Free The Book of Revelation by Rupert Thomson Page B

him shouted, There are drinks at the ambassador’s, everybody — drinks at the ambassador’s . . . .
    Where am I? he thought.
    A white room, somewhere in the Netherlands.
    Lying there, chained to the floor, he could taste a metallic substance in his mouth. His gums were bleeding again. When the women cleaned his teeth, they brushed too hard—or in a way he wasn’t used to, perhaps. That morning, for the first time in his life, he had noticed a thick streak of bright-red in his saliva, and it had shaken him, as if he had been forced to confront his own weakness, his mortality. . . .
    The next few hours were difficult, his mood careering wildly from nostalgia to despair. They’re two quite different places, but the journey from one to the other, it’s a journey that takes no time at all.
    •
    Later that day the door opened and a woman entered. She closed the door behind her, then leaned against it. She was on her own. From where he lay, in the middle of the room, he couldn’t tell which one of them it was; she was standing in deep shadow, and she was wearing the usual black hood and cloak. He was slightly apprehensive about the way the women might react to his behaviour in the garden. He decided that it might be best to try and ingratiate himself.
    “I’m sorry about what happened this morning,” he said. “I got carried away. Being outside, even for a few minutes—you forget what it’s like. . . .”
    Slowly the woman eased herself away from the door and out into the room. The uncertainty, the awkwardness. He thought he recognised her now, if only by a process of elimination. It was Maude.
    “In any case,” he said, “I just wanted to apologise.”
    She kneeled on the mat beside him, as she had done many times, her head averted, her hands laid, palms down, on her thighs. In that moment he found that he could imagine her as a child. She had been unwanted, unloved. Perhaps she had even been beaten. It would explain the way she moved, as if she was trying not to take up any space. It would also explain her voice, which, though monotonous, had a curiously indignant ring to it, almost a kind of reverberation, reminding him of the sound geese make. It was the voice of somebody who had never been allowed to express herself, or had never dared.
    She put one hand on his left ankle and ran it along the side of his foot until she reached the toes. “A dancer’s foot. . . .” The tips of her fingers lingered on the places where his skin had hardened, where his bones had changed shape. “It’s good when what a person does, it leaves marks on their body,” she said. “The hands of a gardener, for instance. . . .” She touched a white scar on his ankle. “What happened here?”
    “A calcium spur,” he said. “The calcium builds up and forms a kind of spike on the bone. I had to have an operation to cut it out. It’s common for dancers.”
    She took a breath. “I’m not going to do anything bad to you.” Her eyes shifted behind the two holes in her hood.
    He wanted to talk to her, to have a normal conversation, but he couldn’t think of a good place to begin.
    “I would like to lie next to you,” she said, “if you don’t mind.”
    “No,” he said, “I don’t mind.” He kept his voice gentle.
    “I have to be naked,” she said.
    She pushed her cloak back from her legs to reveal a pair of black work-boots. The toes were scuffed, and the tread on the soles had almost worn to nothing. As she untied the laces she began to hum in that tuneless way she had, which he now understood to be a sign of nervousness. Not wanting to embarrass her, he looked away. He felt he could have predicted those boots that she was wearing. They fitted the image he now had of her, of someone who was both stubborn and neglected.
    “My body is not exciting to you,” she said.
    He turned to her again. Her thighs were heavy and dimpled, and her ample belly folded in on itself. She had the solid, rounded shoulders