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

by Peter Empringham

  There was tension in the green rooms in which the teams prepared themselves for the event, even if it was only really going to involve awkward boots, grease and strong rubber, and of course bean bags, the staple element of any Knockout based production. Sun Tzu refused even under pressure to swap his warrior outfit for the lilac tracksuits of God’s team, his only nod to assimilation being the word COACH picked out across his backplate.

  They looked nervous. He’d never seen an Archangel stretching before, but then, who had? Quads, adds, wings. Yep, that seems to be in order. The last thing a team needs when this much is at stake is for a key player to tweak a supracoracoideus. He or she could be out for months, by which time the fate of humanity would be decided. The worst part was that Sun couldn’t help feeling a bit of a fraud.

  All that stuff about where to meet your enemy, when to fight and when not; it was fine, pretty good actually, but then he’d never actually done any of it. Had he been around in the twenty-first century, he would without doubt have been writing books on succeeding in business, drinking ragwort smoothies, or maximising your id. The only thing he had in common with the people who wrote those books was that it was all theory. He knew about the Art of War, but war itself was a distant country.

  He clapped his hands, and disconcertingly found himself looking at the expectant faces of angels, cherubim, seraphim, and nephilim. ‘Funny old world’ he thought.

  “Okay.” Sun said, feeling the silence, rustling of wing feathers apart, weigh heavy upon the room, “This is it. We know what they’re like, we know that they won’t necessarily play to the rules. But you’re only here once, and it’s for you to make the most of it. Just be the best you can and enjoy it, take in the experience. And most of all, don’t ever let yourselves look back and think that you left anything out there.”

  He felt the eyes upon him, the hunched figures, knees jiggling, hands clasped between their legs. It was Gabriel who spoke first.

  “Who are we?”

  “God’s Defenders!” The voices were low, repressed.

  “Who are we?”

  “God’s defenders!” Louder, faces looking up from their toes. Gabriel stood.

  “What will we do for him?” Others got to their feet.

  “Everything unto death!” They were all standing now. Sun felt a little less sure of his exhortation for them to enjoy themselves. That felt, somehow, a little weak.

  There was no such concern about the impression the Devil’s retinue created when they emerged into the cooling night air. Their leader had insisted on an Opening Ceremony, having spent some time influencing the International Olympic Committee in the seventies and eighties, and actually occupying a seat on the executive of FIFA until 2015. He loved the simple way in which cash and watches could override morals.

  The holiday camp known as Everland, in a corner of the infinite space housing the wandering unjudged souls was not, though, any Olympic Stadium anywhere. In terms of direction of the show, Danny Boyle was not, despite any indications to the contrary, dead enough to bring his expertise to bear.

  The Dark Side marched out in a deliberate display of sartorial determinism. Sharp black suits, bright white shirts and shiny black brogues; for the distaff side, pale skin, hair long and with a tinge of red, and very very fashionable little black dresses. They marched out in single file, unsmiling, a cross between an audition for Reservoir Dogs and the Paris catwalk for the Armani formal collection. Perfunctory fireworks, cobbled together from a poor selection of materials available locally, puffed and smoked to accompany their parade. ”They’re going down.” He said before they left the confines of the superheated green room. “We’re harder and nastier. Meaner. Utterly lacking in vestiges of sportsmanship, respect, or regret. They’re going down and they are going down hard.”

  “Your guys are looking good there, Satan. What did you say to them before they came out here into this magnificent chalet park cum stadium here today?” asked Strand Crantum, poking a fuzzy microphone into the face of the incarnation of all that is evil.

  “We’re feeling good, too, Strand. There are some nerves there of course; it’s a big prize. I just told them to go out there and be themselves. Venal, lying, cheating, carelessly violent, devoid of empathy. If they can add to that any kind of physical co-ordination, I think that should be enough.” In the background, viewed by millions around the Afterworld, a pathetic but nonetheless incendiary rocket could be seen looping unerringly onto the roof of Lucky Obie’s.

  Strand had less joy finding a member of the opposite team to interview. He harassed hangers-on. “Is He here?” “Of course He’s here. He’s everywhere.” Strand reverted to type. “Chance of precipitation?” he said.

  There was a display, of sorts, one that in all but scale managed to mimic the ludicrous piffle put in front of the eyes of the world by those who governed, generally for their own benefit, the real world’s major sporting events. Enough children had been rounded up to perform a number of tableaux, ranging from small and unsteady pyramids to whirling congas, at least as far as the uneven number of limbs available would allow. Their finale formed them into squares, each holding up a card to help form giant letters forming the names of the teams. Only lack of education and a paucity of preparation led to the viewing multitudes wondering who they should support between ‘DOG’ and ‘STAN’.

  An assembly of New Zealanders (unfortunately none of them Maori) performed a Haka that could as easily have been a welcome to a new shopping mall, and an orchestra cobbled together from 18th century musicians playing traditional instruments such as lutes, virginal, and massed recorders made a passable attempt at ‘The Final Countdown’. If there can be such a thing.

  Interviews had been held to find the person who could truly encapsulate the spirit of the games about to take place, with an opening speech to rouse the crowds, ‘athletes’, and the billions watching on Aftervision. They had rolled up predictably unabashed. Papa Doc, Slobodan Milosevic, P W Botha, Hoxha, Samaranch, a couple of Saudi princes, all blithely convinced that, as in life, their position would give them the right to absorb adulation even as they themselves wreaked havoc and spread misery on all within their purview. Even Geoffrey, who knew himself in no way whatsoever, was amazed at their lack of self-awareness. Those who possibly could have made the speech, who had the right to, stayed silent, unbuoyed by the sense of self-importance.

  So the speech, it turned out, was given by a bystander, a face amongst the crowds.

  It was the kind of thing that can only happen in a world where there are no rules, no givens about behaviour, almost no limits on whom you might meet. The night before the opening, Ron and Ethel, Maggsy, the Control Room team were lounging on the terrace in front of the Entertainment Centre, aware that they as yet had no grand words to adequately capture the import of the event. Out of the woods came a woman, from beyond the campfires of those awaiting the start of the games, or even those who had thought they were about to have the holiday of their dreams but now found themselves gazumped. She was stiffly dressed, skirts long to her feet, a tight bodice rising up under her chin, and her hair likewise was tightened, drawn across her head in disciplined restraint. A feathered arrow poked stiffly from the bloodstained bodice. She marched past the campers, stared down the men looking fearsome at the gates of Everland, marched boldly through those who crowded around the terrace and calmly placed in Ron’s hand a piece of paper. Mary saw her cast a glance at Marcel, their eyes meeting for a beat as if in recognition.

  “We know what this is.” she said, her face stern. “We want them to know we don’t care.”

  Ron turned the note in his hands, passed it to Mary, who scanned the words.

  “I’m not sure this is what they are expecting us to say,” said Mary, “you know, to capture the importance of the event.”

  “Importance for who?” The woman asked. “It don’t mean nuthin’ to us.”

  “Us being?”

  She swung an arm towards the woods.

&n
bsp; “We live over there, past the trees. Twenty-two of us killed in a wagon train. Me, my husband, my kids. Other families. And around the same number of Cheyenne.”

  They looked stunned.

  “Erm, didn’t they, er?” Justin gestured towards the protruding arrow.

  “Sure they did. But they didn’t know what they wiz doin’. Just looking’ after their homes, I guess. Wasn’t them was walking’ on dead men’s graves. That was us, with our bibles and our guns.”

  “So, what’s this?” Ron waved the piece of paper.

  “It’s a message. From people who spent all of their lives fightin’.” She turned on her heel to march back out of the gates, through the throng outside the camp, and straight-backed towards the distant woods.

  Ron placed the paper on the table and ran the palm of his hand across it as if to iron out creases. The writing on it was large and childlike, the lines sloping away to the right hand side of the page. They all read it in silence and then looked to each other. Ron turned it over to see if there was more, and then back to the scribed page.

  When the woman stepped up to the podium after the ceremonial activities were complete, she placed the same piece of paper onto the surface in front of her as the crowd fell silent. She steadied herself on the sides of the plinth as though exhausted from the few steps up and the trauma that took her from life. When she spoke, through the hastily constructed amplification, her voice was a quaver, the words clear but almost as if they were formed from the breeze through the trees.

  “You say this is the end.” she read. “Here where ancient battles are forgotten you choose to end yours. Are you the buffalo, the wind, the sun and stars, the river? Are you the fire, the flood, the pestilence? Can you make us believe? Make this the end.”

  She crinkled the sheet of paper in the complete silence following her words, put it slowly to one side, glanced at the other piece of paper, Ron’s capital letters standing out.

  “I declare the first and last inter-spiritual Jeux Sans Frontières open.”

  There was a ripple of applause from the considerable crowd tiered around the camp. Ron looked out to the perimeter, and saw, beyond the ranks of viewers, at the fringe of the forest, a company of frontiersmen in various states of disrepair (particularly from a tonsorial perspective), and intermingled native Americans, feathers in their hair and painted bodies, their wounds more succinct, the result of the white man’s technology. He wasn’t entirely sure but he thought they might have allowed him a small nod of affirmation.

  25

  It’s a cliché that the living look back on periods a few decades ago and say that they were simpler times. Even so, it is probably true. The gap closes of course. The users of the spinning jenny doubtless sniggered at the thought of those only a century before who could only weave using a single spool at a time; the driver of the first Ford Fiesta, cruising from the showroom in 1976, would have no comprehension of the dexterity required to get the Model T home in one piece less than seventy years earlier. Furthermore, the Fiesta would not have required someone to walk in front of it waving a red flag to avoid startling sheep.

  The seventies, though. Almost primitive man. The arrival of the VCR; the attack on the Olympics because of conflict between Arabs and Israelis; a dictator in Asia launching the slaughter of his people; a nuclear accident at Three Mile Island; pop star dies on the toilet. History they say repeats itself first as farce and then as tragedy. Bad news if life has already been a farce. Replace the decade with any since and the headlines remain the same, although not all dying pop stars choose that particular location.

  TV was different. When the BBC began It’s A Knockout they had no idea about the monster they were creating. A seventies monster, but a monster for all that. Who would have thought that making pallid people dress in shorts and t-shirts and then come to some god-forsaken seaside town in order to be propelled into a freezing swimming pool under leaden skies would prove such a success with the viewers, confined to their homes by the fear of IRA bombings.

  Worse, the Europeans got their hands on it and then it went from plainly odd to utterly bizarre. For a few years, Jeux Sans Frontières was required viewing. Instead of competing in the pissing rain in Torquay, competition took place in the pissing rain in Lyons, Luxembourg, or Livorno. Rather than the comparative dignity of the t-shirt and shorts, competitors were forced to wear themed clothing, usually medieval, and footwear and heads hewn from foam rubber to ensure ineptitude. It was extreme rendition for the sad. It was also, in terms of audiences, huge.

  What it did do, of course, as an antidote to the worship of the sculpted body, was ensure that physical capability made no difference whatsoever to your performance. You could be an Olympic sprinter, but even after having had all of your blood replaced and mainlining steroids, you weren’t going any faster with four foot feet.

  Somehow, Geoffrey being the accidental conduit, this became the medium through which the entire future of humanity would be decided. Somehow, a man who spent his entire days swaddled in filthy hemp, poking his hands into the earth to discover a tuber, defined the gladiatorial field upon which the final battle between good and evil would be enacted. There’s a turnip for the books.

  The morning of the first day of the competition dawned warm, a low mist hanging in a layer above the campsite and the surrounding fields, soon burned off by the sun. Ron walked to the edge of the terrace in front of the Entertainment Complex, leaned on the fence. After a short while his wife puttered across the decking and stood next to him. She reached across his chest, skimmed the steering wheel, grabbed his chin playfully.

  “Don’t be miserable, Ron. We’re only hosting the final battle. It’s not the end of the world, is it?”

  “Humph.” he said. “I don’t get it, Eth. That woman said they don’t care. Isn’t it strange how none of us really do?”

  “I suppose so.” She stared out over the camping ground, where the final touches were being applied to the extraordinary settings for the games to take place. “I’ve just felt much more helpless since I’ve been dead than when I was alive.”

  There was a sound behind them, like a mechanical shovel scraping up a very large amount of gravel. They turned to see Guntrick theatrically clearing his throat.

  “Sorry Ron, Ethel.” he said.

  Strange, really, that this man mountain, blocking any of the light from the rising sun, who had sacked Rome and slit throats, was now apologising for interrupting their quiet conversation.

  “Hello Guntrick. Something up?”

  “Not really, Ron. Well, I don’t know. Everyone seems to think that this,” he tossed his chin in the direction of the campsite, “is going to be the end of everything.”

  “I’m not sure I know what everything really is anymore.” Guntrick looked crestfallen. In his experience, Ron was the fount of knowledge, even if they all suspected he was making it up.

  ‘What’s the worst that can happen, Guntrick, love?” asked Ethel, adopting the motherly tone she had never had the opportunity to use with children.

  Guntrick spread his arms and shrugged. He didn’t know. None of them did.

  Strand Crantum had managed to collar the attention of Atlas, who was running the Heavenly team through a series of warm up exercises.

  “Hi, Mr Lass. I’m Strand Crantum, but I guess you know me?” The musclebound son of Zeus did not display any evidence of such awareness. “I was wondering if I could have a word with God.”

  “Ask Joan of Arc, mate, she speaks to him all the time.” Strand’s head swivelled on his shoulders, eyes squinting in the sunlight.

  “Which one’s she?”

  “Joke. Why do you want to talk to him?”

  “Well, since I’m providing the TV coverage, and I’ve already interviewed The Devil…”

  “Yeah, well,” Hercules shrugged, “don’t think you’ll be getting an exclusive with God, tell you the truth.”

  “Is he here?”

  “Technically, yes.”

/>   “Where?” Hercules leaned down as if sharing a deeply held secret.

  “Everywhere.” he whispered, and lumbered off to lead the team Tai Chi.

  Strand had some vague memory of the stated ubiquity of God. In reality most of his exposure to religious theory was limited to a brief spell presenting the weather on Jimmy-Bob Pimpernickel’s evangelical TV channel, which he had soon grasped as more to do with enrichment and backstage fondling of young women than an accurate representation of Bible study. He gazed hopefully around the busy scene, but no-one jumped out at him as fitting his vague perception of how the Supreme Being should look. It was disappointing, but as a true professional, he swept his hand through his thick, unnaturally black hair and signalled to the camera to roll.

  “Hi, I’m Strand Crantum, and this is day one of the Armageddon Games. Possibly the most significant event in the history of the world and as you can see we are sitting under a high pressure area, a little zesty cirrus up there in the sky, but this final showdown between good and evil has been blessed with warm sunshine, and a very low chance of precipitation.” Behind him, hailstones the size of golf balls briefly pelted the unfortunates gathered to catch a glimpse of the main event. By the time he wrapped, they were gone, and he was able to turn and scan the scene in the conviction of the accuracy of his forecast. He was also able to gawp, along with everyone else, at the emergence of the two adjudicators.

  Marcel and Geoffrey were dressed, if a reference point would help, somewhat in the idiom of Dick Van Dyke in the carousel segment of Mary Poppins, though without the straw hat. The effect in this instance was to reduce Mary and Justin to tears of laughter.

  Geoffrey looked immensely proud to be sporting the gaily-striped blazer, white slacks, and spats. He seemed to be standing taller, shoulders back, his weathered face and greasy hair the only incongruity. Well, those and the streak of what appeared to be Rocky Road ice cream on the front of the blazer he had donned only a few minutes ago. Marcel’s face was flattened into a thunderous picture of disgust.