Sherry Ashworth - Blinded By The Light

SHERRY ASHWORTH

Published by HarperCollins Children’s Books

A division of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by CollinsFlamingo 2003

Text copyright © Sherry Ashworth 2003

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

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Source ISBN: 9780007123360

Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2012 ISBN: 9780007394944

Version: 2016-05-19

Thanks to Linda Kerr, Robyn Ashworth, Jonathan Abel

For Greg and John

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Part One: The Journey

Bodies Recovered

1. From The Preface, Rendall’s Book of Prayers

2. From Rendall’s Parables: The Tale of the Traveller

3. From Rendall’s Laws Governing Purity: Abstinence

4. From Rendall’s Book of Prayers: The Morning Service

5. From Rendall’s Parables: The Tale of the Hungry Child

6. From Rendall’s Parables: The Tale of the Brothers

Part Two: The Arrival

7. From Rendall’s Laws Governing Purity: Alternate Sense Deprivation

8. From Rendall’s Book of Prayers: The Induction Service

9. From Rendall’s Parables: The Tale of the Stallion

10. From Selected Commentaries on Rendall: “They were male and female together.”

11. Letter to all Cell Leaders: From Colin Rendall

12. From Rendall’s Laws Governing Purity: Degrees of Passion

13. From Rendall’s Laws Governing Purity: antimatter

14.

15. From Rendall’s Book of Prayers: Prayer for Recovery

Part Three: The Revelation

16. Bea’s Story

17.

18. Bea’s Story

19.

20. Bea’s Story

21.

22. Bea’s Story

23.

24. Bea’s Story

25.

26. Bea’s Story

27.

28. Bea’s Story

29.

Keep Reading

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

The Orcadian April 5th, 1969

The bodies of Matthew Chalmers, 20, and Trevor Norrington-Smith, 21, were recovered today from Hoy Sound.

The young men, together with another friend, Colin Rendall, were students at Cambridge University, holidaying in Orkney. The accident occurred on Saturday evening, when the three men took a boat out for a midnight row. Rendall managed to stay afloat until he was picked up by Angus Middleton, 66, a retired fisherman, who had witnessed the capsizing from his bedroom window. Rendall was flown to Aberdeen, where he is recovering in hospital with his father by his bedside.

Police are refusing to comment on how the accident could have happened. The inquest will take place in Kirkwall after Easter.

The pain and struggle ceased. I was travelling without effort, moving towards the Light. Where there had been terror, there was now beauty, and peace beyond all understanding. An angel swathed in brightness stood by a table. On it was the Book. White pages, whiter words, thousands upon thousands of them. In essence they said, be free, be pure, do not despair of Perfection. The Book remained inscribed in my head and heart. My purpose was clear.

Didn’t feel like talking to anyone. I was pissed off, to tell you the truth. I’d been on my own since two o’clock when Phil had to go to band practice and left me in the middle of campus.

“Great seeing you, Joe,” he’d said, thumping me in the ribs. I thumped him back even harder. We grinned at each other.

“The sixty or sixty-one’ll take you near the station,” he’d said. “Come up again. Any time, like.”

“Sure,” I said. I thought, I might, but then again, I might not. I slung my overnight bag over my shoulders and set out for the bus stop.

Hell, it wasn’t Phil’s fault. If all had gone according to plan I wouldn’t have been in Birmingham, or even in England for that matter. I would have been in a village in Kenya digging, or teaching kids, or doing some other GAP voluntary work. But just after my A2s, my throat swelled up like a balloon. I lay in bed for weeks – glandular fever.

At first I was too ill to care. Life was just Mum changing damp sheets, pain, nightmarish dreams. Then I was as weak as a baby. When Tasha came to see me she looked taken aback. I date the end of our relationship from that moment. But who could blame her? I was hardly sex on legs. I couldn’t even struggle on to my legs for that matter. Tasha shoved some flowers down by my bed, pecked me on the cheek, and stressed a bit about her forthcoming results.

But it was OK in the end. She got her place at Oxford, went up in October and was mesmerised by the whole experience. She sent me a couple of emails about the college and how cool it was, the amazing people she’d met, the course being harder than she thought, more about the amazing people and parties, and then there was the email which started, I don’t know how to tell you this … You can guess the rest.

To tell you the truth, I wasn’t really gutted. I saw it coming. But put together with the fact that I had to cancel the overseas stuff because I still wasn’t a hundred per cent, and all my mates were off at uni, and I was living at home, it was a bit of a bummer. OK, I was gutted. Tasha and I had been going out for ten months, which was a long time for me. And I liked having a girlfriend. The weird thing is, even when you’re close to your mates, as I was – as I am – you don’t talk to them in the same way as you do a girl. You say stuff to her you wouldn’t say to anyone else. You do things, too, but that’s another story.

But please don’t get the impression I was a loser. That’s never been the case, which was why being at a loose end that November was getting me down. I wasn’t used to it. As soon as I was well, I got myself some work – nights in a pub pulling pints and lugging crates around, and weekends in Electric Avenue selling geeks the latest PC, PlayStation and Dreamcast games. So I wasn’t short of cash. Or invitations. Dave, Rich and Phil all asked me to stay, and I took Phil up on it. So I spent two nights on his floor, both times in a drunken stupor. It was good, kind of.

But like I said, he had to go to band practice, and I made my own way back to Birmingham New Street.

Nowhere is more depressing than a railway station on a Sunday afternoon. There’s a kind of sour, dusty smell. People look fed up; they stand around eating junk food and swigging Coke. Their luggage makes them look like refugees. But you can’t help feeling that where they’re going to might be worse than where they’re coming from. You feel yourself becoming more trashy by the minute, sidling up to the newsstand and reading all the tabloid headlines about scandalous celebrity love lives – as if I gave a toss about which plastic bimbo went to bed with which braindead footballer. I’m tempted to buy the paper anyway – something to read, innit? But then again, I’m almost out of cash and I might want a coffee on the train.