Not the End of the World

by Christopher Brookmyre

  ‘I always knew who Luther St John was,’ Roberts says. ‘Mary might have shut me out but I didn’t forget about her, and I kept an ear open for news. I was at her funeral, such as it was. I know she was a disappointment to her family and all, but I wouldn’t have buried a dog that way. Anyway, when Luther started to get all big and famous, I didn’t care much for his message but I didn’t pay much attention to it either. I was happy enough to leave all I knew in the past, out of respect to Mary’s memory. I’d always felt sorry for Luther too, I mean, his own mother murdered in front of him at that age. But recently, with this election campaign . . .’

  Roberts grimaces, like there’s too much lemon in her tea.

  ‘Making that phone call to you was the hardest thing I ever did,’ she says. ‘But believe me I had to do it. I’d switch on my TV each night, and there’d be Luther, campaigning against sex education in our schools, or pontificating about unwed mothers and the evils of sex “outwith the sanctity of marriage”. And this man wanted to be President. I couldn’t keep it secret any more. I just thought it was time for him – and all the fools who listen to him – to know the truth.’

  Luther was laid very low indeed. His political aspirations were a no-questions write-off and he found himself with a job on his hands salvaging his credibility in the eyes of the CFC flock, many of whom might be having second thoughts about following someone who had become a national joke.

  But, like after any storm, through God-given strength he picked himself off the floor and got to work on repairing the damage. He poured balm on the wounds of his disappointed flock by regaling them with tales of the Christians down through the centuries who had been ridiculed and persecuted for their beliefs. These people, he reminded them, were easy to spot in the history books: they all had the word ‘Saint’ before their name.

  He knew better than to contest Landsmann and Roberts’s assertions, but felt fewer misgivings about challenging the latter’s account of how his mother fell pregnant. Luther charged that she had, in fact, been raped, and that Roberts was protecting the late culprit’s identity because he had been her husband’s comrade-in-arms. Roberts claimed that she had never known the man’s name, and that her husband had taken his knowledge to the grave. She conceded that this man had certainly taken advantage of Mary St John and that his conduct might be defined in today’s terms as date-rape, but couldn’t resist adding that ‘Mary would have been a lot less vulnerable if she’d had a fraction of the sex education Luther St John wants to deny to American schoolchildren’.

  Luther depicted his mother as a victim of the carnal lust in this anonymous soldier, fuelled by society’s obsession with sex; an obsession that was getting worse and worse: ‘It’s no wonder men become like rutting animals when all around they see depictions of fornication as normal, acceptable and desirable, as well as prurient images of women in states of undress and arousal. It was bad enough in the Forties, when my poor mother was fallen upon . . .’

  Mary St John’s tale was also an ace to play in abortion debates, when the old chestnut about pregnant rape victims came up. With God’s help she had accepted her baby as a blessing that had emerged from a dark episode, showing her the way to the light . . .

  Luther focused his attention on what the financial analysts would call his core interests, having burned his fingers on an ill-advised expansion attempt. He stuck to what he knew, what he was good at, and found that the Lord had not deserted him. Within a few years CFC was stronger than ever, his losses at the highly expensive crap-shoot of politics long since recovered. But having steadied the ship and set it on a prosperous course, he was restless. He had more subscribers than ever, he was making more money than ever, but what did any of that matter when he was still a lone voice crying in the wilderness? When neither followers nor finances could any better assist him in stemming the tide of immorality that was gradually engulfing America?

  The Lord said, ‘What does it profit a man to gain the whole world but lose his soul?’ Luther had begun to fear that, for all his achievements, his life would still be a failure if he couldn’t turn that tide, if he couldn’t make America once more embrace the Word of God.

  The future was like a long tunnel, moving steadily towards a light in the far distance. Sometimes the tunnel’s path dipped and the light grew dimmer, like after the ’92 débâcle. In recent years, it had been climbing again, but slowly, and though the light was in sight, he feared he hadn’t enough years of walking left in him to reach it.

  And just when he thought time was starting to run out, God sent him a man named Daniel Corby.

  Steff was leaning over the gallery rail to get an elevated perspective on the clutter and bustle in the lobby below. He was directly above the main doors that led out towards the horseshoe drive, a wide-angle lens swallowing up the tapering hub of the Pacific Vista, a note in the back of his mind telling him to get back here tomorrow with a fish-eye. He was probably the first to notice the helicopter, as the shadow it cast over the rooftop pool ruined the light for the shot he was setting up.

  He was up there through self-banishment. He and Jo had gone to the ‘office’ of Moonstar Films, which turned out, like most other AFFM offices, to be a bedroom with the beds upturned against one wall, a few portable desks, a PC and some cardboard stands bearing promotional material for the duff-looking videos the company was hawking. Jo was interviewing Charles ‘Chip’ Ryker, Moonstar’s chief executive officer, while Steff tried not to get in the way as he snapped the man and his minion, a ferocious adolescent energy-ball called Tia. Tia answered phones, sent faxes, offered and dispensed refreshments and compiled glossy info packs in a near-noiseless flurry as Jo chatted to her boss. Steff kept checking that there was still just the one of her.

  ‘With intellectual properties such as these,’ Chip was saying, ‘we have to maximise the resource throughput while rendering the rights package more pro-actively saleable to our upscale end-user groundbase.’

  Pretty early on Jo shot him a warning glare, having seen Steff’s eyes begin to bulge. He tried. God knows he tried. He was doing all right through another five minutes of ‘critical mass’, ‘out-sourcing’ and ‘hyper-aggressive acquisition strategies in nascent digital micro-niche tertiary consumption media’. And he thought he was going to make it through the whole interview as Chip wound down from ‘brushstroking his corporate futurescape’ and moved into misty-eyed reflections on the gentler side of the business, remembering ‘that this is an art-form as well as an industry’. In fact, Steff was feeling pretty composed as Chip talked about ‘painting with light these active, living, moving visions of ourselves’ and ‘communicating in a medium that shines directly through the windows of the soul’.

  Then Jo asked what was premièring on his market slate.

  ‘Slayground III: Finishing School Bloodbath, Venusian Biker Chicks IV: Space Harleys, and the first in a new horror franchise, The Dentist. Great effects. This guy’s got like drills and probes and shit instead of fingers. Got two sequels in pre-production.’

  Steff reckoned he had made it out of the bedroom slow enough for it not to look like he was about to be sick, but as he had not excused his exit, it must have looked suspicious nonetheless. Jo and Chip were still talking as Tia came out into the corridor and found him doubled up, tears streaming down his cheeks.

  ‘Gee, are you all right?’ she asked.

  Steff had looked up long enough to nod, then his eyes screwed up again as the next wave of laughter seized him. He stumbled away, leaving Tia to her bafflement.

  Steff didn’t know it was a helicopter until after it had passed overhead, when it began its descent and the noise became loudly audible from the front of the hotel. He could see through the sloping glass walls that it was coming down to land on the horseshoe drive outside. He could also see that this was neither expected nor appreciated by the staff and delegates standing out there. Two cars bumped into each other as they swerved to clear a space for the inexorably descending machine, while bel
l-hops and porters dragged trolleys clear and waved people away from the wind-whipped area. Delegates were pouring out of their stands and ‘offices’ into the gallery and lobby, massing near the doors to get a view of whatever was going on.

  Steff felt a hand on his arm and saw Jo push in beside him to look down through the glass at the scene outside.

  ‘What the hell’s this about?’ he asked, prolifically photographing the mêlée.

  ‘Publicity stunt, I guess – probably not the last this week, neither. Hotel security’s gonna chew their ass, whoever they are. This kind of thing needs all sorts of clearance. It’s never supposed to be a surprise.’

  The helicopter touched down and was soon ringed by hotel staff and undeterred AFFM participants, shielding their eyes from the dust and draught kicked up by the rotor blades. A door opened and a bear in a sharp suit climbed out. From upstairs, Steff could make out the earpiece and coiled wire running down the back of his collar. Bodyguard.

  The bear turned around and faced the door, then reached up a hand and helped the next passenger climb out. It was a neat little man, maybe mid-fifties, in a pair of jeans and a crisp white short-sleeved shirt. He got down on to the tarmac, ran a hand through his silver hair and looked back at the second bear climbing out behind him.

  ‘Well speak of the asshole,’ Jo muttered.

  The trio stepped back on to the grass island in the drive’s centre and the helicopter began to rise up once more.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘America’s inverse answer to King Canute. Luther St John himself.’

  ‘That wee guy? That’s him? What’s he doing here?’

  ‘I suspect those gentlemen are asking the same question.’

  A delegation of hotel security personnel were attempting to remonstrate with the new arrivals, but were being steadfastly ignored. St John walked down the drive away from the hotel, bear on either side, saying nothing, but smiling and waving to the onlookers as he progressed. As he reached the pedestrian crossing, two cars that had been sitting by the pavement suddenly turned on their flashing hazard lights and slewed themselves across the road, causing approaching traffic to halt. The same thing was happening on the other carriageway too.

  St John and his minders marched triumphantly across without missing a step, and headed for the Festival of Light, where a hysterical crowd was forming a cheering human avenue before the entrance. St John and party disappeared from view and the avenue was sucked back inside the Festival ground like a miraculously cured rectal prolapse.

  Back at the Pacific Vista, bewilderment and outrage were tying for number-one emotion, as the assembled crowd began to realise that what had just taken place was, in effect, an elaborate practical version of ‘the finger’.

  ‘There’s nothing like making an entrance at your own party,’ Jo said. ‘I guess he’s dropping in to rally the faithful.’

  ‘Well I’m not guessing,’ Steff told her, changing lens and sticking the dismounted one in his shoulder-bag. ‘I’m going to find out.’

  ‘What? They’ll never let you near the place.’

  ‘You’re forgetting,’ he said, holding up his hand and showing off the ink-stamp on the back of it. ‘I’m a true believer.’

  Luther St John was nothing Steff had expected and a great deal more than he had feared. This was probably down to his sum knowledge of fundamentalist Christian TV evangelists coming via the filtration processes of film and television, fiction and reportage. The fictions created expectations of appearance; the reportage (certainly when it was British) tended to accentuate the ridiculous in the message. Those crazy Yanks and their wacky TV preachers. What a laugh.

  This wasn’t funny.

  Steff had an image in his head of a rotund and orotund shitkicker-made-good in a white suit and a white hat, ranting in a cadence that was part Southern cracker and part parade-ground sergeant, ruddy of cheek and hammy of gesture. St John, in fact, was slim and short, relaxed of manner, walking the stage calmly in his casual attire, a boyish youthfulness behind the lines on his face that owed nothing to makeup or surgery. He looked, as they said back home, like his mammy had knitted him. So neat and compact, and yet that short-sleeves-and-jeans look stopping him comfortably short of Niles Crane anal. Like Ben Folds dressed for Sunday lunch.

  He was attractive in an antiseptically asexual way. Women might want to mother him or invite him round for tea and scones, but there was an air of unworldly purity about him that would surely make them feel sinful were they to harbour any more physical feelings. The men, clearly, wouldn’t find him a threat. Steff figured, therefore, that he must pitch himself as a prophet rather than a leader. American males didn’t follow wimps, unless they were under the impression God was telling them to.

  He spoke in soft, measured tones, deeper than his build suggested, with a lilt in his voice that was hypnotically easy on the ear. The accent seemed neutral – somewhere in middle America – but with the occasional Southern inflection surfacing sparingly to add just enough colour. It was a voice you could imagine reading Mark Twain on audiobooks, and breaking all sales records with it. A voice that sounded as if it could lull monsters to sleep, talk down suicides from the ledge, a voice that could sell its words to any listener, sand to the Arabs, coals to Newcastle, rosaries to Rangers fans. Which was the scary part, because the words it was selling today . . . Steff sighed.

  Words like these built concentration camps.

  ‘Friends,’ St John said, taking the microphone from its stand and gesturing for the applause to cease, a look of strain on his face conveying his understanding of how difficult an act of self-control he was asking of them. ‘Thank you for being here. Thank you for making the trip. Thank you for the commitment, thank you for the belief. Thank you for the faith. Now, I don’t know how many of you-all brought life-rafts on your station-wagon roofracks, but . . .’

  All around Steff people were guffawing at this last remark. It reminded him of the corpses-in-waiting you saw on telly at Conservative Party conferences, chuckling vacantly at some fanny-merchant’s dismal, scripted one-liner. St John’s crowd were more animated, and Steff felt he had solved the mystery of where they got the studio audiences for Cybill. Jesus, laugh at this pish . . .

  ‘No, no,’ St John continued, smiling, ‘don’t worry. We’re safe here a little longer yet. But more seriously, time is running out. The countdown has begun. And though we may not know the day nor the hour, we will be ready when the Master calls.

  ‘Unfortunately,’ he said, his tone lowering ominously, ‘that won’t be enough. Not by a long stretch. And I know that seems harsh. I know that seems unfair. You want to say to me, “I am ready. I am pure. Why am I condemned by the sins of another?” Well, the answer is right there at the start, my friends, all the way back in the Book of Genesis. And that answer is, “Because I am my brother’s keeper.” Jesus taught us to hate the sin but love the sinner, so how can we be Christians if we abandon them to their fate? The difficult truth is, we can’t be. And that is why God will punish us all. Because we have failed Him, all of us have failed Him. The sinners have failed Him by their deeds, but we will have failed Him by not acting to prevent those deeds.

  ‘God wants us to love, wants us to care. Love thy neighbour as thyself, He taught us. And when He visits His wrath and we ask Him, “Why, Lord, why, when we followed Your Word?”, He will say, “How were you following My Word when you spurned your neighbours by abandoning them to their sins?” Our neighbours are our responsibility. The whole world is our responsibility. And if our neighbours sin, then that is our responsibility.’

  St John walked over to the mike stand, placed the microphone back in its holder, and leaned upon the aluminium tripod for a quiet few seconds, looking down, as though gathering his thoughts. Great pose, Steff thought, taking a couple of shots while the crowd waited in eerie near-silence. He was more like a good stand-up comic than a preacher. He had timing. He had presence. And he had that voice.

  He lifted the mik
e again, walking forward, head down, the crowd breathlessly quiet in anticipation.

  ‘It’s time to rock’n’roll,’ he breathed. The audience erupted in cheers, applause and other euphoric histrionics. The word ‘woo’, whatever it meant, seemed the preferred form of expression.

  ‘It’s time,’ he said louder, over the subsiding shouts, ‘to be our brother’s keeper. To save our brother from his sin – even if that means having to re-educate our brother about what sin is, because he may have forgotten. And who can really blame him, in this country of ours? This country that was once so great, once held all God’s promise, but now spurns Him. This country that God intended to be our land of milk and honey, but which has been turned instead into Sodom and Gomorrah. Who can blame our brother, when he walks in a land turned upside down, where the word of God has become polluted and distorted beyond recognition, until it is used to excuse the very permissiveness it expressly forbade? Where the Bible is quoted to support the toleration of that which the Lord condemns. A land where they tell us we will be safer from evil-doers if we let them take away our guns. A land where our beloved, sacred freedom has been bent and twisted by poisonous serpents, so that men can burn our flag and deny the very existence of God with the blessing of the law.’

  St John’s face distorted as he put on a whiny fake voice. ‘“It’s a free country,” they say, “so that includes my right to burn the flag and say there ain’t no God.” Well I say to them, “It was GOD who made you free – it would be polite . . . to start showing a little gratitude.”’

  Another hysterical roar. Steff looked at the faces around him. Seductive seemed a singularly inappropriate word in the context of Luther St John, but whatever he was doing to them, they were buying it with everything they could give.