The Book of Revelation

by Rupert Thomson

  None of his visitors acknowledged his predicament—or even seemed to notice it. All the same, he was glad that they had made the journey, and he drew no little comfort from their presence. He needed to be reminded that there were people beyond the room. People who knew him, loved him. People who missed him. Even if they were not actively looking for him, they would be thinking of him. It was a link, a kind of lifeline.

  Though sometimes, it was true, they brought messages he didn’t want to hear:

  You will never be free.

  Our time is over.

  You and me.

  Our time together.

  Over.

  •

  The wound healed slowly, almost grudgingly. Perhaps he was to blame, turning over in his sleep and irritating it, or perhaps it was the chafing action of the ring. In any case, he was being given antibiotics to prevent infection and codeine to neutralise the pain. Most of the time he felt glassy, sluggish—drugged. Every so often, though, the air would seem to clear, and he would notice that the women were naked as they carried out their tasks. They still had hoods over their heads, of course, and they often wore something on their feet—Astrid and Gertrude chose shoes with spiked heels; Maude preferred her work-boots—but they had thrown aside their cloaks. They had become more open, more flagrant, and, at the same time, more voyeuristic. In the beginning the vision of a chained man had been enough in itself. Now it was his injury which they found stimulating—the nature of that injury, and its location. When they took him to the toilet they would shackle his wrists and ankles, as usual, but one of them would lead him by the chain, as though he was an exotic but domesticated animal. When he was lying on the mat, they would walk round him, almost as if they were stalking him, with their hooded faces, angled hungrily in his direction. They would lean down and touch the chain, their breathing quickening as they bent over him, their voices thickening in their throats like beaten cream. Sometimes they would lift the chain—gently, though, so as not to disturb his penis, the way you might try and remove an empty cider bottle from the hand of a sleeping drunk. Other times he would wake out of a medicated daze to find one of the women sitting in front of him, her head tilted back, one hand moving rhythmically between her legs. . . .

  He had never watched a woman masturbate before—no girl he had gone out with had ever done it in front of him—and he was intrigued to see that each of the women had their own quite different techniques. Maude always began in a kneeling position. Then, at some point, though, she would fall forwards, panting, her right arm reaching back down the middle of her body, her right hand hidden. All the weight would be taken by her other arm, the skin creasing at the wrist, her small round nails reddening as the blood rushed in underneath. . . . Astrid masturbated standing up. She would lean against the white pipes that ran from floor to ceiling, or sometimes she would stand close to him, only just beyond the rubber mat. Unlike Maude, she touched herself all over, her hands fluttering this way and that across her body. They seemed oddly fidgety, distracted, almost disconnected from the rest of her. They would circle one of her breasts, flicker across a hip, brush against the inside of a thigh, but they would never settle anywhere for more than a few moments, just long enough, presumably, to bring that part of her to life. When she came, her legs would buckle slightly, as if she had been given a strong muscle relaxant and was having to fight to remain upright. . . . Gertrude was more explicit than Astrid, and more visceral. If this surprised him a little, it was only because she had been the last to reveal her body, and he had sometimes wondered whether she might not be the most modest of the women. But there was nothing modest about the way she lay on her back in front of him, with her legs wide apart and her knees raised. Her cunt was palest pink, almost pallid, with labia that were uneven, swollen, slightly ruffled, like the pages of a book that has fallen into water and then dried out. She would sink the middle fingers of one hand so deep into herself that her hand looked disfigured, and red blotches would appear on her neck, or her breastbone, or on the soft skin of her belly. . . . There was only one thing the women had in common. They all shuddered at the moment of orgasm. They seemed to be responding to some distant violence, as though they were the topmost branches of a tree that was having its trunk shaken. It reminded him of stories he had heard about tidal waves. When a tidal wave has travelled a thousand miles, it becomes just another wave, one among many on a beach. Watching the women, that was how far away he felt from what was happening. He was seeing just a fraction of the power. He was watching ripples.

  •

  Before too long they wanted to see him in what Astrid called “a state of arousal.” The hole in his foreskin had not mended yet, but he was no longer feeling too much discomfort. You might think that he wouldn’t get erections after being hurt like that, but you’d be wrong. The erections happened despite the injury—in fact, there were times when they almost seemed to happen because of it. When the women noticed this, they couldn’t conceal their delight. They appeared to find the sight of his penis struggling to lift the chain particularly exquisite. They got wet just watching. He closed his eyes, but he could still hear the delicate, liquid sound of their fingers in their cunts. . . . They did everything they could think of to excite him. They showed him pornographic movies. They fed him a diet of aphrodisiacs. Astrid, especially, was in her element. She wore a series of fetishistic outfits that catered for every male fantasy, from the standard to the highly specialised, the bizarre. Once, she put on a nurse’s uniform. Another time, she dressed up as a cowgirl, in a ten-gallon hat and denim cut-offs. She would appear with sections of her body wrapped in clingfilm, or tightly bound with rope, or just exposed. In general, she favoured skirts that were so short that they revealed her knickers (which could be crotchless, straight out of a sex catalogue, or plain white cotton, like a schoolgirl’s, tight-fitting and yet demure)—and, every now and then, of course, there were no knickers. He became fascinated by her cunt—as she intended him to, perhaps: it looked so neat, so stuck-on, somehow, that he began to feel as if it didn’t belong between her legs at all, but had lodged there, accidentally, like some exotic, plum-coloured shell. . . . And, all the time, they kept him naked, with the heat in the room turned up and that ten-foot chain running from his pierced foreskin to the iron staple in the wall, like a surreal version of an umbilical cord. . . .

  •

  It was during this period of exhibitionism that he thought he noticed a shift in the relationship between the women. There had always been a difference between the behaviour of Maude and that of the other two, but the difference was becoming more pronounced. Maude began to distance herself from what was happening in the room. She did not make the slightest attempt to arouse him, for instance, and she no longer seemed to want to satisfy herself. Instead, she tended to hang back, in the shadows. Or she would turn away, as if she did not care to watch. She no longer spoke to him either. Astrid and Gertrude did not appear to have noticed this new reticence, or, if they had, they had decided not to acknowledge it.

  Then, one morning, his theory was proved correct—though not in a way he would have chosen. He was still half asleep when the door opened. It was Maude, and she was alone. He leaned up on his elbows, yawning. She stood in front of him with her feet turned slightly inwards, the insides of her knees touching. Her shoulders sloped downwards, as if drawn earthwards by the weight of the rest of her. For the first time, he saw that she had a mole just to the right of her navel.

  “You’ve been very quiet recently,” he said.

  She sat beside him, the breath crushing out of her. She was so close to him that he could see the fine cross-hatching on her knuckles. She was holding an old-fashioned quill pen, he noticed, and a bottle of blue ink.

  “Lie down, please,” she said.

  Her voice had a hard, neutral sound to it, as if she had made up her mind about something and was determined not to be influenced or distracted in any way.

  He lay back slowly. The weather in the skylight wa
s overcast, the light bleak and watery. In the distance he thought he could hear a church bell ringing. Surely it couldn’t be Sunday again already?

  “It’s not right,” she said, “what is happening.”

  He wondered what she meant. He didn’t ask her, though, thinking it might be better just to let her talk.

  “They think they can do what they want.” Putting the quill down, she picked up the bottle of ink and started to unscrew the top. “They should not be doing all these things.”

  “You’re upset,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  When she had opened the ink she placed it on the mat in front of her. Once again, he noticed how blunt her fingers were, and how the nails were almost circular, and it suddenly occurred to him that she might be retarded. Images of her flashed before his eyes like evidence. He saw her as he had seen her first, standing in the alley with her head at a peculiar angle. Not listening, as he had thought. Not shy. But cut loose, floating—adrift in a world of her own. He remembered the time that he had called her names, and how she had failed to react, how she just sat there, staring down. . . . Then, one night, he had woken to find her lying next to him with nothing on, her heartbeat twice as fast as his. In retrospect, the cruelty of the other women seemed in keeping with the room, whereas Maude’s tongue-tied adoration felt eccentric, if not simple-minded. Perhaps it even explained the speed with which Astrid had sprung to her defence and punished him. My friend. It all fitted in. Made sense.

  He watched as she dipped her pen gingerly into the ink and then touched the nib against the bottle to drain off the excess.

  “If you struggle,” she said, “it could be painful.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  She hesitated, pen in hand. “Now they will know the truth,” she said. “Now they will know.” Then she added something in Dutch.

  Her belly pushed forwards, flattening against her thighs, as she leaned over him. Pressing down with the gold nib, she broke the surface of his skin about halfway between his left hip and his navel. He flinched, and took in air.

  “The pain’s not so bad, I think,” she said, as she worked the dark-blue ink beneath his skin.

  “You startled me. . . .”

  “Please do not struggle.”

  “No. All right.” He peered at her across his chest. “What are you doing?”

  He knew what she was doing. She was tattooing him, using the only materials that were available to her.

  It took her something like an hour to complete. She would hold her breath as she leaned over him, just as she did when she was giving him a shave, then, sitting back, she would release it all at once, the air gushing out of her, as if some sort of valve had opened. Then she would dip the gold nib into the ink, touch it gently to the bottle’s thick glass lip and lean down once again. She worked slowly, painstakingly, with a degree of care which, in the circumstances, seemed exaggerated, if not comic. He couldn’t see her face, of course, but he suspected that the tip of her tongue would be showing in the corner of her mouth. If she wasn’t actually retarded, there was clearly a side to her that was naïve or immature.

  Though he had flinched in the beginning, and though it still hurt when she bent down with the pen, drawing what felt like hundreds of short lines on him, it was almost a relief to have pain occurring in a different place. It took his attention away from the nightmare of the ring, it was something new to think about. . . . After a while, he found that he could hardly feel the scratching of the nib at all, and he would lift his head to see what, if anything, was happening. He would watch in a kind of stupor as the beads of blood welled up on to the surface of his skin, mingled with the ink, and then spilled sideways in quick, dark lines, reminding him of the way a girl’s mascara runs when she is crying. He could only stare as the woman etched a single word on to his body, a four-letter word, the most possessive pronoun that exists:

  MIJN

  •

  Gertrude noticed the tattoo almost as soon as she stepped into the room that evening. It would have been hard not to. By that time, the skin around and underneath the letters was thoroughly inflamed; the whole area had lifted into a raw, red weal. For a moment she stood still. Then her head turned and she looked into his face. Her eyes glittered fiercely inside her hood.

  “Who did this?”

  Somehow, he didn’t feel like making things easy for her.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “You don’t know?”

  “You all look the same. How am I supposed to know which one of you it was?” He paused. “It could have been you for all I know.”

  She bent down, both hands braced on her knees, her elbows jutting sideways into the air. She inspected the tattoo at close range, her face just inches from it, then she straightened quickly and walked out of the room.

  When she returned a few minutes later she had the others with her. For the first time in days all three women were wearing their black cloaks, which he took to be an indication of how serious things were. He watched Gertrude take Maude by the upper arm and point at the tattoo. She wanted an explanation, but Maude leaned away from her, resisting her, the way a child might. Gertrude persisted with her questioning. When Maude finally spoke, he heard the word ziekenhuis, which he knew was Dutch for hospital. But no sooner had Maude used the word than she broke off in mid-sentence and lowered her head, as if chastened. Both the other women glanced sharply in his direction. Though this puzzled him, he didn’t ponder it for long. The injury to him didn’t seem sufficiently severe to warrant talk of hospitals—and anyway, he was more interested in the fact that there had been anger in Maude’s voice, something he couldn’t remember hearing before. She was standing up for herself for once.

  At some deeper level, she was also standing up for him, of course. She had disapproved of what the others were doing to him, and the tattoo she had inflicted on him was testament to the strength of that disapproval. In tattooing him, she was attempting to reclaim him; she was saying that he belonged to her, only to her, because only she truly cared for him. He had always assumed that the women’s behaviour was governed by a code—at the very least, there had to be some kind of understanding—but this was his first real glimpse of it. Obviously, in this case, Maude had acted alone, without permission, and against the spirit of the group. As he lay there, listening to her being scolded, he realised that a crack had opened right in front of him. Why not try and drive a wedge into it?

  Lifting his head, he said, “It’s all right. There’s no need to argue.”

  He felt Gertrude turn and look at him.

  “The tattoo,” he said, “it’s really not a problem. You don’t have to be angry with her.”

  “This isn’t your business,” Gertrude said.

  “I was the one who was tattooed,” he said. “Whose business is it, if it isn’t mine?”

  Gertrude turned to Astrid and spoke to her rapidly in Dutch, then all three women left the room, with Gertrude still gripping Maude by the upper arm. When the door had closed, he lay back with a faint smile on his face.

  •

  It had always been Maude who had taken care of the menial tasks. The next morning, though, Gertrude and Astrid appeared in her place. He could only imagine that Maude was in disgrace, and that all access to him had been denied. Perhaps, like him, she had been confined to a room somewhere in the building, and was now lying on a single bed, her big round face turned sullenly towards the wall. When he asked Astrid where “her friend” was—he used the words deliberately, provocatively—Astrid refused to answer. He sensed that the two women had had just about enough of his impertinence. If he wasn’t careful, another punishment would come his way.

  Towards the middle of the day Astrid stepped into the room. She was alone this time. She had replaced her black cloak with a brown suede jacket, jeans and a pair of brown leather boots with low heels. Though he was always apprehensive when she appeared on her own—understandably so, since it often preceded some new for
m of violation she had dreamed up—he discovered that he was smiling. So many Dutch girls dressed that way. It almost amounted to a uniform. He wondered if her face was also typical. Just for a moment he could see her on a bicycle, with short blonde hair, a wide mouth, and steady grey-blue eyes that looked bold or unimpressed.

  Astrid seemed to consider his smile, then decide not to comment on it. Instead, she told him that he had a première in two days’ time. He would be required to dance in front of an invited audience.

  He stared at her, nonplussed.

  “I can’t dance,” he told her. “I’m out of condition. I haven’t trained for—” He did not even know how long it was since he had last trained.

  “You will dance to the best of your ability,” she said.

  “And what about this?” He held up the chain. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

  “That’s part of it. A test of your,” and she paused, “of your ingenuity.” She turned and walked a few paces, her hands in the pockets of her jeans. Then she stopped and looked at him across one shoulder. “You’re a choreographer, aren’t you?”

  He lay back, said nothing. Wind gusted across the roof, a full, low sound, like someone blowing across the top of an empty bottle.

  “It will be worth your while,” he heard her say.

  His laughter was bitter, sardonic. “Where have I heard that before?” He lifted his head again, watched her move smugly towards the door. “That hood with those clothes,” he said. “It looks ridiculous.”

  She paused with one hand on the door-handle. “And you,” she said, “what do you look like?”

  •

  He leaned against the wall in the half-dark, the cold iron of the staple just to one side of his head. The number of times that he had tried to pull that staple out of the wall. . . . He had tugged and heaved and strained, but it hadn’t moved at all, not even minutely. He had examined the chain as well, to see if he could find a weak link. There were none. He had even thought about taking the chain in both hands and ripping the ring free of his foreskin—