by Alex Preston
It began to rain outside. Shadows passed across the stained-glass windows. He took a sip of water. It was going well.
‘We have three hundred churches in the UK running the Course, a further sixty in Australia and New Zealand. And – and this is our great success this year – we have just signed up the two hundredth church in the United States. So over five hundred churches have decided that change is necessary, that we must find a new way of doing things, that our faith will die if we don’t breathe life into it.’ He was sweating a little.
‘That life comes from the energy, the optimism of the young people in our church.’
David heard, very faintly, the sound of Lee playing the piano. Panic hit him like the smack of a wave. He looked around the hall wildly, then back to the empty lectern. He could feel his heart beating hard in his chest.
‘I feel so blessed to have had the opportunity to work with our young people, with the Course leaders . . .’ David paused, looked out into the audience. The Earl was tugging at his ear lobe. He tried to remember if they had discussed a secret signal of some sort.
‘We have enough old men in the church. It’s time to give youth a chance. I think sometimes we forget how young Jesus himself was. These young people . . .’
David remembered how Lee’s fingers used to look when she played. He recalled placing his hands over hers, feeling the delicate bones moving, nursing the notes from the piano. Her head nodding as she swayed with the music. He remembered that, just before she had died, she had cut her hair. Then he saw her skin peeling from her scalp in his nightmare.
‘. . . It’s amazing to see the devotion in the eyes of these young people, before they have been ruined by the world . . .’ David’s breaths came fast and shallow. His heart seemed to be skipping beats, dancing across his chest in jags and stutters.
‘. . . While they still have hope . . .’ Suddenly, terribly distinctly, he pictured the moment when the hairless skull in his nightmare turned towards him. Hollow sockets where Lee’s eyes should have been, pinkish flesh clinging to bone in the corners.
‘It’s . . . Working with these young people is so . . .’
His mind was blank. He could see his irregular pulse in the corners of his eyes. He looked down at the Earl, whose face had turned very red. He saw one of the Americans glance at his watch. He leaned forward onto the lectern, which began to wobble. His water glass fell to the floor, spilling its contents onto the wooden stage and then rolling off to land at the Earl’s feet.
‘Thank you. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry . . . thanks very much,’ he said, lifting his hand and waving half-heartedly to the audience. He walked from the stage. A few people clapped. Silence followed by the scraping of chairs, muttered conversation. Sally was waiting for him. He hugged her distractedly, looking over her shoulder for the Earl.
‘What the fuck was that, David?’
The big man’s face was purple. He loosened his tie with one hand and pushed Sally aside with the other.
‘You knew what you had to do. I thought you were up to this. I told you. I told you we only had one shot. Fuck!’
David and Sally sat in the rectory later that day. Sally had made them both a cup of tea. They were side by side on the sofa. Sally picked at an embroidery on her lap, pausing every so often to lift her tea to her lips. David stared out into the rain that fell through yellow light.
‘I expect you had too much coffee. It can do that, you know,’ Sally said.
‘Yes, I expect that was it.’
He sat as the light began to fade. Sally went through to the kitchen to make dinner. David knitted his fingers together and started to pray. But where in the past the words of his prayers had come easily, now there was just silence. He once again felt as if the walls of his throat were closing in. He couldn’t find any way to speak to God, to the God who had been beside him for so long, whom he had addressed as a favoured employee might speak to his managing director. He fell down onto his knees, then forward onto his elbows. He lay on the thick carpet and sobbed, words stumbling over each other in his foggy mind: Our father who art, Our father, Our father who art in, Our father . . .
*
Mouse sat on the bus as it snaked along the narrow Oxfordshire lanes, his rucksack clutched on his lap. It was raining and the rain was pulled along the windows of the bus, tracing wandering paths like rivers seen from the air. Mouse followed one with his finger. He had travelled up that morning. Sitting on the swaying train as it made its way haltingly out of London, he had fingered the earrings in his pocket, pricking his thumbs with the sharp ends, committing to memory the rough surfaces of the stones.
He was still living in the hall at Senate House. When he visited the boat, it seemed as if it didn’t belong to him any more. He found that he could think much more clearly high in the library tower. He had stood at the window that morning and looked out onto the world and planned. There were a few things he needed to do before he left London. He wrote a letter to Lazlo Elek. It was brief and unsentimental. He had been listening to Lee’s father’s music recently, blasting the famous cello concerto through the empty corridors of the fourteenth floor. The music somehow fitted the place. He wrote to D.I. Farley. He considered writing to Marcus.
He had sent the book to Abby a few days earlier. He imagined her reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to a blond child in her lap in years to come. He thought about the baby a great deal. He wondered if it was his. He hoped that it was. He remembered that momentous night at the Retreat when they had realised that Marcus and Lee were no longer with them, and they both guessed what was happening up in the woods above them, that their friends’ disappearance wasn’t accidental. There was a beautiful symmetry about it. Taking him by the hand, Abby had led him away from the path to a small glade. She had leaned back on a pile of damp ferns and lifted her skirt for him. He remembered the mist that snaked up between her legs. Her nipples had bloomed like pale flowers on her chest as he lifted her blouse and clamped his lips down around them. Her large hand had closed around his cock and guided it into her. An owl had hooted just as he came. They both laughed. It was cold, but they were so drunk that it didn’t seem to matter. She had nuzzled his ear. I love you, my little Mouse. I love you so much. Mouse smiled. He knew that this was the biggest betrayal for her, these few meaningless words.
He hadn’t loved Abby, knew that she didn’t really love him, or not any more than she loved her other friends. But when she had come to see him on the boat in the days following the Retreat, and he had told her what had happened between Lee and Marcus, and how Lee died, he felt a great weight lifted from him. They had fucked again on the small bed. Abby had taken his cock in her mouth and moaned, barely audible, I love you, I love you. Later, when he was inside her and their stomachs slapped together with each thrust, and the boat rocked and her tits swayed with the rocking, she had reached round to cup his balls as he came. Afterwards, she had begged him not to tell anyone about Lee. That it would destroy the Course, but worse, it would destroy her. And out of loyalty, he obeyed her. He felt himself getting a hard-on. It was almost his stop.
He stepped from the bus and walked along the bare ridge, turning up the collar of his jacket against the cold. He swung his rucksack over his shoulder. His hair was damp and he ran a hand through it, sweeping it out of his eyes. He walked down the gloomy driveway. Lancing Manor stood at the end, glowering under its slate gables. Rooks huddled on the roof, heads tucked under wings. Mouse walked around to the side of the house. The Earl was in London, watching Nightingale give his big speech. No lights shone in the mullioned windows. Mouse made his way down to the lake, carefully stepping over the writhing roots that reached up from the damp red earth.
The water of the lake shuddered in the breeze. Rain swept across it, ruffling the surface. At the edges, Mouse could see green fronds of pondweed unravelling from the spongy mud bottom. He walked over to the boathouse, untied the boat and pushed off from the small platform. His hands ached with the cold, b
ut it was a distant pain, easy to ignore. He steered the boat towards the centre of the lake. The rain had begun to fall more heavily and it was hard to judge where the lake ended and the rain began. It was like rowing through mist.
Mouse had a sudden picture of that dark early morning, when Lee’s body had seemed so heavy as he heaved it onto the floor of the little rowboat that he thought the boat might sink. The mist had been very thick as he steered the vessel through it. He had felt close to breaking down, to throwing himself into the water with her. He saw how the fishing wire bit into the skin of her neck, her ankles. After he had threaded the heavy lead weights onto the fishing wire, he had kissed her hard on the lips and tipped her into the lake. For an instant he saw her sinking, dappled by the water that closed around her, and then she was gone.
Now Mouse stopped the boat and opened his rucksack. He drew out a dog-eared copy of Revelations of Divine Love with Lee’s name written in black marker down the spine. He began to read out loud, his voice thin against the sound of the rain falling on the lake.
‘Before miracles cometh sorrow and anguish and tribulation; and that is why we are weak and wicked and sinful: to meeken us and make us to dread God and cry out for salvation. Miracles cometh after that, and they cometh from the high, wise and great God, showing His virtue and the joys of heaven so far as they may be seen in this passing life. He willeth that we be not borne over low for sorrow and tempests that fall to us: for it hath been ever so afore miracle-coming.’
The pages of the book were soon soaked through and he found it difficult to see the words. He was crying so hard that there seemed to be no line between him and his tears and the rain. He looked down at the water, imagining Lee’s fish-stripped bones jostling with the rhythm of the lake moving above them. He reached into his pocket and held the earrings in his palm. He let them fall slowly into the water, the lapis first followed by the turquoise. Then, he gently eased the signet ring from his little finger, looked for one last time at the mouse on the crest, and dropped it into the murky lake. He sat back down in the boat, placed his head in his hands and muttered a prayer. All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.
Acknowledgements
Several books proved helpful while writing this novel. Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God is a remarkably sane and readable history of Christian spirituality, whilst Elizabeth Jennings’s Every Changing Shape inspired Lee’s take on literature, God and the world. I also referred often to Dee Dyas’s Images of Faith in English Literature 700–1550, J. A. Burrow’s Medieval Writers and their Work, David Downing’s The Most Reluctant Convert: C. S. Lewis’s Journey to Faith and A Choice of Anglo-Saxon Poetry (ed. Richard Hamer). J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, which was my teenage Bible, has left its traces throughout the novel. Finally, I must thank Charlotte Brewer, whose tutorials and lectures have given me a deep and lasting affection for Old English poetry.
For their early encouragement and help I thank Chiki Sarkar and the late Kate Jones. Tom Edmunds, Ele Simpson, Elias Maglinis and Florence Ballard all helped with sensitive and helpful draft readings. Jo Turner accompanied me on some bizarre spiritual excursions, and was a rock amid the madness.
I must thank my editor at Faber and Faber, Walter Donohue, who has been a constant source of quiet inspiration and guidance, Becky Pearson at Faber and Faber, Anna Power and Ed Wilson at Johnson and Alcock, Oliver James and Tom Paulin.
Finally thanks to my family: to Al and Ray, to my parents and grandfather for being my best (and kindest) critics, and finally to Ary, as always.
About The Author
Alex Preston was born in 1979 and lives with his family in London. His first novel, This Bleeding City, was an international bestseller, won the Spear’s Best First Book Award and the Edinburgh International Festival Readers’ First Book Award and was selected for Waterstone’s New Voices 2010. It has been translated into twelve languages. Preston writes and reviews for the New Statesman and the Observer and is a regular panellist on BBC2’s The Review Show.
By The Same Author
This Bleeding City
First published in 2012
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2012
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© Alex Preston, 2012
The right of Alex Preston to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
The Revelations is a work of fiction. Characters, events and place names are products of the author’s imagination, or, if real, are not portrayed with geographical and historical accuracy.
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ISBN 978–0–571–27760–5