaming beasts bolt the flaming city and here it comes, rearing across the sound like a mile-high wall of lava, like Krakatoa exploding, and you can feel the heat, the air so thick with flying ash and chemicals and death you can barely breathe. We cant tear our eyes away.
We were never warned that it would look so beautiful.
VII
The Patron was a big open-air concelebrated Mass that brought crowds from all over the parish every August. We’d been cleaning my grandparents’ grave for hours, toiling under the stare of the great stone archangel that surveyed the buried dead from its vantage point on the raised plinth.
My mother doused the headstone using a squirt bottle filled with a solution of water and washing-up liquid. Elbows and foreams pumping, sweat shining on her brow, she scrubbed and scoured the headstone with a Brillo pad, pausing every so often to catch her breath. The summer heat had taken its toll. She placed her hands on her hips and scrutinised my face.
‘What’s the matter, John?’ She groaned as she straightened her back. ‘You’re very quiet.’
I shrugged and said, ‘Nothing.’
She wrenched up a bunch of what looked like clover, bits of dirt dropping from the roots.
‘C’mon,’ she said. ‘Don’t make me get the pliers out.’
I looked blearily at the sun and said, ‘I had a weird dream last night.’
She dumped the weeds in a pile.
‘You and your dreams. What was it about?’
‘The world was ending.’
She picked up a bit of an old dishrag and wiped her hands, took out her cigarettes and lit one.
‘Tell me more. Maybe I can make sense of it.’
‘It doesn’t matter. It was stupid.’
‘Tell me anyway. Just for pig iron.’
I described what I could remember of the dream. She listened and nodded, smoke seeping out her nostrils.
‘People have been seeing the end of time since time began,’ she said. ‘After Our Lord was crucified and ascended to heaven, the apostles thought the world was about to end. When that didn’t happen, they all started writing things down. If not for the end of the world never happening, there’d be no gospels. Same with the first millennium.’
I waited for her to continue, but she didn’t.
‘What happened at the first millennium?’ I said.
‘Nothing. They thought the world would end in the year one thousand, and when it didn’t, they moved the date to the anniversary of the crucifixion.’
She tapped ash onto the pile of weeds at her feet.
‘By the Middle Ages, there were so many lunatics running around England predicting the end of the world, they made talking about the Second Coming a criminal offence. That’s why so many of ’em hit off to America.’
She gazed at the inscription on the marble stone, obsidian flecked with white. People picked their way through the graves dressed in their best clothes, careful not to twist their ankles on sods of muck. In a couple of hours the cemetery would be thronged, the air ringing with decades of the rosary, the bishop’s voice piped through loudspeakers rented from Brown’s Electrical.
‘Aye,’ my mother said, and reached for the bunch of gladioli she’d bound into a plastic shopping bag with a rubber band. She slipped the elastic off and placed the flowers on the pebbles, squinting through the smoke as her hands arranged the petals to her satisfaction.
‘Some dreams you’ll never make head nor tail of,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t put much pass on it. Anyhow—’
She removed the cigarette from her mouth, examining the indentation above the filter. ‘We may get out of here before the people start arriving.’
‘We’re not staying for the Mass?’
She stubbed the fag out on an upturned sod, got to her feet and gathered the cleaning stuff.
‘No one in their right mind stays in town the day of the Patron.’ She pronounced it Pattern. ‘Once the pubs open people will be tearing scelps out of each other.’
We picked our way between the plots, passing through the shadow thrown by the great grey angel. My mother lowered her voice.
‘These goms come to town to pray for their dead,’ she said, ‘and end up joining ’em.’
Jamey kept sending me letters, but the longer I put off replying the harder it was to write.
I thought of a story he told me about a guy who goes to his physician complaining of weight loss and a bellyache. The doctor refers him to a specialist, who decides they need to operate. When the sawbones opens him up they find sixty feet of tapeworm inextricably entwined with his intestines. They’re afraid to remove it in case it starts to thrash about and damage his vital organs. So what do they do? They close him up and send him home and tell him to live with it.
One morning when I got up my mother was wearing her good clothes and her coat was draped over her arm.
‘You going somewhere?’ I said.
‘Visiting.’
‘Who?’
‘Never you mind. I’ll be back to make the dinner. Try and stay out of mischief.’
I sat cross-legged on my bedroom floor and re-read Jamey’s most recent letter.
Balinbagin Boys’ Home
7 Priory Road
Balinbagin
Hey John
As you can see from the address, I’ve been here a week now, and the bizarre thing is, it’s not so bad. In fact, it’s like Butlins compared to living in the same house as Dee and Maurice. The food’s a bit crap and the work is boring and they take your phone away until the weekend, but there’s an old prefab out the back where you can sneak a smoke between classes. Most importantly, nobody’s tried to bugger me behind the bikeshed.
The staff are all softies. All you have to do is cough ABUSE! and they go running for fear of a solicitor’s letter. The other lads are decent enough too. I’m the posh boy. This hard nut called Ger Tarp gave me a bit of a grueller the first week, but when word got round why I was here, he backed off. It didn’t hurt to drop Gunter’s name either. Turns out word of his exploits has penetrated even the inner sanctum of Balinbagin Boys’ Home.
We have to do community service at the weekends, which means raking people’s lawns or cleaning up Balinbagin Park, and we went on a sort of goodwill mission to the local mentaller the other day, brought these care packages of toiletries and stuff. That was a laugh and a half.
Weird thing is,
I could walk out of here anytime. No big walls with barbed wire or searchlights or tracker dogs or any of that. But to tell you the truth, it wouldn’t be worth the hassle. Maurice would frogmarch me straight back in.
Anyway, I’ve been coming up with loads of stories. There’s nothing else to do at night except play cards or watch the telly, and that gets old fairly fast. I’ve enclosed one—more to follow later. All I ask is you don’t show them to anybody else, at least not yet. The reason will become obvious once you read them. I’ll get around to changing the names to protect the guilty at a later stage. Meanwhile, store in a safe place. This one’s about your friend and mine, Garda Sergeant Jim Canavan, arresting officer in the case of The People versus Me. You might use it as bribe material should he give you more grief. Tell him a little bird named Corboy told you. If I’d known about some of this stuff before the court case, I might have blackmailed the bugger into dropping the charges.
They’re talking about letting me out this weekend. To be honest, I think I’d rather stay put—at least until I’ve had a chance to straighten things out with Gunter. He keeps texting me these wonderful little haiku. YOU’RE DEAD, SNITCH that kind of thing. It’d be good to see you though, if you have the time. Want to meet up at the train station in Ballo? I’ll be on the seven o’ clock, Friday evening. I’ll buy you a pint, just drop me a line.
Anyway,
Hope all’s good on your end.
No danger of a letter I suppose?