John the Revelator by Peter Murphy Page A

decipher the liquid’s quiddity, and knocked back a mouthful like it was water.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜What was his name?’
    â€˜Never you mind.’
    She looked out from under her eyebrows and hefted a sigh.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜What was the song?’
    â€˜John the Revelator.’
    She took a sip of whiskey, her face a scowl of concentration. And she began to sing.
    â€˜
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.
    â€˜It worked,’ she said. ‘It sent you off to sleep. So I named you John.’
    She stubbed out her cigarette in the overflowing ashtray.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜Went into himself a-kinda. And one night he saw some programme on the telly and it gave him nightmares.’
    â€˜Nightmares?’
    â€˜Aye.’
    â€˜Like the ones I had?’
    She stared at me. Her pupils were huge.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜That was the last straw for the stragglers. They said they got into music to escape all that tripe. One