What I Tell You In the Dark

by John Samuel

  It’s a perfect crucifix, flat against the sky.

  A message from His faithful retainers, of course – some little poodle of His, busily arranging the landscape. There’s nothing they love more than a bit of good old-fashioned censure.

  But why does it have to get so bloody personal? I mean, okay, fine – I get it: I shouldn’t be here. I understand that. But you’d think that after all this time they might let up a bit. But oh no, they just can’t help themselves. They never miss an opportunity to taunt me with that thing. And yes, I do know how that sounds, by the way. But you’ll have to trust me on this, it is them. I know a sign when I see one.

  It must be driving them crazy, me being down here, but He’s obviously not too concerned about it. If He was I wouldn’t even be sitting here. He’d have just delved in and squashed this. He could even cast me out if He had a mind to. But He hasn’t. And not because He’s not keeping an eye on things either – I mean, come on, it’s me: of course He’s got wind of it. Even a recluse like Him will have heard the news that I’m off the reservation again. Anyway, they’ll have made sure He knows, you can count on that. Every last detail.

  No, I think He’s waiting, and watching. I think He’s actually quite intrigued to see if I can pull this off. He’s the big picture type, not like those hateful minions of His. They’re just petty and spiteful – they’re never going to let me forget what happened.

  No one holds a grudge quite like a servant. The greatest snobs of all.

  ‘Yeah well, they’ll have to do better than that!’ These words actually come out of my mouth as I spring to my feet.

  Karen emits a tiny squeal. Any pretence of concern for my wellbeing vanishes from her face. She is now looking at me with all the fear and surprise of one who is alone with a lunatic. And no doubt I did give her a bit of a shock, but even so, that’s just rude.

  Whatever. I have far more important things to be thinking about. I need to get to Will’s desk before one of those meddlesome idiots thinks to look underneath it, if they haven’t already.

  I look calmly down at her and apologise for my sudden movements.

  ‘I need to get going,’ I tell her, heading for the door.

  She looks like she might be about to start with some more of her HR drivel so I toss in a little parting speech, about the persecutory behaviour I’ve been victim to today. It hits all the sweet spots with phrases like ‘singled out’ and ‘discriminatory’. I even stretch to a few rhetorical questions, as if I am standing there in all my tragedy before a tribunal of hungry employment lawyers.

  She looks massively uncomfortable.

  ‘Stress is not a stigma,’ I warn her.

  She musters a halfway compassionate smile.

  ‘No one’s singling you out, Will.’ She seems to think about putting her hand on my elbow again but can’t quite bring herself to do it. ‘We’re just worried about you,’ she simpers.

  That same smile blinks on and off again in her face.

  ‘So you should be,’ I tell her gravely. ‘So you should be.’

  Right then, back down the silent corridor I go, and back down the stairs, two at a time. My hand slaps the railing, my heels click out an echoing canter.

  This time when I arrive at Will’s desk, I don’t waste any effort trying to look the part. The IT guy seems to have gone, so I just squat down and start groping around underneath the desk, where, to my immense relief, my fingers find a promising obstruction, right where Will left it, near the back and off to the left. But it’s stuck too well for me to prise off. I’m going to need some scissors. My work station is part of a small open plan area and a few people have left their own seats to take a closer at what I’m doing. I ask them if they have any scissors, which is their cue to melt away again.

  I effect a quick but thorough search of Will’s desk. No scissors in any of the drawers.

  The door to Alex’s office, which was firmly shut, is now wide open. He has come out into the corridor and is watching me.

  I ask him if he has any scissors.

  He tells me in his ‘I’m so very concerned about you’ voice that he doesn’t think scissors are a good idea.

  Nahash. Viper.

  Then I spot some, poking out of someone’s plastic desktop organiser. I stride over and retrieve them, before dropping to my hands and knees and crawling under my desk. It only takes a few seconds to cut free the memory stick from its duct tape chrysalis but while I’m still under there I take the opportunity of cover to slip it into my pocket. There are two pairs of men’s shoes next to my desk now – and if I know the security staff in this building, and I think I do, my guess would be that they like to wear exactly this kind of no-nonsense, shiny black footwear.

  ‘Hello gents,’ I greet them as I emerge from beneath the desk, ‘just getting rid of some gum.’

  I put the scissors down. They are immediately picked up.

  Now no one really knows what to do. I stand there smiling.

  I call over to Alex, ‘Alright with you if I pop out for a bit?’

  He just looks at me.

  ‘I’m going to pop out for a bit,’ I tell the goons, who seem unsure whether to let me pass or not. They glance at Alex.

  He shrugs and turns back into his office.

  Right then. Time to get out of this faithless hive.

  Just to make sure, the security guys escort me all the way to the lobby, clumping along at my side. I stand between them in the lift. We listen to its rigid cables lower us to the ground. Not a finger is laid on me, not a word is exchanged. At the big glass doors, they watch me step out on to the pavement.

  It’s a massive relief to break the hermetic seal of that interior. Back in the open, I realise just how oppressive it was in there. It takes me a couple of seconds to get used to it, the rush of all these people again, dozens of them skimming past, heads down, intent on their course. It’s like I’m waiting to join a river – it needs to work back through me again, as water passes through the gills of an unwanted catch. When I’m ready, I twitch back into the flow and head north, leaving the shadow of that sepulchre behind me.

  But even when I’m well shot of it and am enclosed in the tumult of the tube station, there’s still a certain sadness that I’m struggling to shrug off. I do not want to be playing this role. I do not want to be typecast as the Disobedient Son, courting everyone’s displeasure. It sits heavy in my gut.

  ‘This is not about me,’ I tell myself.

  I get a couple of looks, but so what? It’s important I have my head straight before I sit down with Natalie and finish this thing off. Or else I may as well just step back into the shadows and be done with it.

  ‘This is not about me trying to clear my name.’

  I am jammed into one of those lifts that transport people from the surface down to the trains.

  ‘I am doing this for the common good. For all humanity.’

  Deep! Deep! Deep! go the doors of the lift as they slide apart, sluice gates for this flow I’m in.

  It is only now that I realise, down in this burrow, that I’ve forgotten to call Natalie to tell her I’m coming. Never mind. Let the news arrive unannounced. Let it come worming through the ground to her, surfacing at her threshold. A gift from below.

  I reach into my pocket and close my fingers over the memory stick. It pulses in my fist, like there’s blood in it.

  My wrong shall at last be righted. You’ll see. I shall cut the monster’s heart from its chest.

  I am still in the crowd, still in the current. Among you all.

  I’m going to straighten this all out.

  I’ve got this.

  3

  Mind over matter – that’s what people say – I know: I’ve heard them. Wise people, movers of men, writers, philosophers, orators whose words have dropped like balm. In fact, they’ve said it so many times, in so many ways, that it’s solidified into a Truth. This mind, this brittle consciousness of which mankind is so proud, makes you better than the rest. Is th
at it? Nothing left to learn from God’s other creatures, with their base occupation of the flesh. Cogito ergo sum, as one Frenchman so grandly proclaimed.

  Well sorry, but I’m calling you out on that.

  Take this last half hour as an example. At any stage through-out my journey, I could have allowed myself to get bogged down by the spectres of the past, the myriad little reminders of my failure that had been left scattered for me wherever I cared to look. Even the name of my destination, for crying out loud: King’s Cross. It would have been so easy to do – they wanted nothing more than to see me buckle under their jeering attention. But I resisted. Not by thinking my way out of it, though – that’s my point. By doing precisely the opposite: I just let it go – I shifted into neutral and I glided it out. I spent that time sheltering in this body, where neither reason nor memory has jurisdiction.

  So when I’d get a glimpse of a brash black cross tattooed on some bloke’s arm, say, flexing in his repulsive milky flesh, I’d simply rest my head against the window of the carriage – against the cool-to-the-touch glass with its backlit scratches – and I’d let my eyes do some lazy looking. I’d watch the quick slick of world rush past, let the pressure drain out of my head. Same when a dinky little cross came winking its light-darts from a woman’s neck chain, or just now, up in the world again, when I glimpsed through the window of a bookshop the yellow and orange spines going down the shelves, and the red ones ripping across the top – a flaming cross, the worst kind. I just did what I’m doing right this minute –feeling every little flex of my skin, letting every molecule of air open itself up in my lungs, outside in, swelling the alveoli, putting the vermilion of oxygen into my blood and pushing it out into the rest of me.

  From the tip of your nose to the prints on your toes, so much territory to keep track of – it’s absorbing stuff. Although, don’t think for one second think that I find it easy tuning out like that. Because I don’t. No words can describe how I hate that stupid shape springing out at me from everywhere the whole time, like it’s a symbol of hope. There’s nothing hopeful about it, not for me anyway. Not for anyone who’s been splayed across it and left for dead.

  Anyway. Enough said.

  I’m here now, and there’s business to be done. I’m right around the corner from Natalie’s office but I’m not managing to get her on her landline or her mobile – just the cicada buzz of office background on both, overlaid with You’re through to Natalie Shapiro, please leave a message. So I did – the same one twice – telling her I need to speak to her now, in person, that I’ll wait for her in The Lamb. (What? That’s what it’s called – I don’t get to choose the names.) It’s the pub she and Will met in last time. And I must say, it looks a lot better in the daylight – more cheerful, not as grubby as it seemed when I watched them have their clandestine drink here last week. The hanging baskets are still dripping from a recent watering, and there’s no gaudy neon sign shining out from next door (the Sunny Side Up ‘tanning salon and social club’, whatever that’s supposed to mean). The door, too warped to close without a significant shove, is standing slightly ajar, suggesting that it’s one of those pubs that welcomes the early drinker.

  Before I go in, though, I decide to cover all the bases and fire off a quick email too. It takes a certain amount of faffing with Will’s iPhone to get it done (it’s funny, I see these things being used all the time, but actually doing it yourself, skating the fingertips across the screen, bringing glowing fragments of information swimming up to meet them, that’s something else). I have to sift through a ton of addresses – mostly journalists and PR people by the look of it – before I find Natalie. The first tap selects her, the second tap sends the mail. I could do this all day, it’s so satisfying.

  Inside The Lamb, the first thing I notice is the smell of beer-soaked wood, which I find immediately reassuring. There are two men already at the bar, sat several stools apart, but neither one of them bothers to look up as I walk over and order my drink. The barmaid serves me my whisky then disappears to some unseen task, leaving us to our muffled, stale silence. Outside, the distantly layered sounds of car horns and sirens seem remote and irrelevant. I feel entirely relaxed, and as the whisky lights its small and warming fire in my chest, I am finally able to kick back for a minute and marvel at yet another new sensation. I thought the tea was good but this, it’s a whole new level of drama, a tiny sun forming and then silently imploding around my third rib level. A small belch of whisky aftertaste delivers itself into my mouth as proof of what just happened.

  It’s a good thing, her not being here right away. I needed this bit of down time – pun very much intended. A jump-in takes it out of you, especially if you’re not used to it. It was different when I did it last time, I was fresh, I sprang right back into shape. But things have changed. It’s been a long, bitter haul. This time, I’m going to need a little rest.

  Maybe if I scrunched around in this chair a bit and let this stubborn body just unkink itself, like that – now that’s what I’m talking about – just get the back to scooch down a little further and the legs can start to flop out to the sides, and the belly, here you go, now I’m starting to get there, the belly just pushes up into a nice little pillow for my hands, and the –

  A loud noise, crisp and sharp as a gunshot, brings me jangling up from my slump, stomach churning, head spinning.

  Help!

  It’s such a violent shock that I think I may have actually shouted this word – its echo is still rattling in the corners of the room. The barmaid, unnoticed by me, had snuck to the table next to mine and snapped down her can of polish with a resounding crack.

  ‘You can’t sleep here, babe,’ she announces, then squirts the table a couple of times, wipes it and moves on.

  My heart is beating up in my throat, like it’s some creature I’m trying to swallow. I lever myself up on the back of a nearby chair and teeter away to the dimly lit bathroom.

  It takes a while before I’m ready to come out again. When I do, there is a man standing next to the dust-thick curtains on the far side of the bar, staring up at the sky. When he sees me emerge, he stares at me instead. He is in his mid-fifties, I would say, about a head smaller than me – he would appear to be another local. The barmaid seems to know him.

  I nod in greeting, trying not to look like I’ve just been resting my head against the greasy tiles in the toilets. I go to smooth my hair with my hand then I remember that Will’s hair is clippered down to a stubble. I give it a pensive rub instead.

  He is still staring at me. Partly as a way of turning my back on him and partly because, hey, this is my chance to live a little, I go to the bar and order another a drink. A brandy this time. But when I hand over the money, the barmaid doesn’t see it. She’s looking over my shoulder.

  ‘Simon,’ she says, ‘you’re not going to start getting all arsey, are you? You know we don’t put up with that nonsense in here.’

  I follow the direction of her gaze. I see what she means. The starey one – Simon, apparently – is standing at my table and is now eyeballing us with what can only be described as a murderous expression. His whole body is trembling with rage. Eyes as lamps of fire, is how we might have phrased it way back when. Countenance like thunder.

  He barks something at me, which at first I don’t understand, and which is so sudden and guttural it actually elicits a small grunt of surprise from one of the morning drinkers (both of whom, by the way, have now bothered to look at me, and at Simon – they’re not fans). The barmaid hops back a half step. He does it again, a little louder, and this time she squeaks in alarm.

  ‘What the shit is that?’ asks one of the alcoholics.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I tell them. ‘It’s okay.’ I knock back my brandy in one swill. ‘It’s okay,’ I say again.

  I see what’s happened here. It took me a couple of seconds but I’m there now. Those noises he’s making are in fact words, just not ones you’d expect to hear in this day and age.

  I re
ply to him in kind as I walk towards him. The Aramaic feels alien, unwrought, like pebbles grinding together in my mouth. Calm down, is what I’m saying to him. Sit down and calm down.

  He needs a little more persuading. His entire body has gone rigid. His eyes look like they are being forced out of his head.

  ‘She,’ I nod my head in the direction of the cowering barmaid, ‘is going to call the police if you carry on like this.’ But there isn’t a word for police, as such, so I have to say dayan – judge. This threatens to make him even angrier (he thinks I’m referring to Him) so I just say it in English: ‘Police.’

  ‘Do you want her to call the police?’ I tack on, partly for emphasis, partly for the others’ sake – it’s important they see I’m getting things in hand.

  He fixes them with another of his radioactive stares, then slowly, stiffly, he sits down. His hands are unnaturally planted on his knees, his head completely still. When he looks back at me I have to force myself to hold his gaze, the sheer tonnage of his disdain is so immense.

  ‘Wherefore art thou here?’ He demands to know, albeit not as quietly as I’d like. But at least he’s speaking English now, kind of. ‘Dost thou forget He forbad it?’

  Listen to him: wherefore; forbad. Fusty old fool. I can’t stand this lot, with their superior ways. It’s perfectly obvious he hasn’t the slightest interest in your world – he hasn’t been watching you, sucking it all up like I have. He’s just pushed in now because I’m here, and everyone knows I shouldn’t be. That’s all it is. He doesn’t care why I’m here, or what troubles could be in store for you. He just cares that I’ve broken The Rules. And he’s exactly the type I’d expect to come and speak to me about it – from the upper reaches, one of His inner circle – a starchy bureaucrat with all the trimmings. As far as he’s concerned, our Lord and Master could not have been clearer: no more jumping in for me, ever. And I’ve chosen to flout that direct order – it’s little wonder he’s in such a state. He’s virtually oscillating in his seat.