Justin placed his mug carefully on the table. What did he know? A source for knock off DVDs; a warehouse near the Old Kent Road full to the brim of near perfect copies of Louis Vuitton, Dunhill, Burberry; where to buy large quantities of smuggled tobacco. All in all, little to help with the current requirement, not that he intended to let anyone know that.
“I know sources. Import/Export, that kind of thing. But she’s right, we’ll need money.”
At Geoffrey’s suggestion, they turned out their pockets, and in Mary’s case, handbag. The old man had to admit to himself that his momentary burst of self-confidence, brought on by having made a suggestion and not being sneered at or smacked, was punctured by the collected wealth thus revealed.
From Marchant, ten pounds, folded as small as possible and pulled damply from a tiny pocket inside his running shorts; Mary produced a pile of things which neither Marcel nor Geoffrey recognised- tubes and boxes, tissues, bits of paper, one glove, mace. Among these, various pieces of change which when counted amounted to seven pounds and forty one pence.
Geoffrey, of course, had nothing which could even in the most primitive of civilisations would have been deemed to be currency, although some of the agglomerations of goo and fluff could well have been primitive civilisations which could have been asked for an opinion. Marcel at first refused, claiming that he never carried anything in the pockets of his sharkskin because it would ruin the drop of the suit. Something about his demeanour suggested to Mary and Justin that this may not be the truth, and they gave him the thousand yard stare; Geoffrey did the same, but for the simple reason that knowing him well he just assumed he was lying.
Marcel was not given to squirming, and perhaps it was the presence of the recently deceased which made his discomfort evident, but after a minute or so he weakened and reached into the inside pocket of his jacket. He pulled out a fine gold chain, long and beautifully tooled, with a gold locket attached, engraved with beautiful filigree. He laid it on the table with some reverence, where it was regarded in the same way by the others.
“It belonged to my mother.” Marcel’s voice almost cracked as he remembered how he had neglected to take it from her neck before her burial, and that she fought like mad to get out when he had dug her up to remove the jewellery. The others looked at him with sympathy, his face a picture of maudlin distraction as he asked himself why he hadn’t just killed her first. Mary ended the reverie.
“It’s not enough. £17.41, an admittedly very nice necklace with sentimental value and, er, some stuff. We will need lots more than this.”
“Shame there’s not a poker game,” said Marchant, wondering if he should take his tenner back now, “I’m a dab hand.”
Geoffrey and Marcel turned their eyes slowly to each other and then to Justin. Marcel reached to the table and scooped the contributions into his hand, careful to avoid the ball of semi-liquid his partner had contributed.
“Let’s go.” he said. “Last Chance Saloon.”
CHAPTER 11
The hugely populated nowhere land inhabited by those waiting for the Afternet to cast its judgement upon them had some characteristics in common with the world from which its population had come. One of these was the curious way that the good people, or at least those not ineffably bad, seemed to act relatively independently. They wandered the various aspects of their environment, and just generally got on with trying to make it really rather like life. The less attractive personalities tended to gravitate towards each other, form alliances and mini-societies, and basically descend as rapidly as possible into lawlessness and dissolution.
It is something of a mystery how criminals find other criminals with which to commit half-baked master-plans, why Mafiosi manage to maintain such a tight knit and mutually supportive society, or why it is that even school bullies seem to recognize each other without a badge or tattoo. That it should continue, this mysterious magnetic attraction of like-minded wrongdoers, even after their death, is just as difficult to comprehend. The petty criminals, a small proportion of the millions who were now cast adrift by death from everything they had known, and thrown into a huge area of earth-like terrain about which they knew nothing, somehow managed to find and befriend other pickpockets, fraudsters, shoplifters and muggers.
The vicars, meals on wheels ladies, and charity collectors basically just wandered around, found sustenance where they could, tried not to annoy anybody (which some would say marked a small departure from some of their lives), and waited for justice to be done. In the enclaves of the nasty people, justice was still being snatched, pulled into an alley by its throat, and given a good kicking.
The new arrivals in this cesspit had largely belonged to the independent, harmless genre of the deceased. Ron and Ethel had travelled further to go to the tunnels than they had at any other time since they had been reunited; their curiosity about their environment was diminished enormously by their being together, and they had no reason to believe that anything better or worse would be presented to them elsewhere.
Staveley-Down, who talked a good tunnel but wasn’t very happy about entering one, had spent a good deal of his time building a hut in the lee of a rocky outcrop, decorating it in a style to his taste and trying to some extent to recreate a nineteen-thirties country house without the servants, tennis court, grouse shooting, or carriages rolling up the drive. Or in fact the house, taking into account his limited building skills, which were not improved by necessity.
The Visigoths were something of an exception. Just because they had spent their lives engaged in wading in the blood of their enemies, abusing the womanhood of the countries through which they marched, and enacting a scorched earth policy that led to the starvation of thousands, did not necessarily mean they were bad, but merely that they did bad things. To be frank, at the time they lived, most people didn’t need to be set any examples in the abuse of women and had little hesitation in torching the possessions of those poorer than themselves. They had certainly mellowed over the centuries (it’s reasonable to assume that the old dears in Sweeney’s would have been toast had they bumped into the Germans a few centuries earlier). The education given to them by Ron, whilst not always reliable (Mantovani, not generally accepted as being the greatest composer ever, for example), had nevertheless had a remarkable effect, awakening in them a thirst for knowledge which to a great extent replaced that for gore. It is also true that whilst the damned may well seek each other out, this doesn’t necessarily occur with habitual invaders. Had they bumped into, say, a bunch of early Danes, Guntrick and his friends would have rapidly forgotten what they now knew about non-stick coatings and colour-fast washing techniques for man-made fabrics, taken up their cudgels and engaged in mortal combat.
Abraham Lincoln had not really followed this model of behaviour in the pre-afterlife, not intuitively seeking out the like-minded, which may say something about the character traits which had led to his exalted position so cruelly abbreviated by a liking for live theatre. Similarly, despatched without warning, and having found himself deposited in an unprepossessing environment, he had spent a good deal of time simply walking around, trying to establish the bounds of it. He had never, in fact, found the edge, if indeed there was one, but he had experienced shocking extremities of behaviour and character nonetheless.
Lincoln’s exploration was why, when Ron and his group had decided to look for somewhere to cause unrest in the hope of forcing the hand of whoever was running the place (that someone might be was a big assumption in itself), Abe was able to offer a suggestion for a likely location in which to create events which may come to the notice of the management. Just as this purgatory confirmed the murderous tendencies of its inhabitants, so, Abe had discovered, there were characteristics of environments themselves which for some reason seemed to mean that those attracted to nefarious activities were drawn to them.
In this instance, Abraham provided the view that if you want to cause trouble, and do it where there is an incendiary combination of lowlif
e, then you need to find the seaport. It is not entirely explicable what it is about docks which leads to their descent into all kinds of perfidy, but there cannot be a commercial waterfront in the living or purgatorial world which does not test one’s knowledge of the depths to which humankind can sink. You can call it a Marina and build as many bijou apartments as you like but even as you walk out of your security protected front door into what is ambitiously called the plaza there is a much higher chance than average that you will happen upon an all-too-public serving of burglary, bashing, or buggery with a side dish fricassee of illicit gambling, knocked-off watches, and saxophone murder.
A tall man in a dark suit and a stovepipe hat, with a beard big enough for a murder of crows, cuts a dash in any environment, even one populated by the dead of seven centuries. When he is accompanied by a bespectacled man in a flat cap with the steering wheel of an Austin A40 protruding from his chest, his winceyette wife, a military man with a hole in his head, and a horde of Visigoths, one of whom has sheathed his sword rectally, you would expect the traffic to stop, even in Slough. In the Devil’s Docks, no-one batted an eyelid.
In fact, having entered the seaport, the dusk gathering and seagulls wheeling and screaming above, the erstwhile President of the United States was importuned by a brightly made up woman in a short skirt, unfeasible amounts of make up, and a mock sheepskin waistcoat. She was surprised to see potential custom so early, but never one to miss a trick, tottered out in front of the stoutly marching Puritan.
“Lookin’ for business love?”
Lincoln was stopped in his tracks, taking a moment to compute the implication, not assisted in that by 150 years of nothing. At last the realization came and wrote a story on his face.
“Oh. No, sorry madam. As you can see, I travel with friends.” He gestured expansively to the people following. Some of the Visigoths were vaguely interested in the proposition, although a couple of them actually eyed the sheepskin with rather more interest than was appropriate.
“So do I.” the lady gestured to co-workers who, dressed in clothes derived centuries apart, emerged slowly from the shadows and in time honoured fashion, leered.
“Alas madam, I have greater purpose to pursue this evening.” Lincoln tipped his hat and walked on, his retinue following on behind looking variously embarrassed, concerned, and lustful.
The woman shook her head at her friends, stamped her feet as though cold and wrapped her arms around herself the better to keep in the internal organs slithering gamely against the wound in her abdomen.
For anyone who had sailed the main in the eighteenth century, the ‘golden age of piracy’ meant arriving starved of food, water, and companionship in the trading ports of China, South America or the Caribbean. Even for those in modern times who hove to in the benighted seaports of Somalia, or West Africa, the propensity of those havens to redefine corruption, heavy drinking, and lust, lost the capacity to surprise. To seafarers from any era, however, the debased society which had grown up in Devil’s Docks may well have caused offence. Had this vicious, ungovernable society been what welcomed them to Nassau in 1710, the buccaneers themselves may well have led a meeting to protest at the depth of iniquity.
This was three hundred years later, of course. All of the filthy place’s inhabitants were not only dead but also in a state of relative relief that they hadn’t yet been committed to some brimstone. This perhaps encouraged them to loosen any rein they may have had on their appalling behaviour during their lifetimes. For Ron and Ethel, who had thought that the BBC having a female newsreader was a tad risqué, their first impression of this subset of purgatory had caused them both to blanch and Ron to gallantly cover Ethel’s eyes.
Lincoln had seen black men broken on the wheel and the red light immoralities of Charleston and New Orleans, but when he had happened upon this waiting area some years earlier he had bid a hasty retreat. The Visigoths followed along with eyes like saucers, realizing for the first time that learning about tea may not be the peak of their education.
This was way beyond what Ron had imagined when he had sought proposals for a likely source of unrest. He had been thinking more along the lines of a gathering of slightly miffed Scientologists who had found out that Ron L Hubbard was as full of shit as everyone else had assumed all along. This opinion wasn’t disabused by the suggestion for their uprising being put on the table by one of the greatest libertarian political figures in history. Lincoln was a pragmatic man, however. He took the view that if you really wanted to cause a stir, a collection of disgruntled Womens’ Institute members really wasn’t going to register; what you needed was someone who would raise Cain just for the hell of it.
Hence they wandered the grim and grimy dockside looking for a suitable place to begin to spread dissent. Having negotiated the offers of the first prostitutes’ collective, they passed a boxing booth in which enormous pugilists beat to a pulp anyone stupid enough to accept their challenge, and an adjoining hot food stall run by a Polynesian head-shrinker who proffered the resultant remains in a bap, topped with what looked like ketchup but almost certainly wasn’t.
They set up shop just beyond a raucous tavern which blasted light from its shattered windows on to the cobbled pavement, chairs, and tables. People, whole or in parts, issued at regular intervals from its devastated interior. This was handy, because a Californian plastic surgeon had set up shop next door, offering to attach any body part to any other body part so long as the customer provided both ends of the operation. The number of people staggering around with feet emanating from their ears or a spleen tacked onto their chin looked like a macabre stag night in a Korean War field hospital. In the way of things, people with two penises had become de rigeur, not to mention women who had gone for just the one, thus cutting out the middleman.
Whilst anyone walking the dockside was routinely attacked and robbed for anything which might have been of value anywhere in the world ever (which doesn’t actually exclude a great deal), the travellers apparently occupied a bubble of security. This was not, of course, because they looked like nice people. Here, nice people lasted a very short time before being slaughtered in the ring for others’ sport. Anything mashed up in the process was served up for sustenance, and anything whole claimed for the purposes of medical advancement. Ron and Ethel in particular would have been torn apart just for his steering wheel and her Dolcis court shoes, and, as they watched others suffer terrible beatings for much less, they had little comprehension as to why this did not occur. Guntrick could have explained, as it did not take many splashes of re-terminated corpse in the greasy water to spread the word that the man in the viyella jacket was minded by some fearsome warriors enjoying the rare opportunity to remind themselves of their core skills.
Their pitch wasn’t particularly salubrious, given that the floor was surfaced by a number of oozing fluids the origin of which Ron did not wish to guess. It did, however, give them the space to raise a number of hastily prepared placards proclaiming ‘SEND US SOMEWHERE!’ and ‘WHY ARE WE WAITING?’. Neither was exactly rabble-rousing, but Ron had deemed they had the right mix of brevity and mystery to attract a crowd.
It attracted a crowd alright, but market research may well have proved that this was simply because when you are a damned reprobate waiting decades for your punishment you’ll join a queue for anything.
It was Staveley-Down, who like Ron and Ethel had been aghast at the scale and range of horrors in the Devil’s Docks, who took to the ‘podium’ (a small wooden box in the John Major mould).
As Staveley-Down took up station, it was apparent that the Visigoths had, to some extent, been rather over-effective in warding off unwanted attention. The audience comprised a blind mute who had died unluckily in early twentieth century Scotland below the wheels of the first horseless carriage in the Borders region. Taking his usual walk, guided by his nose, to the trees he habitually used as a latrine, he had heard the flapping of the cloth and marching feet of the Red Flag man who warned people of t
he approach of the vehicle and assumed that it was a lightweight invasion of England. Seconds later he was hit at four miles per hour by several tons of wood, which would not in itself have been enough to kill him. Alas he was dragged the remaining thirteen miles to the oblivious driver’s stately home, by which time the rawness of flesh he still displayed was enough to ensure his doom, whether he had subsequently been thrown into the stables and forgotten or not.
The gentrified airman was therefore met with the sight of a man facing the wrong way, covered in ancient horseshit and with all of the bones exposed on his left side. Somehow it cast a pall on his expectations of success for the revolutionary venture. He cleared his throat, looked round to Ron, who raised both thumbs and smiled in encouragement, and began to try to draw in the scum of the Afterlife.
“Gentlemen! Ladies! The time has come to raise your voices and demand an end to this infernal punishment!”
Some more passers-by stopped and looked at the speaker as though he were mad to commit to such an exposed position. A dwarf emerged headlong through the window of the tavern behind him, came groaning to his feet, pulled a substantial shard of glass from his chin, and ambled disconsolately to the slowly growing watching group where he bled steadily on the blind Scot.
“You were dispatched from earth to this terrible place. Your freedom was dashed from your hands. The work of your life, everything that you stood for and strove for, has been turned into nothing. Has been turned into-“ he paused dramatically and slowly waved his hand around the grubby panorama, “this.”
A number of the crowd, which was by now growing by the second, followed the arm as if it were going to point the way somewhere, then turned back, looking somewhat puzzled.
“Woss wrong with it?” The cry came from the back of the group, murmurs of assent rising from others among the cut-throat audience.
“A filthy slum, populated with murderers, footpads, and misanthropes. Wrought with disease, stinking of sewage and illness, riven with bitter conflict and ringing with the cries of pain, horror, and licentiousness.”
The Complete Afternet: All 3 Volumes In One Place (The Afternet) Page 14
