Blind Faith

by Ben Elton

  After half a restless hour or so Chantorria turned up the sound on the video wall.

  'Do you have to?' Trafford asked irritably.

  'I can't bear listening to those poor kiddies any more. Not tonight.'

  It wasn't just the children who were shouting and screaming. It seemed as if the whole city was awake and emoting at the top of its voice. Everybody was up, shouting and screaming as they fought, shouting and screaming as they had sex. And those like Chantorria who were not shouting and screaming were turning up the sound on their video walls to drown out the noise. But all there was on all the channels and on every MyTube podcast was more shouting and more screaming. And the night rang to the sound of sex, violence, reality cop shows, talent competitions and endless, endless karaoke – a cacophony of human excess from the slum suburbs of Reading in the west across the whole London archipelago to the shores of Kensington in the east.

  13

  The following day Trafford was tasked to work at home and Chantorria had booked a visit to the gym.

  'I've left it a month. People will talk,' she said loudly for the benefit of the webcam as she sat on the edge of the lavatory, her knees resting against the opposite wall as she applied bikini wax.

  'You go burn it, girl,' said Barbieheart through a mouthful of tortilla chips. 'Wish I could be with you but, as you know, I am a woman of size.'

  'I'll do an extra K for you, Barbieheart,' Chantorria shouted, wincing as she ripped the wax from her inner thighs.

  'You have fun, girl.'

  'Will do, Barbieheart. I'm lovin' it.'

  Trafford, who was listening in the kitchen, knew that Chantorria was lying. She was not lovin' it and she would not be lovin' it. Chantorria hated the gym; it was one of her secrets, and the fact that Trafford knew she hated it was one of his.

  The vast majority of women looked forward to a trip to the gym as it involved almost no exercise at all. The vast Temple-funded facilities which all women were expected to attend after the birth of a child offered a series of massages, steam baths, inspirational seminars, mass holistic 'treatments' and extravagant communal declarations of faith, and clients consumed enormous quantities of 'health bars' and 'health drinks' while sitting about in towels. In fact, because the gym experience consisted principally of hours of sloth, personal indulgence and guilt-free eating, people tended to come out heavier than they went in. Most women would be pregnant again before they had had the chance to get their figures back anyway. Nonetheless it was important to be seen to be making a personal commitment to self-improvement. Pretending to exercise was an important part of the ritual of self-love and self-love was of course the love of God.

  But Chantorria found the gym a torture. She did not have the kind of self-assertive personality that made social situations easy. Trafford knew that she would end up sitting miserably in her towel on the very edge of a group before eventually being driven to do some exercise. She would spend her day with the hard-bod brigade of confirmed bachelors and honest spinsters, pumping away on various machines, not even pausing, as most of them did, to inject steroids.

  'Trafford!'

  She was calling him from the bathroom.

  'You're going to have to shave me. I can't see it while my tummy's all floppy like this.'

  Trafford did as he was bidden. Chantorria would be using a communal shower at the gym and it was of course unthinkable that she should disport herself naked with hair upon her body. Female body hair was not illegal but it was recognized as having been visited upon the Daughters of Diana by the Love in order that their commitment to their femininity might be duly tested. The adolescent appearance of body hair was evidence of a loss of purity and what was a woman if she was not pure? A slag or, worse, a lesbian. Any woman who was so immodest and lacking in self-respect as to display her Love-given cooch with hair still upon it deserved the anger that she would no doubt bring upon herself.

  Deep inside him, in the place where he kept his secrets, Trafford wondered why the Love had given women bodily hair at all, if he hated it so. Wasn't there a better way of testing a woman's purity and goodness than forcing her to spend so much time and effort depilating? And why, he wondered, if the most heinous crime on earth was paedophilia, did society wish grown women to return their sex organs to the appearance that they had had before puberty? Trafford had only seen full female pubic growths once, on a school trip to the Natural History Museum. The beautifully realized female figures who were depicted dancing among the dinosaurs at the dawn of creation were wild innocents, the first humans, who had not yet come to understand what the Lord and the Love expected of them. Trafford had been fascinated and had remained so ever since. This was what a naked woman actually looked like. If God had designed anything it had been this, and yet here he was scraping the stubble from his wife's cooch until it looked like the cooch of a ten-year-old. Secretly Trafford longed to see his wife as a woman and not as half a little girl, but that was out of the question. Only a heretic woman would let her vagina go covered like the chin of a bearded man. Therefore Trafford squeezed into the tiny bathroom, inched himself between the lavatory and the wall, ducked down underneath Chantorria's raised legs and bobbed up between them with the soap and a razor.

  Chantorria gritted her teeth and gripped the edges of the lavatory seat with all her might. The stitches from Caitlin Happymeal's birth were still red and raw.

  'Surely we can skip down here,' Trafford said. 'Just keep your legs together.'

  'You know I can't risk it,' Chantorria gasped. 'You know what happens to immodest women, particularly if they're discovered by other women. Just get on with it.'

  Trafford did his best and when Chantorria was satisfied that her appearance was suitably modest she pulled on her G-string, sports bra and trainers, hung a large plastic reproduction of her birthstone from the fold of flesh around her navel, gathered up Caitlin Happymeal, who was to go with her to the gym in order to be fed, and went on her way.

  For a little while Trafford mooched around the apartment, throwing away the breakfast things and drinking a glass of Fanta before finally sitting down at his laptop. Even before he had focused on the screen there was an IM from Barbieheart.

  Have a good day at work, Trafford.

  Yes, thank you, I'm sure I will, Trafford wrote in reply before turning and waving at the wallscreen.

  Barbieheart waved back and then typed, Praise the Love.

  Praise the Love big time, Trafford wrote back, hoping that this might conclude their conversation. It didn't.

  Caramel Magnum Moonbeam's giving Ice Blade oral sex at 14c, Barbieheart wrote, completing the sentence with a series of smiley face symbols. Trafford wondered whether Barbieheart had IM'd Caramel Magnum and Ice to inform them that he and Chantorria had not had any sex, oral or otherwise, for months. He imagined she probably had. Dutifully Trafford punched up 14c's web stream and watched as Caramel Magnum's head bobbed up and down at Ice Blade's waist.

  'Great girl, eh?' Barbieheart's voice said through the speakers. 'She gives him plenty.'

  'Yes,' Trafford replied. 'Good on them. But I really should be getting to work now, Barbieheart.'

  It was a mistake, of course, and he knew it instantly.

  'So-rry,' Barbieheart said angrily. 'I didn't realize I was holding you up, Trafford. You looked in such a hurry to get going, after all!'

  'No, it's only that . . . I just thought.'

  'Some of us like a chat in the morning, Trafford. We are a community, you know. We do all have to live together, so it might be nice if some of us tried to mix a bit more,' Barbieheart's voice began to rise, 'instead of thinking ourselves a cut above. Too good for the rest of us.'

  'No, really, Barbieheart, I didn't mean . . .'

  'Whatever. It doesn't matter. It's your loss if you can't be pleasant, Trafford. Have a great day anyway.'

  'Yes, thank you, Barbieheart. Drop in any time.'

  Trafford turned once more to the screen and attempted a smile but Barbieheart had
moved on.

  'Go, girl, go!' the vast naked woman shouted.

  Trafford heard Caramel Magnum Moonbeam's breathless reply that she adored the taste of Ice Blade's cum and that taking it made her feel like a natural woman.

  'Praise the Love, girl,' said Barbieheart.

  'Praise the Love,' Caramel Magnum Moonbeam replied and Trafford pressed his mute button.

  He logged on to DegSep and for a moment managed to focus on his work. He was working on Location Information, part of a vast team attempting to construct a program which would establish the degree of physical separation that existed between people. Satellite positioning was of course as old as NatDat itself. As long as a person carried a communicator, their location on Earth was constantly tracked and recorded and had been for two generations. Should the government, the police or television researchers wish to find out where any person had been at any point during the previous fifty years they had only to ask NatDat. What, however, had never been established were people's positions in relation to each other. NatDat knew where Mr A was, it knew where Mrs B was, and it knew where each had been since the day of their birth. What it did not know was the distance that had existed between them. Currently that information could only be established by putting the two locations on to a map and working it out with a ruler.

  DegSep had come to recognize this extraordinary information gap and had set about filling it. The job was enormous, involving as it did the construction of a program that would calculate and record the relative position of every single person in the country to every other person in the country on a continually updated basis, while also delving into the NatDat archive to establish the relative positions that everybody had had to everybody else since satellite positioning had first become a part of the National Data Bank. Once this information was recorded it would then be possible to search for patterns in the movements of complete strangers. Was a person destined to get closer to some people they had never met than others? If, for instance, one was to study two individuals (D and E) who at one point had been an identical distance from F, was there anything to be learned from the subsequent distances between D and F and E and F? Equally importantly, what would then be the locational story of D and E? Would their shared positional relationship with F in any way affect the relationship that existed between them?

  It was hoped that data of this type would contribute enormously to the general understanding of the workings of fate, kismet, chance, the stars and numerology. Trafford knew that this was unlikely as it was pretty certain that no one would ever actually study the data.

  His concentration did not last long. Within moments his mind wandered – which it was legally entitled to do under the Health, Safety and Respect legislation that protected all employees.

  Suddenly, out of the blue, Trafford found himself Goog'ing Sandra Dee. He had not been planning to Goog' her, the impulse simply came upon him and there he was, Tubing her up and reading her blog.

  What he read astonished him. After the spirited display of individuality that Sandra Dee had put up at work he had been expecting something different, something interesting, but what he found was simply drivel. The worst kind of nonsensical, meaningless rubbish.

  Another beautiful morning, Praise the Love . . . Feeling very chilled but also sooo positive about everything . . . Work was really good and chilled, what a fantastic, magic crew. I'm sooo lucky . . . just Lovin' it . . . Had my star chart done and it's all good, very positive with lots of great stuff ahead but I have to be careful not to give too much, perhaps I'm too trusting but then that's Geminis for you . . . Tried the new limited edition barbecue brunch burger at Mac's! To die for. Seriously wicked . . . Feeling very spiritual, sometimes I wonder if in a previous life I wasn't a handmaiden to the Queen of Sheba. I don't know, I just sort of feel it . . .

  At first Trafford felt a deep disappointment, but reading on he soon began to realize that Sandra Dee and he had something in common.

  Like him, she was a keeper of secrets.

  Like her face, Sandra Dee's blog gave absolutely nothing away; it contained token entries self-evidently written to keep up appearances. Trafford knew that the girl who had bravely returned Princess Lovebud's stare was not the empty-headed imbecile revealed in these blogs. He pressed 'view all entries' and then, on an impulse, copied and pasted a few sentences on to the 'find' engine. Instantly his computer informed him that it had found hundreds of matches. Trafford realized with a chill of excitement that Sandra Dee did not even bother to write a blog at all: she just repeated a small selection of previous entries ad nauseam, changing only the dates.

  Next Trafford pasted the same paragraph on to the general search engine and with mounting excitement discovered that Sandra Dee had not even written the entries in the first place. She had simply copied them from the Space page of a young woman called Cuddlehug.

  Trafford was astonished at the audacity of it. What cool! What sangfroid! Everybody was expected to commit their thoughts and emotions to a blog at least once a day. It was an act of faith, a reaffirmation of pride in oneself and in one's significance as an individual (which was, of course, a reflection of the significance of the Creator). It was only through constant openness and sharing that the duty of man, which was to represent God on Earth, could be celebrated.

  But Sandra Dee just didn't bother. She did not even pretend to celebrate her significance as an individual or her pride in herself. She did not want people to know what she had done that day, or, more importantly, what she was thinking.

  Trafford was breathless with admiration. By playing the simplest of tricks, Sandra Dee had in one stroke relieved herself of the odious duty of the daily confessional and, above all, she had kept her secrets. Anyone could lie in a blog; Trafford himself did it all the time, but in making up a lie one must inevitably reveal something of oneself. No matter how hard a person might try to cover his tracks the lie must still be written, it must be imagined and hence something of its author must be displayed. The solution that Sandra Dee had found was so elegant, so armour-plated, that Trafford could not believe it had never occurred to him. But then clearly this woman had far more courage than he had. She had the confidence to trust that nobody ever actually read anybody else's blog, at least none but the most notorious or popular ones, the blogs written by stars or local bullies, faith leaders or close neighbours. If you kept your head down you would be ignored, and this was clearly the trick that Sandra Dee had perfected.

  Having made his first discovery, Trafford turned his attention to Sandra Dee's Tube Space. Here she had clearly had to be more careful and was thus more exposed. As Trafford knew from recent personal experience, faith leaders scanned their congregation's video history and no individual, no matter how anonymous, could afford to deny the community access to significant digital documentation of their lives. Sandra Dee had therefore dutifully posted an acceptable selection of personal and intimate video diaries.

  There were the obligatory early birthdays and adolescent parties. Gory footage of a teenage appendix operation. The Cherry Pop vid was there, of course. Trafford had half expected Sandra Dee to have found a way of avoiding this one, but she had not: no young woman could afford to defy convention by keeping private their sacred and celebratory, life-enhancing, God-respecting moment of 'losing it'.

  There were numerous other sex videos, demonstrating, as custom required, Sandra Dee's energetic commitment to a series of sexual partners. And like every single other Tube page on the planet there was karaoke, endless karaoke.

  As he punched up video after video Trafford felt let down. When he had read Sandra Dee's blog, he had, for a moment, imagined that he had lucked upon evidence of a genuine free spirit, a private revolutionary who had laid claim to her own existence and was aggressively defending it from appropriation by the community. But her blog was now revealed as a small protest when set against her video diaries, in which she had been forced to conform in every way. In reality she was no more liberated than he.
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  Then Trafford noticed the scars. And the absence of scars.

  He was watching Sandra Dee make love, a poor, grainy video featuring the usual loud and dirty sex. The sort of sex that was expected in such diary pieces. The sort of sex that was just 'amazing'. The sort of sex in which the participants 'did everything' and just 'went for it'. Sandra Dee was astride some grunting one-night stand, her head bowed and her body moving like a piston as she pumped away on top of her lover. Up and down she went, her breasts bouncing in the opposite direction with each frenzied movement. They were not big breasts, of course, Sandra Dee having famously forsworn enlargements, but as Trafford watched them he thought them surprisingly dome-like for the naturals he knew them to be. He knew from personal experience that natural breasts moved in a different way to surgically implanted ones. But the ones he was watching did not move naturally at all; they moved in the jerky, solid sort of way that suggested enhancement.

  He pressed the pause button. Nudging the image forward half a second at a time, he arrived at the moment when the two breasts were at the highest point of their yoyo-like movement. Then he zoomed in. The recording was not of good quality and the light was dim, nonetheless Trafford thought he could see two small scars at the base of Sandra Dee's breasts, the unmistakable evidence of implants. Perhaps Sandra Dee had had her breasts enhanced after all? Perhaps that was her secret? If it was, Trafford thought it a poor one, nothing like so exciting an example of subversion as to actually refuse to do with one's body what the Temple expected. Except then a thought struck him and he zoomed out a little until Sandra Dee's waist came into view.

  Something was missing. There was no appendix scar. The Sandra Dee having sex in the video diary was not the same person as the Sandra Dee shown having her appendix out. Trafford pulled out further to bring the girl's face into view. Except that it did not come into view: there were glimpses of it but the hair was in the way and the wild movement of the head made a clear view impossible. Trafford began to reverse through the videos that he had just watched. They were all of poor quality, a little blurred, dimly lit, and they all featured girls with hair partially obscuring their faces, often with their backs to the camera. But now that Trafford's suspicions had been alerted, it was obvious that these were all different girls. They even had different tattoos. What was more, Trafford was reasonably certain that not one of them was actually Sandra Dee. Trafford reloaded the Cherry Pop vid. It wasn't her either: it looked like her certainly, the teenage girl praising the Lord and the Love as she squealed in pain had the same pale colouring and similar features, when they could be observed, but she certainly was not Sandra Dee. With the childhood videos Sandra Dee had scarcely bothered to find lookalikes, and the little girls featured opening presents and bobbing for apples were clearly all different.