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

by Peter Empringham

  There was a filthy office, an old bloke in terrible knitwear, and a proto-mafioso sitting on typists’ chairs, some grubby audio visual equipment, and a smell of cordite. So there was no reason for him to think of death. More like Colombian kidnapping in Bushey than death.

  The old man looked at him now. Justin couldn’t help noticing a small piece of chicken in a thick sauce on the collar of his cardigan.

  “Hello.” Geoffrey sat back with satisfaction as if he had just described DNA.

  “Hi.” said Justin, shakily. He decided to maintain contact with the wall.

  Marcel grabbed the back of Geoffrey’s chair and pulled him back alongside. He pulled the old man’s face close.

  “Is that it? I put you in charge of people management and you come up with Hello?”

  “It’s not really my field Marcel. I haven’t actually met anyone who’s been alive within the last hundred years for, well, a hundred years. Or more. If ever, since I was alive.”

  “Look, Geoffrey,” the dark-clad man was staring madly into the other’s face, “just get rid of it so that we can stop the leaking and fix the backlog. And even find the manual. The way things are now this place could be packed out soon if we’re not careful. Just talk to it and get it to leave.”

  Geoffrey took a deep breath, and looked over to where Marchant was looking back at him. He turned once more to Marcel, who glowered and waved him forward, and then inched his chair towards the new arrival.

  “I’m really sorry about the inconvenience.” To all intents and purposes he could have been telling the newly dead man that Madame Tussauds was full. “But you really shouldn’t be here. You’re going to have to go somewhere else.”

  Marcel watched in amazement as the old man sat back in his seat, apparently satisfied with this outpouring. Had it not been for a clearing of the throat from the new arrival it was almost certain that physical harm could have ensued. As it was, he decided to see what the underdressed newcomer might have to say, hoping it would be ‘Goodbye’ so that they could get on with important work and particularly make the place ready for the Reaper’s ‘gift’.

  Marchant, who assumed that he had somehow been doped, abducted and removed to this place in the back of a car with blacked out windows, observed his jailers. He had no idea who might be behind this, but did have an idea that people were very tetchy about their computers. There was every chance that within the litany of shoddy output from his cost-cutting business he could well have supplied the wrong version of Netscape to some short-tempered underworld figure. His default setting was to brazen things out, however, and in the absence of a brilliant idea, that was where his psyche led him.

  “Where is here? I don’t know how I got here, so I certainly wouldn’t know how to get somewhere else.” The older figure leaned forward in his chair with a benign, understanding look. Marchant felt he was either going to threaten him or molest him, and he wasn’t sure he wanted either.

  “Well, this is, er, well in any case, the nub is you’re dead, so what you need to do is run along and join the other dead people. Of whom we have plenty.”

  “Oh yeah, right,” Justin curled his lip to accentuate his disbelief, “I’ve died and gone to Heaven.” He looked around at the chaotic office with contempt. “It doesn’t meet its advance billing, does it?”

  The well-dressed younger man, who Justin took to be the enforcer, tugged the grubby cardigan of the other, leaning forward to whisper audibly into his ear.

  “Tell it we are in a sphere of considerable influence. Could make it easier on him, that kind of thing.”

  “I heard that,” Marchant said, “and you will forgive me for thinking that is unlikely. In my experience influential people don’t occupy some shithole like this. Just point me back in the direction I came from and we’ll forget all about this, shall we?”

  “Ah!” Marcel recognised an opportunity for closure. “You’re a Buddhist! You could go back as a Pink-Faced Trench Stoat.” The counter on the wall ticked over to ‘08’, and the display showed that this rare Nepalese herbivore had bought the farm. “Or something else, perhaps.”

  “I’m not a Buddhist.”

  “Well, you’re knackered then.” Marcel looked at the newcomer in the hope of recognising a smidgeon of humour. Justin was not in the mood, so he continued. “Actually, they can’t go back either, Buddhists, I mean. Just my little joke.”

  Geoffrey, worried about the lack of progress and the affect that the presence of this strangely dressed individual may have on the impending arrival of their IT genius, again tried to adopt a conciliatory tone.

  “Look, I’m afraid that you really are dead, and you’re just going to have to accept it. However hard that may be at this difficult time. What were you doing just before you arrived here?”

  Marchant gestured theatrically at his outfit, still damp with sweat.

  “I was out running.”

  “There you go,” Marcel said, “heart attack. Had a check up recently?”

  “Last month. Company Health Cover. Just for me, actually. A1. Everything perfect.”

  Geoffrey joined the inquisition. “Smoke?”

  “Nope. Never have.”

  Geoffrey gestured towards his hand, which was proffering a cigarette. “No,” he said, “I mean…smoke? You might as well.”

  Marchant shook his head, starting to tire of the party. He had always thought that if he did cross a local gangster, which in his part of the world was certainly a likely occurrence, he would end up tied to a chair with his teeth being chipped out with a screwdriver, not being forced to inhale a Benson & Hedges by an old man in slippers. Marcel was equally losing his patience.

  “Drink too much?” He stood and spoke from very close to Marchant’s face, “You look like a party type, I think.”

  Marchant shook his head. This was more like it; in his face. “Social drinker, hardly a drop otherwise.”

  “Family history of illness?” Justin again indicated no.

  “Recent trip to central Africa?” A shake of the head.

  “Serial masturbation?”

  “Oh, that’s deadly now is it?”

  “Amazingly enough, it actually is, yes.” Marcel almost looked pleased that they had some response. Geoffrey, though, had sucked the air of the Social Worker, and interjected once more.

  “Well, all of that doesn’t change the fact that you are here. Being here, I have to tell you, means that you have died. It could easily be one of those freak things like Argon Gas, or ball lightning- you might make the tabloids! Even here, it would be quite good if you could remember what it was; that kind of death gives you a certain cachet, you wouldn’t be just your common or garden stiff. Big icebreaker at parties. Even better if you just happened to be standing next to some maniac-“

  Geoffrey’s flow was halted as Justin almost jumped, eyes widening.

  “Hold on, there was a strange bloke. He stopped me, I assumed he was a beggar or something-“

  “There you go then.” Marcel seized the opportunity to end the conversation and consign the poor visitor to the debris of post-history. “Random but cruel trick of fate, death by prowling nutter. Now bugger off.”

  Marchant hadn’t heard the closing statement from the Dark side, and continued. “-big bloke. Shades. Sickle jewellery, now I come to think of it, which I suppose matched the one he was carrying. Must have been from eastern Europe, eh. Don’t get many scythes in the mega-farms of East Anglia, do you?”

  There are very few occasions where the objectives and thoughts of those of a Heavenly persuasion and those absolutely inclined to endless punishment coalesce. It is reasonable to think that this happens even less when the divergent philosophies are represented by an innocent root vegetable operative- whose innocence could well be due to the lack of opportunity for misbehaviour- and a vicious ne’er do well who holds the former in contempt (although it has to be said that even Marcel had to rack his brains to find things to hate about Geoffrey).

  On this oc
casion, however, it was as if Hutu and Tutsi had suddenly realised that their common love of the machete should bring them closer rather than lead them to separate limb from limb. The opposites were never going to attract but as they looked at each other on the back of Marchant’s last statement they were momentarily united in thought and objective.

  The fact is that the opposing teams in Premier League Afterlife were not really that far apart in their beliefs. If we can forego the essential disparity; that is that the Devil’s legions think that bad is good, or at least more fun, and God’s apostles actually do think being good is an end in itself, we would find that there is no divergence in how they view eternity.

  You want to be bad in life? Well, this sometimes brings its own earthly rewards, but well, you know you have to pay later, don’t you? You won’t find Beelzebub proclaiming this is a bad system, because he actually gets to mete out punishment forever. God agrees. He may be a loving God, but rather like the teacher caning your backside and saying ‘this is for your own good’, he’s all for a binful of torment for the nasty.

  On the other side, the Devil doesn’t want to have to put up with a stream of people who despite the torment and ignominy he heaps on them still follow a path of good works and righteous suffering. As his acolytes shriek with pain and terror, the last thing they want to see is some do-gooding old biddy wandering around trying to spread succour. Bring me your vile, your lascivious, your murderous, he might cry, they are all welcome.

  That’s the management layer. You would struggle more to find commonality between the inhabitants of the Pit and Bliss, though sometimes they were actually the same thing. Geoffrey had no idea of the thoughts going through Marcel’s head, the dreams of torture, of inflicting pain, of bloodletting; it just didn’t occur to him. Similarly Marcel would have been pained by the lack of such thoughts within Geoffrey, had no real concept that you could look at someone like Marchant, invading your self-centred life, without thinking of the ways you would like to see him toasted or roasted.

  Now, they arrived at the same thought at the same moment, unencumbered by their own characters, and saw, in their minds’ eyes, a door opening. Mysterious arrival, last experience a man in a black cloak, a scythe. They also had the same glimmer of doubt. This? Sweaty shirt, headband, attitude? The saviour of the Afternet? Easier for Geoffrey, admittedly, who didn’t place a great deal of store upon appearance, but for Marcel, who believed that in general what you see is what you get, well that was more difficult. What he saw in the preening, self-obsessed pseudo-athlete in front of him was a dickhead.

  Nonetheless, they looked at each other and then back to the sweating figure before them.

  “What did you do? When you were alive?”

  “I ran Worldbest IT, one of the premier computer and software companies in the world. And still do, since I don’t believe this death nonsense.”

  The Afternet management team looked at each other once again, the dawning realisation that perhaps this person actually should be here, that the Reaper had delivered, and that they had spent the last twenty minutes trying to get rid of the very person they had spent so much time trying to procure. They turned their heads to regard the lycra-clad man in front of them and managed their best sheepish grins. Problems over. Worldbest IT, computers and software. Not just World Good, but Best. The return of the Afternet as not just a processing system but also a supplier of services to the deceased was just around the corner. Nothing could go wrong now.

  “Can I just say something here?” This voice was something new.

  Geoffrey and Marcel looked up, and Justin around, to where a girl stood, having emerged from the corner behind the filing cabinet. Each of them knew that there was no way this did not complicate matters. The silence hung heavy, and the extinction clock could be heard behind them ticking off another defunct life-form, but no-one looked. Finally Marcel broke the ponderous silence to address the female stowaway.

  “Did you by any chance see a tall man in black with a scythe just before you woke up here?”

  “Yes.” The girl looked in turn at all three. Marcel looked only at Geoffrey.

  “No wonder he was so cheap.” he said.

  CHAPTER 9

  Sweeney’s Tea Shoppe stood at the edge of a small village green, a family of ducks, mother and young paddling in the central pond. Two bowed mullioned windows stood either side of the gleaming door, itself somewhat anachronistically being a single sheet of plain glass. Across the green was The Cricketers Inn, its façade swept with vines, and baskets teeming impatiens decorating its windows, whilst to either side were respectively a small Post Office and general Store advertising homemade pasties and Girvan’s Verucca Ointment, and that rarity, a wool shop, windows a panoply of colour created by pyramids of four-ply.

  The sky overhead was clear blue, occasionally embellished by the progress of a small cumulo-nimbus whose passing cast no shadow on the sylvan scene. The three roads converging on the green were generally clear of traffic, although every now and then a grubby child would whistle past on a bicycle, or a delivery van straight from the motor museum would chug by, a brightly painted livery promising fresh bread, meat, or other desired comestibles.

  Inside, the small tearoom was warm and comforting, linen-dressed tables waiting for custom, pristine black and white tiles diagonally streamed across the floor. The only customers on that day sat together at a large round mahogany table in the corner with a view from one of the windows. Maude and Elsie, septuagenarian sisters, wore twinsets in their family tartan, Maude a double string of pearls, and Elsie a hat which quite possibly was last seen on the head of Dorothy Lamour in one of the Road films; for sure if they were unexpectedly detained away from sustenance, they could get their five portions of fruit for the day just from the millinery.

  Their companions that morning, as indeed they had been every morning for a number of years, were Lucille, a little younger than the sisters but due to the absence of teeth not wearing quite so well, and Gladys, who had been pushing ninety when the winter’s cold took its final toll. The sisters had been in as rude health as you can be in your seventies when salmonella, that vicious targeter of the old and partial to cold meats, had struck after a wake for a friend run over by a bendy bus. Their visions of Heaven had happened to coalesce; village life, most of it in a tea shop, the look and feel of the blue remembered hills of their youth. And cake.

  The foursome, whose lives had variously run the gamut of joy and deprivation, the suffering of war, hardship, scarcity and the blessings of grandchildren, friendship and the love of others, had envisioned and received an eternity like this. Before them were empty china tea cups and a cold teapot, and in the centre of the table a tiered cake stand held nothing but the sparse remains of consumed confections. A waitress, clad in starched black blouse and skirt, a white lace pinny, and in her hair a white lace cap, emerged from a back room and walked to the table with benevolent attention. She smiled at the ladies and without asking removed the used teacups and pot and the emptied cake stand, walking briskly back to the rear of the establishment. The ladies had smiled at her as she arrived, with the exception of the one who was in the middle of a convoluted declamation.

  “So I said to her, I said, ‘you might call it a permanent wave, dear, but if it doesn’t get me to Marks’s before it’s straight as a stair rod, I call it nothing but a set, and I’m not paying you two and thruppence to look like I’m wearing a Norman Helmet, thank you very much.” Elsie paused and sucked in air, flushed from the joy of grumbling.

  The others clasped their handbags to their chests indignantly.

  “Mind you”, said Lucille, “she’s got some cheek that one, and no mistake. I’ve seen her coming out of Number 31 of a morning looking like the cat that got the cream.” It is in the nature of ageing people that they feel the need to demonstrate agreement with another by saying the exact words that they say at the end of a statement with just a moment of delay, and as Lucille said, ‘…cat that got the cream�
�, emphasis was added by Maude nodding sagely and saying ‘-got the cream.’

  “She’s no better than she should be.” These last few words were carried along in at least stereo.

  The waitress reappeared with a fresh pot of tea, steam gently wafting from its spout, and a tray of fine china cups and saucers, both of which she placed on the table. The ladies moved without haste to distribute the latter as the waitress returned with a fresh cake-stand laden with every conceivable kind of assorted fancy. The casual laziness of their movements as they pursued the ritual of waggling the pot, supplying milk to the cup before or after pouring depending on personal preference, and cooing over the cornucopia of confection before them, demonstrated both their time of life and the lack of urgency they felt in their consumption rituals. There was no threat that the CLOSED sign would go up in any near future. They had no need, you could feel, to look outside. The sky would be blue, a cyclist or delivery van would trundle past, the ducks would walk charmingly across the road in a line or swim charmingly in a chaotic group.

  It is of course in the nature of things that such stability does not always last, although in Heaven, and this was one of them, nothing had acted to belie such predictability for a very long time. Now, though, something was stirring deep in recreated Derbyshire.

  The harbinger was the merest wobble in the straightness of the signpost pointing passers-by to Much Somewhere and Little Something-in-the-Marsh. Then there was a brief moment as if someone had unzipped the entire vista, and four grubby bearded men in animal skins were deposited onto the village green. The ducklings were shepherded by their mother to the far end of the pond, where they paddled just enough to stay there as they observed the newcomers suspiciously. The men picked themselves up and looked around at the kind of idyll which historically they would burn. Franzel adjusted the sword in his rear end to minimise the agony to which he had become so used, and seeing the smoke issuing from the chimney of Sweeney’s, they began to walk towards it, given that it was the only sign of non-duck life that was evident at the time. Reaching the entrance, they pressed their faces expectantly against the leaded windows. Inside, unaware, the ladies continued their discourse on the problems of the world.