The Gospel of Us by Owen Sheers Read Free Book Online Page A

wastoo late. Coming out of the graveyard I ran straight back into them all – the whole crowd from Llewellyn Street, rushing into the underpass. They must have heard the voices too, I guess, and seen the lights of the films. Or at least the Teacher had, and let’s face it, wherever he went by then, whatever he did, so did that crowd. I looked around for him and sure enough there he was again, already walking among those memories coming out of the ground, bathing in them, standing in their beams, allowing the gone faces and places to play all over him, to wash him in their flickering light.
    I felt a tug on my sleeve and turned round to see Johnny.
    ‘Have you seen this?’ I said to him, throwing my arms at the underpass. ‘And in the graveyards? The twins and everything? What’s going on Johnny?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ he said, waving his phone in front of me. ‘But never mind this, we got to get over to the shopping centre.’
    I looked at the screen of his phone. Someone had sent him a photo from the centre. At least, it lookedlike it was from the centre but, just like Llewellyn Street, it looked totally unlike the shopping centre too. It was packed. Not just a busy Saturday either, I mean totally roofed. I could make out huddles of people in red blankets, makeshift stalls and stands, a tower of old TVs and in the foreground a band playing on the roof of the café, all of them in balaclavas, their faces hidden.
    ‘When was this taken?’ I asked Johnny. ‘When’s this photo from?’
    Pocketing his phone he leant in and, with that sense of drama he’d come to love so much, whispered into my ear.
    ‘Now,’ he said, low and hoarse, his voice all excite ment and wonder. ‘That photo is now.’
     
    We heard the shopping centre kicking off before we saw it. It sounded like a mix of a music festival and a prison riot, all amplified by the big echoing space of it all, like the whole place had been turned into a giant speaker.
    There were that many people it was a job to getinside. But when we did I knew right away this wasn’t going to end well; that there was no way the Council, much less ICU would let what was happening in there go unnoticed or unpunished.
    One part of the floor looked like a refugee camp. The Company Man obviously hadn’t wasted any time with those plans of his, with his moving of people from their homes. But something must have gone wrong too. Because usually the Company wouldn’t let us see the results of their dirty work, would prefer to brush them under the carpet or move them out of sight. But this time that hadn’t happened, and that’s why the camp on the floor of the centre was crammed with families and people who’d been chucked out of their homes. For once they hadn’t gone elsewhere, but had stayed instead; not-forgotten, still burning. Some local groups had been handing out red blankets to them which just made them stick out even more, as if ICU had cut into the flesh, not the soil of this town, and these people flowing into this camp were its blood. Which, of course, they were.
    All around that camp were the possessions they’d managed to bring with them. Not in piles, not just strewn about but ordered, arranged, like shrines. Their owners were quiet beside them, not kicking up a fuss or anything. As if they knew that by just being there, by not going away, by being in sight and therefore in mind, they were causing trouble enough.
    The rest of the centre though, well, that wasn’t quiet at all. Something – the assassination attempt on the beach the day before, the leaking of ICU’s plans, the shooting of the woman, the Teacher – something had lit a spark that had lit a fire, the flames of which were now burning brightly in that shopping centre. Banners of protest, flash mobs of kids playing havoc with the Council police, banks of TVs showing testaments from the imprisoned and the disappeared. No wonder the Resistance boys were in there too. Must have thought it was