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The Conrad Press - C Doyle Michael

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129 pages

English

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Heaven and Hell is a stunningly original, erotic and immensely thought-provoking novel about a Jewish journalist, Michael Cohen, sent by a London news agency to uncover secret plans to rebuild the Temple on Mount Zion, Jerusalem, next to the Mosque on the Dome of the Rock. Tempted by women and fascinated by them following a disturbing childhood experience, Cohen undergoes a spiritual crisis that leads to his conversion to Christianity, accusations of proselytising to the Jews, a spell in a mental hospital and a climactic spiritual salvation.

Sujets

Mosquée

Christianisme

Informations

Publié par	The Conrad Press
Date de parution	01 janvier 0001
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781783019656
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0000€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Heaven and Hell

Heaven and Hell
Published by The Conrad Press in the United Kingdom 2016
Tel: +44(0)1227 472 874
www.theconradpress.com
info@theconradpress.com
ISBN 978 -1 -78301 -965 -6
Copyright © Michael C. Doyle, 2016
The moral right of Michael C. Doyle to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. This book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publisher, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Book cover design and typesetting by: Charlotte Mouncey, www.bookstyle.co.uk
Cover Image Les Oréades (1902) by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, held at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France.
The Conrad Press logo was designed by Maria Priestley.

Heaven and Hell
Michael C. Doyle

To my wife Sharon,
without whom this book could never have been written.

By way of a preface :
If you believe in Heaven,
There is a Hell -
And no human ever wants to be there.

1
I t was the beginning of Easter. Rumours of war were spreading throughout the Middle East.
Israeli soldiers crouched behind a wall, rifles aimed at the ready, as Arab youths hurled stones from the top of the Eastern wall surrounding Jerusalem.
The stones smashed onto the cobbled pavement below, narrowly missing the soldiers. They looked nervously at each other. Several more youths appeared at the top of the gate, overlooking the holy city.
Suddenly a shot rang out.
The scream of the bullet pierced the silence of the night as the bullet ricocheted off the top of the Lions’ Gate, the entrance to the Muslim quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. The youths fled at the sound of gunfire, but moments later they re-grouped, and returned to hurl more rocks at the soldiers.
This was not the greeting that Michael Cohen, a freelance journalist from England, had expected. He was thirty-three, clean-shaven with short dark brown hair, brown eyes, and an inquisitive, wide-awake look about him. Long before arriving in Israel he had doubts over his profession, even more so now when he considered the frightening repercussions of what could happen to the Middle East if he wrote a story. The nature of journalism often stressed him, but he liked writing. He also liked drawing and painting with oils; painting was one of his favourite ways to relax, along with chess, which he played to club standard. His degree was a BA in Art History. He’d studied at the Slade; it had been one of the happiest times of his life.
He hoped passionately for a peaceful solution to the Middle East crisis. He had an idealistic view of humanity that people could live in peace and harmony.

2
C ohen profoundly believed in the possibility of peace and harmony between people, even though he knew it was an ideal only rarely achieved. He sought heaven but had all too often found hell in his life. For him, heaven was friendship, a good book, a beautiful landscape, a stunning painting, an exquisite piece of music… and of course women. He adored women. He found them infinitely attractive, beautiful even, yet also puzzling and a permanent enigma. Cohen knew that many men, of course, saw women more or less as he did. There was a difference, though, and he knew it from a lifetime of experience with having women as friends, and also as lovers. The difference was that women so often tended to adore him too. He had never really understood where this adoration sprang from, though he knew he was reasonably good-looking.
Cohen had been brought up in a liberal Jewish home in Finchley, along with two younger sisters, by an affectionate but not excessively doting mother, and a father who ran a lucrative hedge fund and who, leaving early in the morning to go to work and only returning at night after the young Cohen had gone to bed, had been absent from most of his childhood.
When Cohen was twelve years old, he and his family had gone on a summer camping holiday to a large, luxurious campsite near Hastings with tents that had two or three rooms. One evening, when dusk was falling and Cohen was returning alone from swimming, he mistook the tent and peered inside to see a complete stranger, a woman, completely naked, standing in front of him.
He was too young at the time to have any clear idea of how old the woman was, but later in his life he assumed she was about twenty-five. She had long, straight black hair that reached down to her waist. Her breasts seemed to him then, and always in his subsequent memory, very large and wonderfully womanly, yet what captivated him most was her face. Her eyes were dark brown, very bright and seemed to twinkle at him.
She smiled at him, her mouth half-open. He was so astonished by her appearance and so shocked by her nakedness that he didn’t know what to do. He froze to the spot, the sight of her engraved on his mind.
It was the closest the twelve-year-old Cohen had ever experienced to heaven, and later in his life he was only too aware that, somehow, he had never experienced such a heaven again, not even when he lost his virginity at the age of sixteen to an eighteen-year-old French au pair. She was looking after the family of one of his school friends in a large house in Golders Green and, during a sleepover that featured about a dozen boys, she furtively and excitedly whispered to him, him alone, that she wanted him to ‘couche avec moi’ . Cohen had been studying French at school by that time for five years. He had known what she meant. By the time he was sixteen numerous girls had wanted him to kiss them.
But he was still a boy at the campsite that day at the age of twelve, and desperately nervous. He just stood there, frozen with fear and excitement, until a man, who was, Cohen supposed, her husband or boyfriend, emerged from another, smaller, room in the tent.
The man saw Cohen and instantly threw himself at him. He bent him over his knee and smacked him so hard on his backside it really hurt. Cohen’s heaven had become hell. Yet what he remembered even more than the smacking (which he was too ashamed about to report to his parents), was that the naked woman had tried to pull the man away from him.
‘It was an accident!’ she said. ‘The boy just got lost.’ But the man was having none of it. ‘Don’t talk rubbish!’ he shouted at her. Finally, after delivering about a dozen excruciatingly painful final slaps, the man threw Cohen onto the floor, though not before telling the women to ‘ kick that little Peeping Tom bastard out ’ before going back into the room he’d emerged from.
Cohen started to cry. The woman gently lifted Cohen to his feet. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I know you came in here by mistake. It’s getting dark, after all. Look, you’d better go. I’m so sorry he spanked you.’
The woman, still completely naked, took Cohen’s hand and started leading him towards the entrance of the tent. On the way, she stopped, put her arms around Cohen, bent down towards him (she was about six inches taller than he was) and kissed him. It was a real kiss; she opened her mouth and kissed him for perhaps ten or fifteen seconds, long enough for Cohen to be completely aware what was going on, then she probed her tongue into his mouth and French-kissed him. Her heavy, firm, breasts pressed against the top of his chest.
Cohen, even though his posterior still stung, was so excited and disturbed at the woman kissing him that he wondered if he might be going crazy with the thrill of what was happening. ‘Don’t ever forget me,’ she whispered.
Cohen never did.
There were three more days of the holiday left and every time Cohen left the tent for the rest of the holiday his heart was thumping in case he saw the woman again. What would he say to her? What would he do? And if she saw him, what would happen then? But he didn’t see her again.
The beautiful naked woman filled Cohen’s daytime thoughts and night-time dreams for all of his teenage years and for all his life to come.

3
T he soldiers stood up and approached the gate, their rifles aimed at the top of the wall, ready to shoot anyone who moved.
‘Are you trying to kill them?’ asked Cohen, surprised at what he’d witnessed.
‘Of course,’ said one of the soldiers, matter-of-factly, ‘they’re trying to kill us.’
‘But they’re just kids,’ snapped Cohen.
‘Welcome to Jerusalem,’ said the soldier sarcastically. He then turned and fired another shot in the direction of two youths, who hid between the ramparts. The other soldier looked at Cohen’s contemptuously. ‘Whose side are you on? You’d best move away before you get hurt,’ he warned. An angry crowd had gathered, mainly elderly Arab market traders returning home, gesticulating at the soldiers and spitting in their direction. The soldiers retreated cautiously, their rifles on their hips, away from the taunting crowd.
It was Cohen’s first trip to Israel. The incident alarmed him to such an extent that he decided to go back to his hotel and order a stiff drink. One thing he was sure about, as he sipped his brandy in the relative safety of the King David Hotel, that he knew he wasn’t cut out to be a war correspondent. The story he was on had nothing to do with the recent outbreak of fighting in Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Nevertheless, Cohen knew that if the information was true, and the Arabs got wind of it, all-out war could erupt and he’d be caught in the middle of it.