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

by Peter Empringham

“Why? Why do I have to go to my room?”

  “Language.” She said.

  His room was dark, lit only by the candle his parents had given him and the two he had stolen from the basement. Malcolm sat on the edge of his truckle bed and sighed. They just didn’t understand. You shouldn’t be able to force your kids into something just because it was what everyone in the family, back until year dot, had done. He had every right to try to branch out, be something in the world, leave reaping, grim or otherwise to those who found contract killing to their taste.

  He pondered going out. Some of the lads had talked about maybe meeting up in the park and moaning about parents and doing wheelies on their BMXs. He stood and stared into his wardrobe. Eight hooded gowns, deepest black. When he threw the door open it all but sucked the light from the room. He would have to stop his mother buying his clothes. Two for the price of one at Diemark.

  Malcolm reached under the bed for his secret box, pushing aside a large number of tissues in order to remove it, then sat on the bed with the box in his lap. He had been careful, in case someone should find it, perhaps while engaged in the weekly routine of pushing dust and dirt under the nearest surface. The pictures he had on the top were designed to defray any thought that he might be contemplating any deviation from the bloodline.

  Klaus Kinski as Nosferatu. Good shot, even as an obfuscation. Tremendous pallour in the face, splendid black rings below the eyes, and even his mother would have spent time at the nail parlour Klaus frequented. The Reaper in The Meaning Of Life; even though these pages were to disguise the true yearning his secret box represented, he loved this one.

  “Have you ever had to say ‘salmon mousse’?” he had asked his father, hoping against hope that dad had stretched out a bony finger to some pretentious twat.

  “I don’t say anything. I just loom.” His father replied. “I’m a minimalist.”

  And then Bengt Ekerot in The Seventh Seal, playing chess with Max Von Sydow. Behind them was a cloudy sky of blacks and greys, the mood inconceivably dark. His father didn’t play chess, only Cluedo, and he couldn’t imagine leaving the fate of someone in the hands of Reverend Green. Somehow it wouldn’t have the same sense of jeopardy.

  Underneath these, however (and judging from the tissue build up this insurance was probably unnecessary), were the pictures he really wanted to see. People whose faces weren’t ghostly white, who did not hide themselves in the shadow of black cowls.

  They were culled, these pictures, from the limited range of publications available here; periodicals that dealt with death in all its forms, and filled with articles offering to solve all of the problems a Reaper could possibly face. Private Die; New Scythesman; Snuffington Post; Rolling Gravestone. The text was one thing. Endless diets promising to stop that cloak from filling out and allowing it to swing freely. Exercise regimes that promised ‘SCYTHESWIPED! HOW TO GET BICEPS THAT REALLY RIP!”, or “ABSolutely Terminal! Flat stomach, Flat Out!” Malcolm was more interested in pictures of people who weren’t Death, who somehow symbolised life.

  Audrey Hepburn; a cut-out from Roman Holiday, rosy cheeked and doe-eyed, carefully snipped from an article about the difficulty of drowning subjects in fountains. Sigourney Weaver looking unspeakably hot in Ghostbusters similarly excised from a piece that asked whether demonic intervention was a valid substitute for personal (ie Reaper) execution. Marilyn Monroe in that dress in Some Like It Hot, which they had strangely used to illustrate the dangers of not wrapping up warm, but really was just a chance to show Marilyn in that dress. And then reams of Björk. His red-veined eyes had spent a lot of time looking at Björk.

  He had finally broached it. The elephant in the room, the pachyderm that actually only he knew was there. They were gathered around the table in the sitting room, the mis-shapen and previously melted chocolates spread before them, moving the pieces around the board and asking question to establish the guilt of Miss Scarlett or Professor Plum. Malcolm stood in the doorway and took a deep breath.

  “I’m not going to be a Reaper.” he blurted.

  He was hyperventilating, he knew, the palms of his hands, in the folds of the cloak, moistening. His father finished chewing a caramel, teasing the last globs of goo from between his shining teeth.

  His mother shrank into her filthy weeds, dreading what was to come. Velvet laughed at first, then shrank back into her chair, gathering her wings around her.

  “So.” His father swallowed, the large adam’s apple rising and falling as the caramel slipped down.

  “So. What is it you think you might do, then?” Malcolm managed to hold the stare back to his father, showing a confidence he certainly didn’t feel.

  “I want to do something that means something to people.”

  “Death means something to people, Malcolm. That’s the point. It’s up to us to make it memorable. What were you thinking of?”

  “I thought social work. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy.”

  His father sucked his teeth as though there might be some sweetness still to be found, and Malcolm noticed that although Velvet seemed to have puffed out her crop, his mother was shrinking.

  “WHAT” his father rumbled, “DO YOU THINK WE DO?”

  “Oh, Colin, don’t get too upset with the lad.” His mother had retreated so far into her grubby weeds she could have been a charity box.

  “I’ll deal with this, Maureen.” He said. Malcolm concentrated on maintaining a firm face. Velvet looked simply enthralled.

  “Social work?” He said the word ‘social’ as if it involved scraping something off a shoe. “I’ll give you social work. Everything we do, and I mean everything, is for society. We slough off the dry skin, carve out the cankers, pile up the dead wood. Social work? Don’t give me social work.” Malcolm thought it would be the last thing he would have given him.

  “And Cognitive Behaviour? Where do I start?”

  “Don’t.” Malcolm stared at him. There were very few shades in the face of a Reaper, but this would have been red if that shade had been in there.

  His father licked a sheen of spittle from his lips.

  “Don’t start. It’s not for everyone you know, reaping. I’m nearly fifteen. I think you should give me the chance to create my own future.”

  “Your future?” His father raised a deathly finger and pointed. “ Your future is reaping, sonny, and don’t you forget it.”

  “That’s not fair! I’ve got so much to give!”

  “Bollocks!”

  “Language.”

  The knock upon his door was almost imperceptible, but it seemed as if the whole house was in silence and so it came to him. He sat on the edge of his bed, determined not to move, but when it came again he knew he had no option. It was Velvet. She was nervous, he could tell, rocking from claw to claw, her face downcast.

  “What do you want?”

  She stared at him. Her face was lovely, even to a brother. If she hadn’t been mainly avian she would have turned heads.

  He threw the door open in a reluctant invitation, and she pattered her way across the straw rug, turning to look at him.

  “Sit down.” He said.

  “I can’t.” Harpy. He looked hopelessly around for a perch.

  “Well, what is it? Have they sent you to tell me who had the lead pipe in the library?”

  “No, nothing like that. Look, I know I’m horrible to you most of the time, but I can’t help it. It’s my nature. I know how you feel, though. Can you imagine being me for your whole life? I never know whether to go for a bit of a fly or put some make-up on.” He didn’t respond. He had enough on his plate without being drawn into shows of sympathy for his horrible sister. ”Why do you want to be something you’re not?” she asked, “Why can’t you just accept that you’re a Grim Reaper and get on with it?”

  “It’s not fair, that’s why. There’s so much more to life than just wandering round in a cloak scaring people to death.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, I dunno. Travel.�
��

  “There’s loads of travel. Dad was in Colombia at lunchtime.” True, he thought.

  “Girls. What about that? Maybe I want some romance, not to have the only time I see a woman to be as I dispatch her to whatever awaits.”

  “Girls?” she squawked, incredulous. “Take a look in the mirror, brother. Why do you think Dad married mum?”

  “Love?”

  “Lack of options. I mean she’s well-meaning, and cooks a reasonable vole, but she’s no oil painting, is she. Unless she’s a Bruegel.”

  “I’m not like that. I haven’t actually met any yet, and I might be a bit shy at first, but I’m sure I could be attractive to the right person.”

  “Oh yeah. Everyone wants someone tall, pale and terminal. I’m a girl, well, partly, and believe me if I was in the market for a young man I’d want something a little less…monochrome.”

  Malcolm slumped on his bed, hung his head to stare at the folds of his cloak over his knees. Just what he needed. His father savages his dreams of providing useful services to the world, and his horrible feathered sister destroys whatever fragile confidence a teenager might have in his attractiveness to the opposite sex.

  “Sorry.” She said.

  “What?”

  “Just pooped on your floor. A bit. “

  He looked up at her and realised that perhaps his fate wasn’t so terrible. At least he didn’t moult. He stood and walked to the mirror, pulled himself up to full, and not inconsiderable height, smoothed the black fabric around the side of his face.

  “See?” she said. “Not that great, is it? Just face it Malcolm, you’re a reaper; you’ll reap. Some poor woman may find herself so desperate she’ll agree to spend some time with you, but it won’t be your Audrey Hepburn or Marilyn Monroe.”

  His eyes flickered to the darkness under the bed.

  “Oh yes, I know about your little treasure box. You must have a terrible cold, by the way; you should see someone or it’ll be the death of you.”

  “God, you’re nasty.”

  “It’s my role. I’m a harpy. You’re a reaper. Get over it.”

  He felt his lower lip begin to tremble and concentrated hard to avoid tears. He couldn’t let he see how good she was at this role she was born into.

  “And another thing.” She turned at the door, one wing casually stretched up the frame. “My guess is that you’ll be shit at it.” How right she would be.

  1000 YEARS OF SOLITUDE

  The world was a closed place, when Geoffrey died. The things we know, the things a peasant in the 7th century knew were witchcraft, but then a high proportion of the few things they knew even then were witchcraft, too. It was no particular issue to them, though, because of course the things you don’t know are entirely irrelevant to the way you live your life.

  It may be, now, that the secret to eternal life is only a scalpel’s width away, in the gut of a mackerel, the gill of a coelacanth, deep in the straw of an elephant’s dung. Of course, we don’t entirely know where to look, and we certainly don’t know what we are looking for, but isn’t there another dimension, that perhaps we are afraid that we will find the answer? The problem we have now, of being able to fix symptoms but not cure diseases, of sentencing older people to stretched out, miserable, almost health, of how to hide our old people away from the eyes of their family and friends so that we can be outraged when they aren’t treated with ‘respect’ wasn’t a concept in the heads of those blundering through life in 650 AD.

  Survival. The population of the entire world was around the same as present day Brazil. Britain (not that there was a Britain) was Trinidad and Tobago. Cumbria, the massive, sparsely occupied region in which Geoffrey lived, had around the same number of people as a rubbish attendance to watch Manchester United, most of them having about as good a time. It was bleak, not that anyone there knew that. They’d never been anywhere else. For all they knew, it was grey, cold and windy in Trinidad and Tobago.

  Geoffrey’s strange death, documented elsewhere, wasn’t particularly precipitate. It would have happened soon anyway, even had he somehow contrived to not die with his dick in a pond. Naturally he looked much older than his years; thirty was big deal where he lived, and may well have justified a telegram from the Queen. If they had a Queen. Or telegrams. The fact that he was outliving most of the unfortunates in his village was written all over his face, and basically wishing him good day was wondering how many more times he might have to do so and coveting his adze.

  Heaven, then, having tucked his frozen member back into his filthy garments, didn’t differ massively from his life, not because of a paucity of imagination but rather because of the limited possibilities of imagination. Had Geoffrey been wandering around as a root vegetable farmer in the twentieth century, he would have had a veritable cornucopia of visions into his possible paradise. He would have seen the lives of others, on yachts in the Mediterranean, quaffing champagne, disembarking only in order to pilot a Ferrari in the company of a willowy blonde. He would know that some people lived a life of such luxury that they wore a pair of shoes once, hopped from Jamaica to Jacuzzi to Jazz festival in limousines, left more incredible food on their plates than the rest of the world bought in a week. In his lifetime, the very rich simply had shoes, had a fire, had food.

  He would have seen that others gained their karma from helping others. They took their medical skills to war zones and patched up the victims; they treated sufferers from Ebola, from AIDS, from malaria. They laboured in fly-ridden fields to build schools, dug wells, delivered food to the starving. In his life, he may well have helped those less fortunate than himself had their been anyone, or been helped by those more fortunate, had their been any. Life was just life, the struggle to survive, and it was entirely rational that, had he any time to think about what paradise might be like, he would have thought something like this, only less shit.

  So, in the absence of any other ideas, Geoffrey’s eternity was a farm, like his farm only with fertile ground; a house like his house only without the draughts and leaks; a world like his world only without the bitter cold and biting winds, and people who didn’t either cough up their lungs on you or hope you coughed yours up on them so that they could have your tools. Or wife. Or both.

  You could, possibly have blamed the organisers, if you thought they had any idea what was to come in the real world. Could they have offered something to make life a little more varied, more interesting? Maybe even an Atari? That would have been worth it just so that the Gods, in their felicitousness, would have had the chance to have a look at what a bunch of potato farmers made of Pong.

  There was a time, a couple of centuries in, when Geoffrey began to wonder whether it hadn’t actually been the hardship, the challenge, the constant battle against the elements and physical exhaustion that had made the whole thing worthwhile. He was uneducated and prone to bouts of idiocy, but he wasn’t without a semblance of rational thought. He spent a year sitting in a chair gazing at his plot as the few others who were unlucky enough to have had the same dream toiled and tilled, weeded and watered. He didn’t actually do anything as he sat, gazing out over the plot as it began to show shoots, then push further towards the sky, and ultimately provide a range of splendid vegetables.

  He could have done some things, of course. He could have read a book, but for the fact that he couldn’t read, and there were no books. He could have spent the time in supplication to Gods, but even he knew he was dead, and so there was little to be gained from further adulation of the spirits of wind, rain, and earth. His crop arrived immaculately even without seed. The rows were straight, the tubers full and flavoursome, carrots orange and sweet, turnips round with a purple halo, swedes massive and nutritious.

  It didn’t go unnoticed. The few fellow travellers in this Heaven, who laboured throughout Geoffrey’s sabbatical, were less than ecstatic at harvest time when not only was his crop as fulsome as the one over which they had sweated, his vegetables took it upon themselves to leap from t
he earth into the raffia baskets he placed around the perimeter of his allotment. It’s one thing to be bent double, your back aching and knees locked, yanking on a deeply rooted turnip, it’s another entirely if you have to do it with assorted brassicas launching from the soil like Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles and flying past your ears in order to land unerringly in some lazy bastard’s basket.

  The heaven evolved, not unnaturally, such that the occupants, instead of labouring intensively to make things grow, sat around and watched things grow. Sources of entertainment were rare, largely based around watching the dedication of new arrivals to the hard graft of agriculture.

  One of the men there, from Wessex or somewhere similarly effete to the hard-bitten northerners who dominated the population, invented a game called Root Vegetable Chess. It involved a ‘board’ scraped into vacant soil, with sixty four squares. The two competitors each had sixteen pieces (two turnips, two swedes, two carrots, a parsnip and a celeriac, plus eight radishes), and the southerner defined bizarre ways in which these pieces could move. A swede, for example, could only move diagonally, and a turnip in straight lines (obviously). They only played it once. After several turns it became apparent that one turnip looks very much like another, whilst the middle of the court was a veritable salad of radishes. Briefly inspired by the thought of happy hours of competition, they abandoned the site to the weeds, although not before Prthivi, the Hindu avatar and earth god, who happened to be passing by looking for some okra for a curry, watched them playing and spoke of it to Krishna upon her return. Krishna mentioned it to Saraswati, goddess of knowledge (who much later would offer redundancy to St Peter), and she in turn told the story as a joke to a woodworker in Rangoon, when she visited as part of her portfolio for the arts. He was uneducated but no fool, and saw that the solution to the problem was to differentiate the pieces by using different woods, which is how the first chess set, comprising turnips, swedes and so on carved out of on the one hand sheesham wood and on the other much paler ivory, came to be used in 7th century India.