John the Revelator Read Online Free PDF

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.
    â€˜
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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜I’m Jamey Corboy,’ he said.
    He offered me a smoke. I wavered a bit, but he insisted.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜I hope we don’t get the weather you’re expecting,’ I said. ‘You must be roasted.’
    He flicked ash on the ground.
    â€˜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.