by Adam Nevill
There was often a trail of blood leading from a toilet stall to the sink area. I only looked inside the stall once and saw that the epicentre of the mutilation had not been flushed away. Swirls of black hair and a yellow jelly substance floated in the bowl, surrounded by toilet paper and fresh blood. The mutilator wanted their mess to be found; they wanted a physical manifestation of their pain to be seen by the next person who used the facility. This was not uncommon. Like caged animals driven neurotic by uniformity and captivity, we often smeared the walls of the staff toilet with our matter.
I wondered, not for the first time, if someone had also offered a pound of flesh, in ironic tribute, to the silent sterility, to the humming of the lights and the clicking of fingers on keyboards, to the callous, inscrutable but unscrupulous executive and to the almost pointless endeavours that we were engaged in at our desks. Many years ago a woman even took one of her own eyes out with a letter opener. I didn’t see the incident, but there was whispering for hours about how she was spirited away by security, soon after the incident, and dragged screaming down the stairs. There was more screaming outside the building and then silence.
Sometimes, when work was simply insufferable, I felt an urge to open my throat over a bathroom sink, to hold myself upright and to gush euphorically onto the porcelain; to beard myself in blood, to sacrifice and martyr myself in a way that would not be forgotten, at least not for a few days, while also punishing myself for my inability to escape the situation or change my circumstances.
About four weeks before my end, I returned to my desk after I had been contemplating this mystery colleague’s self-destruction in a communal toilet facility, to read a new message in my inbox. A message that would change not only my life but the world I had known. The company’s internal communication service had delivered a message from middle management entitled: CONSULTANCY PERIOD.
I had been anticipating the white envelope, but that did not prevent my stunned disbelief and the cold tourniquet of dread that reduced me to paralysis. But by the day’s end the shock had gradually eased into a heavy, fatiguing, though curiously warm sensation, born of something deep-seated, wild and reckless. This might have been acceptance or acknowledgement. It might have been my response to something that signalled the end of the apprehension that had sickened me for as long as I had worked at that company as an editor. The notification might also have signified a profound psychological fracture that rendered me irreparably broken, and unsure of my thoughts and actions thereafter. I still don’t know.
Messages that had been sent to me from my authors during the previous month must have precipitated my demise. My work had always been beset by problems, but never of the magnitude of that final month. I had become unable to think of a way of surviving a series of setbacks that had been the result of a long momentum of decline within my publishing responsibilities.
So traumatic was that day that I deliberately suppressed any thought of my grim future. I only allowed myself to think of the light that I kept hidden at home. Back then, in my darkest hours, my only comfort came from the light. My Reliquary of Light. And that night I knew that I must open that simple wooden box once more, to gaze into what may have been the last ember of celestial light on Earth.
Working alone, each editor in the company published at least one hundred books per year. The company kept all rights to the authors’ works and paid a competitive seven per cent net royalty. But, as all of our books retailed at ten pence, and because the retailer kept sixty per cent of every ten-penny sale, and because nearly all of our books were pirated anyway, I had been finding it increasingly hard to keep authors on my fiction lists.
A fortnight before my consultancy began, I had been informed that my best author, a writer of mystery stories, had killed himself. He used to write a novel every eleven days and had produced half of my list during the last ten years of my service. Despite his productivity and reasonable popularity, he was able to earn just enough to occupy part of the communal area in a block of flats. He’d lived under a staircase in a cardboard shelter and fed himself on sufficient soya and yeast products to remain alive and committed to his work. Without leaving a note, or delivering his last commissioned work, he had leaped under a high-speed train in a place where this city joins with the next.
The news was catastrophic to my professional life and prospects, and was soon augmented by another heavy stroke of misfortune.
My second most productive and popular author wrote romances. All of her books featured executive tycoons, from the top hundred corporations. These men met lowly service industry workers, and then transformed the existences of these women into lifestyles of affluence and luxury that involved exotic destinations. Eventually these tycoons were unable to live without these heroines. Every book the author had written featured more or less the same story. I’d assumed the repetition was evidence of an undiagnosed mania. But each of her final seven novels revealed even more worrying signs: the author was parting from the strict guidelines of my Flame of Passion imprint. Her last books featured graphic scenes of anal rape and cannibalism.
The author was one of the company’s top performers and occupied a position on the front list, but she had suffered a colossal nervous breakdown around that time. She lived with her elderly mother in one room of a building near a chemical plant that produced chicken portions made from soya. The author was mainly supported by her mother’s small pension, a tiny stipend granted in return for sixty years’ service in a factory that had led to the mother’s blindness and infirmity caused by a respiratory condition.
Without those two authors, who had kept me in a job by producing nearly sixty of my scheduled titles in each year’s catalogue, I could not see how it would be possible for me to continue working as an editor at the company. It seemed the executives had arrived at the same conclusion. I had many other authors who filled the remainder of my lists, but they could only write around punishing work schedules, or around caring for elderly parents, and sometimes children at the same time, in dim and cramped lodgings.
The company was also embarking on a major crackdown on ‘downbeat storylines’. Most of the fiction delivered to me had a tone of despair and misanthropy and was written from what seemed to be a bottomless well of exhaustion and depression. But I had been instructed by the management to reject any manuscripts featuring divorce, suicide, mental breakdown, assorted social ills (they supplied a list) and physical ailments (they supplied another list). Within the new guidelines that I was to follow, the language of our fiction had to be simplified further than it already had been; the novels needed to become shorter and more episodic. Description was to be treated as superfluous, ‘unless absolutely necessary for the progression of the story from A to B’. My new editorial guidelines put particular emphasis on the removal of ‘strangeness’ and ‘imaginative excesses’. All ‘authors [were] to be encouraged to fulfil the material aspirations of our many readers.’
Most of the population was too poor, sub-literate, ill or fatigued to buy the tenpenny books. They had little interest in what we produced anyway. But in the sixty per cent of the workforce that was employed, and in those who had retired at a subsistence level and had leisure time, there were just enough readers to support the publishing industry. Because the bookshops and libraries had all closed, there was no competition in the still functioning retail areas, so that also helped.
All books were downloaded from the Rainforest Cloud, which had a 98 per cent share of bookselling. This was a vast subscription service onto which four million new books were uploaded each year. My authors only contributed one hundred titles, and without my two top mystery and romance authors I knew I had become ‘unsustainable’.
On my journey home on the day that my consultancy began, and within a crowded train carriage, I passed the usual landscape: busy motorways and carriageways, soya crops, grey apartment blocks built too close together, stunted, dirty trees and piles of refuse.
I recalled my holiday the previou
s year, taken in one of the few places remaining on the coastline that was unspoiled by intensive farming, overdevelopment, industry and overpopulation. But on the evening the consultation commenced, I felt as I had done on my return from the coast.
It had taken me five years to save enough money to spend four days in a grubby caravan. But the views of the wind farms out at sea and the shoreline were spectacular, as were the vast sulphur sunsets.
My return journey to the city from the seaside was much the same as my two-hour journey to and from the office, though stretched across half the country. The landscape, topography and living conditions had gradually degraded into a greyish smear of tarmac, wires and cement. Only the flat and stifling uniformity of the soya crops offered any relief between the grim and dirty cities. By the time I reached my destination my face was strewn with tears.
The train guard must have seen my reaction many times before. He said to me, ‘If you’re going to top yourself, I can recommend the facilities under the viaduct. They’re just behind the station on Gradgrind Street. You can find the best euthanisers in the huts by the scrapyard. But stay off the tracks.’ He must have been on commission because he gave me a business card that offered potential suicides ‘Unbeatable Rates’.
I lived in an overcrowded building in the outer suburbs. I shared a room with another man. My salary as a publishing professional did not allow me to live nearer the commercial districts, nor would it allow me much privacy at home. But at least there were only two of us in the room; it could have been much worse.
Our room was divided down the middle by an old curtain on a plastic rail. Each side contained a small bed, a bedside table, a chest of drawers and a wardrobe. These old and scuffed articles of furniture contained all of our possessions. But as soon as I entered the room, on the evening of the day that I was notified of my participation in the consultation process, I could see that there had been incursions from the other side of the curtain.
Like me, my roommate was childless and unmarried. He worked underground and did something dangerous in the construction of new subterranean housing. Unlike me, though, he was a chronic alcoholic and just as selfish, thoughtless and manipulative as the many other addicts that I encountered in the city.
In that room we were unable to avoid hearing each other’s every move, sigh and sob. Graham’s drunken rambling could continue for hours. If he felt that I was not listening, he was prone to tear the curtain aside so that he could rant and spit into my face. When sober and hungover, he was sheepish and pretended that these altercations had never happened. He also continually asked me for money.
Often, I would find evidence of his rummaging for valuables and money on my side of the room. The only item of value I possessed I had concealed behind the skirting board in a place where the wood had come loose beneath the headboard of my bed. Despite all that I had endured at work and at home, and while travelling between those two reservoirs of misery, the idea of the Reliquary of Light not being in my life was the only thing I considered completely unbearable.
When I returned home from the worst day at the office that I could remember, Graham was not in residence; I always counted small mercies whenever I encountered them. I peered around the curtain where it swayed near the entrance to the room, to make certain of his absence.
His side of the room had been reduced to an impenetrable jumble of unwashed clothes, rubbish and empty plastic bottles. His detritus made the curtain bulge and issued a terrible miasma of stale ethanol and male sweat. Whenever his mess seeped beneath the fabric divider, I would kick it back under. I did a lot of kicking in that room.
I retrieved the Reliquary of Light from where it lay hidden. By that point in my life, this object supplied my sole pleasure and purpose. But what the small wooden box contained was of far more significance than me, or any of my worldly concerns. It was of far greater importance than the entire city and all who lived within it. The Reliquary of Light was a receptacle containing a holy relic. A mere fragment, maybe, but one that had its origins in the paradise belt. It was a splinter of the most intense and forgiving and transporting love. Its joy was instantly euphoric and carried a sign from another place that was far greater and infinitely more beautiful than the earthly prison in which we are all trapped. A priest I once knew, called Father Suarez, used to call our world ‘the greylands’.
The Reliquary was given to me by Father Suarez, in the days before he died of cancer. At the time of his demise, I was his youngest parishioner at the Temple of Inmost Light and of the Saintly Martyrs of the Smooth Field. The church is long gone now. Its consecrated ground and hallowed masonry were reused for a block of luxury apartments intended for executives. But before Father Suarez died, and before he saw all that he had maintained and administered demolished, he passed on the Reliquary to me. He told me in a hushed whisper that he had distilled the inmost light from the church and placed it within the box.
I thought him deranged from morphine, but accepted the gift; at the end, the disease had ravaged his small body and reduced him to a barely living skeleton. But that very evening, when I opened the innocuous wooden box in my room, I found myself down upon my knees, and soon weeping from the most intense joy.
In my deepest self, I knew in an instant that all of my troubles were irrelevant in some vast scheme that I instinctively understood but could not define. Language simply does not have the range or depth to describe this light and the wisdom that it issues. As if from a distant place filled with the most piercing and yet soft and gentle light, my entire being was suffused from a mere spark contained within the box. I felt weightless, unburdened. I knew that those who had loved me dearly until their deaths were ever present and waiting for me in another place. Within that small wooden container was a tangible sign of sanctuary and salvation, hope, answers, comfort and love. The transmission of this knowledge was instantaneous; I needed to make no conscious reflection. A dormant part of me that I could not even remember, that had been ground down by my life and its pressures, would awaken in the presence of this scrap of light.
My relationship with the Reliquary was always instinctive and I knew not to overuse the receptacle. A few seconds’ exposure was sufficient to make my spirit soar, for it to rise up and become shrived of its burden within that forever of white light and golden warmth.
I also lived in constant fear of the light source depleting or vanishing. Over time I had noticed its rays dimming, so I preserved my interaction with the Reliquary for the most trying days, like that one, and for special occasions.
Long after I had closed the Reliquary during the evening following notification of my consultancy period, I lay upon my bed in a soporific state. I was entirely satiated in body, soul and mind. Tracks that my tears had made upon my face cracked when I smiled beatifically. I seemed to be gazing at some great secret thing beyond the grubby yellow ceiling of the room. But what I smiled at and acknowledged I do not know. It was ineffable and immanent.
Perhaps the world’s then moribund religions once yearned for that very light. And so suffused had I been by what poured from that box, I was transported to the borders of another place, where there is no time or suffering. That is why I barely heard Graham enter the room. After I had opened the box, albeit briefly, his drunken stumbling was nothing to me anyway. His dismal existence in this cold and unfeeling world remained far outside my private and lingering bliss.
‘You pissed?’ he asked. His grimy, bearded visage had appeared like the face of prehistoric man at the entrance of a cave. ‘You is pissed,’ he added as if stating a fact. His bloodshot eyes flitted in their sockets as his vision skittered about my orderly space. Like a rat seeking sustenance he was searching for evidence of the intoxicants that he would demand a share of.
‘Go away,’ I said quietly. I did not want him to intrude and trample upon the last vestiges of the heavenly glow that was slowly receding inside me as the world reclaimed me, and the usual bustle of anxiety and preoccupation sought an insidious pa
ssage back into my thoughts.
Graham ignored my request and continued to scrutinise my half of the room. He could barely contain himself from intruding further on those great bemired feet.
‘Will you piss off!’ I roared at him.
He withdrew behind the curtain reluctantly and sat heavily upon his bed. But not soon enough; my experience of the heavenly light had been eliminated by his very presence.
As I expected, I was summoned into one of the management cubicles the following day.
I rose from my chair and approached the nearest cubicle door. I noted a static of tension pass across the shoulders and bowed heads of my colleagues who sat nearest my desk. But no one in the office looked at me, the dead man walking.
As instructed in the message that had been waiting for me when I came in that morning at 8.30, I knocked on the door of the cubicle office and entered.
Inside the semi-darkness of the tiny office I took my seat behind the desk. I was the only person present. A metal filing cabinet stood in one corner. The ceiling had the same polystyrene tiles as the main office space. The floor was tiled with linoleum squares the colour of the grey sky outside (at least when the black, toxic clouds dispersed from above the city).
The sole source of faint light was produced by a dim and occasionally flickering lamp. There was nothing else on the desk beside a black telephone. I sat and waited, and waited. I repeatedly checked my watch. I only realised that I had been sitting in silence for twenty minutes when a voice abruptly filled the room and drilled into the marrow of my bones.
Flinching in my chair, I gasped loudly, and then became angry when I understood the obvious management technique; to let apprehension and fear build within an interviewee, before startling them by the sudden breaking of the silence at an unnatural volume.
The voice was broadcast from the phone’s speaker, a small grid built into the base of the phone that enabled conference calls. The voice reminded me of an old ventriloquist dummy, or even Mr Punch: the sound was camp but screechy, its tone amused and insincere. I suspected the voice was a recording too, because it gave me no opportunity to respond at any point during the monologue. I was also unsure of the speaker’s sex, but, as I listened to the voice, I imagined the gaudily painted face of a horrible little man. A figure who had once sat down, read from a card and recorded his voice onto a machine, somewhere upstairs in this building. As the company’s official spiel was recited, I imagined the eyes in the speaker’s face had been alight with sadistic mirth.