What I Tell You In the Dark (8 page)

The next thing I know I am sitting up on the tarmac with a circle of strangers looking down at me. My face is warm and wet. Blood is dripping on to the front of my shirt. My nose is beating like a bull's heart.

‘I couldn't miss you!' a semi-hysterical Indian man is gabbling at me. ‘Vy don't you look?'

Someone, a woman from the circle leads him away, speaking to him quietly. I hear him even in the distance, saying, ‘You saw him stepping right in front of me.'

‘Don't get up,' a voice tells me. One of them, a cuddly looking woman, has squatted down next to me. ‘Stay where you are until the ambulance gets here.'

‘I don't need an …'
ambulance
gets lost in my swooning effort to stand. I reach a wobbly half-crouch then sit back down hard on the ground. ‘Okay,' I concede, ‘maybe I should just …'

‘Don't get up,' she repeats, a little more firmly this time. She puts a half reassuring, half restraining hand on me.

When the paramedics arrive they shine a light in my eyes and ask me some resoundingly clear questions about who and where I am. By this time (it's taken a good twenty minutes for them to get here) I feel pretty much back to normal. The fogginess has burnt off, although a low, menacing ache has set up shop in the mid to back section of my head. And my nose is throbbing to such an extent that my entire face seems to have joined with its pulsating rhythm.

They take me into the back of the ambulance to put some wadding in my nose, or at least one of them does. The other one stays outside, talking to the driver who hit me, the Indian guy, who continues to flit around like a moth.

‘You're lucky to have got off so lightly,' she tells me. ‘But I'm just going to shut the door while I put the cotton in there. I think I may need to make a manual adjustment to your nose – is that okay with you?'

I nod, pointlessly since her back is turned to me while she pulls the door to. I'm about to say it in words when she turns around again. But I don't. I don't say anything.

‘No need to stare like that.'

Her voice has changed,
she
has changed, but it's different this time, not like it was with the guy in the pub. She has none of the rage that Simon (was that his name?) had, and she's actually speaking normal English too, like she's bothered to notice what you've all been up to in the last few hundred years.

She doesn't appear to hate me either, which is a little unnerving.

‘He wants you home,' she tells me, making it sound like the most attractive thing in the world.

‘Then maybe He should have picked a better driver,' I say.

‘You know as well as I do what I'm talking about. He could cut you off any time He wants – but He doesn't want to play it like that. Not with you. He's giving you a chance here. He wants you to be able to come back – while you still can.'

Ah right, so not
entirely
non-threatening then. Still, a nicely phrased, backhanded threat is a far sight more pleasant than being called a fool and a weakling, or whatever it was that last one said.

‘But I'm not finished here.'

She sighs and sits down on the fold-out seat opposite me. This is much more like an actual conversation than my previous
encounter – this paramedic barely seems to have skipped a beat. You never know, maybe she's used to being puppeted like this. Perhaps she's one of their regular conduits. Wouldn't surprise me, the line of work she's in.

‘There is nothing to finish here …' then she tries to say my name – my
actual
name – but it gets stuck in her throat. There's no way that was ever going to work. We both smile at this. It's a little shared moment – come to think of it, she probably did it on purpose. A cunning reminder to me:
We're both on the same side
.

‘I'm sorry but there is.'

She shakes her head, in a kind way.

‘It can't be easy for you.' She has her hair pulled back in a no-fuss pony tail. Her hands are pink and scrubbed clean. ‘And just so you know, not everyone blames you. There are some of us,' she lowers her voice a little, ‘who didn't agree with the way He handled things. You've been badly mistreated, if you ask me.'

I lower my head, although strangely not to cry – you'd think this would be the time I would do it. Goes to show, a body has a mind of its own, stores up feelings in its muscles and tissues, only lets them go when it's good and ready. No, my bowed head is to hide from her the traces of a smile. I see plain as day what she is trying to do to me. She doesn't pick up on this, though. She's encouraged by what she sees. Penitence, imminent capitulation is the sense she is getting. I feel at an expert advantage – crucial hours ahead of her in a body, already so much more mastery of it at my disposal.

She leans forward, all friendly. ‘I'm curious …' She wants to take this opportunity to ask me some things – a prurient guard walking the condemned man to the chamber ‘… that Christ thing, how did you manage to …?'

‘Mess it up like that?'

She spreads her hands.
Your words, not mine
.

‘Because I felt sorry for them.'

That's not enough for her.

‘But weren't you supposed to just be … how can I put it? … a bit part? You carry David's crown for a while then pass it on – wasn't that the plan? Get a lineage in power and have things running His way down here, instead of …' words fail her ‘… this Jesus cult you left behind' is what she lands on. Then she spreads the hands again, the only apologetic gesture she has – probably not much call for it. ‘That's what I heard anyway.'

‘I'd say that's pretty much the size of it. Except when it came to it, I kind of drifted off message.'

She makes a
You think?
face.

‘Fine, totally off the rails then. Whatever. But at the time, it felt like I was helping.' I rub my face with my hands. This conversation is even more exhausting than the walking and getting hit by a car. ‘I don't know what else to tell you,' I say into my hands.

And it's true, I don't. Two thousand years of raking it over and still I don't know more than that. I had no idea the Jesus thing would go viral like it did – it didn't seem so important at the time. Who knew it would drag on for so long?

The door opens and her partner starts climbing in. ‘How we doing in here?'

‘Just give us a second, Rob.' I can't see her face but some sign passes between them – they must get tricky customers all the time. ‘I'm fine,' she adds. ‘We just need a couple of minutes here.'

‘Sure, no problem.' And he's gone again.

‘Look,' she says to me, ‘I don't have time to be chit-chatting with you. The fact is He understands why this is stirring you up so much – of course He does. What happened back then was a disaster, no one's disputing that. Far from it – it's galling for us all, the way they've taken to heart all that babbling you did – but He needs you to stop it now, okay? Whatever it is you think
you're doing, you're going to need to back off. Others will take care of this for you.'

‘Oh will they?' I get myself ready to leave. ‘No, I'm sorry, but this is my mess, and I'm going to clean it up. I can't sit by and watch anymore. I'm tired of just
watching
all the time. I'm so tired of all of it.'

‘You stay
right
where you are,' her voice commands me, under new strain, about an octave deeper. ‘You callow brat.' Here we go. ‘Is it not enough that you poisoned the well once before with your mindless promises about heaven and eternity? You do realise what you've done, don't you? These people are shooting for another life now, thanks to you and your jam tomorrow fairy stories.'

‘Yes –
exactly
. Why do you think I'm here?'

She fixes me with a desolate stare.

‘I really don't know. But what I
do
know is that you should not be here. And you know it too.'

‘The hand that errs,' she mutters as she rifles in one of the equipment drawers, ‘is not the hand that heals.'

She holds out to me some vials of morphine and a large sealed syringe. ‘Use these. Return yourself to Him. Throw yourself upon His mercy.'

‘No.' I stand up, like a giant in this confined space. ‘I must find an ending.'

She makes a gesture I'm not sure how to describe. More than a shrug, less than a shudder.

‘An ending is exactly what you will find. He will show you no kindness if you refuse Him now.'

So this is it
.

Do I say it or think it? I cannot tell. No matter, there are no words left to speak. It is a mutual kinesis – not just me, but Him too. Another hand must set the fire in this dry straw.

‘He will put you in the earth,' are her final words to me.

That's what they call it, when He casts one of us out.

‘
Lama sabachthani
?' I croak. Forsaken again. Godforsaken.

I stumble out of there and push past her partner. He doesn't seem especially surprised to see me leaving like that. People in sudden aggressions, refusing help, it's part of his job. Mine too.

The way back to the flat is a blur. Houses, doors, railings, fences, people peeping out of windows, a dead something under a bush – it all goes scudding by me. A wet trim of fallen leaves runs along the side of the pavement. Its musty stench of rot and damp is still in my nostrils as I open Will's door.

Inside, it's the most I can do to reach that sofa again. I am suddenly overwhelmed by fatigue. It is choking in my throat, aching through my limbs. My entire frame is working to a new gravity, like it wants to be way down there somewhere, in the earth's core. All around me is the detritus of insomnia. How long since this body last slept?

The most I can manage is to roll down on to the floor and crawl over to the mattress. Lying on the sheets, I blink slowly. Curtain down, curtain up again: I see the carpet and the small pile of books beside the makeshift bed, Aquinas's fat face in there. I blink again, but this time my eyelids will not open. There's nothing more I can do.

It's been a proper, old school Monday. Lundi. Lunes. Howl at the moon day.

I take a deep breath. All sound shuts out, leaving only the slow, steady beating of this heart, telegraphed to me through the springs of the mattress, remote and rhythmic. The drum call of a forgotten outpost.

5

The moment I open my eyes, I feel the change.

I pat my body, checking for what I do not know.

Can this really be it? The dark descent?

Are these
my
hands now? My flesh? Or am I being tricked by imagination? This sudden feeling of being fastened here just another fluke sensation.

Reason shakes her head.

I raise myself up on watery legs. A constriction in my chest tightens my breathing then lets it go again. I hear the air rasping in my lungs.

It is night and the room is in shadow. Swatches of streetlight stripe the carpet at my feet.

‘I'm going to be sick,' I say into the stillness of the room.

I vomit a few chokes of nothing, bile and water. I take a few steps forward, then vomit again as I hold myself up against the doorframe.

A low, persistent pain in my nose has been woken from its own sleep and is now establishing itself in new positions, behind my eyes and cheeks. I am burning up, the shirt on my back is wet through.

‘I am planted here now.' My voice is gasping, faraway, explaining this to me. It understands better than I do.

I sink down to my hands and knees but even the weight of this proves too much and I roll over on to my side, legs tucked up against me, stunned as if by birth.

She was right, He has put me in the earth.

A spasm of panic begins in my abdomen and stabs its way
through to the rest of me. My teeth clench shut. I grip my knees tighter and close my eyes. Animal sounds come, not from me but from within this body. Whatever was left of Will is being displaced and released as my occupation completes itself.

‘There is nothing to fear,' I tell myself in a hoarse whisper. ‘He has put me to matter.'

Saying these words aloud gives me pause, and for a second the panic, the tension in my body, the world itself spinning on its axis, all seem to stop. This obstinate reality sits, unblinking, in my path.

I say it again, trying to believe it this time. ‘He has put me to matter.'

I look around me. Little seems to have changed. The colours perhaps are off, washier than before, but that may just be the lightness in my head. Inside, though, I have been transformed from the centre out. The cupped light at the heart of me has been snuffed. All connection to Him has gone dark. Signal lost. There is only this heavy coat of flesh.

‘There is nothing to fear,' I repeat.

And I'm right about that, I know I am. It is entropy, pure and simple, an irreversible process that cannot be gainsaid – it requires only acceptance. I am a part of its governance now, slaving to it with the other beasts. I have taken my place alongside the people, the cattle, the creatures that walk and those that roam free by feather and fin. I am in the care of Nature.

I exhale a long, whistling breath.

‘I am alive in His world.' These words settle me. My pulse begins to slow.

All His miracles are tethered to me now. I think about the almanac of the seasons, the crops that rise and are cut, the tides that push and pull as the veiled moon slowly bares its face. I think about the violence of birth and the surrender of death. I smell rain rising from hot ground. I hear snow creaking under-foot.
I think about the roosting bird that comes only because it knows it should, or the cellar spider that makes his silent dance from life to dust in the bounds of a single day.

‘The bee has one sting, the primate has two thumbs, the octopus has three hearts, the dragonfly has four wings …' I make a list of these things, softly into the carpet, on and on, until my voice becomes so heavy that I am unable to carry it, and there is no longer anything left, no thought or word, that can stop me from sinking into the black, currentless quiet of sleep.