Not the End of the World

by Christopher Brookmyre

  ‘The choice here tonight is between the Condom and the Cross.’

  Well gee Dad, let’s ask about the relationship in this country between sexual violence and Christian family background, huh? Let’s talk about the correlation between rape rates and religious fundamentalism. Hey, guess what? The more Bible-thumpers there are in any area of the United States, the higher the incidence of violence against women. What a far-out coincidence!

  ‘Do you want our children’s innocence ruined at five?’

  First, why don’t you tell me what innocence means, Dad? Because in your mouth it’s always been interchangeable with ignorance. Shit, they even sound alike.

  So what was this ‘innocence’ that would be so damaged by knowing what your genitals were for? What disturbing realisation about the true nature of life were we deferring in children to whom we had already described the torture, mutilation and slow, agonising death of a human being by crucifixion; that we could tell them about driving nails through a man’s feet and wrists in a merciless act of violence, but we couldn’t tell them about the act of love and affection that preceded all of their existences.

  What kind of unspeakable ordeal would childhood become if kids missed out on all the foreboding, confusion, embarrassment and guilt associated with body parts everybody had but nobody talked about?

  Boy, Madeleine was sure glad she had been spared it. Who knew? If what was between her legs hadn’t been shrouded in so much shame and mystery, she might have thought no-one else should be touching it! Just think what she might have missed out on if she’d thought she had the right to say no when Daddy started coming into her room at night. Thank God her innocence had been protected. Jesus, if it hadn’t been for Christian morality’s triumph over the obscenity of sex education, she might have been in her teens before she even knew what sperm tasted like!

  The phone rang out somewhere behind her, inside the apartment, but she wasn’t in the mood for talking, so she let the answering machine deal with it and stayed put on the balcony. Her brief outgoing message passed in a mumble, followed by the loud bleep, and then she heard a familiar and cheerful voice sound out over the speaker.

  ‘Hey Maddy, Zip Spigelman here, your fellow filth-peddler.’ Madeleine smiled. Zip was the producer of the movie she was about to make her legit début in, and with such a talent for putting people at ease, she was sure he’d one day be working on far more prestigious projects. Herself she was less certain about.

  ‘I caught a little of the news, saw the Reverend’s still working hard to keep your profile high. I don’t know what Tony Pia’s paying that guy, but he sure delivers. Anyway, I was just callin’ to say Tanya’s got a dress for you. It’s one of the costumes you’ll be wearing in the movie and we thought it’d be cool if you wore it at the press conference on Wednesday. If you can maybe drop by her place tomorrow, she can make sure it fits okay and make with the needle if it don’t.

  ‘Oh yeah, and the other thing is Tobe Delgado’s gonna come along to the press conference too. We figured it would take some of the heat off you, and having the director there might remind some folks that we are actually making a movie. So, three filth merchants together. Look forward to it. See ya.’

  Madeleine walked into the room and played back the message again as she raided the fridge for another beer. She glanced across to the open bedroom doorway, through which she could see the script lying on her bedside table.

  Movie scripts. Costumes. Producers. Press conferences. It made her head spin, although in a pleasant way, like a healthy beer buzz. She smiled to herself as it occurred to her that Luther St John wouldn’t be the only person in this world cursing her name to the skies. Every out-of-work struggling actress in LA would be throwing darts at her picture for the way this opportunity had fallen into her lap. She thought of her own disdain down the years for the endless succession of talentless teeny-boppers – suckers of Satan’s cock, someone had once described them – shot to fame by a pretty face and slick marketing while hard-working singers and musicians waited years for a break that usually never came.

  She hadn’t harboured ambitions to be an actress or a movie star. It had all been Tony’s doing. Even when she was working in the adult business she never saw legit acting on any list of possible futures; indeed, at that time she hadn’t been thinking much about the future at all, at least no further than the inevitable discovery of her true identity.

  When that particular storm broke, she realised that while she had always anticipated it, she could never have been ready for it. There were so many lights downstairs outside the building that night she remembered thinking flights into LAX were going to start landing on the boulevard. She felt scared, besieged and thoroughly alone. She didn’t know who else she could turn to so she’d called Marco, who had always looked out for her since getting her started in the business. He had directed four of the features she appeared in, and she only did the other two upon his recommendation of the director and producer involved.

  Marco wasn’t much more equipped to deal with what was developing than she was, but his brother Tony was a different story. Tony was an agent representing several of the biggest names in the adult industry, as well as a few actresses who had moved on to parts in the mainstream B- and C-movie business. He was, by his brother’s description, precisely the kind of slippery sleazeball you wanted on your side in a situation like this. To him, controversy wasn’t a problem; it was the material he worked with, putty in his hands.

  The first thing Tony did was get her out of the deal she’d signed to make her next hard-core feature. Aside from the unmanageable circus it would undoubtedly become, she wanted no part in it because her porn movie alter ego Katy Koxx had disappeared the minute the truth got out. It was the real Madeleine Witherson who would be in that picture, and the real Madeleine Witherson could not strip off and fuck somebody in front of a camera crew. The producer was whining about reneging on a contract, asking Tony whether the name Kim Basinger meant anything to his client, but Tony pointed out that this was a skin flick they were talking about, and that meant his client had to consent to having sex: if she did not consent, no contract and certainly no court could make her. He also added that six million bucks was a cheap ticket out of a film as crappy as Boxing Helena.

  Madeleine had enlisted Tony on Marco’s recommendation purely because she needed help to survive the media onslaught. But Tony saw it as an opportunity rather than an ordeal. The notion that discovery would be a platform to greater things rather than the end of something good had never crossed her mind.

  Not that it was going to be easy, but when the wolves came for Madeleine she was prepared, and she had a long-fanged lupine of her own in tow. Instead of being wiped out by the wave of media attention, Tony helped her surf it. Opinion polarised between those who painted her a villain or a victim; she refused to be brow-beaten by the former or seduced by the sympathy of the latter. It almost broke Tony’s heart that she turned down appearances on the more lucrative Oprah and Geraldo in favour of Larry King Live and Sixty Minutes,but he stood by what she was trying to do, which was prevent the media making her its property. The pundits quickly learned that if they were going to make free with their opinions on Madeleine Witherson, they’d better be ready to go head-to-head, because she always demanded her right to reply, and for a while ratings dictated that she got it.

  Soon enough, though, in accordance with Warhol’s Law of Temporal Physics, her news value began to decline, but not before Tony had harnessed her notoriety to secure a three-picture acting deal with Line Arts, beginning with a starring role in Angel’s Claws. That was the upside. The downside was that her exposure to blowhards like St John would continue, but then loudmouthed religious assholes were nothing new in Madeleine’s world. It was a trade-off she could live with.

  Fame – or she guessed that should be infamy – had granted her access to certain circles lately: certain company, certain parties, certain dates (for what that was worth). But, truth be told, sh
e felt like a tourist: it was interesting to visit but she couldn’t see herself living there, and she wasn’t comfortable enjoying the trappings of celebrity without feeling like she’d earned it. (A militant part of herself might tell her she darn well had earned it, but that would be to deny the real reasons she’d got involved in the adult business.) She was looking forward to shooting the movie, nervous in case she really stank, but excited by the opportunity of getting inside her character. Granted, her part was hardly Ophelia, but she did have a few good lines amidst the slashing and vamping. Mainly, though, she was keen on the prospect of working, of getting on with something constructive, artistic merit notwithstanding.

  She’d spent a long time sticking herself back together, and more convalescing. It was time for Madeleine Witherson to start getting on with her life.

  Funnily enough, while Madeleine Witherson was thinking about getting on with her life, across town in Glendale Daniel Corby was thinking about ensuring she wouldn’t have much life left to be getting on with.

  This was because Daniel Corby was a Christian. And, obviously, because he was pro-Life.

  Mr Irony didn’t pay Daniel too many visits.

  He scrolled his cursor down the screen, watching the names flash past in two columns until he reached hers. Daniel observed with satisfaction that her status had been reclassified as C (for confirmed), having graduated since yesterday from a week of TBC (to be confirmed) and from a fortnight before that of NRY (no response yet). Then he scrolled back up again past the Moonstar logo and clicked to move on to the schedule information on a different page. Nothing had changed. The charter, the harbouring, the catering, the timetables, nothing.

  A few more double-clicks and he was heading over to the charter company to check on arrangements their end. The little hourglass icon sat stubbornly in front of him as he sipped his root-beer through a straw. The Net was slow tonight. Too many jerks playing stupid games and sending dirty pictures around the world. Savages. The most advanced communications technology known to man and they were using it to exchange grainy beaver shots or blow each other up in VR combat. He looked up from the screen while he waited, catching his reflection in another monitor, which had been switched off. After all these years some part of himself was still expecting to see his old face each time he looked in a mirror, and was therefore disappointed in what was actually there. The scarring and disfigurement didn’t hurt any more, but he still felt it tingle sometimes, especially when he got mad, thinking about sluts like Witherson and anyone else who chose to scorn God’s Word.

  The hourglass changed to a key turning in a lock as his ‘skeleton key’ patch got to work accessing the charter firm’s files. It took about a second and a half. Their security wasn’t hot, but then, who would have any incentive to hack them? Apart from him, of course, and if he wanted in, he’d get in no matter what. Computers were Daniel Corby’s thing. They were his vehicle, his weapon, his agent, his world. But they were not his life.

  God was his life.

  He looked at the packages on the table in front of him, wrapped innocuously in Cellophane. They took up hardly any space, and seemed insignificant compared to the plethora of state-of-the-art electronic hardware that surrounded them here in the basement. But those little packages were going to carry God’s Word louder and further than all the CPUs in the world.

  Daniel had always believed he could serve God through computers. However, those striving to serve Him were a precious few compared to those using computers and every other medium to spread filth, corruption, sin and evil. So ultimately he had learned that he could better serve God through computers and plastic explosives.

  He had done what he could to fight the good fight down the years, at college and beyond. Uploading viruses on to pornographic websites, spamming pro-abortion newsgroups, and, of course, he had been part of Life Guard California. Life Guard was an anti-abortion group, which had grown out of a regular Internet forum, meeting up IRL and carrying out real action instead of just sitting around talking about it. They’d all had enough of stupid gestures like picketing clinics and pleading with women to turn around and save their babies. It never worked. The kind of woman who could even contemplate slaughtering her own flesh and blood clearly had no morality to appeal to. Life Guard knew you had to talk to these bitches in a language they’d understand.

  They hacked abortion clinics’ client lists and got the addresses of women who were due to have baby-murders carried out, then they would send them Cellophane baggies full of blood and little plastic limbs through the post, along with flyers telling them they’d be held accountable one day for the slaughter when America woke up to itself. One day there was going to be the abortion equivalent of the Nuremberg trials, the leaflets warned.

  They would also find out where these women lived, then put up posters on neighbourhood streetlights and around the entrances to their places of work. The posters carried the name and photograph of the woman concerned, stating first that she was pregnant and second the date she was intending to kill her baby.

  Unfortunately one of the clinics mounted a sting operation, feeding the cops the names of the women on their list, and several of Daniel’s partners were arrested pasting up flyers outside an office in Van Nuys. And what a joke: when the media found out about it, it was Life Guard who were called sick. How insane was that? They weren’t the ones who were murdering innocent children. The whole country was screwed up. Not only did it permit this holocaust to continue, but it punished anyone who lifted a hand to try to stop it.

  In the end the members who had been caught weren’t prosecuted, but the experience and the publicity were enough to puncture their commitment to the cause, and the group soon began to disintegrate. Daniel was disgusted. Who could be so spineless as to put their public image above their principles? Especially when what America needed was more people prepared to stand up and tell it like it is, not hide behind all that political-correctness bullshit. People like Pat Buchanan. People like Rush Limbaugh.

  People like Luther St John.

  But this had been before he met the great man, when he was just a face on TV and a voice on the radio, not a guiding light whose destiny was bound up with his own. Maybe if their paths had crossed back then, he reflected, he’d never have had the accident. But then, wasn’t it the lessons of the accident that provided the insights they had shared that momentous night? Would they have found so much to say to each other without it?

  Daniel had been rash and impetuous back in those days. He had just felt so boilingly angry, so frustrated by what had happened to Life Guard that he seemed compelled to do something, to strike out. And though he now understood that it had been a mistake, a grave, grave mistake, he also knew that bombing the abortion clinic had taught him two very important things.

  The first was that God’s will could not be achieved through random acts of wanton violence.

  The second was the necessity of synchronising your timer device with the watch you are wearing rather than the clock on your garage wall.

  eight

  ‘No,’ he said, into the pillow. ‘I ain’t goin’. I resign. I ain’t gettin’ up. I ain’t even openin’ my eyes.’

  Sophie kissed the back of his neck and ran a finger slowly down his spine. ‘Come on, Sarge. You gotta get up. You gotta protect and serve the people of Los Angeles.’

  ‘No,’ he mumbled, goosebumps and small hairs on his back rising in response to Sophie’s touch. ‘I decided. I don’t even like the people of Los Angeles.’

  ‘Well you still have to protect our mortgage payments and serve the man holding the note at the bank. Come on, Larry.’ She kissed his neck again. ‘I’m the one should be wanting to stay in bed today. I’m supposed to be teaching Titus Andronicus to thirty wired teenagers. Just what you’d want to calm them down – the Jacobean equivalent of Natural Born Killers.’

  ‘I thought you said you were gonna do Othello this semester.’

  ‘Yeah, well, that was before Janet Richa
rdson gave it to her senior class at Truman High.’

  Larry turned his face around out of the pillow. ‘Ain’t that the school they had the race riot?’

  ‘You got it.’

  ‘Shit. Of course, if you ask me, the real tragedy in Othello is that he didn’t have OJ’s dream team to get him off later.’

  Sophie punched him in the back playfully, digging her knuckles in until he giggled. ‘Wise-ass,’ she said, giving his buttocks a squeeze.

  ‘Well, this morning I’d trade your teenagers wound up on Shakespeare – Othello or not – for my Christians wound up on Luther St John. Moral righteousness can be worse than PCP. You just don’t know what these assholes might get up to if they think they’re doin’ it for God.’

  ‘So the Reverend SJ was whipping up a storm last night, huh?’ she asked, in between nibbles at the back of his ear. ‘He talk about the M word again?’

  ‘Which one? Miscegenation or Mongrelisation?’

  ‘Same difference. Did he?’

  ‘Nope. This was a high-profile deal. The networks were doin’ news coverage, and he wouldn’t want that to be the only thing they were talkin’ about. But I’m sure it’s on the agenda some time this week.’

  ‘So you reckon it’s still a sin?’

  ‘These guys only revise the sin list to add,honey, never subtract.’

  Sophie took his hand and placed it on her belly, swelling from the growth within. ‘Well I guess we’re pretty much condemned,’ she whispered.

  ‘I sure hope so,’ Larry replied softly. ‘Because if heaven’s full of those motherfuckers, I want my ticket to hell.’

  Sophie giggled, burying her face between his shoulder blades and holding his hand tight against her stomach.