200 Days
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In 200 days the world will end.
That’s what Brendan in the chipper said to us last week as he packed up the order. Two large chips, battered sausage, fillet of cod, carton of curry, and a prophecy of the apocalypse. Please and thank you. I assumed it was a joke. But Brendan wasn’t smiling. He rarely did. He just said the world was going to end and then he sent me on my way.
No one else seemed to hear him, and if they did they pretended not to. It started raining as I left the chipper. That lovely misty sort of rain. The type of rain you learn to enjoy after years of living in a place with a broad variety of rains. The chipper food was warm beneath my arm. The purple confusion of dusk fell all around me. The hangover from the night before was all but gone, but Brendan’s bizarre revelation jumpstarted the anxious cogs again.
Did I really need to worry about this? I suppose not. I got into the car and pushed the thoughts away from me. My stomach growled. The world kept turning.
When I woke up the following morning there was only one hundred and ninety-nine days left.
Water balloons are a memory exclusive to my childhood. I can remember the smell of them. Cheap rubber and water that seems colder than it should be. I remember we built a fort out of wood we found along the beaches. We built it on a small patch of grass overlooking the rocks. The rocks where we used to go pool fishing, catching shrimp for my mother to cook. I always caught them but never ate them. They looked like aliens to me. Peach-coloured aliens sent from the far reaches of the universe to die in a pot inside a mobile home along the coast of Waterford.
One day we swapped the water balloons for stones and took turns hiding inside the fort we’d built to see if it could withstand the onslaught. The rocks got bigger and bigger as the afternoon dragged on, and the holes in the fort got wider and wider. Inevitably, one of the lads – Mark was his name – got a stone straight to the face. It cut open his eyebrow, blood dripping from the gash like melting ice. His brother came down afterwards and wanted to fight whoever had done it. Mark blinked through tears and blood on his way home. No one knew who’d thrown the specific stone which meant we all shared the blame. And Mark’s older brother couldn’t fight all of us, really. But we stopped throwing rocks and moved onto starting fires.
Every time I pass the chipper now I think of Brendan’s prediction. He revealed it almost 3 months ago, in and around 80 days have passed. I’ve been into the chipper several times since and Brendan has not said another word. Even when I raised my voice at him and told him to go and fuck himself. I haven’t been barred but I haven’t been back since either. That was last Friday. Today is Thursday. I won’t go in tomorrow though.
My grandfather didn’t know his own middle name when he making his Confirmation. It was a different time, a different place. You and I couldn’t forget middle names now if we tried. But he could. And so of course it went that he ended up picking the same name – Joseph – for his Confirmation name. His aunt then told him afterwards but it was too late. I always thought that was gas.
I caught wind of Brendan down the pub last Saturday night. I was out with herself. We do it every so often. Brendan had the glisten upon him. It comes when you’ve enough pints in you to fill a urinal. I never caught his eye, thank God. He was going on about the apocalypse again.
“Less than a hundred days now,” he was saying, “Less than a hundred days.”
Not long after that they had to carry him out of the pub. No one else seemed to pay his words any mind, but I was shook from it again.
We’re trying to get healthier now, myself and herself. That’s why we’ve cut out the chipper. We decided together. She was surprised when I suggested it but is happy that I’m starting to take my health more seriously.
I ended up taking Joseph for my own Confirmation as well. As a sort of tribute to the man. I already had his first name as my middle name anyway. It only seemed right. Sometimes life isn’t as complex as people make it seem. Sometimes when you don’t know something you can still carry on grand. Other times knowing certain things makes it awfully hard to get back to normal life. Knowledge of a thing can be wicked.
April 7th is the day. I tracked it. Did the math. From when Brendan made his prediction. It’s less than three months away now. It doesn’t bother me. I just find it interesting.
We caved and went back to the chipper last Friday. I was looking forward to seeing Brendan, to seeing what he was like since that night in the pub. He wasn’t working when I went in. Some young one, only. When I asked about Brendan she said he was away on holidays. Brendan hadn’t missed a Friday evening chipper shift in well on twenty-five years. There were 45 days left.
I only vaguely remember the first time I was stung by a bee. It was near the beach in Waterford. Long before we learned to throw rocks at wooden forts. It got me right between the ring finger and the baby. It was a wasp rather than a bee, and I remember is squirming its way to death on the sand, taking solace perhaps in having fulfilled its biological destiny. I cried like the child I was and held my wounded hand up to my mother for her to fix it. In a way it felt like a rite of passage, going from toddler to boy. Every boy gets stung by a wasp at some stage. It means you’re really a boy.
Brendan hasn’t been seen or heard from since the night in the pub. There are 11 days left until his version of the world ends. Herself has me back on a diet. I have no interest in the chipper anymore anyway, so it’s all the one. Some of the far-too-regulars down in Jackie’s heard that Brendan was off up the country with some sort of religious sect. Heading for The hill of Tara for the 7th. They say he’s had a breakdown, that he’s not all there in the head. That he’s gone off the deep end altogether. I always shat myself when I heard that.
The world ends in three days. I haven’t shaved since I heard about Brendan’s disappearance. The hairs on my chin are all wires and twine. Herself says I’ve lost it. But she didn’t see the look in Brendan’s eye ninety-seven days ago. She didn’t see what I saw. There’s not much to be done for it anyway. I was never one for prepping for an apocalypse. Seems like madness. Why would anyone want to live in a world after it’s ended?