Revelations of Divine Love

Set in the Welsh Valleys in the 1980s, an intense friendship forms between teenage shoplifter Teleri and Maggie, a strange and troubled misfit who speaks of visions of Christ and demands to be called Julian. Over the course of a summer, the two girls find solace in their relationship, but darkness is never far away. Revelations of Divine Love was published in Bracket: A New Generation in Fiction, ed. Ra Page, Comma Press. You can read an excerpt below.

Reviews

“In Annie Kirby’s ‘Revelations of divine love’ the Welsh landscape and the mythological intensity of youth combine like a wave breaking.” (Excerpted from a review of Bracket: A New Generation in Fiction by Mslexia.)
“Kirby describes sublime moments with careful precision and evokes the brooding power of buried trauma.” (Excerpted from a review of Bracket: A New Generation in Fiction by Nicholas Royle in Time Out.)

Excerpt from Revelations of Divine Love

I set off early, walking along the old Farrow Road to the edge of town, then following the bank of the Gwri-fawr, pushing through river mist and fern fronds. Most days, rain wrapped itself around the valley like a veil. It drew us together, but it kept us apart from the other towns scattered between the mountains. It didn’t matter how far up Bryn Celyn you climbed, the thick mist of cloud meant you couldn’t see beyond the twin rivers twisting side by side at one edge, or the ghost colliery and the corrugated roof of the Honda factory on the other. Once in a while the sun unfurled behind the clouds, filling them up with pale light instead of rain, and the sky would turn to silver, but most of the time Cwmcelyn was grey sky, grey houses, grey people, grey rain.

But the sun was shining on the day it started, which is why I was on the edge of the mountain at half past six in the morning.

The last time the sun had been shining had been a Sunday in March and it was the day Dyl died. Well, maybe he died the day before, nobody knows for definite, but in the morning when they came to tell us, the sun was leaking around the edges of my curtains and I was pressing my face into the cool side of the pillow. They found him floating in the pool where the Gwri-fach and Gwri-fawr rivers come together, face down with his jacket ballooning up over the surface of the water. It was kids that found him, little ones from the junior school who’d gone up to see if their newspaper and nail-varnish boats would survive the drop from the edge of the waterfall.

The Courier said Dyl’s blood alcohol level was three times the legal limit but I don’t know why they thought that was important ‘cause he wasn’t driving anywhere, didn’t even own a car though he worked in the Honda factory putting bits of engines together. He just walked by himself into the valley after a night drinking in the Tafarn Glendower and jumped into the river.

I couldn’t get the image of Dyl’s swollen jacket out of my mind. It lingered for months. And when I’d woken up that morning to a halo of sunlight I’d felt sick with grief. I dozed a bit and dreamt of when we were little and Dad was spinning Dyl around by the shoulders of his snow-washed jacket, all the while Mam laughing and screaming at them to stop. Then that dream slipped into another one, Dyl’s jacket, the snow-washed one I mean, turning in the waterfall pool, with him all green and drowned underneath. I ran into the bathroom and puked in the toilet, then sat in the kitchen making snail trails in the butter with the knife, and decided to go up there so I could look at the pool without Dyl’s body floating in it and see if I felt any better.

So there I was. Between the mountain and the river, water rushing over rocks and the sun filtering down through the trees in layers. The two rivers flow in tandem for miles, edging closer to one another as they twist down the slopes of the Bryn-y-Llys and through the valley along the base of Bryn Celyn. An hour’s walk into the valley the Gwri-fach veers off at an angle, scurries across a rocky outcrop and drops into the rumbling Gwri-fawr below, so that there’s a waterfall and a deep, clear pool before the Gwri-fawr gathers itself together and continues alone down to the ocean. Before Dyl died, we used to swim up there, lads jumping off the waterfall in their keks, girls paddling in the shallows. I’d somehow made the waterfall further away in my mind than it really was, and the mingling of the different beats of the rivers, one low and breathy, the other flitting across pebbles, took me by surprise.

To get to the pool itself you either had to jump off the waterfall, or wade across and slide down a steep slope on your arse, hacking through a mass of ferns and bramble. You’d think that with all the rain, the rivers would be bursting at their seams, but what we got was mostly drizzle that barely licked the rivers’ thirst. So the Gwri-fach was shallow and I hardly even got my trainers wet. I stood at the top of the slope for a bit, thinking I should turn around and go home, and then my ankle turned on a rock and I crashed through the ferns, feeling them slither and rip as I tumbled, landing on my knees in the dirt at the edge of the pool. I had mud on my jeans and scratches on my hands. I stood up painfully, feeling the bruises already beginning to blossom on my knees.

There was a body in the pool, face down, clouds of black fabric and red hair floating on the surface.