What I Tell You In the Dark Read online

  ‘The bee has one sting, the primate has two thumbs, the octopus has three hearts, the dragonfly has four wings …’ I make a list of these things, softly into the carpet, on and on, until my voice becomes so heavy that I am unable to carry it, and there is no longer anything left, no thought or word, that can stop me from sinking into the black, currentless quiet of sleep.

  What follows is as intense and crippling as any illness. The sun rises and sets on two days before my fever breaks. I sleep and I dream and I wake and I sleep and I dream and I wake.

  The first time I open my eyes, it has been raining. Drops are still clinging to the window frame. They tremble there for a long time before letting themselves go. Such pressure at the surface of things, it makes me sad. Water curled in on itself. The molten earth forced into a sphere.

  Another time, I wake to find I am on fire, being shaken in the grip of a delirium. I cannot think straight. Everything in me has been burnt down to a bottom ash of dry protests. I call out to Him, in the old way, crying for Him to take me under his wing.

  After that my dreams become a series of sweaty, tangled elisions. More visions than dreams really, acid-sharp in detail and all of them charged with the same regret – images of Jesus that lash and fork like plasma. On the last day, the deepest of them all is dislodged.

  It is from the later time, when I had haunted him down to near nothing. I watch it play out, eyes open, as if it is projected on the white wall in front of me. I am there, back on the stony ground of the desert. Christ’s legs painfully thin, the bones in his feet sharp against the sandal leather, but despite these difficulties I journey for days, battered by the sun and kept from sleep by the frozen night. I fast, I thirst for as long as I can, until finally I collapse. That night, the night of my collapse, I wake with a start, a deep ache of cold in my bones. The sound that woke me is still there, whispering between the rocks, but I see nothing. The air is a swarming gloom. I search for a stone, something, anything I can use as a weapon. But there’s nothing. When I look up, it is beside me, silently watching, as big as a man. It is reared up and tensile, almost still, just its head moving very slightly from side to side, the way serpents do when they are ready to strike. I am so afraid that I begin to weep. That’s when it too begins to make noises, quietly at first, soft like my weeping, then louder, unnatural sounds.

  As I sprawl on my back, it moves on top of me, its appalling weight on my chest, its tongue tasting the air between us.

  The fever leaves me scoured down like whitened wood in the shoreline. My lips are salty and dry.

  I must have water.

  Bent in a slow walk, I take myself to the kitchen tap. I drink and drink, and then I drink some more. The water swishes painfully in my belly. It has, I realise, been days since I have eaten.

  I go to the fridge and heave open its door. It’s a picture of neglect but there are a few things that are still this side of rotten. There’s an open tin of spaghetti hoops in tomato sauce, there’s a block of dry and cracked cheddar. I also see some kebab meat in a grease-soaked wrapper, and a carton of grapes shrivelled on the stalk. I sink to the floor, not knowing where to begin, but my body does not wait to find out. It moves independently of all thought and volition, seizing what I need.

  I dip two fingers into the spaghetti hoops and shovel them into my cement mixer mouth of lamb and cheese. I add in a tomato I find lurking at the back of the shelf. It explodes between my teeth, juice runs down my chin and drips on to the floor. I bend forward and suck up the little rusty pools, then I take four more huge bites of cheddar. Finally, and only when I absolutely have to, I get up and go over to the tap for more water, cradling my belly on the way, as if it’s a bomb that might go off.

  I continue like this for some time, stopping occasionally for my gut muscles to cramp and flutter beneath the strain. When I’ve finally had enough, I wander down the hallway to the bathroom, taking the grapes with me, vacuum popping them into my mouth like a tennis ball machine in reverse.

  I draw myself a hot bath and slip down among its crinkling bubbles. I let my thoughts rise away from me like the wisps of steam that curl off my arms as I hold them up in the pale afternoon light. And as I lie drowsing in my tub, it softens, this light, to the glow of evening. It is beautiful to watch, a little sad too, to hear the tap drip-dripping its count into the water at my feet. Time tugging at the edges of me, pulling me along. Every second is now being taken away, grain followed by grain. Moments I shall never have back.

  I haul myself out of the bath and stand steaming on the mat, pink as a ham. I let myself dry naturally, the dripping from my body fast at first then slowing to a delicate, hesitant pace, like those raindrops at my window, each one drawing so painfully close to letting go. It is intoxicating, the slowness of it. Nature’s speed. One element banished by another, just as I was – the creeping change towards a new state.

  As I dress myself in Will’s pyjamas the light outside continues to change, smudged by the dusk. On a whim, I decide that I want to go out there. I feel strong enough after the food and the bath, and I want to do it now, before it gets dark. There is something at the moment, about the dark, that I do not like.

  I pull on a coat and shoes and go clumping down the stairs. The sound brings Alice Sherwin to her doorway but, on seeing me, she doesn’t say whatever it was she was planning to say. She just shakes her head and goes back inside.

  The daylight is almost gone. As I come to the edge of the park only the top windows of the high-rises at the far end of the playing field catch the fire of the setting sun. Yet again, I have to stop. It’s not weariness this time that makes me keep pausing, as if to catch my breath, nor is it that same exhilaration that I felt during those first few hours after jumping in, that marvel at the firing of my senses. This is the reward of beauty – I don’t know how else to describe it. For longer than it should be possible, I have watched, only watched. I have seen the way people struggle with the task of fitting their lives to the perfect, impossible circus of beauty that whirls around them. Some manage it, many – most – do not. But for all my watching, I have acquired nothing more than a kind of clinical wisdom, the ability of a psychiatrist observing a patient, to predict what will and what will not work, who will or will not succeed. What good, though, is this truth when it is not grounded in experience? That is what I have lacked all this time. Real knowledge. Knowledge born from life – not from a brief intervention in your lives or from endless observation, but from joining with you. And here is my reward – this great beauty that lay hidden from me for so long. From knowing in my gut, the way you know it, that all this huffing and puffing will lead us to the same vanishing point, I am able to see the world afresh. I turn with it now. I too am fixed to its workings.

  These leaves that lie scattered beneath the trees, the map of their veins is drawn from the same skein that puts the blood-shadowed lines in my own flesh. Their creases, too, are the same. I pick one up and hold it next to the skin of my palm – time folded into all matter, marking it. I am matched to this now – a part of life, no longer apart from it. Each moment flurrying like a snowflake, distinct from the last but impossible to grasp, dissolving on impact. I relax into it. This is right.

  Along the path from where I’ve decided to sit a small band of derelicts and drunks are performing their evening routine. They move as a single entity, orbiting the bottles and cans arrayed on the wall of a nearby flowerbed. The choreography is repetitive and precise, binding them together in a series of small shuffling engagements. Starless planets locked in alignment.

  Needless to say, now that I am thrown in with mankind, grounded so to speak, not one of them notices me. I have become just like any other. I am all but invisible.

  Some distance beyond them, a game of football is proceeding against the failing light. The players are too distant to be anything more than shapes, line drawings of form and movement. Occasionally their shouts rise up off the flat ground and reach me, mixing in with the isolated bark of a
dog or a snatch of music. At one stage, two young men lope past, hoods up, both on their phones. The one nearest to me shakes his head at whatever he is hearing and makes a kind of hiss-spit noise. It’s a well-practised gesture, so much more economical than words – the equivalent of which, had he been forced to use them, would be something like I have nothing but contempt for you and/or what you’re saying. I make a note of this useful device.

  It also reminds me (him being on the phone, I mean) that I had agreed to speak to Natalie on Monday afternoon and it must now be … Wednesday. Yes, that sounds right – I glance up at the sky, as if I’m expecting it to be confirmed there. Perhaps it would be if I knew where to look. Mercury’s day.

  She must be wondering what’s happened to me.

  ‘Is it Wednesday today?’ I ask one of the homeless guys who happens to have strayed within earshot of my bench. Like he’d know, but I have to work with what’s to hand.

  He looks me over, one eye squinted mostly shut, the other doing the work of two, writhing around the socket like it’s trapped there and wants to be out.

  ‘You bunk out then?’ he slurs.

  I make what I’m pretty sure is my What? face.

  ‘What?’ I say, to leave no doubt.

  ‘Hospital trousers.’ His good eye is ranging up and down my leg.

  His swaying is beginning to make me feel like I too am moving. Like the ground is slowly undulating beneath us.

  ‘Oh – right. I see what you mean. No, I’m just wearing pyjamas,’ I inform him, as nonchalantly as it’s possible to say that to a stranger, in public. ‘I live nearby. So anyway,’ I steer us back to the point, ‘do you know what day it is?’

  He either doesn’t understand the question or doesn’t know the answer because what he says is, ‘Have a little syrup, mate.’

  He holds out a plastic bottle containing a few fingers of something roughly consistent with motor oil. In a gesture of invitation or impatience, he gives it a sharp little shake. The liquid slops malevolently.

  ‘It feels like a Wednesday,’ I tell him as I take the bottle.

  While we’ve been talking, the sodium street lights along the path have clicked on, turning our clothes, the grass and his mystery syrup into different shades of the same kind of no colour.

  I take a swig. It goes down like a bad oyster steeped in something medical.

  The bottle is then immediately reclaimed and the eyebrow above his watching eye waggles inquiringly (by the way, I can now see that it’s the whole of the left side of his face, not just the eye, that’s hanging in a lifeless sag).

  ‘Heh?’ he wants to know, meaning How was it?

  I am not confident I can speak at this precise moment so I opt instead for an enthusiastic nod. The motion makes me feel sick and dizzy.

  With this act of kinship now between us, he is moved to sit down on the bench with me. It’s more of a controlled subsidence than a conventional sitting down. He all but keels over onto me. The bottle, however, rights itself in his hand, gimballed like a ship’s instrument. Muscle memory from years of falling and fighting while holding a drink.

  My bones, cold and heavy as steel a moment ago, seem to be warming up. From deep in my stomach a syrup-tainted belch releases itself. I let it go discreetly through my nose with that umph sound nostrils make as a gust passes through.

  This seems to remind him that he ought to drink some more. With unexpected deftness he raises the bottle in one swift movement so it’s standing vertical on his lips and drains the lot in a single open-throated swallow. He then lets his weight redistribute itself, partly on to the wooden bench-back, partly on to me.

  I want to get up and leave but my legs say no. The thought then comes swimming through to me that, even so, I really must.

  Natalie. I need to speak to Natalie.

  My attempt to move brings him sharply back to consciousness.

  ‘Heh!’ he says, except it’s not the warm, interrogative heh of moments ago. This is a more threatening heh. ‘Doing?’

  I understand this to be shorthand for a longer question.

  ‘I need to go,’ I tell him.

  ‘Why you even here?’ he’s properly awake now, eyeballing me.

  ‘Good question. God question,’ I add, releasing, again through the medium of my nose, a little laugh. This time it’s more of a quacking, trumpeting sound. It makes us both start a little.

  I do want to go, genuinely I do – in fact, I must, as discussed (ha! that rhymes) – but I also want to sit for a few more seconds on my soft syrupy seat, maybe say some more things with my loose lazy lips.

  We both lapse into a further silence for what could be two or twenty minutes.

  ‘I’m here because it’s what I’ve always wanted,’ I tell him when I’m ready. I like saying the words. ‘Always,’ I repeat. Particularly that one.

  His head lolls on its limp-stemmed neck. ‘Eh,’ he says, gently this time, leaving off the first, hardening h.

  ‘Why now?’ I shrug. ‘Can’t rightly say. It’s not like this thing of Will’s,’ I wave expansively to include the tramps, the footballers, all the houses, but meaning of course the Church, far from here, in their gold and incensed bunkers, ‘is that bad.’ I look at him. ‘It’s pretty small potatoes. Po-tay-toes,’ I say. We both have a quick giggle. It’s a funny word. ‘… compared to what I’ve seen. All manner of unholy horrors,’ I suddenly turn a bit serious here, so does he. ‘All manner,’ I reiterate gravely, ‘carried out in my name. And I just sat on my hands.’ I show him what I mean but the hard wood hurts my knuckles so I take them back out. ‘For centuries …’ his head nods at my words ‘… for centuries, I did nothing. But!’

  This but snaps us both to attention. We look at the finger I have held up to accompany it.

  ‘But,’ I resume, ‘it was happening all the time. I just didn’t know it. I kept trying to think my way out of it – you know?’ It’s a rhetorical question. I’ve stopped looking at him now. I’m looking at myself, back then, whatever that was like. I’m already forgetting how the other way felt. This earth pull is so strong, it pushes everything else out. ‘Except that never works, trying to think through a problem. All you do is mangle it up, bend it so far out of shape with your thinking that you don’t even know how it looked to start with …’

  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 s
top 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.