They diverged not at all on the importance of the Entertainment Complex. Holidays in British caravan or chalet parks weren’t just about discomfort, penetrating cold, and catering of prehistoric quality, there was a key role for professional entertainers whose sheer incompetence had brought them to this backwater. Guests should entirely shed their inhibitions and perform at the apogee of ineptitude in front of their fellow campers. It would be big, and it would be beautiful.
The decorator, René, arrived on the day the thirtieth of forty planned chalets was completed. There was a gentle rise on the land-side of what was rapidly becoming a ‘park’, and Ron had commandeered it for the site office (a 2-man tent with a table in it) and stuck on one side a sign announcing its importance. Alive, Ron had been an actuary. Day after day he would work on the life expectancy of people of a certain age, calculate the loss to the company their death would represent, and decide on an amount they should pay each month in order to leave something for their descendants. Then the company would double it and brazenly charge the customer the larger amount. He had worked out that, given his birthplace, date of birth, parentage, upbringing, diet and gender, he would most likely keel over at the age of 58. For him, it was the parentage that really told the tale. Three prior generations on his father’s side had suffered heart disease, and his mother’s line carried mitochondrial disease in their DNA, so if one didn’t get him, the other certainly would. The insurance company for which he worked refused to give him life cover, due to his ill-judged burst of honesty when filling in the application form. Ethel, who had cause to have a great deal of faith in Ron’s calculations, hadn’t a clue about all this but would have undoubtedly taken exception to it. Had he lived, he would have been 58 in a few months time.
He hadn’t wanted to be an actuary, even though he knew he was rather good at it. He had always wanted to be a foreman. He saw something deeply romantic in standing legs apart, arms akimbo, in a nylon shirt and clip-on tie, surveying the handiwork of grunting manual labourers. He would be able to walk to a trestle table, unroll some blueprint or other, pin the curling ends with a paperweight in the shape of a ram and a half-empty coffee cup, point to parts of the unfurled sheet and look up to the scene before him to check that the one matched the other. He had pondered taking up the smoking of a pipe to enhance the look of rumination. He would don the yellow hard hat, roll up his sleeves, and march onto the actual site, skipping lightly to avoid a fast-approaching wheelbarrow of slurry, laugh with the grafters at how often it seemed that he was narrowly missed by heavy objects dropped from the scaffolding above. Things would grow under his supervision, walls rise, timbers hoist and roofs be slotted into position. He would roll up the blueprint one last time, high five some of the builders and proclaim that he would not be able to join them at the pub because after this exhausting task he really should catch up on lost time with his beautiful wife.
Instead, he had calculated the likely dates of death for people he didn’t know. Now though, from his table on the gentle slope, he was able, as in his dreams, to gaze on the hive of activity before him. He looked at the young men struck down by new diseases, women plucked in childbirth, and people of all ages seen off by crushing, cutting, or falling, and wondered whether he had, in fact, got any of them right.
René was a little older than he had anticipated, a distinguished gentleman in a pair of striped cotton pyjamas. He was thin and his eyes were sunken and dark-ringed, sagging skin on his cheeks suggesting that he had once been fuller of face. He arrived, with further demonstration, were any needed, of the unpredictability of legacies carried beyond the grave. He pushed a trolley laden with tins of paint, bolts of cloth, brushes and knives, and was panting from exertion when he laid down the handles of his burden in front of Ron’s desk.
“Wheels!” Ron exclaimed. “Where did you get those?”
The old man glanced around at his trolley, and shrugged.
“Everything I have here I have through trade.” His accent was thick, French or something, “I paint, someone gives me more paint. I paint more and then I have too much paint to carry. So I paint and I am rewarded with the wheels. This is a good place to procure things if you have some little talent.”
“Well, you certainly must have been in demand. Whereabouts in France are you from?” Ron and Ethel had adventurously taken their holiday in Brittany once, but came home early, unable to cope with the wanton application of sauce to whatever they ate. Sauce, or at least, gravy, was for Sundays, and there was something wanton about its use during the week.
“Belgium, in fact.” Ron knew about Belgium, its unhealthy ubiquity of mayonnaise.
“Well, welcome René. Let me show you around.” They wandered around the noisy site, the completed chalets in something approaching rows. Guntrick and his fellow construction engineers tended to eschew disciplined adherence to the straight line if it unduly delayed the opportunity to bash something.
“It is very impressive.” said René, his face set unsmiling. “The slight offset of each habitation subtly captures our situation here. We have moved from one plane but not quite to the new one we dreamed we would inhabit. We stand a little to the side of regularity and order. It is there, we feel, within reach, but we cannot, alone, move it into line.” Ron looked at him, nodding inanely, and then back to the Visigoths heaving tin sheets onto the field.
“Yes.” he said. “That must be it. So, do you think you could decorate these? I was thinking cream and white stripes at the top and bottom, and a thick band across the middle in taupe. Or beige.”
René gave him a sharp glance.
“I see what you are thinking. Our imprisonment in this blank existence, with the suggestion that release is trapped here somehow, but that even when we meet it, it will be bland and colourless.”
“I just wanted them to look like caravans.”
“Let me paint one. That one, at the far end, so that I don’t impinge on the work of your people. I can see in my mind’s eye what can be done here. There is an energy that will help my work.”
“That’s a deal, then René. Would you like a cup of tea?”
“That would be lovely, thank you Ron. And then I shall begin. I am so excited. So many blank canvasses!”
“It’s tin, actually.”
“Very little, Ron, “said René Magritte, “is ever what it seems.”
6
The afterlife; the intended one, the one to which people go forever, not the one caused by the breakdown of The Afternet, which was just a simulacrum, was infinite in its complexity. All religions feature some idea of Heaven and Hell, but they certainly haven’t spent any time getting their collective story straight. The Buddhists see Heaven as a release from suffering, and then a rebirth; in fact several beliefs think plunging you back into the land of living is some kind of reward (strange, given that you are supposed to spend all of your current existence, with all of its pain and frustration, working towards the next one); Jehovah’s Witnesses only have room in Heaven for 144,000, with everyone else annihilated, which is bad news for number 144,001; the Mayans thought everyone was for the torment except sacrifices and women who die in childbirth, which seems an unfair limitation, and the Mormons have you getting a period of instruction in the spirit world which doesn’t sound like bliss to most people. It’s all a bit vague, but there’s a widespread adherence to the idea that the good transcend into a lot of laying around and listening to lift music.
There’s no real consensus regarding Hell, either. There’s a reasonable chance someone might consider that eternity in the company of 143,999 Jehovah’s Witnesses, always coming to your door and trying to get you to read The Watchtower, could come pretty close. The Aztecs posited an endless transition through fields of flesh-scraping knives, rivers of blood, and fearsome jaguars. Not Jaguars. Judaism gives you twelve months of shame, which seems relatively mild when making the mistake of being a Zoroastrian pitches you into purgation in molten metal.
The Afternet not only provi
ded judgement on an instantaneous basis, it allowed an infinite number of Heavens and Hells. The dead did not uniformly have to be punted over a river by some shadowy figure in rags in order to occupy the endless span of their death, because they all got the Heaven they dreamed of, or the Hell they deserved. In either case, if this involved the punting bit, then that was what occurred. Heaven could range from a never-ending tea shop in an Arcadian English village to driving around a race circuit in snarling Jaguars. Not jaguars. Hell could as easily be the unending filing of tax returns as it could be the receipt of inventive torture.
The Afternet ‘controllers’ played no part, made no intervention in the apportionment of eternities to individuals, and in fact, like the gods themselves, were specifically disbarred from visiting any of the environments in which those passing found themselves. In the case of the gods, or Satan’s followers, the logic of this restriction was only too understandable. You don’t either want to be under the hands of an expert masseuse in a never-ending health spa when a putrescent succubus pitches in for a bit of ethereal enforced sexual activity, or even bathing in super-heated ferrous metals as Neptune turns up to take the piss.
It’s forever, though, and given how little time it takes mortals to find their way around parking regulations, it was unlikely that the supernatural wouldn’t finesse a method of subverting generally understood rules. Deities major and minor routinely manufactured reasons for visiting Heavens, usually in the guise of ‘Fact-Finding Missions’, and found themselves consistently amazed at the breadth of imagination in the beings that inhabited the earth. Their desires proved to be endlessly nuanced and refined, their dreams and aspirations spread wondrously over a panoply of endgames.
Snooker halls, restaurants, pine-fringed lakes in which to swim or sail, gardens manicured and wild, buses, trains, theatres and opera. All abounded, each slightly different from the last. The lazy religious establishment offered clouds, the choir of angels, and some sugary drinks. When it came to understanding what Heaven might mean to a peasant scavenging for crust in 19th century Cairo or a rich kid going to build schools in modern-day Africa, they did not have a clue.
Somewhere in the middle of the rambling environment around which the waiting souls wandered, there were tunnels, in infinite numbers, providing rapid transit to the Heavens. In fact, Ron and the Visigoths had accidentally discovered them some time ago, and a batch of the Germans had spent a very pleasant day in one Heaven partaking of afternoon tea, but such was the scale of the Afterworld that they were never able, or likely, to find them again. On that occasion, Marcel and his co-workers moved swiftly to close the tunnels down and prevent a mass migration. Of course, they couldn’t have done that without knowing where the tunnels were, how to open them, and where they led. This wasn’t knowledge they ever really took the opportunity to exploit, but when, as Marcel had proclaimed, they wanted to get pissed, they knew just the tunnel to take.
Na Gopaleen’s was a two-storey building on the corner of a cobbled street. The brickwork on the ground floor had been painted black, as had the lower half of the enormous windows that ran along the two sides facing the street. The window was painted in a half moon, above which ‘BEST BEERS’ was picked out in large gold curlicued letters, and ‘SELECT SPIRITS’ along the other. A broad red band ran around the building above the windows, proclaiming the name of the establishment. A ledge ran around the building above this, hanging baskets cascading floral displays over and among the letters.
As they approached, a massive black door on the corner was flung open, letting a skirl of music into the street, the sound of loud conversation and singing. It also allowed the egress of a burly man with thinning hair, a skein of which hung down one side of his head. It appeared that his exit was not entirely voluntary, unless he had specifically requested a boot in the backside and the consequent headlong tumble onto the cobbles.
“Oh my God, is he alright?” Mary looked at the figure curled in the road, hand to her mouth.
“I bloody hope not, Mary.” said Marcel. “It wouldn’t be his Hell if he was, would it?” The curled figure slowly dragged himself onto hands and knees, watched by the foursome, who had involuntarily stopped to stare. His face was pockmarked, and there was a cut over one of his eyes. He groaned, and grabbed the shank of hair, pasting it back across the top of his head, then tenderly poked at his teeth as if to check that they were all present.
“Who the fuck are you?” He had a strange accent, harsh, as if it hurt his throat, perhaps causing the coughing fit into which he launched.
“I would say,” Marcel said, “your worst nightmare, but I guess you’re living that already, aren’t you?” With no warning, he kicked the man hard in the face, causing a shower of spittle and blood to explode onto the cobbles. Mary’s hand repeated the trip to her mouth.
“My God, Marcel, what are you doing?” She grabbed his arm and pulled him away as if he were about to repeat the treatment. The Frenchman shrugged.
“He’s in Hell, Mary! He’s supposed to suffer. Just thought I’d help. And work out some of my repressed anger at the same time.”
“When did you ever repress your anger?”
“I’m working on it.”
“Do we all get a go?” Justin looked anxious to join in the punishment.
“No we do not!” Mary reluctantly released Marcel and pushed Justin away from the hacking man on the floor. She figured that Marcel was beyond correction, but she didn’t need Justin to slide from simply being an egotistical, self-serving, nefarious, sly crook into one with an added violent streak. She knew that he certainly wouldn’t have wanted to join in had the potential target not been on the floor shaking and sniffing.
“We need to regain our focus.” They looked up with some surprise at Geoffrey, who spoke whilst trying to remove some chewing gum from one of his sandals. “Our objective is clear, and present.” He prodded a finger towards Na Gopaleens. “We have prepared well, and now we have to deliver.” Geoffrey had been watching a lot of The Apprentice recently, which he believed to be about providing worthwhile activities for the mentally challenged.
Inside, there was a festive air. The floor was stripped and scarred wood, sawdust strewn and scuffed across the timber. A massive corner bar was deep in customers, sparkling drinks glasses hanging from the timber frame above it, and a line of pints of Guinness in various states of completion stood on the polished mahogany. There were mirrors on the walls behind the bar, faux antique, etched with slogans for tobacco and alcohol. A shelf was laden with an extraordinary selection of whiskies and whiskeys; optics hung glittering liquids. There was loud twiddly-dee music, originating from a band in the corner; a fiddle, guitar, Irish harp, bodhran and bombarde. The song in play was something about a girl from Eniskillen way, who apparently was not only willing, but happy for her man to go poaching whenever he so desired.
“I don’t get it.” said Justin. “What is this?”
“It’s a Heaven.” Marcel said. “And on a lesser scale, a Hell.” They shouldered their way past tall fair-haired people, others more squat and powerful, skin almost blue-black. There were people with Slavic features, a large number of Japanese. The conversations in their ears were Babelesque, the tongues of Scandinavia, the Far East, Africa.
“It’s an Irish Pub?” Mary asked Marcel as Geoffrey ordered drinks. He nodded. “but this is full of Swedes, Japanese, Americans, isn’t it?”
“Of course it is. They all love an Irish pub.”
“But where are the Irish?”
“Are you mad? They’ve got their own, proper Irish pubs. You don’t think it would be Heaven for the Irish to have to share the space with this shower, do you?”
“Why didn’t we go to one of those, then? This is all a bit…fake?”
“It would ruin it for them, wouldn’t it?” He sipped the creamy top of the Guinness Geoffrey had passed back, winced. “We aren’t here to get noticed, just drunk. Like most of these folks, I guess.”
They found a tabl
e in the corner, vacated by some very heavy drinkers. Drained glasses covered the surface, nuts scattered between them. A miserable-faced young woman came and cleared the glasses, cleaned the wooden surface until it gleamed. Mary realized that this girl was paying, eternally, for some misbehaviour.
“I thought we didn’t have any money?” said Justin, taking the top off a pint.
“Don’t need it,” said Geoffrey, who had a large single malt with orange juice, “wouldn’t be Heaven, would it?”
“Oh, right. Lucky we got a table, though. It’s rammed in here.” Marcel looked at him, with some justification, as if he were a complete idiot.
“Everybody gets a table if they want one, Justin. I know it’s hard for you to think in any constructive way, let alone put yourself in the shoes of someone who has visualized their Heaven as an Irish pub, but if this is where you are going to spend forever, you don’t want to spend that forever waiting for somewhere to sit, do you?”
“Ok, but how come there are all these people who died quite recently? How come there are Musketeers wandering around the Afterworld but there are Danes in here with mobile phones?”
“I’ve got that one, Justin,” Mary put down her Guinness on the newly gleaming table, “When The Afternet started up again, it did all the easy stuff first, babies to Heaven, Nazis to Hell, and so on, but then I went in and tried to change it so that it did the longest occupants first, but I made a couple of errors in the code, and it started to work alphabetically, which for some reason is the default setting. “I’m willing to bet that lot over there, “she pointed to a group of laughing, pale-skinned Scandinavians, “are called Andersson or something like it. I managed to go back in and correct it, but remember what we’re talking about here, in terms of backlog. It hasn’t even done all the babies. Or Nazis, come to that.” There was a shout and the sound of feet thudding on the wooden floor as the man from the street was once more violently ejected, doomed to spit his teeth onto the cobbles time after time after time.
The Complete Afternet: All 3 Volumes In One Place (The Afternet) Page 66
