The Book of Revelation

The Book of Revelation Read Free Page B

Book: The Book of Revelation Read Free
Author: Rupert Thomson
Tags: Fiction
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his performance after all. . . .
    The chains that bound him chinked and rattled.
    Taking one arm each, the women led him towards the door. With his hands cuffed tightly behind his back and his ankles shackled, it was hard to do more than shuffle.
    He had been wondering what lay beyond the room. This proved a disappointment to him. All he could see was a passageway, its walls and ceiling painted white, its carpet a hard-wearing, industrial shade of grey. There were two white doors, one to his left, the other at the far end of the passageway. There were no windows. The only sound he could hear was the steady, drowsy murmur of the fluorescent lighting overhead. The building felt as if it might have been refurbished recently, but he couldn’t imagine what it would look like from the outside, let alone where in Amsterdam it might be—if indeed it was in Amsterdam.
    The door to the bathroom was the door on the left. One of the women remained in the passageway, like a guard, while the other guided him inside. The room was no more than eight feet long and four feet wide. In front of him was a toilet with a black seat and a white cistern. A small hand-basin jutted from the wall to his right. The brand-name on both the toilet and the hand-basin was Sphinx, one of the most common makes in Holland. He smiled grimly when he saw the name and said, “That’s perfect,” but the woman standing behind him did not react. Like the passageway, the bathroom had no windows. There was no mirror either.
    Without a hint of shyness or hesitation, the woman pulled down his track-suit trousers and took his penis out of the jockstrap he was wearing underneath. He sat down to urinate, something he had never done before. He had the idea it might make things easier, somehow, even though it meant he had to face the woman who had escorted him into the room. She seemed the more bizarre for being so close to him, in such a confined space. . . . In the silence before his urine came, he heard her breathing. It must be hot, he thought, wearing a hood and cloak—and, almost immediately, he imagined he could smell her sweat, bitter as the sap in a spring flower. He knew which woman she was. The raw knuckles, the chewed nails. . . . She had served him his first meal. She was also the only one whose voice he had not heard as yet. All of a sudden a feeling of power ran through him. It seemed so out of place, so utterly unfounded, that it made him catch his breath. But it was fleeting, too. No sooner had it registered itself in him, than it was gone, leaving not even a flicker of itself behind.
    When he had finished, the woman pulled up his jockstrap and his track-suit trousers, then, reaching past him, flushed the toilet. Once again, there was no hint of awkwardness or prurience on her part, only a kind of methodical efficiency; a task needed doing, and she was doing it. Still, it felt odd to be handled in that way. It had brought back a period of his life that he had thought was lost for ever. With just a few simple actions, she had closed a gap of thirty years, returning him to his first few moments in the world.
    •
    The two women who had taken him to the toilet wasted no time in chaining him to the floor again, then they hung the handcuffs and leg-irons from conveniently placed hooks on the wall behind him and retreated to the left side of the room.
    The woman with the white hands and the darkly painted nails stepped forwards. She stood so close to him that he could see a small, right-angled tear in her cloak, about hip-high, as if it had caught on a nail, and there were spots of something that looked like dried mud along the hem.
    “Better?”
    He nodded.
    She stood over him, peering down. Her shoes showed below her cloak. They were black, with rubber soles. “Are you cold?”
    He shook his head.
    “No,” she said, “it is quite warm in here.”
    She kneeled beside him, looked right at him. Perhaps because her eyes were framed by the fabric of

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