The Gospel of Us Read Online Free PDF Page B

shouting at the Company Man, boring her eyes into him, so she didn’t see Old Growler down below her. Didn’t see him take a pistol off one of his men and start striding towards her; didn’t see him raise that pistol, both arms straight; didn’t see his finger squeeze on the trigger.
    I saw the shot before I heard it – a sudden wound of blood and broken bone erupting between hershoulder blades. And then the echo of it, resounding between the civic buildings, stopping the chants, the shouts dead.
    She fell like a bird from a tree.
    Slow at first, then a heavyweight descent, tipping backwards into the screams of the crowd. I turned away, expecting to hear the thud of her body hitting the ground. But it never came.
    When I turned back the crowd had cleared from around her, everyone pressing back in a circle, edging away from her death. Everyone, that is, except for the man who’d caught her.
    Straight away spotlights were on them, and a camera crew, catching her last breath in his arms as he looked down into her face, his own obscured under a blue hoodie. The front of her chest was crimson, as was the ground beneath her, blood pouring from her back. She was shivering, shaking, so the man, still holding her in his lap with one arm, took off his hoodie with the other and laid it over her.
    For a moment nothing else happened. It was like they were painted there, lit in the lights, her headresting against his shoulder, her arms hanging limp, her knuckles resting on the ground. But then he lifted his head, and we all saw it was him.
    The Teacher, clear as daylight, with that camera zooming in close now to shine up his image on the big screen behind us.
    Staring through the barrier fence he looked towards the Company Man, still stood at his microphone on the platform. The Company Man returned his gaze. Eventually it was he who spoke first – not to the crowd, but just to the Teacher.
    ‘Who are you?’ he said. The Teacher looked confused, before trying to answer.
    ‘I’m… I am…’
    But he got no further.
    The Company Man filled the silence again.
    ‘If you have something to say, then say it.’
    The Teacher looked blank. He looked down at the woman, dead in his arms, then up at the Company Man once more.
    ‘I have nothing to say,’ he said. ‘I came to listen.’

Book Two: Saturday

     
     
    Before I tell you what happened that Saturday, I should tell you what else happened on the Friday night first. I don’t know why, but a few hours after that woman was shot, I went back to the secure area in the centre of town. It was dark by then, the big arc lights turned off, the civic buildings inking round the square like sleeping giants. ICU security and the police were still there, but unseen, in the shadows. The whole place was like a forgotten memory, as if whatever we did, whoever died, none of it would ever be noticed.
    But not everyone had forgotten. I knew that as soon as I entered the square and saw the candles. I don’t know who’d brought them, but there they were, a huddle of them all different sizes, their waxmelting down their sides like tears. They’d been placed right where she’d fallen and right where he’d caught her. I walked closer to them. Their flames lit the ground so I could still see the stain of the woman’s blood, spreading like the map of a country over the paving slabs, cities and towns marked in dark spots of old chewing gum. Like I said, I still don’t know who’d put them there, who’d lit them, but it was enough that they did. Not forgotten, that’s what those flames said. Still burning and not forgotten.
    I knelt down to feel their warmth against my hands. It was a gentle heat, like a breath or human blood. As I crouched there I listened to the nighttime town. It was death-bell quiet – just the usual sighs of cars and lorries over the Passover and somewhere else, streets away, a security alarm complaining. It was like the whole town wasn’t so much sleeping quiet as waiting