The Man Who Owns the Chipper
Shame hangs like curtains above shattered windows in a house avoided by every member of a nosey village. The sweet scent of unkept lawn is strong. Most people avoid even allowing their eyes to fall on the place, resisting a primal temptation. It’s not even said to be haunted. The front garden is littered with unclaimed footballs, hidden like soldiers among the tall grass. The front gates are permanently closed, fused by rust. Years ago it was said that the council would knock the place down and build a handful of smaller apartments, but it never happened. Now it’s just a reluctant feature of a town desperate to forget.
In 200 days the world will end.
That’s what Brendan in the chipper said to us last night as he packed up the order. Two large chips, a battered sausage, fillet of cod, carton of curry, and a prophecy of the apocalypse. I assumed it was a joke. But Brendan wasn’t smiling. He rarely does. He just said the world was going to end and then he sent me on my way.
No one else seemed to have heard him, and if they did, they pretended not to. It started raining as I left the chipper. That lovely misty sort of rain that doesn’t feel wet. The food was a hot water bottle beneath my arm. The purple confusion of dusk was around me. The hangover from the night previous was all but gone, but still resting below my eyes. But Brendan’s bizarre revelation jumpstarted the anxious cogs again. Did I really need to worry about the end of the world? I suppose not. Not much I could do to change things either way. I got into the car and pushed the thoughts away from me with the clutch. My stomach growled. The world kept turning. And 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 as if I’d lived inside them for a time. Cheap rubber filled with water that seems colder than it should be. I remember we built a fort out of driftwood we found along the beaches. We raised it on a small patch of grass overlooking the rocks. On the rocks we used to go pool fishing, catching shrimp for my mother to cook. Those days never ended until they did, forever. I always caught the shrimp but never ate them. They looked like aliens. Orange aliens sent from the far reaches of the universe to die in my mother’s 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 got a stone straight to the face. Mark was his name. It burst open his eyebrow like a water balloon. His brother came down afterwards and wanted to fight whoever had done it. He always had a hurley on him so we kept quiet. Mark dripped 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. But we stopped throwing rocks and moved onto starting fires instead.
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. He barely even makes eye contact with me. Even when I raised my voice at him and told him to go and fuck himself after the pub. 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. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.
My grandfather didn’t know his middle name when he making his Confirmation. It was a different time, a different place. You and I couldn’t forget middle names 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 at that stage. I always thought that was gas.
The house with the grass that’s too long and the rusted gate went up for sale. I didn’t think anyone owned it. Reckon the bank reclaimed and put it back up. Untouched, of course. ‘A project’ is how it’s described in the advert. More like a money pit, but sure listen. Someone will buy it. A developer. Probably. Build two houses in the same space and make triple the money. This country is fucked.
I caught wind of Brendan down the pub on 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. 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, 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.
Someone was in to cut the grass. Not our grass. The grass inside the abandoned place. I walk past it most days but I missed the whole of last weekend on account of no longer going to the chipper. When I walked by on Monday I could smell the cut grass. Did you know that the smell is because of a chemical the grass releases when it’s being attacked? I read that online before.
We’re trying to get healthier, 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. She bought me runners and all.
I ended up taking Joseph for my own Confirmation in the end. As a sort of tribute to the man. I already had his first name as my middle name anyway. It only seemed right to do that. Maybe he’d live on with his name wedged inside my own. Sometimes life isn’t as complex as people make it seem. Sometimes when you don’t know something you can still carry on grand. Knowing certain things often makes it awfully hard to get back to normal life. There’d have been no panic if he’d never been told his middle name. Knowledge of a thing can be wicked.
They’ve started the work. First it was a van outside the place for a week but it didn’t seem like there was much going on. Then there was a cherry-picker and a bigger digger. It was yellow but not a nice yellow. The house didn’t put up much of a fight. It was old and more than happy to collapse. The grass is pure muck now from the rain and men’s feet and the diggers and the cement being mixed. They closed off the plot with those cardboard-looking walls that aren’t made from cardboard at all. Now it’s noise all day and eerie silence at night.
April 7th is the day. I tracked it. From when Brendan told me. 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 the 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 wasp. It was near a beach in Waterford. There was wind and blue skies above. That was when I lived in shorts. This happened 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. My father stepped on it in an act of protection. 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 right 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. 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’m between two minds about it myself.
In 2012 a heap of people thought the world was going to end. The Mayan Calendar. CERN Hadron Collider conspiracy. The type of lads who knew Santa wasn’t real before the rest. They even made a movie about it the year before. Clever bastards. Fear sells more than sex does. That’s been known. The world didn’t end though, so they changed the date. A miscalculation. The CERN believers actually went a step further and said the world had actually ended, but the collider itself transported us all to a different timeline where the world hadn’t ended. A convenient little workaround. Clever bastards, as I said. Nice to know we can be moved around like cattle.
Four days before the end they made the news. Brendan and company. I couldn’t believe it. It was everywhere. Trending. Viral. Thirty-three of them; seventeen men and sixteen women. Nipples free and balls hanging lose, dancing around bonfires up towards Meath, awaiting the end. I couldn’t spot Brendan among them but no doubt he was there. By then the chipper was closed down. When they realised Brendan wasn’t coming back, his two remaining employees emptied the till and shuttered it up.
The night before the world was due to end I was craving chipper. It’s all I could think about. I convinced Herself that we should drive over to the next town and get something to eat.
“It won’t take us long.”
And away we went.
It was only a thirty minute drive, up hills and between lush fields, along boreens with grass taking up the middle of them like landing strips. The roads were fierce quiet. It was a clear night, so we decided to eat our chips leant on the bonnet of the car, looking out over the bay between the peninsulas of Bantry and Castletown-Bere. The food was a lump of grease in my stomach, causing sleepiness, and I wondered whether it would be my last real meal. Across the water, the sun sank beyond Bere Island, causing the sky to turn to a soft medley of pink and orange and green. Aa sky resembling fruit you could almost eat. The sunset at the end of time. But instead of finding fear in the brown paper of the chipper, there was relief.
If the world ended then, looking out at that perfect ending, there’d be no complaints had. Not a single one.
Daragh Fleming is an author and poet from Cork, Ireland. His debut in nonfiction, Lonely Boy, is published by BookHub Publishing. He has poems in Beir Bua, Trasna, The World Transformed Sunday Morning At The River, and more. Fleming won the Cork Arts ‘From The Well’ Short Story Competition in 2021 and was longlisted for the Cúirt New Writing Prize in 2023. His debut poetry collection is due in October of 2023. You can follow Daragh on Twitter @DaraghFleming