Metallic grey skies had hung over London for days before finally bursting into hours of torrential rain. Tom felt his spirits dampen beyond retrieval. He had been walking in Regent's Park, the grim weather keeping it almost empty; now he needed some resolution to his mood. It was either Mozart on the South Bank or the whores out East. He called a cab but by the time he reached Hungerford Bridge he realised that even Mozart's sublime genius could not rescue him to-night. He gave the driver new directions and they snaked along Embankment for a rendezvous with the hookers instead. It was Friday night and the bright young bucks from the City would be keeping them busy.
He knew a small wine bar off the main streets that sold passable Italian wine, had enough customers to allow you to feel inconspicuous, not too many to feel oppressive and stayed open longer than the law allowed.
Three quarters of the way through a bottle of Sicilian red, his spirits lifted slightly and he was starting to contemplate the entertainment that had brought him there in the first place. He knew the best place to find the kind of whore he needed tonight. Soon he was walking through one of those numerous, small, dark churchyards that populate east London. Before reaching the exit he was startled to hear, and then see, a young woman sitting on one of the seats, sobbing loudly.
Like all city dwellers he was conditioned to ignore human suffering and walked on but something stopped him and he went back. He was still miserable and he did not need this diversion but he went up to her anyway.
"Can I help you at all?"
She shook her head and said nothing and he was about to move on but having spoken to her and seen the distress in her eyes it was even harder to move away a second time. He was annoyed with her for making him care about her.
"Look, I can't just...leave you here."
"Why?" she sobbed.
"What's the problem?"
She answered him just to get rid of him, although what she said was true. "Earlier today I had a blazing row with my boyfriend and he threw me out of the car and drove off with my bag, money, phone, the lot. And in the last twenty minutes I've been fired from by job. No job, no money, no means of getting any money. Happy now?"
The rain suddenly increased. She was a desperately sad sight. He could not leave her there.
They had been in his apartment for nearly two hours and were making inroads into one of Tom's expensive bottles of South African wine. She had finally dried out. She had calmed own. He suddenly realised how young she looked and that she was extremely pretty.
She was in the middle of explaining how she came to be in a churchyard, all alone in the early hours of the morning crying the tears of Niobe.
".....so, whatever way you look at it, the whole thing was my fault. I liked him, sure enough, in the first place but never intended it to become serious; never 'settling down' stuff. But he was in love with me, big time. That's when I knew I had to leave: at the moment when his love seemed the greatest; when his parents were all but planning the wedding. He was shattered when I told him. He literally crumpled at my feet and sobbed like a baby, begged, pleaded with me to change my mind."
She covered her face at the horror of the memory. "Oh God, it was horrible, really horrible. For weeks afterwards he followed me everywhere. Wherever I was, he turned up. I tried to be rational and talk to him but he just saw that as I sign that I wanted still to be with him. Either way I couldn't win. Then he bombarded me with emails, text messages, telephone messages. Then his parents waded in and started doing the same thing. They said he was 'wasting away', was a 'broken man' and today when I saw him, I realised to my horror that they weren't exaggerating. And I am responsible for it all."
She paused. Tom said nothing and allowed her to finish her story.
"And I am overwhelmed with guilt. Guilt that I don't know what to do with. Except that I must do something with it. I have to exorcise it because it's eating away at me."
A few verbal palliatives formed on the tip of Tom's tongue but the woman spoke from the heart and he would not insult her with banalities.
Instead he said, "How do you go about exorcising guilt?"
She took one more long sip of her wine, laid her head back on the chair and prepared an explanation that she feared he would not understand.
"I think that sometimes you just have to go right down. All the way, to the Darkest part of the Night, that part of your being that you don't really want to recognise; then just live it, let it happen and after that you can be released and get back to the Day and to Life. But you have to go all the way down first before you can get release."
Tom listened intensely to this young woman; astonished at the maturity of her words from someone apparently so young; or astonished that she should say so much of what he himself believed but which had taken him so much longer to understand.
There was a long silence. "You're very quiet," she offered, "you don't agree."
He took a long sip of wine. "On the contrary, I agree entirely. Only it's disarming to hear one's own innermost thoughts spoken by another, especially someone so young."
"I'm only young in years. So you go down into the Dark as well, yes?"
"Oh yes."
"Well, nice to meet you."
They both smiled.
"Don't you sometimes wish you could go down into the Dark with someone? Share it, I mean. Just for a short time. Have a contract that none of the world, with all its ways, exists and for the moment there is only the Dark and nothing else. Wouldn't that be nice?"
The intelligence and maturity of this young woman was beginning to fascinate and threaten him in equal measures.
"You know, no names, no biographies," she continued.
"You mean like now?"
"Of course. After all, I don't even know your name."
Tom now realised that something profoundly important could be happening and so picked his words with great care.
"Share the Dark?" he queried.
"Yes."
Tom took a long sip of his wine. This was not what he had planned for the evening. Finally he asked, "So tell me then, what is the Night and the Dark for you?"
"Well," now she was choosing her words meticulously, "to-night, just before you came along to rescue me, there were some whores at the end of the road plying their trade. I have always been fascinated by whores. I used to look out of my bedroom window when I was a kid and watch them up our street. I don't really know what it is about them that fascinates me but it does. So, in the Dark and the Night, which we're talking about, I'd like to be one of them.
