The Complete Afternet: All 3 Volumes In One Place (The Afternet)

by Peter Empringham

  Their demise eventually came from the boredom of exchanging insults with the Roman defenders. This was a pastime generated simply to pass the time, and particularly fruitless given that the Visigoths hurled their abuse in early German. The Romans, meanwhile, were searching their memories for the accusative declension of the verb ‘to fornicate’. And the word for ‘off’. Guntrick’s particular group of stinking mass-murderers had captured a young boy from a nearby village. To pass the time they poured wax into his opened skin whilst he taught them how to really insult a Roman; a practice which continues to this day in British Public Schools.

  One evening, they were reeling from the effects of large amounts of premier cru kartoffelwein, and lurched to the walls of the capital of the world. At great volume, they accused the guards’ mothers of consort with beasts of the field, their sisters of troilistic practices with priests and gods, and, to their eternal regret, Rome of not having a joined-up transport policy. The Romans in the main found little to disagree with in the first two accusations. Outraged, however, by the slur on their renowned road building (which admittedly didn’t handle corners too well), they agreed that vengeance was necessary.

  A group of young Roman bucks, pumped with courage from the cover of darkness and the knowledge that after 6pm their besiegers were basically too drunk to invade a vestal virgins garden party, walked down the hill and slaughtered their abusers with glee, righteous anger, and some creativity.

  Luck being what it is, the young and mutilated Roman boy, seeing his captors being hacked in all directions, stood and faced his saviours, thanking them profusely in Latin. The Romans, not to be fooled by this trick of a young male form with a smattering of their mother tongue, decapitated him for good measure. As was the way of things, for this alone the Roman contributors to the slaughter were, upon their deaths not much later, consigned to their Hell. The Visigoths still awaited their fate sixteen centuries later, and the young Roman boy Lucius, head under his arm, seated on the grass next to Guntrick, was a constant reminder of both their error, and their wait.

  This outcome was, as ever, a triumph of incompetence. When the Visigoths had first arrived in the Afterlife, just after 409AD, they had set off up the stairs, following the signs, as did all applicants at the time, St Peter still being the judge of all sins. Unfortunately after a couple of days hard ascent, they picked a fight with a bunch of Sumatran sailors who had drowned in a tsunami whilst hunting tuna. The fight was a typical ‘you looking at me?’ pushing match, which of course a word of which neither of them understood.

  It’s a universal gist, nevertheless; it was started because the Sumatrans, physically unscathed from their watery end, were finding the stairs relatively easy going. They swept past the Visigoths, who were having to wait for one of their number, Franzel, who was struggling with his walking due to the broadsword up his arse. It wasn’t a fair match, to be honest, since the Visigoths still had a number of their limbs and internal organs in a wickerwork basket they had found at the base of the steps. They swung punches with arms they didn’t have, keeled over from general leg-lack whilst trying to adopt aggressive stances, and slithered on exposed gullets, gore, and gangrene. The upshot was that they were booted with some despatch back to the base of the stairs they had been climbing for some time, and had to lie there as they were showered with South Pacific spit, and listened to what they knew were streams of belittling Sumatran abuse.

  Guntrick had finally extricated himself from the moaning and groaning heap of early Germanic warfarers, many of whom were conducting their own variation on a body search. His first thought was that too much potato alcohol had finally begun to affect their ability to pillage. Secondly, he looked up at the beautiful marble steps stretching up into the clouds, to the rear ends of tittering Sumatrans still in view amongst the throng beginning to ascend. He concluded that he couldn’t really be troubled walking all the way up there again, since he had no idea how far it was, and it wasn’t Visigoth nature to necessarily obey signs, after all.

  “Get your limbs, lads”, he said, “we’re staying.”

  At first, the presence of a bunch of predatory mittel-Europeans at the foot of the ascent didn’t attract a great deal of interest, but when they gathered together buckets, water, and their own rags and started bothering the dead to clean their faces, a passing saint being fast-tracked reported them to the authorities. No-one had ever refused to climb the stairs before. For a long time everyone who died assumed they were going to heaven and therefore that the climb would be the entrance to the eternity of their dreams (wrong!). For the first time, now, there were refuseniks, and something would have to be done.

  This brought about the first ever (but oh by no means last) sub-committee to be formed in the post-existence, and for hundreds of years they met in futile attempt to clear the blockage. St Francis would say that they were basically children and should be brought the judgement of God, Herod would counter with the view that climbing the bloody stairs only to be cast down was part of the eternal irony, and so it went on, to the boredom of all involved. Gradually, more and more of the committee couldn’t even be bothered to turn up. Eventually, there were so many apologies being read out at the start of the meetings that they took longer than the meetings themselves, which was quite a long time. In the end, nobody turned up to read the apologies, the Afternet came in, lost the plot, and the Visigoths took on the unenviable status of People Waiting Longest for Someone to Decide Whether They are Blessed or Damned. Which is PWLSDWTBD, a very early acronym, explaining why the habit of initialisation took so long to catch on.

  The downside of hanging around for a millennium, a half, and a bit, is that you do really rather run out of entertainment; let’s face it, most of us can’t think of what to do with the kids for six weeks in the summer. The upside is that you can really get yourself an education, which of course is the last thing you can do when school’s out. The Visigoths, who, after all, had been exposed to few of the broader aspects of life in the 5th Century, let alone had any idea what might be to come, had been given the gift of time in which to add to the sum of their knowledge. It is easy for us to assume that earlier peoples who revelled in warfare, rape and pillage, were unintelligent (which doesn’t stop us taking the texts of a Japanese warlord from 2500 years ago as a guide to how to run our businesses and our lives), but we should really take into account that warfare, rape, and pillage were just the constituents of their mothers milk and their environment. Guntrick may not have been able to win Who Wants to be a Millionaire - Phone a Friend wouldn’t have helped - but he had an IQ which had only ever been geared to invasion of other peoples and chopping them up as fast as possible.

  Over the centuries, as more and more souls were condemned to wait for their Afterlife and entered the physical compass of the marauders, the Visigoths became multilingual, learned the names for the bits of themselves which had been inside but now were outside, even found out that there were names for the quantities of things. One of them, Adwahl, could cook a soufflé, although they had always had doubts about him and looked not to share his tent. The carapace of the world, over time, shed its scales and shone its light upon them, their eyes widened by the very existence of art, chocolate, gasoline, and drinks not made from potatoes.

  A tall, wide man with a straggly beard, goatskin coat, and a spear projecting from his chest both front and back (the point still sporting remnants of what looked like a lung), lumbered sheepishly to where Guntrick and Lucius were sitting. He raised a hand to his mouth and coughed politely. Guntrick, who had been watching some ants bite his feet, looked up; the eyes in Lucius’ head also swivelled upward.

  “What is it Adrael?” asked Guntrick, not bothering to feign interest.

  “The lads were wondering what we should do today. To pass the time, sort of thing?”

  A question that you have heard for perhaps the half-millionth time doesn’t get any easier to answer, and Guntrick had to resist the urge to rotate Adrael’s spear, an activity which
he knew caused significant pain. Instead, he looked first at Lucius, who simply looked back. Disconcertingly, Lucius’ unattached shoulders shrugged. The question may well be oft-asked, but he was, after all, the leader, and thus bore some responsibility for thinking of something to do for the several hundred-thousandth time. Out of the corner of his eye, as he surveyed the other Visigoths milling, sleeping, talking to each other, and in various states of physical disrepair, he caught sight of a man approaching.

  Ron, in a beige windcheater, taupe nylon slacks, and a pair of grey slip-ons with gold strips across the toes, was heading in his direction with no little purpose. Ron was, by and large, wholly unremarkable, even to a Visigoth born fifteen centuries earlier, apart from the car steering wheel impaled into his chest. It was a useful prop to break the ice at parties but a real hindrance when trying to buy a new shirt.

  Ron and his wife Ethel had been travelling to Dawlish in their green Austin A40 on a clear sunny day in 1982 when a Ford Fiesta driven by a young drunk crossed the central white line on a blind corner and ploughed into them at a closing speed in the region of 120 miles per hour. The Fiesta flipped tail over head and slammed onto the roof of the pristine Austin before continuing on its inverse journey into a small copse where it somehow managed to burst into flames. Ron, thrust on to the large wooden steering wheel, which had detached and formed a pirouette, had his life snuffed out an instant after the collision; Ethel, squeezed by the impact of the Fiesta into the passenger footwell, shuffled more slowly from the mortal coil and upon arrival in the Afterlife, in the unwelcome company of a trio of charred youths, was panicked by the absence of her husband of thirty two years.

  I must be dead, she thought. This doesn’t look like any life I know. Did Ron die? If he did, where is he? She surveyed the scene in front of her, a wide open space, with very earth-like vegetation. People wandered through the trees in states of total disorientation, and every few seconds there would be a shiver in the light, and someone would simply appear, whether very old and supine, of any age but with the pallor of illness, or spewing water from saturated lungs, bleeding from wounds caused by guns, knives, or the rapid coalescence with something very solid, and in a couple of particularly unpleasant cases, in bits.

  “Ron?” Ethel called. “Ron, where are you?” A blackened form staggered towards her.

  “Were you in that car?” it said, as motes of cindered flesh drifted off and upwards.

  “Yes, I was.” Said Ethel.

  “I’m sorry.” The words came from somewhere near the top of the figure which was upright in defiance of its appearance. “I was driving the other car”.

  “Sorry you should be, young man. Look what you’ve done.”

  “I know. My mum will go mad.”

  Ethel was about to berate him, but then thought better of it. “She probably will, you know. She probably will. But here we are, and I can’t find my husband.”

  “We’ll help,” said the blackened figure, waving a gruesome limb to his friends, who shambled over towards them. “What does he look like?”

  Ethel surveyed the wreckage of three lives in front of her. Tears welled in her eyes, and she wiped them away gently with the back of her hand. She was, somehow, unmarked. “I have no idea.” she said.

  For the next couple of hours, in a strange disconnect, the middle aged woman and three young people in various stages of disintegration wandered on. Through the fields and trees, the bewildered crowds of scarred and aged souls, they searched for the love of her life. It happened of course that the numbers continued to increase, the air shivering before them, and new arrivals, mainly in ones, but occasionally twisted groups, opening their eyes to the unreality of their new reality. Weary and despondent, she thought she would give up, but buoyed herself with the thought that perhaps Ron wasn’t even here, had somehow survived. Eventually she peered through a stand of elms filtering sunlight. She saw the back, so instantly recognisable, of the man with whom she had shared her earthly home for so long. She said as much to her fellow searchers and began to hurry up the hill towards the figure.

  Ron was trying to communicate with a Hindu couple who had fallen together from the side of a train in Bangalore. He waved in front of their eyes a picture of his wife, which only just managed to distract them from the car part he sported on his bloody chest. He heard the cry behind him, turned to see Ethel making her way towards him as fast as she could, smiled. Dead? Who cares?

  Ethel and her killers swayed with shock at the sight of the little man with the big medallion, but her eyes met those of Ron, and glistening, creased with joy. He had, after all, loved that car almost as much as her, so she should not begrudge him a part of it for this eternity.

  More than twenty-five years later, the couple still inhabited the waiting world, their future a row of binary digits stuck somewhere in the logic gates of a failing system. On the upside, they had met and talked to more people during those years than in the entire time they holidayed on the Devon coast. In that life, they had tended to keep themselves somewhat to themselves, shared the time of day with Mrs Wartman, their landlady; Franco, who ran the café where they liked to lunch; and latterly a couple called the Kentons, from Cheam, who would perhaps have waited for them to arrive on that fateful day. In this one, some of the souls they met simply disappeared. The charred trio, for example, just weren’t there one morning, gone to heaven knows what fate. Drunk, yes, culpable certainly, but not bad. Who knows what decision the temperamental processor made?

  When Ron strode purposefully towards Guntrick, it was with the certainty of a warm welcome, since they had become firm friends over the years. Such a bond between a leader of violent invasion and a member of the Austin Owners Club of Great Britain may seem an unlikely one, but endless time creates strange bedfellows. The pair shared many a happy hour, although Ethel occasionally worried when Guntrick or one of his followers looked at her with what she imagined to be a recidivist glint. Ron taught Guntrick English, how to make a curry, and line dancing, amongst other things (the latter becoming a weekly event for which the Visigoths provided ‘security’). In return, Ron could now converse in Ancient German, cut his hair with an axe, and skin a yak, which in retrospect he believed may have been useful when faced with some of the cremated food Mrs Wartman plonked in front of them in Dawlish. Not that there were a lot of yaks wandering round the old seaside town during the summer months.

  As Ron approached, his loafers bending and shaping to the rough terrain, the gold strips glinting in the morning sunlight, Guntrick hauled himself to his feet. Over the years Ron had proved adept at finding things for the Visigoths to do, which was a challenge, admittedly, for a group of people who had sacked Greece and turned Athens into an inferno. Su Doku had kept them occupied for a number of years, not least because of the requirement to learn how to count up to nine, and karaoke had become a particular favourite, though Ron’s backing track to ‘Can you Feel the Force’ didn’t have even the stereophonic feel you would have got at your local pub. He could manage a reasonable bass line, though, and the sight of thirty German hoodlums bashing out ‘Fight for The Right to Party’ lived long in the memories of those who were processed to their rightful end, as well as many who still wandered the netherworld of the holding lands.

  “Guntrick,” yelled Ron, halfway up the hill towards him, “Guntrick, you aren’t going to believe this.”

  The last time Ron had said this, Guntrick had for the first time been exposed to the beauty of five card stud poker, an experience which within an hour had made him fall in love with the queen of hearts and lose his favourite catskin coat. He still held a warmth in his heart for the stern figure staring just at him from the royal suit, and a shiver on his skin from exposure to the elements. Ron had disappeared with the coat, adding it to his ‘hoard of potentially useful things’, and muttering something about James Garner and the Great Escape.

  “Guntrick, this is fantastic.” Said Ron, panting heavily and leaning against a rock to catch his brea
th. “I think I might have found a way out of here.”

  Ron had one of those voices that carried. It just had that pitch which somehow was perfect for enabling everyone within a two hundred yard radius to not only hear that there was a noise, but to be able to understand every separate word. It was a perfect voice for the theatre, or railway station announcements. It was the voice of someone telling you you have done something wrong.

  The effect of Ron’s words was to enliven the slumbering Visigoths, who knew from the tone that something was afoot, and that, what’s more, it would lead to a renewed blast of interest in their wait through long centuries. Around Guntrick, they began to heave themselves to their feet, stop the conversations in which they were engaged, drop the stones they were holding for purposes unknown, and begin to gravitate towards their captain. Ron all the while puffed his way up the last few metres of the hill.

  There was a good reason for their interest. The Visigoths had moved on a lot during the millennium or so of disregard from the Afternet, but their education had accelerated exponentially once the middle-aged, middle-class, Middle-Englander had hooked himself onto their group. Apart from poker, which remained a major leisure pursuit, they had been apprised of the battles of World War II (a particular favourite, although they thought the flying bit was somewhat underhand); the discovery of America, Australia, the Poles (North and South, not the race, which they had slaughtered at various times). There was even Margaret Thatcher, of whom they quite liked the sound, which could have stemmed from Ron’s reverence but was just as likely to be a common gene, as well as how to change the cylinder head gasket on an Austin A30. This in itself is remarkable for anyone who could not have the faintest conception of a car.