by Glenn Myers
The bit after the credits
In the first edition, the following chapter appeared as a prologue to the whole book.
For the second edition, I put it here, lest it prevents readers of a nervous disposition from clicking the buy button, or making their way to the sales counter, just at that delicate moment of indecision.
One reviewer wrote that this first chapter ‘threw a bit too much weird at you all at once (penguins which pull your soul around are an example).’ I figured though that now, after coming this far with Jamie and co, you won’t fear even the pengubim.
The action starts a few moments after the end of Paradise. It also sets you up for the second book in the series, The Wheels of the World.
‘So this is my soul?’
‘I’ve seen worse sir,’ said Stub.
‘You’d better lead on.’
We tramped through cans, bottles and takeaway cartons around the outer edge of the Dome. It was raining. The tall spirit ahead of me wrapped his overcoat around himself and pulled his hat further onto his head. I followed his long strides rather like a Yorkshire terrier trying to keep up.
Stub’s moody stride across the landscape lost a bit of dignity each time he sank into the rubbish. Sometimes he set off a mini-avalanche and went whoa with flail of skinny arms.
He didn’t find it funny.
Eventually we put most of the rubbish behind us and started climbing out of the valley that housed the Dome.
‘It will be all right, won’t it?’ I asked.
‘So I am led to believe sir,’ Stub replied.
Looking back I could see it was a pleasure-dome, brown at the edges, tacky with a swimming pool and restaurants. Beyond the Dome lay the stain of a town and further hills.
Climbing onto the ridge, we came out from under the shower-cloud and for the first time got a clear view of the sky above and the landscape beyond. I gaped.
The landscape that was my soul was floating between two waterfalls of colour that stretched from the horizon almost to the top of the sky.
‘This region of the heavenly places is called Vanity Fair, sir,’ said Stub.
It took a while for the colours to resolve themselves.
‘It’s a mall,’ I said eventually.
‘Yessir,’ said Stub.
What a fantastic place. Shops were piled on top of each other, layer after layer, filling the sky on both sides. Signs jutted out. Goods spilled onto marble ledges. Vast open doors beckoned. ‘In a way, it’s The Mall, sir,’ continued Stub.
‘It’s like the Grand Canyon for shopping,’ I said.
All the famous high street names were there. They were sliding past on either side as the great landscape that was my soul glided forward.
‘Osama’s!’ Back on earth, my favourite Afghan restaurant had closed down. Here it seemed to be thriving. The wide frontage of the shop stretched back into dark depths where, under whirring fans, a celestial version of the Giant Surly Bread Chef conjured his wondrous flatbread from doughballs and meat. ‘Can’t we go in?’ I asked.
‘No sir,’ said Stub.
‘Just put my nose in the door?’
‘That’s not why we’re here, sir,’ said Stub.
‘Some aren’t even shops at all,’ I said, my eye still ranging up and down the levels of Vanity Fair. A shopfront was busy with editors and journos playing with gadgets, and I recognized it as a 3-D version of one of my favourite magazines. A political review was next door. I spotted a theatre and a camping exhibition.
‘May I suggest you look straight in front of you?’ asked Stub.
‘But this is fantastic.’
‘Sir.’
‘If we must.’
I pulled my gaze away from the Old Fashioned Internet Sweetshop which on earth only existed as a website but here in the heavens took up three candied storeys.
‘The task in hand, sir.’
Below me my soul-landscape sloped down to a cricket pitch and a cliff edge. A wooden pavilion stood at the edge of the cliff. Three ropes stretched from under the pavilion into the sky. These ropes led to a penguin-like creature which was pulling my soul through this canyon of colour.
‘That’s my pengub.’
‘Yessir.’
Pengubim—pengubim is the plural, like cherubim and seraphim—are the workhorses of the heavenly places, towing souls through the ether.
‘Keziah told me about the pengubim,’ I explained.
‘This is where you steer your soul, sir,’ said Stub. ‘In principle.’
‘You mean, if I did ever actively steer my soul, that pavilion is where I’d do it from?’
‘That is the theory sir.’
‘How does the pengub know where to go if I don’t steer it?’ I asked the gaunt spirit.
‘It feels the impulse of your heart and tries its best.’
I glanced again at the bright canyon of shops that filled the sky on both sides.
‘So my soul came back here as soon it could.’
‘This is it’s natural habitat, sir.’
‘What you’re saying,’ I said, as I followed him towards the pavilion, ‘is that my soul is never happier than when mooching aimlessly on a consumerist whim and fancy.’
‘It’s a default setting, sir. When you can’t be bothered to do anything else.’
‘And now I have to break out of it.’
‘Indeed, sir.’
The pavilion on the edge of my soul was wooden, musty and empty. We inspected its echoey depths: a large room for cricketing teas. Changing rooms for the two teams and the umpires. A room at the back where a grounds-keeper could brew cups of tea.
‘What’s with the pavilion?’ I asked Stub.
‘You built it, sir. Think it through.’
‘It’s not coming,’ I said. Stub sighed.
‘As well as reflecting your love of the game of cricket—and perhaps a generally playful outlook on life—it also says something about the deep conservatism that lurks in your heart. You cling to its old-fashioned simplicity.’
‘I do?’ I said. ‘I thought I was a radical, creative thinker.’
‘You are not a radical, creative doer, sir. There is a difference.’
A picture-window occupied the back of the pavilion facing out over the cliff to the pengub. A ship’s wheel allowed me to steer. Stub told me my pengub was called Henry.
‘So this is where I’m supposed to take command of myself.’
‘Yessir.’
I sat in a captain’s chair in front of the wheel.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘OK. Now what do I do?’
‘You break out from all of this,’ said Stub, his red eyes on me. ‘You break the shackles of the past. You move on.’
‘I do?… All the shackles of the past?’
‘As many as we can manage, sir.’
‘I feel quite nervous about this,’ I said. ‘Now that it comes to it.’
Stub gazed down at me. His heroin-addict face was barely visible between the turned-up collars of his overcoat and the turned-down rim of his hat.
‘See that thin strip of sky?’ he said. By straining my neck I could see a purplish ribbon far above us. Lights pulsed in it. Lazy golden meteors slid across like crayon strokes. The weather blew down from there. ‘Head for that.’
‘OK.’ I pulled gently on the wheel.
Henry the pengub flapped his earnest wings, and we climbed.
It was a long way. We rose through layers of shops and eventually emerged from the canyon.
‘Finally. The end of Vanity Fair,’ I said.
‘No sir,’ said Stub. ‘Just the limit of the retail space.’
‘What’s up here, then?’
‘You can never tell,’ said Stub. ‘Moods. Lusts. Irrational Emotions. Sudden Whims.’
‘Wild Dreams? Forlorn Hopes?’
‘In all probability.’
‘Abandoned Principles?’
‘Certainly.’
‘Ideas Whose Time has Come?’
�
�Not unless they’re very lost, sir.’
‘My soul swims through this stuff all the time?’
‘Yessir.’
‘How will I find the Diner?’
‘They said they’d put a light on for us, sir.’ Stub was scanning the sky.
‘What’s that dark patch?’ I asked.
‘Some kind of slick,’ said Stub. ‘The heavenly places aren’t as clean as we might like.’
‘Is it dangerous?’
‘Merely unpleasant.’
‘Can we avoid it?’
‘Sir, we’ve hardly started. We’re in the bowels of Vanity Fair. This is just the beginning. It’s the beginning of the beginning. We need to keep to our course. The best thing to do is put Henry onto auto-pilot.’
‘How does the auto-pilot work?’
‘There’s a bit of string for tying the wheel down.’
‘Ah.’
I tied the string and watched apprehensively as the black cloud grew to fill the picture window.
Stub wrapped his coat around himself and pulled his hat further down.
‘Let’s walk around for a bit, sir.’ We left the pavilion, crossed the cricket pitch, climbed the ridge again. All was gloomy. The rain-shower had passed, and I could look down on the brightly lit Dome. Inside the Dome, I knew, were sweet memories: a swimming pool, friends—some wearing bikinis—and a selection of restaurants.
‘That’s where I used to go at times like this,’ I told Stub. ‘Gloomy times.’
‘And at all other times,’ said Stub.
Near the Dome I could see the lights of Keziah’s black Mini and also those of the Polish truck called Zlotcwicvic Enngerrgrunden Transportowicz, Krakow (I never did quite catch the spelling)—driving around the rubbish outside the Dome: traumatic memories I’d never managed to purge.
The blackness was now all around us, clammy and cold.
‘I feel I could start writing French existentialist poetry,’ I said.
‘Resist the urge, sir.’
‘It won’t help?’
‘Not in my experience, sir.’
‘What’s that?’ Over the cricket pitch, a patch of darkness was thickening and taking shape like a giant black raindrop. Having gathered itself, it slowly fell.
‘Melancholy is lumpy in the heavens, sir,’ said Stub. ‘It condenses out. Brace yourself.’
The blob landed, wobbled on the cricket pitch and exploded.
‘What is the point?’ I exclaimed suddenly. ‘Really. What is the point?’
‘No point at all!’ snapped Stub.
‘I don’t know why I go on. I don’t want to go on. I don’t.’
‘Nobody’s forcing you,’ said Stub.
‘And you’re no help!’ I said.
‘I’m no help?’ snarled Stub. ‘You’re an albatross around my neck!’
‘No.’ I said. ‘You’re an albatross around your own neck!’
‘Oh yes?’ yelled Stub.
‘Yes!’ I shouted.
We were standing toe-to-toe, looking each other in the eye. I coughed.
‘Sorry,’ I said.
‘It’s all right, sir.’
‘That was the blast wave, wasn’t it?’
‘Yessir. They pass.’ I brushed gobby bits of melancholy off my shoulders and face.
More dank minutes passed before the slick began to break up around us. I returned to the pavilion, untied the wheel, and steered Henry towards the purple sky.
We were higher now, but my eyes struggled to make sense of what I was seeing. Bubbles drifted by. Shower clouds blew over. Patterns of light lit the sky—shafts of light breaking into fragments. Schools of silverly light like fish coalescing back into lightening-like shafts. Lights strobed. I saw huge fat golden raindrops on solitary journeys; in the distance, odd beings (animals? machines?) on paths not aligned with mine. Smoke-like waves curled by. Sometimes I glimpsed distant landscapes pulled by almost-invisible pengubim.
I looked at a vertical grey line that seemed suspended in the middle distance.
‘What’s that thing?’ I asked.
‘Navigation aid,’ said Stub.
‘It’s followed us ever since we climbed out of the Vanity Fair mall.’
‘That’s a trick of perspective,’ said Stub. ‘It’s always present. It helps people steer through the layers of metaphor and imagery in the heavenly places. A lot quicker than using the pengub. You’ll get training.’
Up we went.
Finally, a steady point of light high in the sky, the colour of brass. As Henry the pengub pulled, the light expanded, unfolded and became a tiny city, which grew.
I eased Henry out of the climb so that we approached the city almost horizontally. I picked out skyscrapers nestled together, basking in their own golden glow. The city rested on a cloud, pulled by a six-winged pengub.
‘I’ve never seen anything like this,’ I said. ‘Even with everything that’s happened.’
Strange beasts flew round the city, flapping their great wings. Some of the skyscrapers were connected by high walkways. Vast, not made by humans, the city shone with its own quiet light, sliding across the sky like a cruise liner.
‘Er… that’s not where you want to go,’ said Stub.
‘It isn’t?’
‘I think that’s an administration block.’
‘Oh.’
‘The Diner can’t be far.’ Stub was still scanning the sky. ‘I’m sure they’ll have put it somewhere nearby. There!’ he said finally.
‘That light there?’
‘Yessir.’
We rose above the great city and flew on.
It’s not easy to measure time in the heavenly places, since time passes at different rates depending on the neighbourhood. Even after we spotted the light, it was a long pull towards the Diner through the busy purple sky.
‘Steer just so as you miss it, sir,’ said Stub. ‘The navigation light is swinging underneath the Diner itself.’
‘OK.’ I adjusted my path slightly. We passed the light, which was hanging down from the porridge-coloured clouds on which the Shepherd Diner and Lido rested. We came to the lip of the cloud; and over.
Henry, slowing now, flapped leisurely along the length of a low white wall, which was topped with terracotta tiles. We followed the wall until it enlarged into a two-storey building in the same white and terracotta. Friendly arches in this building gave glimpses into a garden and pool within. In front of the building was a pavement cafe, which offered a spectacular view of the high heavens.
The cafe was nearly empty. Seated at one of the tables, with a fresh smoothie in front of her, was Keziah. She wore her familiar black top and jeans. Her face was as white as ever, her hair as straight and black as ever, the eyeliner overdone as usual, the lips sulky. She did seem, though, slightly more relaxed than the Keziah I was used to.
We glided past. I waved. She appeared to sigh and I noticed green eyes watching me steadily.
‘How do I park this thing?’
‘Fly out, then approach the Diner head on,’ said Stub, ‘Get your pengub nice and high, to keep out of the way. And dead slow.’
I still maintain that I was going dead slow and the bump was just what happens when two things with momentum meet. Hardly any chairs fell over. A bartender did poke her head out of the entrance to see what was happening, but she soon went away, after putting the chairs back up.
Keziah was standing up with smoothie splattered on her T-shirt.
I tied the wheel, left my pavilion, walked with Stub to my soul’s edge, and stepped neatly onto the Shepherd Diner and Lido.
‘Hello,’ I said to Keziah.
‘Thanks for this, Jamie,’ she said, holding her T-shirt so the orange juice, passionfruit and mango didn’t stick to her.
‘Sorry.’
With a flick of thought, Keziah changed into identical clothes that were clean.
‘Never mind.’
‘Hey, where’s Henry going?’ I asked, seeing my pengub f
lapping away, towing my soul behind him.
‘The Diner has its own pengub, sir,’ said Stub. ‘Customers’ pengubim enjoy swimming with her. Henry will be OK.’
‘I see.’ Then I said to Keziah. ‘I hope I’m doing the right thing.’
‘If you don’t think you’re doing the right thing, you shouldn’t have come.’
‘I’m just not totally sure what I’m letting myself in for.’
Keziah glared.
‘Jamie.’ She grabbed my shoulders and spun me around, so that I was looking out over the heavens, my feet overlapping the edge of the Diner. ‘Look at it!’
‘Ow,’ I said.
‘Look at it. Billions of souls. Down there, swimming in that soup, a soup they’re blind to. I can see it. You can see it. Because of what we’ve been through. And up here, a team, friends. Jonah and Corrie Bright and Stub, and others. Turning the world upside down. Turning it the right way up. Replanting Eden.’
‘Well, yes.’
‘Not many people get to do this.’
‘I suppose—’
‘We live in the margins, Jamie. And it’s what life is for Jamie. It’s what life is about.’
‘For you maybe.’
‘No. For you too.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Not perhaps. Not this time. Jamie, what you are doing is re-starting your sad, smug, hedonistic, self-obsessed life.’
‘I am?’
‘And to start with you might like to practice your steering, which is lousy.’
‘Keziah,’ I said, wriggling out of her grip, which was hurting, ‘if we’re talking about driving we might like to remember how we got here in the first place.’
‘That was not a driving problem. It was a head problem. And it was a long time ago.’
‘It was two months and three days ago.’
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In the same series:
The Wheels of the World (Jamie’s Myth, 2)
ISBN 978-0-9565010-1-1 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-9565010-2-8 (epub)
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Copyright
Paradise Copyright © 2010 Glenn Myers. First published 2010 by Fizz Books Ltd. Third edition 2016.
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ISBN 978-0-9565010-0-4 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-4523-8994-3
Glenn Myers has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This novel is a work of fiction. No, really. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electric, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise—except for brief quotations in published reviews—without the prior permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying. In the UK, such licences are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby St, London EC1N 8TS. Email: [email protected]
Cover design by Sam Richardson