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

their hour, their day, that finally the Town was going to listen to them and wasn’t going to take ICU’s messing lying down any more. The very fact The Band had turned up again, well,that was a sign of just how confident they suddenly were.
    Still, no one really knows who The Band were, other than every now and then they’d crop up, sing their Resistance songs, then disappear again before the Council could get their hands on them. Always played in balaclavas, and hardly ever on a stage. Always somewhere they could cut and run if they had to – on a car-park roof, down some back alleyway, in the derelict cinema. I hadn’t seen them for ages and, I’ll be honest, I think we’d all assumed they’d been caught or disappeared. Or, like most everyone else, that they’d just given up. But they obviously hadn’t, had they? And now they were back to prove it, back to help fan those flames which had caught all over town.
    Like I said though, as soon as I’d seen the state of the shopping centre, all those people gathering, the protest stalls, the shrines of belongings, The Band, I’d known ICU wouldn’t let it go on for too long before stepping in with their size nines. And sure enough, that’s just what they did, a full raid on theplace, about twenty or so pairs of size nines to be exact, all attached to the feet, legs and riot armour of ICU security, Old Growler at their head.
    It was The Band they were after but as ever The Band were too quick. They’d set up their signaling chain before they’d started playing, and the call had come down the line a good few minutes before the security came barging through. So by the time they did The Band were already gone, just their kit abandoned on the café and the buzz of a single amp; that was all that was left of the song that had, just minutes before, been filling the place.
    Seeing the security come in we’d all braced ourselves for what would happen next. But ICU must have been more nervous about what was happening than we thought, because there was no clearing of the place, no arrests, just regular ID checks, a few searches of bags and then they drifted away to the edges to keep an eye on everything from there.
    The Company Man must have known he’d have to play this one subtly, I reckon – that he couldn’t just come down hard again. That what was happeningwas something new, something different and as such he’d have to come up with something new and different himself to counter it. If only we’d known exactly how new and how different then we might have been able to stop it. Except of course, he never wanted it stopped, did he? The Teacher, I mean. Because he might have walked down that dune on Friday morning looking like a lost child, but by the time the shopping centre was kicking off, he already knew, I reckon. Somehow, from all he’d seen and heard, he already knew what was going to have to be done. And how he was going to do it.
     
    Johnny and me hung around the centre for a few more hours after the raid, just to see what was going to happen next. But not much else did. It seemed like the happening had all slowed down for a bit by then, and in its place there was a sense of waiting instead; the whole town waiting for the next trigger, the next move – by us or by them, by the Company Man or by the Teacher.
    We were on our way out, heading back toJohnny’s to finally have that practice, when I got a clue as to what that next move might be. A flyer, palmed into my hand by a kid in a black hoodie, walking past me as quick as a whippet. By the time I looked round he was already gone, melted into the crowd.
    ‘What’s it say?’ Johnny asked.
    I looked down at the flyer. There was nothing fancy about it, no illustrations, printed in a hurry by the looks of it. Just some words on a page.
    But that was enough.
     
    TONIGHT
     
    Sandfields Social and Labour Club
     
    THE LAST SUPPER
     
    Be There
     
    They’d started closing the social clubs the year before