What I Tell You In the Dark (3 page)

The young lad whose job it is to push the demeaning little mail cart around the office has just said something to me. I
didn't catch what it was but the tone of it sounded like a well-meaning enquiry about my health. Now he is standing there, open-faced, waiting for some kind of reply. Others who are pretending not to have noticed watch their computers in silence, also waiting to see what I'll say.

‘Okay, thanks,' is what comes out. I move on before he tries to prolong this inadequate response into some kind of conversation.

I need to settle down a bit. I've got myself all tensed up, worrying about that memory stick. It dawned on me as I was travelling here that it's not exactly hidden in the most convenient place – Will was alone in the office when he stashed it. So I'm going to have to choose my moment to get the thing back. It's going to take a little patience. I can't just be climbing all over everything and causing another rumpus – the last thing I need is for the security guys to eject me from the building. It was bad enough just now on the way in here, the basilisk stare I got. But they couldn't argue with my pass (although it still didn't stop the guy at the desk asking me,
Would you like me to call up for you, sir?
). I mustered my most imperious look and proceeded wordlessly past him. I could feel him staring, though, as I waited for the lift to come. Everyone listened to Will's shoes nervously tapping on the marble floor.

Predictably enough, word of my arrival has travelled, so that by the time I reach Will's part of the office, there's a small welcoming party waiting for me. The man at the head of their group is Alex, Will's immediate boss. They are, without realising it, standing in a loose diamond formation. It's perfectly natural. Birds do it, bees do it, even shysters such as these do it. Short-range repulsion, alignment, long-range attraction – look it up. It's everywhere. Particle physics, cellular robotics, ants, birds, fish, people. Not me, though. I just push right past them and sit down at my desk. No one else is moving. They're just
staring at me. I should probably make an effort to seem a little more professional. I pick up the phone and look as though I am about to make an important call. But before I can think of a number to dial, Alex comes over and hovers at my side.

He is a sorry excuse for a young man (which is what he is – no more than Will's age, possibly even younger). His flaccid, unexercised body presses against his shirt. His face, with its quick, piggy eyes, is that of a sly old spinster or a murdering nurse.

The others hang back in their headless diamond, watching for his cues.

‘Hello, Will,' he says, in a voice that makes me instantly dislike him. ‘Is everything okay?'

‘This isn't really a good time, Alex.' I show him the phone, which unhelpfully starts to make that dim honking noise phones make when you've been holding them for too long. We both look at it. I put it back in its cradle.

He says, ‘Why don't we head into my office for a chat?'

‘Do I have to?'

‘No, of course you don't
have
to,' he lies, then immediately trumps it with an even bigger lie, ‘I'm just worried about you. I'd like us to talk things through – I want to make sure that you're taking all the time you need to help you recover from…' he peters out here, suddenly aware of the watching eyes and listening ears and the fact that he doesn't have a convenient euphemism to describe what happened this morning. ‘To recover,' he corrects himself, deciding to snip it off there.

I shrug and rise to my feet.
Dissembling serpent. I will tear your house to the ground
.

‘Thanks,' I say to him, ‘I appreciate that.'

It's the only way to tackle these people, whose livelihood is untruth – by telling lies of your own. The curse of the modern world, if you ask me: lies, lies and more lies. Truth has lost its
value. Time was, you could have gone in hard with something like this and come straight at them, swords swinging, trumpets cracking the heavens. And they'd have had no doubt that it was God's righteous anger they were seeing. People were more open to us back then – maybe because they were closer to it all, the deaths and the births, the blood and the spit – they felt the rhythms more. My kind used to stun their souls to the surface just by showing up. It was like fishing with dynamite. A sight to behold. But not anymore. We just don't have that kind of presence now – modern societies are far too busy being amazed at themselves, it's side-lined us. These days if we want to get something done, we have to do it remotely – the touch behind the touch – just like you with your drones and your fourth-generation warfare. No one bothers with jump-ins or any of that old school stuff anymore – it's just not worth it. No one, that is, except for throwbacks like me.

As I follow Alex to his office I feel an almost overwhelming urge to smite him down, to slap the lies clean out of his mouth. There's something so profoundly callous about the back of him, the uniform pinstripe of his suit, the perfectly squared off hairline. I can barely contain my ire. Will's spirit was crushed into dust by these people and their banal, workaday evil, and yet on they go into further iniquity. My eyes bore into the rounded hump of his shoulders.

Will understood it – he saw how avarice is choking this world. And as his understanding grew, his panic mounted. The briar of greed everywhere around him, rooted in every crevice and corner – he simply couldn't cope with it. A blinding swarm – that's how he saw it – the swarm intelligence of countless moneychangers, the flit and crackle of their wings eclipsing the sky, always devouring.

The locust has no king
. I watched him say it this very morning to the woman, Stella. The leader. He stood up in the meeting,
everyone except him quiet in the aftermath of Stella's announcement, her carefully packaged messages about InviraCorp still hanging in the air. But he dared to tell this appalling truth to her, to all of them, his pointing finger shaking before him.

Watching him after that I realised something had reached an end in him. The way he stumbled in the corridor, those last few steps to the bathroom, holding on to the walls like a passenger on a ship. Minutes later, I was in there, snatching him up.

We've now reached Alex's office and he is holding open the door for me. ‘Okay Will,' he says, ‘in you go.'

The way he is trying to dominate me with this rote-learned conciliation is making me surprisingly angry. Sympathy as strategy, manipulation beneath a pelt of kindness… I'm sick of seeing it. It's an insidious form of oppression and I've watched its creeping rise in the world with mounting despair. It's perhaps not surprising, then, that I'm starting to feel like I want to gouge out his eyes or thump his gut – but really, who am I kidding? Even if it would change anything, this body couldn't withstand a fight, not even against a house cat like him, and especially not against the thick wrists and sloping shoulders of the security apes. No, there's simply no way. And besides, it must be at least a week since Will has slept more than a few hours in a night. Even the walking I've done today has exhausted me. In fact, a nice sit down may be just what I need.

And so in I go. The dagger of my enmity will remain cloaked a while longer.

He puts a guiding hand on my shoulder. ‘Okay Will,' he says again. There is an almost professional patience in his voice – I am a simple but troublesome child passing through his care.

I shrug him off.

Just know this
, I tell him silently as I pass.
There shall be no covenant. No mercy either
.

•

I find that if I lean back in my chair, I am able to see past the guy who is talking to me and get a clear view through the window behind him. Several hundred yards in the distance the steel skeleton of a new building is being slowly hoisted and lowered into place. Tiny men are busy operating the cranes or standing and watching the cranes or walking to where there are other machines and more tiny men. Behind them is a bright blue sky. It's really quite poetic in its way.

‘Are you still with us?'

This is directed at me but I choose to ignore it because I'm not yet done with my looking out of the window, and anyway I would have thought the answer to that was self-evident.

Even so, the man who is talking to me – mid-fifties, stuffed toad-like and wet-lipped into his suit – has moved his head so that it now interferes with my line of vision, and the concert of tiny men is replaced by his jowly face. His name is Oliver, he is one of the in-house lawyers. Not just one of, in fact: he is their elder. A Son of Zenas.

‘Every word,' I tell him cheerfully. It's not an exact answer to his question, which I've already forgotten, but it addresses the spirit of the thing.

‘So, Will, what I was saying is that we cannot of course
make
you go home if you do not want to be off work and if you are, as you have stated yourself to be, in perfectly sound …' he describes a little shape in the air with his finger ‘… health.'

He then waits for a short while, as if for a response from me. Was that supposed to be a question?

‘Was that a question?' I ask him.

‘What?'

‘What you just said. It sounded like a statement but you,' I imitate his funny little hand gesture, ‘seem to be waiting for me to say something.'

‘Is there anything you would
like
to say?'

‘About what?'

Nicholas, one of the managing partners, has had enough of this. Perhaps he thought it would be easier to get rid of me.

‘Don't mess us about, young man,' he snaps. ‘Okay? We're in a very delicate situation here.'

His little miss just-so assistant who's been taking notes during all of this doesn't, I notice, write that last part down.

I should probably mention at this point that there are also a couple of other people in the room besides Oliver and Nicholas. There is Alex, of course, the orchestrator of this little impressment (no sooner had the advertised chat in his office begun then these various players began to drift in, one by one). There is also one of the security guys sitting, like last time, near the door – but he's not the one I dealt with when I jumped in, or at least I'm pretty sure he's not, it's hard to remember exactly. And there's Karen, who is from Human Resources. She is standing over by the window (not the one I was looking out of) where the sunlight has drawn the shadow of her body into tight focus beneath her blouse. Unsurprisingly, Will's loins are stirring at the sight of her – I should probably look away, and yet I can't help resenting that thought a little. Why should I be tyrannised by my own flesh? It's a cruel paradox, this body of yours – the mind always straining to take flight and explore its own bounds only to be constantly conscripted in the service of your earthly needs. This carnal divining rod, always twitching, forever pointing the path to debasement, I remember it from last time – the determined effort to ignore it. It's exhausting.

I refrain from putting my hand down my trousers and guiding the thing under the waistband of my boxer shorts so it's not digging in quite so much. The reason I don't is that Oliver here, and the others for that matter, are watching me with great attention. I am certainly not going to give them an excuse to send me home if they can't find one for themselves.

Returning to Nicholas's point, re the messing about in times of delicacy, I tell him, ‘My view of the situation, Nicholas, is that
I
am the one being messed about here. So why don't you just let me get back to work? As I keep telling you, I'm fit as a fiddle.'

‘Fine,' he says, although clearly it's not. ‘But if you are going to insist on being here then I must tell you …' he ventures a quick glance in the direction of Oliver who inclines his head as if to confirm that yes, this is, unfortunately, our position, ‘… that I shall be permanently removing you from the InviraCorp account. I do this as a matter of routine based on the events of recent days – as you know, we are experiencing acute difficulty with this client and they have asked for a completely fresh team on the account.'

He checks that his assistant is committing each and every one of these solemn words to record. She is.

When her pencil stops, he adds, with visible reluctance, ‘This is not, in any way, a measure of your fitness to work.'

Her hand springs back into life, the words lace across her pad in a filigree of corporate compliance.

‘The moving finger writes,' I observe, ‘and having writ, moves on.'

‘Be that as it may,' Nicholas says, with an arctic smile, ‘you may rest assured that there will be a full review of the handling of the InviraCorp account. No stone,' he almost hisses at me, ‘shall remain unturned. And if, my lad, it transpires that –'

‘Thank you, Nicholas.' This interruption is the first thing Karen has said. Everyone turns to look at her. Will's slackening member starts awake like a sentry caught drowsing at his post.

‘Will …' she makes a feline movement from her seat on the window sill and slides into one of the empty chairs opposite me ‘… I think every one of us in this room is acutely aware of, and a little exercised by,' she glances at Nicholas, ‘the damage that recent press coverage has caused our agency. It comes at a
critical time for our business and, as I am sure you realise, the reputational risk is worn by ourselves as much as InviraCorp.'

‘As the apologists for black-hearted wickedness?' I venture.

She scans my face for a second, not unkindly, just genuinely curious. I think she's wondering if that was a joke. When she sees it wasn't, though, her tone becomes less conversational.

‘As Nicholas has stated here for the record, Will, the Abel-wood Board and the managing partners have launched a formal review into the InviraCorp account. The terms of reference are to ascertain how this very grave breach of client confidentiality has occurred.'