Free The Gospel of Us by Owen Sheers Page A

face said, and that’s what he said too, when she got to him.
    ‘You look beautiful.’
    Again I followed his hands, his arms, the way they embraced this person who wasn’t there, and I saw this time it was a woman. A woman just a little shorter than him, her head resting against his shoulder as they began to dance. He held her so close, so tightly as they moved about that scrap of grass, I thought he’d never let her go. But then he did. Suddenly she was gone, and he looked just as surprised as me. He searched the air for where she’d just been, but it was of no use. He was alone again. As he sunk to his knees his head dropped and he pulled his hands through his hair, tearing at it in grief.
    Right, I thought, I’ve got to help him now. Got to wake his brother or Peter, get them to take him to wherever he’d made his home. And I would have too, if only he hadn’t spoken again, if only he hadn’t spoken with that voice that wasn’t his.
    ‘That you son?’ he said.
    At first I thought he was talking to me. That somehow he’d seen me and was trying to scare me with this other voice, this deep, low voice, gentle but hard. But he wasn’t talking to me, he was talking to himself.
    ‘Dad?’ he said in his usual voice.
    He was looking up at one of the roofs now, as if he was speaking with someone up there.
    ‘Hello son,’ he said in the deep voice. ‘You’re out late.’
    ‘So are you,’ he replied, looking up to the roof again.
    ‘You know me son,’ the deep voice said again. ‘Always working.’
    And that’s how it went. The Teacher standing on the grass in the middle of the close, looking up at one of the roofs, talking with himself. Talking as if he were two men, not one.
    ‘Do you see me?’ he said in his own voice.
    ‘Of course I see you son,’ replied the deep voice. ‘I can see the whole town from up here. You should come up sometime. It’s beautiful, especially at night.If the moon’s full it catches the terraces over on Western Avenue something lovely – makes it look like the street’s made of silver. And all the lights in the windows too, turning on, turning off, each one telling a part of someone’s story. You could set your watch by some of them. Mrs Evans, for instance. Over there on Brahms Road. Eight thirty every night her bedroom light goes off. I could count you down to it, it’s that regular. Then Phil – you know Phil, don’t you? Well, likes his reading does Phil. His light won’t be off for another hour at least.
    It’s the same in the morning too. People do like their routines, don’t they? There’s one woman, over on Sandfields now, who walks the same way to work every day. Same way, same time, every day. Sometimes I want to throw something in front of her – piece of slate, one of my tools – just to make her go another way. Just once. But you can’t, can you? Have to let people make their own choices. Isn’t that right?’
    ‘Yes,’ the Teacher said in his own voice again. ‘I suppose you do.’
    ‘Can you see a piece of slate down there son?’
    ‘A piece of slate?’
    ‘Yes. It fell just now. Somewhere over there. Might not be much of it left. It’s funny like that, slate. So strong, yet fragile in the end. No two pieces the same either, you know that? Might all look the same from down there, but I’m telling you, from up here you can see their differences. Different grain in each of them. That’s the best way to work it too, you know that? Follow the grain – let the slate tell you where to go, what to do. Any luck?’
    The Teacher looked down at his feet. ‘No. Can’t see it.’
    ‘Try further over there,’ he said to himself, using the deep voice again. ‘By the path. Always a shame, isn’t it? To see a shattered slate. All that work put into it, all that strength and grain, broken. Only way though, sometimes. Has to happen.’
    ‘Does it? Why?’ he asked himself as he walked over to the path.
    ‘Well,’ the deep voice explained.