The Revelations (26 page)

When they got to the bottom of the stairs, Rebecca let go of Marcus’s hand and skipped down the corridor, laughing. Marcus followed her through the kitchen, where she stopped to grab a bottle of vodka from the fridge, and then into the garden. There were picnic blankets and cushions spread out on the grass around the fire, and Marcus threw himself down beside Rebecca, intent on drinking in her face, searing her likeness onto his memory. A gust of cold wind blew across the garden, carrying with it traffic fumes and dust. The fire’s flames danced. Marcus caught sight of Mouse standing in the kitchen talking to Daffy and a tall black girl with an afro. He turned back to Rebecca.

‘I hate these parties,’ she said.

‘Why?’

Rebecca took a slug of the vodka and passed it to Marcus.

‘Hugo always manages to find inspiration the next morning. So I’m left to clean up the place. It’s my payment for staying here during my gap year. I’ve become the de facto cleaning lady. Which makes me hate these parties. Whenever I see people having fun I just think about the mess I’m going to have to face, hungover, the next day. He manages to make me feel so bourgeois.’

Marcus drew out a cigarette and offered her the packet. She shook her head.

‘No thanks. I don’t smoke. So what do you do, Marcus? Are you an artist too?’ She looked at him with a wry smile. Someone stumbled over Marcus’s legs, apologised, and staggered off into the darkness at the bottom of the garden.

‘God, no. I’m a lawyer. I live in Notting Hill. Um . . .’ Marcus stopped. Rebecca yawned. He realised how uninteresting his life would seem to a girl like this. It wasn’t something he considered ordinarily, that he lived an existence that could make a girl yawn. Within the world of the Course he was seen as dashing, bright, a leading light. Here, as the fire burned down into embers, and the noise of the party still swept over them, Marcus felt suddenly old and dull.

‘Are you, like, a real lawyer? Murderers and all that?’

‘No. No, that isn’t what I do at all.’

There was a pause.

‘I secretly do quite want to be a housewife,’ Rebecca whispered, leaning over towards him conspiratorially. ‘It would drive my father wild, after everything he’s spent on education, but I’d like to live in a big house in Henley and have lots of children and dogs. I’d bake on Tuesdays and supervise the gardener on Mondays and Thursdays.’

Marcus laughed. He was slowly getting used to seeing Rebecca as herself, rather than as a reflection of Lee. She leaned towards him again.

‘So what else do you do? What’s your thing?’

Marcus sighed. ‘Do you know the Course?’

‘The cult thing? Yes, of course I do. You’re not involved in that, are you?’

He nodded. ‘I’m a Course leader, no less.’

Rebecca whistled. ‘Jesus . . . I mean, fuck. I had a couple of friends at school who went for a while. I always thought it was just a phase. Like anorexia or smoking pot. I didn’t think someone as old as you would still be doing it.’

Marcus winced and lit another cigarette.

‘Am I old?’

‘No, but I mean, you’re not really young, are you? The Course always seemed to me like a crutch that people leant on until they worked out who they were. Something to get you through those in-between years.’

‘I think maybe it was like that for me. But then it became my life. It’s not a bad way to deal with the world, even for someone as old as me.’

‘I’m not saying it is. Just that it seems a little bit easy.’

He could feel her edging away from him. Where before she had been charming and conspiratorial, he now felt her looking at him from a distance, with a kind of anthropological interest.

‘To tell you the truth, Rebecca, I’ve been thinking about leaving the Course. Life just goes by, sometimes, and before you know it you’re thirty and the best things are behind you. I think I did need the Course when I first came to London. I’m not sure I do any more.’

She leaned towards him again.

‘I say my prayers quite often. When I’ve been really bad.’

Marcus looked at her, frowning.

‘That’s one of the things that bothers me about the Course, though. You have so many people who think that they can act without consequence. As long as God forgives them – which of course he always does – they’re in the clear. They can do almost anything – no matter how cruel.’

‘I suppose that’s what makes you Christians seem so otherworldly. You are cut off from the rest of us by your ability to be forgiven. Whereas, even though I try to pray, I never feel all that confident about it.’

Marcus sipped from the bottle and passed it to her. She took a long gulp and choked a little.

‘You look a lot like a friend of mine. A friend I don’t see any more.’

‘I get that quite a lot. I always take it as an insult. That my face is just this tabula rasa that people project their images onto. I want to be an actress, so I don’t suppose it’s the worst thing.’

‘No, but you look exactly like her. It’s bizarre.’

Marcus looked back towards the house, trying to make out Mouse through the kitchen doors. There was a thick pack of bodies in the room. Everyone was dancing and Marcus found it hard to distinguish between the dancers.

‘Shall we go inside?’ said Rebecca, rising to her knees.

‘Sure,’ said Marcus.

Rebecca took him by the hand again and led him into the surging mass of people. She still carried the bottle of vodka and passed it to him as they began to dance. She fixed her eyes upon his as they moved together, leading him through the sweating, gurning partygoers, spinning him in the darkness. A slower song came on, something deep and trippy, and Marcus felt Rebecca press herself against him. She snaked her thigh between his legs and looked up at him.

‘Here, have one of these,’ she said.

Rebecca emptied a small paper package into her palm. Two white pills. She picked one of them up between small finger and thumb and forced it gently between Marcus’s lips. The pill was bitter and caught in his gullet for a moment. He watched Rebecca take her own pill and then she leaned towards him and kissed him, pushing her tongue where moments before she had pushed her fingers. They continued to kiss as they danced, and he realised that she was smaller than Lee, her hands were like paws on his body, clawing away at him, burrowing under his shirt to twist the hair of his chest. He allowed himself to imagine her as Lee, though, and half-opened his eyes to see the pale skin marked by freckles along her cheekbones.

After fifteen minutes, Marcus began to feel the pill working on him. He seemed to hear the music more clearly, to sense the surge and life of the surrounding dancers. His skin tingled whenever Rebecca touched him and when he kissed her the world seemed concentrated in their mouths; then the music changed again, and he was spinning very quickly, and Rebecca took him by the arm and led him upstairs.

Carrington’s studio was empty when they walked inside. The bright lamp was still on in the corner, casting extraordinary shadows across the room, picking up small sculptures and exploding them against the wall as a violent
Guernica
of strange, dark images. Marcus took Rebecca in his arms and they began to kiss again. They danced in dreamlike patterns, feeling as much as hearing the music from the party below. Marcus thought suddenly that he could see the mist that had moved in the air that night with Lee. He lifted Rebecca’s
jumper
off and helped her to undo her shirt. Marcus’s heart banged hard in his chest.

It began to drizzle on the skylight above them. Rebecca, wearing only her underwear, dragged a beanbag to the centre of the room.

‘I love to look up at the sky,’ she said.

‘Lee . . .’ Marcus moaned, and then reached down to slip off her pants.

She looked very young. Marcus remembered kissing Lee in her room at university, and tried to imagine what would have happened if Abby had not come in that night. He realised he was still fully clothed. He knelt down on the wooden floor, took one of Rebecca’s ankles in his hand, and began to lick slowly up her leg. His tongue went dry very quickly. He suddenly thought of Darwin, and hoped that the dog wouldn’t be lonely without him there. He reached the top of Rebecca’s leg and slipped his tongue inside her. She moaned quietly, placing her hands in his hair. Marcus began to cry. At first silently, wetting the inside of her thighs with his tears, then in great gulping sobs as he licked hopelessly at her.

‘Oh, you poor darling. Come here, Marcus.’

Rebecca was very good about the whole thing. She held Marcus’s head in her lap until his sobbing receded, and then he told her the whole story. She listened in silence to the tale of Lee Elek, nodding sympathetically whenever Marcus looked up at her. The drizzle had turned into driving rain. Marcus lay down beside Rebecca on the beanbag and they looked up at the sky. She shivered and Marcus found a sheet and draped it over her. The effect of the pill was beginning to wear off and Marcus felt suddenly very tired.

‘I’m sorry. I’m such a mess at the moment. I’m so embarrassed.’

‘Don’t worry. It’s better than my usual experiences up here. I like you, really I do. I would suggest we see each other again. If you weren’t married, that is. And a religious nut.’

Marcus spluttered.

‘I’m joking, I’m joking. But seriously, you need to get out of the Course. Those aren’t good people you have been telling me about. You’re better than that.’

As it began to grow light above them, Marcus said goodbye to Rebecca and crept downstairs. People were sleeping everywhere. The last revellers sat smoking in the rain by the dead fire, umbrellas capturing the smoke as they exhaled it, forming foggy huts around them. Marcus couldn’t find Mouse. He walked out into the dreary morning and trudged up Hackney Road looking for a cab.

Marcus slept as the taxi made its way through empty streets across London, his cheek pressed against the cold glass. He woke with a start as they sped along Bayswater Road. It was only when they drew up outside his flat that he realised that he had lost his key. He searched through his pockets, turning out tissues, his phone, his wallet, and a packet of cigarettes, but the key was not there.

‘Fuck,’ he said.

‘No money, mate? Need a bank machine?’ The cabby looked at him in the rear-view mirror.

‘No. I’ve lost my key. Shit!’ Marcus remembered that he had given Abby’s key to Mouse. ‘Listen, would you mind taking me to the top of Ladbroke Grove? Just past the Sainsbury’s. A friend of mine has a spare key.’

‘No problem, mate.’

Marcus was feeling terrible by the time they got to the canal. His mouth was dry, his throat had begun to scratch and his sinuses ache; he could sense that he was coming down with a cold. He paid the driver and stepped out onto the bridge, then made his way down to the towpath. The wind sent the rain raking painfully down his cheeks. He held his arm up, shielding his face with his jacket, but the wind whipped around, and he found himself dancing to try to avoid the rain. Dark clouds raced across the sky as he squelched along the path, his shoes wet through, his socks damp and cold. The trees shuddered in the wind, sending spirals of their last leaves down onto the water to float among the cans and plastic bags. The canal was brown with fallen leaves, pockmarked by the rain.

Marcus reached the
Gentle Ben
and stepped down onto the deck. He banged on the door of the cabin. No response. He cupped his hand to the window where the curtains hung open a crack. He could see no one inside. He banged on the door again, then tried the handle. It swung open. Gratefully, Marcus flung himself down the steps and into the dark cabin. It was cold inside and Marcus tried without success to locate the heating controls. He flicked the light switch and nothing happened. Marcus opened the curtains, but it was so dark outside that it barely altered the murky cabin.

Marcus made his way through to the small room at the back of the boat that Mouse used as a study-cum-wardrobe and found one of his Thomas Pink shirts. Mouse’s jeans would be too short for him, so he took off his own and hung them over a chair, hoping that they might dry a little while he searched for the key. He looked at the papers piled on Mouse’s desk. There were pictures from children’s fairy tales, scholarly articles on C. S. Lewis, a copy of
The Way of the Pilgrim
.

Marcus padded through the gloomy boat, checking whatever pieces of Mouse’s clothing he found, willing the key to appear from a trouser pocket, or perched on a sideboard. Marcus could picture his bed at home and longed to be back there with the heating turned up, a mug of tea and a book beside him, Darwin sprawled at his feet. He went back into the study and searched through the drawers in Mouse’s desk, looking with interest at the photographs he found. Many were of Lee, or had clearly been taken by her. Marcus realised that he should show Mouse his own collection of pictures. It had helped him to feel closer to Lee, to capture more accurately his feelings for her, when he saw her at her most beautiful, before the sadness set in.

Marcus was about to give up looking for the key when he noticed a small tortoiseshell box on the desk. It was the sort commonly used to house cufflinks, but Marcus thought that the key might have been placed inside for safekeeping. He fiddled with the tiny clasp of the box, opened it and stood staring at the contents, his tired mind suddenly racing. He held the box up to the window. Inside, against the black velvet lining, sat two earrings: one lapis blue, the other turquoise. Marcus picked them up and laid them in his palm. He sniffed them, not quite knowing why. Very gently, Marcus placed the earrings back in the box and carried it through to the main cabin.

Marcus pulled on his damp jeans and sat down. He found a slightly grubby pair of socks, and then wrapped a blanket around his still-icy feet. He felt the box in his pocket. There would be an explanation. There must be an explanation. He dialled Mouse’s phone. It rang several times, but there was no answer. Marcus sat on the bed, shivering every so often, and waited for his friend to come home.

He saw Mouse trudging down the towpath towards him an hour later. The canal curved round past the gasworks, so there was a stretch of about a hundred yards where Marcus had an uninterrupted view of his friend. Mouse’s velvet jacket was drenched. He had his collar turned up and he was doggedly sucking on a cigarette that he had to pause and relight several times as it was extinguished by the rain. He looked very small among the flying leaves and raging trees. His blond hair was soaked to brown, plastered flat upon his head. He jumped when he saw Marcus.