What I Tell You In the Dark

by John Samuel

  ‘I think perhaps your chess game will have to wait until morning,’ she says. All pretence of me having to rush off anywhere to catch a flight was dropped some time ago, by us all.

  With a belly full of hot soup and red wine, the thought of a cosy bed in this quiet, enchanted house is more than I can resist. I allow myself to be taken to a room up in the eaves, a space that has been whittled into the ancient timbers, and I say my goodnights. I sink effortlessly into the downy embrace of the duvet.

  As I lie there in the dark, I start to think about what he said to me, how this Christian myth has brought as much good as bad. I know in my heart, from all that I have seen, that he is probably right. It would be foolish, wrong even, to condemn the whole thing – en bloc, that was his phrase. Imagine the cost to those millions, for whom the radiance of Christ is all they have, the only gift of hope with which to warm themselves, their children. Or to those who set their courses by Christ’s star in circumstances too horrific to imagine.

  Why race to tear down a structure that has so much good in it? He’s right, I must slow down, take a breath, step back …

  These thoughts begin to cradle me towards sleep. I feel the warmth of my cover – so this is the cover of night, I smile in my drowse – like the glow of that hearth downstairs. I visualise him and I hear once again the comfort of his words as he spoke to me – to Will, my boy – and I know that it is not too late for me to salvage something from the wreckage of this young man’s life and to live it out with grace and humility. My hair could also whiten, my body could curl as the professor’s has done, dry as a leaf. I too could be surrounded by the spoils of a life lived in observant inquiry, my books, my memories, the echoes of those I have known, the wife that I love and who loves me in return. The promise of completion that was never to be with my Magpie. Someone to grow old with, to die with, whose love could carry me into the ultimate quiet that awaits all nature’s work.

  I am free. Free to live as I choose.

  9

  A small sound wakes me. It is deepest, coldest night. The moon, high and bright in the sky, lights the room. A silent parliament of strangers sits on the floor around my bed, packed tight against the walls, all the way back to the door, eyes wide, watching me. Mothers with sunken cheeks and loose breast skin hold the awkward parcels of infants hollowed out by the disease. Men, dark skinned, white-eyed, stare in wordless accusation, their arms folded like sticks, missionaries’ wooden crosses hang on strings from their necks, the hard corrugation of their ribs tight against their skin.

  Sick with dread, I remain absolutely still, alone with their silence. Then comes that sound again, the sound that woke me, still a long way off, but getting closer. It is the sound of a mob, baying for my blood. I can smell the dust and heat of Jerusalem, the sweet decay of Pilate’s breath.

  I open my eyes, not suddenly in horror or surprise at my dream, but with the familiar oppression of guilt reinstalled in my body. It has permeated me like a gas, suffocating the hope that nudged me to the borders of sleep. Now it is my evening spent at the fireside, the soft persuasion of the professor’s words, that seem like a dream.

  I dress in the dark and move as quietly as I can through the house, taking great care not to rest my weight on a creaking board. At the front door where my shoes were taken from me, I find them, cleaned and polished on the mat. My coat is also hanging there. It occurs to me that I should leave an explanation as to why I am about to run off, ostensibly for a second time. But what would it say, this note? How could it possibly explain my trajectory through two millennia?

  No, this departure must be silent, in the dead of night. There can be no explaining it. Vanishment, I think to myself as I slowly turn the door handle. A term the good professor would understand in his own way – a return to zero.

  Outside, a persistent, cold rain forces me to tilt forwards and draw my coat tightly around me. The whole way back into town, I barely look up, nor do I spare time for a thought except for the dogged visualisation of where I must get to.

  But when I finally do reach the plaza I find it looks very different at night, and not in a good way. While some of the office buildings are still brightly lit, despite being empty, the Spyre Group building is completely dark. I stop at the doors of the reception to cup my hands against the wet glass and peer inside. I can just make out a baseball cap and what looks like a bunch of keys that have been left on the counter where I stole the pass from. I hadn’t reckoned on any kind of security, and the thought that these things might belong to a guard is profoundly unnerving. I wait for a few minutes more but nothing changes. As I walk down the ramp into the car park my footsteps echo ridiculously loudly in the closed space. My stolen pass activates the door that leads from the top of the car park’s steps into the office. It beeps loudly as it opens and it closes with a sharp metallic click. I half hope that a light might automatically turn on but it doesn’t. I spend an awful few seconds feeling along the walls like a blind man, without success. It is only when I remember Will’s phone in my pocket that I am able to light my way to the far door at the end of this long, windowless corridor.

  After that, each new room I enter, every turn of desolate corridor, makes the susurration of blood pressure grow louder in my ears. I shake like a wino as handles are turned and light switches flipped on. But little by little, as the building slowly reveals itself to be empty, I start to calm down. When at last I reach the darkened reception, I pick up the bunch of keys and give them a triumphant shake.

  ‘Now,’ I tell myself, ‘for the hard part.’

  Except the thing is, it really isn’t. It’s disconcertingly easy to get into their computer system. I simply cruise around the building scanning each person’s work station until I find someone who has been stupid enough to write down their username and password. Inevitably, the offending Post-it is stuck to a monitor in one of the partners’ lairs (one of the few offices that is furnished like an actual room, to the extent that there are pictures and items of non-commercial type furniture in it). It always seems to be the most senior figures who end up letting down an organisation with their carelessness. Maybe that’s just what happens when you are isolated from the daily rigours of work. You become divorced from the detail.

  I sit down at the desk and crack my knuckles while the computer boots up. On the far side of the room is a rather fancy little drinks tray – dark lacquered wood, a friendly crowd of bottles and tumblers. Next to it is a mini fridge, no doubt stocked with mixers and ice. But not yet. That will be my reward when the job is done. You have to have a work ethic.

  In the end it takes nearly three hours of unbroken concentration before I manage to retrieve everything I came for. But still, that’s not bad going, especially when you consider the Byzantine structure of this trust, not to mention the fact that all I had to begin with was its name and the name of the beneficiary (which turned out to be one of three shell companies used by the Vatican). But I got there in the end, and what I now have is enough to draw everyone into the picture – InviraCorp, the Vatican Bank, the Vatican’s accountants – in fact, it’s more than enough. Every last detail is laid bare to me, the files like artefacts carefully arranged on the side of an archaeologist’s trench.

  I try to access Will’s Hotmail account only to find that it is blocked by the firewall – but it’s not a major setback. When I logged into the system using this guy’s details, it automatically launched the company’s email account, so I’m able to just use that instead without having to faff around with more passwords. I open a series of new messages (I was right, by the way: according to his email signature, this guy is a partner of the Spyre Group) and I begin the process of sending the files to Natalie. There are eighteen of them in total so I spread them across several messages, just to be sure that they don’t get snagged in this system or hers. I also write a brief covering note so she knows it’s coming from me. The messages I title like those postcards I saw earlier this evening: Proof 1/18, Proof 2/18, and so on. It’s
good to have a motif.

  When I finally come to shut down the computer, my hands, my fingers, the tendons in my forearms, everything is aching from the strain. My neck makes a sickening crunch when I straighten up from my task. And yet I can’t help thinking that despite the intensity of the work and the stress of finding my way into and around this building, and despite the professor tempting me from my course, this has all still seemed a little too easy. Not once have I felt His attention on me, nowhere have I registered the warning signs of their disapproval. But then, I suppose, there’s no reason why I should. I am, I remind myself, lost to His view now. A solitary pixel. I need to start getting used to that fact.

  ‘You mustn’t look for problems when there are none,’ I murmur, rubbing my eyes with the heels of my hands.

  Perhaps having that drink might make me feel more victorious. The amber glow of whiskey is beckoning – bourbon, Maker’s Mark – couldn’t be more fitting. I slosh a few fingers into one of the heavy-based tumblers. These glasses, with their good solid handful of liquor, are made to compliment that well-hung feeling of money and power, the surveying of a small empire of funds and cash and assets and liquidity surging through the place, driving turbines of administration and wealth management. No doubt the person whose working days are spent in this office likes to wash back a man-sized mouthful of bourbon at the end of a fat-pocketed day, or perhaps in mutual alpha recognition with a client or cohort of some description. And as I stand here doing the same, I can see why. It’s a good feeling. The long day done. The soldier home from the field.

  Drink still in hand, I gently horn off my shoes with the tips of my toes and go padding in my socks out across the carpet, for a little bimble around. I end up settling in the largest of the meeting rooms, where a flat screen television is mounted in the centre of the far wall, at the head of the table almost, as if it presides over what goes on here. I find the control and click it on.

  The next couple of hours fly by.

  The first thing I click on is a news channel. One item features an English clergyman talking about the hierarchy of their church – women, he declares, will soon be allowed to become bishops. In a stroke of staggering genius, the reporter refers to him at one point as the chief primate of the church.

  ‘Love it,’ I say, raising my glass to the screen before swilling back the last of my whiskey. I think about going to get another but nothing, not even the promise of more of this honey-sweet slugging juice, could tear me away from the television. It’s fascinating, it’s heartbreaking, it’s hilarious, it’s gut-wrenchingly tragic, all at the same time. It’s you, basically, all packed up in a box.

  What comes next is the most extraordinary thing I’ve seen so far. I have no idea what it is called, nor can I say for certain what it’s about, and yet every last detail is utterly addictive. It’s like heroin for the eyes. All I can be sure of is that these people – deeply ugly characters, every last one of them – have been forced together in confined and challenging circumstances. They appear to be in a jungle, but again, I could be wrong about that. By rights, it should be a truly dismal viewing experience, except that somehow, it isn’t. In fact, it may well be one of the most heartening things I’ve seen since I jumped in. I love it that people are making programmes like this – it reminds me of the commedia dell’arte you used to see so much of, the way each character tells of some dangerously soft patch in the collective soul. It’s vital for mankind, I think, to have lightning rods of this kind, to draw people’s hatred and despair into a common circuit. Excellent stuff.

  But my restless finger soon turns to switching again and I find myself plunged into another kind of drama, slower-acting this one but, as each phase unfolds, more and more disturbing. It’s a film, not a high-budget affair – the colours are weak and the way it is shot forces you to look at the characters in an unflattering, pitiless way. A woman is being held captive in a dingy back room. A man, who we never see, who features only as a voice on the phone, relays instructions to her increasingly reluctant captors.

  It leaves a bitter taste, this story. It is an unwelcome reminder of the kind of things that corrupted my relationship with Him – the ways in which I used to see Him behaving towards you, acts that sowed the early seeds of doubt and resentment in my mind (seeds I thought had come to nothing but which I now realise had been steadily growing into a choking vine, thriving in the shade of my denial). You must see it too, of course you do – I know you do, I’ve heard it a million times from the atheists and the rationalists – what kind of God would …? and so on and so forth. But the others, too, the triers, the ones who want to believe, they must feel the needle skipping from time to time. How could they not? But then that’s where my Suffering Son routine comes in, always invoked to persuade people away from their better instincts, and to swallow down the lump of doubt that perhaps He has it in Him to behave badly, cruelly even.

  ‘Christ,’ I say. ‘Jesus Christ, what a sorry state of affairs.’

  But the cardinals, the vicars, the Zadoks of your age, they can never really explain it away, not so that it doesn’t just keep coming back, again and again – the damp appearing each time through a fresh coat of paint. Because there is no explaining it, some of the stuff that’s gone on. Take Abraham as a for instance. God calls him up, effectively, just like the man in this film, an authority figure suddenly on the end of the line, and He tells Abraham to grab his son, tie him up and then drag him up a mountainside. Once he’s at the top, he is informed that he must murder the child. Like any father would, Abraham protests, he begs Him not to ask for so much. It is not until Abraham, demented with grief and horror, is about to push the knife into that delicate ribcage that the instructions are withdrawn. It was just a test, he is told.

  Now, you tell me: is that love?

  But hey ho – what’s done is done. There’s no point in getting worked up about it.

  I have a last flip over to the news channel, just to sort of cleanse my palate, as it were, and I am immediately told that it is five o’clock and time for the headlines. Well, not for me it’s not – it’s time I got going. These finance types like to get into work nice and early. It’s the same promise of that fat, lazy worm not yet gone to ground that brings the birds down from their trees.

  On my way back through the office I stop at one of the windows and watch the bay start to lighten in the pre-dawn. The rain has stopped, the sky washed clean for another new day. Time for me to get outside, maybe even have a little stroll on the beach before I have to head up to the airport. The sea, all water, yet receives rain still. Amazing, how many words I have committed to memory. They keep just bobbing to the surface in neat packages, like flotsam from a sinking ship.

  I exit the building the same way I came in, dodging the CCTV angles, and I emerge from the garage’s up-ramp into a world that is suddenly looking really rather lovely. That very early light is putting its thin blue shade on the bricks and tarmac and the frosted backs of the parked cars. My breath announces the life that is in me with vapour patterns that appear and immediately disperse before my face. Scattered birdsong comes blitting and witting out from the little hiding places they will always find for their homes. Halyards clink softly against masts. There is no traffic, there are no people – I am perfectly alone.

  I walk past the marina and decide that I do have time to go down on to the wet and deserted beach. There’s a good mix of shale in the sand, which makes for a pleasing foot-crunch. The tide has not long turned and there’s a brackish smell in the air. It feels just right in my lungs, laden with life. After a mile or so of walking, I take the steps back up to the road. The soles of my shoes scrape some of the beach along with me.

  From the bus stop where I stand waiting for the first service of the day, I watch a man walk down from one of the beachfront houses. At this distance it is hard to tell his age but his step is lithe and springy. He has a towel rolled into a tidy tube, which he leaves a little way up the beach, where the sand’s a little dri
er. As he reaches the waterline his movements do not betray the slightest resistance to the cold. He wades slowly and methodically up to his waist and slides into the water. He has the air of a man who has done this all his life.

  The next time I look he is nothing more than a distant churn of arms and water, just swimming out deeper and deeper, aiming at nothing.

  10

  It’s just before seven o’clock when I decide to call Natalie. She hasn’t replied to my email yet, so I thought I’d try speaking to her instead. I’m operating in a bit of a bubble here – it’d just be nice to share the news, feel some of her excitement about it, hear her first thoughts on how she’ll be running it (they’re bound to want to splash it on the front page, but maybe there’ll be follow-up pieces inside, copy filed from the affected countries even). I’d just like to have a bit of contact, is all I’m saying.

  But the person who picks up is not Natalie. It’s a man, older by the sound of it, and half asleep. At first I think it’s the wrong number – I hold the phone away from my face to check – but no.

  ‘Is Natalie there?’

  ‘Who is this?’ he wants to know.

  ‘It’s Will. Is Natalie there?’

  He perks up a bit. ‘Ah yes – Will.’ But I do not like the way he says Will, as if it’s something amusing, and I especially do not like the Ah yes, with its implication that he, whoever he might be, has been discussing me with Natalie.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I ask him, ‘do I know you?’

  ‘No, but I know you.’ Again, his tone is insolent. If I didn’t know better I’d even say there was a suggestion of something more in it, a threat of some kind.