What I Tell You In the Dark by John Samuel

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 downthat 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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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 …’
    â€˜They’d be writing my