Alex Preston - The Revelations

‘They’re my role models, and I won’t have you talk about them like this. It’s fucking hard to say how I feel. When I’m right down in my slumps, I can’t find my own words to express it. And not only do the women mystics help me say how I feel, they rephrase my unhappiness as something positive. They make me feel that there might be something good the other side of all this pain.’ Her eyes were bright with angry tears.

Mouse let go of her wrist, a little ashamed.

‘Do you remember when those boys slapped me?’ Lee said, looking at him sharply.

Mouse did remember. They had been walking down the King’s Road on the way to the Course the previous summer when two gym-inflated bankers stumbled out of a pub and stood blocking the pavement ahead of them. The bankers had taken their suit jackets off and their ties hung loosely around thick necks. They were sweating and Mouse could see their muscular chests pressing wetly against shirt fabric. As Mouse and Lee passed, he heard one whisper to the other and then, so quickly that he could hardly register it, the banker had turned and slapped Lee hard on the arse. The two men stood, laughing, as Mouse and Lee continued up the road.

‘Just keep walking,’ Mouse had said, clutching Lee’s arm. ‘It’s not worth it.’ Shame and fear sent blood to his round cheeks and goggled his eyes. Lee’s mouth hung open and he could see her mind whirring. The bankers’ laughter still reached them through the warm summer air. Suddenly, her mouth set in a hard line, Lee had ripped her arm from Mouse’s grip, turned, and started running back down the road towards the bankers, rummaging through her handbag as she went. The one who had slapped her, his thinning hair gleaming in the early evening sunshine, looked bemused at the sight of the madly rushing girl, her blonde hair flying out behind her like smoke from the fire of her rage.

As she reached the banker, her pace unchecked, he half-raised his arms to fend her off, an uncertain smile on his lips. At the last minute before impact, Lee leapt into the air, at the same time drawing something out of her handbag with her right hand and plunging it into the banker’s neck. Mouse started running towards them, his heart thumping. The banker sat down heavily as Lee rolled away from him, picked herself up, and turned to look at Mouse, a triumphant grin stretched across her face. The second banker was bent over his friend, slowly drawing what Mouse could now see was a black and yellow Staedtler pencil out of the knot of muscle that ran between the banker’s neck and his shoulder. A thin plume of blood darkened his white collar. The two men, one crouching, twirling the pencil in his fingers, the other leaning back and breathing heavily, looked at Lee as she walked away from them, awe in their eyes.

‘Of course I remember,’ Mouse said, taking his signet ring off and spinning it on the table. ‘How could I forget?’

‘Well, when I was running towards them, all I could think of was Judith slaying Holofernes. How none of the men around her would protect her, and so she had to become a hero herself.’ She looked at him pointedly, and he felt again the shame of that evening when she had expected him to protect her and he had only felt how plump and childlike his body was next to those brawny bankers. ‘And while not all of the women I study are as physically heroic as Judith, they do show you how to act in the world. That enduring can be a heroic act in itself.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Mouse said. Lee hugged him towards her, her voice softer now.

‘I’ve got my demons at the moment. I need you to help me fight them. If the Retreat goes well, I’m sure it’ll pull me out of this slump. It has to. Otherwise, I don’t know what I’ll do.’

They finished their drinks, waved to Philip and Maki who were still talking at the bar, and walked out into the cold night. Mouse escorted her to her bicycle and then strolled home, up through Holland Park and past the tree-hushed squares of Notting Hill.

The boat rocked him slowly to sleep that night as he lay with the Retreat bright in his mind. He pictured Lee running laughing ahead of him, saw David standing above him and looking down with pride. There was a sudden stab of guilt as he recalled the massage earlier, but then he remembered standing in the church at the last Retreat and hearing the heavenly chanting of the Course members, the tongues and the tears and the happy loss of control. Mouse slept as the moon passed through the sky, its reflection crossing the water of the canal. The boat sighed as a breeze whipped up early in the morning and then dropped again, leaving the water very clear and still in the first brightness of dawn.

Marcus parked on the crest of the bridge and looked down the canal. To the right the horse chestnuts of Kensal Green Cemetery trembled in the breeze. The graveyard’s wall was crumbling and Marcus could see through a gap to the rising ground which stretched up from the shrunken tombstones of the children’s garden to the vast mausoleums of colonial grandees. Marcus occasionally came up to visit Mouse on Sundays in summer, when they would sit and drink cans of cider on the roof of the boat and then wander through the cemetery inventing stories for the dead. Foxes would leap surprised from undergrowth as they passed, woodpeckers sweeping in bouncing flight over their heads. Now Marcus could see Mouse making his way up the towpath pulling his old suitcase with one hand, holding his snare drum and high-hat over his shoulder with the other.

Abby was trying to get the car’s radio to work. A long blare of static came from the speakers. Lee sat in the back pressing her temples with her fingers, taking controlled breaths. She had cut her hair very short the previous night. She told Marcus and Abby how she had been suddenly infuriated by the long blonde hair and had cut it herself in the bathroom sink. Jagged edges stuck up on top of her head; Marcus thought she looked like an adolescent boy. The shortness of her hair made her blue-green eyes and angular cheekbones seem unearthly and disturbing, shorn of the softening frame of her long hair. Lee’s neck, where she had cut the hair in a severe line at the back, was as slick and white as a scar.

Marcus was impatient to be on the road, to head westwards and shake free of the grim city. He leapt from the car when Mouse appeared on the pavement and squeezed the suitcase and drum into the boot. Mouse climbed in beside Lee, lifting Marcus’s guitar onto his lap.

‘Blimey,’ he said as he caught sight of Lee’s hair. ‘Auditioning for the Sex Pistols?’

‘I wanted a new look. Now be nice about it.’ She leaned over and placed a breathy kiss on his cheek.

Abby switched off the radio and suddenly they could hear the ducks on the canal, the birds singing in the cemetery. Then Marcus started the engine and they pulled out onto Harrow Road and were away. The skies were heavy unbroken grey above them. Marcus drove haltingly along the A40, braking for speed cameras, nosing from lane to lane, trying to cut a clear path through the traffic. Just before the widening of the road at Hillingdon, a traffic jam snaked back from the charred carcass of a burnt-out car. A lane was closed, and people edged past the scene, noses glued to their windows, looking for bodies.

‘So who’s not going to make it through the Retreat?’ Mouse asked. ‘I know you’ve all been thinking about it. There are always drop-outs at the Retreat.’

There was a silence. Marcus looked into his wing mirror and waved as the car behind let him through.

‘Of course we’ve been thinking about it.’ Marcus looked across at Abby. ‘The twins will be fine. Neil’s a good bet. I think most of our group are in for the long haul. What do you think, Mouse?’