What I Tell You In the Dark (21 page)

‘He doesn't mind, Mum,' Izzy says, still the only one looking at all cheerful in this situation. ‘Look at him. He looks like he's been sleeping in a skip – I'm sure the sofa will be a step up in the world.'

And with this she gives me the most natural and warmest embrace I think I've ever had. ‘Honestly,' she murmurs, ‘what
are
we going to do with you?'

Will's mother, still helpless by my side, turns her attention to the only practical task she can think of. She starts fussing
around, brushing the sleeve of my jacket in quick little movements and frowning at the dirt on my shoes and trousers. ‘Please tell me these are not your work clothes, Billy.'

She tuts and frowns a little more, then orders me to go and change out of them right away and begins to fret about which dry cleaners would possibly be able to sort out this mess in time for Monday. Clearly though, she's relieved to have found something she might actually be able to help with.

When I get back from the bathroom carrying my bundle of dirty clothes, they have all disappeared into the kitchen. I am back in a tracksuit again (the only thing I could think to pack during my panic at Will's flat) and a pair of trainers from his wardrobe with a trinity of black stripes at the side.

‘Why don't you go and relax through there,' Will's mother suggests as she confiscates the dirty clothes from me. She means the room next door, where Luc and the children have also been shooed away to. We're not wanted here in the fug of roasting meat and vegetable steam.

Izzy, who was just on the phone (keeping it cradled between shoulder and ear while chopping vegetables), says, ‘That was Dad. He's stuck up at the church. He says start without him and he'll get back as soon as he can.'

Will's mother rolls her eyes. ‘He'll be up there all afternoon, in other words. I'll take him something cold after lunch or he won't eat anything at all.'

This conversation makes me realise that I am ravenous. It must be twenty-four hours since I last ate.

‘When's it going to be ready?'

‘As soon as you're out from under our feet – now get going.' She makes a little flapping motion with her hands.

I use the opportunity of being alone with Luc and the kids to fill in some gaps. I ask the little girl, whose name is Maia, various questions about where she goes to school now, what she likes to
do and so on. She's fairly monosyllabic, also I'm not sure what level of French Will is supposed to have so it takes me longer than it normally would to get my questions sounding pidgin enough to be passable, but she does at least divulge that they live in Paris, and that
Papa
is always at work (to which Luc, who is feeding the baby, shrugs in that way the French do). But what she really wants to know is how I managed to disfigure my face.

‘
C'est dégueulasse
.' She has climbed up on to the sofa next to me and is scrutinising my scabs and bruises. Her own nose is wrinkled in fascinated disgust.

‘Maia!' Luc warns her, then to me, ‘Sorry.'

She doesn't back down, though. She continues peering into my face. The self-assumed duty of carrying out this investigation has given a slightly pious set to her mouth. She looks like one of those pudgy cherubim you see buzzing about in Renaissance paintings which, for obvious reasons, I find particularly entertaining. Perhaps my amusement is showing because Luc seems to consider the task of policing her to be less urgent than it was a few seconds ago and has returned his attention to Paco, the baby.

She's asking me how it happened. I can tell that Luc is also listening for the answer, even though he's pretending not to. I wish I could think of something to say that might satisfy them both, but I can't, and nor do I trust myself to try. My mind feels skittish, the memory of Abaddon still prowling there, rattling at the windows like a nasty drunk.

‘I should have been more careful,' I tell her.
Sage
is the word I use, wise more than careful. She sighs then slides off the sofa and disappears from the room.

And it's true, I should have been. I have done this all wrong. Every single step of the way has been dogged by mistakes, every action ruled by impulse, every outcome boxing me deeper into this corner.

Luc is hunched over Paco, rubbing the child's cheek, trying to get him to wake from his milky stupor and continue sucking. Every few seconds the tactic works and Paco resumes his gummy squeak then subsides again into sleep.

I stare at them – or not so much at them as at the whole of this irrelevant, nonsensical situation – and I understand that I have lost. This, right here, is what defeat looks like. After all those centuries of gnawing guilt, I have arrived right back at the same fate. Another violent death awaits me, sure as a falling axe, except this time my presence here will not have left the slightest mark. Not one single knot of my bird's nest tangle will have been loosened. Abaddon has made certain of that.

‘It's funny.'

‘What is?' Luc wants to know. I dismiss the question with a wave of my hand.

‘In fact, no: it's hilarious. Hilarious is what it is.'

I'm standing. My back is lit up with the pain of it.

Luc is gathering Paco's stuff together, preparing to leave the room. The baby gurgles in his arms.

‘You know what? It doesn't matter.' I try to smile but my face won't move, stolidly representing the part of me that knows that it does matter. A lot. ‘It's not like it could have ended any other way.' I spread my arms and let them fall, the international sign of resignation. Broken wings. ‘The house always wins,' I tell him.

He doesn't even try to reply to that, and to his palpable relief, whatever else I might have been about to add is cut short by the appearance of Izzy in the doorway.

‘So,' she asks brightly, her face flushed from the heat of the kitchen, ‘who's ready for some lunch?

The only position that does not hurt me is to perch, stiff-backed and formal, at the very edge of my seat. I am aware that it gives
me a kind of priggish haughtiness – a Victorian gentleman dining vastly below his station – and the fact that I have chosen not to utter a single word since we began lunch won't have helped either. But what is there for me to say? I have no place at this table, I am a stranger in their midst. An identity thief.

‘Strange,' I say aloud. They stop their conversation to look at me. ‘
Etrange
,' I tell the French speakers, ‘
estrange
in old French. It's from the Latin.
Extraneus, extranea, extraneum
,' I add, for a bit of fun.

‘Billy, sweetheart, why don't you eat some of your meat?' Will's mother looks like she would give anything, her life even, to see me eat a forkful of beef. ‘You haven't touched a thing.'

I had been wrong before – when the steaming plate was set down before me, I found that I wasn't hungry after all. In fact, I could think of nothing more repellent or ultimately futile than to begin shovelling this slop down into the fuel belly of my flesh suit. But now I find myself loading up my mouth with the cold, gravy-sodden beef simply because I cannot bear her to look at me like that anymore.

‘Foreign is what it really means,' I inform them through the food, ‘not peculiar or weird,' I make a bit of a face for that last word because I despise its mindless dismissal of what cannot be explained. ‘Most formally, it means “from without” – again from the Latin,
extra
.' I force a swallow and immediately start loading the fork again so I can repack my mouth before my gullet sends everything back up and out on to the table. As I raise the dripping meat it reminds me: ‘There's strange matter too. I bet you didn't know that.' I fill my face and start chewing again. ‘It is only stable at very high pressure,' I try to say, but it gets lost in the chew. Only a small shower of gravy comes out.

When the table is being cleared, Maia, who has been told that she must finish what's on her plate before she can have any ice cream, points an accusing finger at me.

‘But
he
didn't finish,' her voice is wobbling on the edge of justified tears. She has made the effort to say it in English, presumably so she can include her grandmother in the appeal. The way she says
finish
makes it sound like
fiendish
with the
d
filleted out.

‘Yes but Billy isn't feeling very well today, my darling,' I hear Will's mother say from behind me, where she is loading things into the dishwasher.

Luc and Izzy exchange glances. Clearly none of this is in the least bit helpful. Luc tells his daughter in a rapid burst of French just to eat a couple of carrots. Izzy tuts and goes off to join her mother. It seems to me that they're focussing their energy on entirely the wrong things but I refrain from saying so.

Maia, still giving me the evils, nudges her carrots around the plate with the little tines of her fork. When Paco begins to grizzle in his carrycot and Luc's back is turned for a few seconds, I snap my hand across, snatch up two of the carrots and pop them in my mouth. A minute or two later when the opportunity presents itself again, I repeat my act of kindness. They're baby carrots – is that what they're called? The little ones, anyway – so they're easy to swallow quickly and discreetly. Maia, who has been in awe of me throughout this operation, is now looking over my shoulder, where, now I come to think of it, the sound of the two women clearing up seems to have stopped. I look round too (having to rotate my entire body like a robot because of my back). The garden door is open and I can see through the window that they are both outside, standing by the bin store, deep in conversation. Their body language seems conspiratorial, bent in too close together or something, it's hard to define, but more than once Izzy shoots a furtive glance at the house.

When they come back in I pretend not to have noticed their absence. Maia marches up to her mother and presents the carrot-less plate in triumph. I meanwhile try to extract some
details from Luc about his work but, given that Will has presumably known him for a number of years, it's not easy to find the right questions. All I manage to discover is that he's a doctor or surgeon of some kind, although it's a shame that his specialty is not the kind I need. His words, not mine. As soon as he says it, the delighted commotion of Maia receiving her bowl of ice cream comes to an abrupt halt, no doubt because both women have stopped what they were doing to stare at him. Even Paco has fallen silent.

‘No,' Luc splutters, ‘I didn't mean …' But he decides that's not going to be the best way of tackling it. ‘What I
meant
,' he says instead, ‘was I am not …' then he fizzles out again. He's getting stressed, he can't find the English for it, he cranks his hand like he's dredging the word from some pit ‘… osteopath,' he finally says, glancing over my shoulder, presumably at his wife. He relaxes a little. ‘You are in pain, no? With your back. I have noticed how you sit, it's all …' he does quite a good impression of me, bolt upright and robotic-looking. ‘But perhaps I can help – just a little. As I have said, it's not my specialty,' working that in again nicely, just to slam the door on any doubt that he might have voiced what everyone is clearly thinking, ‘but I do have some knowledge of …' again the hand, but this time no English arrives ‘…
les vertèbres
.'

Izzy thinks it's a great idea, Maia does too. My opinion is not really sought. A space is cleared on the sofa and I am laid out there. The mewling Paco is taken away by Izzy and, despite her protests that she'd rather stay to watch her father perform an
opération
on me, Maia is pressganged by her granny to help with the afternoon's errands, not least the task of finding someone to clean my suit.

I am left alone with Luc, who is sitting on the edge of the sofa, telling me what he thinks the problem is. He has already examined me from all angles. Before I lay down, he got me to
strip to the waist and stand naturally, as he put it. He then probed various parts of my back and waist, occasionally pushing down on my shoulders, shaking them a little, as if to loosen them, telling me again to be natural. There is plenty I could have said to that, but I didn't.

Coincé
, that's his verdict. It means jammed, locked tight, but also, more literally, cornered. How have I done it, he wants to know. How have I trapped this tension into a corner of my body?

‘I think I might have slept in a strange position,' I tell him, my voice muffled by the sofa cushion.

He only grunts in reply. ‘
Ai, ai, ai
,' he says to himself as his fingers discover a particularly taut block of muscle. He kneads it lightly with his knuckles.

‘That's it,' he announces, in English, his accent adding a certain authority to the diagnosis, I don't know why. ‘Here,' he prods gingerly at my disc. I yelp. He moves on to the floor and, kneeling beside me, he raises my left leg a few inches. I yelp some more.

‘Yes,' he says. ‘There is no doubt, you have ruptured that disc.' He says
rupture
in the French way, making it sound like a silkier process than the harsh
rup
of the English would suggest, with its connotations of ripping, worse than ripping: a flesh-tear. ‘It can happen from tension,' he is explaining, having now moved up level with my head. I have turned to look at him through one eye, the other half of my face still buried in the warm musk of upholstery. ‘Sometimes the muscles can just …' He demonstrates with his hands, meshing his fingers together and slowly squeezing.

‘I can give you some tablets for the swelling, and you should put some ice or a warm bottle –'

‘Hot-water bottle,' I correct him but he doesn't seem to hear me.

‘If you like, I can make a small adjustment here,' he rests his hand lightly on my lower back. ‘There is a very simple manipulation for this. To release some pressure.'