The Gospel of Us by Owen Sheers Page B

shopping centre. The camera followed but it was no use; he was gone. Someone else though suddenlyfound it. A pair of hands grabbing the lens and swinging the image towards their face.
    ‘I know him! I can vouch for him! I’m his follower!’
    It was Peter, shouting into the lens, crying, screaming what he hadn’t said just twelve hours earlier. But no one wanted to listen. Not even Growler’s men.
    ‘I am!’ Peter cried, as the screen went blank and he was swallowed by the crowd. ‘I am!’
    When the screen flickered into life again it took a few seconds before we realised what it was showing. The images were coming from inside the shopping centre now, taken on a camera phone. But this was no accident, no leak. They wanted us to see this. They wanted us to watch as Growler’s men went to play on the Teacher’s head, body and face. As they tore his skin with the soles of their boots. As they broke his bones with their fists and their knees. As they showed him who he was to them. Which was nothing, nothing.
    And then we heard it too. The Teacher’s screams,echoing down those empty corridors, between those silent shop-window dummies, their blank faces looking on as he got free of their hold, staggered away, slipping on his own blood, only to be caught again and beaten again under the cheerful smiles of holiday posters.
    It was all too much, too much. Where had this come from? Behind me I could hear the screams of his mam as her other sons dragged her away. The cries of the Legion Twins, rocking and rocking behind me as they discovered the beautiful world he’d given them could be darker, more cruel than anything they’d ever known before.
    And it was too much for Sergeant Phillips too. After a minute of that footage up on the screen he broke ranks and ran towards the cordon of ICU security guarding the entrance.
    ‘Let me in!’ he bellowed at them. ‘Let me in! This is my town, my jurisdiction!’
    But it was too late. Everything was too late.
    Shortly afterwards one of Growler’s men came out, clipped off a run of barbed wire, then went backin. None of us wanted to know what they were going to do with it, but it was the barbed wire that really told us, when they finally emerged again bringing the ravaged Teacher with them, what this had all been about. Power and fear.
    They’d crowned him with it. Someone in there, no doubt Old Growler himself, had taken the time to weave that wire into a crown, then push it onto the Teacher’s head, so hard the barbs scraped against his bone.
    ‘Your king!’ Growler shouted to us as he held up the Teacher by the scruff of the neck. ‘The king of your town!’
    Shoving him before him he began to walking back to the police van. ‘You!’ he shouted to Sergeant Phillips. ‘Bring your men. Follow me!’
    He turned away again and walked three or four metres before he realised Sergeant Phillips hadn’t moved. ‘I said,’ he shouted back to him. ‘Follow me!’
    Sergeant Phillips stood taller. Old Growler passed the Teacher to one of his pack dogs, thenstrode back to face up to Phillips. ‘That,’ he said, ‘was an order.’
    Sergeant Phillips stared down at him. Then, slowly, he lifted his hand to his head, removed his beret and threw it to the floor. Old Growler looked at it, then looked at the rest of Phillips’ men. One by one they all did the same, until there was a litter of berets at their feet, like dark petals shed across the civic centre’s floor.
    Growler didn’t wait to see anything else. Turning on his heel he strode back to the van, hit it twice on the side, and then they were gone. They had taken him.
     
    You’ll hear all sorts of stories about what happened next. But so few people were there it’s hard to know which are true. So I’ll just tell you what I heard, what people were saying in the days and weeks after, about what they did to him.
    About how they’d taken him to the stonemason’s yard up by the road to watch his own gravestone being