Alex Preston - The Revelations

Mouse looked behind him and sucked his stomach in as she squeezed past him.

‘Wow, this room is tiny. Bad luck. My name is Lee, by the way.’

She took off her shoes and sat down on his bed, lifting his suitcase onto the floor. He saw her eyes scanning the piles of books. She reached over and picked up a tattered copy of The Wind in the Willows .

‘Oh, I love this. I had forgotten how much I did, but then I read it over the summer. It’s magic.’

Mouse’s eyes bulged even more. He sat down in his desk chair, knocking a pile of books over as he swung round to face her. They were only a foot apart and Mouse could smell her shampoo.

‘Do you really like it? I think it’s a serious work. I mean really very spiritual. It’s my favourite. I read it when I can’t sleep.’

Lee looked around the room. Treasure Island lay open on top of a copy of Eugénie Grandet, The Famous Five rubbed shoulders with La Vie mode d’emploi, Struwwelpeter with Les Fleurs du mal .

‘What are you studying?’ she asked.

‘French.’

‘So why all the kids’ books?’

Mouse blew his fringe upwards and spun a pencil on his desk.

‘I’ve always taken them with me. My dad is in the army and we travelled around a lot when I was young. I just got used to having my books around me. All I have to do is read the beginning of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and I feel. . I don’t know, safe. It’s a wee bit sad, I suppose, but no worse than television.’

She set down The Wind in the Willows on top of the Bible that lay beside his bed. She took off her jumper; her singlet rode up as she lifted it, revealing a flat white stomach. Mouse tried not to look at the softness of her breasts under the vest, the black bra straps on her shoulders. She leaned over suddenly and, very close, breathed a question at him. He felt a flutter of panic, felt time slowing, making the air around them heavy.

‘What’s your accent? Where are you from?’

She stroked his flushed, fleshy cheek with cold fingers. He spoke quickly, stumbling on his words.

‘I’m from Scotland. Well, I grew up in Germany and then came back over here when I was thirteen. We were in Shropshire for a wee while and then my dad was posted to Barry, outside of Dundee. It’s where his family are from. I don’t really know what my accent is. I try to make it as ordinary as possible. It’s just how I speak, you know?’

With the light cutting along her cheek, he thought she was very beautiful. He could see fading summer freckles across her forehead, lying like stars along her arms. He noticed that she wore different-coloured earrings in her ears. He wondered if she knew that they didn’t match. Her tracksuit bottoms were frayed around the heel. He felt suddenly ashamed of his body, the way his stomach pushed out beneath his T-shirt, his goggling eyes.

‘What are you doing here? I mean, I’m glad you came over, but I didn’t think people like you mixed with people like me. Why aren’t you out with Abby and Marcus?’

She drew back a little and smiled at him.

‘I saw you at dinner the other night and I thought you looked nice. I don’t want to hang out with just those people. I want to meet people like you. I think we could be friends.’

‘Well I don’t. I didn’t ask you to come over. I just want to get on with my work. All of the other students in my tutorials have spent every holiday since they were kids in France. They worked in Paris on their gap years, have pretentious parents who insist on French at the dinner table once a week, you know? I’m at a disadvantage from the start and so I am going to need to work really hard to keep up. I think you’re grand, Lee, and I’m pleased to have met you, but maybe you should go. I can’t really deal with this now.’

She looked at him with a frown, knitting her eyebrows together, then pulled back the duvet and slipped into his bed. He watched her wriggle like a fish for a moment and then saw the tracksuit trousers slither slowly to the floor.

‘Will you read me a story, Alastair?’

‘Um. . OK. Call me Mouse. People call me Mouse.’

So he opened The Wind in the Willows , took a deep breath, and began to read.

‘The Willow-Wren was twittering his thin little song, hidden himself in the dark selvedge of the river bank. Though it was past ten o’clock at night, the sky still clung to and retained some lingering skirts of light. .’

Lee slept in his bed that night. She wore one of his T-shirts and they lay in the close darkness hugging, talking in whispered voices. He massaged her thin back with his thumbs, feeling the closeness of the bones under her skin. She let him kiss her lips, but kept them tightly closed when he tried to move his tongue inside. He was also allowed to feel her breasts and her arse through her clothes, but she pushed him away when he tried to slip his hands under the waistband of her pants. Neither of them slept, and when the sun rose he sat on the windowsill reading aloud from The Wind in the Willows again. She lay back with her eyes closed, smiling.

*

It was the closest he had come to something sexual with Lee. And it was why he went for these massages. He had enough self-knowledge to realise that it was in pursuit of those early nights with Lee that he went to the tall Georgian house in Marylebone. He slid back to the present, away from memory, as the girl massaging him started to apply oil to her naked body. Her breasts shimmered, her stomach glistened. She began to chant.

‘Om, shanti, om. .’

Pressing her breasts together, she slid over his body, rubbing herself against him, all of the slippery warmth of her vibrating with her chanting. He began to intone the mantra and allowed his mind to empty entirely, felt the world centre on his groin. She moved faster, flinging her body over his; she was panting. Mouse’s voice rose to a wail as he came hot shots over his own belly, over hers. She mopped at herself with a towel and then handed him some tissues. In the aftermath he felt empty. His breath came tightly into his chest, escaping with a high wheeze. The girl dressed in the mirror and then left the room. Mouse made his way out into the afternoon. He was carrying his drumsticks.

He decided to walk down to the church. He wasn’t due there for another few hours and the massages always filled him with a strange energy. He couldn’t go more than once a month, though. The emotional and financial expense precluded it. He always felt a heady sense of guilt afterwards. He nurtured it, enjoyed it as one can enjoy any pain that is rare and self-inflicted. It helped to give shape to his time at the Course knowing what it was like to sin.

He dived through the underpass at Marble Arch and came out into the north-eastern corner of Hyde Park. It had been a cut-glass autumn day, the leaves threw a multicoloured net over damp grass. Now with the light fading over them, two boys flew a kite which was silhouetted against the rich blue of the western sky. He watched the kite shudder for a moment in the high air, whip in the wind and then crash to earth. He walked along the avenue of trees down towards Knightsbridge, imagining those who once rode alongside him, Victorian ladies with their bodies hot under stiff-collared clothes perching side-saddle as gentlemen with enormous sculpted moustaches raised their hats and bowed. Mouse ran up the hillock upon which Achilles was perched and placed his hand on the cold bronze of the statue’s calf. Then along the south side of the park, past the rose gardens and the last dying games of football, until he came out by the lake.

*

Those first few weeks with Lee were bright in his mind. When it had all seemed ahead of him, when it had promised so much. He wasn’t to know that he wouldn’t get any further, that her coldness was something more than the initial prudishness of a sensitive teenage girl. They spent all of their time together during that wonderful autumn, and it felt to Mouse that he lived under two skies: the natural sky above and the artificial sky that Lee cast over him. Mouse carried her books to the English faculty and left her with a lip-kiss at the door before running to his own lectures. They’d walk to dinner together and then sit and smoke cigarettes until it was time to go to the pub, or to Marcus’s room to hang out with Abby and the others. Marcus had the biggest room in college and there was always booze and often drugs on offer. Mouse didn’t mind that Lee described him as her discovery, presented him to the others with a note of possession in her voice. He wanted to be owned by her.