What made this change is hard to define. Were you, walking down the Strand, or Park Avenue, or the Champs Elysées, to happen upon various demons, satyrs, nymphs and obscure gods dressed in fat suits walking a greasy pole across an expanse of water while trying to lob large plastic hams onto a poet with a massive polystyrene opened book on his head, it is reasonable to assume you would at least stop and stare for a while before resuming your hunt for a decent espresso. Here, the spectacle was met with benign disinterest.
Marcel and Geoffrey gamely adjudicated contests in which the rules were not really adequate when the players were supernatural beings, and even where they were, adherence to them was sporadic.
“Well, what happened there, Marcel?” Crantum shoved the microphone into the Frenchman’s face. Behind him, whoever was in the poet suit for God’s team was sinking inexorably to his knees under the weight of accurately projected fake hams.
“We have had to disallow several of God’s hams,” said Marcel, with the weary tone of a man trying to make head or tail of the instructions for a piece of self-assembly furniture, “because some of them were carried to the head of the gigantic poet by sprites.” He heard himself saying the words and almost wept at what he had become.
The mini-marathon continued between each of the games. The next of Hercules’ labours was enacted in a parody of the legend that was beyond parody. When the runner around the perimeter is dressed as an Aegean stable, and covered in dung, to be cleansed only if shoved into the foaming pool, it is clear that a literal interpretation of the metaphorical offers nothing to those wondering where to place their allegiance. The efforts of all involved were rewarded with the supreme indifference of the watching crowd, who even indulged in a Mexican wave, accidentally started by a real Mexican, falling over with his arms in the air after too much home made tequila.
Crantum managed to collar Hercules (the real one, not any of the ones in rubber suits) after the final leg of the mini-marathon, a bizarre episode with contestants attempting to capture the three-headed dog Cerberus. Further cheating by the Devil’s team, enabled by the physiological accuracy of the Cerberus suits, was undermined when the light side realised that their opponents had slipped in the real thing, slavering and snarling at the beginning of his run. God’s ‘Hercules’ didn’t bother to extend the bungee towards the beast, satisfied to simply whistle and shout ‘Fetch’, sending a branch arcing over the opponent, at which point the stupid mutt leapt into the pool of its own accord.
“Well, Hercules, that must have been quite something, huh? Watching your life’s work enacted by dedicated, if supernatural, athletes?”
“Not really.”
“Brought back a few memories, huh? The Hesperides! How’d’ya like them apples?”
“Bollocks.”
“I’m Strand Crantum, it’s fine and sunny here, and that was Hercules. Back to the studio.”
The second last game involved a tin bull on a railway track, propelled by the efforts of two members of a team furiously winding handles to make it go at speed. Their opponent, clad in leather chaps and fringed shirt, had to wait for the ‘bull’ to pass a certain point, and then pursue and mount the bull, pulling back on its horns to stop it. Failure resulted, naturally, in a dowsing. The side of heaven, even after the result of the mini-marathon, was now a point ahead in the overall scoring, and unbeknownst to the others lazing on the terrace, God had made an appearance, presumably with a view to running triumphantly onto the field as the final point was secured and absorbing the adulation of the watching billions.
Such was both the level of disinterest of those lounging on the terrace, and indeed their inability to keep track of the many people who wandered in and out, paring wood for Thomas, mixing paint for Matisse, baling out Lucky Obie’s, that He slid in unnoticed.
“What an unutterable load of toss.” said Justin. Heads nodded, for him a rare display of agreement. “What’s the point?”
“The point,” said a youth, a God, “is that all of this decides whether the future of mankind is in the hands of a benevolent, loving father, or the incarnation of evil.”
“Is it, though?” Mary thought aloud. “That benevolent loving father lets terrible things happen. Wars, abuse of women and children, disease, starvation-“
The youth cut her off before she could continue with this litany. “He can’t control everything. He gave you- us- free will.”
“You don’t need free will to get malaria. You just need a mosquito, which He apparently also created.”
“It seemed like a good idea at the time.” Heads turned to look at the thin young man, who swallowed and wished he had come here as someone whose voice had broken. Some had an inkling that this gangly adolescent may not be exactly who or what he seemed, but whereas once they may well have pursued this idea, the warmth, the situation, the ludicrous nature of what they were seeing suppressed inquisitiveness.
“It’s all redundant anyway, isn’t it?” Justin lounged almost horizontal in his chair, “All this. Doesn’t matter to anyone.”
“It must matter.” The thin young man was energised, “Surely everyone has to care whether good or evil triumphs?”
“Used to matter, mate, “ said Justin, sipping his beer, “when you could tell the difference.”
A shadow was cast over the assembled group, as Guntrick ambled back onto the terrace. He spread his arms across the chairs in which Justin and Mary were lounging.
“All be over in a few minutes, whatever.” He cocked his head towards the arena. “Then we’ll know, won’t we? The lads are ready to charge, anyway, given the chance.”
“Charge what?” asked the youth.
“Oh, anything really. We’re not massively discerning when it comes to charging. When you’ve been hanging around here forever, the chance to have a bit of a charge comes as a welcome relief.”
The young man looked away for a moment to where Apollo, who in an early example of proto-Soviet job creation bore responsibility for both plague and healing, was wrestling in vain with the horns of the bull. Its acceleration was unchecked, and the pretty god, blond curls flowing from beneath a ten-gallon hat, was launched over the head of the contraption and plunged into the grubby pool.
The two hunched deep red demons operating the bull high-fived and cackled.
“They’re on fire, those two.” Justin said.
“S’pose they are.” the youth agreed, begrudgingly.
“No, really. Look.”
He was right. Such was their excitement that the demons had burst into flames, and their continued high-pitched laughter was punctuated with further small explosions, from wings, tails, or cloven hooves.
“He’s going to need some new demons.” Mary said.
“Don’t worry, he’s got bloody millions of them.” muttered the young man.
At the end of the game, Strand shoved his microphone into the face of Geoffrey, who shuffled pieces of paper in his hands, with a look on his face familiar to those who knew him. It was the mixture of panic and vague recognition he wore when he knew something should make sense but was damned if he could find it. Behind him, Marcel was desperately trying to keep his man-made fibres from coming into contact with the sparks borne on the breeze from the still popping and smouldering demons.
“So. Geoffrey what a dramatic rodeo contest there!”
“Yes.” Geoffrey stared again at each piece of paper in turn.
“And what was the score in the end?”
“Well, God got two. That’s two, isn’t it?” He held one of the sheets in front of Strand, who nodded.
“And the Devil got more than two.”
“How many more?”
“Some more.”
“Well, there you have it. The old scoreboard shows that Satan has edged into the lead with only a single game to go. Drama all the way to the end! Could be all over for the influence of the dark side or just the end of civilisation as we know it. And the weather’s set fair for the final game. This is it. Go
od guys or bad guys. Who is gonna get the upper hand?”
“I don’t know yet.” said Geoffrey, a man who would ever remain oblivious to the existence of the rhetorical question.
28
Unbeknownst to Strand Crantum, who throughout his broadcasting career brought unbridled animation to bulletins about no weather whatsoever, his enthusiastic announcement that the end was nigh was met throughout the Afterworld with consistent disregard. This was, after all, a population who had met their end only to find that they hadn’t, and then waited, in some cases for decades, for it to turn up.
There were crowds around the giant screens, but their attention to what was being broadcast was intermittent, the screens being treated rather more like the meeting point at an airport than a view of the tense and titanic struggle for control of life itself. Around the perimeter of Everland, where the live action was taking place before their very eyes, the gathered multitude similarly dipped in and out of the fray, certainly much more enlivened by the site of combusting demons than gods in boots and spurs failing to stop a mechanical bull.
On the terrace, as below them pieces of stage set were shifted to make way for the final contest, they had caught the desultory mood, lounging in the warm afternoon air (as forecast by Strand), sipping drinks, swapping stories swapped many times before. Only the young man, who each assumed someone else knew, kept his attention on the arena as it was prepared. He watched the contestants pacing nervously, grimaced as the smoking remains of previous players were shovelled into a bin and doused with water, noted Marcel trying to explain to Geoffrey for the literal millionth time the difference between an ‘8’ and a ‘3’. Throughout, though, he could feel a rising annoyance at the spectators’ inattention, and the chattering and occasional bursts of laughter from those on the terrace. He knew he needed to stay calm; he would need all of his energy for whatever transpired when the final game was up. Even so, a burst of sniggering from behind him whipped his head around.
“Do you have any idea what is happening here? Do you have an inkling what this might mean?”
“Take it easy, young man.” Ron saw that the youth was red in the face, and his eyes appeared to have lost all colour. “We know. It just isn’t really anything to do with us.”
“Nothing to do with you?” he spluttered. “How can you say that?”
“It’s obvious. We’ve been hanging around here for years. Nothing to do with us. People have no idea where the ones they loved when they were alive might be. Nothing to do with them. Now this. Games. Little battles. It’s irrelevant. We can’t change it, can we?”
“Well that’s because the affairs of gods are infinitely more important.”
“Really?” Ron said, “That must be why they need to dress in foam rubber suits and throw buckets of water over each other.”
“Ron.” Ethel placed her hand gently on the sleeve of the beige windcheater. “Calm down now. You know about your blood pressure.”
“I don’t know if I’ve still got a blood pressure.”
“Well, excitement has never been good for you. He’s young, he should be more bothered.”
“He’s dead, Eth, like the rest of us.”
“That’s just where you’re wrong.” The young man was about to say more, but at that moment the whistle blew to signify the start of the final game, and he whipped his head around to watch the action. The others followed suit a little more reluctantly, Ron wondering what the youth had meant, but prepared to wait until this was all over.
It was a classic of the format; brainless slapstick now cast as a metaphor for life, or the face-off between good and evil.
A representative of each team, unencumbered for once by any costume frippery, slid with some trepidation onto a fat pole suspended across the swimming pool (which by now was lathered in grubby foam and bits of demon). The pole itself comprised a series of rounded blocks threaded onto a single core, so that each could rotate independently. Hard enough to try to stay out of the drink under such circumstances, but even more difficult when your opponent is given license to smash you with a large foam-rubber ended stick, like a giant Q-tip. By such means would be decided the fates of men.
The game was best of five legs, each requiring a different player. The first was a grudge match between Archangel Gabriel and a previous acquaintance. Abezethibou had been a comrade before his fall, and sneered at his opponent as they faced off before the contest.
“Still licking the old man’s arse, Gabe?”
“Nothing to what I hear you have to do, Abe.”
“You’re goin’ down, white boy.”
“That’s it! That’s what I heard you have to do.”
There was a little pushing and shoving, the pair kept apart by Marcel and Geoffrey, who was trying to simultaneously stop a fight and offer worship. Separated, the pair engaged in a little wing-flexing, Gabriel’s pair splendid, fully-fledged and bright white easily outdoing the single grubby, singed wing of his rival, had this only been a peacock contest.
The trash-talking preamble rather outshone the actual affray, both being disqualified early on for use of the aforementioned wings, an infraction that had never been an issue when Weston-Super-Mare played Hastings all those years before.
“So!” Crantum’s delivery never wanted for an exclamation mark. He was one of the few people who could have made persistent drizzle sound like the moon landings. “Four ties to go here in the Ultimate Showdown, and Gard needs three of those to maintain his dominion over the nat’ral world.” He squinted towards the cue cards. “You would have to be here to believe the unbelievable tension in the air. It’s beyond belief.” The last was extemporized and he was rewarded with a cutting flash of hands from the director.
“So,” he said, trying to hide the disappointment at finding his creativity so constrained, “back to the greasy pole.”
Back to the greasy pole indeed. They sat astride the rotating beam, these gods and monsters, and pummelled each other with fat-ended batons. They snarled abuse and venom, clung to the structures between their thighs and, when subjected to a real a priori truth- gravity- myths and legends plummeted into the filthy foam that the pool had become. It just so happened that the myths and legends doused in the mire so far were shadows from nightmares and visions of horror.
“That pool’s going to take weeks to clean.” Ron said, his lip almost quivering at the gradual ruination of his dream.
“Oh,” Ethel rubbed his shoulder gently, “I don’t really think the pool was why people came, Ron.”
The second leg went deeply dark. Nosferatu didn’t even try to hit his opponent, Kali, who had been selected for her quadridextrousness. It turned out that four arms don’t help when you only have one weapon, and in any case the guy at the other end just stares at you with those eyes that are red-rimmed but strangely warming, and hold on, what’s that tingle in my groin, and ooh, I think he can see into my soul, and I’m sliding, I’m sliding…
Nosferatu raised a single fist and yelled, “Come On!” as Kali floated in the pool in a pre-orgasmic miasma.
The youth was nervous. He had at least found a seat and now sprawled backwards, his knee bouncing, biting his nails.
“Oh, man, this is so tense.”
He watched the next two bouts, twitching from his semi-recumbent position to leaning sharply forward in his chair, turning away in despair each time a seemingly terminal blow was landed with the foam rubber Q-Tips, clenched his knees when one of God’s representatives appeared to begin to roll on the hinged poles, and flung his arms into the air in triumph as the next two Devil players plunged sidelong into the sludge beneath them.
The watching members of the teams seemed to be living each cut and thrust with the actual players, but these apart the audience remained disassociated. Even before the last two combatants were introduced, the viewing public had decided that conversation, music, and play was possibly of more interest.
The young man felt a presence at his shoulder, and turned from the c
lenched position he had adopted to look into the face of Mary.
“Bit personal, is it?” she said.
He nodded.
“I get that.”
“How could you possibly get that?” His voice was low, a growl.
“Excuse me, I don’t understand why you think I wouldn’t.”
“You have no idea.”
The voice coming from the thin frame was unreal. Even though spoken low, its timbre was such that everyone on the terrace not so much heard it as felt it, and they all stopped their casual interplay to absorb what was being said.
“I have every idea.” she said. My life wasn’t great, but it was mine. Then something brought me here. For most of the people here it was real, actual death. For me, it was Death; an inept Death.” She glanced up. The same inept Death was watching from the far corner of the terrace.
“Detail. Grains of sand.” He said.
“Add up, don’t they, grains of sand?”
The young man, his face coloured, a flood of red rising from his cheeks into eyes now roiling with dark swirls, gripped tight to the arms of his chair. He stared out to where Geoffrey and Marcel were leading out the contestants for the final Final Showdown.
“Do you…” He seemed to be trying to control his voice, which threatened to burst into a roar of unimaginable proportion, “do you know who I am?”
“Oh yes.” She said. “I know exactly who you are. They probably know who you are.” She waved an arm at the multitudes surrounding the arena. “You might want to consider whether any of us really care.”
The finale was predictable in some ways. Satan’s final player made his forerunners look like a character from Beatrix Potter. Sun Tzu ran out of options once Nike withdrew with a migraine and so had hoped it would all be over by now. On the one side was a demon able to spontaneously sprout limbs, shoot fire, breathe breath so foul that anyone with a nose could be doubled up in pain. This wasn’t the biggest problem for the seraphim on the other side, edging his way onto the rotating support, awkwardly pulled along on one of his three pairs of wings. When Marcel blew the whistle for the game to begin, the scale of the mismatch became abundantly clear.
The Complete Afternet: All 3 Volumes In One Place (The Afternet) Page 87
