Alex Preston - The Revelations

Mouse had slipped out of work early and made his way to the large Georgian house on Gloucester Place. He was always staggered by the economics of it, that a place of such grandeur could be maintained by six or seven masseuses and their balding, unthreatening male receptionist. He paid one hundred pounds for his forty-five-minute session. Something soothing and Eastern played on a hidden stereo. A gamelan, a sitar. She sat astride one of his thighs as she massaged his arse and he could feel the soft slick hair of her pussy on his skin. It amused him that these girls — some of whom were English and well-spoken, a step above the sex-trafficked skag addicts in the brothel next door — fooled themselves into thinking that what they did was somehow better than prostitution. Eastern mysticism was in high vogue, and they must have felt that it lent dignity to their compromised lives. He had found the place through a website that promised ‘enhanced consciousness’ and ‘a way to rebalance the chakras’. Of course it was nothing more than a posh handjob. But the pretence suited Mouse, who didn’t want to have sex with these girls, just needed an hour of being touched, an hour when he could lose himself in physical pleasure without feeling that he was breaking the rules of the Course.

He had argued with Lee earlier that day. It was not a serious disagreement, just one of the small moments of friction that invigorated their relationship. He knew he had been staring at her too much in the library earlier. Perched behind his desk, he had been conjuring a daydream of exquisite beauty starring Lee against a deserted rocky beach and pine trees growing down to the sea. He stared at her and imagined her naked back pressed to the rough bark of the pine, her feet in the water and her arms stretched above her, her breasts falling forward as she dived in. She smiled at him the first few times she caught his eye, but then her expression grew increasingly irritated. A tall and aristocratic-looking student sitting next to Lee kept glancing at Mouse, whispering in her ear and then looking back at him with a frown. By this time Mouse was imagining Lee in the empty hall high above them in the tower of Senate House, her clothes scattered on the parquet floor, her hair falling down over her shoulders like Dulac’s Little Mermaid.

Lee had refused to have lunch with him and had disappeared towards the Brunswick Centre on the arm of her newly appointed protector. She didn’t come back that afternoon. After a sad sandwich in the staff cafeteria, Mouse went back to the library, found where the tall boy had been working and removed three pages of notes from his desk, folding them and placing them at the bottom of the bin as he made his way to the lift. He called ahead and booked his massage and then set out along the Euston Road.

As he lay on the bed with its sheet that was bobbled from too many washes, too many attempts to rinse out the oil and come and sweat, he felt the heaviness that had dogged his day lifting. He had been to a dinner party at the house of an older girl from the Course the night before. A girl who had once seemed to offer an escape from his obsession with Lee. Three years ago, he had taken her to the theatre, and then on to a bar, spending money he didn’t have getting her drunk. He had tried to kiss her in the taxi back west, and she laughed at him, told him that he was a dear pal, but she had a boyfriend, didn’t he know? Now the boyfriend had become a husband, the girl’s stomach strained against the material of her maternity dress, and her cheeks glowed every time she looked at her wealthy, successful mate. Mouse had played his part during dinner — the doting, unthreatening friend, laughing at her jokes and reaching out to touch the taut skin of her stomach to feel — there! — a kick. But he raged as he walked home, shouted prayers into the night sky, screamed at the desperate unfairness of it all.

The masseuse asked him to turn onto his back and he did so. He could see her looking at him, at the large belly that sat above his short, skinny legs, giving his body the appearance of a toffee apple abandoned on the bed. His cock stood straining, pulsing against the bulge of his stomach. She began to massage his feet, rubbing warm oil onto the hard pads of his soles.

He was worried about his friends. Lee was a constant concern, but now Marcus and Abby seemed argumentative, strung out. They rarely came to the pub after the Course. Dark pouches hung beneath Marcus’s eyes. The Retreat was like a beacon ahead. Only three more days and then they’d be together for the weekend, and all things would be well again. David had told him that the Retreat would be held at the Earl’s country house on the edge of the Cotswolds, Lancing Manor. Each year it was somewhere different, the exact location never revealed to the new members until the night before. Mouse thought back to the Retreats he had been on so far: some of the best days of his life. He didn’t know what he’d do without the Course.

The girl began to move her way up his body. First his calves; resting her arse on his foot, she ran her oiled fingers up one leg and then the next, kneading the muscle, moving her thumbs in circles around his knees. Then his thighs, which she pulled and stretched, making her way slowly up to the join of leg and groin, the fold of skin where his pubic hair started. She brushed his cock by accident and he felt it thrill.

*

Lee had discovered him. Three weeks into term and he had only left his room in college for lectures and meals. Sitting on his own in the wood-panelled dining hall under badly painted pictures of morally upright fellows, he would shovel the food into his mouth as quickly as he could, reading a novel to discourage any of the other outcasts from claiming him as one of their own. He watched the surrounding tables with bored scorn. Marcus’s voice was always the loudest, his laugh audible from the quadrangle below. Everyone knew Marcus. And Abby at his side, striking and statuesque, but Mouse could see her in fifteen years’ time when she’d be hulking and matronly. Daffy and all of the other laddish types who followed Marcus around were not the sort of people Mouse had come to university to meet. So he sat reading the novels of André Gide, with his blond hair flopping in front of his eyes, and left when his plate was clean.

One evening, scurrying across the quad after dinner, he saw a girl watching him from a window high in the wide blank wall of the college’s main building. He recognised her vaguely. She was friends with Marcus and his crowd. Her face looked young and lost as she peered out into the misty air. The face disappeared into darkness and Mouse climbed the spiral staircase to his own room, the smallest room in college. His clothes were still in his suitcase, perched at the foot of his bed. Books were everywhere, reaching in perilous piles towards the ceiling, three deep on the windowsill, filling the drawers of his dresser. He opened the window and stared out across the college lawn towards the parks. Only a small desk lamp lit the room behind him and he felt somehow powerful up there in his cupboard of a room, looking down over the world.

He watched people walking back to their rooms after dinner, heard brief snatches of conversation. Then there was a knock on his door. Mouse panicked for a moment, stared around his room and thrust handfuls of dirty socks and boxer shorts into drawers, stuffing them between tightly packed books. When he opened the door he saw the girl who had been watching him from the high window earlier. He stepped forward and tried to pull the door closed behind him to block her view inside. She placed one hand on the door frame. She wore a hooded sweatshirt and tracksuit bottoms, scuffed trainers on her feet.

‘Can I come in? You’re Alastair, right?’ Her voice was deep and cool.