The Gospel of Us

by Owen Sheers

  When he lifted his head there was nothing but sadness in his eyes. Sadness and determination.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, handing the photograph back to her. ‘I have to go now.’

  But she wasn’t going to let him off that easy. ‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘No, you keep it. You keep it now.’

  And then it was her who left him. Left him standing there in the middle of the dance floor, staring down at that photo.

  If Kev the MC hadn’t drawn our attention to it, most of us would have missed what happened next. I’d gone back to the bar. Word had got round that The Band were on soon. Still here, still burning they were, and there was no way I was going to miss them for a second time that day.

  Kev had come on to introduce them when his eye was caught by something else.

  ‘Hey! Hey People! Look!’ he said, pointing up at the wall behind me. ‘Some bugger’s left it recording!’

  I turned round and saw he was pointing at the big screen, the one we watch Six Nations matches on. I took a step back to get a better view. It was the Teacher again, with Joanne. They’d gone into another room in the club and must have thought they were on their own. But they weren’t, because a cameraman from one of the TV crews must have gone in before them, then set down his camera while he went off for a piss. So now there they were, the Teacher and Joanne, being broadcast to the whole club without their knowledge.

  ‘Shhh,’ Kev said, playing it for laughs. ‘If we’re quiet, maybe we’ll see a bit of action!’

  He needn’t have shhh’d us because there was no sound on the feed. But we didn’t need sound. At least I didn’t, not to get an idea of what was happening in there.

  The Teacher was asking her something. Again and again, explaining himself to her. But whatever it was Joanne was having none of it. She looked like she did on the slip the day before, when she was strapped with explosives. Scared, tearful, shaking and shaking her head. But the Teacher wouldn’t let up. We saw him place his hands on her shoulders, saw her put her hand over her mouth, saw the tears come sliding down her cheeks. There’d been some laughing at first, but not now. The whole club was deadly quiet, watching this silent movie being played out before us.

  Eventually he must have got through to her, because her shaking head became a nodding head. Yes, she seemed to be saying. I understand. I’ll do this.

  And then he kissed her. On the cheek, long and close, like a kiss of life. Or death.

  Fair enough old Kev had a job on his hands to pick up the atmosphere when the two of them came back in again. He went straight for it though, firing off some jokes as they walked back to the table, stuff about ‘slipping off for some private tutoring eh Teacher?’ That kind of thing. But I could tell even Kev was shaken underneath, that even he was unsettled by what we’d seen.

  But then The Band had come on and, well, everyone went wild for them, so I guess we forgot about it. Until what happened later that night. After which no one, not a single person who was in that club, would ever forget what they’d seen again.

  As ever The Band didn’t only make us go wild, but made ICU wild too, although in a very different way. They must have had their Company spies in the place because within minutes of The Band starting up one of their Resistance songs the whole party was raided, broken up by Old Growler and his wolf packs of Security.

  This time The Band didn’t get away, but were cuffed there and then on stage before being led out the back. As for the rest of us, it was just the usual stuff, photos taken, IDs checked, a few of the rowdier ones taken off for a beating in the back of a van. Old Growler was in his element, stalking the tables, eye-balling us all. He saved his special treatment for the Teacher though. Singling him out and making him stand up on the stage. We all waited for what he’d do to him next, but Growler, he was cleverer than that. He understood anticipation was the worst part of fear. So he did nothing. Just made the Teacher stand up there while he stared at him, stared at him good and hard like he was trying to kill him with looking.

  After a while he knew he’d done enough. Rounding up his men, he ordered them out before giving the room one last scan of his own, then left us with one of his favourites.

  ‘Enjoy your night,’ he said to us all. ‘It’s your last.’

  Then, turning to the Teacher.

  ‘So make the most of it.’

  I didn’t fancy sticking around after that. No one knows how to execute a buzz kill quite like ICU, so to be honest I knew the night wasn’t going to be rescued now Old Growler had done his business. So I left. As I was going though, passing the Teacher’s table, I heard him lean across the back of a chair and speak to Joanne again. Now, I can’t be sure, because the club was still loud and everything, the next band coming on stage, but this is what I think he said.

  ‘If you’re going to do it then do it now. Follow them.’

  I carried on out the club doors but then stopped at the top of the stairs. Had he really just said that? Follow who? Old Growler’s mob? And do what exactly? I was still trying to make sense of it when, sure enough, the club doors swung open and Joanne walked through them, then straight on down the stairs, head down, taking them fast, as if she had someone to catch up with, someone to catch.

  I glanced back into the club through the windows in the door. The Teacher was up on his feet again, only this time he wasn’t just up, but dancing too. Clapping his hands, swinging his arms and getting them all out on the dance floor, all his followers. Peter, the Legion Twins, Alfie, his brother, Simon, all of them rocking and shuffling out onto the dance floor to shake their stuff, with the Teacher leading them, shouting out to whoever’d listen,

  ‘Let’s dance! Let’s dance!’

  The next time I heard the Teacher he was shouting again, but unless I’d seen him myself, seen him with my own eyes, I’d never have thought that voice belonged to the same man.

  He was crouching down on a piece of grass in the middle of the close where my girlfriend lives. I’d gone over to her house after the club because she hadn’t been able to be there herself, so I wanted to tell her all about it. Her mam’s been sick ever since she was twelve, so she spends most of her time caring for her and can’t go out nights. We were sitting in her bedroom, talking, when I heard the shouting. I told my girl to stay put while I went to have a look, then went to the bathroom at the end of the corridor. Opening the window I looked down, and there he was. The Teacher, crouched on the grass, shouting and screaming.

  A bunch of boys on bikes were cycling round and round him. Just kids they were, we all know them, annoying little shits causing trouble then wheelin’ off. But nothing serious, nothing to shout about like he was doing down there. But shout he did. Again and again, cowering away from them as if they weren’t kids at all, but demons.

  I reckon he must have freaked them out in the end, because pretty soon they scarpered, leaving him alone whimpering on the grass. I looked to the head of the close. The club was just there, on the other side of the street. I could make out a bunch of people on the bench of the bus stop outside its car park. It was his followers. I could make out Alfie’s bright jumper, and the Legion Twins, leaning against each other like one man leaning against a mirror. They were asleep, all of them. Nothing unusual in that. All of us have dozed off after a big night, haven’t we? At the bus stop, in the train station. But the fact they hadn’t been woken by the Teacher’s shouting, well, that was weird.

  I decided I’d go and wake them up. Tell them their man was having a bad trip or something. So I went and told my girl just that; that I’d be back in soon enough, but I had to go and sort out this bloke first, crouched on his own in the middle of the close. When I got out there though, he wasn’t on his own. Old Growler was with him.

  At least, I think it was Old Growler. It was hard to say. The close was dark and whoever the Teacher was talking to was wearing one of those Security gas masks. Only even that was different. The nose of it was longer, more like a snout. Like the snout of an animal. But the way th
e man stood, the way he did that little parade back and forth, the way he stabbed his finger in the air like his boss; all that made me think this was Growler, or at least some kind of a bad dream of him.

  I couldn’t hear what they were saying. The Teacher had stopped shouting now, and if he was speaking at all then it must have been softly. Bending double, I edged nearer, parking myself up behind one of the neighbour’s garden hedges. I got there just in time to hear the end of their conversation.

  ‘Tell me your story,’ the Teacher said. Just as he’d said to everyone he’d met these past two days. ‘Tell me your story.’

  Silence. Just the sounds of the close sleeping, the tick of hallway clocks, the creak of a bedspring turning. I wanted to look, but didn’t dare. I pressed my ear right into the hedge, straining to hear. And then, finally, he spoke.

  ‘I have no story,’ Growler said. ‘I am.’

  When I plucked up the courage to look over that hedge the Teacher was on his own again. Or was he? Again, it was hard to tell. There was no one else in the close now, but he was still talking. Looking up at one of the windows, talking, saying, ‘I don’t want to come in. I want to stay out here. I want to stay here.’

  Then, all of a sudden he was down on his haunches again, his arms outstretched as if open to a child running towards him.

  ‘Here you are!’ he said as he stood up, throwing his arms in the air, catching a weight of nothing a moment later. ‘Let’s get you dry is it?’

  I edged closer. He was on his knees, smiling, rubbing at the air with both hands. I followed the shape of them, the shape his hands made in the night and I saw it was a little girl. He was drying a little girl.

  And then he wasn’t.

  Standing up again he turned to the head of the close. He’d seen someone else. Someone walking towards him, slow and steady. I could see his face clearly now, the one streetlamp catching his eyes. They were wet, filling with tears. Whoever was coming towards him must have been beautiful. I mean really beautiful. Because that’s what his eyes said, that’s what his face said, and that’s what he said too, when she got to him.

  ‘You look beautiful.’

  Again I followed his hands, his arms, the way they embraced this person who wasn’t there, and I saw this time it was a woman. A woman just a little shorter than him, her head resting against his shoulder as they began to dance. He held her so close, so tightly as they moved about that scrap of grass, I thought he’d never let her go. But then he did. Suddenly she was gone, and he looked just as surprised as me. He searched the air for where she’d just been, but it was of no use. He was alone again. As he sunk to his knees his head dropped and he pulled his hands through his hair, tearing at it in grief.

  Right, I thought, I’ve got to help him now. Got to wake his brother or Peter, get them to take him to wherever he’d made his home. And I would have too, if only he hadn’t spoken again, if only he hadn’t spoken with that voice that wasn’t his.

  ‘That you son?’ he said.

  At first I thought he was talking to me. That somehow he’d seen me and was trying to scare me with this other voice, this deep, low voice, gentle but hard. But he wasn’t talking to me, he was talking to himself.

  ‘Dad?’ he said in his usual voice.

  He was looking up at one of the roofs now, as if he was speaking with someone up there.

  ‘Hello son,’ he said in the deep voice. ‘You’re out late.’

  ‘So are you,’ he replied, looking up to the roof again.

  ‘You know me son,’ the deep voice said again. ‘Always working.’

  And that’s how it went. The Teacher standing on the grass in the middle of the close, looking up at one of the roofs, talking with himself. Talking as if he were two men, not one.

  ‘Do you see me?’ he said in his own voice.

  ‘Of course I see you son,’ replied the deep voice. ‘I can see the whole town from up here. You should come up sometime. It’s beautiful, especially at night. If the moon’s full it catches the terraces over on Western Avenue something lovely – makes it look like the street’s made of silver. And all the lights in the windows too, turning on, turning off, each one telling a part of someone’s story. You could set your watch by some of them. Mrs Evans, for instance. Over there on Brahms Road. Eight thirty every night her bedroom light goes off. I could count you down to it, it’s that regular. Then Phil – you know Phil, don’t you? Well, likes his reading does Phil. His light won’t be off for another hour at least.

  It’s the same in the morning too. People do like their routines, don’t they? There’s one woman, over on Sandfields now, who walks the same way to work every day. Same way, same time, every day. Sometimes I want to throw something in front of her – piece of slate, one of my tools – just to make her go another way. Just once. But you can’t, can you? Have to let people make their own choices. Isn’t that right?’

  ‘Yes,’ the Teacher said in his own voice again. ‘I suppose you do.’

  ‘Can you see a piece of slate down there son?’

  ‘A piece of slate?’

  ‘Yes. It fell just now. Somewhere over there. Might not be much of it left. It’s funny like that, slate. So strong, yet fragile in the end. No two pieces the same either, you know that? Might all look the same from down there, but I’m telling you, from up here you can see their differences. Different grain in each of them. That’s the best way to work it too, you know that? Follow the grain – let the slate tell you where to go, what to do. Any luck?’

  The Teacher looked down at his feet. ‘No. Can’t see it.’

  ‘Try further over there,’ he said to himself, using the deep voice again. ‘By the path. Always a shame, isn’t it? To see a shattered slate. All that work put into it, all that strength and grain, broken. Only way though, sometimes. Has to happen.’

  ‘Does it? Why?’ he asked himself as he walked over to the path.

  ‘Well,’ the deep voice explained. ‘It’s what people need sometimes, isn’t it? Like a warning, a sign. Lets them know something’s wrong with their roof. A roof, any roof now, is only as strong as its weakest slate see? One cracked slate, one loose one, that’ll be where the water gets in. People always forget that. They’ll look at the whole roof, from a distance like, and think “nothing wrong with that. Good roof that.” But you got to get closer haven’t you? Got to look at every slate. Listen to every slate. That’s the only way to know for sure. But who does that? And no good telling them either. Usually a slate has to fall before they hear you. One has to fall, and then they’ll listen. Shame, like I said, to lose a slate, but well, if it saves the whole house, got to be worth it in the long run, hasn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  He’d got to the path now and was looking down at it, as if he’d found something.

  ‘What do you mean “you suppose so”?’ he said in the deep voice again. ‘What’s one slate to a whole roof in the end? To a whole house? Small sacrifice I’d say. Now, have you found that piece yet?’

  ‘Yes,’ he answered quietly. ‘It’s broken.’

  ‘Is it? Thought it might be,’ said the deep voice. ‘Never mind. Can you pass it up?’

  Silence. For once he didn’t answer himself, but just kept on looking down at the path.

  ‘Son?’ he said in the deep voice, soft and low. ‘You going to pick it up?’

  He looked up at the roof.

  ‘Do I have to?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he answered himself. ‘I’m afraid you do son. Pick up the slate now. Pick it up.’

  Moving very slowly the Teacher bent down to the path, picked something up, something dark and jagged, then stood again and held it in the air.

  ‘Thank you, son,’ he said in the deep voice.

  Moving just as slow again, he dropped his arm. There was nothing in his hand.

  ‘Well,’ I heard him say in that low voice. ‘I suspect you’ll be on your way is it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Going on a jour
ney are you?’

  ‘Yes. I think so. Going on a journey.’

  In the distance I could hear the grinding of a large lorry, the lifting whine of a siren getting closer. The Teacher turned his head towards the street, towards the gathering sound.

  ‘Well,’ he said in the voice from the roof. ‘I hope you’ve got everything you need. It’s important to be ready, remember that son.’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied, his own voice sounding small in comparison, like the voice of a child. ‘Thanks, Dad.’

  And then he walked away. Walked away towards his sleeping followers and the sound of that lorry, grinding, and the sound of that siren, whining, both of them getting closer.

  Book Three: Sunday

  What I didn’t know back then was that we all have different voices, just not all of us have found them yet. Because of what the Teacher did when he was here I’ve found one of mine, and I’m going to use it now to tell you what happened next. Why? Because to describe what happened that Sunday, to really describe it, would need a whole new language, let alone a whole new voice. But until we discover that language, this’ll have to do.

  If I’d known what the Teacher was walking towards that night, if I’d known the terrors waiting for him, I’d have run up that close and tried to stop him. But none of us knew, not then. Except him of course, I’m sure of it. That’s why he wasn’t surprised when he reached the end of the close and he saw Joanne standing on a wall, pointing at him.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said when she lowered her arm, sending a unit of Council police running over to him.

  As they seized him, pulling his wrists behind him, gripping his shoulders, he managed to turn his head to look back. I followed his gaze to where it landed, right on the patch of grass where he’d danced with that beautiful woman of air; right where he’d danced with her, held her and lost her.