by John Samuel
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).
Inside is an entrance hall whose floor has been polished to a neck-breaking gleam. A small table by the door bears a stack of letters, all of them for Will, all of them bills. Luckily, though, Ms Sherwin, the stacker of envelopes, the polisher of floors, is not here to visit her disapproval on me. Even so, I take the stairs two at a time. All I want now is to get inside and get on with the job.
A couple of minutes later I’m sitting on Will’s sofa, his laptop booting up on my knees. As its fan wheezes and its innards tick into life, I find myself surprised by these familiar surroundings, how different they are in the unfiltered light of reality. The hysteria of all these bible pages, for one thing, taped to the walls like that, scarred by Will’s highlighter, annotated by his looping scrawl. Or his mattress, his duvet, his pillows, all of them dragged through from the bedroom and deposited here in the hope that the murmur and flicker of the television might hold some promise of sleep. It all just seems a little unhinged, looking at it this way. I hadn’t noticed that before, when I was watching him do it all. I must have got caught up in the moment, I guess. Caught up in the person. It’s hard to explain.
The screen flashes on. Okay, this is it. I know it’s on here somewhere because I watched him put it there. I watched him stay late at work one evening, waiting for the others to leave. Then once they’d gone, I watched him travel around the office like an insect, sucking data into a memory stick. Too smart, too painstakingly cautious to email something like that, he carried it home in his pocket, vigilant at every step, needing to be certain no one was following.
So why is nothing happening? There was a blank white screen, inviting the expectation of something more, except now all I have is a neutral background that looks nothing at all like Will’s desktop. And some stupid video offering to help get me started.
Please no. Surely he hasn’t.
He has. He’s stripped it. He’s wiped his computer.
In a desperate attempt not to believe this, I whip the cursor around the screen, clicking on this, clicking on that, but everything I open launches itself for the first time, oblivious to a time before Will lobotomised the system.
I almost hurl the thing at the wall. How could I have not noticed this?
I slump back into the sofa, sending the computer clattering to the floor. He must have done it last night. He must have known what he was going to do today. He was getting ready, covering his tracks, eliminating all evidence of –
‘Wait!’ I actually shout this, springing back to my feet.
Wait. There’s still the memory stick. That dear, darling little memory stick of his. He took it back to work and he left it there, an insurance policy squirreled away in his desk. He must have forgotten about it, or else he just switched off this morning and stopped caring about the details, one foot already off the stage. Either way, it’s still there for the taking.
‘Yes!’ I complete a hugely satisfying air punch as I collapse back down into the sofa cushions.
My weight causes a pile of papers to topple from the armrest and subside against my leg. I pick up the edition of last week’s newspaper with Natalie’s article in it. Will has left it folded out at the harrowing picture of a cloth-masked doctor injecting a baby whose arm barely seems wider than the needle. Above it the headline reads Bleeding the heart of Africa.
I’ve read it several times already, like I was almost physically there with Will as he devoured the words over and over. But actually holding the pages between my fingers like this, it makes the whole thing seem even more real. The suffering is less abstract when you can feel the story next to your own skin, as if yours are just the last in a long line of hands upon hands upon hands. It suits her writing too – it’s like it’s meant to be touched. There’s a lean muscularity to her prose – the news and nothing more, every word weighed for its content.
I worm down further into the cushions and hold the slightly trembling pages above me. She tells the story with glorious economy. Big Pharma the immediately familiar villain of the piece, except this time she can reveal that its clutches extend further than we ever knew. InviraCorp – the name slips like a serpent into her text – one solitary company but with a root structure so vast that it curls through every corner of HIV care in Africa: the distribution of medication, the bribery of corrupt officials, the eventual dizzying profit hikes. InviraCorp – she keeps repeating it, showing how it’s everywhere, an unseen force in the lifecycle of these antiretroviral drugs as they are shipped across a continent ravaged by plague – she uses that word. Children born with a death sentence, whole communities annihilated, while this one corporation looks calmly on. Enormous wealth leveraged from the pit of human misery.
It is the perfect beginning. I crumple the pages down into my lap. Now it’s up to me to make sure she finishes the story – Will couldn’t, but I can.
I rise from my seat and stand with my back to the window, washed in dusty sunlight. On the opposite wall, I watch my shadow, still and dark, sharpened by His light.
I must go now. I must retrieve the putrid secrets that Will extracted, whose poison nearly killed him, and I must bring them to Natalie. In her hands they will be delivered to the world.
I swap the tracksuit for one of Will’s pressed suits and a freshly ironed, cellophane-shrouded shirt. In the bathroom I splash my face at the dank font of the sink.
I will uncover this truth, intact, a still-beating heart of darkness.
I watch my hands straighten Will’s tie, smooth down the lapels of his suit. I like this smile of his, how it sets his jaw with new purpose. One of God’s own soldiers now.
‘Apokálupto,’ I tell my reflection in a whisper. It shall be revealed.
It’s a whisper that remains on my lips as I retrace my steps back out into the daylight, and as I glide through the streets in search of wings to carry me toward my destiny. At a minicab office I blurt the address to one of the men who is sitting there playing dominos. He nods and takes his coat from the back of the chair, and still without a word, he leads me to his car. A sturdy charioteer. Together we speed through the traffic. Nothing impedes us.
I shall deliver this vile grub of truth to her.
Am I speaking these words? I cannot tell. The man’s eyes watch me in the mirror but they do not threaten. They understand, just as He will come to understand this purpose of mine. It opens in me like a bud – a hidden quick that senses change. The long, hard remission of winter is coming to an end.
2
Back here again.
This building is a Möbius strip of corporate collusion. Corridors turn back on the same corridors, offices reveal the same set pieces of huddled talk. Lone figures at phones and computers, connected to unseen others. I hasten through, and each one that sees me works the same script, affects the same show of casual greeting. Only when I have passed do they begin their excited whispering. And who can blame them?
It’s going to be hard to justify my presence here, so soon after this morning’s events. Even before today the coals of suspicion have been smouldering. Since the InviraCorp story broke last week, the account has been locked down. Low-level execs like Will were immediately shut out of the files. They must suspect a leak – Will was convinced that they knew he was passing information to Natalie. He barely slept these past few days. The morning her article appeared, the partners were in at dawn, having received early word on the wires. By midday, InviraCorp’s top people were beginning to arrive from the City office. By late afternoon the rest had made it, all the way from the European production facility, rumpled and irritated by hours of travelling. Will watched them come and go – we both did – but no one discussed what was said. Not that they needed to. Damage limitation is all that matters
at times like these. Everyone knows that. Bring out the janitor with his piss mop and his bucket. Deny, deny, deny.
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?’
&nbs
p; 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.
