The Book of Revelation Read online

  Was this the first time they had attempted something like this?

  All of a sudden he saw the theatre floodlit for the evening’s performance, with people crowding into the foyer, taxis drawing up outside—

  “What’s the time?” he asked.

  The woman shook her head, her way of signalling that he shouldn’t talk. But he wanted to. He had to.

  “Look,” he said, “I’ve got a performance tonight.”

  She gave no sign that she had even heard him.

  “I’m due on stage at seven-thirty.” Then, though he felt stupid saying it, he added, “I’m a dancer.”

  She might as well have been deaf.

  “So I can’t ask you anything?” he said.

  When the woman saw that he had eaten and drunk enough, she rose to her feet, picked up the tray and moved towards the door. He watched her go, his head lifting off the rubber mat, his neck muscles at full stretch. She had not spoken to him, he realised. Not even once.

  Lying back, he wondered if he was being held to ransom. The thought of his father receiving a ransom note—his father who had always been so careful with money!—was almost enough to make him laugh out loud.

  •

  Later on that first day, when night had fallen and the overhead lights had been switched on, all three women returned. This time they stood by the door at the far end of the room. They seemed to be conferring.

  At last they turned and swept towards him. They gathered round him, as before. Disturbed by their approach, tiny complex galaxies of dust floated away from him, across the floor. . . .

  He had decided to hide anything he might be feeling, in much the same way that the women were concealing their identities. He would reveal as little of himself as possible. At the same time, there were things he needed to know. He had to try and find out who the women were, where they had taken him, and what they had in mind.

  “What do you want?” he said.

  The women glanced at each other.

  “Do you want money? Is that it?”

  “Money?” one of the women said. “No, we don’t want money.”

  This was not the woman who had spoken to him earlier. This woman’s voice was lower, huskier, as if she smoked. She had almost no accent.

  “So what do you want?” he said.

  The woman reached up with one hand to ease the hood away from her neck. Though the material did not look particularly coarse, it appeared to be chafing her. Her skin must be sensitive, he thought. She had white hands, with short, tapering fingers, and her nail-varnish was a dark purple-black, the colour of dried blood or cheap wine. He was noticing hands; hands were all that he was being shown.

  “We already have what we want,” the woman said. Then, turning to her two accomplices, she said, “Don’t you agree?”

  They nodded.

  Yes, this was a different woman. She seemed to have more authority. Maybe she was even the leader. In any group of three, there would have to be a leader.

  “We have some rules. . . .”

  The woman turned away and walked towards the alcove that housed the washing-machine and the tumble-drier. She moved slowly, and with a certain gravity, a sense of self-importance, like a judge. She told him that he should not, under any circumstances, try to escape. There was no point, actually. They had taken all the necessary precautions. They had thought of everything. She also warned him against any attempts at violence. She was sure, in any case, that it was not in his nature. If he behaved well, she said, he would be treated well. She paused, waiting for him to speak, perhaps, but when he chose to say nothing, she continued. There was a device close to his right hand. If he was hungry or thirsty, or if he needed to go to the bathroom, then all he had to do was press—

  “Actually,” he said, “I need it now.”

  “The bathroom?”

  He nodded.

  From where she was standing, the woman signalled to her two accomplices—a simple lowering of her head, a granting of permission. They turned and left the room. While they were gone, he examined the “device.” A square piece of metal—aluminium, by the look of it—had been screwed into the floor next to the mat. In the middle of this metal plate was a round white button. It looked like a light-switch or a door-bell. He pressed it once, but heard nothing.

  “Only when you need something,” the woman warned him.

  Her two accomplices returned, carrying handcuffs and leg-irons. One sat by his feet, the other by his head. For the first time, he noticed how each individual rail doubled back on itself, resembling the handle of a traditional umbrella. When he looked at two of the rails together, the two that held his feet, for instance, he saw they had been laid out in such a way that they formed a kind of fractured S:

  The woman sitting by his feet released the two smaller stainless-steel rings so they could run freely along their rails, then she brought his ankles close together and secured them with the irons. Only then did she unlock the larger stainless-steel rings. Once his legs were securely shackled, the second woman performed an almost identical manoeuvre on his hands, using the cuffs to fasten them behind his back. The two women worked in unison, in silence. At no point was any part of his body free. The routine was so efficient that it had to have been worked out in advance.

  They helped him slowly to his feet. Though he had only been lying down for a few hours, he felt an impatience in his muscles. Something fidgety. His body had been denied its afternoon’s exercise. He stood between the two women, moving his arms and legs, moving his head on his neck, as if he was going to give 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 her hood, they seemed to glitter with an almost supernatural light.

  “You see, we don’t want you to suffer,” she said. “On the contrary. . . .”

  As if responding to a signal, the other women approached and kneeled. One sat at his feet while the other took hold of his sweater and eased it gently over his head. Underneath, he wore nothing except his old torn shirt. Starting at the collar, the woman began to undo the buttons. Her fingers were elegant but strong. This undressing was quite unlike the undressing he had just experienced in the bathroom, and not simply because a different woman had taken over. There was stealth in this. There was anticipation.

  Wanting to make things difficult for her, he tried to move sideways, but with his wrists and ankles secured by the stainless-steel rings, there was very little he could do. He could only watch, in fact, as, one by one, the almost transparent pearl-white buttons sprang out of their holes.

  “Ah yes,” one of the women said—or, rather, breathed. Their interest was in the air; it was palpable, like a vibration or a pressure.

  He closed his eyes, darkness as a form of denial, darkness as escape, but found he could see more vividly than ever, the women’s hands, what they were doing. Their fingers on the drawstring of his track-suit trousers, slowly teasing the knot undone, slowly loosening the waistband. . . .

  “You’re very beautiful,” he heard one of them say.

  “Such smooth skin,” said another.

  A third woman spoke, a murmur of corroboration.

  He felt them begin to touch him. Sometimes their hands were tender, sometimes they were only curious, but there was no part of him, no curve or hollow, that they did not, in the end, explore.

  He couldn’t have said how long this adoration of his body lasted.

  Once, the colour of the inside of his eyelids altered, and he opened his eyes to see that one of the women had switched the main lights off and that another was bringing tall candles into the room. The atmosphere became intimate, but also oddly medieval. That flickering, unstable light, and his clothes laid open, peeled back, like the skin of an animal that was being dissected. His nakedness—three figures, hooded, crouching over it. . . .

  He shut his eyes again.

  There was a moment, too, when he felt the beginning of an erection, that gradual tightening at the base of his penis, that slow, almost luxurious rush of blood. It was as if his body was taking sides against him. Betraying him. Though his eyes were still closed, he could hear the women’s voices:

  “Look.”

  “He’s ready.”

  “Who’s going first?”

  •

  The ceiling was no longer there, the walls slid away, and he had views at last, wide open spaces, the bright sky arching over him, the dark vault of the earth. And the landscape kept changing before his eyes. He saw glittering salt flats that stretched for miles, and fields of tall grasses shifting under heavy dark-grey clouds. He saw a yellow prairie bounded by a range of mountains; they stood in shadow, tilting slabs of black and indigo. A fresh wind moved over his face, into his hair. It wasn’t raining, but the air smelled of rain; rain had fallen recently, perhaps, or else it was on its way.

  The air smelled of distance.

  Land all around him, vast and dramatic, land as he had rarely seen it in his life, and he was alone in it. Alone, but not lonely. There was that sense of being at the centre, of being somehow fundamental, the hub of a wheel that includes the universe in all its aspects and dimensions. He had felt this before, though not for many years. Perhaps it was simply the feeling of being young.

  Sometimes he was standing still, sometimes running, but he was always alone, untroubled and curiously absorbed—a kind of rapture. . . .

  Though there was a part of him that knew a door could open and lights could flicker on, brilliant and merciless, and then something could take place that would fix him exactly where he was, in that white room, his wrists and ankles shackled.

  Even in his dreams there was a part of him that knew.

  •

  Waking in darkness, not knowing where he was. Then noticing a faint light falling from the window high above. Landing on his body, soft as snow.

  Night now.

  He lay still and listened. There were no sounds coming from outside. No police siren in the distance, no drunk man singing—nothing.

  Knowing nothing, and then remembering. The smell of rubber. Thin. Almost comforting. The cold grip of the stainless steel. The delicate, metallic chinking of the chain’s links shifting as he turned over. . . .

  After the women were done with him, after they had finished, they adjusted the rings so as to give him more freedom of movement. By sliding the rings along their rails, he found that he could alter the position in which he slept. He could lie on his stomach, if he wanted. Or turn on to his side. He could bring his hands close to his face or draw his knees up towards his chest. He was freer, but not free.

  What had that woman said?

  You’re ours now. You belong to us.

  He felt nothing but shame and humiliation. No, wait. That wasn’t entirely true. There had been another feeling there, a feeling that lurked behind the others, shadowy and sly—insidious: a feeling of excitement. . . .

  Once he had an erection, it had taken him almost no time at all to come, the sperm seeming to leap out of him, to catapult across his stomach. The women had taken it in turns to lick him clean, bending over him with warm, wet tongues. They had even argued over who should have the cloudy pearl of liquid that had formed at the tip of his penis, the last remaining evidence of orgasm. There had been a moment when he tried to say something, but one of the women put a hand over his mouth, a hand on which he could faintly smell himself.

  “No, don’t talk. You’ll spoil it.”

  Afterwards, he needed to urinate. This time they chose not to take him to the toilet. Perhaps they were afraid that it might break the spell. Instead, they allowed him to use a metal bedpan, which they had brought into the room with them.

  Later, they removed his clothes completely and washed him, every part of him. He felt as if he was in a painting, the darkness all around him, a tin bowl full to the brim with water, his naked body, and everything lit by candles. Shadows jostled on the walls, like people who had been drawn to the event. Like crowds.

  When the women had dried him, they dressed him in clean clothes, then slipped a pillow underneath his head. They left the room in silence, blowing out the candles as they closed the door.

  “Sleep now,” he heard one of them say.

  •

  He woke again at first light. He was lying on his side, one hand
under his cheek. Two or three drops of candle-wax had landed on the floorboards close to him; they could have been old coins, coins that had been handled for so many years that they had been worn quite smooth. He looked down at his body. He was wearing a white T-shirt and white underpants. They were not his clothes. The events of the night came back to him, and he felt a sudden queasy hollowness in the pit of his stomach. He had allowed the women to do exactly as they wished. He had submitted without an argument, without a struggle. What sort of man is it, he thought, who just submits?

  He turned on to his back and watched a cloud drift through the skylight. There was another dimension to what had happened too, a dimension that was even harder to acknowledge: the excitement he had felt, despite himself. Had the women identified some kind of need in him? Had he tacitly encouraged them? Was he, in some fundamental sense, responsible for all this?

  This was a version of himself that he didn’t recognise.

  Perhaps, in the end, he had simply been taking the path of least resistance.

  He still had not decided what he thought when the door opened and a woman appeared. She was carrying the bowl they had used for washing him the previous night, and, judging by the angle of her head and the cautious way she moved across the room, the bowl was full of water. She set it down on the mat, no more than a foot away from him, then left the room again, returning moments later with a towel, a flannel and a washing-bag. Settling beside him, she unzipped the bag and took out a disposable razor and a can of unscented shaving-foam. She shook the can a few times, sprayed foam on to the palm of one hand, then used her other hand to smooth it on to his face and neck. She had bitten her nails so far down, he noticed, that they were almost circular, which made her fingers look blunt, like roots.

  She shaved him quite differently to the way he would have shaved himself. She started with the groove that ran from the base of his nose to the middle of his upper lip, small vertical strokes of the razor, then she moved along the right side of his upper lip and out across his cheekbone towards his ear, still using the same small strokes. After finishing the right side of his face, she returned to his upper lip, the left side now, and repeated the same manoeuvre—or, rather, its mirror-image—before dropping downwards to his chin, and then still lower, to his neck. He noticed that she held her breath each time she laid the blade against his skin, then let the air rush out of her as she leaned back and rinsed the razor in the bowl, and he thought of children, how they do exactly the same thing when they’re drawing. He couldn’t remember if he had ever been shaved by anyone before. He didn’t think he had. She was surprisingly good at it. He never once had the sense that she might cut him.