The Revelations (11 page)

Pressing her breasts together, she slid over his body, rubbing herself against him, all of the slippery warmth of her vibrating with her chanting. He began to intone the mantra and allowed his mind to empty entirely, felt the world centre on his groin. She moved faster, flinging her body over his; she was panting. Mouse’s voice rose to a wail as he came hot shots over his own belly, over hers. She mopped at herself with a towel and then handed him some tissues. In the aftermath he felt empty. His breath came tightly into his chest, escaping with a high wheeze. The girl dressed in the mirror and then left the room. Mouse made his way out into the afternoon. He was carrying his drumsticks.

He decided to walk down to the church. He wasn’t due there for another few hours and the massages always filled him with a strange energy. He couldn’t go more than once a month, though. The emotional and financial expense precluded it. He always felt a heady sense of guilt afterwards. He nurtured it, enjoyed it as one can enjoy any pain that is rare and self-
inflicted
. It helped to give shape to his time at the Course knowing what it was like to sin.

He dived through the underpass at Marble Arch and came out into the north-eastern corner of Hyde Park. It had been a cut-glass autumn day, the leaves threw a multicoloured net over damp grass. Now with the light fading over them, two boys flew a kite which was silhouetted against the rich blue of the western sky. He watched the kite shudder for a moment in the high air, whip in the wind and then crash to earth. He walked along the avenue of trees down towards Knightsbridge, imagining those who once rode alongside him, Victorian ladies with their bodies hot under stiff-collared clothes perching side-saddle as gentlemen with enormous sculpted moustaches raised their hats and bowed. Mouse ran up the hillock upon which Achilles was perched and placed his hand on the cold bronze of the statue’s calf. Then along the south side of the park, past the rose gardens and the last dying games of football, until he came out by the lake.

Those first few weeks with Lee were bright in his mind. When it had all seemed ahead of him, when it had promised so much. He wasn’t to know that he wouldn’t get any further, that her coldness was something more than the initial prudishness of a sensitive teenage girl. They spent all of their time together during that wonderful autumn, and it felt to Mouse that he lived under two skies: the natural sky above and the artificial sky that Lee cast over him. Mouse carried her books to the English faculty and left her with a lip-kiss at the door before running to his own lectures. They’d walk to dinner together and then sit and smoke cigarettes until it was time to go to the pub, or to Marcus’s room to hang out with Abby and the others. Marcus had the biggest room in college and there was always booze and often drugs on offer. Mouse didn’t mind that Lee described him as her discovery, presented him to the others with a note of possession in her voice. He wanted to be owned by her.

They were generous with him. For his nineteenth birthday Marcus and Abby bought him an early edition of
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
inscribed to him with their love. Lee gave him a golden signet ring and had an invented coat of arms engraved upon it. She placed it upon Mouse’s finger as they lay in bed the night of his birthday. He held it to the light, looked at the engraving of a turret with what he thought was a mouse rampant atop it. He laid his hand down on the bulge of his bare stomach and saw the ring shimmer, then placed it gently over Lee’s left breast. They slept in the same bed for the first term. She said she was lonely in her room alone. She would let him take his clothes off and press himself against her, sighing with pleasure as he ran his hands over her flannel pyjamas, circled her nipples through the soft cloth, ground his groin against her thighs. But still she wouldn’t let him go any further; she kept her pants on under her pyjamas, and threatened to leave when he insisted too vehemently.

Lee had asked Mouse along to the Course one night in December. A freezing wind nudged them along the wide high street as they walked out after supper. Lee wore a coat with a sandy fur collar and clung hard to Mouse’s arm as they reached the dark quadrangle of the graduate college. They had made their way into the dimly lit chapel where candles flickered above carved wooden choir stalls and chairs were set out in a circle on the ornate mosaic floor. Mouse sat and watched Lee, contributing little to the conversation. When they sang he mouthed the words silently, preferring to listen to Lee’s rich, low voice rising to fill the small chapel. When they came out into a night made suddenly bright with snow, breathlessly cold, she had turned to him, eyes streaming.

‘So what did you think?’

‘I thought it was brilliant,’ he replied. ‘Really moving.’

‘Do you think you’d like to come again? I’d love it if you would.’

He thought for a moment. ‘I’ll give it a try. I’ve been thinking for a wee while that I needed something new, some way of negotiating life. Life just seems . . . it seems unfair at a very deep level. Not just the inequalities in society, but the way that the most successful people also seem to be the most awful.
Something
isn’t right with the world and I need a way of dealing with it. I’m not sure that this is it, but if you believe in it, I’ll come with you.’

‘I saw a Bible in your room.’

‘I’ve been trying to read it a little bit every night. It’s a cultural document, you know? It all makes a bit more sense now.’

At the next service, a guest speaker had stood in the centre of the circle of chairs and fixed each of them in turn with his pale eyes. His sandy hair was flecked with grey and he wore a white shirt, chinos and a blue blazer. Mouse thought he looked like a banker. But when he spoke, the small chapel came alive. He had talked about the emptiness of modern life, the way that everything had lost meaning in a world cheapened by consumerism and sex. He marched up and down the room as he spoke, slamming his fist into his hand for emphasis, and Mouse, who hadn’t been to church since his mum took him to Christmas services as a child, was hooked. He and Lee had gone to the pub with the speaker afterwards. His name was David Nightingale.

A bicycle screeched to a halt behind Mouse. He dropped his drumsticks and scrabbled in the gutter to retrieve them.

‘Watch where the fuck you’re going!’

Mouse had stepped into the road without looking. He had crossed the park and was walking down Queen’s Gate. The sun had sunk from the sky and now it was almost dark. The yellow taxi lights that flashed past seemed like the warmest lights he had ever seen. Finally, he was on the King’s Road and he could see St Botolph’s spire black against the dusk sky. Mouse rapped out a tattoo with his drumsticks on a wheelie bin. He was looking forward to playing later.

He made his way past the vicarage, keeping to the shadows. He could see Abby and Sally Nightingale in the rectory’s kitchen. Abby was talking and helping to roll out sheets of pastry, while Sally nodded and smiled every so often. The church was empty when he went into it. A flickering lamp glowed in the Lady Chapel, and the ceiling was lit by the spotlights that illuminated the church from the outside. He relished being in the church on his own. He reached down and pulled out a prayer cushion, knelt upon it and rested his head in his hands.

‘O, God, protect my mum. I’m sorry that I’m not always there for my friends. I’m sorry that I sometimes think and do things that I know disappoint you.’ He spoke the words out loud in a small, soft voice, more Scottish than his everyday accent. ‘Please, Lord, I pray that I might achieve all the things that David asks of me. I pray that the Course might grow and flourish. O, Lord, let all be well.’

He bent forward until he was almost lying flat and pressed his hands to the cold stone floor. He felt safe in the darkness of the old church. He understood the age of the place, recognised the terms for its distinguishing features, knew the faces of the saints in the main altar window as he knew those of his friends. He had a photograph of the inside of the church pinned to a cork board on the wall of the boat. Lee had taken the picture just before the start of a Course evening, looking up through the candles towards the spotlit altar. He liked to line up his eyes with the shot when he came into the church. He laid his cheek against the stone floor, shut one eye, made a soft clicking noise and then slowly rose to his feet.

He felt islanded that evening: very distant from the other members of the Course; not scornful, or resentful of their privilege, but as if they were from a reality so profoundly different from his own that they might as well have been characters from a novel. He sat slightly apart from Lee as David stood to introduce the guest speaker – a well-known artist who had been a heroin addict until he was persuaded to attend the Course. Mouse half-listened to him, keen to get on with the music and the discussion session when they would talk about the Retreat.

It was Lee who had suggested they form a band. She used to take Mouse to the college music rooms late at night when neither of them could sleep that first cold winter at university. She’d play the ‘Promenade’ from
Pictures at an Exhibition
in the dark, and Mouse would sit very still as Lee rocked backwards and forwards, humming softly behind the music. Marcus was a decent guitarist and played after dinner parties when everyone would smoke and sing, Abby’s voice standing out above the others, high and clear. Mouse had learned to play the drums. He was co-ordinated and had a good sense of rhythm, and Lee was endlessly patient playing alongside him as he bashed away on the college’s kit until one of the serious musicians came and told them to stop. For Christmas that year Lee gave him a snare and a high-hat which he carried up to Scotland on the train and practised as the snow built up outside his window.

They played gigs in bars and clubs throughout university, had a regular slot in a pub on Sunday afternoons, did friends’ birthdays, the wedding receptions of their friends’ older siblings. It was another way to spend time together. It was only when Lee introduced Mouse to the Course, and they met David, that they realised that music was a way to God. When they moved to London, and Abby and Marcus joined the Course, David persuaded Marcus to take up the bass, implementing a stricter regime of band practices. It was David who chose the name of the band and had
The Revelations
printed across Mouse’s drum kit. David and Lee had regular songwriting sessions, where Lee would adapt lyrics from the religious texts she studied at university and David would set them to music.

That evening at the Course they played one of these songs. The older Course members knew the words and stood with their arms wide and their faces towards the roof, singing. Staring out over the candlelight, Mouse found himself mouthing along as he drummed. Lee had taken the lyrics from Julian of Norwich’s
Revelations of Divine Love
; he remembered her scribbling them in an old exercise book one afternoon at her flat, thumbing through a tattered copy of the mystical text as she wrote. Now the ancient words were new-made, sung over driving rock music.

He thumped his foot down on the bass drum, smashed the cymbal and tapped away at the high-hat: it was the perfect instrument for him. Only when he was playing the drums did he lose the feeling of jittery energy that had once sent him running in mad bursts around the quads at university, that caused him to fiddle and jiggle and jerk his way through life.

In the discussion group they talked about the Retreat. Mouse stood up immediately as the group settled in the room in the crypt.

‘It’s the most brilliant experience. It should really be viewed as the pinnacle of your time here. Although there are sessions afterwards, they draw heavily upon what you learn at the Retreat. It’s a time for us to bond, for us to really talk – not in the way we do here, but with real depth. There’ll be a few wee services to go to, but the rest of the time is yours to speak with David, speak with us. I have to say I’m jealous of you. I’d love to have my first Retreat all over again.’

‘My first Retreat’, said Lee, ‘made me feel like a child.’ Her voice took on a dreamy note. ‘It was all so simple, and so perfect. Beautiful autumn weather and time to spend with friends. And they’ve all been like that, ever since. The Retreat is an oasis.’ She was wearing a short denim skirt over dark tights and her hair was tied with an elastic band in an untidy pile on her head. Mouse could smell something rich and unwashed when he moved close to her. He noticed that her tights were laddered.

‘Do you ever get anyone who freaks out? I’ve heard it can be pretty intense.’ Philip was looking at Lee, but Mouse answered him.

‘It’s such a friendly atmosphere. We’ll all be there, you know. It’s like a massive, brilliant sleep-over.’ He smiled.

‘But someone told me you have to speak in tongues. I don’t know if I want to do that. It sounds a bit weird.’ Maki looked at Mouse with her eyebrows raised, but he just smiled and
nodded
. David had prepared them for this.

‘Don’t worry too much about what you hear. The whole speaking in tongues thing is just a small part of the Retreat. It’s . . . it’s a bit like those Magic Eye books. Some people find it really easy, some people just don’t get it. If you let yourself go with the flow, you’ll get there. Just don’t fight it.’

Lee nodded.

‘You know David is always going on about how empty the world feels?’ she said. ‘How our lives are so fragmented and superficial? When you hear the tongues, this beautiful, eerie music, and everyone is chanting together, it makes all of that go away for a while. It’s this most extraordinary feeling of release, as if everything suddenly makes sense. And the silence afterwards, it just blows you away . . .’

When the discussion groups were finished, Marcus and Abby said goodbye. Mouse watched them walk off towards the car, Marcus’s arm around Abby’s broad shoulders. A police siren wailed down by the river and Mouse shivered. Lee came up behind him and slipped her arm through his. Huddled together, giving the impression of one body, so closely were they linked, they made their way to the pub under misty cones of light that hung down from the street lamps.