However, even though God had taken a less interventionist stance than his old rival, the vast majority of those gathered around the ongoing festival had taken it upon themselves to pursue activities which could broadly be categorised as ‘good’. Some had spent time harnessing wind, water, and whatever raw materials they could find to generate power. This was lucky, because the amplification botched together by a group of like-minded electronics geeks over a period of ten years would otherwise have lain unused, leaving the music to be enjoyed only by those very close to the performer and quite possibly nipping the whole thing in the bud.
The fact that people had decided without any outside intervention to do something useful to pass the time was evidenced to Ron, Ethel, and their following friends both through the appearance of Lynyrd Skynyrd on the stage (proving that you had to be careful of aircraft even after the sixties), and by the fantastic breadth of activity taking place in the massive field before the stage.
People juggled and ate fire, clowns entertained rapt cross-legged crowds of children, acrobats jumped and tumbled. As testament to the sheer good luck of dying with a few seeds in the turn-ups of your trousers, crops had been grown and food was now being bartered from colourful ramshackle stalls, swapped for clothes, or poems, or songs. No-one needed to eat in this afterlife, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t taste, as the Visigoths had discovered at Sweeney’s, and they relished the falafel wraps they swapped for an impromptu, but increasingly enthusiastic performance from Franzel and his Amazing Bum-Sword.
“This is incredible.” Said Ron, as the rock and roll blasted from the stage. “What do you think, Mr Lincoln?” he asked, as Sweet Home Alabama blasted across the heads of the dancing crowds.
“I think that these young men,” he gestured towards the stage, “need a lesson in history.” His stern visage cracked for a moment. “The sword thing was good, though. Very inventive.”
They continued to wander forwards through the crowd. There were young and old, dancing, sitting and talking, cooking food. Lucius fell into brief conversation about head care with a group of men separated from theirs at some whim of Henry VIII. The discourse took place, as they stood, at waist level. A horribly mutilated group of black slaves, killed in a fire at a sugar plantation, swayed as they sang along with the performers, without irony joining in with the song suggesting they were now as free as birds. Ron and Ethel loitered as Guntrick and Adwahl engaged in an exchange with some twenty first century Goths who had died separately but managed to find each other in the crowd, their studied glum demeanour, black hair and clothing proving of great interest.
“God,” said one, having listened to Guntrick’s description of his own history, “I wish I’d known there was a ‘Visi’ version when I was alive. I could have been miserable and caused inhuman amounts of suffering.”
“How,” Adwahl gestured towards the face of a youth, “do you get that lovely effect around your eyes? It gives them such depth.” The demonstration of eyeliner was cut short by Ron chivvying them on (as though there was time pressure), leaving Adwahl with only one eye adorned, like a Droog from Clockwork Orange.
Staveley-Down happened upon a gathering of tail gunners, still in their leather helmets, goggles cracked or punctured, flying jackets ripped and shredded, shards of metal ignored in their flesh. They looked as though they should have been sitting school exams. When Ron suggested they move on, the airman looked at the middle-aged man in the flat cap, and then back to the evidence of the most dangerous job in the world.
“I think I might just hang around here for a while, Ron, if you don’t mind?” Ethel came to Ron’s side, smiled at the man in the grey uniform.
“We’ll probably stay here somewhere,” she said, “so we’ll see you?”
“I hope so. Who knows what’s going to happen? Do you think they’ll fix it?”
“I don’t know.” Said Ron. “They looked a pretty strange bunch.” Spoken by a middle manager from Southern England travelling in the company of a group of German marauders, an ex-President of the United States of America, and a World War II pilot.
At the front of the crowd, serenaded by a somewhat mashed-up Otis Redding (don’t take that ‘plane) singing Dock of The Bay, they happened upon a large sign saying ‘PHILOSOPHER’S COMMUNE’, around which sat a large group of people from a large number of centuries. Beneath the main banner was a smaller sign, saying ‘TODAY: WHY ARE WE HERE?’. Clearly endless leisure time did not dissuade people from addressing the big issues.
What can only be described as ‘a hippy’ was perched on a small dais in front of the audience, his kaftan somewhat dingy, hair and beard unshorn, as of course they would have been at the moment of his death.
“We’re here,” he paused for dramatic effect, “because we’re here. We were, like, sold heaven and hell, right and wrong, by The Man when we were alive. But there’s, you know, only this. And, well, we can make this into something real, you know?”
There were mumbles amongst the audience. A hand shot up. It belonged to an old man in a plaid shirt. He spoke in an American midwestern accent.
“Ah’m old. Ah didn’ spect ter be old when ah died. I followed the Lord, ah respected people, I tret ‘em right. I like it here, folks is good. But mah bones still ache.”
The crowd murmured appreciation of the sentiment, and a beautiful young blonde girl hugged the man to his obvious delight. Otis was pumping it up with Call me Mr Pitiful, a sentiment supported by his rearranged features, and a number of the people in the audience made similar points to the old man.
This felt like a kind of heaven. People in the main were well behaved and friendly. The music was fantastic. But that cancer, that wound, that sheer debilitation of age still hurt, still suppurated, still ached and chained the abilities. There weren’t slates, metaphorical or physical, waiting to be wiped clean.
Guntrick looked at Ron, who was fiercely resisting what had become a kind of compulsion to get on his hind legs and address the crowds with his secret knowledge of The Afternet. Lincoln had wandered off to listen to a group of people discussing the establishment of a police force. He felt, after his recent experiences, a refreshment of his belief in human nature and its desire to bring order, which he saw as an innate facet of a civilised society. What he didn’t know was that they had been arguing for fourteen years and so far failed to establish their frame of reference. Which is an innate facet of a civilised society.
Smoke from a large campfire drifted slowly across the crowd as Ron and the Visigoths listened to the would-be philosophers discuss the questions which in reality had been the same ones troubling earthly thinkers for centuries. However they were framed, in the end they boiled down to the question ‘Is This It?’ Ron and his crew were in the strange position of actually knowing the answer. They weren’t though, any closer than anyone else to knowing whether or not that was a good thing, but an answer to that, or at least evidence supporting an opinion, was provided in the next few minutes.
Whilst it was a fact that the crowd at Deadstock was, in the main, benign, there was no reason to believe that had its population been processed by a functioning Afternet they would all have been consigned to their own individual eternal bliss. The atmosphere of the place was one of co-operative living and quiet wellbeing but simply by dint of being a collecting place for all kinds of those passing from life it was bound, over time, to throw up meetings of those who had not coexisted happily in life and were no more likely to do so in death.
As Otis left the stage with a rousing version of I’ve Been Loving You Too Long, it happened that a group of Hamas militants, continuing their ten year search for Halal meat, stumbled upon the praying forms of a number of ultra Orthodox Israeli Jews running a felt hat stall. Adwahl heard the ruckus behind them, and, pausing only to collect Lincoln, who was busy propounding the benefits of jury trials, they made their way through the crowds to where the confrontation had gathered an audience of its own.
What they saw was enough to c
onvince Ron that the failure of The Afternet, and thereby the random bundling of millions of people into this hinterland was not a situation that could be supported for much longer. Life was riven with enmities and rivalries of varying degrees of entrenchment, and outcomes ranging from mild disagreement to institutionalised violence. The confrontation they watched proved that such positions and beliefs were not withered by death.
The chance meeting began with shouted exchanges, then escalated to finger-pointing and pushing, before moving on to the forcible removal of the others’ headwear, the garnishing of it with spittle, and the trampling of it into the dirt. Hundreds of years of enmity, thousands of deaths to no conclusion, unquestioning hatred and bitterness, were not about to be put aside by the small matter of not being alive anymore. If, at least in theory, an infinite number of monkeys can produce the works of Shakespeare, then a massive number of humans in an infinite landscape for what may be an infinite length of time, could doubtless produce an infinite number of ways of hating each other, whether they carried that baggage from their earthly existence or made it up later for the hell of it.
Guntrick and his men found themselves in the unfamiliar position of stopping a fight. A young man with long sidelocks was being beaten to a pulp on the floor by two screaming Arabs, whilst behind them one of their compatriots lay quivering in fear as a thin man in dark clothes stood over him with a boulder big enough to cause significant damage. A couple of Visigoths relieved him of his load and others tossed aside the other assailants, and Gruntrick stood his army between the two factions, who snarled at each other until the Germans snarled at them. The crowd, drawn in by the noise and action, began to disperse, helped by guttural instructions of “Move on please. Nothing to see here.” The Hamas men, with some encouragement from the Visigoths, slunk away muttering.
Ron looked to the sky, blue, with the smoke from the campfires wisping slowly across his vision. “I wonder if he’s watching?” he said, “This bloody mess. Or their God, or theirs?” He nodded towards the departing backs of the militants. “This can’t be how it”s meant to be.’
“As flies are we to the wanton Gods,” Adwahl said with great solemnity, “they kill us for their sport.”
Ron stared at him. “I didn’t know you knew Shakespeare, Adwahl.”
“Who?” said the Visigoth. “My dad used to say that. Never knew what he was on about. Until now.”
The fracas had cast a pall upon the good mood the atmosphere of Deadstock had brought to them. The vividly revealed tensions so narrowly below the surface were almost worse than the pit of iniquity they had found at Devil’s Docks, where at least what you saw was what you got. They wandered sullenly through people oblivious to the confrontation which had taken place, but for all they knew, brewing their own, given the right chance meeting.
They found themselves close to the front of the stage. There were three very black men, their white shirts grimy from whatever labour they had undertaken, denim bib and brace worksuits worn and torn. One of them looked up at the strange brew of people ambling up beside them, his face broke into a huge grin. He looked straight at the tall, black-clad man in the stovepipe hat.
“Hallo Brother.” He said. “Why so glum?”
Lincoln looked into the rheumy eyes. “I don’t know. I have good days and bad days. There are just so many days.”
“Don’t worry, everything’s gonna be alright” said the man, “Sam’s on next.”
He was. Sam Cooke, in a brown jacket, a pair of too small trousers and one shoe, strode onto the stage, his relative completeness in some contrast to those who had gone before.
“Where’d he get those trousers?” asked Ethel, “they could do him some damage, that tight.”
“Weren’t wearin’ any when he died, so this is a step up.” the black man laughed.
“Plane crash?” asked Ron, rhetorically, pleased at his growing knowledge of pop stars’ route to eternity.
“Hell, no. He was with a lady of the night. Had to find whatever he could when he got here.” Ron nodded, as if he had known all along.
The crowd had an expectant hush. Sam slinked up to the microphone, cobbled together from some tins and a stick by an ex-telecoms engineer from Johannesburg, and in a pure, heavenly voice, eyes closed, revealed that he was born by a river in a little tent.
It felt like everyone knew the song. As dispiriting as had been the bloody fight only a few minutes ago, this was uplifting. There was no backing music, no other singers, no visual support, just a man on a stage with his eyes closed singing for the many hundredth time, and thousands swaying and doing the same.
Abraham Lincoln, in particular, was rapt at the sight of this southern man holding the crowd in his thrall.
He sang in his strong clear voice that for all that it had taken a long time, a change was going to come. Oh yes it is, sang the crowd.
“When did he die?” asked Lincoln, of no-one in particular.
“Nineteen sixties, sometime.” Said one of the black men, his eyes fixed on the figure on the stage.
Two hundred years, thought Lincoln. Two hundred years and the change still lay in some undefined future. He looked around the huge acreage, people standing and swaying, sitting cross-legged, couples slowly dancing in close embrace. The thousands there, blissfully unaware that their individual progress lay in the hands of a small band in a transit van somewhere in North London, sang with some hope that a change was gonna come.
CHAPTER 21
The van fumed in a queue of traffic behind temporary traffic lights set up by the progenitors of a hole in the ground required to deliver cable- fed pornography to another thousand homes. Marcel wiped the condensation from the window and observed a group of youths hiding from the rain under the awning of a shop promising a stand up suntan in eight minutes. No experience necessary.
The early evening had signalled a deterioration from a reasonably warm afternoon, greyness prevailed, and the sky deposited slanting rain in a brisk easterly wind. The youths were clad in improbably large padded jackets, trousers that slunk groundwards, generating an ape-like stance, and baseball caps worn at forty-five degrees. The Frenchman saw them hurl abuse at a passing old woman pushing a supermarket trolley laden with all of her worldly goods, signing with their fingers, screwing up their faces. The woman, hunched and dripping, did not turn her head but inched on past.
Justin leaned on the horn as the lights changed and those in front seemed to decide to move with improper lethargy. Mary, belted between them, fingered the handwritten pages on her lap, peering into the gloom through the sodden windscreen, Lot the Latvian not having spent much of his considerable fortune on wiper blades. At each stop, she had gone through another part of the instruction manual she had written with the dead men, Geoffrey for a moment tearing himself away from the instructions for the Wii, and paying as much attention as his excitement would allow. It didn’t matter how much she repeated what she had to say (and the traffic presented opportunities aplenty), she couldn’t help feeling that telling Marcel, Justin and Geoffrey how to wire up a multiple parallel bus to maximise the three hundred or so terabytes of storage they had purchased was akin to teaching a rhino to thread a needle. At least they nodded a lot, which the pachyderm was unlikely to have done, deliberately, at least.
“Bloody Hell!” said Justin, “there’s no way we’ll make it at this rate.”
“We’d better.” Said Marcel, “Or for you the consequences are unthinkable.”
“What about for you? Don’t think you’re immune.”
Marcel turned to look at the driver, and Justin wished that for once he had just agreed. The dark eyes bored into him.
“Not unthinkable for me, computer expert, because I’ve already been there. My guess is that not many friends of Lot the Latvian will be sitting in a green field surrounded by bluebirds when they fall off the cliff.”
Justin sniffed, tried to look hard.
“I’ve had hardship, you know. I fought to get where I am. I wa
s in the school of hard knocks.”
“Hard knocks?” Marcel sneered, “You have no idea what Hell is like, do you? We dream of hard knocks, they’d be blessed relief.”
Mary spread her arms to calm the unpleasant atmosphere. “Guys, guys. Very interesting, this comparison of how tough you’ve had it and everything, but let’s finish the job. Oh, and the lights are green.”
Those lights were green, but plenty of red ones, and plenty of choking traffic gave Mary opportunities to go again and again through the major parts of her manual. When the van, for the first time unsnarled, pulled in at the street corner she indicated, she thought to herself that she couldn’t teach them any more. This was largely because they seemed to have no apparent capacity for learning in any shape or form. She silently handed over the sheaf of paper to Marcel, looked into the deep eyes which gazed back as their hands briefly touched.
“Are you sure you know what to do?” slightly querulous, she just threw the question into the air and let it gently bounce off the interior of the panel van as the rain did the same thing on the outside.
“We’ve got it.” Marcel withdrew the manual and clutched it on his lap, turning rapidly and facing front.
For some reason, Justin turned the engine off, and there was silence apart from the thrum of the rain on the metal of the roof. Geoffrey, suddenly aware that he wasn’t being thrown around, looked up to the backs of the heads in the front seat and edged forward on his knees until his elbows rested on the back of the vinyl.
“Is this it?” He said. Mary turned and looked at him, and smiled weakly.
“Yes, Geoffrey. I live just round there.” Perhaps subconsciously, she put the emphasis on ‘live’. Having done so, she herself wondered whether she had just been cruel. There was silence once more. She broke it.
The Complete Afternet: All 3 Volumes In One Place (The Afternet) Page 25
