The Book of Revelation (10 page)

She reached up with both hands to adjust the piece of mauve velvet, then she turned to face him. In her eyes he could see nothing but indifference. She had the look of somebody who didn’t know him. Who had never known him.

“You’ll never be free,” she said.

“I will,” he said. Though, suddenly, he wasn’t sure.

She shook her head and stared into the distance again.

“No,” she said.

He looked away from her, unable to find the words with which to contradict her. When he turned to her again, she was no longer there.

Sometime later, in the middle of the night, his family appeared—his mother and his father, both still young, in their fifties, and his brother, Edward, who worked for a bank in Tokyo. His father and his brother had dressed for the occasion, in identical grey suits. His mother was wearing a cardigan over a pleated skirt. People often said that he took after his mother, though he couldn’t really see it, except in the eyes, perhaps, which were hazel and sloped upwards at the corners, giving them both a faintly Slavic look. She seemed more preoccupied than usual, her head craning on its slender neck, as if she was peering deep into the corners of the room. “Well,” she said at last, “this isn’t so bad, is it.” His father nodded in absent-minded agreement, one hand lifting to smooth his thinning hair. Edward, meanwhile, had tucked one highly polished heel against the far wall and was measuring dimensions, as if he was thinking of putting in an offer for the property. That was just like Edward. He watched his family, half despairing, half amused. Eventually, his mother came and stood beside him. She did not appear to find the situation out of the ordinary at all. She simply smiled at him, and then repeated herself: “Really, darling, it’s not that bad.”

He wasn’t sure how to interpret their behaviour. Did they genuinely not notice that he had been mutilated, that he had been chained to a wall? Or were they
pretending
not to notice, so as to disguise their embarrassment, their shame? Or—more subtle, this—were they trying to offer him a message of hope, trying to give him strength, but using an oblique, almost coded approach in case his captors overheard? Before he could decide, his mother caught sight of the full moon floating in the skylight. A gasp came out of her, a soft sound that signified both shock and wonder, and she began to spin, some part of her knowing that everybody’s eyes were fixed on her, the other part not caring. Her skirt flared out all round her, making the shape of a mushroom in the ghostly, silver air. . . .

Other people came to visit him as well, all sorts of people from his life. Bert Gischler, the company director. Stefan Elmers, the photographer. Even his mentor Isabel van Zaanen appeared, wearing an ankle-length fur coat and diamond earrings, as if she had arrived straight from a première. Isabel had worked for the company as a guest choreographer for many years, and he owed much of his success to her advice and inspiration. Standing by the wall, she lit one of her Egyptian cigarettes. “Remember what Balanchine said,” she told him. “’First comes the sweat, then comes the beauty.’” She smiled to herself—Balanchine had been a friend of hers—then she walked over and bent down so he could touch his lips to her cheek.

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 was 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.