What I Tell You In the Dark (22 page)

Whatever is
coincé
in there, he means.

‘Yes,' I tell him, ‘please. Release away.'

I allow myself to be delicately choreographed into a position where I am lying on my right side at the edge of the sofa. He is crouching beside me and has brought one of my knees up level with my hip and is holding it lightly in the crook of his left arm. With his right arm he is reaching across me and very gently rocking my body, his free hand resting on the injured disc. He is telling me to relax and to take deep breaths in and out. We continue like this for a few moments, then midway through one of my long exhalations, he forces my leg and hip sharply downwards in a swift, sudden movement. There is a deep crunch in the base of my back.

I make a noise I haven't heard myself make before, almost like a bark. It doesn't faze Luc though.

‘Let's try one more,' he says. ‘Breathe in,' he eases me back into the sofa cushions, making sure that my arms are right (my right limply at my side, my left wrapped across my shoulder in a loose embrace). He positions his weight in readiness over the top of my hip and starts to roll me back towards the edge again. ‘And breathe out,' he sighs.

This time he waits until I am nearly at the end of my breath before pushing his body into the top of my leg and bringing another muffled crack from my spine. It sounds like someone biting down on an ice-cube. It is not as fundamental as the first time but the relief is still enormous. He keeps me in that finish position for a few seconds then slowly shifts me on to my back. I lie there looking up at the ceiling, not really seeing it, just allowing the white canvas of the plasterboard to settle over me, clean and pure as a shroud.

‘I feel different,' I say to him at length.

But he has gone. He must have crept away, thinking perhaps that I needed to sleep.

I sit myself up. The movement is free and easy. I try standing, then tentatively rotating my hips, raising my leg – the pain has completely disappeared. It's extraordinary. Luc would want me to continue resting, I'm quite certain of that. He would want me to lie still for a while, because that is what people always want after some adjustment has been made to the way things are. Always the belief that stillness and silence will help the transition of change into permanence – but that is wrong, that is not the operation of the universe. And anyway, I have a reason for getting to my feet. There is something I want to look at. Luc's hands freed more than just my bones, it turns out – they also disturbed certain sensations, memories of a sort, that were hiding in the tissue of this body. And now more are following, all in a rush, like a structure suddenly giving way. Glimpses of the life I stole from Will are flooding into me and now I want to go over there, to the shelves on the other side of the room, and look at the photographs that are arranged among the ornaments and the books. I want to look at those too, or re-look, that's how it feels, at things that already belong to me. Things to which this body, in its own dumb, blind logic, also belongs. This is how lives are stored. Memory is not a data cloud, it is not a mystery abstracted from the self, it is an essence that inhabits us, suffusing the body and shaping us, until finally we take on the look of our life. Our age becomes a physical truth of ourselves – that which cannot be concealed. Even the shadow parts of us, those moments of our lives that we are unable to accept, cannot be kept boarded up. To believe they can is to court tragedy. The unwanted self is restless. It will either work inwards, creating disease, chasing out sleep, or else it will break loose, shocking the world with its strange and sudden appearance. Just as Will's
life is breaking out in me now, leaping heroically between my synapses, forcing itself on my attention.

Again that word
rupture
, the French way, comes into my mind.
Cette lumineuse rupture
, such an elegant description of this process, the secret architecture of mind and memory split open like a pomegranate in the sun. I had a lot of time for the guy who wrote that, used to watch him all the time – bow tie, very clear eyes – although his name escapes me for the time being. The point is, I can't be in Will's body and not expect to take on the vestiges of his life. I was a fool to have believed I could.

The first of the pictures I pick up is of Will and Izzy holding hands in a garden, not here – it's the garden in St Lucia. I know that without even having to think about it. I know the house too, up on the brow of a hill – I can see the tatters of mist in the morning, I can hear the squabbling of the birds, I can the smell the flowers – that, more than anything: the rich scent of flowers thickening the air. And the heat. The lawn is a dense carpet of Bermuda grass edged with spiky bougainvillea and the small peeping blooms of crotons. In the far left of the picture the white boards of the house are only just visible behind clumps of coleus plants, their broad, lurid leaves spread like butterfly wings in the sun. The sky is a saturated, tropical blue. Will is just a child here, no more than four or five. He is holding something in his hand, a stuffed monkey, worn and stringy from never being allowed out of his sight.
Chop-Chop
– that's its name. His sister is looking right into the camera, a head smaller than Will, the spitting image of Maia, her skin brown as a nut and her hair bleached white by sun and sea. But Will is looking slightly off to the side, as if someone is approaching, someone his sister and the photographer have yet to notice.

Luc, who must have heard me moving about, has come back in the room.

‘You're up,' he says, his tone and expression both suggesting, as predicted, that he considers this to be unwise.

‘I am,' I say, placing the picture carefully back where I found it. ‘And Luc, I have to ask …' I turn to face him with my friendliest grin ‘… what
have
you done to me?'

He looks a little taken aback. ‘Has it not helped?'

‘No, no, no,' I tell him, ‘I'm joking – I'm fine – better than fine. The pain has completely disappeared – you're a magician. I'm just saying that something else has happened too. What you did has loosened something, in my mind, I mean.' Again, I'm doing my best to make this sound like a positive thing but the expression on his face would suggest that the message isn't getting through; in fact, this would appear to be the worst news he has heard for quite some time.

‘I think you should lie down,' he tells me.

‘No really, I'm fine.'

The trouble with these situations (by which I mean those times when other people have come to view you, rightly or not, as slightly unhinged) is that whatever you say to them takes on the air of exactly the sort of thing a slightly unhinged person would say. Such as
No really, I'm fine
.

‘I just want to look at the pictures,' I tell him, making it worse.

‘I'll go and get Izzy,' he says.

When she comes I find it difficult not to think of her as a child, if that makes any sense. It's almost like we're both still children, the tiny, sun-kissed shoots from the picture. She stops halfway across the room to set down the tray she is carrying – she has brought tea and biscuits. I have a different picture in my hand now. It was taken in the Fifties by the look of it: a man in a suit standing in front of a black touring car. He's wearing a hat like they all did then, and he has a pipe in his mouth, clenched between his teeth. He's not smiling. It must be one of Will's
grandparents, and yet I can't seem to place him – I know something about him, though, I just can't put my finger on what it is. It's too quick to grasp, flitting past me like a bat.

‘Which one have you got there?' She has walked up behind me and is peering over my shoulder.

It gives me quite a start and I thrust the picture back on the shelf a little too quickly, making some of the knick-knacks fall over. A china toad dressed smartly in a top coat and tails has the delicate stem of his umbrella snapped out of his hand. I start fiddling around trying to get it to stand back in place but it won't balance properly without the umbrella.

‘Don't worry,' she gently takes it away. ‘My fault. I'm always doing it to Luc – he says I should tie a bell around my ankle or one day I'll give him a heart attack.'

There's such an easy way about her, I feel like I've known her all my life. Before Will even, back in the dark light. That's how I think of it now, my state before this: a dark light. It's nonsensical, I know, but it's the perfect description – I guess you'll just have to take my word for it.

She has picked up a different picture and has wormed in against the side of me, cuddling me with her spare arm, holding the photo up for me to see. It's Will in school uniform, not that much older than in the Caribbean pictures but in a different time, with less sun in him. Two teeth are missing from his smile.

‘Billy the kid,' she gives me a little squeeze. ‘Come on,' she says, putting it back, not where she found it, just shoved at random among the others. ‘Our tea's getting cold.'

We sit happily together on the sofa. In fact, with the possible exception of Luc's medical attentions, which don't really count, it's the first time I've managed to properly relax in the company of another since I jumped into this mess. I ask her questions about life in Paris, about when she thinks she might start back at her work again. I find I know things about her – such as the
fact that she's a translator, an occasional writer of movie subtitles, a keen runner – and so my questions make a little more sense now. That jarring note has gone. She tells me she doesn't know anymore, that it's been so long since she had the time to take on any proper jobs, as she calls them, that all her clients have moved on. It would mean starting over.

‘Maybe it's time to try your hand at something else?'

‘Maybe. But what? Teaching?' she frowns like Maia frowned at the mention of her carrots. ‘No thanks.'

She lifts the saucer with the last remaining biscuit on it and offers it to me.

‘You can't let me eat the last one, Billy. Please – I'll have eaten all of them if you don't at least have one.'

My stomach contracts just at the thought of it. That's one thing that hasn't been loosened by my spine.

‘Just because I'm not having it doesn't mean you have to.'

‘Pah,' she says, shoving it into her mouth. ‘You know nothing.'

We sit on in comfortable silence after that until the sound of Paco crying in a nearby room brings the relaxed part of our conversation to an end. She has other work to do besides this.

She takes my empty mug from me and puts it alongside her own on the tray, then she gathers up my hands in hers and says, ‘I'm going to give it to you straight, Billy. If you don't start dialling down the loony stuff, you're going to find yourself back in that place again. You don't want all that, do you? And presumably it's not ideal for work either?'

I shake my head.

‘Well, in that case you need to start doing whatever it is you're not doing. Do you have the right medication?'

I probably seem a little disheartened at the turn things are taking. She says, ‘I'm sorry to have to pry into your business but Mum's serious about this. She spoke to me after lunch. She said they're going to get Dr Whatsisname –'

‘Bundt.' I remember him now, or parts of him – his office, his polo neck under his jacket, his habit of saying
Mm
when other people are talking.

‘Bundt,' she repeats, ‘that's him. Mum says they're going to get him to hospitalise you again, unless you can manage to get your act together. It's too much for them to cope with – you see that, don't you? It scares her, Billy. She'll convince herself that you're suicidal or something – you know what she's like. And Dad isn't going to get in the middle of it – you know what
he
's like.' All I know is the photos I've seen, and the certainty when looking at them that he loves me. Loves Will, I mean. ‘She just needs to see that you're on top of things – that's all it is.'

She gives my hands a little shake. ‘You can do it, I know you can. You just take things a bit too seriously sometimes – but you can get a handle on that. That's what the pills are there for. I know it's not brilliant taking them, I'm not saying that, but they're all there is at the moment, and it's better than letting yourself get really bad again. You have to help yourself, Billy.'

I smile feebly. ‘I know.'

What can I say? Dozens of languages at my command, all of them teeming with words and images, and yet no way to explain myself. Not even to this willing ear.

‘Tell you what,' she says, ‘why don't we go out for a walk? Mum and Maia will be back soon, then Dad, and then we'll be into the kids' meal times and … Let's just say this might be the last chance we get to have a quiet chat, just the two of us. We could collect some things for church tomorrow, like when we were kids.'

I like the sound of that.

‘I'll go and grab Paco – he can come with us in the pushchair.'

I like the sound of that too. I want to savour every moment in the bosom of this family. I don't have long, I'm guessing a day
or two, before Abaddon's hounds catch my scent. I have no intention of running from them – what would be the point? They cannot be outrun. But just for now, just for today, I will allow myself to forget about all of that. I will crawl into the nest of this man's life and take every morsel of love that I'm being given, even if it is meant for another. This is my reward, scant as it is. Tomorrow I will slip away and face my fate.

Outside, a thick fog has descended. It has swallowed the lane that leads into the village. There is no sound from the unseen fields and the wood beyond them. We walk through the dripping silence as if through a dream – I make a comment along these lines but clearly it's the wrong thing to say.