The Revelations Read Free

breath. He ran over his speech one final time, frowning and smiling as he would on the stage, pausing for a ripple of laughter, glancing down for a moment and then fixing the room with the intensity of his pale blue eyes. When he had finished, he pressed his palms together, muttered a prayer, placed a hand gently upon his wife’s sleeping face and with a quiet ‘Amen’, he turned onto his side and fell asleep.

Two
    It was five o’clock and the church was luminous in the late afternoon light. A gardener moved around the flower beds that lined the churchyard, carefully sinking down onto his knee pads to tend the immaculate bright borders, tempting blooms into the year’s last warmth. The banners were up on the King’s Road, tied to the black railings of the square. The wind caught them and they fluttered, compressing and expanding the C of ‘Course’ like a mouth. Aeroplanes queued to land overhead, following the path of the river, barely moving in the pale, clear air.
    The spire was of tawny Portland stone, surmounted by a capstone and cross. Octagonal, the skin of the spire tapered towards the wrist-thin point, supported by dark iron bands. The four columns over which the spire was raised had settled or bent over the years, meaning that it had slipped from its true perpendicular. When completing his renovations, David Nightingale had considered rectifying the spire’s minor but noticeable misalignment. After consulting with the Course members who had raised the funds, however, it was decided that the slight wonkiness was part of St Botolph’s charm.
    Inside, the glory of light that exploded through stained-glass windows illuminated a fine gold altar cloth, burnished chasubles and a coracle-sized collection plate. Everything gleamed. Someone was practising the organ: a toccata with fumbled trills. The organ pipes cascaded down the wall at the back of the nave, silver and bronze bars protruding like fangs from a rose-window mouth. Where once a rood screen would have hung, there was now a television monitor bookended by black speakers. Ten years earlier the shabby church had struggled to fill half of its dusty pews with an ancient congregation; now chairs were packed tightly along the side aisles, smaller television screens were arranged in the transept. The music stopped. Footsteps down wooden stairs, the echo of a slammed door. Then silence in the light-filled church.
    *
    As they walked down the gravel pathway towards the church, Lee tugged at the sleeve of Mouse’s jacket and hung back, her heels kicking up dust. She was slightly taller than him, and looked very slender next to his stout frame. Taking her hand in his and squeezing, he gave her a hopeful smile. Lee looked away. In her ears she wore stones of different colours: one lapis blue, one turquoise. Mouse dropped her hand and followed her eyes to the church’s bright spire. He decided that he liked September. It was a wistful month, a month to curse not having made more of the summer, a month when thoughts turned to night-living winter. Yet on evenings like this, when the sun slanted across the sky, picking out the wrought-iron balconies that hung like birdcages on the facades of the houses surrounding the square, September was magnificent.
    ‘Are you OK, Lee?’
    ‘I’m fine.’
    ‘A wee bit nervous?’
    ‘Oh, I suppose a bit. I’ve been working too hard. Not sleeping enough. Not sure that I’m up to being a leader.’
    ‘You’ll be brilliant, you know you will. The Course is going to pull you out of all this.’
    ‘I know. I’m hopeful, I really am.’
    She squinted her blue-green eyes at him. Her legs, emerging from a frayed denim skirt, straddled the path. She was as thin and white as a wishbone. Mouse took her arm and led her past the gravestones of the ancient cemetery that encircled the church. Vines climbed over cracked graves, lichen dappled chipped stones, creeping into the cavities of letters no longer legible. They made their way into