Book of Revelation - Hardcover

Thomson, Rupert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375409270 ISBN 13: 9780375409271

Verlag: Random House USA Inc, 2000

Inhaltsangabe

On a bright spring day in Amsterdam, a young man steps out of his studio to buy a pack of cigarettes. A dancer and choreographer, he would seem to have made the life of his choice: an international reputation; an exquisite French girlfriend, from whom he's been inseparable for seven years; careful plans for an interesting future, with no regrets lingering in his past. Moreover, he is charismatic and physically beautiful.
Then, passing through a dark alley, he is accosted by three cloaked and hooded women - fans, he briefly thinks - who drug and then hold him their sexual prisoner. Their motivations remain to him as mysterious as the story of his abduction seems unbelievable, even laughable, to those in whom he later confides his plight and shame. Those eighteen days of bizarre captivity, and the subsequent years of his life, make The Book of Revelation a compelling and disturbing account of the most forbidding aspects of the human psyche.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rupert Thomson is the author of five previous novels -- of which <b>Soft!, The Insult, Air & Fire</b>, and <b>The Five Gates of Hell</b> are available in Vintage paperback. He lives in London.

Aus dem Klappentext

t 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."<br><br><br>On a bright spring day in Amsterdam, a young man steps out of his studio to buy a pack of cigarettes. A dancer and choreographer, he would seem to have made the life of his choice: an international reputation; an exquisite French girlfriend, from whom he's been inseparable for seven years; careful plans for an interesting future, with no regrets lingering in his past. Moreover, he is charismatic and physically beautiful.<br><br><br>Then, passing through a dark alley, he is accosted by three cloaked and hooded women -- fans, he briefly thinks -- who drug and then hold him their sexual prisoner. Their motivations remain to him as mysterious as the story of his abduction seems unbelievable, even laughable, to those in whom he later confides his plight and shame. Those eighteen

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One

I can see it all so clearly, even now. The studio canteen was empty, and I was sitting in the corner, by the window. Sunlight angled across the table, dividing the smooth, blond wood into two equal halves, one bright, one dark; I remember thinking that it looked heraldic, like a shield. An ashtray stood in front of me, the sun's rays shattering against its chunky glass. Beside it, someone's coffee cup, still half full but long since cold. It was an ordinary moment in an ordinary day -- a break between rehearsals. . . .

I had just opened my notebook and was about to put pen to paper when I heard footsteps to my right, a dancer's footsteps, light but purposeful. I looked up to see Brigitte, my girlfriend, walking towards me in her dark-green leotard and her laddered tights, her hair tied back with a piece of mauve velvet. She was frowning. She had run out of cigarettes, she told me, and there were none in the machine. Would I go out and buy her some more?

I stared at her. "I thought I bought you a packet yesterday."

"I finished them," she said.

"You've smoked twenty cigarettes since yesterday?"

Brigitte just looked at me.

"You'll get cancer," I told her.

"I don't care," she said.

This was an argument we had had before, of course, and I soon relented. In the end, I was pleased to be doing something for her. It's a quality I often see in myself when I look back, that eagerness to please. I had wanted to make her happy from the first moment I saw her. I would always remember the morning when she walked into the studio, fresh from the Jeune Ballet de France, and how she stood by the piano, pinning up her crunchy, chestnut-coloured hair, and I would always remember making love to her a few days later, and the expression on her face as she knelt above me, a curious mixture of arrogance and ecstasy, her eyes so dark that I could not tell the difference between the pupils and the irises. . . .

Brigitte had moved to the window. She stood there, staring out, one hand propped on her hip. Smiling, I reached for my sweater and pulled it over the old torn shirt I always wore for dance class.

"I won't be long," I said.






Outside, the weather was beautiful. Though May was still two weeks away, the sun felt warm against my back as I walked off down the street. I saw a man cycle over a bridge, singing loudly to himself, as people often do in Amsterdam, the tails of his pale linen jacket flapping. There was a look of anticipation on his face -- anticipation of summer, and the heat that was to come. . . .

I had been living with Brigitte for seven years. We rented the top two floors of a house on Egelantiersgracht, one of the prettier, less well-known canals. We had skylights, exotic plants, a tank of fish; we had a south-facing terrace where we would eat breakfast in the summer. Since we were both members of the same company, we saw each other twenty-four hours a day; in fact, in all the time that we had lived together, I don't suppose we had spent more than three or four nights apart. As dancers, we had had a good deal of success. We had performed all over the world -- in Osaka, in São Paulo, in Tel Aviv. The public loved us. So did the critics. I was also beginning to be acclaimed for my choreography (I had created three short ballets for the company, the most recent of which had won an international prize). At the age of twenty-nine, I had every reason to feel blessed. There was nothing about my life I would have changed, not if you had offered me riches beyond my wildest imaginings -- though, as I walked to the shop that afternoon, I do remember wishing that Brigitte would give up smoking. . . .

I followed my usual route. After crossing the bridge, I turned left along the street that bordered the canal. I walked a short distance, then I took a right turn, into the shadows of a narrow alley. The air down there smelled of damp plaster, stagnant water, and the brick walls of the houses were grouted with an ancient, lime-green moss. I passed the watchmaker's where a cat lay sleeping in the window, its front paws flexing luxuriously, its fur as grey as smoke or lead. I passed a shop that sold oriental vases and lamps with shades of coloured glass and bronze statues of half-naked girls. Like the man on the bicycle, I had music in my head: it was a composition by Juan Martin, which I was hoping to use in my next ballet. . . .






Halfway down the alley, at the point where it curved slightly to the left, I stopped and looked up. Just there, the buildings were five storeys high, and seemed to lean towards each other, all but shutting out the light.

The sky had shrunk to a thin ribbon of blue.

As I brought my eyes back down, I saw them, three figures dressed in hoods and cloaks, like part of a dream that had become detached, somehow, and floated free, into the day. The sight did not surprise me. In fact, I might even have laughed. I suppose I thought they were on their way to a fancy-dress party -- or else they were street-theatre people, perhaps. . . .


Whatever the truth was, they didn't seem particularly out of place in the alley. No, what surprised me, if anything, was the fact that they recognised me. They knew my name. They told me they had seen me dance. Yes, many times. I was wonderful, they said. One of the women clapped her hands together in delight at the coincidence. Another took me by the arm, the better to convey her enthusiasm.

While they were clustered round me, asking questions, I felt a sharp pain in the back of my right hand. Looking down, I caught a glimpse of a needle leaving one of my veins, a needle against the darkness of a cloak. I heard myself ask the women what they were doing -- What are you doing? -- only to drift away, fall backwards, while the black steeples of their hoods remained above me, and my words too, written on the sky, that narrow strip of blue, like a message trailed behind a plane. . . .






It is only five minutes' walk from the studio to the shop that sells newspapers and cigarettes. I ought to have been there and back in a quarter of an hour. But half an hour passed, then forty-five minutes, and still there was no sign of me.

I had last seen Brigitte standing at the canteen window, one hand propped on her hip. How long, I wonder, did she stay like that? And what went through her mind as she stood there, staring down into the street? Did she think our little argument had upset me? Did she think I was punishing her?

I imagine she must have turned away eventually, reaching up with both hands to re-tie the scrap of velvet that held her hair back from her face. Probably she would have muttered something to herself in French. Faít chier. Merde. She would still have been longing for that cigarette, of course. All her nerve-ends jangling.

Maybe, in the end, she asked Fernanda for a Marlboro Light and smoked it by the pay-phone in the corridor outside the studio.

I doubt she danced too well that afternoon.






That night, when I did not come home, Brigitte rang several of my friends. She rang my parents too, in England. No one knew anything. No one could help. Two days later, a leading Dutch newspaper published an article containing a brief history of my career and a small portrait photograph. It wasn't front-page news. After all, there was no real story as yet. I was a dancer and a choreographer, and I had gone missing. That was it. Various people at the company came up with various different theories -- a nervous breakdown of some kind, personal problems -- but none of them involved foul play. My parents offered a reward for any information that might throw light on my whereabouts. Nobody came...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Random House USA Inc
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2000
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0375409270
• ISBN 13: 9780375409271
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Knopf; https://knopfdoubleday.com; ; 3 Queen Caroline Street Hammersmith; London; W6 9PE; Vereinigtes Königreich
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar