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

by Peter Empringham

  “Really?”

  “Oh yeah. No limits. But he’s redundant too, and he says ‘do you fancy coming for a few pints in an East End Pub during the Blitz, pearly kings, knees up muvver brahn, even the dear old Queen mum dropping in nightly for a gin and a pipe of old shag?’. What’s he going to say? No, I’ll just wait until they need another whale, not that I can really remember how I did it in the first place? No. He’s going to have a right old party in a damage-free environment that many people sadly remember as the best time of their lives. There are hundreds, no thousands of them. Every island in Polynesia has slightly different gods, and give a god a chance to multiply and he’ll take it. They’re all over this place like a cheap suit, and that place and the next. Do you love me?”

  That one slipped in, right at the end there when she least expected it. She looked into his face, frozen forever at its prime, the bruising and swelling above his eye that she wanted to touch.

  “We need to go.” she said. “ Before you push someone into the water.”

  The hermit wasn’t entirely happy. This wasn’t what he had signed up for. Isolation was his joy, and here were a sound of voices, two people suddenly emerging from a wobble in the air. A sound he hadn’t heard for years and one for which he had no desire.

  “How far does this go?” asked the brown-skinned woman. He waved his cane to take in the entire horizon. “Excellent.” she said. He watched quietly as they walked away from him over a smooth outcrop and towards the setting sun. Eventually they became black pustules erupting from the surface of the mesa before him, until something changed and one continued to shrink as the other became larger and then took on form and movement until the female was standing once more before him.

  “Have you got an Afternet terminal? Please.” she asked. He drew himself up as though the question insulted him. His face was evenly tanned, lined from the sun, his eyes clear and alert. He clenched his hands around the top of the cane. Finally he sniffed, made a half turn and waved the cane airily to the entrance to a low cave in the shadow of a small bluff.

  She nodded and walked to the entrance, ducking inside and then finding that the whole space hollowed out. Inside was something of a showstopper. There was an enormous extra king size bed with crisp white Egyptian cotton sheets and duvet, a huge refrigerator, cooking range and microwave. A music system of some sophistication was laid out along one of the walls; Linn Sondek, Naim amp and Wharfedale speakers. A collection of vinyl albums stretched around every wall. In the middle was a Macbook Pro, screensaver showing that it used the very latest operating system. The room was warm and the gentle rasp of Chris Smither’s voice singing ‘Time Stands Still’ wafted from the massive audio system. She heard the shuffle of his feet behind her, and turned to look at him, raising an eyebrow in enquiry.

  He shrugged. “It’s people I don’t like,” he said, “not what they make.”

  Mary pinged a very brief A-mail to Justin and Geoffrey, the gist of which was that they had found somewhere suitable to lie low and that even though they hadn’t seen her and Marcel for some time (completely wrong, unknown to them), they were both fine and the plan would now work really well. She said goodbye to the luxuriating hermit and headed back off across the plain towards the dot that was the waiting Marcel.

  The terrain was dry and bare, and as the globe of the sun fringed upon the edge of their vision and then began by degrees to fall behind it, the sky began to darken and the air to chill.

  “Where exactly are we going?” asked Marcel.

  “Exactly as far as we can get from the only other person here, and then if we need to, tomorrow, we’ll go a bit further.” Her tone was peremptory and he decided against further questioning, at least for the moment. The last vestiges of sunlight had flickered in the sky and stars were beginning to appear when they came upon an escarpment riven with openings and she suggested they find somewhere comfortable to spend the night.

  “Comfortable?” he said, eyeing the landscape warily. “It just looks like holes in rock to me.”

  “Then we’d better find a comfortable hole in the rock, hadn’t we? Or two, probably, just to be sure that nothing improper occurs.”

  “Good point.” He said. “I want to feel safe.”

  Most of the caves were small, dusty affairs, falling swiftly below head height and offering no potential for occupation. Others, though, were actually fully furnished, laid out with ottomans and woven wall-hangings, plush sofas and fitted kitchens, or even Swedish minimalist furniture most of which looked as if it would collapse given a decent shove.

  “Who the hell did all this?” she asked.

  “Well, it’s a heaven, isn’t it? Maybe it’s so he can move around a bit, or in case any other dreamers think this might be a suitable way to spend the endless years.”

  They eventually selected adjacent caves, he taking one that had marble-clad walls and a whirlpool bath, and she something more feminine, featuring a massive bed covered with throws and cushions. She suddenly realised how tired she was, and how much toll the last few weeks had taken. She had been eternally on edge, waiting for the moment when some chance comment or innocent piece of behaviour would trigger a reaction in Marcel entirely out of proportion, but with the inevitable repercussion that they would have to move on.

  She lay on top of the bed, sinking into the softness, happy that they had finally found somewhere even he would struggle to find someone to argue with, unless he wanted to trek back across the plain to tell the hermit he didn’t like his choice of music. From the cave next door she could hear the muffled grind of the whirlpool bath. She closed her eyes and drifted easily off to sleep.

  The cave was pitch dark when she awoke and she had no feeling for how long she had been asleep. The bed was so soft she felt as though she had somehow been enveloped by it, pillows moulding themselves around her. Below her feet the opening of the cave was a dark blue door in the solid blackness. For the first time for a long time she felt relaxed, pulling the cushions around her, stretched on the massive bed. Peaceful, the silent night, the freshness of the air, scents of pine and hibiscus. She raised her arms into the darkness above her, revelling in the peacefulness.

  There was a thud. She was half-asleep. The scents, the darkness, the blueness of the opening to the night sky could all have been part-dream. There was a sound of footsteps as though someone were shuffling almost on tiptoe; something being moved; the sound of paper, a wrapper, whatever, an illusion. She turned in the bed and slept on.

  They just sat, by and large, the following day, on the ledge before the caves, backs against the rock wall, legs outstretched. The landscape was barren enough to make a hermit feel that he had cut himself off from civilisation, but not so devoid of features that he might change his mind and head for Las Vegas Heaven at the first opportunity. There were hills of scrub, and circles of palms around identikit oases. Kites and buzzards circled in the sky and thin wispy clouds drifted slowly across azure blue.

  “What are we going to do here?” he asked.

  “What are we not going to do is more like it. We’re not going to cause fights with Gods, we’re not going to ruin the Heavens of those who have dreamed of something all their lives. We’re not going to get noticed, which after all was the general idea in the first place.”

  “Boring idea, wasn’t it?” He flicked a bug off the ledge and it spiralled into the air, plummeting to the valley floor.

  “That might have been a Buddhist.” she said.

  “Should have had bigger dreams. Anyway, if it is, it’ll be back.”

  “What was all that noise last night, anyway?”

  “Noise?”

  “Yeah. Noise. Middle of the night. After your interminable whirlpool bath.”

  “Beats me. Maybe I was dreaming about giving some jumped up egotist deity a bit of a thumping.”

  The next day, it was his turn.

  “Do you always whimper in your sleep?”

  “Whimper? I do not whimper.”

&
nbsp; “That’s the trouble with these caves. Walls like paper. Don’t make them like they used to.”

  They spent the days staring into the plain, which somehow changed its topography endlessly. Sometimes there would be eagles floating on the thermals, wings spread, other times skeins of martins and swifts banking and swirling through the warm sky. In the distance they could make out animals approaching the watering-holes, and on the walls and ledges lizards basked in the heat. And in the nights they slept deeply, but every night one or both was brought half awake by the sound of movement, sometimes the scratching of a wall, feet flitting softly across the rock floor.

  “It’s probably that search for authenticity.” Marcel pitched a stone over the ledge and listened to it skittering into the valley below. “You know, if this really was some kind of New Mexico or North African plain, there would be spiders and snakes, and things rushing about in the night. Mice, for example, and, I don’t know…voles.”

  “Voles?”

  “I said I didn’t know. Whatever little furry things live in these kind of places, to make it feel real for the occupants. Occupant.”

  “Like naturally occurring whirlpool baths and super king-size beds, I suppose.”

  He shrugged. “You have to give the punters what they want. Speaking of which, shall I kill a warthog and roast it over a spit for dinner?” She looked at him with a degree of doubt. “Or shall we have some of those steaks from the naturally-occurring fridge?”

  They ate beneath the stars, the sound of cicadas rattling from the hillside above them. Mary was feeling a distinct sense of achievement. Several days now without arguments, violence, random attacks on objects of worship. Marcel seemed to be imbued with calm, had revealed memories of his life that did not involve whoring or perfidy or murder. He had even asked her some questions about her own existence, and had either been interested or done a very good job of looking as if he was.

  There was an elephant in the room, for sure, the memory of the question they had asked of each other and which neither answered. It was, though, an elephant in a very, very large ‘room’, a single pachyderm in a vista apparently unending, and it wasn’t difficult to poke it off into some far-off corner where the wainscotting should have been. They were separated by a wall of rock, and perhaps by an unspoken desire in each of them to have the questions answered, but those questions weren’t repeated, and they bade each other goodnight with easy comfort, both taking a last look at the swathe of stars glittering in the inky sky.

  Mary was disturbed, she didn’t know how much later, by a deep thud in the recesses of her cave, and for the first time what sounded like muttering, like actual words, although she couldn’t make them out. It didn’t sound like vole language, though. And then a shadow flitted across the relative paleness of the cave entrance, a massive, hanging, hooded blackness that first blotted out the moonlight and then disappeared again into the dark. She let out an involuntary yelp, and leapt to her feet, ran to the ledge and into the cave next door.

  “Marcel! Bloody Hell, Marcel!”

  He was bare-chested and drew himself up sleepily, candles offering a pale light around the head of his bed.

  “I knew you’d come eventually.” he said thickly, holding the bedsheet aside.

  “Oh, don’t be so bloody stupid. There’s something in my cave. It’s massive. A black, winged thing.”

  “It’s probably just a bat.”

  “Bloody big bat. It had to be six feet tall.”

  He reluctantly pulled himself from his bed, picked up a candle, and walked past her, grumbling. She followed nervously behind as he walked onto the ledge and then into her room. The light from the flame flickered and cast shadows onto the walls as he lit more candles to throw the space into a fuller dim light. There was nothing to see out of the ordinary, if you accept that a fully furnished cave in the middle of nowhere has any quotidian qualities. He put down the candle and turned to her, his arms outspread.

  “I can’t see a giant bat. Or any bat for that matter.”

  “Sssh.” she said, “Listen.”

  They stood in silence, heads cocked, and there, for sure, was the reedy sound of a suppressed moan coming from the depths of the cave.

  “An injured bat?” he said. The distant keening continued.

  “Right!” Marcel raised his voice. “Come out whatever you are.” There was a sound of scrabbling and then indistinct words.

  “Or whoever you are. Is that you, hermit? What are you, a peeping tom?”

  They heard a long sigh and then it was as if the blackness at the furthest extremity of the cave began to shift, and from the darkness came more darkness, but now it flowed and reformed, a tall shape moved towards them, a huge winged creature, the head hooded.

  “Don’t shoot.” said a nervous voice, deep and resonant.

  “Shoot what?”

  “Anything. Whatever you have, don’t shoot. I’m coming out with my hands up.”

  It did. As it edged out of the deeper darkness it took on the form of a tall cloaked man, the light from the candles glinting on a scythe held upright to its side.

  “Oh.” The voice became firmer. “It’s you.” The figure threw back the hood to reveal a ghastly pallid face, dark-ringed sunken eyes.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” asked Mary.

  “I could ask you the same thing.” said the Grim Reaper. “Any chance of a cup of tea?”

  16

  Justin and Geoffrey fell into a mutually satisfying routine that only helped to emphasise the smoothness with which the Afternet was now working. The master screen continued to scroll at blinding speed, the details of the souls processed barely firing the LCD zipping from the bottom of the screen. On occasion the routine would stop, the cursor blinking alongside the name of someone whose behaviour had been of such complexity that even this system was momentarily flummoxed, pondering the choice of final destination.

  Justin paid no attention whatsoever, but Geoffrey’s eye would be caught by the pause, and he would glance nervously to the screen, hoping against hope that this was not another system failure. Then the decision was made and once more the system fell into its pattern of lightning fast judgement.

  The pair chatted over food, and argued over whose turn it may be to make tea or coffee, but that apart, once they were no longer being treated to regular postings of Marcel thumping someone, they may as well have been in different rooms. Marchant followed the social media, dreaming up potential moneymaking schemes, the gist of which he jotted down, planning to somehow inveigle Mary into creating the necessary software on her return. Geoffrey ploughed on through the ever-increasing panoply of terrestrial television output, transfixed by the moving pictures. He was as likely to stare transfixed at the glittering overblown draw ceremony for the FIFA World Cup as to laugh out loud at The Bourne Ultimatum, which he believed to be some kind of slapstick. He was working his way doggedly through the back catalogue of South American soaps, not understanding a word but taking them to be documentaries.

  Despite their contented general lack of interaction, Geoffrey regularly sought Justin’s opinion on what was happening to his absent colleague.

  “Where do you think he might be now, Justin? We haven’t seen any pictures for ages.”

  “That’s the point, Geoffrey. He’s lying low.”

  “I know. But I just wondered where he might be. Is he safe? He might be in some awful Heaven. It’s not like him to be among lots of people for so long without causing some kind of problem.”

  “Maybe Mary’s acting as a bit of restraint on him, Geoff.” Justin didn’t move his eyes from the screen. This conversation was almost identical to one that had taken place the previous day and the day before that. He didn’t even bother to act interested. If he had been quizzed on the fact, he was much more concerned about whether Mary would return than Marcel. Despite his prior feting as a rising star in the IT firmament, it took most of his knowledge to switch between applications; without her, none of his brill
iant concepts could come to fruition.

  Geoffrey knew that he was asking the same questions every day, but unlike Justin, found that the uncertainty actually distracted him from his viewing. Even as he watched some dark-haired beauty, in pancake make up and earrings the size of hula hoops, emoting frantically at a swarthy handsome man with a swirl of chest hair emerging from his plunging neckline, he found himself wondering where his own swarthy friend might be. Admittedly, the company of Justin alone gave him absolute licence to watch TV, but it was leaving something of a vacuum in his routine. The family breakdowns, unwanted pregnancies and sexual peccadilloes of the Velasquez family were a constant source of astonishment, but he came to realise that he missed the random insults and offhand contempt from the Frenchman that had become so much part of his afterlife. He missed Marcel, in fact.

  This new routine was destined to be shattered. Even in forever nothing, it would seem, lasts forever.

  The sound of running feet from the corridor outside the control room invariably meant an end to routine and torpor. This time the footsteps approached at speed and Geoffrey actually felt a frisson of excitement; something was going to happen to break this new normality. He was actually disappointed when the sound peaked and then continued on and faded away again. They returned, slower, until they halted outside the door.

  “Someone’s here, Justin.” Geoffrey said, with a hint of excitement.

  “Hmmm.” said Justin, who was following a series of Faithbook posts instigated by a photo of the goddess of victory, Nike, dressed head to toe in Nike. Other Gods had picked up the idea of this nominative commercialism, the latest of which was Mars covered in chocolate.