“I don’t think it gets much better than this.” Said Ron.
“An ox, Ron.” Adwahl leaned against the fence.
“I’m sorry?”
“If we had an ox. Over an open fire. Turning on a spit. We could stuff it with rosemary and garlic, baste it in a reduction of its own sauces. Six hours of delicious aromas drifting over the whole site.”
“Well, ok,” Ron said, “but still…”
“Electricity would be nice.” His wife glanced at him. “We could have fairy lights all around the roof, there, and ooh, an immersion heater, and I could have a long hot bath.”
Ron smiled gently and nodded in reluctant agreement.
“I wouldn’t mind something, a tincture, for my throat.” Chippendale croaked.
“Canvas,” said Magritte, “that would be lovely.”
“Soap” said a voice.
“Telephones” another, “Cheese.” “A soft mattress.”
It stopped eventually, like a little flurry of wind that had blown itself out.
“Still. It doesn’t get much better than this.” he said, to general murmurs of agreement.
13
Faithbook was a bit of a mistake, really. The worldly version allegedly came about so that blokes who couldn’t attract women using traditional methods, such as conversation, emotional connection, or pumping iron could at least get to anonymously look at attractive girls whilst pretending to be interesting and physically developed. The afterlife version was the result of Mary having a slightly woozy interaction with Vulcan, the Roman god of fire, at a party to celebrate his successful detonation of the volcano Eyjafjallajökull in 2010. He was the centre of attention, as you would expect, and obviously basking in his success. Other Gods, a stream of nymphs and the odd harpy flitted in and out of the group surrounding him, listening to the story of how he made it all happen, seemingly on an endless loop. Mary watched him flex his pecs and run massive dark fingers through his blond beard as she helped herself to the Flaming Lamborghinis served up by half naked servants.
“Why are they all such wankers?” she asked, leaning heavily on a Doric column.
“Who? Everyone?” asked Marcel, who had tried one of the cocktails but after regurgitating it viciously into a pot plant was opting for water tasting of metal.
“Gods. They’re…I dunno, so fake. So you blow up a mountain? So what?”
He leaned in close to her and she fanned the flames on the top of her drink to keep them away from her hair.
“Insecurity, Mary. They aren’t convinced of their role in the modern world.”
She breathed the scent from his long hair, which smelled of lemons with a hint of singe.
“You’re secure, though, aren’t you Marcel? You always seem convinced of your self-worth. Alright for some I suppose.” He flashed her a genuine smile (loving little more than a compliment), then flicked the side of his hair back with his hand. He involuntarily turned at the sound of laughter from the group surrounding Vulcan even as Mary said “Do you love me?”
“What?” He said, turning back to face her. “What did you say?”
“Oh, er. Isn’t he lovely?”
“Prick. Like all of them.”
Vulcan caught her at a bad moment, therefore, when he wandered over moments later. She was red-faced with embarrassment at asking the question, relief at not having it heard, the heat from the Flaming Lamborghini.
“Hi. Saw you here and I don’t think we’ve connected, have we?”
Connected? She was pretty sure they hadn’t; indeed that no-one had for some time.
“Ha! No. I’m Mary.” She held out a limp hand.
“Well, you know who I am.” He said.
He had a booming voice, and she suddenly thought that half of the gods just sounded like Brian Blessed and the others like Julian Clary. By their timbre shall ye know them.
“You’re not one of us, are you?”
Her mind was beginning to feel a touch fuzzy. What was in a Flaming Lamborghini, given that it certainly wasn’t a Lamborghini?
“Well, I don’t blow up hills, if that’s what you mean. But as Shakespeare nearly said, ‘What a piece of work is a man…how like a god!’” She swayed slightly and looked into his puzzled face.
“But you’re not a man.” he blared. They probably heard that in Hades.
“I think it’s ‘man’ as in ‘human’; person; homo sapiens.”
“Shouldn’t think so.” Vulcan said, adjusting the cloth around his groin. “So. What brings you here, not being one of us, in a non-gender specific sense if that helps you answer a simple question.”
“I was killed by mistake by an inept Reaper and now I do all of the programming for The Afternet” she said. “Oh, nice work on the eruption, by the way. Nobody saw that one coming. Eyeja foci…Efojyoko…Fudgycoco…well you know what I mean.”
“I call it Keith.” he said.
“Bloody good idea.”
“So you put things on the Afternet? All that A-Bay and stuff?”
Mary slurped the pink liquid from her glass, which had, thankfully, given up its flames. She nodded.
“Do you know I had a brilliant idea?” Vulcan bellowed. People at the other side of the room turned and nodded their agreement. Mary demurred.
“I think that we; the gods I mean, don’t get enough exposure, and particularly we don’t see each other very often and don’t have a way to keep in touch. You know, I’m off providing streams of molten lava to atomise poor shanty dwellers, Saturn’s helping to bring in the crops. I’m doing important work in making mountains tremble to generate fear without actually making them erupt, Fons is making sure there is water to put the fires out. We’re all so busy being busy we just don’t have time to connect, to keep up with the important things. And gossip.”
“Bummer.” she slurred, launching into a slide stopped only by a bust of Julius Caesar. “By the way, it was a bit crap, wasn’t it?”
“What?”
“Eye jokey fukorama. Keith. It was just smoke, wasn’t it? Are you losing your touch?”
They made a hasty exit, Geoffrey chuntering on about the lack of respect for those who were divine, Justin complaining that he had been about to make ‘a real connection’ with various Gods of wealth. Marcel had an arm around the unsteady Mary to help her with their accelerated departure.
“That’s my girl.” He said.
So, head throbbing and pounding as though Thor himself were inside it and giving it some hammer, she devised Faithbook. Much as she quite enjoyed the actuality of going to a party, she rarely relished the interaction with the worshipped. Nevertheless, she retained her understanding of which side of bread to butter, and knew that if you did what the gods wanted, then sometime in the future there might be payback. Which, coincidentally, was exactly what the Mayans and Incas, and other extinct races thought.
It started slowly. First, they worried that they needed a profile picture. ‘It steals your soul!’ ‘You haven’t got a soul, you’re a God!’, ‘Oh, ok.’ Next there were issues about privacy. Diana, who spent the largest part of her life naked, was concerned that people would see more of her than she was prepared to show. Aphrodite, who had a similar approach to clothing, didn’t object but her ‘friends’ did. Horus, the falcon God of Egyptian scatology, was concerned that the site may show up his ageing perch and habit of indiscriminate shitting, but his concerns were assuaged by an assurance that the site was not real-time, 24-hour video.
“But I don’t know when I might need to poo.” Horus said.
“No one does.” replied Veritas reassuringly, with her fingers crossed.
It took off, for all that. It was a closed user group, for the mighty only, on the understanding that the last thing gods or goddesses wanted was someone from the great unwashed berating them online about their lives having been ruined due to a rubbish crop of sweetcorn or an inconvenient tsunami. As if there were any other kind. The only non-deities with access were the folks in the Afternet Control Ro
om, and then supposedly only for administrative purposes. If Mary had a tenner for every time she had reset the password of some forgetful representation of holiness, she would have been absolutely loaded and could have stopped Justin from embarking on yet another doomed money-making scheme.
Unfortunately, Faithbook evolved, not in terms of its users, but in the way it was used. Officially denied access to the Heavens and Hells, the users took pride in posting snaps showing them in any number of paradises behaving like Freshers at the University of Plonker. There was an unspoken competition running to see who could post a picture from the worst Hell, and a particularly stupid running series called the Kick The Bucket Challenge.
Immortal beings posted pictures of themselves being terminated in increasingly creative ways. The aforementioned Vulcan swallowed a hand grenade; the result made Vesuvius look like a spot being popped; Pestilence was knocked over by a bucket of antibiotics; Papa Legba had a seizure following sixteen continuous hours of blues music played at maximum volume, and Narasimha, who had the misfortune to take the form of a hairy newborn child, had some serious issues after his bottle was filled with Jack Daniels. The only real drawback to this ludicrous juvenility, was that they were all reincarnated and back posting pictures of their lunch before you could say ‘mortality’.
The foursome in the control room used it just to keep an eye on where the gods were going. Had God known, he could have used them as the afterworld version of GCHQ, but if he did know, he didn’t know he knew. Unfortunately for Mary and Marcel, it also became a real issue in their effort to travel underneath the radar.
In the first couple of weeks, as they searched for a place acceptable to Marcel (which was in itself difficult), their progress might as well have been on the giant screen in Times Square, at least as far as hiding it from the authorities was concerned.
Their first Heaven was a recreation of late 17th century Versailles. This version of the court of the Sun King, Louis XIV, came with some of the drawbacks removed, such as dental decay, scurvy, and the King himself. Just as no self-respecting Irishman would be found literally dead in the theme pub that was Na Gopaleens, so this Versailles was not a destination of choice for contemporaneous stiffs. Those who died during that period had seen quite enough of the sixteen hundreds, thank you. There was a tendency at that time to dream of a much more traditional eternity, one that didn’t include serious body odour, taxes on salt, and almost continuous war. This Heaven owed a good deal more to the Costume Drama Department of the BBC than it did to historical accuracy and was populated to a great extent by those who held rose-tinted views of the past; and of course, this being Heaven, they got what they wanted.
Occupants wandered the fabulous gardens in brocades and furs, elegant stockings, wigs falling in curls past their shoulders. And that was the men. The ladies strolled in bejewelled dresses flared with whalebone, fluttered scented handkerchiefs to their noses and tittered behind fans in what they took to be an alluring manner. The gardens were always bathed in sunshine, and the air filled with the sound of string quartets and the occasional bellow of a lion or elephant from the menagerie. The incredible ornate fountains gushed endlessly in a mockery of reality, when only the ones immediately before and behind the King had been flowing as he strolled, due to a lack of water.
The were trysts and liaisons, dances and feasts, wine gushed from spouts in the walls, and there was an inexplicable interest in pétanque and games of chess with small dogs dressed as the pieces. Naturally, for some of the occupants (drawn to a great extent from the French aristocracy of the time), this was their Hell, and they were given a serious taste of their own medicine. They were deputed to the kitchens, clearing out the stinking stables, and of course to clearing up the waste products of those strolling in bliss. This was a huge place, and as in the real Versailles the designer hadn’t seen fit to overburden it with toilet facilities, so these inhabitants, like those of centuries before, became accustomed to performing their ablutions wherever they happened to be.
The first sight that greeted Marcel and Mary was that of the once Duke of Burgundy emerging from underneath the massively bustled skirt of a Pittsburgh hairdresser with a love of ‘historical’ bodice-busting novels. They assumed that he was up to his old tricks until they spotted that he was carrying a heavy china pot swimming with both liquid and solid output.
“Travail de merde, mon seigneur?” asked Marcel with a small smile. The Duke glared but did not reply. Like those who had actually performed the task during their lives, there was nothing to be gained from complaint.
For a while all was peaceful, and Mary was really enjoying it, sweeping across the lawns in an ivory gown adorned with seed pearls, her bosom thrust upward to show off the huge ruby necklace she wore around her throat.
“Tha’s a sight for sore eyes, madam” said a scrap merchant from Halifax (Yorkshire, not Nova Scotia) who had spent his fortune on housing and education for the poor, to the distaste of his wife. Mary forced a giggle and a peek from behind her fan.
“Why sir,” she said huskily, “you don’t look so bad yourself.” He was a bit on the porky side in fact, but no real need to shatter any illusions. Marcel was looking a touch flashy-eyed, and she gave him a warning glance.
“Dost fancy a cup of Horlicks and a round of Scrabble before bedtime madam?”
“Oh! Hast Scrabble been invented?”
“It hast if we so desire, milady.”
“Why are you talking like that?” asked Marcel as he eased her away towards another group watching a man juggle with flaming brands.
“I’m just trying to make us fit in, Marcel. It might be easier if you didn’t look at everyone as if they were slaughtering your family.”
“Quite capable of doing that myself, thank you.”
Perhaps it was, though, too good to be true, and the catalyst to the end of this luxurious period came, as you might expect, with the arrival of a bunch of Celtic Fomorian deities sneaking away from their limited duties elsewhere. They rampaged across the lawns, told the string quartet to ‘liven it up a bit, can’t yer?’, and lay underneath the gushing wine spouts in drinking competitions.
The last straw was the chess game Marcel undertook with Elatha, a very beautiful god who had caught Mary’s fluttering eye. There was a massive argument over whether the French bulldog dressed as a knight had actually been taken by Marcel’s Shih Tzu bishop or had just wandered off for a piss.
“Oooh look!” said Geoffrey, beckoning Justin to share his screen. “It’s Marcel. Wondered how he was getting on.”
“What the hell is he doing?” asked Justin, turning his head on its side as if that would help interpret the picture posted on Faithbook.
“I think he’s trying to get that dachshund into that man’s bottom.”
That was the end of that low-profile sojourn.
The remaining two guardians of the Control Room were thereafter treated at regular intervals to photographic evidence of both the whereabouts of their wandering companions and the reasons for their change of location. On a beautiful multi-masted tall ship sailing in a Caribbean-like turquoise ocean, Marcel was projectile-vomiting on Kuruzome, the gentle spirit of the Japanese Cherry tree, who had won a holiday in a Christmas raffle. The Frenchman turned up in a string of mugshots alongside the Norse deities Punor and Tiw. All three were arrested for smashing up an eternal deer farm to which they had mistakenly gone for Punor’s stag night. They were only released, according to the accompanying text, because Tiw pulled rank as god of justice.
It went on. Swordfights, fistfights, cross-eyed drunk at parties, and once, naked with a smirking quintet of nymphs in some dappled glade. None of them, Marcel, Mary, or the Gods or nymphs, should have been there, but the social media revealed that they were, and they were not enhancing the heavenly nature of any of their environments.
“This is the worst piece of quiet, incognito activity I’ve ever seen.” Justin said. “It’s about as likely to remain unnoticed as the sun.” H
e was looking aghast at a screenshot of Marcel waterskiing on a dolphin behind a speedboat driven by Dionysus, God of, among other things, ritual madness. The Frenchman was naked except for a pair of Ray-Ban Wayfarers.
Mary was at her wits’ end. Everywhere they went was peaceful, full of happy people, and seemed an ideal place to put down some short-term roots. They may not have been Marcel’s idea of Heaven, but they seemed to offer real hope of meeting their purpose. Then the gods turned up, and everything turned sour. This, she thought, is too much like life: people happily getting on with their existences and then a religion-shaped spanner gets thrown into the works. It’s not like you even have to believe in them, just the fact that they exist in someone’s imagination seems to be enough to cause havoc and discord.
They were drinking coffee, or at least she was, in St Mark’s Square in 18th century Venice. Marcel was looking particularly miserable, holding a damp cloth to the swelling above his black right eye. They had shortly before stumbled into a massive hangar, so large she couldn’t see the other end, populated by thousands of bearded men with dark eyes, who seemed to be just wandering around stumbling into each other.
“What’s this?” she asked, not really expecting an answer.
“Ah.” he said. “Bad choice of tunnel. This is Islam martyr Heaven. Virgins. They get 72 each, apparently.”
“But they’re all-“
“Yes. Comes as a bit of a shock, I should think. Let’s go.” Why, as they beat a hasty retreat, he chose to shout ‘Hey, beardy! Bet you can’t wait, eh?’ she had no idea, but he was rueing it now.
“Why do you do these things?” she sipped her coffee, heard the flutter of a pigeon in the air above her.
“I don’t know.” he mumbled, pressing the damp cloth to his forehead. “Can we ask someone who actually deserves to be here if they can invent ice?”
The Complete Afternet: All 3 Volumes In One Place (The Afternet) Page 75
