Alex Preston: The Revelations

‘Don’t move.’ Her voice came thick and sharp. ‘Now, move a little bit. Just there. No. No, not there. Now come out and go back in again.’

Marcus was fairly sure that she was already pregnant. He kept a record of her periods on his calendar at work and watched for tampons in the bathroom bin. As he looked up he saw a slight heaviness around her jaw, a swelling of her nipples. But they continued to have sex as if it were a religious ritual, with the same unthinking repetition. He knew it was partly for the relief of orgasm, for those white seconds in which she could spit herself out of the world. But she didn’t enjoy any of the build-up. He saw her struggling above him.

He blamed the Course. It never used to be this bad. When they were first together it had been wonderful. Occasionally difficult but ultimately magnificent. Now it was like watching someone labouring up a hill, leaning into the wind and trudging desperately towards the top. He could see her nails digging into her chest and knew that there would be ten crescents of blood by the time they finished.

‘That’s it. You’ve almost got it. A bit faster. That’s it.’

Marcus thought about death to stop himself coming. Abby insisted that she was more likely to conceive if she came and so she pushed herself towards orgasm after increasingly joyless orgasm. As Marcus began to move more quickly beneath her, as he became aware of the friction and the warmth and the first whispers of pleasure, he thought of clay-cold death. But he had to work hard to stop himself panicking. Once, he had thrown Abby backwards, staggered to the bathroom and plunged his head into a basin of cold water until the frantic beating in his chest stopped. But now, two years into their marriage, he was able to control the rush of terror.

‘Oh, come on, Marcus. Sorry, I mean, please. Keep going. No, not that fast. Relax. Don’t come just yet.’

He pictured his father on the tennis court. It was high summer and their shadows danced beneath them. Marcus was hitting the ball well; the heavy air hummed with the whump of his ground strokes, the quiver of the strings, the skidding of quick-stopped trainers. He sent his father running from one tramline to the other, cut drop shots skimming wickedly low over the net. The day heated up around them. As Abby’s moans rose in pitch, Marcus remembered the moment he saw his father’s racquet drop to the ground; the ball he was about to hit thumped into the fence at the back of the court. His father sank to his knees. Marcus leapt the net and fell to his own knees to face his father. Through the white T-shirt, translucent with sweat, Marcus could see a dark triangle forming just below his father’s throat. He remembered thinking it looked like a vagina. A purple vagina creating itself beneath the damp cotton. Slowly, his father fell backwards. Marcus pressed at his chest, panted stale air into his lungs, screamed and shrieked until his mother came sprinting down from the house, wringing her hands and already sobbing. Marcus’s sister arrived a few moments later, by which time it was clear that their father was dead. As his sister sat down, deflated, against the cross-hatch fence of the tennis court, Marcus watched something change in her face, something irrevocable that would colour everything that followed. He recognised it because he felt the same thing himself. He was nineteen.

Bellowing, Abby came. Marcus, with a little exhausted sigh, followed. He felt himself grow limp quickly afterwards, suddenly lost within her. Abby scrunched her eyes shut, milking the last shudders. When it was over she seemed smaller, slightly ashamed. She rocked backwards and lay with her pelvis tilted upwards, a pillow thrust beneath her buttocks. Marcus got up and walked to the window. Outside there was nothing but dark sky and, in the distance, the black coffin of Trellick Tower. He pressed his hands on the cold glass, carefully arranging his left hand so that it covered the reflection of Abby’s face. After a few minutes she turned the light off, pulled the covers up over her bare shoulders and curled her knees to her chest.

*

David Nightingale sat in his study, with the stillness of the rectory at night wrapped tightly around him. The high sweep of his forehead was bathed in green light from the lamp on his desk. Behind him on the wall was a wood-framed poster. Almost a decade younger in the photograph, his hair still sandy-blond then, he smiled above that year’s advertising slogan: Come and Have a Deep and Meaningful . It had been a good Course as he remembered it. The first year they had expanded outside London. Now a map on the opposite wall showed hundreds of red flags dotted around the country: churches where the Course was taught. He shuffled the papers he had been working on, leaned back and stretched, looking up into the pleasing shadows of the high ceiling, the delicacy of the cornice-work. Occasionally he heard the distant howl of a police siren on the King’s Road. Otherwise there was nothing but the ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece and the creaking of his wife preparing for bed in the room above.

He looked over the Course accounts. He had long stopped trying to follow the sophisticated investment vehicles that the Earl had set up. Money was funnelled through Cayman Island trusts, distributed among the various charities and not-for-profit organisations that came under the Course umbrella, managed by banker members who waived their fees and saved their best opportunities for the Course’s monthly investment meetings. David whistled to himself when he saw how much had been set aside for developing the Course internationally. The US remained the primary target. He and the Earl had just returned from a trip to New York, where there was standing room only for David’s speech in the ballroom of the Plaza. Eager priests had rushed to press his hands afterwards, snapping up copies of The Way of the Pilgrim and the Course DVD. It was good to be back at St Botolph’s, though. This was where it all began. This was the Course’s home.

Only on the nights before the start of a new Course did he regret giving up smoking. He picked up a pencil from his desk, gripped it between his fingers, drew it to his lips and inhaled, breathing in the sweet tang of the wood, the sharpness of the lead. He realised how ridiculous this was and chuckled quietly to himself. He hadn’t smoked since university. And this was the tenth year he had been leading the Course. Strange that he still felt the nerves, still worried that he would bound onto the stage in front of the young upturned faces to find that he was stuck for words, floundering in the glare of the bright lights and wide eyes. There would be new Course leaders tomorrow. He let his mind settle upon each of them in turn: Marcus, Abby, Mouse and Lee. He knew they would be anxious, perhaps unable to sleep, and he allowed their imagined nervousness to merge with his own. Lee’s face dwelt the longest in his mind. She was troubled — he realised this — but the air of quiet panic that hung around her was one of the reasons she’d be so good as a Course leader. Nothing pushes people away like piety. A certain fragility of faith, if kept in check, could be comforting. He would need to watch her, though.

Lying in bed later, he listened to his wife snoring. His arms were behind his head and he flexed his biceps in a nervous, monotonous rhythm. He was proud of his body. He had not developed the middle-aged dough of his peers; he jogged along the King’s Road every morning, played tennis at the houses of wealthy Course members on Saturday afternoons. Propped on his pillow, he looked down at his wife, watched the tremor that passed along her upper lip with each exhalation. She no longer dyed her hair; mousy-grey strands fell down her face and trembled in her breath. He ran over his speech one final time, frowning and smiling as he would on the stage, pausing for a ripple of laughter, glancing down for a moment and then fixing the room with the intensity of his pale blue eyes. When he had finished, he pressed his palms together, muttered a prayer, placed a hand gently upon his wife’s sleeping face and with a quiet ‘Amen’, he turned onto his side and fell asleep.