A chasm of darkness stretches between two pale faces of cliff, like a raven's wing extended to smother the light, or the black key of a piano sat awkwardly in the middle of everything. Smoke leaks from every crease of the rockface – smoke that is vengeful and vindictive, venemous as it snakes between the stones. The ground itself appears to be coughing.

A man joins this grim activity as he heaves and splutters, his legs crumbling like dry clay as he collapses into the dirt. Smudged, scorched, scarred: his face is no longer recognisable. Delicate fingers of flame reach towards him and he tries to scream, his lungs filling with amber heat as he gasps for wind and water, dragging himself away. The chains clasped to his manacled feet screech across the floor, in a sick metallic imitation of his own cries. As the smoke engulfs him in a choking embrace that can never be deadly, he unleashes his last siren for redemption:

"Abraham!"

I turned away from the screen with a quiet grimace. Glancing around the dim room, the rest of the class sat in an unphased contemplation, watching an old man be tortured for fifteen minutes by bad CGI. They watched the screen and I watched them. They were a mangled soup of uniforms, clicking pens and crucifixes but they all shared the same look of complete boredom. Rows upon rows of placid faces, lined up like titles on a bookcase. But they were slumped and unanimated – paper versions of themselves.

I wondered how the video wasn't evoking any kind of reaction from them. No whispers, no shudders, not even a cursory frown. Why couldn't they feel the same anxiety that I did? It was such a strong guilty feeling, so conspicuous that I marvelled that they couldn't hear it ringing through the room.

As the camera panned away from a heavenly shot of Lazurus and directed our view back to the man in the flames, I turned to my friend, Joseph, one of the only people in the class lacking that impressively deadpan expression.

"That's gonna be us, right?" I grinned at him, laughing quietly, though my breath sat uncomfortably in my throat.

He chuckled but his words were genuine. "No-" then, as I smiled at his conviction "-Hell isn't real."

"Right," I nodded. I wanted to believe him. In many ways, I did. But I had been pulled in different directions for so long now, that I couldn't tell who was a blasphemer and who was an atheist. I couldn't tell if they were the same thing. I couldn't tell which one I was.

When the flames on the screen dwindled into blackness and a roll of credits, the teacher flicked the lights back on, causing the ceiling to sag with the heavy glare of luminescence. It was quiet for a few seconds, and I was momentarily united with my classmates as we all winced at the sudden light pricking at our eyes. Somewhere, in the centre of the silence, Mr Chambers cleared his throat.

He dusted his hands off of some imaginary powder, "That's one version of Lazarus and the Rich Man," He summarised in a non-chalant tone, "It's a little graphic but it gets the point across."

I wondered what point that was exactly.

I liked Mr Chambers a lot. He never taught us his own opinions, like most of my previous teachers, because he believed we should be able to learn unswayed by the power of peer pressure. This felt like a luxury I hadn't yet been afforded, and I was grateful. But it didn't make the video any less disturbing.

Mr Chambers picked up a pile of sheets and dealt them amoungst the class like a pack of playing cards, quickly and mechanically. I flipped mine over, half expecting to find an ace of spades, but instead being greated by a lengthy stack of questions.

I knew the right answers, since each scene from the video was now stamped into my mind, but it seemed to me that they weren't asking the things that mattered. It hardly seemed logical to recount the seven deadly sins when we could be asking why eternal torture was an appropriate punishment.

Still, I bent my head, brought my pen to the paper and watched my hand dance a slow waltz of drawling answers. The rest of the class did the same, and as they talked, I talked too. While it was blaringly obvious to me that I didn't belong here, no one else seemed to notice. So Joseph and I sat and wrote and talked and blended in with the beliefs and teachings that would never taste quite right to us. After twelve years, it was as easy as breathing.

———

Cards on the table, I wrote this recently as part of my English A-level course, but it is still useful to GCSE students. This is an autobiographical piece about my experience at Catholic school. It's mostly food for thought, not a generalisation on religion but just one point of view. I'm also aware I've reused certain imagery in this piece that I have used in past pieces. Honestly that's a good tip for cutting corners in creative writing. If you have a few good metaphors that can be used across genres, it saves you a lot of time thinking up new ones in an exam. The examiner isn't going to know that you've used them before.