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CHAPTER 1
I jump in at 09.20 on Monday 30th September 2013, just as he's hooking the noose of his belt on the back of the door. There he is all solemn and tearful, a toilet cubicle at work the last thing he'll see on this earth, when suddenly I come surging through, like that, in a heartbeat. It's a full take. There's no way of describing it, other than to say he just switches off and lets it happen. For weeks now he's been praying for something like this, retreating to the seclusion of this stall, these tiles hard against his knees. He wanted strength – each time those words, Give me strength. And I tried my best to oblige, burning on him every way I knew how, showing him he's not alone. But it wasn't enough. Today he simply asked for forgiveness. Have mercy on me, Lord, for what I am about to do – that kind of thing. Yeah well, sorry – but no. I can't just let him bow out like that, not now, not when he's so close. There's a bigger picture here. He may not be able to see it, but I can, and I'm afraid sitting back and training the vine hasn't worked. It's time for me to take the plunge.
It's a massive shock, of course. I mean, it was never going to be a smooth transition, not after all this time, but I'd forgotten just how overwhelming it is. The creatureliness of a frame, the fluids and the flesh, the pressure of all that blood and electricity: it's a lot to feel at once. And the noise – it's everywhere. Inside you, thrumming, beating noise, then all around, from every direction.
So it turns out another guy was in here washing his hands and he hears me. He goes to find somebody, telling them there's a person in the bathroom having a fit. By the time it gets round to the maintenance man kicking in the door of my cubicle, I'm starting to get a handle on things. That's to say, I'm fully aware of it happening. There they are, both of them standing above me – the handwashing guy, who tries to talk to me in a shocked sort of way, and the guy in the overalls, who hangs back and says very little.
I'm naked at this point, my clothes are in ribbons, and I've wound toilet paper in a big turban around my ears to try to deaden the sound. I must have been feeling way too hot because I'm kneeling at the bowl splashing water all over my body and I'm panting, like a dog does on a hot day.
Anyway, there's a big commotion and I end up wrapped in a blanket, with the toilet roll turban still on (I bit the guy's hand when he tried to remove it), and I'm led away like that, out of the bathroom and across the fifth floor of the office. Every mouth is pretty much hanging open, and lots of people are holding some temporarily forgotten object in their hand, a phone or a document or something, as they watch our little procession pass by. No one says a word.
It's disturbing how little time it takes for them to be satisfied that I'm well enough to be sent home, alone, in a cab. There are three other people present when this quasi decision is reached in the privacy of a meeting room still thick with the smell of new carpet (having gobbled up some smaller PR outfits, Abelwood has moved in with the other superagencies that straddle the line between Westminster and Soho).
The first of these three people is an oriental woman from Human Resources – her name is something like Pim or Pin. Then there's a silver-haired man called Nicholas, who is in charge. And lastly there is the unnamed security/maintenance man who brought me here, just sort of hovering in the background in case I start biting or shouting again.
I'm very absorbed in drinking tea, especially in tracking the hot bolt all the way down my throat and into the pit of my belly, so I'm not really listening to much of what they're saying. Which is fine because they mostly seem to be talking about me as if I'm not there: while I am undoubtedly the subject of the conversation, its real agenda is a kind of risk assessment exercise, with the hidden question of what the come-back will be if I freak out, top myself, maul the taxi driver and so on.
Eventually I am asked, almost as an afterthought, if I would like to see a doctor. I shake my head. I then try out my normal speaking voice for the first time, to ask if I can borrow some money – the tracksuit I have on (I am wearing someone's spare gym kit) has empty pockets.
By way of an answer, I am handed a plastic bag that contains the wreckage of what I was wearing, including my wallet (but not, tellingly, my belt) and I am told that the cab will be on account so I needn't worry about that. I am also assured by Pim/Pin that I needn't rush back into work, that I should take my time with it. They can take care of my accounts while I'm gone. She keeps using my name, tacking it on to the end of her every utterance. The softness of its monosyllable, Will, lost in the mouth of this robotic stranger.
In the taxi, I find myself growing increasingly impatient with the gentle cinemascope of the view. I want to be out there, amongst it all. I ask the driver to pull over but he refuses to deviate from his instructions. So next time we stop at some lights I just open my door and get out.
I stride off down the street, ignoring the vague sound of the driver calling behind me. I remove my headdress as I go. The air is sharp and clear against my skin – one of those autumn days – you can almost taste how blue it is.
But it's not long before my progress slows and pretty soon I've reached a near crawl – literally, in places. There's just too much to see, out and about like this, at large in the world. I keep stopping without meaning to stop, if you know what I mean. And people keep looking, while pretending not to look, in that way city people do. Like now, here, in this warm current of air wafting up from ... I'm not exactly sure, beneath the ground somewhere, some ventilation outlet connecting the hidden tunnels of the tube trains to the open world. It's intoxicating. Layer on layer of scent, old things rotted down and burrowed out, mixed in with the new life, the films and residues of daily passage. I snort it up in greedy gulps, hands on knees, pulling the life into me.
I am that I am, to plagiarise a line from His Nibs.
'Morning,' I say, in celebration of this fact, to a man coming out of Russell Square station.
Mor-ning. Such a great word, gorgeous mouthfeel. I say it again. Up it comes, rolling through the throat and into the tongue muscle. Thought to flesh.
But the man has gone.
Shame. I would have liked to talk to him, touch him even. When you've been benched for as long as I have, you just want to get involved. You want contact.
Eventually, reluctantly, I drag myself up from my stoop, straightening my spine vertebra by vertebra – acting it out in miniature: the Rise of Man. What you fondly think of as evolution. Ha! I love that: like you did it all yourselves somehow. One day, you're grunting about, Version 1.0, on the make, pulling your food out of trees and holes, then a few million years later you're doing your shopping online and launching satellites.
Wrong.
We're the ones who unmonkeyed you. We whispered it all to you, about the light and the dark and the rain for your rivers, about all the things you could and could not do. It was a simple two-hander: the Big Man and the Bad Man. And you felt its truth.
But now ... now it's all been forgotten. The story of how much we love you has been lost in all the noise, it's become just another –
'Sorry,' I have to say to someone with whom I've just collided (my fault – eyes were half closed for a moment there).
But he, the object of my collision, seems to want more than that.
'Watch where you're fucking going,' he warns me. He's a cockney. Not the chirpy sort, the hard man sort.
'Sorry,' I repeat. 'I will.'
Evidently, though, I don't seem as apologetic as I should be because he continues to glare at me for a few seconds longer. There's a rheumy pinkness to his eyes, his mouth is a stubble-surrounded slot from which insults emerge.
'You tit,' is the one he chooses to end our encounter with.
As he passes, he shoulders me so hard I nearly fall over.
But it turns out to be just what I need, the physical jolt of it. It shakes me awake.
I am here for a reason – no more dawdling, no more sermonising. I must finish what Will began.
I set off again.
As I walk I force myself to ignore the chorus of things that are crying out for me to touch them, taste them, fondle them with my itchy fingers. Instead, I focus my attention on Will. I make myself remember his agonies, the tears he spilled, the help he so desperately craved. And I remind myself too how I nudged and prodded him, the tenderness with which I coaxed him – it's excruciating how close he came. But you can't blame him. This situation he had, a guy like him would get eaten alive trying to take it public. I probably should have realised that a little sooner – he just wasn't built for it. But I'm here now, so let's see what can be done.
This time on earth I tell myself, working the words loose with each footfall, it's like water in my hands.
At a busy road everyone is waiting for a break in the traffic. I wait with them. Next to me a young woman stands with her child, its hand in hers. I smile at her, she smiles back.
Every drop is precious.
I make short work of the next few miles. On only one other occasion do I fall prey to distractions, as I'm passing a queue of cars at the lights on Bishopsgate. Music is belting out from one of their windows.
'Forget about the price tag ...' the singer chants '... Ain't about the cha-ching cha-ching.'
Away to my left, the spire of St Helen's winces up over the rooftops, a barrage of holy ground standing fast against the floodwater of greed. The usurers' towers are massed on the horizon behind it, a glinting tide of steel and glass.
I find myself slowly beginning to move to the music, sliding back and forth on the soles of my trainers. I reach up into the sunlight, my fingers a silhouette.
Across the street three young men call out to me – Oi Oi! Nice dancing mate! One of them is filming me with his mobile phone.
I pull myself together and hurry on. I speed past pubs and office buildings on Houndsditch, pushing east, away from the privileged centre. After a couple more miles, my legs grow heavy and uncooperative – at one point I even wait at a bus stop for a few minutes but the grid of digits printed on the timetable threatens to suck me in. I could dwell for hours on numbers, the way they twist and thread their helixes into you. Those same spirals that spin down through shells and pine cones and whirlpools are tucked inside you too – but you already know that.
Again I resist. Again I press on.
It is nearly midday by the time I reach Stepney, a hinterland of poverty that hangs out of Whitechapel like a stillborn. This is where Will calls home, among the exhaust-blackened terraces and the tower blocks. There is something timeless about this place: suffering distilled through the generations. Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
I've seen these kebab shops, these strip-lit grocery stores I don't know how many times as I've watched Will come and go – this scrub of parkland shoehorned between the buildings. There's nothing pretty about any of it, and yet I find myself irresistibly drawn to it. It makes me nostalgic for that other time I jumped in. Those golden few weeks that preceded my infamous Mistake. I came to feel right at home among the poor and the destitute back then – so much easier to read life there, I found, with the frills torn away and people just being people. And He understood that – I could tell – He appreciated what I was trying to achieve down in those fly-blown dustbowls, with everyone writhing over each other in their blind litter, desperate to get a touch of me. Or at least, He understood it right up until it turned sour. After that, He saw nothing but His own fury.
Appropriately enough, it's a homeless woman who rouses me from this thought. She scuttles out from some corner and grabs hold of my arm.
'I know you,' she shouts, even though we're only a few inches apart.
'No,' I tell her, 'you don't.' I try to move off but her determination to hold on to me forces me to stop.
This is not good. I need to get rid of her, pronto. This kept happening last time – loners, lunatics, vulnerable people as they're now known, they've always been the first to sense us. And if you're not careful, it can really throw you off your game. I ended up with a slipstream of them following me into every temple, on to every mountaintop – and it wasn't just me either: Simon, Barnabas, Paul especially, a lot of those early guys really struggled with it. I don't want to sound callous but it's not exactly what you want when you're trying to sell The Word to people, to have some comet's tail of derelicts and misfits.
I shake her loose. But she keeps up with me, beetling along at my side.
'It's you!' she yells again, this time really drawing out the ooh part of you.
She's strangely hard to describe, as these people so often are – she's filthy of course, and wild looking, but that's about all you can say for certain. Her hair could be any colour really and she could be literally any age between twenty and sixty. It's impossible to tell, the lives they lead. Her hands, though, are bony and strong.
'Alright, you got me,' I tell her. 'It is me.'
At this, she stops dead in her tracks. Her lips are moving silently, her eyes are darting around, looking at everything but me.
I'm going to try to do it the nice way – I owe her that much (she is right, after all). 'Look,' I say gently, 'come over here.'
I lead her to a small alleyway where another homeless person is asleep – unconscious is probably a better way of describing it – in a drift of rubbish bags. People occasionally flit past but no one is paying us any attention. She just stands there in front of me, eyes lowered, entranced by her hectic, fiddling hands.
In a whisper, not wanting to break the spell, I ask her to look at me. Which she does, stupefied with wonder. I crouch down next to the sleeping form at our feet (on closer inspection I see that it's a man). He doesn't move.
'This,' I place a hand on the man's shoulder, 'is where you can serve me best. You must help your fellow man.'
'Get off,' he mumbles from the depths of his stupor.
I stand up to face her. She continues to watch my every movement, rickety but intent, like a mangy hawk.
'My sheep hear my voice,' I tell her, 'and I know them.'
Very slowly, I reach out my hands to her, open palmed – noli timere. She allows herself to move in a fraction closer. I tell her how He loves her, how He loves all His children, that the poorest in body are the richest in soul. I woo her with my words, nearer and nearer, until finally I am able to draw her against me in an embrace. We remain like that for several minutes, and as I hold her, her aroma reveals itself to me like a deeply held confidence. At first there is only the citrus astringency of urine but, little by little, something far more complex emerges, something unknowably sad – the peaty sweetness of loneliness and decay. I rest my cheek against her grease-dampened head and lull her softly. Then, as the last of her spasmodic movements twitch into stillness, I lay her down in the plastic next to the man and kiss the blackened knuckle of her hand, which still clutches my sleeve.
'You must release me now,' I almost sing to her.
She settles back into the plastic. The man's body adjusts soundlessly to accommodate her.
'Be on this earth,' I tell her as I leave. 'Every second is a miracle.'
By the time I reach the top of Will's street, I'm beginning to feel good. Better than good, in fact. I feel more – can't think of the word – than I've felt for a very, very long time. All I know is that jumping in like this was the right move. I'm sure of that now – it's something I can feel, on a cellular level. (Complete! That's the word I was looking for. I feel complete again.) It hasn't been easy, though, doing it like this, against the will of the Big Fella. The last thing I want to do is defy Him but it was a split second thing, you couldn't even call it a decision – more of a reflex really, quick like a cat. And now here I am.
It's a two-storey terraced house with a flat on the ground floor and another above. There are buzzers for Pryce and Sherwin (Will's neighbour – her angry fist comes knocking late into the night, her notes come skidding beneath the door – his pacing, she says, is like a herd of elephants).
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "What I Tell You in the Dark"
by .
Copyright © 2015 John Samuel.
Excerpted by permission of Abrams Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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