What I Tell You In the Dark (32 page)

It's just a moment's inattention, less than a moment, a second, as I wait for the sound of the phone, that magic tone to say the message has been sent. But it's enough. Abaddon springs from his chair and grabs my wrist. Prising the gun from my hand, he turns to Gregory and starts striding towards him, the Glock held out in front.
Click-crack, click-crack
goes the mechanism as Abaddon pumps the trigger and racks the slide, searching for rounds that are not there. I have no choice now but to run. I heard the message go, I'm certain of that, which means there's nothing left for me here. Abaddon will want to seal this in blood, and I have no appetite for violence, never have had. It was always said to be my great failing, after the last time – a recrimination that has rung in my ears for millennia. Too soft. Too weak to guide them.

As I move towards the door I see Abaddon's back, and Gregory and Alex recoiling before him. I see Stella, pushed back from the table, hands up at her face, shouting at him to stop. The other two, lunged forwards out of the line of fire, are silent. Their heads are bent down between their knees, like passengers braced for a crash.

Nobody hears me leave.

20

Fleur and the others look cowed and panicked as I pass by, suggesting that news of this morning's events has already broken loose. I'd like to think that Stella was the one brave and resourceful enough to have made the call. Goes to show, though, that you really do have to be going some to travel faster than bad news, and my progress has been faltering at best. The compression of that room has left me weaker than ever before. But this would be a bad time to rest. There is a security guard of some kind, or at least a well-built employee of the hotel, who for the time being has decided, or has perhaps been told, to keep his distance, which tells me that more serious people are already on their way.

Outside I keep to the smaller, less conspicuous streets but even they are teeming with people. Everyone is heading to work. Some seem to want to go, others look less happy at the prospect, but one thing they all have in common is the desire to be nowhere near me. And who can blame them? Every now and then I catch sight of Will, stooped and crazed in snippets of reflections, and even I am startled by it. I try to carry myself better, to measure out my steps but I am too exhausted to make it work. The state of neurotic alert into which I have forced this body has reached its end. This is not a decision, it is a fact. It comes from an ancient place, one of the few secrets that still remain balled up in that fist of reptilian brain.

It's amazing, in many ways, that I have lasted this long. My kind will always make short work of a body. We're too accelerated, too condensed to be housed in such flimsy form. In no time at all the frame begins to buckle and grumble just as this one has,
like some jalopy that's been thrashed in a race, rattling up the final hills, grinding dangerously at every corner. It was the same way last time. Or at least I think it was… It's a funny thing, but my memories have kind of taken a step back in these past few days, into the dimmer light of something not quite my own. It's as if the pictures I once held in my mind, images of last time, of Jesus, have been stolen from someone else, or from books or paintings, lurid composites of things only glimpsed or imagined. They lack substance, I guess, is what I'm saying. Even my darling Maryam has become flat and unseeing, as dead as a board-painted icon. Why, I don't know. I assume it to be an effect of body-life, an inevitability of the downsizing I have suffered. It's stupid to be upset about it, and yet I can't help feeling as if I have lost more than I have gained. My own existence has now all but faded, leaving me to be troubled by the spikes and prickles of Will's past, a cuckoo in the thatch of another bird's home.

I have arrived in a smart little square with porticoed buildings whose shut, gloss-painted doors tell me that I have no business to be lingering here. But I can go no further. There is a tidy garden in the middle of the square, fenced off by black railings. I will take refuge there. I circle it once, slowly, pausing here and there to catch my breath and peer through the thick shrubbery that has been planted like a secondary perimeter just inside the railings – or perhaps it was there first, the vestige of a time when boundaries were softer, when people were better drilled on where they should and should not be. On completing my circuit, I have learned that there are only two entrances to this sanctuary, tall gates on opposite sides, and both are locked. Up and over is the only option.

I haul myself on to the roof of a parked car, to get a better view of entry points. It immediately starts to squawk and flash beneath me. I'd like to say that I feel like one of those characters the Greeks were so fond of, who always seemed to be leaping on
to the backs of wildly complaining beasts. But it just seems a little sad to me now, all this. I'm struggling to see the point in any of it, to be honest. In fact, if I'm
really
honest, I'm wondering if I did actually hear that message get sent, and if I really did see Abaddon firing that gun, or if he wasn't simply snatching it away from me and hurrying over to join the rest of them. I don't know, I can't think, especially not with this car alarm screaming in my ears. I slide back down to the pavement. Just as I am about to start climbing, an indignant woman with a yapping dog approaches me and asks what in God's name I think I'm doing. It's a well-phrased question, given the circumstances, but it's not one I have time to answer.

Instead, I begin to hoist myself over the railings. She does not stay to watch. It's hard work. At first just one knee finds the right purchase, on an agonising little nub of bone-to-metal contact, but the pain soon spurs me on to hook my free foot on the sign that is bolted to the stanchions and I propel myself upwards. I then ease myself in a kind of tender slow motion over the spearing railing tops and roll down through the shrubbery into thick, bosky undergrowth. I lie face down for a while, breathing in the earth. It is as damp and cool as a well.

Eventually the car alarm stops and I am able to hear the sound of the birds and the rustle of my shoes in the grass as I walk. I have the garden to myself. That's not to say that those who are watching from upper-storey windows will not have called this in, of course they will, but for the moment at least, I am alone.
Like the panting hart
, I find myself saying,
spent from the chase
. Will's words, not my own, but this time I am glad of their comfort.

I settle myself at the foot of a large yew tree. The whorls and knots of its bark make smiling faces, encouraging me to rest. I allow my eyes to close. When I open them again a child is walking towards me, across the sunlit grass. As he gets closer, I see that in fact he is not a child at all but a fully grown man,
just slight in his build and with an unusual lightness to his step. He is wearing something I can't quite describe except to say that it is familiar to me in some way. He stops just in front of me, his hands hanging at his side, smooth and fine-boned as a boy's.

‘Why are you lying here?' he asks me.

I am looking up at him, up into the sun. His face is indistinct, curiously unmemorable.

‘I am resting.'

‘Are you tired?'

‘I am very tired.'

He thinks about this.

‘It has been a long time,' he says at last.

‘Yes. Yes, it has.'

We are both silent for a while.

‘I am sorry,' I tell him.

‘Why are you saying that to me?'

‘I feel like I know you.' I squint at him; he seems to be shifting around.

‘You do not remember?'

‘Not really.' I hang my head.

‘I have failed them,' I say, when it is clear that he is not going to explain himself.

I feel his hand stroke my head, and yet when I look back up at him he does not seem to have moved. He is still standing a few steps away from me. I get the sense that he is looking beyond me, into the distance.

‘It is nearly time,' he tells me.

I look around. I see no one else.

‘You cannot fail them,' he adds softly, ‘because they are not looking at you. You never did understand that. They see only themselves.'

‘But last time …'

He shushes me. ‘Last time you just happened to be there. That is all.'

It is hard to focus on what he is saying. His voice is too like my own. His words seem to become lost in mine.

‘They have forgotten the true meaning of our love,' one of us says.

‘They will see it again. They always have.'

There is a loud noise behind me. I look round to see men in black uniforms flowing through the open gate.

‘I'm tired of this,' I tell him.

But he has gone.

The men are yelling at me to put my hands in the air. I shuffle round on my knees to face them. They close in on me in a fast creep, the stocks of their guns tucked into their shoulders, looking at me down the sights, shouting, ‘Armed police! Armed police! Armed police!'

‘I want to rest,' I tell them but it is lost in their shouting.

I think about the future that awaits me now, jammed into the shell of Will's life. I think of his family, of the doctors who will stupefy me with pills. I start to move my left hand down towards my empty jacket pocket. It sets off a cacophony of voices. Some policemen are telling me not to move, to stop fucking moving. Other policemen are shouting to each other –
He's reaching! He's reaching!

Still I continue, exhaling through the movement.
This breath I put back in the world
.

It's only as my hand is sliding into the silk of my pocket that I feel it happen. It hits me before the sound does. By the time I hear that brittle snap, I can already feel it spinning, tearing inside me. Then I feel a second one thud into my chest, right next to the first. Again that dry twig snap arriving just behind it. Some things move faster towards us, that's all it is. Just physics and numbers. Parts gentled into shape.

I am on my back, the sky far above me.

When I turn my head to the side, I see a pool of my blood running into the ground. My hand is flapping like a fish, my whole body shakes with it. Many feet are moving around me, many hands are on me.

But this time there is nothing else, nothing is tugging at me. He is not lifting me the way He lifted me from that hated cross, the way the tide bumps a boat off the sand. I am no longer His charge. Like all men, I must now lapse into darkness.

My heart is stopping. There's no mistaking it, the pressure just goes. I close my eyes. My moment.
Consummatum est
, for real this time.

One final beat. One last thing.

The hand of a child, Will's hand, enclosed in another's, the black of his sleeve, the band of gold on his finger, the path ahead of them both, and rising up there, at the end of it all, the mossy buttresses of his father's church set deep in the earth.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I owe a debt of gratitude to the following people, all of whom have helped in one way or another with the writing of this book. First and foremost, my extraordinary wife, without whose love and support I would be lost. My parents and my sister, for always being in my corner. The one they call Gerontion, ideas man par excellence, and Beloved Aunt, a fellow artist in disguise. My agent, Nelle, whose vision and encouragement made all the difference. And Andrew Lockett, for believing in this book.