The Book of Revelation by Rupert Thomson Page B

girl’s mascara runs when she is crying. He could only stare as the woman etched a single word on to his body, a four-letter word, the most possessive pronoun that exists:
    MIJN
    •
    Gertrude noticed the tattoo almost as soon as she stepped into the room that evening. It would have been hard not to. By that time, the skin around and underneath the letters was thoroughly inflamed; the whole area had lifted into a raw, red weal. For a moment she stood still. Then her head turned and she looked into his face. Her eyes glittered fiercely inside her hood.
    “Who did this?”
    Somehow, he didn’t feel like making things easy for her.
    “I don’t know,” he said.
    “You don’t know?”
    “You all look the same. How am I supposed to know which one of you it was?” He paused. “It could have been you for all I know.”
    She bent down, both hands braced on her knees, her elbows jutting sideways into the air. She inspected the tattoo at close range, her face just inches from it, then she straightened quickly and walked out of the room.
    When she returned a few minutes later she had the others with her. For the first time in days all three women were wearing their black cloaks, which he took to be an indication of how serious things were. He watched Gertrude take Maude by the upper arm and point at the tattoo. She wanted an explanation, but Maude leaned away from her, resisting her, the way a child might. Gertrude persisted with her questioning. When Maude finally spoke, he heard the word ziekenhuis, which he knew was Dutch for hospital . But no sooner had Maude used the word than she broke off in mid-sentence and lowered her head, as if chastened. Both the other women glanced sharply in his direction. Though this puzzled him, he didn’t ponder it for long. The injury to him didn’t seem sufficiently severe to warrant talk of hospitals—and anyway, he was more interested in the fact that there had been anger in Maude’s voice, something he couldn’t remember hearing before. She was standing up for herself for once.
    At some deeper level, she was also standing up for him, of course. She had disapproved of what the others were doing to him, and the tattoo she had inflicted on him was testament to the strength of that disapproval. In tattooing him, she was attempting to reclaim him; she was saying that he belonged to her, only to her, because only she truly cared for him. He had always assumed that the women’s behaviour was governed by a code—at the very least, there had to be some kind of understanding—but this was his first real glimpse of it. Obviously, in this case, Maude had acted alone, without permission, and against the spirit of the group. As he lay there, listening to her being scolded, he realised that a crack had opened right in front of him. Why not try and drive a wedge into it?
    Lifting his head, he said, “It’s all right. There’s no need to argue.”
    He felt Gertrude turn and look at him.
    “The tattoo,” he said, “it’s really not a problem. You don’t have to be angry with her.”
    “This isn’t your business,” Gertrude said.
    “I was the one who was tattooed,” he said. “Whose business is it, if it isn’t mine?”
    Gertrude turned to Astrid and spoke to her rapidly in Dutch, then all three women left the room, with Gertrude still gripping Maude by the upper arm. When the door had closed, he lay back with a faint smile on his face.
    •
    It had always been Maude who had taken care of the menial tasks. The next morning, though, Gertrude and Astrid appeared in her place. He could only imagine that Maude was in disgrace, and that all access to him had been denied. Perhaps, like him, she had been confined to a room somewhere in the building, and was now lying on a single bed, her big round face turned sullenly towards the wall. When he asked Astrid where “her friend” was—he used the words deliberately, provocatively—Astrid refused to answer. He sensed that the two women had