What I Tell You In the Dark by John Samuel Read Free Book Online

reach into my pocket and close my fingers over the memory stick. It pulses in my fist, like there’s blood in it.
    My wrong shall at last be righted. You’ll see. I shall cut the monster’s heart from its chest.
    I am still in the crowd, still in the current. Among you all.
    I’m going to straighten this all out.
    I’ve got this.

3
    Mind over matter – that’s what people say – I know: I’ve heard them. Wise people, movers of men, writers, philosophers, orators whose words have dropped like balm. In fact, they’ve said it so many times, in so many ways, that it’s solidified into a Truth. This mind, this brittle consciousness of which mankind is so proud, makes you better than the rest. Is that it? Nothing left to learn from God’s other creatures, with their base occupation of the flesh. Cogito ergo sum , as one Frenchman so grandly proclaimed.
    Well sorry, but I’m calling you out on that.
    Take this last half hour as an example. At any stage through-out my journey, I could have allowed myself to get bogged down by the spectres of the past, the myriad little reminders of my failure that had been left scattered for me wherever I cared to look. Even the name of my destination, for crying out loud: King’s Cross. It would have been so easy to do – they wanted nothing more than to see me buckle under their jeering attention. But I resisted. Not by thinking my way out of it, though – that’s my point. By doing precisely the opposite: I just let it go – I shifted into neutral and I glided it out. I spent that time sheltering in this body, where neither reason nor memory has jurisdiction.
    So when I’d get a glimpse of a brash black cross tattooed on some bloke’s arm, say, flexing in his repulsive milky flesh, I’d simply rest my head against the window of the carriage – against the cool-to-the-touch glass with its backlit scratches – and I’d let my eyes do some lazy looking. I’d watch the quick slick ofworld rush past, let the pressure drain out of my head. Same when a dinky little cross came winking its light-darts from a woman’s neck chain, or just now, up in the world again, when I glimpsed through the window of a bookshop the yellow and orange spines going down the shelves, and the red ones ripping across the top – a flaming cross, the worst kind. I just did what I’m doing right this minute –feeling every little flex of my skin, letting every molecule of air open itself up in my lungs, outside in, swelling the alveoli, putting the vermilion of oxygen into my blood and pushing it out into the rest of me.
    From the tip of your nose to the prints on your toes, so much territory to keep track of – it’s absorbing stuff. Although, don’t think for one second think that I find it easy tuning out like that. Because I don’t. No words can describe how I hate that stupid shape springing out at me from everywhere the whole time, like it’s a symbol of hope. There’s nothing hopeful about it, not for me anyway. Not for anyone who’s been splayed across it and left for dead.
    Anyway. Enough said.
    I’m here now, and there’s business to be done. I’m right around the corner from Natalie’s office but I’m not managing to get her on her landline or her mobile – just the cicada buzz of office background on both, overlaid with You’re through to Natalie Shapiro, please leave a message . So I did – the same one twice – telling her I need to speak to her now, in person, that I’ll wait for her in The Lamb. (What? That’s what it’s called – I don’t get to choose the names.) It’s the pub she and Will met in last time. And I must say, it looks a lot better in the daylight – more cheerful, not as grubby as it seemed when I watched them have their clandestine drink here last week. The hanging baskets are still dripping