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The Last Day
7.00 am - 8.30 am It was the day the world ended but no one on Gomorrah Grove even noticed. Apart of course from Adie Moran but she had seen it coming, ever since Mona Blood had shown her the scrap of newspaper with the nun's prediction on it. Mona had promptly forgotten all about it in favour of the next sensational titbit: the dead rock star, idol of a generation, who turned out to be alive and well and living as a woman with five children in Shackahack, Arkansas; the leading British politician whom photographs conclusively proved to be an alien. But Adie, eleven and three quarters, near enough, on that day in dismal February, ignored such irrelevancies and stared at the smudgy photograph of the Polish nun who had firmly stated, not in those precise words, of course, that God had had it up to here with mankind. Like any craftsman worth his fee, He couldn't tolerate a flawed creation and had decided finally - although all time since the beginning of the world was as a blink in the eye of God - to scrap the lot and start over with a fresh dollop of primal clay. From the window of the box room she shared with her older sister Martina, Adie looked out over the grey wet street and wondered exactly when the thunderbolt would fall. Now when nearly everyone on this day of rest was still sleeping? At mass - the virtuous being beamed straight up to heaven? In the greasy aftertaste of Sunday dinner? While everyone stared at TV as early darkness crept over Paradise Hill? At the stroke of midnight? Though midnight here would already be tomorrow in Moscow. It was a puzzle. As Adie peered through the window, a figure lurched along the pavement. For some people it was still yesterday.
Martina, fourteen and with unwashed off lipstick on pouting lips and gritty mascara swimming in violet eyes (Martina was only something else) rolled and curled in her cosy bed. In her dreams, the duvet transformed itself into her lover, pushing between her legs so soft, so soft, caressing those already embarrassingly huge breasts that left the boys speechless as she passed, only smirking among themselves and making smart remarks after she had gone. Two years previously she had been as flat as her kid sister. How much bigger were they going to grow? But her lover had the face of none of the gangly, blotchy, greasy-haired youths who hung around at night trying to look intimidating and cool as they wheezed on robbed cigarettes. He was a rock star - any one of the teen icons whose images, torn out of fanzines, were stuck to the walls around her bed. He was a movie star. He was the fella from the Crescent who rode a motor bike and looked moody. He was River Phoenix. Across the landing, four of Adie's brothers fiddled with themselves on the two bunk beds that left little space for anything else. One wall, including the doors of the fitted wardrobe, was completely covered with pictures of Manchester United team players, even though thirteen-year-old Hughie affected to be different by supporting AC Milan and quiet introverted Joseph, aged sixteen, disliked team sports and collected Real Crime magazines, piled up in a cardboard box within easy reach of his hand - he slept on the bottom bunk - Geoffrey Dahmer rubbing shoulders with Fred West, Denis Nillson and the boys from Bootle. It was the older lads, Bernard and Mark, who were football mad, though Mark more than Bernard, who had recently discovered that he was attractive to women and who had made it his secret ambition to sleep with every girl in Gomorrah Grove aged between sixteen and thirty, excepting the idiot Barbara Cheevers and if possible including the nurse that lived at the top of the road who must be nearer forty but who had the pertest, roundest bum Bernard had ever seen under the stretched white cotton of her uniform. Nevertheless, it was Bernard who was the brains of the family with a place at university no less - and quite the Renaissance man, combining a mathematical and scientific bent with a wide taste in reading from Terry Pratchett to Dostoevsky. Mark, in his last year at school and applying to all sorts of technical colleges for all sorts of courses from catering to the leisure industry to satisfy his mam, was less of an intellectual titan, dreaming only of being discovered by some major league team and, even as he turned over in bed, scoring yet another brilliant goal.
As Adie Moran's dad slept in a sonata of snores, her mother stared open eyed at the flaking paint on the ceiling. In the early light she spotted a cobweb and nearly wept. Really, life was too hard. The moment you nearly got on top of things another spider sneaked up and deposited another web. She had so many worries, never mind making ends meet, just forcing them round to point in the general direction of each other was hard enough. Everything had the tendency to fly off and before you knew it, it was another visit to the Credit Union. Thank God, so far she'd avoided the money lenders that bled some of her neighbours white but she could see it coming. And she hated refusing the kids, particularly Bernard, such a charmer, whose grant seemed to go nowhere and who could always get around her with a hug and a wink. The older girls were all right, thank God, with husbands in employment, and Francis was making good in an Irish bar in Germany and even sending home the few bob to her personally, knowing that if his da got wind of it, that would be the last she'd see of it. But it was Declan was the biggest worry of all. Wherever did she go wrong with Declan? Snoring Jack Moran slept a blameless, dreamless sleep. Or was his brain still pickled? Saturday night always made a big hole in the housekeeping but what was a man to do, worn down by life. He deserved the bit of pleasure after so long with his nose to the grindstone. He harrumphed towards the borders of consciousness, then slumped back into oblivion again.
God will not be mocked, the nun had written, words transcribed from the mouth of the Virgin Mary herself when she had suddenly appeared hovering above the nun kneeling all the long night in motionless prayer. It was understood that Mary herself, soft as whipped cream, if it were up to her would give the erring children yet another chance. Mothers, I ask you! God, on the other hand, no wishy-washy sentimentalist but a Victorian dad determined not to spare the rod since the children were spoiled already, had decided the time was long overdue to smite. Not that the righteous need fear, of course. The gates of heaven were already swinging open for them. Adie hoped she was one of the righteous since the alternative was too horrible to contemplate. On the other hand, the prospect of an eternity spent praising God sounded deadly tedious, worse than school assembly because that was only forty minutes long and occasionally the head teacher even cracked a mild joke. Adie didn't think God had much of a sense of humour although Mona Blood said sure you'd know He must have if you've ever seen a naked man. Adie hoped Mona was one of the righteous to brighten up eternity a bit but she had to admit that her friend could be a terrible bitch, even vicious and spiteful at times, like when she stuck a notice saying SCREAMING FOR IT on poor simple Barbara Cheevers' back. To be honest, Adie didn't give Mona more than an outside chance of numbering herself among the blessed. And, looking on the bright side, Mona, always bonking off mass, probably wouldn't enjoy it anyway. Still, perhaps when you're dead you don't think of things in the same way. Maybe they'd all have a really cool time singing hymns for ever and ever, like at some mega rock concert, God and Jon Bon Jovi, and Halleluia the all time number one hit. Adie generally stayed away from thinking too much about what eternity actually meant. The few times she had - at night before sleeping - it was like a great hand squeezed her guts. No beginning and no end. How could that be? Her brother Bernard, the brainbox, had tried to explain the theory of how time and space curved back on themselves and from then on Adie had seen herself as in a giant transparent egg floating in nothingness. It didn't really answer the questions, though.
Adie's mother, Jean, could take no more of the snoring. No matter how hard she tried to push Jack on to his side, he remained an immovable object steadfastly - and against all the laws of physics as Bernard might have pointed out - resisting an irresistible force. Anyway, it was nearly eight o'clock, the time she usually got up on weekdays, even though there was really no need. Everyone could in theory get their own breakfast, even Adie who always just shovelled a bowl of Rice Krispies into herself. Jean fitted her feet into soft mules and pulled on her dressing gown before creeping out on to the landing. In a way, she thought, the house was at its nicest at this time when everyone else was sleeping (how could she know that Adie lay wide awake on her top bunk, her small face almost pressed against the window pane, waiting for a pale horse to gallop up the suburban street?). Jean silently glided down to the kitchen where the old dog lifted her head, too tired even to wag her tail. She glanced out of the back window at the coal shed as she put the kettle on for tea, then felt in the pocket for her cigarettes. There were three left, enough not to panic yet. As she lit one and drew the first billow into herself, her body curled with a rough cough that she tried to suppress. The tea was strong and bitter, boiled in the pot the way her mother had made it for her own brood of ten. Jean had gone one better with Adie and then was persuaded by the doctor, who feared for her loss of weight and her apparent ability to go on breeding indefinitely, to have her insides out. Jack had made a fuss of course, thinking she'd be no sort of a woman for him after, then coming round when the doctor had had a word, frightening him with the information that another pregnancy could be life-threatening for Jean, leaving him to bring up the kids alone. And then Adie had nearly died of convulsions that first year, as if God were punishing them for the sacrilege. But really, Jean thought, looking at the coal shed again, heaven would have to be very good indeed to be worth it all.
Next to the Morans' house, Neillie Kearney, newly returned home from his night out, having noisily fumbled with his keys, dropping them twice and cursing, having stumbled up the stairs grunting and muttering, was now vomiting his social welfare into the lavatory bowl. His wife, Marion, lay rigid with rage in her half of the bed. Let him try to climb in beside her. Just let him try. Fecking waster.
Across the road, the four Rotweilers that the O'Connor boys were trying to breed, woke and clamoured loudly for meat. Mickser opened his eyes and shut them again instantly while Joey burrowed his head deeper into the pillowy belly of his girlfriend, Linda.
The new baby in the house next door to the Kearneys, screaming with hunger, suddenly went quiet when her mother, breasts spurting milk in a primal response, let the baby attach her mouth to one large nipple, while Jim, the naughty man, twisted round in bed and sucked at the other, Caroline laughing and trying to push him off - "There'll be none for Aisling if you scoff it all." And Jim, relishing the sweetness of the warm blue milk, imagined, cuckoo-like, how pleasant it would be to keep everything for himself, Caroline, the milk, the warm nest of a bed. Then looked across at the guzzling head of his wonderful daughter and conceded that after all it was nice to share.
Little Miss McHugh peeked out through the window. Still safely dark. She opened the back door, stepped out into the back garden and stood under the rain while her puzzled cats, Peter, Cuddles and Jeremy, rubbed up against her ankles and miaowed for their breakfast. The clouds that churned across the sky gained a lighter tinge even as she looked. She sighed and went indoors to pull down the blinds that had to keep the light of day out. Because poor little Miss McHugh couldn't tolerate daylight - "Like Dracula," Bernard Moran had quipped, "maybe she's a secret vampire." "Not at all," his mother had reproved him. "It's a serious disease. Lupus." "Sorry," Bernard had replied. "I shouldn't have said Dracula..." He'd paused for effect. "Obviously, she's a werewolf." Then had to explain to Adie that lupus in Latin means wolf. But poor little Miss McHugh - and everyone on the street prefixed her name with the epithets - had an even heavier burden in the shape of the large, cantankerously senile, eighty-six year old father who lay in bed wringing a crinolined lady by the neck - a small brass bell - every time he wanted, or thought he wanted something. Quite often, by the time Miss McHugh had struggled up the stairs, he had forgotten or changed his mind. Luckily he slept a lot. Dr Duffy, seeing her predicament combined with a refusal to have her father "put away" as she expressed it - and after all, if she did, what would she have left to live for, how would she fill her suddenly empty, imprisoned days? - compromised by giving her plenty of tranquillisers for the old boy, to knock him out. She switched on her radio, softly for Pa had sharp ears yet, and listened to early Mass while she drank some fennel tea and caressed the ginger and white fur of her cat Peter.
Ted Cheevers, on his side of the bed, stared at his wife's thin back, encased in a brushed nylon nightdress that tied tightly round the neck and wrapped round her feet. He suspected she kept her panties on all night, too, in case. In case the nightdress should ride up to her waist during the dreams that tormented her, in case he should roll against her in his need and feel her flesh against his hand. He suspected but never had occasion to find out, for at the first touch of their bodies she instinctively jerked away from him. He got up and sat on the edge of the bed. Was it his imagination or did he hear a sigh of relief from Helen even as she slept? He went and ran himself a bath, though the only sweat he would wash off as ever was his own. Of course she wasn't sleeping. She only ever half slept, anyway, one part of her brain always ready to register any flicker of movement, any sound. She allowed herself now the pleasure of rolling on to his side of the bed, into the hollow made by his form, of shedding dry tears into the pillow that smelt of the coconut shampoo he used on his hair.
The snores that emitted from the marriage bed of the Bradys came both from large Brendan and chubby Jacinta, both pinned down on their backs by the chintzy percale sheets she tucked in so firmly under the mattress. It was like a duet for two horns in atonal counterpoint. The couple luxuriated in a bit of a lie-in on Sunday mornings, especially in winter when the gas central heating was programmed to switch on at 7.30 am. Waste not, want not, Jacinta always said, and they wanted for very little. Or actually to be precise, Jacinta wanted for a great deal but still had more than most of her neighbours. Make that more than all of her neighbours. But then, as she often said, the neighbourhood left a lot to be desired. Young Brendan, sleeping his apparently innocent sleep, sandy-haired like his dad, with a sprinkling of freckles over his snubby nose, looked like a dote, the shiny apple of any mother's eye and especially Jacinta's. As for his dreams, the less said about them the better - his mother would have had a fit. Bred to be devious, young Brendan had already learnt to dissemble in his sleep. Meanwhile, in the back bedroom, the girls were lying in twin beds, as unlike twins as it was possible to be and anyway they weren't, four years separating exemplary Michelle, nice and round in all the right places, from her kid sister, Celine, skinny and doomed. Celine's nails were bitten down and bleeding. Now in her sleep, she rolled over and found her sister's outstretched hand and feasted on those manicured vestiges of claws, while Michelle dreamed that she was swimming in a sea as thick and brown as the ox-tail soup her mother made out of a packet, that glistening silver fishes nibbled at her as she tried to move her sluggish limbs.
Mona Blood listened through the thin partition to her parents having a screw in the next room. God, her da must have been dreaming of yer one Cher again. Mona, of course, had forgotten that it was the day the world was supposed to end and was thinking with dread of the two projects - one on fish and one on local history - she was to hand in on the Monday, neither of which she had even started. The Apocalypse she might welcome if it let her off the hook. Her da roared - the climax was approaching - and Mona heard her mam emit several appropriate whimpers. A few moments later the lavatory flushed and then her mam went down to make breakfast. It was always a fry on a Sunday morning, crisp rashers, pink sausages like plump fingers, fried eggs the edges slightly curled and crunchy from too hot fat, black and white pudding, slices of white pan turned golden with oil. Soon the smell wafted up to Mona, torn between the warm bed and the desire to stuff grease into her face. Greed won and she thumped down the stairs to where her mam, the flush already fading but the bite marks on her neck standing out livid, shook the great iron pan and turned the rashers.
Gomorrah Grove, a strip of street in a thirty-year-old estate of grey houses, lined up with military precision in a turn off Babylon Avenue that you'd miss if you didn't know it was there. Cut off by a railway line with only a footbridge that was guarded by gangs from the flats on the other side, who saw it as their patch, no place for the Seasiders. For the sea hemmed the inhabitants in on the other side, across a long wavering strip of dirty beach adorned with sanitary towels and disposable nappies and lumps of shit and dead fish washed in by the tides from the promontory that was Paradise Hill where the wealthy lived staring across the sea to Sellafield.
Blue with cold in the stone-flagged chapel, Mrs Tolly knelt whipping her bare, shrivelled shoulders with regular though weak strokes. God, she hoped, would forgive an enfeebled old woman her apparent lack of zeal. She would tighten the metal chains around her torso to make up for it. As morning advanced, a sliver of grey light crept across the flagstones. When it touched the hem of her gown, tied around her waist to leave her top half naked, she would go down to breakfast. But not till then. Across her grey flesh crawled long red fingers as she whipped herself with those rhythmic strokes and muttered prayers of devotion to her mediatrice, Our Lady in heaven. It was the biggest house on Paradise Hill. The oldest. All the land as far as the eye could see had belonged to Mrs Tolly's father, also now in heaven it was devoutly to be hoped. The sale of the land had not been precipitated by need, for Mrs Tolly's father had been fabulously rich, his money mysteriously made through an unspecified import-export business that had connections with obscure and barbaric regions of the globe where black people, Mrs Tolly had always understood, wore few if any clothes. Mr Tolly, also now long deceased and twanging his harp no doubt alongside Mrs Tolly's father, had been brought into the business and had taken to it like the proverbial duck to water. No, there had been no reason to sell the land except that it was too much for one family and a worry as well as an embarrassment in the days of ever greater democracy when such differences of wealth and class were supposed to be declining. The big houses that dotted Paradise Hill had been the concession of Mrs Tolly's father, each purchaser vetted for his suitability as a neighbour. Mrs Tolly, for her part, seeing herself as a philanthropist, and of course with the approbation of the late Mr Tolly, had sanctioned the building on old grazing land of the housing estate that contained Gomorrah Grove to bring inner city families to the healthier environment of the seaside. That was over thirty years previously and the snotty kids who had not been content to stay in their place outside the gate, and who had scaled the walls to wreak havoc in the ornamental gardens and more particularly the orchard, now had thin and unhealthy children of their own. The sea air, it seemed, had done nothing for them, due, as Mrs Tolly informed the parish priest over and over, to bad diet and unhygienic habits, exhorting him to harangue his congregation on the subject. The fact that her own two girls survived only in a framed photograph of them aged eight and seven, huge bows askew in ringletted hair, their faces pinched and wasted, was beside the point. It was an inherited weakness - on Mr Tolly's side, needless to say. Now not even their ghostly voices shrilled in the garden for they had never been considered strong enough to play outside except on the balmiest of days and under the strictest supervision. Mrs Tolly gathered her robe over her skinny dugs, wincing as the cloth touched her back. The repeated strokes had, after all, cracked the dry skin into open wounds. "Halleluia!" said Mrs Tolly.
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