Alex Preston - The Revelations

She was chewing on the inside of her cheek. Marcus could see blood on her teeth when she opened her mouth. He took her hand, feeling horrified and helpless.

‘You talk about my slumps, but none of you know what it’s like. When I’m in one of them it’s like being in a dark cell with one other creature, and then you find out that dark creature is yourself. It’s a bond between me and my dad — that we both go there — but it doesn’t make it better. It doesn’t make you want to go on surviving.’

Marcus saw that people were beginning to come into the chapel. He stopped playing and looked down into the shadowy nave. Mouse and Abby sat in the front row, huddled together for warmth. He smiled at them and then turned back to Lee. Leaning towards her, he spoke in a low voice.

‘I’m so worried about you.’

‘Don’t be.’ Her voice was suddenly hard. ‘Please stop worrying about me. And stop telling me that you’re worried. Sometimes if you think about something all the time, and harp on about it, it can make it real. I’m fine, really I am. I’m finding ways of coping.’

Marcus saw David come into the chapel, followed by Sally and the Earl.

‘Now let’s just play some music,’ Lee said. ‘Worry about yourself, about Abby. I can look after myself.’

Marcus lifted up his bass and began to pick out a series of notes, following Lee, who was playing a rousing tune that marked David’s passage down the aisle. The priest turned and stood in front of the low altar, his white shirt and chinos bright in candlelight. The new members looked nervous and excited. The atmosphere was constructed to be as fertile for revelation as possible; nothing should feel forced. Each of the new members had been given a candle to hold as they entered the small chapel. Marcus watched the careful way each of them held the flames, trying not to allow the wax to spill from the white cardboard collar that formed the handle.

David read a passage from St Luke — ‘He was praying in a certain place, and when he ceased, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray”.’ The cold dark room echoed with the sound of his long vowels, the stentorian manner in which he declaimed the Lord’s Prayer. Marcus laid his guitar across his knee and sat on his hands to keep them warm. While the priest talked, Marcus thought back to his first Retreat. He had travelled down with Abby to a tatty hotel near Exeter where chickens pecked in the yard outside their window. Those days in the balmy air of an Indian summer had changed Marcus. They had brought him closer to Abby, but also made him face up to the creeping realisation that someone — God, perhaps — was trying to win him over.

The coincidences had been occurring with disturbing regularity in the days leading up to that first Retreat. Phrases from the book he was reading on David’s orders — C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters — had been appearing on billboards, in graffiti on the sides of buildings, were spoken in meetings when he was half-listening, leaping from the surrounding drone. The number sixty-two cropped up everywhere: receipts, payslips and telephone numbers, page numbers in books that seemed full of hidden meaning, whispered significance. He would find a song repeating in his head on the way into the office; on the way home he’d sit next to a tramp singing the very same song in a voice far too beautiful for his grizzled face. But the biggest coincidence, the moment that had shocked him into belief, had occurred on the Saturday morning of that first Retreat.

Marcus and Abby had been arguing in her room. Because they were not yet married they had separate bedrooms and Abby didn’t think they should sleep together during their time at the Retreat, should obey the laws of the Course at least here. Marcus had shouted at her and stomped from the room. Outside it was warm enough for him to take off his jacket and sling it over his arm. An estuary swept across the horizon and he strode purposefully down towards the sea. He was twenty-three and he walked with the bouncing steps of an athlete. The sea was further than he thought but he pressed on, past low cottages and cows watching him with stupid curiosity. Down a narrow lane with flint walls overgrown with ivy he came upon a small church. Norman, with a leper gate and crumbling roof. The door bore a heavy padlock; looking in, with his hand cupped to the grubby window, Marcus saw that the inside was empty, the church disused. The graveyard had been overtaken by nature. Nettles grew in thick clumps above red-veined dock leaves, brambles were knotted around teetering gravestones and rabbits scuttled under apple trees as he made his way further into the cemetery.

Marcus liked to look at dates. When he went to art galleries he spent as much time calculating the ages of the artists when they died as he did looking at their paintings. Picasso filled him with hope, Toulouse-Lautrec terrified him; Dalí was a beacon, Jackson Pollock a tocsin. It was the same in cemeteries. Whenever he walked around Kensal Green with Mouse he looked hungrily for signs of extreme longevity, but was often brought up short by the graves of teenagers, people dead in their twenties and thirties. He watched particularly for family tombs where parents had outlived their children. So in the little churchyard in Devon, Marcus tore back brambles and scraped away lichen, bringing his face down close to the dappled gravestones. Most were very ancient, almost unreadable, telling of plague-deaths and children snatched by smallpox and dropsy. Then, as he was about to leave, he saw a newer stone in the corner of the graveyard, the sandy earth seemingly fresh-dug. A bunch of tulips lay upon the earth below the stone. The engraving upon it made Marcus’s throat close up in fear.

‘Marcus Glass. Taken from us aged 23. Grant him rest, O Lord.’

He staggered backwards, the few wispy clouds in the blue sky above him circling wildly for a moment. He had a sudden and vivid picture of his mother and sister at his father’s funeral, their faces pinched with sadness. He found his finger returning to trace the path of his own name, his own age. He knew that it was a sign. After the series of coincidences that had marked the last few days, this was the heavy-handed proof. When he returned to the hotel he went to find David and told him everything, told him that he was ready to really believe. David embraced him and he felt a shadow lift from his mind.

*

Lee nudged Marcus. He jumped. Lost in memories of his early days in the Course, he had missed the end of the reading. He began to strum a succession of quiet deep notes as Lee played slow descending chords. Abby sang a solo first, then the congregation joined with her. The plainness of the song suited the dark little chapel. Marcus could see the faces of the twins as they sang, twin mouths beaming, twin cheeks shining. It was a simple refrain, a prayer repeated over the same chord sequence.

‘I must become God,

And God must become me,

So that we can share

The same “I” eternally.’

Abby swayed from side to side as she sang, her eyes closed. There was something hypnotic in the music. Just as it felt that the hymn was fading into monotony, David began to improvise in the spaces between words, singing a descant in a high, fragile voice.

‘Yalullialla. Yaweahalalla. Hanna, hanna. .’

It was the sound of the desert, the sound of ancient civilisations, and Marcus took a deep breath, trying to inhale its extraordinary purity. David was standing with his arms held out, his face turned up to the roof, a wide smile showing his bright teeth. Almost before it had begun, it was over. David muttered a final blessing and then led them up the aisle and back up to the main house. Marcus could see the dazed expressions of the new members. There were glasses of white wine on the round table in the centre of the entrance hall. Maki came over to Marcus and handed him a drink.