Chapter 1
Humans have an arrogance of sole existence. Beyond our world, there is nothing.
We are bordered by our walls, by our frontiers, by our seas, by the clouds and ultimately, by space.
After this, we all know, lie a few dead, inhospitable planets, dying stars, buggered satellites and bits of dead spacemen.
Possibly though, just possibly, we might condescend to Heaven, but we can’t get a spaceship there or have a camera pointing to paradise, so we imagine it as we want; a world apart from ours, the desert island of our death, something to look forward to that, for once, we can’t screw up.
Then imagine a white, a pure, soft, smooth, brilliant, endless white. Within this explosion of hypnagogic purity lie the ultimate shades of every colour, colours that the dull blind eye of the human doesn’t see. Red in the disguise of harlot scarlet, of lush crimson, sweet wine burgundy and deepest bloody rose. Chameleon blue, fading from the depths of the sea to the palest eyes of the new-born and a green that sweeps from bitter bile to lush, fertile, life-affirming emerald, each colour presented on the canvas to the dreamer’s eye as it was in Van Gogh’s mind.
If you could pass through the myriad colours of a rainbow, as a spirit passes through the rings of Saturn on its journey to eternity, imagine how your mind and soul would expand as you tried to contain the ten million colours known to man, each one minutely and infinitely changed by every trick of the light and every unique eye until, before you, stood an infinite wall of colour.
Arnie Layne, if he was honest, was really a bit fed up with it. Of course, it was nice, very nice, but that was it really, just nice. All the colours were lovely, a gardener’s fantasy.
And the parties, they were nice too.
Everything was really...nice.
But the colours were beginning to give him migraines, they were just too bright. They burrowed like worms through his eyes and into his brain until he felt as if he had broken, scrambled eggs inside his skull, whipped into frothy uselessness by the battering whisk of beauty. He never remembered this from when he was born. He didn’t remember being completely overwhelmed by how his brand new eyes were forced to take in every fresh, blinding colour that assaulted his senses after the quiet warmth of his mother’s womb.
And the parties. Oh, sweet Lord, the parties!
They were all the same; polite conversation around homemade, low-alcohol wine, about what you were before, what you would like to be and wasn’t dying just the most exquisite experience and Genghis Khan wasn’t as bad as they say, he was just confused and Stalin was soooo naughty, but he really cared about that moustache....
Always interesting, but always the same and so bloody patronising. It was as if he had ascended, not into Heaven, but into some left wing social worker’s goody-goody charity event.
He had met Stalin. He had told him what he thought.
‘I am forgiven,’ said Stalin.
‘Not by me,’ countered Arnie.
‘I forgive you for not forgiving,’ Stalin said with warm, wet eyes.
‘Knob,’ said Arnie as Stalin walked away.
Stalin lifted a hand and waved cheerfully in retreat. ‘I forgive you,’ he called back.
Such was Heaven.
Chapter 2
The sun, wherever it had been during the day, probably sulking behind some bank of grumpy grey cloud, refusing to move until somebody had noticed its obvious beauty, had gone, defeated into submission after a day of trying to continue its dreary work of brightening up the hum-drum lives of those depressed little creatures that scrabbled about their duties on that rather grubby little planet Earth.
Sunset had fallen with a thump. No glorious light or myriad of colour spread across clear twilight skies, just a sort of totally pissed-off drop behind the musty, decaying buildings, to go on a search for a more responsive part of the world.
In one of those musty buildings, now covered by exhaust fumes and factory waste, was a man who sat in an armchair, can of bitter in hand, and stared blankly at the television screen.
He might have been dead.
This was not a totally unreasonable assumption to anybody who didn’t know this man, for he never moved, not even apparently to breathe, nor to blink. The one giveaway was that occasionally his right arm would move mouthwards, pour the contents of a can down a seemingly bottomless gorge and pull another can from a thirty-two pack placed handily at the side of the chair.
Minimal movement, minimal effort, minimal brain.
He was wearing a vest that, struggle as it might, could not quite reach his trouser line and left for all to see a vastly adipose layer of flesh, thinly disguised by a beer-sodden carpet of hair, which led to a dark, cavernous navel, filled by loose stitching from said decaying vest, crispy flakes of pizza and other less pleasing life forms.
The trail of beer scrambled its way up the vest to a loosely swinging chin. The chin was covered by three-day-old stubble. From there it moved lazily onto another chin and then finally another chin, sticky to the touch, if anyone would dare to touch it, then onto a moist mouth shrouded in two soggy blankets of ruddy flesh. Behind his fat wet lips lay, like a rotten eel, a foul-smelling, furred tongue, dead to taste, dead it was commonly thought, to movement, as between it, the vocal chords and the mouth, it rarely produced any more than a primitive grunt.
Past the squashed, previously broken nose, lay two piggy-like vacant eyes, the whites of which were interspersed with streams of red, rather like a strawberry ripple, but the kind of strawberry ripple that would cause the eater to hesitate, certain that the veins of strawberry were actually veins of blood.
The salt and pepper hair, what was left of it, lost, no doubt, through scratching when asked about the deep meaning of existence, sat upon a sweaty forehead, totally unfurrowed by passing life, probably totally oblivious to passing life.
This was the landlord.
He is irrelevant, but worth mentioning for the fact that he was so extremely revolting. A superb example of the most basic form of human life, a living specimen of post-amoebal existence, a stumbled step back down the evolutionary ladder. A real ego boost to anybody with a bad self-image.
He was also Charlie Makepiece’s landlord.
Charlie Makepiece believed firmly in fate. He believed every time he fell asleep and every time he awoke, that fate was with him. He believed that just around the corner was the ultimate surprise, the package that fate, with its quirky sense of humour, had hidden from him these past fifty-three years.
In that package was money and all that it represented; sun, sea and women, in any order, a house on the beach, the saunter along hot, white sands to pass the day with the local fishermen and hear stories of their battles to land their catch. Then an evening stroll, as the sun unclothed and revealed itself in all its splendour before slipping seductively into the depths of the sea, which would take him to the local cafe for some of the young, acidic wine, yielded by the nearby vineyard and some of the fish that he had seen throwing themselves against the land only hours before.
Then, to round the night off, a casual, seemingly serendipitous, conversation with some buxom señorita, the wordplay, the meeting of the eyes and the touch of finger tips, to finally take her to wherever her dreams and his money would carry them. When she was totally captivated by his earthy charms, he would take her back to his web and devour her as the spider would his fly in a night of total, uninhibited, unbridled love. It was a schoolboy’s fantasy, an old man’s fantasy, come true.
Come the new day, as the sun spread its wakening arms through his windows, she would quietly leave. No ties, no complications, no tears.
Fate, however, had not yet played that hand. It had kept it firmly out of Charlie’s reach, hidden behind its back, leaving poor old Charlie to be yet another victim of circumstance.
Charlie tutted at the self-pitying thought as he lay in bed, hands clasped behind his head, coffee cup precariously balanced on his chest.
He was no victim of circumstance. At least he could say that. He had always been in control of his own circumstances, they were self-created and he could live with them, was content with them. Not happy, but content. As long as fate was still on his side.
He took a sip of coffee and reflected on the previous night. His left arm reached out and fumbled for a half bottle of White Horse on his bedside table. The bedside table was actually an old wooden chair, but he imagined it to be a bedside table.
He deftly unscrewed the lid with a single hand and poured the contents of the bottle into the coffee. Maybe half a teaspoonful came out. Charlie stared at it with irritation, then philosophically shrugged.
‘Do not,’ he said aloud, ‘allow the things that you cannot change to fuck up the start of your day.’ He threw the bottle across the room. It shattered on the wall above the already full waste bin. ‘Consider yourself,’ he said with sleepy gravity, ‘defeated.’
It had been a successful night, but decidedly dodgy.
As he had climbed from the window of the large, isolated, detached house, he had knocked a vase from the sill. It was glass and it was empty and Charlie had been too busy looking at other things to notice it.
It had fallen towards the flowerbed beneath the window in the kind of slow motion that no one believes exists until they actually see it happen. He thought it was going to be okay. He thought its fall would be cushioned by the inevitable lush flora and thick layer of expensive fertiliser that the gardeners put on these posh beds. As luck would have it, there were no flowers or thick bed of fertiliser. There was, however, a drain cover.
He reached out a hand, but it was too late as the vase fell slowly onto the rusted metal and shattered. The noise had sounded like a twenty-one-gun salute and Charlie, surprised at his clumsiness, had nearly followed it out of the window, probably to be speared by one of those hideous concrete angels or a statue of Eros for which the wealthy had such a penchant.
He could picture the scene. The fall of the vase, the undignified tumble from the window as he cast himself upon the vengeful arrow of the spiteful angel.
Charlie laughed at the absurdity of it. As it was, he had been bloody lucky. The homeowners must have been comatose, fallen asleep after one too many gins in front of Match of the Day after their passionless five minutes of Saturday sex.
No! No! I won’t have that, he thought. It had been a classy area. These were people of taste and influence and background. They would never have fallen asleep tanked up on beer. No! Only the best for the likes of them. Wine, a good Riesling probably, along with an upright Channel Four documentary about the lower classes (to help them keep ‘in touch’) and a silent, passionless ejaculation that neither of them really felt anymore, but nonetheless was in keeping with, as far as they knew, what their closest acquaintances were doing. Then, the pièce de résistance, a couple of Temazepam prescribed by their pet GP to help them forget their soggy moment of intimacy.
Still, thanks to that overpaid lap-dog of a doctor, Charlie had got the goods (a decent Blu-Ray player, assorted eighteen carat knick-knacks and some rather passable Clarice Cliffe) and by eleven that morning had fenced them in exchange for a Bible-sized bundle of tenners and returned home to escape into the shroud of sleep.
Tonight he had agreed to work with somebody else, out of town, on what he had been promised would be a profitable job.
He preferred to work alone. He was by nature a loner and didn’t like to have to rely upon others. People were too fickle, too easily broken by conscience or law. Not that he didn’t respect both of these, he only stole from those he knew could afford it, but not everybody thought like him, not everybody could be trusted. Experience had taught him that. In trust you stood, still in trust you fell.
He drank his coffee down to the last Scottish drop and prepared to get himself ready for the day and night ahead.
Chapter 3
Arnie was bored. He was at another party and had just finished talking to Adolf Hitler about Mein Kampf and was on the verge of dying of that boredom, but couldn’t because, as luck would have it, he was already dead. That was the problem with being dead. There was no escape.
It had taken him a long time to find out how Hitler had managed to join this rather exclusive club. This was, after all, Heaven. Surely some sort of exclusivity existed otherwise, where was the reward?
Eventually he had, by pure chance, bumped into Eva Braun at some soirée and had enquired.
It transpired that, at the end of the Second World War, dear old Adolf had taken some poison down this rather plush bunker of his, but all that had happened after two hours of waiting was that he had let go some monstrous belch and continued on life’s inevitable course. His tablet had been out of date.
Even eight and a half metres below ground, he could hear the onslaught above.
Throwing his pride to one side he had turned to Eva and calmly said, ‘Shit, Eva, vot shall I do now?’
She, being the brainy one of the two, simply replied, ‘Darlink, vy don’t you shoot yourself?’, upon which he took out his gun, put it to the side of his head and pulled the trigger.
Well, being more used to painting and shouting at people, all he managed to do was shoot his earlobe into oblivion and shorten his eyelashes. At this point he said, ‘Oh, God help me’, took aim and blew himself to kingdom come, quite literally.
Eva, being rather distressed at seeing the abstract painting created by Adolf’s brains on the white bunker walls, along with her awareness of the rapid approach of less than friendly allied forces, also said ‘Mein Gott’, and followed him, much against her will.
She’d had plans to open up a hat shop in Vienna. She had even made a downpayment on a small but upmarket premises.
However, that aside, it was, it seemed, that ill-meant appeal to God that had saved Adolf.
‘Selfish bastard!’ she had fumed as she stormed off. ‘I could have been big in hats.’
Still, in amongst all the confusion (the end of the Reich etc) at least he had got the blame for killing her as well - on Earth, if not in Heaven. Worst of all in many people’s eyes, he also got blamed for killing his faithful hound, Blondi, viewed by many as a greater sin than the decimation of Europe. The truth was though, that Eva had given the dog the cyanide capsule that Adolf insisted she carried about with her at all times, ‘just in case’. She had hated that dog more than Mussolini (he had once pinched her in the front room. It had hurt) and had spent many a long, dull dinner party kicking it under the table as it scrounged for leftovers.
Arnie snapped out of his reflections, nodded courteously at Queen Victoria and started to leave for his engagement.
One of the bosses had said Saint Peter wanted to see him as something ‘rather unusual had cropped up’. At that point, Arnie’s stomach had leaped into his ethereal mouth and proceeded to produce a harmony of butterflies for the next two days.
What in Heaven’s name did Saint Peter want to see him for? He hadn’t done anything wrong that he could remember. Sure, he’d thought about things. He had almost been tempted to corner Samuel Becket and ask him to return the two and a half hours of his life he’d wasted waiting for Godot.
This was purely as a release from his boredom, though. He didn’t seriously think of doing it. The truth was that Heaven did not meet most people’s expectations. What was it Ian Gillan had sang? No Laughing In Heaven. If he had known he was serious…
Anyway, even that pompous, officious little man who spent his time leaning on the Pearly Gates greeting those poor surprised buggers with his superior gaze couldn’t read his thoughts.
So, what was it? What in the name of well, God, was it all about? No matter, he would find out in a minute.
That was another thing. He hadn’t even got to meet God. You would think, with all that praying, all that calling out to Him, all those buildings and those hymns and those monks and nuns, that he would at least give you a wave as you landed. It had indeed, been easier to meet Elvis. What a sweet guy. Tubby, but sweet.
The long corridor, as white and irritating as ever, was surrounded on all sides by a mist of clouds. This was one of the few things that actually impressed him about Heaven – the clouds. They really did look as good and as soft as they did from Earth. Of course, up here, one could walk upon them, but they were silent and your feet felt as if they were never quite touching something. It was an almost sensation. There was a lot of that here, much like the low-alcohol beer.
At the end of the corridor was a large, oaken door. It appeared to be medieval, thick and impenetrable, painted with the patina of infinite years of use. When approached from a distance, which one had no choice but to do, it started off as a small, insignificant blob in the distance. There was the impression that, as one strode like an innocent lamb through the rose-fragranced mists, that there could be nothing but the pure light of goodness beyond the door. As one got closer, however, there came upon the approachee the realisation that the door was not quite so benign as you once thought, that it towered darkly, and that it wasn’t roses the innocent lamb could smell, but rosemary and mint sauce.
Arnie knocked on the heavy oak door and waited for a reply.
He shivered. Odd, he thought. He could not recall ever having shivered in Heaven. God, after all, was the perfect thermostat.
After a moment, the door slid noiselessly open and revealed the great saint sitting at a relaxed slant in a wicker chair behind a glass topped wicker table. Upon the table was what looked suspiciously like a Margarita. The rim of the glass was frosted with salt and a slice of lime was hinged smilingly upon the rim. Yes, concluded Arnie. It was a Margarita.
The saint wiggled a finger at a point five yards in front of him, solemnity etched into his granite brow. He wore flip-flops.
‘Sit down, Arnold.’
Arnie grabbed a lump of nimbus and moulded it into a chair. As he did this, Peter leaned forward and, his eyes closed, took a long, slow sip of the drink. His face puckered. ‘Sharp,’ he said with a satisfied nod.
Arnie sat down. He felt as if he was almost sitting on something, in the same way that he had been almost walking on something.
The saint tugged at his beard and twirled the end of it round his index finger. It was an annoying habit, tuned to perfection, a ploy used to instil the greatest amount of awe in the shortest space of time. It worked. He peered fiercely at Arnie. All the grey hair in the universe would not at this moment have lent him an ounce of benevolence.
‘We have a discrepancy, Arnold.’ He held up a hand to combat any protests. ‘Nothing too major, that can’t be put right, but it’s one of those little things that has to be dealt with, smoothed over, taken care of.’
Euphemisms, always those bloody euphemisms. Arnie tried to remain implacable.
The saint continued.
‘You led a good life, Arnie. You were always kind to people, gave to charities, even saved a cat’s life.’ Arnie smiled the sad, helpless smile of a piglet saying goodbye to its mother. ‘But, sheerly by accident, a completely unintentional occurrence, a discrepancy in your record has come to light. Naturally, this could not be passed over...' he smiled glibly, 'so to speak.’
Arnie tried desperately to think of what he could have done wrong. A discrepancy? What the hell was a discrepancy? What did that mean? That was anything from littering to...to what? Where did discrepancies end and sins begin? Would it be reasonable to say that skipping a red light was a discrepancy and that, for example, bestiality fell on the side of sin? If you skip a red light though, you could cause untold damage. He bit his lip and reassessed his thoughts.
Littering. Stick with littering. Suppose you threw away a piece of gum? Yes. Littering with gum could be viewed as a discrepancy. Unless of course a pigeon or a dog or a badger choked on it. That would, in its own way, be murder. All living things and all that. That was as bad as skipping the lights, wasn't it? And for all the pros and cons of bestiality, it rarely ended in death, if at all. So which was the sin and which was the discrepancy?
He can’t have done anything wrong. He had even given that flea-ridden tom cat the kiss of life, never mind the scratches he had suffered after the cat had woken, assuming its dignity to be at risk.
Peter coughed. 'Stop thinking would you, Arnold? Just for a moment.' Arnie sat to attention. Peter opened a buff folder (even in Heaven, folders were buff) and ran his eyes quickly over the contents.
'Do you remember a Miss Flanagan?’ The emphasis was on the Miss. ‘Rather nice little Irish girl in the admin department?’
Arnie felt himself flush. Oh, Lord, he thought, even I had forgotten about that. Bloody red tape.
‘I can see you do,' said Peter. 'Several times you committed an indiscretion with her, Arnie. Once, so I understand, in the third floor stationery cupboard. Anyway, she disappeared to the backwoods of Ireland after the,’ he consulted his notes, ‘yes, after the thirty-first indiscretion.' He looked at Arnie from beneath large, severe, grey eyebrows. 'In your manager's office. On the desk. Well, she was on the desk, you remained standing.'
'Do you watch everything?' asked Arnie.
'Only the interesting stuff. Did you ever ask yourself why she left, Arnold?’
Arnie looked blankly at his boss. He was flabbergasted. His jaw hung loosely, dislocated by the right hook of revelation. He grunted. ‘I just thought she was bored with the job. She was always ambitious. I...’ He tailed off miserably.
‘The girl was pregnant, Arnold. She was to give birth, bring new life into the world, drop a sprog...’
Arnie raised his hand. ‘I know what pregnant means. Thank you.’ He counted to five. Slowly. ‘Why didn’t she tell me? I could have helped her out.’ There was panic in his voice. ‘I could have helped her look after it.’
‘Not it, Arnie. Them.’
Oh, God, he thought, twins. ‘Alright, both of them.’
Peter cut in. ‘Six of them, Arnold. A large bundle of unhappiness thrust into her ever-open lap! Hadn’t you ever heard of contraception? Couldn’t you have done something to prevent this massive blob on an otherwise unblobbed copybook?’
‘She was a catholic,’ retorted Arnie, sensing a route of escape. ‘She even took the skins off her sausages at meal-times, for goodness sake!’
‘Her Catholicism, however inconvenient to your bestial urges, is irrelevant. You sinned, not just once, but thirty-one times. That’s a little more than a casual grope in an alleyway, Arnold!’ Peter snorted in annoyance. He pressed his hands into mock prayer and sighed. 'The poor woman. She gained thirty years overnight. She had babies clinging to her tits like a disgruntled sow.'
Peter closed his eyes and pressed his folded hands to his lips. The sentence was to be passed, nothing could reverse it; once you fell, you stayed fallen, weighed down by a thousand moral bricks.
Peter drained the remains of his margarita. ‘Arnold, I have come to a decision.’ Arnie gulped. ‘I’m afraid we have to demote you.’ He pointed downwards. More euphemisms. ‘Unfortunately, after speaking with Nick, it seems he’s a bit full at the moment. Can’t take anybody for a couple of months and purgatory’s packed. So I’ve had an idea.’
He smiled a saintly smug smile. Arnie wanted to hit it. ‘We are going to put you to the test. The sort of thing that will tell us if you are worthy to stay here.’ He paused to select his words, to give himself time to load his verbal weaponry to cause maximum effect. ‘There is a man on Earth who is possibly worthy to come here but who, like you, has committed various indiscretions. It is quite simple. You save him, you save yourself. It is the decision of my colleagues and myself,' he pointed up, 'and the Big Guy, that you be earthbound until this worthiness is proved. Or not, as the case may be.’
Arnie’s chair, by coincidence, melted, the cloud giving a soft ‘wumph’ as it evaporated.
‘Earthbound!’ he spluttered. ‘Earthbound! You can’t do that to me. You can’t send me back there.’ The panic became hysteria. He considered begging, suicide, which was not really an option, anything. He peered over the wicker table with the glass top from his position on the floor and looked at Saint Peter. ‘When?’
Peter glanced casually at his watch. ‘Oh, half an hour.’
Arnie screamed silently. His brain tried to claw its way out of his head, to shake itself back into reality, to crawl back inside and then curl back into its peaceful sleep.
This could not happen. He was dead. He had a right to be dead, he had earned it. He’d worked damned hard on that shitty little planet to be dead.
'I want to appeal,' he said.
Peter smiled. 'To whom?'
'I want to see your manager.'
Peter sat up in the wicker chair. 'This isn't McDonald's, Arnie. You aren't going to tell God that your Double Delight Bacon Heart Attack Breakfast Special wasn't up to scratch.' He leaned forward. 'This is not about a cold, flat, grey burger, Arnold. This is about your soul.' He picked up a cocktail mixer from beneath the glass topped wicker table and gave it a vigorous shake. 'There are no refunds.'
Arnie glared at Peter, who was by now salting the rim of his glass.
'But...'
Peter didn't look up. 'Buts are full of shit, Arnie. The chit-chat is done. Paul will give you the details.’ He waved a dismissive hand. ‘Now go away.’
Arnie stood up, peered at what he now considered to be the biggest bearded bastard in the universe and left the room.
‘Shit!’ he said.