CONTENTS
Title Page
Epigraph
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
About the Author
Also By Rupert Thomson
Copyright Page
Will there ever be anything other than the exterior and speculation in store for us? The skin, the surface— it is man’s deepest secret.
—STEFAN HERTMAN
ONE
I can see it all so clearly, even now. The studio canteen was empty, and I was sitting in the corner, by the window. Sunlight angled across the table, dividing the smooth, blond wood into two equal halves, one bright, one dark; I remember thinking that it looked heraldic, like a shield. An ashtray stood in front of me, the sun’s rays shattering against its chunky glass. Beside it, someone’s coffee cup, still half full but long since cold. It was an ordinary moment in an ordinary day—a break between rehearsals. . . .
I had just opened my notebook and was about to put pen to paper when I heard footsteps to my right, a dancer’s footsteps, light but purposeful. I looked up to see Brigitte, my girlfriend, walking towards me in her dark-green leotard and her laddered tights, her hair tied back with a piece of mauve velvet. She was frowning. She had run out of cigarettes, she told me, and there were none in the machine. Would I go out and buy her some more?
I stared at her. “I thought I bought you a packet yesterday.”
“I finished them,” she said.
“You’ve smoked twenty cigarettes since yesterday?”
Brigitte just looked at me.
“You’ll get cancer,” I told her.
“I don’t care,” she said.
This was an argument we had had before, of course, and I soon relented. In the end, I was pleased to be doing something for her. It’s a quality I often see in myself when I look back, that eagerness to please. I had wanted to make her happy from the first moment I saw her. I would always remember the morning when she walked into the studio, fresh from the Jeune Ballet de France, and how she stood by the piano, pinning up her crunchy, chestnut-coloured hair, and I would always remember making love to her a few days later, and the expression on her face as she knelt above me, a curious mixture of arrogance and ecstasy, her eyes so dark that I could not tell the difference between the pupils and the irises. . . .
Brigitte had moved to the window. She stood there, staring out, one hand propped on her hip. Smiling, I reached for my sweater and pulled it over the old torn shirt I always wore for dance class.
“I won’t be long,” I said.
•
Outside, the weather was beautiful. Though May was still two weeks away, the sun felt warm against my back as I walked off down the street. I saw a man cycle over a bridge, singing loudly to himself, as people often do in Amsterdam, the tails of his pale linen jacket flapping. There was a look of anticipation on his face—anticipation of summer, and the heat that was to come. . . .
I had been living with Brigitte for seven years. We rented the top two floors of a house on Egelantiersgracht, one of the prettier, less well-known canals. We had skylights, exotic plants, a tank of fish; we had a south-facing terrace where we would eat breakfast in the summer. Since we were both members of the same company, we saw each other twenty-four hours a day; in fact, in all the time that we had lived together, I don’t suppose we had spent more than three or four nights apart. As dancers, we had had a good deal of success. We had performed all over the world—in Osaka, in São Paulo, in Tel Aviv. The public loved us. So did the critics. I was also beginning to be acclaimed for my choreography (I had created three short ballets for the company, the most recent of which had won an international prize). At the age of twenty-nine, I had every reason to feel blessed. There was nothing about my life I would have changed, not if you had offered me riches beyond my wildest imaginings—though, as I walked to the shop that afternoon, I do remember wishing that Brigitte would give up smoking. . . .
I followed my usual route. After crossing the bridge, I turned left along the street that bordered the canal. I walked a short distance, then I took a right turn, into the shadows of a narrow alley. The air down there smelled of damp plaster, stagnant water, and the brick walls of the houses were grouted with an ancient, lime-green moss. I passed the watchmaker’s where a cat lay sleeping in the window, its front paws flexing luxuriously, its fur as grey as smoke or lead. I passed a shop that sold oriental vases and lamps with shades of coloured glass and bronze statues of half-naked girls. Like the man on the bicycle, I had music in my head: it was a composition by Juan Martin, which I was hoping to use in my next ballet. . . .
•
Halfway down the alley, at the point where it curved slightly to the left, I stopped and looked up. Just there, the buildings were five storeys high, and seemed to lean towards each other, all but shutting out the light.
The sky had shrunk to a thin ribbon of blue.
As I brought my eyes back down, I saw them, three figures dressed in hoods and cloaks, like part of a dream that had become detached, somehow, and floated free, into the day. The sight did not surprise me. In fact, I might even have laughed. I suppose I thought they were on their way to a fancy-dress party—or else they were street-theatre people, perhaps. . . .
Whatever the truth was, they didn’t seem particularly out of place in the alley. No, what surprised me, if anything, was the fact that they recognised me. They knew my name. They told me they had seen me dance. Yes, many times. I was wonderful, they said. One of the women clapped her hands together in delight at the coincidence. Another took me by the arm, the better to convey her enthusiasm.
While they were clustered round me, asking questions, I felt a sharp pain in the back of my right hand. Looking down, I caught a glimpse of a needle leaving one of my veins, a needle against the darkness of a cloak. I heard myself ask the women what they were doing—What are you doing?—only to drift away, fall backwards, while the black steeples of their hoods remained above me, and my words too, written on the sky, that narrow strip of blue, like a message trailed behind a plane. . . .
•
It is only five minutes’ walk from the studio to the shop that sells newspapers and cigarettes. I ought to have been there and back in a quarter of an hour. But half an hour passed, then forty-five minutes, and still there was no sign of me.
I had last seen Brigitte standing at the canteen window, one hand propped on her hip. How long, I wonder, did she stay like that? And what went through her mind as she stood there, staring down into the street? Did she think our little argument had upset me? Did she think I was punishing her?
I imagine she must have turned away eventually, reaching up with both hands to re-tie the scrap of velvet that held her hair back from her face. Probably she would have muttered something to herself in French. Faít chier. Merde. She would still have been longing for that cigarette, of course. All her nerve-ends jangling.
Maybe, in the end, she asked Fernanda for a Marlboro Light and smoked it by the pay-phone in the corridor outside the studio.
I doubt she danced too well that afternoon.
•
That night, when I did not come home, Brigitte rang several of my friends. She rang my parents too, in England. No one knew anything. No one could help. Two days later, a leading Dutch newspaper published an article containing a brief history of my career and a small portrait photograph. It wasn’t front-page news. After all, there was no real story as yet. I was a dancer and a choreographer, and I had gone missing. That was it. Various people at the company came up with various different theories—a nervous breakdown of some kind, personal problems—but none of them involved foul play. My parents offered
a reward for any information that might throw light on my whereabouts. Nobody came forward.
All this I found out later.
There was a point at which Brigitte began to resent me for putting her in such a difficult position. She found it humiliating, not knowing where I was; I was making her look ridiculous. It must have been then that it occurred to her that I might have left her—for another woman, presumably. How cowardly of me to say nothing. How cowardly, to just go. Brigitte was half French, half Portuguese, and her pride had always resembled a kind of anger. There was nothing constant or steady about it. No, it flared like a struck match. When she was interviewed by the police she told them that I had abandoned her, betrayed her. She couldn’t produce any evidence to support her theory, nor could she point to any precedent (in our many years together I had never once been unfaithful to her), yet the police took her seriously. A woman’s intuition, after all. What’s more, she lived with me. She was supposed to know me best. So if that was what she thought. . . . The police did not send out any search parties for me. They did not scour the countryside with tracker dogs or drag the city’s waterways. They did not even put up Missing Person posters. Why would they? I was just a man having an affair.
This, too, I found out later.
One other thing. The last person to see me before I disappeared was not Brigitte, but Stefan Elmers. Stefan was a freelance stills photographer who worked for the company. He took pictures of us dancing, black-and-white pictures that were used in programmes and publicity. Both Brigitte and I counted Stefan as a friend.
As I was walking along the canal that afternoon—and this could only have been moments before I turned into the alley—Stefan happened to drive past me in his car. Usually he would have stopped and talked to me, or else he would have shouted out of the window, something cheeky, knowing Stefan, but there was another car behind him, right behind him, so he just kept going.
Apparently, I looked happy.
For the next eighteen days no one had the slightest idea where I was.
TWO
When he came to, there was a taste in his mouth, a kind of residue, that was sweet yet chemical, like saccharine. His eyes didn’t work properly. Things spun round, tilted, misted over.
He lay still, with his head on one side.
Floorboards. A white wall.
In the distance he could hear violins. Or it could have been cellos. He listened to the music, as if it might afford him an insight into what had happened. It just went on and on, though, indefinite, unchanging. It fed on itself without ever seeming to consume itself.
Time passed.
The music was still there, but he couldn’t be sure where it was coming from—or even, in the end, if it was real.
At last he felt able to lift his head. He was lying on his back, his wrists and ankles held by stainless-steel rings. Each ring was attached to its own individual rail by a second, smaller ring. Each rail was firmly bolted to the floor. All four of the smaller rings had been locked into position on their rails, using metal eyes that were built into the floor at certain strategic points. The structure puzzled him. It was so intricate, so carefully designed. But why, what for?
His mind was slow and cloudy. Answers would not come.
He looked around. It was a large room, rectangular in shape. A single door stood in the far wall, just above the toe of his right shoe. There were three lights in the ceiling, each fitted with a wide metal shade; the light they gave off would be merciless, unflinching, like the light in an abattoir, he felt, or a laboratory. Everything had been painted white, even the pipes that ran from floor to ceiling on his right, even the wall to his left, which was built out of naked brick. There were no windows in the room, only one small skylight that looked as if it had been nailed shut. Floorboards stretched away in all directions—bare, unvarnished, slightly dusty.
He lay back, aware of the black rubber mat beneath his body. It reminded him of being in a gymnasium. It had the same smell. Hot-water bottles. Sweat. He stared up at the skylight. A white window-frame, a simple square of blue. It seemed only distantly related to the narrow strip of sky he had seen while walking down the alley.
The cigarettes, he thought. I never bought the cigarettes.
He saw the women as he had seen them then, their faces concealed under conical black hoods, their black cloaks swirling round their bodies. The fabric flapped and rippled, making him think of rays, the way they move across the ocean floor, and he could hear their voices overlapping—We saw you dance last week, we were in the second row, it was wonderful—so much so that it was hard to tell exactly who was speaking. He was used to receiving praise from strangers, of course. He had learned to be patient, gracious. . . . Though he had the feeling that one of them had not talked at all. Instead, she had simply inclined her head, as if she was paying close attention. Or was she shy, perhaps? Even at the time, something about the encounter had struck him as being wrong—and yet he didn’t think it was the enthusiasm; the enthusiasm had seemed genuine, unfeigned. He had been about to excuse himself and turn away when he felt that sharp, cold pain in his right hand. He shivered as he remembered how the needle had left the vein, how smoothly it withdrew, how stealthily, like a snake that has just released its venom. . . .
A hypodermic, presumably.
A syringe.
He could still remember the sunlight falling across a steep roof at the far end of the alley, the tiles gleaming as if coated in gold leaf, but he could remember nothing after that—nothing until this white room with no windows, this imprisonment. . . .
Once again he raised his head to look around. This time he noticed that the walls were studded with unusual fixtures—all kinds of brackets, hooks and bolts; they did not set his mind at rest since he could think of no innocent explanation for their presence. To his right, and slightly behind him, was a shallow alcove. Inside it stood a washing-machine and a tumble-drier, both German-made. The sight ought to have reassured him—such appliances were familiar, domestic, part of everyday life—and yet, in the context of the rubber mat and the stainless-steel rings, in the context of the fixtures on the walls, they took on a threatening air, they became accomplices.
Fear surfaced on his skin like a sharp, hot scent.
He felt the sudden urge to urinate.
•
He had no memory of hearing the door open, and yet it must have done, for there they were, the women, moving towards him, the hems of their black cloaks snagging on splinters in the floorboards. They stood above him, peering down, as though he lay far below them, as though he was lying at the bottom of a well.
“You’re ours now.”
He could not tell which one of them had spoken. His gaze lifted beyond them, to the skylight. That square of blue, empty and indifferent.
The same woman spoke again. She was the tallest of the three. She had a slight accent, as if she had learned her English in America.
“You belong to us,” she said. “You’re ours.”
His first instinct was to ask her what she meant, but he fought against it. He didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of hearing his voice. Not yet, anyway. He wanted to deny her something. Perhaps it was the only thing he had that he could still withhold.
Though she seemed content simply to stare at him—to run her eyes down the length of his body, and then up again. . . .
A plane appeared behind her shoulder, a single speck of silver in the blue. It was strange to think of all the people up there, reading magazines, listening to music, drinking drinks. It was strange to think they didn’t know that he was lying in a room below them, held by chains. . . . He watched the plane cross the top right-hand corner of the skylight, its progress steady, smooth, impervious—
Then it was gone.
The women were murmuring to each other now, their voices lowered, intimate, distorted by their hoods. He couldn’t distinguish one voice from another, nor could he make out what any of them were saying, even though they were still standi
ng over him.
At last, and without warning, they withdrew. He lay still. The air had a muffled quality to it, a deadness. He wondered whether the room was sound-proofed. It seemed likely. If so, the music he had heard when he came round must have been playing in his head, his blood making one thin sound as it ran through his veins, like fifty bows drawn slowly over fifty sets of strings. . . .
And now, in the same way, the woman’s words floated in the air above him, haunting, constant, the meaning just out of reach:
You’re ours now. You belong to us.
•
It was hard for him to work out exactly how much time had passed. The blue in the skylight had darkened, though it was not yet night. He was just beginning to feel the first stirrings of hunger when the door swung open and a woman walked into the room, a tray balanced between her hands. She moved towards him cautiously, so as not to spill anything, setting the tray down on the rubber mat. There was cold meat, salad, cheese, fresh fruit and bottled water. In the context of the room, which was so bare and colourless, the food looked exotic, almost absurd.
Kneeling beside him, the woman reached for the water. For a few moments she struggled to undo the plastic top. Either she had no strength in her hands, he thought, or else she was nervous, perhaps. The air gushed out of her as the seal broke and the top finally came free. She filled a glass and held it to his mouth. He gulped the water down. She had to do everything for him, dabbing his chin with a napkin when he drank too fast and almost choked.
By now, his head had cleared. He felt he should start to take things in, to gather information. He watched as the woman peeled an apple, green skin curling away from moist white flesh and dangling in the air below her thumb. Her hands were raw, he noticed—red, slightly swollen knuckles, bitten fingernails. Her head remained lowered, which made it difficult to see her eyes, though he sometimes caught a glimpse of them, a momentary glitter, as she helped him to a piece of lettuce or a slice of meat. Once, the faint, ticklish smell of mothballs lifted off the sleeve of her cloak as she reached towards him, making him think that it had only recently been taken out of storage. Where had the cloaks come from? Did the women own them?
The Book of Revelation Page 1