by John Samuel
‘Look, just so you understand,’ I’m telling her, ‘I’m not The One. I can’t emphasise that enough. There is no One, there never will be a One – it’s just something people would like to believe. It’s back to that whole narrative thing again,’ I explain, as if we’ve discussed this many times before, ‘mankind’s fatal weakness for a tidy story, like there’s always going to be that One, the hero to usher in the right ending. But the truth is I don’t know how this is going to end. No one does.’
‘Will, are you sure you’re okay? You’re not making much sense.’ Worrying that might be a little harsh to one as fragile as myself, she immediately adds, ‘Please don’t think I’m looking to you for all the answers on this. What you’ve given us already is –’
‘But I can get the answers – it’s not that. Sorry, sorry to interrupt, but I just want to be clear about what I’m saying here. I can get you the answers, that’s really not a problem – I’m simply trying to point out that …’
What? What am I trying to point out? That I’m not the second coming of Christ? I think she probably assumes that. Seriously. What am I thinking? I’m not, that’s the point.
‘Never mind,’ I tell her.
‘Look, I really don’t want you to think anyone’s putting pressure on you, Will. I don’t want you to …’ she runs into a dead end, unable to summon a tactful phrase for the sort of freaking out she thinks I might do. ‘What I mean is, if you can get more information easily and,’ she leaves an emphatic pause here, ‘legally, then yes, great, of course I’d love to see it. But if you can’t, then please don’t feel like it’s expected of you.’
Like last time I jumped in, you mean? Shooting my mouth off to try to meet that constant expectation, that tireless need for reassurance, to be told that there’s something more than all this, that there are many rooms in my father’s house and other assorted nonsense. Some of that was forgivable – at the end, especially. It was just the pain talking. (Try it some time: getting flogged to within an inch of your life then left dangling in the wind, birds pecking at your head while you get freeze-frame jointed by your own miserable weight – it hurts, it makes you say things. It was just unfortunate for me, for us all, that people were properly listening.) The other stuff, though – my I’ll be back shtick in particular – that’s on me. That was a huge error of judgement. But the trouble is, once you start down that path, reassuring people, telling them little stories to make them feel better, you can’t stop. It’s like trying to fill a bath with the plug out. What you end up with is a lot of disappointment and thwarted expectations. It’s probably hard to imagine now just how bitterly let down they all felt by my failure to come back to earth and gather up all the good ones. Time has passed, and most people seem to have forgotten about all that now, and for those who haven’t there are still the fanatics and the zealots, the televangelists making a tidy little business out of the waiting game. But you should have seen them back in the day, the ones immediately after Jesus, waiting and watching for my magical parousia. Talk about a slow-hand-clapping audience.
Anyway.
‘I’ve just got a thing about this,’ is my colossally inadequate summary of all that. I try to weave in a phrase that I’ve heard bandied in Will’s work place, ‘I’ve got a thing about managing expectations. Expectation management,’ I summarise, trying to make it sound more like a formal Thing.
Nothing from her. She’s at a bit of a loss now.
‘Okay, look – let me tell you what we need to make this case.’ What am I, a policeman now? I need to ground things a bit. ‘Let me run through the information that will more than satisfy your lawyer. Information that I can get for you.’
‘Okay, sure.’ She sounds tired.
I take the phone away from my face and look at the clock. It’s 20:09. Of course it is. A two and a nine, a couple of little zeroes wedged between. What else but a hard eleven to root me in the loneliness of this moment? I know I said I wouldn’t get sucked into the numbers, and I’m not about to start, I’m just saying it couldn’t be clearer: eleven, or ainlif, as I still think of it. Ain, lif – one, left. Just me.
I put the phone back to my ear. ‘Quickly then.’
I have produced a pen from somewhere, in a drawer I didn’t even know I’d been looking in. I’ve moved to the kitchen, it would seem. I start sketching on the wall, making a diagram of my plan.
‘Okay, so you have the Vatican Bank.’
For this I draw the hated shape, except that here, like this, a cross actually looks right. Dark axes of power.
‘They want to invest in InviraCorp …’ I draw a long line almost to the skirting board, far enough down for me to be crouching. There I mark a black circle. ‘But they can’t just do it directly or else everyone would know and …’
‘They’d be writing my story for me,’ she chimes in.
That’s good, her engaged voice is back. She’s finishing my sentences again, like the other day down by the canal.
‘Exactly,’ I tell her. ‘So they have to use some offshore location – in this case Jersey,’ I draw a big fat pound sign midway down the line, ‘where they set up a little cluster of trusts,’ I stab at the pound sign with the pen point, making the cluster, ‘administered by faceless trustees, for the benefit of undeclared owners.’
‘And you think you can get the details of these trusts?’
‘I know I can.’ My pen hovers over the dot cluster, I know no such thing. I believe it, though, to the point of knowing. Quite the model man I’m becoming. ‘All they are is conduits, these places. No money is kept there, it just flows through, but what they do hold is records. Details of where that money is headed and what other money it will send back.’
‘What do you mean send back?’
‘Well …’ my pen quickly sketches another line, shooting off at a tangent ‘… the money doesn’t just go straight from the Jersey trust to InviraCorp, it goes via another one of these offshore places – let’s say Cayman for argument’s sake.’
I intend to draw a palm tree but it comes out looking like an anchor – that’ll do just as well.
‘From there, it goes to InviraCorp. But, and this is the important part, the profits also come back. That’s what the trustees are there for, to ensure that the right people are benefiting from the different income streams. So when the money they ushered out of the holy coffers has doubled, tripled, septupled itself, they then divert it right back in.’
I delve a little more into the granular detail, talking her through the twists and turns of these structures, all the while etching in my words until my diagram has become labyrinthine, Escheresque in its conundrums. It now covers the whole of the wall space between the door and the fridge.
I realise it has been several minutes since she has spoken. ‘Are you still there?’ I ask.
‘Yes, of course. I’m just trying to keep up.’
‘Don’t worry if it’s all a bit much to take in. We can go over it again at some point – this is just to give you a sense of the situation. It’s really not an uncommon set-up. In fact, pretty much every business runs its money through these places – it’s all perfectly legal. It’s a standard way that companies have come up with to avoid paying their dues. That’s just how people are – how they’ve always been.’ Darwin had that cold, I want to add, but I don’t because I don’t want to come off sounding too certain, like some kind of evolutionary biologist, secular zealot type, which obviously I’m not. I just happen to know what I’m talking about. ‘But this isn’t about tax avoidance. This is about something much, much worse than that. This is about a cabal keeping their secret, about the vast market they have created. First they sentence the God-fearing masses to death with propaganda about contraception, then they portion up life itself, in the form of hopelessly inadequate delay drugs, and they sell it back to the miserable wretches as they die in their ditches.’
I pause, not for effect but to recover my composure. It’s made me pretty angry saying all this. Wi
th myself, as much as with them.
She breathes a rush of static into my ear, the phone like an exotic shell that’s trapped the sound of a warm and perfect sea.
‘You should hear what they have to say about it.’
There’s the sound of her fingers tapping a keyboard.
‘Are you still at work?’ I ask.
‘No but I can access it here, the comment they sent last time. I only used part of it in the piece I wrote but there was a phrase in there that …’ The sentence is left hanging while she scans through her email folders.
‘Here it is.’ She reads, ‘InviraCorp is part of the solution in the global fight against HIV, not a part of the problem … Okay, that bit I used but this: InviraCorp is a politically and religiously neutral organisation. I didn’t bother with it. It wasn’t relevant, or at least, it didn’t seem relevant at the time. Now, though, it makes perfect sense why they would want to drop in a phrase like that.’
It has Alex’s fingerprints all over it.
‘Cheap spin,’ I tell her, ‘will not be enough to get them out of this mess. Not once you have the evidence to dish the full dirt. Besides, InviraCorp is not the real target here. They’re the small fry. We’re hunting for the big prize.’
I have in my mind a spear held aloft in the leaf-filtered light, silent footfalls taking us deeper into the wood. The beast sulking at the mouth of its cave, surrounded by bones and scattered trophies of shields and helmets.
She, meanwhile, is still busy on her computer. I can hear her typing again, the sound a modern hunter makes.
She’s forwarding to me a few bits that I might find useful, she tells me. She then starts again to address her nagging feeling that I may be biting off more than I can chew – if only she knew (am I doing it subconsciously, I wonder, this rhyming thing?). She’s worried about me, just like my little Mary Magpie always was (with good reason it turned out, but this is not the same thing at all). I tell her, for the last time, that I’m absolutely fine. That I’ll be in touch in a day or two. Then we hang up.
I decide that what I need to do now is go and look at myself in the mirror. The physicality of this body has become much more centre stage with me since I got dropped by the Big Man. I kept noticing, for example, during that conversation with Natalie how different parts of it would light up and react to things she was saying, to changes of temperature in the room even – it’s non-stop. But whereas before all of that was just stuff I noticed, as you might come to grow familiar with a car you are driving, say (maybe a little more than that, but you see the point I’m making – there’s a separateness), now it’s actually a part of my intellectual landscape. My thoughts, my feelings, all of it, have become attuned not only to this body but also to the atmosphere around it.
Strange though, because the face that confronts me in the mirror shows no sign of the self-possession and calm that I feel inside. Its appearance is agitated and gaunt. Older too, I fancy, from when I last looked, just after my bath. Vital minutes, a matter of hours even, have been confiscated from me since then.
‘Need to shave this stubble off,’ I mutter as I start looking round for the things to do that with.
It’s not something I’ve ever tried before – as you may recall, JC had a big glossy beard, not to mention lovely thick hair and dreamy brown eyes (you can see how he got on the shortlist for possible frontmen) – and, I have to admit, it’s not quite as easy as it looks. But bit by bit I get the hang of it and pretty soon I’m enjoying the rasp of the razor (particularly during the parts near to the bottom of each ear, when the rasp becomes richer, more of a rolling something heavy across gravel sound). It’s hugely rewarding to see the bristle-flecked globs dropping into the sink and being washed away by the running tap.
The mirror itself forms the front of a cabinet and when I’m finished shaving I open it to reveal an inner pharmacopeia. I have a closer look at a packet of pills I find stuffed towards the back of the top shelf, dated October 2010, exactly two years ago – Olanzapine, atypical, prescription only, one tablet three times daily. This must be what that HR woman had been referring to in our meeting this morning. No, hang on, was it this morning? Can’t have been. Whenever it was. She had alluded to some previous episode – I’m sure that’s what she had called it because I remember thinking at the time how amusing the implication was, that anything out of the ordinary must surely be part of some series of events. This constant suspicion that there are other, less reliable, more frightening forces at play in the world whose episodes must be suppressed at all times, whatever the cost, lest they develop into a series.
There can and will be only one reality. Words to live by in this quick-killing time.
I pull out from the olanzapine box a leaflet warning of possible side effects: tremors, fever, akathisia, confusion, uncontrollable twitching, uncontrollable eye movement, sores, itching, swelling, numbness, loss of vision, loss of speech, loss of balance – it goes on. Much more interesting, though, is the way in which these ailments are announced, between brackets, in a thick slab of text separated from the rest. It is only as I run my eyes down this list that I suddenly understand something about my own situation, so strikingly similar in structure to what has been neatly contained between these curls of ink. Finitude, in a word. In order to understand this mess of mine, I had to bracket it in mortality – inception on one side, death on the other. Just as mathematicians set numbers, I have delimited my own troubled bio into something a little more time-constrained. It makes perfect sense. Chunking is, I believe, what the computer geeks who are building your future like to call it. (On a side note, it is also occurring to me that I could even use this method to explain, at some later stage, the wider mysteries of the shape and substance of His universe, as in the formulation { } or the empty set. By definition, of course, a set cannot be empty, it cannot contain nothing, so this formulation can therefore be used to express the substantiation of nothingness, which is the key to understanding and, ultimately, embracing the natural genius of His design.)
I’m getting a little hot again.
My armpits and neck and hairline are damp with sweat and my vision has become what I can only describe as melted at the edges. It’s not an aggressive heat like before, with the fever, but I do still feel like I need to simmer down a little. Maybe I got too cold outside or maybe it’s a lingering after-effect of the syrup. Either way, my mind is over-processing, which in turn is running the body too fast and too hot. I need to watch out for that. It’s no different to a petrol engine or a computer in its casing. Everything needs fanning.
I shove the box back in the cabinet and take out something that should help cool me down: a blister pack of yellow and turquoise capsules, fifteen mils of slow-release Valium. Every morning I watched Will rise raw and nervy from the sleepless hollow of his mattress and pop one of these into his mouth. It always seemed to help him calm down; worth a try now, then. Without it there’d be little chance of sleep, and sleep is what I need right now if I’m to head out of here tomorrow and fulfil my promise to Natalie.
I crack one of the pills into my hand and wash it down with a slurp from the tap. I wait a few minutes, then I decide to take a second one. No point going at it half speed.
Back on my mattress I notice on Will’s phone that there are new emails, must be from Natalie, she said she was sending some, and several missed calls, voice messages too, from the last few days. I dial in to pick up the messages. Two are from HR Karen, executing her corporate responsibility of pretending to care if I’m okay. The others are from Natalie, pre-dating our conversation just now, and essentially irrelevant, but I listen to them anyway. I lie down with the phone between my head and the pillow. I am supremely comfortable.
They all say things like, Will, hi, it’s Natalie Shapiro. Give me a call when you get a chance. The two later ones also include phrases like hope you’re okay and surprised not to have heard from you.
Each time, her voice flitters through me. That Maryam thing.
/> I start thinking about her (Mary). Lazy thoughts, drifting through like music from a distant room. My dusky little temptress. Not, by the way, that I ever touched her, not like that, but I drew great strength from her physical presence. Even when I was making a spectacular mess of everything, she was there for me. It was love in its purest form – but just like everything else, it has been sullied by my celebrity. I find it hilarious that people assume the tabloid mentality is something new. When I think of the generations of prurient Christians who’ve pored over every last scrap of information, each tiny detail they might be able to construe as evidence of the brief and frankly inglorious life of Jesus. They’re no different from the gossip mongers who drive your princesses to their deaths or hound your politicians to ruin and despair. All celebrity is toxic, and my little Magpie became tainted by association. And whenever I’d start to think that maybe finally it was all dying down and her name might actually be left to rest in peace, they (and no, I’m not being paranoid – it was them) would throw some new morsel into your path. The spite never dies. They would roll back a stone, say, like they did in Nag Hammadi, and expose some faded tractates. Who was it with that Egyptian stuff again? … I lose track. Philip? Or was he in with the Dead Sea codices? Whatever, it’s irrelevant where they happened to ‘turn up’, the fact is that the maunderings of Philip … It was him, by the way – of course it was – prancing Hellenophile, always sounding off just out of earshot somewhere. Anyway, where was I? Yes, Philip and his codices, too boring for the fire that destroyed the others (there was some cracking stuff in that earthenware pot they found out there, incidentally), were idly tossed into your path so we could have a fresh bout of speculation about Mary and me, based on his nincompoopish observations (with a few key phrases mysteriously nibbled out, naturally). What was it now? The Saviour used to kiss her often on her – then a strategic blank, neatly excised – by ants, I think was the consensus of the archaeologists who unearthed it. On her what? People wanted to know. Kissed her where, Philip? Do tell. And so on it goes, with the ant-eaten blanks eagerly filled in by a gormless fraternity (because it is only men who care about this stuff) of Madonna/whore obsessives.
