What I Tell You In the Dark (24 page)

I dress myself quietly in the clothes I was given yesterday and I prepare myself, once again, to sneak away from a sleeping household. In the hallway downstairs a movement catches my eye – through the glass panel of the door I see Will's father at the far end of the garden, bundled up in a coat and hat against the chill of the dawn. He is among a copse of apple trees, gathering the fallen fruit. I try to ignore him but it's no good. I pull on some shoes and go to the garden door. I borrow an old wax jacket that's hanging there – one of his. It smells of damp earth and lawnmower fuel. As I walk towards him, I leave behind me a trail of footprints in the dew-sodden grass. My silvered approach. When I'm just a few feet away, he looks up at the sound of me. There is a curious blankness to his face – the slow, mechanical work of collecting the apples and laying them in the basket has taken him beyond himself.

‘You're up early,' he says, finding his smile. It's the first time I've seen him smile. It's a beautiful thing, as natural as the bird-song that is now beginning to swell and repeat around us, pushing out far into the distance.

‘I'm not much of a one for sleeping these days.'

‘You never were.' He picks up the basket and moves across to the next tree, the last in his circuit. ‘Me neither.'

I help him find the best of the windfalls, examining each one
before adding it to the basket. If it has been chewed or is too badly bruised, then I follow his lead and toss it towards the longer grass where the boundary fence signals the beginning of the neighbouring farmland.

‘The mice will have those,' he tells me.

When we're finished with the apples there are other jobs to be done, and we continue to work in an amiable silence broken only by his occasional remarks about this plant or that. But after a while the spell is lifted and he stops what he's doing to take a long look at me.

‘What is it you're so afraid of, Billy?'

We've been tying back the wisteria where it has managed to pull itself free at the side of the house. I'm standing there holding a ball of twine.

‘The same thing as you,' I tell him. ‘I fear for mankind.'

‘That's not what I mean. I mean you, Billy – what are
you
afraid of? In your own life. What is it that makes you keep returning to these same worries?'

Maybe he's right. Maybe we have been here a number of times before. It's the sense I get, from all the talk of doctors and the concern that seems to inhabit every look and remark. Will's is a life that has been scarred by the crash sites of emotional breakdowns. It has left everyone expecting to find disaster around the next corner. But that wasn't me. That was him.

I hold up the ball of twine. ‘I want people to understand that this is the true shape of life. They have been led to believe otherwise but this is how it is: tightly wound, turned in on itself – nothing at the beginning, nothing at the end.'

It pains him to hear me say this. I can see he wants to reach out and hug me but he doesn't move. The feeling stays trapped in his body.

‘But why do you feel the need to take this on your shoulders? People will believe what they're going to believe, Billy.' There's a
hard-won wisdom of his own behind this statement. ‘It's not your responsibility,' he tells me.

‘But it is. That's
exactly
what it is. My fear for them is more personal than yours. It's in me, it never lets go.'

‘No.' This time he does manage to bring himself closer to me. He takes the ball of twine from my hands and places it gently on the ground. ‘It's not your battle to fight. You need to concentrate on getting yourself well before you start thinking about everyone else.'

He takes my right hand in his. This loosens another of those memories from Will's body – climbing across some rocks on the beach, his father reaching down to pull him up.
Give me your hand
.

He searches my eyes but doesn't see whatever it was he was hoping to find. ‘You're not hearing me, are you?'

‘I hear you, but you have to understand that I know things you cannot possibly know. You believe that your church can save people, but I
know
that it cannot. It's not your fault – I'm not blaming you. Far from it – I blame myself. But people need to understand that they have been misled. If they don't, then I'm afraid they will always believe in magic.'

‘But Billy, there is a mystery to life. This is God's way. You cannot force people to believe one thing and not the other. They either choose to let the truth into their hearts or they do not. There is nothing that you can do to change that. God gave us all free will for a reason. So that we can choose Him, Billy. That's what faith is.'

I can feel that same pressure from last night starting to build in me again. I have no clue how to release it. I need to make myself clearer. Plainer speech. That was something else I got wrong last time, with Jesus – all those parables, too much aphorism and metaphor. It was too baggy in the end, left too much room for others to stuff their own meanings into it.

‘You're right,' I tell him, because it's always the best way to start when you want to show someone how hopelessly and profoundly wrong they are. ‘The mystery of God is real – and not just to those of us who have Him in our hearts …' I try to ignore the icy vacuum of His absence at the centre of my own self ‘… but also for those who deny His hand in the universe. To them, the mystery is just given another name – the unexplained dark matter that ignited the big bang, the elusive mathematics of coincidence and chance … it doesn't matter what you call it. The point is, whether you accept Him or not, it is still a mystery. And I have no argument with that. It is enough simply to recognise that there is a larger hand at work. But what I
do
object to is the storybook of the church – the codices, the bible verses, the liturgies, the promises of more, the fixation with perfection. This is wrong. I'm sorry to say it, and I mean no disrespect by it – but these are all lies, which you have in turn been teaching. And they are corrosive lies. They nourish a belief in magic and miracles, which power the larger machines of misery and conflict.'

He has been watching me with a mounting look of impotent sorrow. To him, I am the man trapped beneath the ice – there in plain view, suffering, drowning, and yet completely cut off. Not even words can carry between us. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, I press harder. I tell him that it is cruel to teach people that the life we have now is flawed, that it is just something to be endured until the final prize arrives. I explain to him how it stops us from loving one another, from loving our world. And when still he says nothing, and all there is to look at is the lonely end of string trailing away from the ball at our feet, I find my words continue to spill out. Because the idea that this is my legacy, that this mess is my doing and will never be put right, is too much to bear in silence.

‘I wanted to put a stop to it,' I say, although I am no longer talking to him. I am reminding myself. I am overwriting the
sourness of Abaddon and the coldness of His disownment of me. Or at least I am trying to. ‘It was going to be my one true gift to the world. It came to me in the firing of that single second, as I watched Will poised to take his own life, and I realised that I could save this boy and that maybe, just maybe, I could use this second chance to achieve something amazing. To end the lies that I began so long ago. When you think about it,' I smile bitterly, ‘it's what everyone would expect from me – the alpha and the omega. What begins with me, ends with me.'

But he doesn't smile back. In fact, he doesn't move a single muscle, not in his face, not anywhere in his body. He is frozen with the effort of what he is about to say.

‘Billy, do you …'

But he sort of folds in on himself and falls quiet again. It takes a few moments for him to try again.

‘Do you think that you're Jesus Christ?' he seems barely able to believe he's actually uttered those words. ‘Is that what you are saying to me?'

What would be the point in trying to make him understand? An apparition of this kind is just not compatible with modern faith. The angels and prophets belong to the heat and the robes and the wild eyes of the bible. There is no place for God to move openly among you now. Abaddon was right about that at least. Besides, I can see that Will's father has already turned his thoughts to medicine, and the promise of a more contemporary kind of miracle.

Sure enough, he asks me, ‘Will you see Dr Bundt with us? I will be there with you, Bill,' he puts both hands on my shoulders, ‘there at your side. I will always stand by you.'

‘
Abba
,' I say to him. ‘Father. I am so sorry I let you down.'

When the others go to the church service, it is agreed that I should wait for them at home. It is also agreed, in a separate
conversation, that Luc should wait here with me. No one actually says this but it is obvious that he has been appointed as the one who stays behind to keep an eye on me.

I find him sitting at the kitchen table with his laptop open. Paco is on a blanket on the floor, gurgling at some blocks.

‘Hey,' he says when he sees me. ‘I expect you want some coffee.'

Without waiting for an answer, he gets up and busies himself with filling the kettle, rinsing out the coffee pot and so on.

‘Are the others up at church already?'

‘Yes, but this one was feeling a little grumpy so …' we both look at Paco burbling contentedly on his blanket.

‘Right.' I take a seat at the table.

When Luc comes over with my coffee he turns his laptop towards me so I can see the screen. ‘I wanted to ask your advice about this,' he says.

It's the perfect prop, saving us from having to discuss any of the real issues at hand. That conversation will have been scheduled for after the church service – with a different doctor, the kind I need.

‘I'm uploading some
témoignages de client
.' He looks at me to check that I've understood.

‘Client testimonials.'

‘Exactly. For our new medical centre – I don't know if Isobel has told you but I have made a collective with many partners, in the
quatrième
. All kinds of practices take place there and … What?'

It made me smile, the way he said that last part. Like they've partnered up with witches and palmists and whatnot. Talking with him like this is having a pleasantly relaxing effect after the morning's events. I'm afraid I ended up in what Will's mother termed
a bit of a state
again after my encounter with his father, and it has taken a good couple of hours for me to get myself
back on an even keel. It's funny, I've observed it many times before, this vacillation between fear and acceptance, but this is the first time I've actually experienced what it feels like. Mostly I've seen it in people who are terminally ill or who, like me, have experienced the scourge of loss or defeat. Until now, the closest thing in my own experience had been the dread and anxiety that poisoned my final few days with Christ, but even that at its very height lacked the weight of the feeling I have now. It lacked the force of permanence. I guess it's something I'm just going to have to get used to, for what little time there is left.

‘Nothing,' I say. ‘Just a funny turn of phrase. Carry on.'

He tells me that more and more medical professionals are operating like this,
en collectivité
. They want to market the business themselves, he says, using social media. He's been reading up about it: what, he wants to know, should he be doing to improve his Klout score? Whatever that might be.

‘But perhaps this is not what you do,' he says after I've been silent for a while.

‘No, no it is – sort of – but really you need a specialist to help you with this kind of detail. Digital isn't my area.'

‘I understand – a bit like with me and your back?'

‘A bit – except you did manage to help me there.'

‘And how is it now, your back?'

‘It's sore, but nothing like before, not going down my leg or anything. It's more like an ache – a strong ache.'

‘That's normal. It will be calmer in a couple of days.'

A distinct agricultural smell has begun to drift up from the vicinity of Paco, who is sounding a little less content than he was.

Luc gathers him up. ‘Time to change I think.'

While he's off doing that I find myself looking at what he'd been about to show me on his computer. It's the YouTube channel for this collective of his, and he's right, there are a lot of
different disciplines under one roof, a dozen at least, each of them uploading their own video blog (vlog, I think I heard him call it, although I may have imagined that). I'm surprised to see that there are already several hundred subscribers. He made it sound like they were just getting up and running.

‘This is impressive,' I tell him when he comes back in. ‘I hadn't realised you already had such a following.'

‘It just takes a little effort,' he says, ‘but it's possible. You don't have to be an expert …' he looks at me apologetically ‘… for this stuff, I mean – for the simple stuff. It's so easy to talk to people these days,
en directe
. Everyone is online.'

‘Wait!' I touch his hand, which is poised over the mouse pad, about to move us on from this discussion. ‘What did you say just then? Say that last part again.'

‘I … Which part?'

‘You said something about talking to people directly.'

‘Just that, you know, you can communicate so much more effectively with people through all of this.' He tilts his head towards the computer. The deep ocean of life into which each of these little machines ultimately flows. The millions of people, watching, waiting, connected by a living plexus of tributaries and streams to the lambent pool of this screen. That is what he means.