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

by Peter Empringham

  “None of us are perfect. I sinned once. Really sinned. But I confessed in front of God, and…” he smiled and cast his eyes around the room, “He must have forgiven me because here I am. Through this room walk some of the great minds, not all of them known, not all of them famed. But this is all I could have wished for.”

  “You think that is how it works?”

  “I think it is how it worked for me.” He glanced again at Ruskin, now listening intently to a man describing the concept of the catalytic converter. “And you?”

  “I’m just visiting. I sinned much more than once, if you believe in the concept of sin. I could still be confessing and not have finished the list.”

  “ And France? You must be recent?” The priest gestured towards Marcel’s zoot suit.

  “Ha. No. I just have access to a wardrobe. I’ve been here, in one way or another, for three hundred and fifty years.”

  “I don’t have access to a wardrobe.” The plump priest gestured to his black uniform. “Even though I’ve been here that long also. Paris originally. East side. You?”

  “The same, actually. Branleur.” Marcel was wondering how to extricate himself from this small talk, and didn’t see the shadow pass across the priest’s face.

  “I’m Father Monreal. Didier.” Marcel looked at the priest’s outstretched hand. He didn’t go much for the hand-shaking thing; too many times a demon had accepted his grasp only to toss into some burning sputum, or worse thumbed his nose, but the place seemed benign, and this was, after all, a redeemed sinner-priest. He grasped the hand.

  “Marcel.” He said. “Marcel de Branleur.”

  He had long become accustomed to the foul taste of drinks others enjoyed, but even so drank them for the effect they had. As the afternoon wore on he visited the globe on numerous occasions to replenish his glass, and over time sank into a maudlin humour that gave out an aura of visitor beware. Visitors he had for all that, and had he been more sober, he may have noticed an undercurrent in their conversation, but he wasn’t, and he didn’t.

  “So when were you born?” One asked.

  “1632. What of it?”

  “Do you believe in the spirit world?”

  “Are you serious?”

  Another.

  “Your mother must have been distraught at your early death?”

  “Well, she was probably shrieking at the time, but for an entirely different reason.”

  “What was her name. My mother was called Mabel.”

  “Eloise. She was called a lot of other things but that was her name.”

  “Where do you stand on Original Sin?”

  “I think there are some sins that are highly original. Just ask Eloise.”

  The evening was closing in, the greens of the gardens becoming darker and the dog lovers beginning to round up there charges and walking contentedly to who knows where to share tales around the fireside. Marcel leaned of necessity against the Encyclopaedia Britannica, grateful for its hefty support, thinking about the return to the Control Room. This had not been his most enjoyable breakout, but he at least felt he may be able to face the gibbering of his comrade.

  The priest was coming towards him, and he looked quickly around to see if there was any quick method of escape, but his legs appeared to have been immersed in some kind of slurry, and any progress he could make would not be rapid.

  “So Marcel,” the cleric had that particular kind of beatific expression only available to the clergy; the one that said ‘I’m self-satisfied, and I am going to tell you why’. “Have you enjoyed your time with us?”

  Marcel started to speak, but it came out as a belch, tasting of sherry, amaretto, and pastis, none of which he had drunk, and a flavour not naturally occurring. Even in his state, Marcel perceived that Father Monreal’s voice had deepened, and he seemed to be afflicted with some respiratory issue that made his words come between rasping breaths.

  “Do you still bask in the sins of the flesh?” the priest rasped. Marcel shrugged. In truth he would like to, but opportunities were few and far between.

  “You could be like me. Confess, repent. You don’t have to let yourself be destroyed by the memory of your sins.” Marcel’s brow creased. He had no idea where this was going, but it really was time he went home.

  “You can work with me, Marcel. Together we could bring order to this Afterworld. If you only understood the power of good.”

  He needed the toilet. Where was it now? Marcel forced his face into a semblance of normality and stared at the animated figure before him, heard the grating breaths.

  “Did anyone tell you what happened to your father?”

  “There was some milksop who thought he was my father. Who knows, maybe she killed him? Enough were carried out on stretchers.”

  “No! look into your conscience, Marcel, and you will know.” The priest stared and put his hand on Marcel’s shoulder. “I am your father.”

  He felt a desperate dread sinking in his stomach, a dread of the thought and the possible truth. “It’s not true. It’s impossible!”

  “I was a young priest in your parish. My only sin was to be enticed by your mother, to know the flesh. Some months after, the local men confessed that they were consumed with sin of Onan, as she had eschewed the relief they were usually guaranteed, as she was with child. Search your heart, Marcel, you know it to be true.”

  Marcel suppressed further belches, staring at the squat, porky figure with the white collar as it continued to speak between gasping breaths.

  “Join me, Marcel. Together we can make the Afterlife a better place, as father and son.”

  He? The son of a priest? A fat, short priest?

  “Noooo!” He cried, sliding slowly to the floor.

  SOMETHING ABOUT MARY

  In the age of isolation, the conjoined person is king. Or queen. Mary, like many, watched it happen in life, this withdrawal from real interaction, characterised in the main by an increase in virtual interaction. She loved computers, always had. From the moment she first touched the chiclet keys of her father’s Radio Shack keyboard and watched its text unreel on the screen, green on black, she was hooked. What she had never done was to mistake it for life.

  Tall, dark, and pretty, her hair a challenge, bursting from restraint and grooming like a restless child, she turned heads. Serious and articulate, interested in the world and concerned with what it was becoming, she turned them back. Men who looked at her as she passed, offered her a drink, quailed and shrank when she dared to suggest that instead of football they might want to discuss the situation in Iraq, walked when she mentioned the earnings gap.

  “It’s just a conversation, love. I don’t want to know your life story.” You don’t? Then I don’t want to know any of yours.

  Was it this that made people retreat from the corporeal world into the virtual? How much easier to have those relationships on a screen than face to face, subject to the realities of stale breath, body odour, spinach in teeth.

  So the interaction increased, only very little of it took place outside cyberspace. Mary spent all day in front of screens and therefore was reluctant, at first, to turn on and tune in when she got back to her flat. Just another two dimensions, the same two dimensions, the same fizz of electrons across a bank of liquid crystals, and besides, there was another thing, a thing she would only come to learn rather than know from the beginning. Computers told the truth. There was nothing else they could do. People who used computers were not constrained by their construction, by laws of electronics.

  Dating. Computer dating, to be precise. The time Mary spent on her profile! Did she have a good sense of humour (GSOH)? Cue hours of viewing of the most popular comedies. Peep Show, League of Gentlemen, YES, but they’re wicked aren’t they? My Family, good grief. Classics! Three and a Half Men, The Simpsons. Moments, yes, but there wasn’t a meltdown going on in her living room. She settled on SOH. Let the respondents figure out if she merited a G.

  Non-smoker. Well yes, if you discount t
he time she left the miserable bloke she was with and shared a pack of Marlboro with a girl outside a party in Hampstead (North, not the posh bit). She started breathing normally on the Thursday after. In the pub after work sometimes she snagged a roll-up from one of the girls, spent ages sucking miserably on increasingly wet paper whilst spitting out tobacco. Dope? A few joints at University leading to days in darkened rooms staring at the door as though the Jabberwocky was going to come in at any minute and demand her dissertation. So, ok, non-smoker.

  What was she seeking? She read the pages of contact ads, in the Standard, The Independent, Cosmo (to get a good spread), and it was obvious that everyone was ‘seeking’. No-one was looking, hoping, dreaming. What did they advertise for in the Leicester Mercury? Desperately Seeking Sikh?

  She didn’t really like dogs, or animals as a (admittedly massive) grouping that much, so whilst she didn’t want to rule out people who did, she was loath to ‘seek’ someone for whom that was prime mover. Wandering around on a misty, moisty Sunday morning through some autumnal woods, waxed jacket, chunky boots and Arran mittens, arm in arm with a man as they talked about books or politics or the passion of the night before, as an energetic Springer burst unremarked back and forth between the trees, had a deep attraction, a pleasant spot in her imagination. Not so much, if the dog was the point, if the man dried its hair afterwards before hers, if he complained about her muddy bootprints but forgave the filthy paws. It didn’t take her long to notice that no-one said ‘loves people’.

  Older man or younger man? Everyone seemed to give such an enormous range. How could you be seeking someone 30-50? That, her logical mind told her, was a forty percent variation. Admittedly, at work she’d seen older people, hunched and slow-moving, wearing cardigans with football buttons and in summer nylon shirts with strings of pens in the pocket. Then at the Christmas party a song from after the millennium would come on and they would say ‘Oh, this was the first record I bought.’ Mary would look at the person cradling a plastic cup of weak punch and wonder what it was about ‘Who Let The Dogs Out’ that made them decide to enter the world of music appreciation. Could you stipulate a mental age? A behavioural one?

  She managed to cobble together a profile of herself vague enough to pique the imagination of virtually anyone, along with a pen picture of her target that she thought truly reflected the narrowness of her idealised picture of a future life partner. She couldn’t just put ‘bloke’. The restrictions she placed on prospective suitors proved unsatisfactory.

  “You’re black.” said her first date reprovingly. “You didn’t say that on your profile.”

  “Yours didn’t say white,” she replied, turning to leave. “or dickhead.”

  She excised the words ‘loves theatre’ after an excruciating day watching a marginally talented troupe take on Shakespeare’s comedies in sequence.

  “Moving, I thought.” said her companion. “They really got to the nub.” Feeling returned to her backside a week or so later, possibly provoked by the rapid exit she had to make when the next candidate revealed that what he and she thought of as ‘watersports’ were entirely different things, although the wet suit she had thought to bring with her would have proved efficacious for either.

  ‘Rambling in the countryside’ proved to be a thin man with a wispy beard and bottle specs talking incessantly about how Alpha Centaurians created crop circles as the blundered through saturated pasture. ‘Loves modern art’ led to an afternoon in a warehouse in Eaton Socon during which she was asked to roll naked in paint mixed with cookie dough and imprint herself on a massive canvas as her new best friend watched. She declined. It all declined.

  Towards the end, her list of preferences was barely worthy of the name ‘list’. It all but said, ‘bloke’. The last tryst was with a dumpy personage with spiky deep black hair and a straight moustache, with a voice of disconcerting gruffness, like a dog worrying a treat. Even from her angle, some distance above the shoulders of this candidate, she could see the fingers of a flame tattoo reaching from his collar towards his smooth neck and chin. However, for the first time, the conversation was moderately interesting (even if she did have to lean in very close to locate words in the basso grumbling), and there was no sexism, racism, or even general discontent in the opinions he expressed.

  They were walking back from the cinema, Bourne Ultimatum, popcorn and watery Pepsi-Cola, having been harboured by the darkened auditorium from the storm brewing outside. There was rain in the air but as yet none in actuality. The wind was beating, though, stirring up leaves and dust, discarded plastics which furled against the walls of buildings and rose in plumes before dying to the pavements and then gathering strength for further assaults. He, Paddy, reached up to link his arm in hers, an angle that was bound to cause some pain over time. His hair, gelled to within an inch of its life, stood firm, but some small way down the road, as she cocked her head in an attempt to discern what on earth he was gruffly saying, she saw that his other hand was reaching to the flapping edge of the straight black moustache, fluttering fingers finally locating the errant stripe and plastering it back onto the top lip. She pulled her arm away, stopped, and turned sharply to him.

  “What was that?” She said, her words clear even in the moan of the wind. At that moment the threatened rain arrived, and landed large and heavy upon their heads.

  “Let’s find some shelter.” Paddy grunted.

  “Let’s not.” She said, staring down at him. “What’s going on with that moustache?”

  “Movember?” The diminutive paramour suggested.

  In the thudding rain, black streaks were beginning to dribble down his forehead. He blinked as the first arrived in his eye. Mary reached out and stripped the moustache from his upper lip, eliciting a squeak, holding it up in the air where it waved madly in the wind. She looked down at the black-streaked face, shorn of its adornment, and had a sharp stab of realisation.

  “You’re a woman.”

  “Only in terms of gender.” The voice was higher now, and the lip previously host to the thing in her hand was now trembling slightly. The rain hammered onto them, the wind howling and sending the spatters of downpour against their faces.

  “That’s a pretty important term. Do you do this all the time?”

  “Wednesdays and Fridays.” Said Paddy.

  “It’s Thursday.”

  He/she shrugged.

  “I’m prepared to make exceptions.” There was no safety, even in a wanted profile that only said ‘bloke’.

  That was life. No justice in it, no logic. She was attractive, intelligent, on occasion interesting, although with a tendency to revert to her knowledge of computers when under pressure but she might as well have been a short overweight woman pretending to be a man twice a week for all the success she had with the opposite sex. Everyone who might have been interesting was at home pretending to be interesting on social media. Interacting more than ever, but so rarely face to face.

  Death, though, that was a different thing, and in that state she met someone who thought Facebook was the act of trapping someone’s head in a weighty tome as a precursor to enacting other and more varied punishments on other parts of their person. Her attraction to Marcel was entirely ridiculous, she knew, but when has that ever been a barrier to romance. The living world is littered with those who will never disavow their affection or love for entirely unsuitable recipients. He was by turn charming, dangerous, witty, rude, caring, and venal. A dangerous mix.

  Mary had subconsciously sworn that the hunt was over, that she would never again subject herself to the lottery of looking for love, certainly not through cyberspace. She was dead, after all. She didn’t even know whether sex, or even romantic love was possible.

  He was in one of those moods, the ones when it seems as if he believes that everything and everyone is against him, and that everyone is an idiot and everything is shit.

  “Look at this kettle! It’s disgusting. It’s full of- I don’t know- fur or something.”<
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  “That’s just the hard water, Marcel,” she tried to placate him, “It’s limescale. Happens everywhere.”

  “And cotton.” said Geoffrey, his eyes remaining firmly fixed upon an episode of 24. “Why does everything take so long in this? It feels like every hour is, well, an hour.”

  “Cotton?”

  “I think so, let me check.” Geoffrey removed his sandal and sock and turned the sock inside out to look for washing instructions.

  Mary stared at him.

  “Geoff. Have you been washing your socks in the kettle?” Her mouth was beginning to feel a little unpleasant.

  “Obviously. I only have a couple, and I can’t be bothered to go all the way to the washing machine. And we have to think of the environment. Quick wash, socks and soap.”

  “Soap?” Mary said.

  “Socks?” Marcel said.

  They exchanged a look. If it could have been any more than a look and had been capable of speech, it would have been a look that said that they had both been drinking tea made with water from that very kettle.

  “His daughter’s been kidnapped again.” Geoffrey said, staring at the screen. “She should be more careful.”

  Cups were thrown, feet stamped, walls punched.

  “Marcel, let’s just find a way to stop him doing it again.”

  Even as she said it, even as he held back his fist from the back of Geoffrey’s head, Mary knew that these were not words to throw balm on a wound. It was, she knew, probably really nothing to do with the sock-washing, it was just the anger he had. His eyes flashed darkly, curses rang from his mouth, his body filled with rage.

  “Mary, why don’t you just fuck off?” She did.

  And in death she happened upon a room with a sign that said ‘SPEED DATING. TODAY.” Who knows? This could be the answer.

  It was disconcerting, helping herself to tiny Danish pastries and weak coffee, to note the preponderance of wings amongst the assembled candidates. On shoulder blades, on heels, they flexed and fluttered for no apparent reason, like an inadvertent muscular twitch. There were a lot of beards, too; thin, defined ones, long curly ones, even some teased into pigtails for the occasion. And colours. Not just of clothing, but of skin, ranging from pallor almost translucent through ochre and terracotta, all shades of green to the odd purple. It was like a Star Trek Convention. Here they were, gods, nymphs, satyrs, spirits, handmaidens looking for love and prepared to spend two-minute sessions in rapid discovery to make it happen.