It was a mild, shoeboxey-sort of night at the side of the M50. The beginning of a new shift. Alan, Riodhán and Bulmer were on tonight. Alan held the ladder while Bulmer lumbered up and waited for Riodhán to stop scratching his hide and fetch the sign.
“Give us it here, give us it here” Bulmer said.
“He’s always fucking doing that isn’t he?” Riodhán said, to Alan, Alan supposed.
Riodhán never made eye-contact.
“Doing what?” Alan said.
“Saying this. Saying this. He always says things twice, the git!” Riodhán said.
“Shut up you pharisee-frigger or you’ll get a belt across the shin, twice.” Bulmer said from the top rung of the ladder.
“Here don’t be standing on the top rung you shit or you’ll fall and break all our faces.” Alan said. Bulmer merely grunted back and got on with his job. He needed Riodhán to pass him up the pull-ties but Riodhán was slacking again so he half mumbled, half-shouted to Alan to throw him a couple. When he’d finished the job Bulmer took a good look at the sign. He seemed proud, there was that particular loathsome glint in his eye.
“Well boys, I’ll tell ya the big lad will be proud o’ us ‘ight!” he said, his bogger accent exaggerated, due to his excitement.
“Ah yeah. Anyway, no time to dilly-dally, don’t want to be spotted by the gardaí this time and we still have a fair fifty signs to go.” Alan said.
“Hup!” Bulmer shouted as he folded up the ladder and kicked Riodhán in the arse before placing the ladder in over the backseats.
“Fuck off!” Riodhán moaned as he rubbed his sore arse.
Once all three men were somehow arranged in the overstuffed matchbox of a car, Alan stepped on the peddle and they were shooting down the motorway towards the next billboard.
The sign read:
“Find Jesus Before He Finds You”.
Above it: an uncanny and slightly blurry sketch of Jesus’ face, done in white on a black background.
Just three missionary men on a good night’s work. Underneath it all, their ordinary hearts beat with the same fervour as a bishop at a bowling alley, who just scored a strike with the help of his friend ‘the good lord’. Or like a young priest in the seminary, so monstrously bored he starts to converse with his own hallucinations. It was those moments of religious high that make it all worth it, that keep you in the game.
The beat-up honda was nearly out of sight when Sign-Jesus gave a little wink.
“These men are doing the real work” he said to nobody in particular.
He was feeling proud, and perhaps a little peculiar.
Hannah Fitzpatrick 