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

by Peter Empringham

  Ethel had to listen hard to get the drift of his accent and vernacular. She leaned forward, nodding to him to go on.

  “We got into trouble with some Indians.”

  “Do you mean Injuns?” she said, being more familiar with the vernacular version of the word from a diet of Audie Murphy films.

  “No. Ah mean Indians. They wuz from Punjab or some such like, headin’ west to open a pickle factory. Near the whole wagon train wuz wiped out by whutever they got from the food they made us. Plumb tore their insides out. Me ‘n’ Keziah wuz the only one spared from having that on account of we didn’t have nuthin’ to do with the food. Didn’t like the smell. Cardy Mam or some such.”

  “Heavens, so you were left on your own? Little children?”

  “Yes’m. Though I wuz twelve or so an’ nearly a man, I guess. Anyway, we walked for a day or so and then we wuz ambushed by Injuns.”

  “Indians,? Heavens, I didn’t know there were so many in the Wild West.”

  “No, ma’am. This was Injuns, right enough. Blackfoot or some such. They took Keziah, and left me for dead. Took my hair right off my head.” She glanced involuntarily at his head, which bore a luxuriant growth of wavy red hair.

  “It growed back,” he said, noting her glance, “but this colour, casting me into a minority discriminated against throughout history. Jus’ bad luck, ah guess. Anyways.” He sighed and shrugged his shoulders. “Ah walked fer days across the plains and wound up in the hills of California just as everyone was arrivin’ lookin’ fer gold. I worked in a livery ‘til ah had enough money to buy mah own claim and spent the days panning for gold in the river up above Sutter’s Mill. I got a lotta dust and the guys on either side of me struck it rich. When ah couldn’t afford to eat no more ah had to move on. I sold the claim for a few bucks. Heard the fella who took it over scored the motherlode two weeks later.”

  “Oh, how awful!” Ethel said.

  “Them’s the breaks. Ah moved around for a while pickin’ up work here and there, then ah got mahself a plot of land in Montana. Beautiful. Hills all around, the soil was rich, crops wuz growin’ themselves.”

  “Oh well, that’s good. I’m pleased it all ended well.”

  “Well, it ended. Couldn’t figure out what all the noise an’ whoopin’ was one mornin’, ‘til ah pulled on mah breeches and walked on the porch. There wuz an arrow stickin’ out o’ the sign I made. ‘Little Big Horn Homestead’ it said. Went up in smoke like the Seventh Cavalry. Got scalped again. Had a hope that maybe I would get another colour of hair, but it didn’t turn out that way. Ah managed to escape, though, which is more than you kin say fer them other blue devils. Ah’d had enough by now of all that heat, and the attacks on mah hair an’ such, so I headed back east. Wound up in Utica, New York. Ah never seen so many people. Opened up a store sellin’ evrythin’ at ten cents. Seemed like a really good idea to me.”

  “Oh good, so you have relevant retail experience.” Ethel smiled, wondering when the story would end.

  “Not much, truth be told. Guy named Woolworth opened up right next door, sellin’ everything at 5 cents. Ah wuz outta business in days. Ah’m ashamed to say ma’am I went out an’ got blind drunk, with another fella ah just kinda bumped into. There was carney in town and the place was hoppin’. Me ‘n’ him really tied one on.” He heaved an enormous sigh and his hand feathered towards the knife in his neck. “That’s how ah got this.”

  “Heavens! What, did you get into a fight?”

  “No ma’am. I was walkin’ behind a kinda big wooden wheel thing when this came flyin’ past and stuck me right in the neck. Turns out the guy ah wuz drinkin’ with wuz the knife-thrower. He was so drunk he couldn’t a hit a barn door. Ah wuz leanin’ on one, in fact. Jus’ bled out.”

  Ethel had her hands to her face in horror; she had never become attuned to the endless tales of the extraordinary ways in which people met their ends. For all of those who simply died of old age, or cancer, or TB, or a host of other illnesses, there were those who were impaled on shards of frozen urine dropped by passenger aircraft (a disconcerting adornment with which to be encumbered as you waited for judgement) or who had for some reason decided to take a bath while using household electrical appliances ranging from one-bar fires to ice cream makers. She turned and looked briefly at the expanding park, where some of the other applicants, many of whom had long and successful track records in the supply of essential provisions to the masses, still loitered, awaiting her decision. She looked back to the young man opposite, his shock of red hair counterpointing the shock of the knife in his throat.

  And that’s how the general store on the holiday camp became known as Lucky Pete’s.

  It quite possibly never occurred to Ron (although for sure it would have occurred to Justin) that he could turn this dream into a commercial operation. As far as Ron was concerned, everything he did was all about finding a productive way to pass time, and if the time was passed in pursuit of something of a dream then all the better. That caused a problem all of its own, because of course in life the whole point of holiday camps was that people paid to go there as a respite from the drudgery of their everyday working lives. This was a place where they could shed inhibitions, do nothing or do everything, eat, drink and get very wet indeed.

  Here, at what was now EVERLAND they were being forced to face up to the reality that firstly nobody worked, therefore having nothing from which to take a vacation, and secondly that there was no booking system through which people could reserve their places, should they want them. And they wanted them. Difference in itself is a major boon for those trapped in a never-ending rotation of sameness. On one of his rare excursions away from his rolls of paper and hard hat, Ron wandered beyond the fence constructed around the chalet park.

  “Oh Ron, for heaven’s sake get away from it for a while.” Ethel was being driven mad by his constant attention to the tiniest detail. “Go for a walk. Join a gym.”

  “Is there a gym? Oh no!” He unravelled a sheet of paper, looked at it as though it would reveal the location of the Ark of The Last Covenant. It was in fact a drawing of the proposed toilet blocks. “We need a gym, Ethel. Everyone’s into that, now aren’t they? Pumping hot pedals and butting their ass, or something?”

  She placed a gentle hand upon his forearm, which had never been in proximity to a barbell of any kind.

  “Love, they might be into that now; our now. Maybe even more so, now, the real now. But it never occurred to most of the people here that it might be a good idea to go in out of the sunshine and the green grass and then when you were really hot, lift some metal bars. They worked. They hit things and melted things, they walked miles to do what they did. They inhaled fibres, stood in front of molten metal, they crouched, miles under the earth, for hours and hours and hit the inside of the world with pathetic little tools. They don’t want a blooming gym.”

  He looked at her, her face was set with an anger he rarely saw, and he knew that she was absolutely in earnest.

  “You’re too close to it, Ron. Go away.”

  His eyes watered. Was this it? He subconsciously stroked the leatherette on the A40 steering wheel sitting proud of his chest.

  “I mean just go and be away from here for a while. You’re fired in on it. It’s all you think about. You roll the papers, you unroll the papers, you point, you shout. Just take a break and leave it to other people for a while.” She looked at him, so desperately hoping that she hadn’t struck something inside, that he would see that he was in the grip of an obsession.

  “What happened with the awning Lucky Obie was putting up in front of the shop?” he asked grumpily, moving the drawings into a pile on the desk.

  “It fell on him.” she said. “Woodworm”

  “So for some reason we’re all here wandering around for years or decades or centuries and whoever or whatever decided we would have woodworm?”

  “I think they maybe decided we would have wood. Then it probably comes with the territory.”

&
nbsp; “I think,” he rolled his shoulders back and took a theatrical deep breath, “I should go for a walk. Just take a break, you know.”

  “Are you sure you can be spared, dear?” Ethel said as she ushered him out of the door.

  It was on the walk that he found out that the demand for accommodation at Everland might just exceed the capacity, and in reality (or whatever this may be), it was easy to understand.

  He didn’t go far, happy to accept the idea that a break may be good for him, but at the same time seriously worried that something critical may occur in his absence. He couldn’t put his finger on what on earth that might be, but he knew that in a land that defied logic it could come from any direction. Meandering around the perimeter he took in a phenomenon he had seen before; the gradual coagulation of souls when anything that might be an ‘event’ started to occur. Deadstock, the Afterworld Cup, had attracted millions, who heard from someone who heard from someone that something was going on. They trudged along until the stream of people became fulgent and then they all marched together and set up their camps and created community. On the obverse, people bent on violence and ill-deeds had their own hot-spots, such as Devil’s Docks, and a place he had only heard about somewhere in the east, called Slough.

  Outside the fence there were hundreds of people. They were camped along the riverbank, up on the hill opposite; at the far end of the camp they spread into the trees. They had stretched awnings from tree to tree, pitched tents, arched saplings to support coverings of leaves and moss. They had heat, and light, and water from the stream. Enough of them were from an era where that was enough to create a home to carry the more effete modern dead with them. He saw a man in a pinstripe suit sitting cross-legged in front of a tureen above an open fire, tasting the mixture within and tossing in some herbs. Around him were a band of children, none above ten years old; they wore only skins around their waists, they were swarthy, their hair black and shiny and around their necks were bands of beads. The man scolded if they came too close to the heated pot. Ron didn’t even ask about how they came to be together. Any logic about groupings of people that may have applied in any previous existence was of no relevance whatsoever here.

  But as he talked to people he found that they were all waiting for the chance to spend some time inside the chalet park.

  “But you’re here. And the camp’s there. “

  “I know. Can’t wait. How do we apply, do you know?”

  “But it’s five yards.”

  “I know. So close. Looks great, doesn’t it? What do you think it will be?”

  Disappointing, he thought appreciatively, like all holiday camps he had ever visited.

  They were sitting on the deck when Chippendale emerged from the building to proclaim that all was ready. It was the last thing to be finished, and there had been a mounting, if suppressed, sense of impatience amongst all of the others involved in construction of Everland. Guntrick and his men at one point descended to basically chopping stuff down for the sake of it until Ethel set them to digging out a pool, which they lined with what was left of the thick plastic sheeting. They formed a chain through the woods to the distant water and ferried innumerable buckets until the new facility was complete. In the interests of differentiating the pool from a morass of sludge she persuaded them to plunge into the sea to wash off the grime accumulated through the weeks of their efforts.

  Which was, she realised when she saw Thomas emerge from the Entertainment Centre, exactly what she would have to do with him.

  The Visigoths almost ran in fear. The door creaked slowly open and a haze billowed from the opening, and then Chippendale edged into view, his form becoming slowly clear, as if he were part of the whitened air. He was covered from head to foot in dust, wood shavings, slivers of pine, and blotched with the homemade stain. His hair stood madly on end, and he appeared for all the world like a wraith floating from the underworld.

  “Strictly speaking,” said Ron, “you should be wearing a mask in there for Health and Safety reasons.” Chippendale doubled up, hacking and coughing into the dust issuing from the doorway.

  “Bit late for that, Ron, in more ways than one.” He managed to gasp in some clean air. “It’s finished. But you might want to let the air clear a bit.”

  Chippendale’s helpers emerged in a slow and steady stream, similarly covered in the debris their work had created, but laughing and proudly clapping each other around the shoulders and back, cheered by their achievement. The last few emerged in reverse, sweeping mounds of shavings and dust out onto the deck, where they brushed it into piles, leaning on their brooms, white, like zombie cleaners.

  Thomas was seated with Ron and Ethel, drinking a glass of Goodtime’s beer, his eyes weeping from the dust.

  “I’d give it a few minutes to clear, if I were you. It all got a bit frantic in the end in there. Oh, and the stain’s still wet, so don’t lean on anything.”

  When they finally went in, Ethel first, then Ron alongside Thomas, they stood in silence and surveyed what he had created. Even though the room had been swept, the shafts of light coming through the semi-transparent plastic at the windows illuminated the dust floating in the haze.

  The bar was on the left of the room, curved elegantly like the f-hole in a violin, its top in thicker wood with an extravagant roll facing the room. It was stained caramel colours, and its wave-like face was etched with curlicues and marquetry diamonds, hearts, spades and clubs. These figures were large towards the far end and as the pattern repeated became smaller, leaving a larger area of untouched wood until at the nearer end they cascaded towards the bottom of the construction as though falling headlong into the floor.

  “Well?” asked Thomas, scruffing up his hair and sending more detritus into the clearly defined shafts of light.

  “It’s…it’s just amazing.” Ron felt the moistness in the rims of his eyes as he stared at something he would not have believed could be created in this place. Everything they had made had made him proud; the ability of everyone to cobble together functional items out of basic constituents was a source of huge satisfaction. The furniture outside was unique; or at least every piece was. The tables odd-shaped, bound or nailed together; the seats were of different heights and sizes, varying degrees of slope and height. But this? This was art.

  “Can I really not touch it?” asked Ethel, who was gazing at the smooth and perfect curves of the construction.

  “Not yet.” Thomas said. “Tomorrow.”

  They heard the sound of shuffling feet behind them, turned to see Guntrick and the other Visigoths and then Goodtime, Lucky Obie, and the others who were making the chalet park a reality. They all gazed at the bar, slack-jawed, as though a massive ship was hoving into view.

  “Do you like it?” asked Thomas, eventually. Without a word, Ron turned to him and gave him a massive hug. This was not a gesture common to the wealthy artisan class of 18th century London; nor, to be truthful, the lower middle class of the twentieth. Thomas accepted the gesture, arms outspread so as not to give anyone the impression that it might be anything than a physical demonstration of gratitude. For all that he had demanded, in order to heighten his own memory of holiday camps, shoddy workmanship and a lackadaisical approach to finish, Ron knew something special when he saw it, such as the hood mechanism on a Triumph Vitesse.

  René gently shouldered his way through the crowd, and gave a low whistle. The youthful crew who had been assisting him in his own part of the development followed him as if joined by slightly differing lengths of string. The Belgian, strangely, was wearing a baseball cap sideways on his head, trousers at half mast, the gusset large enough to have given impetus to a decent sized yacht, and spoke whilst performing some kind of downward bull-horns gesture with the outside fingers of his right hand. Ron didn’t notice.

  “Sacre bleu, Monsieur Thomas, you have done something magnificent here. This would make Gaudi proud.”

  “Whodie?” asked Chippendale.

  “You must meet him. I
am sure he is here” he waved an arm expansively, “somewhere. It is marvellous.”

  “Thank you” said Thomas, shaking the Belgian’s hand. “I quite like your disappearing chalet, too.”

  “How do you like the work of my team Ron? Ethel?” asked Magritte.

  The group turned as one from the magnificent craftsmanship of Chippendale’s woodworks to the huge opposite wall of the building. It had been painted in the main a pale grey, although when they looked closely they could see thinly coloured blots and splotches scattered around the background. In the central portion was a huge stencil in black and dark greys of the figure of Urizen as depicted in Blake’s Ancient of Days, the sun and its halo behind him monotone, the corona beneath shards of greys, stencilled. His hair and beard blew to the side, like the original, his muscular arm reached down, but instead of holding a massive mathematical compass, the fingers clutched cloth, as if he were pulling up the centre of an enormous blind, which then fell in creases towards the corners of the wall. In the space where the blind was raised, ghostly figures were staring from the blackness beyond, the ones in the foreground starting to creep forward as though trying to escape from the void.

  There was silence. It was disturbing, but to all of them immensely moving. They knew who the man with the beard was meant to be, and what the blind was, and who the people cautiously edging towards the light might be.

  It wasn’t magnolia, but Ethel could not, along with all of those staring at it, help but be moved. She said nothing, but hugged the artist with tears in her eyes.

  “Very good, René.” Said Ron. “That should do nicely.”

  “Maggsy” said René.

  “Come again?”

  “Maggsy. I’m called Maggsy now.”

  They watched the sun go down over the trees, sipping Goodtime’s beer. The last of the light sparkled on the ripples of the pool and a zephyr stirred up whorls of wood shavings and dust from the floor of the deck. Just beyond the fence, the fires were beginning to come into relief, the sounds of music and the cries of children playing creating a sylvan backdrop.