What I Tell You In the Dark (20 page)

The man hurries away.

‘You need to learn some humility,' Abaddon continues, as if no one had interrupted him. ‘You need to remember who made this universe and you need to let the people remember it too. It doesn't matter that they think they're going to flutter up to this little paradise you've promised them. Let them think it. In fact, the more they think it, the better – you actually did The Boss a favour with that nonsense. It's the perfect outcome – He didn't ask you to lie for Him, but you did, and now that you have … well, let's just say it doesn't hurt our numbers. As long as people still think there's something in it for them, then they still keep Him in mind, they still praise and honour Him for the life He has given them. And by the time they find out it's just a simple switch-off, well at that stage there's no turning back – and besides, they never do find out. The human brain is a well-wired bit of kit.' He pauses for a second, probably thinking about the brains he's seen, spilled out of cracked heads. ‘But I wouldn't want to spoil the surprise,' he gives me an evil smirk, ‘you'll be seeing it for yourself soon enough.'

‘You're a liar.' He's right, my voice does sound small and pathetic. ‘He cares, I know He does. Don't forget, I knew Him once too – better than you, better than any other – and I know that …' but the words peter out into nothing, because I don't actually know. I'm beginning to wonder if I ever knew. ‘Just
because you don't care about anything,' a last thought hisses out of me, ‘don't assume the same is true of Him.'

‘You, my friend, are adorable.' He pats my cheek lightly. ‘Why don't you just go ahead and believe whatever you want?'

He turns to go, then thinks better of it – one more thing to say.

‘Oh yeah – I didn't tell you, did I? I also had a chat to your employer, and to those good people at InviraCorp. I just felt it was important for them to know where their leak was coming from. You can imagine what they made of it all. But that wasn't even the best part. No, the best part was when I told our friends over at the Vatican – and, believe you me, we do have friends there. Good friends.' He shakes his head, smiling, ‘
Dio mio
, what a rumpus. They were
not
impressed – they were even talking about putting some of their
esperti
on it.' There's an almost reverential light in his eyes when he says this. ‘Have you ever seen those guys work? So much more subtle than I ever was, and so careful too. You can always trust them to do a good, clean job.'

He holds the barrel of his finger to the side of his head and makes a silent
Pow!
with his lips.

‘And fear not, they'll be sure to make it look like an accident,' he tells me as he begins to walk away. ‘They always do.'

12

Everyone better just get out of my way. I can't
believe
that not one single person found the courage to step up and help me tackle that monster. Again!

‘Where were you?' I scream at some people outside a restaurant.

‘Where are they when I need them?' I growl to myself as I jog along the pavement.

Of course, the moment Abaddon was out of the picture and it was just me there, recovering myself, half collapsed against the cold bricks, I had no shortage of strangers coming to check on me, wanting to know if I was alright, if I needed any help.

Too little, as I told them all, and too late. I actually had to shove one woman out of the way as I struggled to my feet. Too persistent for her own good.
Let me help you
, she kept saying to me.

‘You were not here when I needed you,' I hissed to her as she tottered backwards from my push, ‘You never are.'

‘Help!' she called out. The irony of it.

That was when I started to run, a run that has now slowed to an erratic, panting trot. It soon becomes clear that I will not be able to continue any further on foot. My head is throbbing with the strain. I touch my hair and find that once again my crown is wet with blood from Abaddon's beating.

I come to rest at a bus stop. Its destination is obscure to me, nor do I bother to look. I know only that its number, 38, is perfect for the occasion. As I stand there, I become aware of the others who are waiting, a lowing, mulish throng pressing around me, the miasma of their smells, the prattle of their talk.

Breathless from my exertions, I have to squat on my heels. Every few seconds I need to hawk up the bile that seems to be pooling in my lungs and gob it out into the road. Some of them shrink away from me, others barely seem to notice. Their chewing, speaking faces stare with the effort of menial tasks. They witter to each other about nothing, they gawp at their phones in a paralysis of fascination. Nowhere do I see the promise of meaningful exchange. Nowhere is there evidence of real inquiry. There is no penetrating gaze, except for my own.

Disgust makes my mouth begin to work, but silently, not giving voice to the words, just shaping them and aiming them at those who are watching me through the slanted sides of their vision.

You ruined me
, I secretly say.

On the bus, I sit alone at the back. Occasionally I look out of the window. I have no idea where I am going. At some traffic lights I see a billboard next to a man selling newspapers. It says ‘Father Behind Honour Killing'. As the bus sets off again the vendor looks up at my window.

I burrow back into my seat. I shut my eyes, I shut them so tightly it makes the muscles in my face tremble. Abaddon was right, I am a joke. All these people, it's not truth they need, it's comfort. They reach out their arms, slack-jawed with wonder, always trying to touch what they cannot have. And to think I tried to bring it closer to them, I tried to compass them, teach them a way to love Him and to love themselves. To live in love, that was my dream. And now look – the name of Christ snatched up like a trademark, bartered to a tribe of thugs and crooks.

What an imbecile I have been. To think I was ever moved by the sucking thirst of mankind – to think I actually sacrificed everything for it.

‘Stop that.'

There is no one else left on the top deck of the bus except for me and this man.

‘Stop that,' he says again. He is sitting a few rows away, turned round to face me.

He means my hands. They are drumming on the back of the empty seat in front of me. I can't seem to stop them.

‘You deaf, mate?' He has stood up now, or halfway up – he cannot stand in this space. He is holding a can of lager. He has big square hands and a poorly reset nose.

‘No,' I mumble. With great effort, I force my hands under control by gripping the metal rail I have been banging.

Still he stands in the aisle, trapping me like an animal. He is dark – jet black hair, coarse stubble – a
contadino
with murder on his mind. There is a bulge inside his jacket – it can only be a gun.

I prepare myself for death. Once again, I shut my eyes.

‘You can't sleep here.'

This is the next voice I hear. A hand is shaking me, not roughly but briskly, part of someone's work.

It is the bus driver. We're parked, stopped for the night, and I am down on the floor wedged between the back seats. My back is twisted somehow. Hot needles of pain shoot down my leg and up my spine as I struggle to my feet. We are in the bus garage.

‘I must have passed out,' I tell him. ‘There was a …' I don't bother to finish my sentence. He's no longer there anyway, he's halfway down the stairs.

‘You need to get off the bus,' he calls up to me.

As I hobble out into the street, still hounded by the pain in my back, I start to notice an arrhythmia in my heart that had not been there before. It occurs to me that the man on the bus must have injected me with some form of slow-acting poison. It happens all the time.

I double back into the garage in search of some private corner where I might perform an intimate appraisal of my body. I end up in an unlocked store cupboard, with standing room only among the mops and buckets and bottles of cleaning agent. I disrobe and by the light of the half-open door I spend thirty dismal minutes examining every inch of my body for signs of needle puncture, rubbing at each blemish, scratching at every fleck of skin, like a witch hunter searching for a mark.

The results, though, are disappointing. Inconclusive might be a better word since my other symptoms persist, are worsening even, despite the lack of any obvious puncture point. The pain in my back, for example, has now spread to my left leg. Each time I move it the sciatic nerve flashes down through my buttock and into the back of my knee. It takes a great deal of time for me to put my trousers back on. My shoelaces I have to leave undone, my socks lie discarded on the cement floor – bending to reach these things is now impossible. Wounded, limping away from there, I know that I must go to ground. I cannot stay out in the open like this.

When I reach Will's flat it is well past midnight. I ask the taxi driver to stay and watch while I unlock the door and go inside. But as soon as I am upstairs, shut away once again in the airless apartment, I realise that this is not the refuge I was looking for. I need to get further afield. There will be others like the man on the bus, and it won't be long before they come looking for me here. The hemmed-in geography of the city makes me feel like a laboratory rat, forced on through the plastic corridors of an experiment, ever nearer to death. What I need is a more natural space, with large, solid houses. A picture of just such a place flickers half-formed at the edge of my consciousness – a memory of Will's still snagged in this flesh – but it's enough. Enough to know that I need to find my way to his parents' house. It's an added complication – just talking to his mother on the phone
was exhausting enough – but it's safer than this, waiting here in this cell.

I take something for the pain and I work deep into the fretful hours of the night gathering what I need. The first thing to find is Will's address book, a dog-eared little thing I have seen somewhere. I can visualise everything about it, except for where I saw it. I perform my search in total silence, creeping from room to room, my limp slowly ironing out as the pain killers kick in. Voltarol, this one was – a swart mythology to its name. A muscular, hammer-wielding name. I soon find it and, along with some clothes, other scattered papers, anything really that looks useful, it gets stuffed into a canvas bag.

Then comes a soft knock at the door. I listen, stock still, as this is followed by a gentle scraping in the lock. Someone is trying to pick it open. In a reflex of panic I start to shout at the top of my voice, yelling that I am calling the police. I collect pans from the kitchen and bang them together, advancing towards the closed door as I would towards a bear that has come sniffing around my camp. I stop only when I hear a different kind of knocking, the hammering of angry fists, and the sound of Alice Sherwin spitting my name. I know then that the intruder must have fled.

I remove myself to the bedroom. There, ears covered with a pillow, eyes sealed tight, I wait for the deliverance of morning.

13

As I step off the train a woman who can only be Will's mother waves to me from the far end of the platform. She had sounded relieved when I'd called her from a payphone in the station but that's not how she looks now as she walks towards me. The nearer she gets, the more her determination to look cheerful starts to waver, to the extent that when we actually meet and hug she finds it hard to let go. I can tell that she is crying into the folds of my coat, so I decide to let her stay there for a minute or two. Unlike the city dwellers I left behind in London, the people around us here are unashamedly curious. One lady in particular almost seems to be thinking about coming over.

Will's mother has noticed this too. ‘Quick,' she says, sniffing and blinking up at me, ‘before Mrs Evans sticks her nose in.'

She doesn't pry too much into what she calls my business as we drive away from the station into a nexus of overgrown lanes, but she does want me to see the doctor. I remember his name from our last conversation – Dr Bundt. She glances over at me to see how this request has gone down.

I nod but continue to stare straight ahead. I can feel her eyes on my battered face, as if she's trying to make it match up to my laconic explanation (
I was in an accident
).

‘Oh Billy, you have got yourself into a pickle.' She sounds like she's going to cry again.

Back at the house, though, there's too much chaos for any of that maudlin feeling to last. As we were reaching the end of our journey, Will's mother had said to me that Izzy, Luc and the kids are staying – she'd wanted it to be a surprise, she said, but (again
with the glances at my face) she'd decided I'd probably had enough surprises. I had no idea who any of these people were but, now that we're here, I can see quite clearly that Izzy must be Will's sister. Same forehead, same way of standing.

‘Good grief,' is the first thing she says to me, ‘you look dreadful.' But unlike Will's mother, who is clucking disapprovingly at my side, Izzy seems to find it vaguely amusing. ‘Someone obviously doesn't share your unique sense of humour – or did you walk into a door?'

Before I get the chance to answer, Luc (I'm assuming) appears in the doorway flanked by a little girl and bearing in his arms a wriggling baby. ‘
Oh la vache
!' he says. ‘What happened to you?'

I'm beginning to think it might be worth getting some kind of card printed up for me to give to people. ‘I got hit by a car,' I tell him. ‘It's a long story.'

Secure in the safety of her position behind Luc's legs (which she took up the moment she saw me), the girl announces, ‘
Je suis dans ta chambre
.'

‘Ah yes, I meant to tell you about that,' Will's mother says a little sorrowfully, as if she might now be thinking that her son is the one in most urgent need of a proper bed. ‘We're a bit short on space, so I'm afraid you're going to have to make do with the sofa.'