What I Tell You In the Dark (2 page)

Again I resist. Again I press on.

It is nearly midday by the time I reach Stepney, a hinterland of poverty that hangs out of Whitechapel like a stillborn. This is where Will calls home, among the exhaust-blackened terraces and the tower blocks. There is something timeless about this place: suffering distilled through the generations. Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

I've seen these kebab shops, these strip-lit grocery stores I don't know how many times as I've watched Will come and go – this scrub of parkland shoehorned between the buildings. There's nothing pretty about any of it, and yet I find myself irresistibly drawn to it. It makes me nostalgic for that other time I jumped in. Those golden few weeks that preceded my infamous Mistake. I came to feel right at home among the poor and the destitute back then – so much easier to read life there, I found, with the frills torn away and people just being people. And He understood that – I could tell – He appreciated what I was trying to achieve down in those fly-blown dustbowls, with everyone writhing over each other in their blind litter, desperate to get a touch of me. Or at least, He understood it right up until it turned sour. After that, He saw nothing but His own fury.

Appropriately enough, it's a homeless woman who rouses me from this thought. She scuttles out from some corner and grabs hold of my arm.

‘I know you,' she shouts, even though we're only a few inches apart.

‘No,' I tell her, ‘you don't.' I try to move off but her determination to hold on to me forces me to stop.

This is not good. I need to get rid of her, pronto. This kept happening last time – loners, lunatics, vulnerable people as
they're now known, they've always been the first to sense us. And if you're not careful, it can really throw you off your game. I ended up with a slipstream of them following me into every temple, on to every mountaintop – and it wasn't just me either: Simon, Barnabas, Paul especially, a lot of those early guys really struggled with it. I don't want to sound callous but it's not exactly what you want when you're trying to sell The Word to people, to have some comet's tail of derelicts and misfits.

I shake her loose. But she keeps up with me, beetling along at my side.

‘It's you!' she yells again, this time really drawing out the
ooh
part of
you
.

She's strangely hard to describe, as these people so often are – she's filthy of course, and wild looking, but that's about all you can say for certain. Her hair could be any colour really and she could be literally any age between twenty and sixty. It's impossible to tell, the lives they lead. Her hands, though, are bony and strong.

‘Alright, you got me,' I tell her. ‘It
is
me.'

At this, she stops dead in her tracks. Her lips are moving silently, her eyes are darting around, looking at everything but me.

I'm going to try to do it the nice way – I owe her that much (she
is
right, after all). ‘Look,' I say gently, ‘come over here.'

I lead her to a small alleyway where another homeless person is asleep – unconscious is probably a better way of describing it – in a drift of rubbish bags. People occasionally flit past but no one is paying us any attention. She just stands there in front of me, eyes lowered, entranced by her hectic, fiddling hands.

In a whisper, not wanting to break the spell, I ask her to look at me. Which she does, stupefied with wonder. I crouch down next to the sleeping form at our feet (on closer inspection I see that it's a man). He doesn't move.

‘This,' I place a hand on the man's shoulder, ‘is where you can serve me best. You must help your fellow man.'

‘Get off,' he mumbles from the depths of his stupor.

I stand up to face her. She continues to watch my every movement, rickety but intent, like a mangy hawk.

‘My sheep hear my voice,' I tell her, ‘and I know them.'

Very slowly, I reach out my hands to her, open palmed –
noli timere
. She allows herself to move in a fraction closer. I tell her how He loves her, how He loves all His children, that the poorest in body are the richest in soul. I woo her with my words, nearer and nearer, until finally I am able to draw her against me in an embrace. We remain like that for several minutes, and as I hold her, her aroma reveals itself to me like a deeply held confidence. At first there is only the citrus astringency of urine but, little by little, something far more complex emerges, something unknowably sad – the peaty sweetness of loneliness and decay. I rest my cheek against her grease-dampened head and lull her softly. Then, as the last of her spasmodic movements twitch into stillness, I lay her down in the plastic next to the man and kiss the blackened knuckle of her hand, which still clutches my sleeve.

‘You must release me now,' I almost sing to her.

She settles back into the plastic. The man's body adjusts soundlessly to accommodate her.

‘Be on this earth,' I tell her as I leave. ‘Every second is a miracle.'

By the time I reach the top of Will's street, I'm beginning to feel good. Better than good, in fact. I feel more – can't think of the word – than I've felt for a very, very long time. All I know is that jumping in like this was the right move. I'm sure of that now – it's something I can
feel
, on a cellular level. (Complete! That's the word I was looking for. I feel complete again.) It hasn't been
easy, though, doing it like this, against the will of the Big Fella. The last thing I want to do is defy Him but it was a split second thing, you couldn't even call it a decision – more of a reflex really, quick like a cat. And now here I am.

It's a two-storey terraced house with a flat on the ground floor and another above. There are buzzers for Pryce and Sherwin (Will's neighbour – her angry fist comes knocking late into the night, her notes come skidding beneath the door – his pacing, she says, is like a herd of elephants).

Inside is an entrance hall whose floor has been polished to a neck-breaking gleam. A small table by the door bears a stack of letters, all of them for Will, all of them bills. Luckily, though, Ms Sherwin, the stacker of envelopes, the polisher of floors, is not here to visit her disapproval on me. Even so, I take the stairs two at a time. All I want now is to get inside and get on with the job.

A couple of minutes later I'm sitting on Will's sofa, his laptop booting up on my knees. As its fan wheezes and its innards tick into life, I find myself surprised by these familiar surroundings, how different they are in the unfiltered light of reality. The hysteria of all these bible pages, for one thing, taped to the walls like that, scarred by Will's highlighter, annotated by his looping scrawl. Or his mattress, his duvet, his pillows, all of them dragged through from the bedroom and deposited here in the hope that the murmur and flicker of the television might hold some promise of sleep. It all just seems a little unhinged, looking at it this way. I hadn't noticed that before, when I was watching him do it all. I must have got caught up in the moment, I guess. Caught up in the person. It's hard to explain.

The screen flashes on. Okay, this is it. I know it's on here somewhere because I watched him put it there. I watched him stay late at work one evening, waiting for the others to leave. Then once they'd gone, I watched him travel around the office
like an insect, sucking data into a memory stick. Too smart, too painstakingly cautious to email something like that, he carried it home in his pocket, vigilant at every step, needing to be certain no one was following.

So why is nothing happening? There was a blank white screen, inviting the expectation of something more, except now all I have is a neutral background that looks nothing at all like Will's desktop. And some stupid video offering to help get me started.

Please no. Surely he hasn't.

He
has
. He's stripped it. He's wiped his computer.

In a desperate attempt not to believe this, I whip the cursor around the screen, clicking on this, clicking on that, but everything I open launches itself for the first time, oblivious to a time before Will lobotomised the system.

I almost hurl the thing at the wall. How could I have not noticed this?

I slump back into the sofa, sending the computer clattering to the floor. He must have done it last night. He must have known what he was going to do today. He was getting ready, covering his tracks, eliminating all evidence of –

‘Wait!' I actually shout this, springing back to my feet.

Wait
. There's still the memory stick. That dear, darling little memory stick of his. He took it back to work and he left it there, an insurance policy squirreled away in his desk. He must have forgotten about it, or else he just switched off this morning and stopped caring about the details, one foot already off the stage. Either way, it's still there for the taking.

‘Yes!' I complete a hugely satisfying air punch as I collapse back down into the sofa cushions.

My weight causes a pile of papers to topple from the armrest and subside against my leg. I pick up the edition of last week's newspaper with Natalie's article in it. Will has left it folded out
at the harrowing picture of a cloth-masked doctor injecting a baby whose arm barely seems wider than the needle. Above it the headline reads
Bleeding the heart of Africa
.

I've read it several times already, like I was almost physically there with Will as he devoured the words over and over. But actually holding the pages between my fingers like this, it makes the whole thing seem even more real. The suffering is less abstract when you can feel the story next to your own skin, as if yours are just the last in a long line of hands upon hands upon hands. It suits her writing too – it's like it's meant to be touched. There's a lean muscularity to her prose – the news and nothing more, every word weighed for its content.

I worm down further into the cushions and hold the slightly trembling pages above me. She tells the story with glorious economy. Big Pharma the immediately familiar villain of the piece, except this time she can reveal that its clutches extend further than we ever knew. InviraCorp – the name slips like a serpent into her text – one solitary company but with a root structure so vast that it curls through every corner of HIV care in Africa: the distribution of medication, the bribery of corrupt officials, the eventual dizzying profit hikes. InviraCorp – she keeps repeating it, showing how it's everywhere, an unseen force in the lifecycle of these antiretroviral drugs as they are shipped across a continent ravaged by plague – she uses that word. Children born with a death sentence, whole communities annihilated, while this one corporation looks calmly on. Enormous wealth leveraged from the pit of human misery.

It is the perfect beginning. I crumple the pages down into my lap. Now it's up to me to make sure she finishes the story – Will couldn't, but I can.

I rise from my seat and stand with my back to the window, washed in dusty sunlight. On the opposite wall, I watch my shadow, still and dark, sharpened by His light.

I must go now. I must retrieve the putrid secrets that Will extracted, whose poison nearly killed him, and I must bring them to Natalie. In her hands they will be delivered to the world.

I swap the tracksuit for one of Will's pressed suits and a freshly ironed, cellophane-shrouded shirt. In the bathroom I splash my face at the dank font of the sink.

I will uncover this truth, intact, a still-beating heart of darkness.

I watch my hands straighten Will's tie, smooth down the lapels of his suit. I like this smile of his, how it sets his jaw with new purpose. One of God's own soldiers now.

‘
Apokálupto
,' I tell my reflection in a whisper.
It shall be revealed
.

It's a whisper that remains on my lips as I retrace my steps back out into the daylight, and as I glide through the streets in search of wings to carry me toward my destiny. At a minicab office I blurt the address to one of the men who is sitting there playing dominos. He nods and takes his coat from the back of the chair, and still without a word, he leads me to his car. A sturdy charioteer. Together we speed through the traffic. Nothing impedes us.

I shall deliver this vile grub of truth to her.

Am I speaking these words? I cannot tell. The man's eyes watch me in the mirror but they do not threaten. They understand, just as He will come to understand this purpose of mine. It opens in me like a bud – a hidden quick that senses change. The long, hard remission of winter is coming to an end.

2

Back here again.

This building is a Möbius strip of corporate collusion. Corridors turn back on the same corridors, offices reveal the same set pieces of huddled talk. Lone figures at phones and computers, connected to unseen others. I hasten through, and each one that sees me works the same script, affects the same show of casual greeting. Only when I have passed do they begin their excited whispering. And who can blame them?

It's going to be hard to justify my presence here, so soon after this morning's events. Even before today the coals of suspicion have been smouldering. Since the InviraCorp story broke last week, the account has been locked down. Low-level execs like Will were immediately shut out of the files. They must suspect a leak – Will was convinced that they knew he was passing information to Natalie. He barely slept these past few days. The morning her article appeared, the partners were in at dawn, having received early word on the wires. By midday, InviraCorp's top people were beginning to arrive from the City office. By late afternoon the rest had made it, all the way from the European production facility, rumpled and irritated by hours of travelling. Will watched them come and go – we both did – but no one discussed what was said. Not that they needed to. Damage limitation is all that matters at times like these. Everyone knows that. Bring out the janitor with his piss mop and his bucket. Deny, deny, deny.