Alex Preston - The Revelations

Without warning they came out of the wood and were standing at the top of an escarpment that led down to the motorway. The road was cut deep into the hillside, so that they looked down onto the bright street lights. Marcus could see that Mouse was already heading towards a footbridge that crossed the road half a mile to the south. His stout frame was outlined against the ridge of the hill, purposefully striding, his cap like a ship atop his head. The twins still followed behind him, although they were finding it hard to keep up with his bounding steps. The motorway below them was six lanes across, busy despite the late hour with articulated lorries thundering freight through the night. He turned and followed Mouse along the escarpment, Abby still clutched close against him.

The bridge was suspended a hundred feet above the motorway. It seemed very flimsy to Marcus as he led Abby along it. There was no wind from above, although the machines rushing beneath them seemed to create their own strange currents, sucking the air from around the Course members and then a sudden rush as the lorries surged past. Mouse was standing at the centre of the bridge, leaning far forward over the handrail, waving his hat to the vehicles below, a cigarette pointing downwards from his wildly grinning mouth. Marcus caught some of his friend’s exhilaration. He slipped out of Abby’s embrace, danced forward, then turned back and took his wife’s hand before leading her out to the middle of the bridge.

The noise from the traffic below made speech impossible. The roar whipped thoughts from their minds and the breath from their chests. The bridge shuddered when the largest lorries passed beneath, hummed and trembled the rest of the time. Marcus saw Philip come up behind Lee and place his strange zombie arms around her shoulders. He gripped Abby’s hand tightly in his own. He could see that Mouse was shouting, screaming down into the roar of traffic below. It felt as if they were linked by something, as if a chain of feeling hung between them like bunting out there in the high and dangerous sky, as they stared down on the man-made sublime.

A convoy of military vehicles passed beneath them: Land Rovers and tarpaulin-covered trucks followed by transporters carrying tanks and amphibious vehicles. Through the open backs of the trucks, Marcus could make out soldiers leaning against the shuddering material, some of them trying to sleep, some talking over the roar of the engines. One of them looked up and Marcus imagined that the soldier might carry the image of the young people silhouetted on a bridge away to battle, that it might rest in his mind like a talisman, a reminder of home. Looking down on the military vehicles, Marcus thought of toys he had collected as a child and arranged in careful formation to show his father when he arrived home from work, battlefronts drawn out on the kitchen floor. When the convoy had passed something in the air changed, and Marcus was aware that Abby was shivering beside him; he saw Lee slip gracefully out from under Philip’s arms. Only Mouse was still standing braced against the roar below, his chubby cheeks livid in the glare of the street lights, the hat now back on his head giving him the air of a mad general leading his troops on a final suicidal mission. Lee knelt at the entrance to the bridge and took Mouse’s photograph. Finally, Mouse joined them, his large eyes wet, his mouth hanging stupidly open.

Making their way back up the hill towards the house, there was a sense of deflation, but also of a communal recognition of this deflation, a feeling that they were together in feeling rather disappointed by the natural world, by the inconsistencies of the sloping ground when compared to the tarmac and metal perfection that they had just witnessed. Marcus drew his rabbit-skin jacket closer around his shoulders and pressed his lips down into the worn fur of the shoulder. He breathed in the greasy softness of the pelt. Abby looked dazed and had to lean on him every so often to catch her breath. They skirted the edge of the lake, whose waters were an oily reflection of the night sky. Philip came to walk beside Marcus and Abby.

‘I’m nervous about tomorrow,’ he said. Marcus looked over at him. His face was very pale in the moonlight.

‘Why’s that?’ Marcus felt Abby squeeze his hand in his pocket.

‘It feels like it’s going to be a test of everything that has gone before. That if we can’t embrace it all, we’ll somehow have failed. I’m worried I’ll be standing there in the service and I’ll feel as uninspired as I always did, back when I was a choirboy and I used to see church services as a kind of endurance event, used to long for the sermon because it meant we were entering the home straight.’

They were walking through the darkest part of the wood now, and Marcus could barely see Philip beside him. Abby stumbled on a root and then spoke, leaning across Marcus to address Philip’s shadowy outline.

‘When I spoke in tongues for the first time, all of the rest of the service suddenly made sense. We become a community when we pray, or sing together. In that comfortable, familiar space it’s amazing what you can do.’

‘I really hope so.’

‘Try to think of it as abstract art. You know the way a painting can be terribly moving, even though it is just a few splashes of paint on a canvas? The way something by Pollock can be more powerful, and beautiful, than a Constable landscape? It’s because it entirely bypasses our consciousness. The tongues, the music, the words of the service — you should think of them like that. As something beyond the scope of your rational mind.’

‘That’s helpful. I’ll see if it works in the chapel tomorrow.’

Finally, they broke free of the woods and saw Lancing Manor looming above them, a black shadow against the starlit night behind. A turret rose up like a coil of smoke from the house, a light burning in its narrow window.

Back inside the dining hall, Mouse initiated a half-hearted drinking game, but Marcus could tell that everyone was tired. He made sure the coats were hung back in the cupboard and drank a glass of water. He wanted to leave while there was still a feeling of community hanging between them. It was something he remembered from his first Retreat, when the Course members, who had until then seemed somehow suspicious, distant and self-satisfied, gathered around him and he felt warmth radiating from them.

‘I’m going to bed,’ he said, looking over at Abby. She smiled at him and they walked down the dining hall holding hands. They made their way through the heavy doors and into the main hallway, where a single lamp stood on the mantelpiece, a solitary point of light in the darkness that reared up above them. Abby shivered as they crept up the stairs and down the long corridor past the ghostly photographs. Their room was warm. Mrs Millman had lit a fire in the grate earlier when she came in to close the curtains. Their duvet was turned back and the bedside light cast a cosy glow across the white sheets.

Marcus helped Abby with her zip. She let the dress fall to the floor and stepped out of it. She wore white pants, a black bra that was fraying under the arms: Marcus could see a safety pin holding one strap together. Her thighs were milk-white as she took down her pants, bending to place them on a chair. She turned towards him, carefully unhooking her bra, and he lost himself in the wide expanse of her face. She undid his belt with a flourish and helped him take down his boxer shorts. They lay down together on the bed, which creaked and sagged reluctantly beneath them.

Abby kept laughing as they fucked; at one point he looked down at her and saw a smile flash across her face, igniting in her eyes and then exploding across her pink lips. Every time they moved, the bed groaned and Abby squealed laughter. Marcus thrust into Abby, stopping when he was entirely inside her, feeling their bodies intersecting at so many distinct points, hot skin against hot skin. They fell asleep and woke still pressed close together. Abby cradled Marcus’s head in her arms, hugged his face to her chest. He had no idea what time it was, nor for how long Abby held him. He lay and listened to her heart and the distant moan of the motorway. They slept again and when they woke it was growing light outside. Marcus could hear people moving downstairs. Milky sunlight fell into the room through the gap in the curtains.