The Revelations

by Alex Preston

  *

  Next door, Marcus was already floundering. Everyone had been introduced. Each in turn spoke a few words about their lives, what they hoped to get from the Course. It was time for Marcus to address them. David stood in the shadows at the entrance to the room, watching. Abby’s mind had gone blank. She sat berating herself for her silence, biting down on her lower lip. Finally, knowing that David was depending on him, Marcus began to speak.

  ‘I encourage you not to look at The Way of the Pilgrim quite yet. Just keep it at home and spend your time between now and next week’s session thinking about the emotions that you have experienced tonight.’ Marcus was always worried that the overtly religious nature of David’s book would put some people off. He found it disconcerting that the Course insisted on marketing itself as a forum for philosophical enquiry when it was so clearly focused on pushing a fairly narrow form of evangelical Christianity. He found it stranger still that no one seemed to mind. The religious nature of the Course accelerated swiftly after the initial session, but very few members stopped coming. Perhaps David was right, that people just needed an excuse to embrace it all. The Course provided that excuse.

  ‘I think I should make one thing clear from the start, though,’ Marcus continued. ‘The Course has been the most positive force in my life over the years I’ve been a member. Abby and I have had some difficult times and I really don’t know what we would have done without the Course to support us. I mean, I look at young people struggling to carve out an existence in London and I just wish I could persuade them all to come along. You don’t just come here to talk about the big questions. You also find yourself at the centre of a really vibrant social scene. We have dinner at each other’s houses, we go to each other’s weddings, we are godparents to each other’s children. I really haven’t kept in touch with that many of my friends from before the Course. I haven’t needed to. The people you will meet here will be your friends for life.’

  Marcus saw the priest smile at him before ducking further into the shadows. He bridled against the group that had been chosen for him and Abby. He knew that they were seen as a safe pair of hands, comfortingly conforming to the priest’s vision of a Course couple. He was certain that Mouse and Lee would get a more interesting group and he felt suddenly exhausted, astonished that life had moved so swiftly, so certainly to this point, where he was sitting in a damp room trying to convince people to accept a God the certainty of whose existence only flickered at the edge of his vision, disappearing if he stared at it straight on. The older man – whose name was Neil – moved his chair forward with a scraping sound that made everyone stop and turn to look at him.

  ‘Could I ask a question? About the sermon tonight . . . if one calls it a sermon?’ He was perhaps fifty and what hair he had left clung perilously to his scalp above his ears; the top of his head was entirely bald. His skin was tight and tanned and seemed to constrain his jutting cheekbones with difficulty. He spoke in a sharp voice; a voice of boardrooms and corporate retreats. Marcus could see the silk lining of his suit shimmering. ‘I wondered if anyone else prayed when David asked us to be silent? I wasn’t expecting to, but I found myself praying, and it was an extraordinary experience. I haven’t prayed since school.’

  There was a pause and then one of the blonde girls hesitantly raised her hand. ‘I did. I remember my mother used to pray with me when I was a child. She is very religious and I remembered one of the prayers and I said it, and I was mainly saying it for her.’

  Slowly the scales of shyness began to drop away, and Abby and Marcus answered questions in voices that echoed the quiet humility of the blonde girl. Calm descended upon the room.

  *

  Lee found the twins extraordinary. They didn’t finish each other’s sentences so much as perform a canon, with one talking over the other, slightly ahead or behind. They blinked their large eyes at the room and reminded her of stage-school children with their bouncing enthusiasm and lisps. Lee could see that even Mouse was rather taken aback. She smiled in encouragement as they held forth.

  ‘And Daddy used to take us to church on Sundays when Mummy was ill . . .’

  ‘When Mummy was ill the whole house was silent, like a church. We used to pray for Mummy to get better . . .’

  ‘And when Mummy didn’t get better, in fact when she died, we made a pact, didn’t we, Alice . . .’

  ‘Yes, a pact, Ele.’

  ‘That we wouldn’t believe in God. We’d stop praying and we’d live raucous lives. And we did . . .’

  ‘We lived astonishing lives.’

  ‘But we feel it is time to come back to the church now.’

  Lee cleared her throat and the group turned to face her.

  ‘I think that’s very important,’ she said, leaning forward, her thin shoulders hunched, her face very serious. ‘The idea that you can come back to the church. I know I’ve done some bad things in the past; I was a tearaway as a teenager and I disappointed a lot of the people around me. But what you learn is that this church is very forgiving. It doesn’t matter how far you’ve gone, you can be saved. I find that idea incredibly comforting. It reminds me of that line in Catherine of Siena that says “God’s forgiveness to all, to any thought or act, is more certain than our own being”. It’s a religion that recognises that we are fallible, a religion founded on forgiveness.’

  Mouse smiled at her.

  ‘Lee is the brains of this operation. Go to her if you have any deep questions. Come to me if you want to know where the nearest drink is. Now, maybe I should say a few words about next week’s session . . .’

  The clock, which reminded Lee of the clock that she had watched as she sat her finals at university, a clock whose hands moved in mysterious leaps, jumped on towards nine and then David came in and thanked them and they were all out in the balmy night. The church’s lights were still on and they threw out a soft glow into the courtyard where the new members stood with their Course leaders, suddenly unwilling to leave the place and each other.

  ‘Does anyone want to come to the pub?’ Mouse lit a cigarette and took a long drag, blowing the smoke up so that it was caught in the light thrown from the church, a blue haze dissolving slowly into the night.

  Four

  Abby stared into her lemonade. The glass was old and chipped; fissures that would one day destroy it ran like veins under the surface. When Mouse banged his hand on the table to emphasise a point, the bubbles in her lemonade shuddered, some were dislodged from the side of the glass and went shooting upwards. She watched the tiny explosions as they leapt free of the liquid. She centred the glass on the beer mat, squared the beer mat to the table.

  Abby’s stomach hurt. She kept telling herself it was her stomach. As fear fluttered through her mind she tried to convince herself that the pain was higher up, further back, tried to make herself burp as if that would somehow prove something. She thought back to the meal in the church, the pools of grease that shone iridescent in the spaghetti sauce, the starchy stickiness of the pasta.

  Neil – the only one from her discussion group who had come to the pub – sat opposite her. They were both quiet, listening to the chatter further down the table. Neil was drinking a glass of white wine. She could hear an edge in Marcus’s voice that told her that he had passed from merriment into drunkenness. The twins had bought shots of tequila. She had handed hers to Marcus. She watched the lights of a fruit machine dance up and down Marcus’s white shirt, saw his hands move as he spoke. He threw himself back laughing, almost toppled from his stool. Now all she wanted was to lie in bed with a hot-water bottle on her stomach and Marcus, sober, asleep beside her.

  She realised that Neil was speaking to her. She smiled distantly at him.

  ‘My daughter died last year,’ he said, placing his hands flat on the table in front of him.

  ‘I’m so sorry, that’s terrible,’ Abby said. She looked at his downcast eyes. ‘How did she die?’

  ‘She’d been ill for a long time. It was only obvious r
ight at the very end that it was anorexia. That it was killing her.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ said Abby, leaning towards him.

  ‘You don’t expect these things, do you? Not if you’re a normal happy family. You don’t look out for them. I just thought she was thin. I keep turning over her life in my mind, looking for clues. We gave her everything: holidays, a fantastic education, a bloody pony. And her brother – completely normal. Although heartbroken about his sister, of course.’

  ‘Of course, I can imagine.’

  ‘A chap at work put me in touch with David. I suppose everyone thought that I’d gotten over it too easily. I was back on the trading floor two weeks later. It did me good to lose myself in my work like that. But quite a few of my colleagues have been to the Course over the years. And to be with young people like you, talking about very serious subjects – it’s wonderful. A bit like going back to university.’

  Abby reached over and laid her hands on his, gently collecting his fingers in her own. They sat in silence for a while and then she lowered her hands back into her lap.

  *

  Marcus was sitting at the other end of the table talking to the twins. He had a meeting at eight o’clock the next morning with one of the senior partners. Initially, he had told himself that he would have one drink and then take Abby – who was looking tired and ill – home to bed. But Mouse’s manic conversation, and the promise of another drink, and another chaser, had kept him at the table. He had edged himself away from Abby, whose disapproving glances had only a very minor effect when he was feeling like this. He tried not to look at her and concentrated instead on the twins, whom he couldn’t tell apart, and who were talking so quickly that he only had a vague sense of what they were saying, and so instead looked into their long-lashed eyes.

  *

  Lee stood outside with the tall, dark-haired young man from her group. His name was Philip. He still wore his leather jacket buttoned up to the throat, even though the night was mild. They smoked in the darkness, and Lee felt tired, but peaceful. She peered inside the cars that passed down the King’s Road, saw young people heading out for the evening, tired City workers coming home, old ladies perched over their steering wheels straining their eyes into the shimmering street lights.

  ‘I really don’t know why I’m here,’ Philip said.

  ‘What? Here with me?’

  ‘No, at the Course. It’s not like it’ll do any good.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I thought this might be a way of making myself believe, of convincing myself that it all means something. I can see it won’t do any good. You’re all lovely people, but I don’t think I’ll be coming back next week.’ He was drinking vodka and tonic. He drained his glass and laid it gently on the window ledge. Lee turned to face him, taking his elbow firmly in her hand.

  ‘Give it time,’ she said, her voice suddenly sharp. ‘You’ve only been to one session.’ Her voice softened and she loosened her grip from his elbow, letting her fingers trail down his arm to take his hand. ‘You’d be surprised how it works on you. I’ve seen people who swore they were atheists at the first session speaking in tongues by the time the Retreat comes around.’

  ‘Oh, no, I couldn’t do that.’

  ‘That’s what they said, too.’

  Philip smiled shyly at her.

  ‘I was a choirboy when I was a kid. I used to go to these wonderful cathedrals and sing. It was awesome to hear your voice rising to fill all that space. But I got so bored during the services. I couldn’t really follow the words, or at least I didn’t see how they were relevant to me. Whenever I’ve been back to church since, I still get that feeling. As if the priest is speaking a language that I don’t understand, as if the service is designed to bore you into submission.’

  Lee dropped his hand and lowered her eyebrows, her cigarette held between her fingers like a baton conducting her words.

  ‘We’re not supposed to listen to it all. Remember it was once in Latin, all of the service sung in a language that much of the congregation wouldn’t have understood. I use it as a time to relax, to still my mind, focus on my breathing. Don’t think that you can reduce it to something easily comprehensible. The beauty of the service lies in its mysteriousness.’

  Lee’s cigarette had burned down and she turned to go back inside. Philip reached out to stop her.

  ‘And the stuff you hear? The stuff about sex? How we’ll all go to hell if we fuck before marriage? That’s not part of the Course really, is it?’

  She looked up at him, a cool indifferent smile on her lips.

  ‘We have to take the Bible as the basis of what we believe. It’s what the Course is founded upon. And it says sex should only be between people who are married. That homosexuality is evil. So yes, it is part of the Course. It has to be. But I think, more than anything, the Course teaches that whatever you do, you’re not beyond hope.’

  She reached up, placed a kiss on his pale cheek, and then walked back inside.

  *

  Mouse sat talking to the Japanese girl, whose name was Maki. He laid his hand heavily on hers whenever he wished to emphasise a point.

  ‘And the wonderful thing about his work is that it is so bloody honest. You sit there reading him and you think . . . you just think Christ this is brilliant, you know?’ He had forgotten which author they were discussing. ‘So, do you live in England? Are you over studying?’

  ‘Actually I work for a fashion designer on Bond Street.’ She had a slight American accent.

  ‘Oh, what’s that like?’

  ‘Shallow, depressing. It’s why I came to the Course. I heard about it from a girl at work. She’s an ex-model who now helps design the swimwear collection.’

  ‘Oh, yes, Pippa Walsh.’

  ‘That’s right. Anyway I told her I was feeling lost in London, lonely and so on, and she told me about the Course. I’m not really any religion, you see. My parents were nominally Shinto, but they got married in a Christian ceremony and when my dad died he was buried by Buddhist monks. I like the ritual of Christianity. I like the hymns.’

  Mouse went to the bar to get another drink. He was looking forward to going to work the next day. He had taken the job at the library to be close to Lee, but, over time, had found himself warming to a life caught somewhere between student and academic. He had wanted to join Lee on the MA, but couldn’t afford the fees and so instead applied for a position as assistant librarian in the art deco monolith of Senate House. He saw Lee most days: she chose to study in the Special Collections Reading Room where he worked. They had lunch together. Lee regarded him as a talisman, a charm that had helped her to a distinction in the MA and would now see her through her PhD. Mouse was happy. He was able to spend much of the day fetching Lee books, watching the sun move across her or the way she frowned and sucked her pencil as she read.

  On the days that Lee stayed at home, or when she had to walk to Gordon Square for lectures, Mouse would climb up to the library’s upper floors, where readers were forbidden to enter and the hundreds of rooms were used to store books. He walked along long corridors of identical wooden doors, negotiating dog-legs and corners that seemed to defy the logic of the building’s external architecture. There were certain spots that drew him to them – his favourite was the hall on the fourteenth floor that reached up to the lofty ceiling three floors above and was entirely empty. The wind always moaned there, no matter what the weather at ground level. Otherwise it was a room of absolute stillness.

  The library had originally been designed to be much larger, with a second tower rising up towards the Euston Road to give the impression of a vast modernist steamship cruising through Bloomsbury. The project had run into financial problems and the building was cut off parallel with the northern edge of Russell Square. Because of the untimely foreshortening of the architect’s vision, there were corridors that led nowhere, warrens of narrow passages that culminated in brick walls, rooms with no purpose whose air was never disturbed by human b
reath. These orphaned spaces were Mouse’s realm: it was here that he spent his days, here that he felt at home.

  He had discovered hidden rooms where collections of children’s literature of the 1920s and 30s were stored. He would sit for hours staring at copies of The Arabian Nights and the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen illustrated by Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac. He would take the staff lift to the fourteenth floor and search out Rackham’s Wind in the Willows and Dulac’s The Little Mermaid and then, with a cup of tea held carefully away from the friable pages, he’d allow himself to be taken into other worlds.

  His life at the library complemented his existence at the Course. Not only because he was able to watch over Lee, but also because the librarian who was nominally his boss was working on a seemingly endless piece of Marxist criticism, attempting to unpick the economic coding that linked the Bible and the Bhagavad Gita and the Declaration of Independence, and was irritably shut in his office for most of the day. This meant that Mouse was able to work the hours he wanted, was able to take days off to attend Course events. He had no defined holidays but managed to get up to Scotland to see his mum regularly. He felt that his life had a fine degree of symmetry to it: of course he wanted Lee to love him, but until that time arrived, he was able to stay close to her, monitor her, stop her from doing anything drastic. He saw her come back into the pub, followed by Philip. Mouse bought himself a beer and returned to the table. Marcus was sitting with his arm around Abby, who was leaning on his shoulder, her eyes tightly closed.

  ‘Listen, Mouse, Abby’s knackered. Shall we finish up with a couple at ours? Abby can go to bed. I’ve got some good bottles of wine in the rack.’