The Revelations Read Online Free PDF Page A

husbands and would treat Mouse with a kind of little-brotherly fondness that he both played up to and loathed. He’d spend long night hours on the boat fantasising about these girls, knitting their faces into surprised masks of pleasure or pain, knowing that they’d always be out of his league.
    Mouse watched Lee, taking advantage of the fact that her eyes were tightly closed. Her chest rose and fell very slowly, quivering as her lungs emptied. He looked at the threads that snaked down her thighs from her frayed skirt. When she was drunk and let him stay over in her tiny flat with its air of girlish chastity, he would creep into her room in the darkness of 3 a.m. She always slept with the duvet tucked between her legs, and Mouse would stand in the pale orange light of the London night and look at whichever leg was visible. He would strain his eyes against the dimness, trying to see into the shadows where her thighs disappeared inside the frilled shorts she wore to sleep. He kicked her chair with one particularly forceful jerk of his leg. She very deliberately laid her hand on his thigh and squeezed. He smiled a broad and hopeful smile.
    *
    ‘I always worry about doing this so early on the first evening . . .’ Abby watched the priest with wide eyes as he spoke. ‘I’d like to ask everyone to be quiet for a moment. Just think about what you have heard so far. If you’d like to pray, then I encourage you to do so. But if not, just enjoy the silence here. Enjoy a bit of time away from that constant noise outside.’
    Abby thought back to when she first attended the Course. She didn’t go just because Lee was a member, although she saw the change it worked on her friend: a greater seriousness, a sense of commitment. Nor did she go because she felt any profound spiritual need. It was because she had been standing in the rain on Battersea Bridge after an argument with Marcus. The rain was falling so hard it was as if the river was trying to reach up to the clouds. It was a terrible argument: they had screamed at each other until she ran from the flat, out of the front door and down to the river. She stood on Battersea Bridge and thought about jumping. Not in the way that someone seriously considering doing so would think about it, but in a way that tried to shape her mind into that of someone who might. To Abby, this was as good as doing it. She stood there, imagining the rush of the air, the downward plunge, the shock of the water. At that moment a bus had rumbled past, throwing up the contents of a large puddle, soaking her. Part of her thought that she must have jumped, she must have lost her mind and jumped. But she looked up, saw the bus, and on its back was an advert for the Course. The cool, smiling eyes of David Nightingale. Shouldn’t there be more to life than this? in bright red letters. She signed up the next day.
    Abby prayed that the evening would pass well. She prayed for Marcus. She prayed that she might be pregnant. That the butterflies in her stomach might signal that something was being created. And she prayed that if she was, she might keep it this time. That in nine months she’d lie listening to a baby’s moth-flutter breath. She would make David godfather. She opened her eyes for a moment, saw him with his head bowed and closed her eyes again.
    She remembered the night she had lost the first baby. Very early on. Not even a baby. A clot, a smudge of cells. She had been working late with Sally Nightingale on a proposal for exporting the Course to other Christian denominations. It had felt just like the return of her period, a pain which built from nothing into a sharp twisting of her gut. Sally had taken her into the rectory and waited outside the door of the bathroom, asking in a reedy voice what she could do. When she saw the blood Abby had known immediately. She was businesslike and brave about the whole thing, biting her lip and wincing to stop herself crying out. She found painkillers in the