What I Tell You In the Dark Read online

  ‘Yes,’ I lie. It seems the kindest thing to do.

  The train is slowing down and there’s a bit of a crowd behind me. I step through into the little hallway.

  ‘Oh,’ she sniffs loudly. ‘Oh I see. I’m sorry, Billy. I don’t mean to … You get back to your work trip then, and we’ll see you on the weekend. Will you come down on Saturday morning? Just text me the time, Dad can come and pick you up at the station.’

  Who knows where I’ll be by Saturday morning?

  ‘Will do. I’ll see you then.’

  But she’s not quite finished.

  ‘Billy? You are remembering to take your tablets, aren’t you? Only Dr Bundt –’

  ‘Of course I am.’ Number three in my liar’s triptych.

  ‘Oh good. I hope you don’t mind me asking. I just worry about you …’

  ‘You don’t need to worry.’

  ‘I’m your mother, worrying’s part of my job.’ She’s much chirpier now. ‘See you on Saturday then. Love you.’

  ‘Love you too.’

  Poor woman. And poor Will. It’s the worst part of suffering, to see how your pain spreads to the people who love you.

  I slip the phone back in my pocket, which is a feat in itself. There’s barely room to move in here now. Everyone has squashed into this tiny space, with their smells and breath and chatter. At the other end of the carriage I can hear the Thais faffing about with their luggage – they’re a squabbly bunch, more like chickens than people.

  As I step out on to the platform at Gatwick I reflexively check my surroundings for signs of His disapproval, but am not surprised to find that there are none. Throughout the day I have been watchful, before that even, after my conversation with Natalie yesterday, during my first outing in the park, and yet not one sign have I seen. It seems odd, not to be opposed, to have been stripped of my well-worn role of Disgraced Son. Even His minions appear to have forgotten me – no more sport for them in the mocking crucifix, no more scolding cameos. The abandonment is total. And yet, Paranoia still whispers to me now and then, as it is at this very moment, that surely there must be a reason for this, that He knows something I cannot yet see. They all see it, a fatal crack in my future, a flaw that will see me subside into failure.

  No. I shake my head free of this thinking. I must stick to the evidence of my eyes. It is simply that I am forgotten. The moment I was born into this world, I died in His eyes. He, they, none of them, have any further interest in me. For them, mortality is an early form of death, no longer worth watching in any detail, just part of a seething, faceless whole. And that is precisely how I need to stay: invisible. From here on in, I must keep to the cover of humanity, and accomplish my work in the shadows.

  All around me, I see evidence of His absence. The billboard ads that litter the airport concourse – Lust, Greed, Pride, Gluttony: I’ve crossed off four of the Big Seven after just three minutes of walking. This is the people’s terrain, where His reach is incomplete, confined only to those spired strongholds I mean to attack, and the forces they mobilise. I can hide here from His judgement.

  And so when the airline girl asks me at the check-in if I have any baggage, I simply tell her no.

  ‘I have nothing,’ I say. ‘Just me.’

  8

  As we descend upon Jersey and the rattling tube of our small aircraft banks to line itself up with the runway, I am given a tilting vista of the island. The coastline is perfect, its hems of greenery and unspoiled sand touch a glittering sea. Large houses sit like jewels on their abundant pillows of land. Only money, and lots of it, can keep a place looking so good at this fatigued stage of the human race.

  In the arrivals terminal, corporate drivers wait with their cardboard signs, messenger bees buzzing back and forth from the moneypots. With me on the plane were the men for whom these signs are intended; also alongside us were other rich men’s wives laden with London shopping, returning home to rest before drawing more from the well. One such woman has, like me, not had to dally in the baggage hall and has swept through into arrivals more or less alongside me (while studiously deleting the fact of my presence from her consciousness, if you know the type I mean). I have no bags – she has a few of those stiff paper bags with rope handles from fancy boutiques. She is sour with the stench of emptiness. A genuine sadness washes over me as I watch her walk out towards the car park and recede into the distance. I hate to see life squandered like that, body and heart hardened by the thrust and parry of securing a moneyed husband, and for what? Trinkets, personal trainers, house, car – stuff, just stuff.

  Speaking of the quest for money, it occurs to me that I need to pay a visit to the cash point. I find one in a quiet corner of the arrivals lounge, which would have been a perfect setting for the channelling exercise of extracting Will’s PIN from the muscle memory of his fingers. Unfortunately, though, I was forced to have a stab at that earlier this morning, in the loud and echoing concourse of the railway station when I was buying my train ticket. It doesn’t do much for your powers of concentration to know that there is a queue of time-pressed commuters at your back – not to worry, though, I got there in the end (third time lucky – but still, a win’s a win).

  I am pleasantly surprised by the oddly colourful notes that come out of this dispenser – it’s like real money, just a bit more fun. Some of it even has pictures of Jersey cows. So that’s what a cash cow looks like, I nearly say to the gentleman (he deserves the term – hand-stitched gloves, perfectly parted hair, Windsor tie knot) who has ambled up to take his place at a respectful distance behind me. But I keep my thoughts to myself and confine myself instead to a cordial nod in his direction – a gesture of thanks, really, that his subtly cologned presence (nothing floral, more like an old sandalwood box with a squeeze of lime) has chased away the stench of that offshore slut creature.

  It takes no time at all to get into St Helier, or Town as the taxi driver calls it. I ask him to drop me at Maritime Plaza, which turns out to be a sizeable development of new buildings, some of them apartments, some commercial, abutting an equally spotless marina with nothing but white speedboats moored in it. Behind, out in the bay, is a sunlit castle. All of this, combined with the apparent absence of any people (there is not a single soul in sight), makes for a vaguely dreamlike effect. A favourite phrase drifts into my mind, the beached margent of the sea. It’s pleasing to say, and I repeat it happily to myself as I walk across the plaza towards the Spyre Group building. This is my target – the trust company through which the Vatican’s assets are channelled. All I need to do is find a way of getting in there and excising that very particular portion of its carefully guarded data. It seems easy enough – what I mean is there’s nothing special about it from the outside, just your typical modern office block, four storeys of chrome and glass with a down-ramp to a basement car park. I sidle past and have a furtive glance through the entrance – a couple of girls are sat behind the reception desk, one is talking on a headset, the other is sending a text message. Neither of them look at me as I pass.

  I decide the best idea for now is just to hang back and look for an opportunity. It’s gone one o’clock, the offices are steadily disgorging themselves of hungry workers. Too busy at the moment. From the window seat of a nearby café I watch the suits go back and forth in a stuttering stream. I keep my eyes glued to the Spyre Group building, waiting for something useful to happen. I am on my third coffee by the time it does. One of the receptionists, the texting one, not the headset one, has appeared. It’s well past lunch now, and at first I think she may just have come out for a cigarette. But no, off she goes, beetling straight past me across the once-more deserted plaza. She must be off on some errand. This is my moment. When she’s well out of sight, I pay up and wander over there to make my move. If I’ve learned one thing in all these centuries of watching it’s to keep a plan as simple as possible, and this is no exception. All I do is rush up to the front desk and tell the headset girl that there are some kids skateboarding down the ra
mp into their car park. She looks predictably shocked at my battered appearance (this bruising around my nose is making everything a lot harder – people already see me as trouble before I’ve even opened my mouth, I can see it in their faces) but she looks even more outraged at what I’ve just told her. As I hold the door open for her, she races out to take a look, not even waiting to see if I am following behind her. Which is good, because I’m not. Instead, I’m stuffing a security pass into the pocket of my jacket, an act which, even though it takes just ten seconds to complete (seven to locate the pass on her desk, three to get it in my pocket), she very nearly catches me doing.

  ‘Did you see them?’ I ask affably when she walks back in.

  It’s clear from the way she’s eyeing me that I have the look of someone who has only just stopped doing something they shouldn’t have been doing. She bustles past me.

  ‘There was no one there,’ she tells me, while scanning the surface of her desk – she shows no sign of noticing that one of the passes has gone. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t think I caught your name.’

  ‘Oh don’t worry,’ I tell her, as I breeze back towards the door. ‘It’s not important.’

  Outside, I set off at a nice brisk pace in the direction of the marina. I have to say I’m feeling pretty pleased with how smoothly that just went. A quick glance at Will’s phone tells me that it’s a little after three. Got some hours to kill, then, before I can try to inveigle my way back in there. The cover of night, another phrase that pops into my head. Yes, I like that – it has the right feel to it. Not the cold brilliance of the stars, but a blanket that can be pulled over, close and tight.

  When I get to the long sea wall that shelters the marina from the open water of the bay, I see that the tide is a long way out. I smell it too, a deep, reeking mud scattered with weed, some of which has clumped, brown and friable in the autumn sun, while other strands trail in the slow-running rivulets left by the tide. The wet earth left naked for the air to touch, and then releasing the essence of that touching for me to draw into myself in long breaths that pull down to my stomach, filling me from the centre out with the layers of life and matter that have been churned into the shore.

  I watch a beaten-up old Land Rover splash out through the pools and streams towards the castle. As it nears the unmetalled strip of causeway that runs between castle and beach, it cuts across a slightly raised, drier bank of mud. The tracks of its tyres show darker here, almost black, beneath the chalky grey of the surface. I want desperately to get down there, to delve my hands into these fresh scars. I want to rub myself with it. But I won’t. Even amid the beauty of this open space I am still aware of watching eyes – the houses and offices that overlook the bay, all of them filled with people.

  I start walking. I need to keep myself moving for these remaining hours of daylight. I turn to the East, as Barnabas did in his desire to see and hear for himself the masses out in Antioch who were already beginning to sing out Christ’s name to Paul’s mad conducting. It seems incredible that the starved ravings of those men could still hold fast in a world like this, could still have a place among these modern buildings, these lanes of cars, this bright emerald of a traffic light showing through the branches of a tree. Even then, there was something faintly ridiculous about their snarling sermons, that dogged stance they had, leaning into the crowds as if into a strong wind. Their desire to die, for that is what it was – with my face, Christ’s face, in the air before them, egging them on.

  But I never hid from that responsibility. I accepted it and I pulled it into me, a sharp grain that century by slow-dripping century became smoothed like a pearl into my own dream of death. I see that now, so clearly, in the ebb of this perfect afternoon. Guilt wears you down, steady and forceful as a tide, and leaves you dreaming of peace. And when you see that peace will never come, you begin to dream of silence instead, the deep and lasting silence of an ending. But it has taken until now for that ending to begin. It happened the moment He cast me out. My final second of life was released into the air, to start wending blindly, inevitably towards me.

  I have now reached the coast road that exits the town to the east and follows the contours of a peculiar landscape. The rocks that have been exposed by the sea have a low, lunar geography, pitted with craters and volcanic pockets. They cover almost all of the empty beach in a single mass. Here and there, where breaks open up like tiny canyons pushing into the edges, terns step daintily on the sand, dipping and pecking in the collected pools of seawater. In one place, a man digs small trenches with a garden fork, occasionally stooping to collect whatever he is looking for and dropping it into a bucket.

  After about an hour of walking (although, it must be said, I stop a good many times to look at the view or simply to rest) I come to a small roundabout where there is a chance to head inland. A sign indicates that Grouville Church is somewhere along this narrower road. I had planned to continue my tracking of the coast but something in the name of this church makes me stop and choose this way instead. A short way along it, I find myself passing a yellow telephone box, which I notice has a directory sitting on the little shelf next to the phone. I decide to check to see if what I’m thinking is right. I open the directory to L and run my finger down the listings. There are a few Lemprières but the first of them, Mr and Mrs A, does indeed have that word, Grouville, in the address. I key the number into Will’s phone.

  It rings for a long time. I’m almost ready to hang up when a woman’s voice comes on the line, so formal and slow that at first I think it is an answering machine.

  ‘This is Will Pryce,’ I say when the voice has finished. ‘I used to be a student of Professor Lemprière’s.’ It’s my best guess. ‘I just happened to be in Jersey for a meeting and wondered if perhaps …’

  ‘Oh yes, of course. When did you say you were planning to be in Jersey? I can let him know that you –’

  ‘No, sorry,’ I cut her short, ‘I meant I’m actually here now. I thought perhaps I could drop in and say hello to the professor. But if it’s not a convenient time then …’ I let the line lapse into awkward silence.

  ‘Not at all,’ she says, with undiminished formality. ‘I’m sure he would be very happy to see you, Mr … Price, was it?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. Will. Will Pryce.’

  ‘Why don’t you drop in for a sherry this evening, say around six o’ clock?’

  I instinctively glance at the bare wrist where Will’s watch used to be. But anyway, I don’t need to see the time to know that her suggestion isn’t going to work. I have a couple of hours to kill right now. By six I’ll be on my way back into town for phase two of my plan.

  ‘I’m afraid I’ll be heading back to the airport by then,’ I lie. ‘I was really just thinking that perhaps he might be free now to … um … see me.’

  This conversation is becoming a little awkward. I’m clearly colouring outside the lines, etiquette-wise. Perhaps I should just ditch it. It’s starting to feel like it would be less frosty out here.

  I’m about to put a quick maybe next time end to this when she pipes up with a stoically cheerful, ‘Of course, that would be lovely.’ And then, warming to it, ‘An impromptu guest – what fun!’

  ‘Great – I’ll head over now, then. How do I …?’

  ‘Oh just tell your taxi driver it’s the first left after the Hollyside farm shop in Grouville. The name of the house is La Fin de Chasse.’

  ‘Lovely. Thanks very much.’

  ‘I’m afraid it will just be a simple tea,’ she tells me before hanging up.

  Her mention of tea makes me realise how thirsty and hungry I am. As I’m walking, looking out for someone who can give me directions, I feel the hunger gently shifting in my gut, a creature quietly dreaming in there.

  A man sweeping leaves in his driveway for a fire I can smell but cannot see tells me that the Hollyside farm shop is just up the way, on the corner with the main road. With the sweet acridity of burning leaves still clinging to my hair and clothe
s, I continue walking, realising that I may in fact be on the right road already. I start looking at the names of the houses. There are long intervals between them, with hard rutted fields and sparse hedgerow filling the gaps. At one point the road narrows to a lane and I am forced to climb up on to the bank so that a tractor is able to pass. The driver looks at me, in my suit, ankle deep in grass and nettles, without thanks or curiosity.

  Sure enough, I eventually come to a wooden sign that says La Fin de Chasse. It announces the beginning of a muddy driveway lined with mature chestnut trees, many of which have been pollarded down to little more than hefty stumps. In a dip, about two hundred metres away, I can see the roof and upper storey of a house. A thick ribbon of smoke is rising up from the chimney, suggesting a fresh load of coal has just been tipped on the fire. As I get closer, I can smell that it has. All this burning in the countryside – man’s proof that he is here, making known his Promethean arts.

  The door is answered by a lady whose face and attire perfectly match the voice I heard on the phone.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she says, looking first at my nose and then down at my shoes – following her eyes, I see they are covered in mud. ‘You ought to have told the driver to come right to the door.’

  She insists on taking them from me so she can clean them up. She tells me to wait where I am, that she’ll be back in a second with some slippers for me. As I am standing there in my stockinged feet, a figure emerges from the dimness at the end of the hallway.

  ‘Is that Will?’ He has a gentle, mellifluous way of speaking, as if he’s reciting a poem to himself.

  It is a dark, long corridor of closed doors, so it’s only as he gets near to me that I am able to see him properly. His eyebrows and hair are a pure white, and his long limbs seem frail as twigs. But there’s a brightness to him, in his step, in his eyes particularly. He grips me by both shoulders and holds me out before him, frowning, as if at a possession he can’t quite place.