What I Tell You In the Dark (10 page)

I trail off then immediately find I need to start up again. It's a bit like being sick. So much so, in fact, that I find myself checking the ground at my feet to see that I haven't been. I haven't.

‘The
process
is what counts. Catysis, catalystis, cataly, sis.' I can't say it. ‘Change moves through you,' I say instead, and prefer it, because it's a better description of the way it seems, like you're the ecosystem in which changes form and evolve. ‘It crept up on me, like stuff does.' I do look at him now. Both eyes are shut, a thread of saliva has run from his open mouth and now swings softly from his chin. I tell him anyway, ‘Every person on earth has experienced it – and it was no different for me: these things grind away below decks, down in the engine room, just a growling you can't recognise as thought, but then one day it gets spat up into your conch, your conchuss, your conscience-ness …' My tongue, slow-witted mollusc, apparently unable to perform that trick either ‘… your mind. Fully formed. Obvious.'

I get up and start staggering off. This time he doesn't notice me leaving, he just flows into the space where I'd been sitting.

‘The truth,' I continue to burble nonetheless, ‘always comes at the most trivial moments. Like Paul,' I smile to myself at the memory of that lunatic, ‘riding along on his horse, clippety-clop, drowsing in the dust, swaying in the saddle, probably daydreaming about throwing stones at poor old Stephen … and then boom!' I shout that. And why not? Because that's how it is –
boom!
‘Everything changes. The gears suddenly bite, and off he goes. Off he
went
,' I correct myself. ‘New life, new name, new truth. Just like me.'

At the top of Will's road, an old man is opening the door to his house. I stop to watch him. He has to put down his two shopping bags so he can get his key in the lock. I don't need to see his hands to know that they are thin-skinned and mottled. His trousers billow about his legs, which can scarcely be wider than the bones that support them. He has the small head and big ears of a nocturnal creature on the listen for predators.

I want to speak to him, share some words of fellowship, but there is nothing to say. The affinity between us, he the forward
traveller down a road I myself have just set foot on, is too complex for language. Besides, it is only I who am new to this. To him, it is all he's known. Killing time. Days, glowing bronze or streaked with rain, happy, sad, unnoticed or dull, that conspire to kill you with their passing, one by one, until finally the last of them comes, death-laden, in a dawn like any other.

6

What I should be doing is sleeping, recovering, getting warm again, but I'm not, I'm speaking to Natalie. Will's phone is tight against my ear, radiating its heat, thawing my frozen emotions. I have been explaining to her that I fell ill on the day we last spoke.

Sorry – did I just say
thawing my frozen emotions
? If so, apologies for that. A touch of tramp syrup and the hyperbole soon kicks in. So anyway, I've been telling her, with an increasingly tinny edge to my voice, that I have not been at all well. But, investigative journalist that she is, she knows a cover story when she hears one, so I'm now midway through a fumble on her latest question, which wasn't even really a question, it was one of those statements that hopes for contradiction –
You don't sound like you're okay
, is what she said.

For some reason, I'm going completely off beam. For some reason? Listen to that. I really must learn to give myself a break – it's always been my problem. Anyone else would be telling themselves it's a miracle to still be functioning at all after everything that's happened. Not a
miracle
miracle, obviously, but you know what I mean.

‘Look, just so you understand,' I'm telling her, ‘I'm not The One. I can't emphasise that enough. There
is
no One, there never
will
be a One – it's just something people would like to believe. It's back to that whole narrative thing again,' I explain, as if we've discussed this many times before, ‘mankind's fatal weakness for a tidy story, like there's always going to be that One, the hero to usher in the right ending. But the truth is I don't know how this is going to end. No one does.'

‘Will, are you sure you're okay? You're not making much sense.' Worrying that might be a little harsh to one as fragile as myself, she immediately adds, ‘Please don't think I'm looking to you for all the answers on this. What you've given us already is –'

‘But I
can
get the answers – it's not that. Sorry, sorry to interrupt, but I just want to be clear about what I'm saying here. I
can
get you the answers, that's really not a problem – I'm simply trying to point out that …'

What? What am I trying to point out? That I'm not the second coming of Christ? I think she probably assumes that. Seriously. What am I thinking? I'm not, that's the point.

‘Never mind,' I tell her.

‘Look, I really don't want you to think anyone's putting pressure on you, Will. I don't want you to …' she runs into a dead end, unable to summon a tactful phrase for the sort of freaking out she thinks I might do. ‘What I mean is, if you can get more information easily and,' she leaves an emphatic pause here, ‘legally, then yes, great, of course I'd love to see it. But if you can't, then please don't feel like it's expected of you.'

Like last time I jumped in, you mean? Shooting my mouth off to try to meet that constant expectation, that tireless need for reassurance, to be told that there's something more than all this, that there are many rooms in my father's house and other assorted nonsense. Some of that was forgivable – at the end, especially. It was just the pain talking. (Try it some time: getting flogged to within an inch of your life then left dangling in the wind, birds pecking at your head while you get freeze-frame jointed by your own miserable weight – it
hurts
, it makes you say things. It was just unfortunate for me, for us all, that people were properly listening.) The other stuff, though – my
I'll be back
shtick in particular – that's on me. That was a huge error of judgement. But the trouble is, once you start down
that path, reassuring people, telling them little stories to make them feel better, you can't stop. It's like trying to fill a bath with the plug out. What you end up with is a lot of disappointment and thwarted expectations. It's probably hard to imagine now just how bitterly let down they all felt by my failure to come back to earth and gather up all the good ones. Time has passed, and most people seem to have forgotten about all that now, and for those who haven't there are still the fanatics and the zealots, the televangelists making a tidy little business out of the waiting game. But you should have seen them back in the day, the ones immediately after Jesus, waiting and watching for my magical
parousia
. Talk about a slow-hand-clapping audience.

Anyway.

‘I've just got a thing about this,' is my colossally inadequate summary of all that. I try to weave in a phrase that I've heard bandied in Will's work place, ‘I've got a thing about managing expectations. Expectation management,' I summarise, trying to make it sound more like a formal Thing.

Nothing from her. She's at a bit of a loss now.

‘Okay, look – let me tell you what we need to make this case.' What am I, a policeman now? I need to ground things a bit. ‘Let me run through the information that will more than satisfy your lawyer. Information that I can get for you.'

‘Okay, sure.' She sounds tired.

I take the phone away from my face and look at the clock. It's 20:09. Of course it is. A two and a nine, a couple of little zeroes wedged between. What else but a hard eleven to root me in the loneliness of this moment? I know I said I wouldn't get sucked into the numbers, and I'm not about to start, I'm just saying it couldn't be clearer: eleven, or
ainlif
, as I still think of it.
Ain, lif
– one, left. Just me.

I put the phone back to my ear. ‘Quickly then.'

I have produced a pen from somewhere, in a drawer I didn't even know I'd been looking in. I've moved to the kitchen, it would seem. I start sketching on the wall, making a diagram of my plan.

‘Okay, so you have the Vatican Bank.'

For this I draw the hated shape, except that here, like this, a cross actually looks right. Dark axes of power.

‘They want to invest in InviraCorp …' I draw a long line almost to the skirting board, far enough down for me to be crouching. There I mark a black circle. ‘But they can't just do it directly or else everyone would know and …'

‘They'd be writing my story for me,' she chimes in.

That's good, her engaged voice is back. She's finishing my sentences again, like the other day down by the canal.

‘Exactly,' I tell her. ‘So they have to use some offshore location – in this case Jersey,' I draw a big fat pound sign midway down the line, ‘where they set up a little cluster of trusts,' I stab at the pound sign with the pen point, making the cluster, ‘administered by faceless trustees, for the benefit of undeclared owners.'

‘And you think you can get the details of these trusts?'

‘I know I can.' My pen hovers over the dot cluster, I know no such thing. I believe it, though, to the point of knowing. Quite the model man I'm becoming. ‘All they are is conduits, these places. No money is kept there, it just flows through, but what they do hold is records. Details of where that money is headed and what other money it will send back.'

‘What do you mean
send back
?'

‘Well …' my pen quickly sketches another line, shooting off at a tangent ‘… the money doesn't just go straight from the Jersey trust to InviraCorp, it goes via another one of these offshore places – let's say Cayman for argument's sake.'

I intend to draw a palm tree but it comes out looking like an anchor – that'll do just as well.

‘From there, it goes to InviraCorp. But, and this is the important part, the profits also come back. That's what the trustees are there for, to ensure that the right people are benefiting from the different income streams. So when the money they ushered out of the holy coffers has doubled, tripled, septupled itself, they then divert it right back in.'

I delve a little more into the granular detail, talking her through the twists and turns of these structures, all the while etching in my words until my diagram has become labyrinthine, Escheresque in its conundrums. It now covers the whole of the wall space between the door and the fridge.

I realise it has been several minutes since she has spoken. ‘Are you still there?' I ask.

‘Yes, of course. I'm just trying to keep up.'

‘Don't worry if it's all a bit much to take in. We can go over it again at some point – this is just to give you a sense of the situation. It's really not an uncommon set-up. In fact, pretty much every business runs its money through these places – it's all perfectly legal. It's a standard way that companies have come up with to avoid paying their dues. That's just how people are – how they've always been.' Darwin had that cold, I want to add, but I don't because I don't want to come off sounding too certain, like some kind of evolutionary biologist, secular zealot type, which obviously I'm not. I just happen to know what I'm talking about. ‘But this isn't about tax avoidance. This is about something much, much worse than that. This is about a cabal keeping their secret, about the vast market they have created. First they sentence the God-fearing masses to death with propaganda about contraception, then they portion up life itself, in the form of hopelessly inadequate delay drugs, and they sell it back to the miserable wretches as they die in their ditches.'

I pause, not for effect but to recover my composure. It's made
me pretty angry saying all this. With myself, as much as with them.

She breathes a rush of static into my ear, the phone like an exotic shell that's trapped the sound of a warm and perfect sea.

‘You should hear what they have to say about it.'

There's the sound of her fingers tapping a keyboard.

‘Are you still at work?' I ask.

‘No but I can access it here, the comment they sent last time. I only used part of it in the piece I wrote but there was a phrase in there that …' The sentence is left hanging while she scans through her email folders.

‘Here it is.' She reads, ‘
InviraCorp is part of the solution in the global fight against HIV, not a part of the problem
… Okay, that bit I used but this:
InviraCorp is a politically and religiously neutral organisation
. I didn't bother with it. It wasn't relevant, or at least, it didn't seem relevant at the time. Now, though, it makes perfect sense why they would want to drop in a phrase like that.'

It has Alex's fingerprints all over it.

‘Cheap spin,' I tell her, ‘will not be enough to get them out of this mess. Not once you have the evidence to dish the full dirt. Besides, InviraCorp is not the real target here. They're the small fry. We're hunting for the big prize.'

I have in my mind a spear held aloft in the leaf-filtered light, silent footfalls taking us deeper into the wood. The beast sulking at the mouth of its cave, surrounded by bones and scattered trophies of shields and helmets.

She, meanwhile, is still busy on her computer. I can hear her typing again, the sound a modern hunter makes.

She's forwarding to me a few bits that I might find useful, she tells me. She then starts again to address her nagging feeling that I may be biting off more than I can chew – if only she knew (am I doing it subconsciously, I wonder, this rhyming thing?). She's worried about me, just like my little Mary Magpie always
was (with good reason it turned out, but this is not the same thing at all). I tell her, for the last time, that I'm absolutely fine. That I'll be in touch in a day or two. Then we hang up.