Blinded by the Light Read online

  And then we heard voices outside the dorm. We froze.

  “Hey, Bea.” I sounded husky, not like me. “We’re not supposed to do this.”

  “I know.”

  She extricated herself from under me. She looked more beautiful than ever, flushed and dishevelled.

  “It can’t be that wrong, can it?” she whispered.

  “No. Fletcher said it was OK.” But I could read her mind. We’d been told we could have a relationship, but not break our vow of chastity It was a thin line. And she knew, as I knew, that just then, our bodies had betrayed us. If it wasn’t for those voices, if we had been free from discovery, we’d have gone all the way. Guilt welded us together. I’d never felt closer to her.

  “Joe – listen – I think I’d better go,” she said.

  “Look, don’t worry. Whatever happens, I’ll stick by you,” I told her.

  “I know you will. And I’ll stick by you.”

  I wanted to kiss her again, but knew it would be wrong. I watched her get up and leave the dormitory. The movement of her body departing made me want her more than ever.

  At the Evening Service when it was time for transgression cleansing, I washed my hands and said some stuff about feeling too smug about my progress, having slept in the afternoon and having lied. Only I didn’t say what the lie was. The lie was a lie of omission. I should have spoken aloud what happened with Bea, but I didn’t. Nor did she. We glanced at each other, then looked away.

  So it came as no surprise to me when Fletcher indicated he wanted to speak to me. I followed him to his room. For some reason I was feeling slightly mutinous. I admired Fletcher – yeah, I suppose I even hero-worshipped him. I’d never known anyone like him. But recently I’d found his attention suffocating. He’d been watching me more closely than ever. That whispering voice said, get off my back. I didn’t know why I was thinking in that way. I decided to deal with it later.

  Fletcher shut the door to his room behind him. He didn’t sit down. He eyeballed me, his face a mask.

  “Joe. You need to be more careful of your purity than ever. As you progress, there are more temptations. antimatter is attracted by Perfection. You know this. So be honest, be absolutely honest. What did you hold back tonight?”

  I couldn’t hold his gaze.

  “I have negative thoughts,” I said.

  “I thought so. Pray that they vanish.”

  “I will.”

  “And Joe?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What about Bea? I saw her go into the dormitory. She was with you a long time.”

  “Yeah. We were talking, and stuff.”

  “What stuff?”

  I shrugged.

  “Tell me. You promised to tell me. What happened?”

  I swallowed hard. I didn’t like the tone of his voice. It was pleading, desperate.

  “We kissed.”

  “Just kissed?”

  “We didn’t sleep together!”

  “So you’re telling me you just kissed.”

  “And other stuff – you know.”

  “I don’t know, Joe. Explain.”

  “Stuff you do with girls. Leave it, Fletcher.”

  “I need to know.”

  I noticed his fists were clenched. I was afraid now.

  “I… I just felt her a bit. She felt me. Over our clothes.”

  “Over your clothes. But no more. Did she touch you, Joe?”

  “We stopped when we heard voices.”

  “But otherwise you would have carried on.”

  I shrugged. The interrogation was over. I wished I could go but Fletcher was barring the exit. I looked up at him and watched his expression move from a hard stare to an apologetic grin.

  “I have to do this,” he said. “And maybe it’s time to tell you why.”

  He walked over to the sash window and stood by it, looking out over the farm.

  “I have to go to Orkney. There’s been a message from Rendall. A Perfect is among us, but the Perfect himself does not know who he is. Rendall is convinced that the Perfect is a White One. We’ve been asked to use our intuition to sense if the Perfect is in our midst.” He paused, turned, looked at me, his eyes alight.

  “Joe – I think it might be you.”

  “Me?”

  Now Fletcher approached me, kissed his fingers and pressed them to my forehead. “There have been signs,” he said. “Signs I’m not allowed to divulge. Also, Rendall and his men have been reading runes. There’s to be a Gathering in late September. We must be there, you and me.”

  I was incredulous and exhilarated, all at once. Of course I wasn’t a Perfect. I was Joe, but maybe Fletcher was right, maybe all these whispering thoughts were antimatter out to get me, maybe there was a revelation coming, a revelation that would blow me apart, and everything would finally make absolute sense, every question would be answered. I could get away from the farm, travel to Orkney Meet Rendall. See Carbister.

  “Before then, Joe, I want you to go out on your first Attracting mission. I want to test you in the world. A Perfect can move safely anywhere. You are an immortal.”

  I knew I wasn’t an immortal, but then, I believed my soul was immortal, and so in a way, Fletch was right. And I wanted to go Attracting. Except there was one condition, one condition I thought I’d better make clear now.

  “I’m not going anywhere without Bea.”

  Fletcher paused. “I said that was all right. You can take her with you.”

  “And to Orkney” I was getting bold now. I was fired up by this idea I might be a Perfect. It was stupid, I knew I wasn’t, but it was easy to act as if I was as Fletcher thought so.

  “No. Not Orkney.”

  “Then I’m not going.”

  I’d defied Fletcher. I awaited the explosion. But there was none. I heard his heavy breathing.

  “You are going,” he said.

  “With Bea,” I added.

  Then to my surprise he said, “With Bea.”

  I grinned at him, and then he hugged me. I would never have imagined I’d be alone in another guy’s room, hugging him. But we broke apart after a moment. Fletcher seemed charged now, rapping out instructions, full of excitement.

  “It seems a risk to send you Attracting but Rendall will want to know that you can survive unsullied in the outside world. Go to Manchester, a place where there’s lots of people. Where the clubs are.”

  “The Gay Village?” I suggested.

  “No! No – a different place. Not Deansgate.”

  “Down by the university?”

  “Yeah – that’s good. Go on a weekday night – you’ll be safer. Then you can stay late. Take a morning train home. The Light will protect you. I’ll keep a vigil in the Service Room with some other White Ones. I’ll get you a phone, and one for Bea too, so you can keep in touch. There’ll be an allowance – you’ll need some money – and you must build your strength up. You look thin. The time approaches. It comes quickly. We must be ready. I praise the Light that lights up the Truth, that reveals Perfection to the unworthy”

  I bowed my head. Fletch had begun a prayer.

  I couldn’t pray. My mind was reeling. Me, a Perfect? Surely Perfects would know they were, or maybe not? I was stunned, but who’s to say that Fletcher wasn’t right? I ought to look after my purity. I’d better not be alone with Bea again. Except when we go Attracting.

  To be honest, I couldn’t wait.

  The Sentinel Wednesday, May 6th, 1985

  A young man was killed last night after being stabbed in a drunken brawl outside the Potter’s Arms. Witnesses say the trouble began when several revellers started an argument inside the pub, and then were ejected by the bar staff. The fighting escalated once the men were on the pavement. The victim, Keiran McDermott, 19, of Turnham Street, Stoke, leaves a mother and two sisters.

  A man is helping police with their enquiries. The victim’s friend, John Elliot, 21, who witnessed the attack, said, “I know who the bastard is. He thinks he’s hard, b
ut tell him from me, if the police don’t get him, I will. Keiran was a great mate, one of the best. His mum is devastated.”

  Another witness, Trevor Harrison, 58, said, “They were all tanked up. I knew there was going to be trouble. Kids today can’t control themselves.” Other bystanders said the quarrel seemed to be personal in nature.

  See our leader, p 23 – Violence in the City – what the council should do to stop it once and for all.

  13.

  From Rendall’s Laws Governing Purity: antimatter

  We cannot recognise antimatter with our senses but know it by its effects. We know the man who plants the bomb, the absence in his eyes. We know the force that floods the rivers and drowns the fields. We know the cell that grows cancerous. We know the dark seeds of doubt which feed leech-like on our heart’s blood.

  I tried to joke about it to Bea. I told her Fletcher had finally flipped, he thinks that I’m a Perfect! But she didn’t seem to find it funny. She questioned me closely and asked me how I felt about it. Her seriousness calmed me down.

  “Well, if I am, there’s nothing I can do about it,” I told her.

  We were facing each other across the table in the kitchen.

  “I can’t really believe I’m a Perfect. I can say in absolute truth that I have no consciousness of being anyone but me. Only I feel I have to go along with this. It doesn’t seem that I have a choice.”

  “I suppose,” Bea said, “it’s like those little boys who are discovered to be reincarnations of the Dalai Lama. They wouldn’t know, either. Only I find it hard to believe too. It makes me feel a little scared of you.”

  I didn’t like that. “Don’t be. Nothing’s changed. Except we can go out Attracting and then to Orkney. And the chances are we’ll go and meet Rendall, and he’ll shake his head, and send us back, and everything will be as it was before, and we’ll have had a holiday.”

  Bea smiled at me. “I guess. But I wish things were as they were before.”

  I knew what she meant. Sometimes when I looked back it seemed the best times as a White One were behind us. I loved the lead-up to being initiated, those early days full of new discoveries. Now there were responsibilities, work, and darker moments. All part of the journey. And then this. Because if Fletcher was wrong about me, then what else was he wrong about? And if he was right, then what?

  “We must just try to carry on as we were before,” Bea said, with decision. “We must take one day at a time.”

  “Yeah, Fletcher said to carry on as normal.”

  “Well, there we are!”

  But the truth was, in the intervening days before we went Attracting, I thought of little else. At times I was so excited to have a destiny, and almost thought I had intimations of it. When I was small, there were times I had felt my parents were not my real parents. Was that an inkling of what was to come? Then I would look around me at the farm, the stone floors, the wooden chairs, and the reality of everything told me that I was real too, not an immortal, and that Rendall would realise this, and Fletcher would be let down gently.

  As the days went on, I partly got used to it, the seesawing, believing and not believing. The only thing that kept me going was the thought of Attracting with Bea. She was looking forward to it, too. I saw it as my chance to show myself how much I’d changed, how immune I had become to the temptations of the world, how I could see through the shallow fripperies of so-called Western civilisation. Or so I said to Fletcher. I saw myself as a knight surrounded by an armour of Light that would carry me, immune, through the mean streets. This was the image I focused on in my visualisations.

  But the reality was a smelly, almost-empty train that stopped and started all the way to Victoria. I told Bea that it was easy not to be seduced by the old world because it was so sordid and disappointing. What we had was so much better. She nodded vehemently in agreement.

  We finally reached Victoria, and a memory ignited.

  “This is where it all started!”

  “Victoria Station?” Bea asked.

  “Yeah – I went on the tram with Nick and Kate to Victoria. This is where they got off.”

  She squeezed my hand. We were holding hands, had been for all of the journey. I suppose we were nervous. We hadn’t been to Manchester for ages and it dwarfed us. At that moment I had never felt less like a Perfect. I was just a kid again. I sensed Bea felt the same.

  The station was cavernous and grand, and you had this sense of the old Manchester that was linked with steel umbilical cords to all its satellite towns: Bury, Rochdale, Preston, Blackpool – I knew the names of all these places were carved in stone outside. But now the station was a pit, the ticket booths were closed and anyone who had any sense was elsewhere. Late at night was not the best time to be in a railway station. We had to move on and find places where people might be Attracted to us. We had to cross Manchester in the direction of the university, wait, and see what happened. There was something about the early hours of the morning that made people ask big questions.

  Bea and I left the station. I was coughing a bit – I’d had this cold I couldn’t shake off. Luckily it was a warm, autumn night. We weren’t in a rush. We wandered up to the Printworks and gazed up at the bright lights of the cinemas and restaurants. The laughter of people out partying, the throb of traffic, the blasts of loud music, the smells of exotic food, they were all too much for me. I couldn’t relate to it any more, and yet just a year ago this was my stamping ground: me and my mates would go out and get plastered, eye up girls, queue up outside clubs. Altogether, I felt like I did when I was getting over glandular fever, remote, disassociated, my mind and body weak.

  Bea disentangled her fingers from my hand and put her arm round my waist. I felt better immediately Partly because it was her, partly because, for a moment, we felt like a normal couple going out together, boyfriend and girlfriend, camouflaged. We walked down Cross Street, opposite Marks and Spencer, and suddenly I felt a rush of happiness. I was away from the farm, free! Just for a moment I didn’t care about anything.

  “We’re in Manchester, Bea!”

  “Yeah – I’m happy too.”

  I kissed her then, and the kiss felt like a tiny moment of rebellion. It may even have been the spark that ignited the slow-burning fuse. But not yet. Bea was feeling chatty now, going over the things we had to remember.

  “Kate said not to feel bad if nothing happens. We’re not evangelicals, and the right person might not turn up. All we have to do is be there. And she said you just know. It’s weird, Joe, how all the White Ones are young, isn’t it? Have you noticed that? I think that was why Fletcher was happy with us starting at the university. Have you asked yourself why we’re all young?”

  “Rendall’s in his fifties.”

  “Sure, but Fletcher’s the oldest one at Lower Fold. I hope we do meet someone tonight. I love the way that being a White One has challenges. Like this. It’s a journey, isn’t it? A journey towards enlightenment. It’s so clever the way it all works.”

  I glanced over the road at the Royal Exchange Theatre. I went with school a couple of years ago to see Waiting for Godot. Two blokes under a tree. I didn’t know what the hell it was about. But it was good, though. It was good not knowing what it was about. I was only half listening to Bea. It was enough to have her alone with me.

  “It makes you wonder who thought it all out. The structure of it all. Because if the Light is just Light, it wouldn’t have the practical intelligence to construct a system that hooks so neatly into human psychology. But if Rendall devised all the stages on our journey, then how? And why? Do you ever think about these things? Joe? Joe!”

  “What?”

  I was looking in at the Cross Street Chapel. Those guys had a faith too. It seemed so ordinary compared to ours, a chapel on the ground floor of an office block.

  “Joe – you’re not listening! And I was going to say something important.”

  “Say it.” I smiled at her, and stopped walking.

  “It was n
othing. I suppose I was just thinking aloud. Being away from the farm, it’s funny. You see things from a different perspective. Just ignore me.”

  “It’s weird being in Manchester again,” I said to her. “It’s doing my head in.”

  “I know what you mean,” she said.

  We walked on. We got to Albert Square. There was the Town Hall, floodlit, massive. Once me and Tash had been shopping on a Saturday and when we got to Albert Square there were all these temporary stages and people were performing – it was some sort of music festival. There were these black guys doing a reggae number and everyone was joining in, clapping and that. Old ladies were waving their arms in the air. I laughed but found myself tapping my feet. Tash was going on about how good it was to see such cultural diversity – she used to talk like a dictionary

  I said to Bea, “You don’t get any black White Ones either.”

  “Black White ones? What are you on about, Joe?”

  Opposite the town hall Caffe Uno was still open but I didn’t reckon we had enough money to eat there. A shame, as I was hungry. I hadn’t been to a restaurant for ages. I knew that food as entertainment was morally corrupt because I had often said so.

  “Did you eat tonight?” I asked Bea.

  “Yes,” she said, “but I’m still hungry.”

  We cut through to the Central Library where I revised for my A2s. So did a few of my mates. We spent more time sitting on the steps and stressing than actually working. It was weird the way I wanted good results more than anything, but half the time I couldn’t be arsed to work. And I got the grades but I wasn’t going to uni now. So it had all been pointless.

  Pointless because my destiny lay elsewhere. I was a White One, possibly a Perfect, entrusted with an understanding of the world, given a part to play in its destiny, with a family, a structure, a purpose. A tram blazing with lights trundled past. On our right the Midland Hotel oozed wealth and grandeur. Once I went to a Bar Mitzvah there. There was this Jewish kid in our class, Adam Goldblatt. His parents were rolling in it. They’d even invited some Manchester City players to the reception. I got their autographs. Earlier, at the synagogue, I’d reddened with embarrassment as I watched Adam singing some Hebrew with his voice that was breaking, and wondered what the hell it was all about. Then we had this huge dinner and we all got pissed. Adam threw up in the toilets and his mum was in floods of tears. It was a good night. I wondered what was going on inside the Midland Hotel now.