Blind Faith

by Ben Elton

  In a moment the mob turned from a disparate rabble of angry voices into a single terrifyingly violent scream. The Chris-lam was torn from his box and if the police had not intervened there could be no doubt that he would have been at the very least severely beaten. Instead he was arrested for inciting religious hatred and disrespecting the will of the majority and the police led him away.

  15

  That night, after they had collected Caitlin Happymeal from the tenement childminder, Trafford approached the subject of the Vaccinator once more.

  'Did you see the faces on the screen?' he asked Chantorria as she was tucking Caitlin into her cot.

  'Of course I saw them,' Chantorria replied.

  'Do you want Caitlin Happymeal to be one of those faces?'

  Chantorria looked up angrily. 'Don't you dare speak to me like that! I gave birth to her; she's part of my body.'

  'Then you should want to save her.'

  'Only the Lord can save her. How can we possibly change fate?'

  'Well, if everything's preordained anyway what difference does it make what we do?'

  'Don't be a smart-arse, Trafford. That's what people don't like about you. They know you think you're clever.'

  Chantorria had finished with the baby and begun getting ready for bed herself. Their little fold-out shower cubicle had long since broken down and was now used as an extra cupboard. Instead she stood in a washing-up bowl and sponged her body at the tiny basin that was bolted to the wall in the corner of their bedroom. Chantorria usually played footage of splendid waterfalls on the wallscreen while she bathed but this evening she did not bother.

  'I don't even know why you're so sure that this awful thing will work,' she said, dabbing at her body with the sponge.

  'I'm not sure. Of course I'm not sure. How could I be?' Trafford replied testily. It was four in the morning by this time and his head ached. 'But when I think about it, it seems possible, very possible. I mean I can sort of understand it, the logic. I find that very compelling.'

  'Compelling?'

  'Yes. Intellectually.'

  'Trafford,' Chantorria hissed, 'we are talking about our daughter. We are talking about heresy! What the fuck has your intellect got to do with it?'

  Trafford took up his communitainer and flicked through the tenement podcasts. The streams from each apartment in their building appeared on the wall in turn. Most of the occupants were asleep. There were a few fights, one or two couples still having sex, a few others watching them having sex, or watching porn or reality TV. Barbieheart was at her post of course, but snoring loudly, slumped forward over a bucket of fried chicken which was still clasped between her vast arms.

  'Let me ask you this, Chantorria,' Trafford said, sugaring the rims of two glasses and filling them with Bud corn-syrup beer. 'Don't you ever get tired of not knowing anything?'

  'What do you mean? I know as much as anybody.'

  'Which is nothing.'

  'Trafford, please don't go off on one. We need to sleep. Caitlin will want feeding soon, she's only had formula all night.'

  'Let me put it differently. Don't you ever want to understand something?'

  'I'm going to sleep.'

  'The Lord made Heaven and Earth. The Lord made us.

  The Lord does this, the Lord wants that. We don't know how or why, we don't need to know, it just happens. There's never any explanation, it's all a miracle. Children are born, some die, it's God's will, we can't change it. Don't you think that, in a way, that's sort of . . . sort of . . . ?'

  'Sort of what?'

  'Pathetic?'

  Whatever else Chantorria had expected him to say, it clearly wasn't this.

  'Pathetic?'

  'Well, to just . . . give up . . . leave everything to God. I mean why did he bother making us in the first place if the only function we serve is to believe in him and then die. Isn't that a bit pointless?'

  'I wish you wouldn't talk this way, Trafford. It's weird. Our job here on Earth is to have faith. Faith is an acknowledgement that there is something bigger and more important than us, which I certainly hope there is. What's pathetic about that?'

  'Well, perhaps I want something else in my life, something other than faith.'

  'What could there be other than faith?'

  Trafford struggled to think of the word. He knew there was one, he had heard it used in different contexts, but this was the context for which the word had been coined.

  'Reason,' he replied.

  'A reason? Isn't Caitlin Happymeal a reason? Isn't your daughter a reason? Aren't I a reason?'

  'No, not a reason. Reason itself. I want to work something out in my own mind. I want to arrive at a conclusion because I've thought it through, not because I've been told to believe it. I want to take part of my life back from God.'

  'Trafford,' Chantorria replied, and there was fear in her eyes, 'you can't deny God! They'll burn you!'

  'I'm not denying God!' Trafford said hurriedly. For all his brave words, he was a long way from wishing people to think him a heretic. 'Surely you can act independently without denying God? I would have thought that any God with half a brain would expect that of his children.'

  'Trafford!'

  'I mean wouldn't faith itself be more valuable if it was arrived at through question and doubt? What's the use of blind faith? Seriously, it's not difficult saying you have faith if the alternative is being burned alive. But does that mean you really have faith? That man this evening, that Chris-lam. He had faith.'

  'Trafford, he very nearly got beaten to death. You want to get us both beaten to death? Is that it? That man was mad.'

  'Of course he was mad to do what he did. To risk dying for his faith. You wouldn't do that. I wouldn't do that. Faith to us is anything we're told to believe. If Confessor Bailey told us that a cherry alcopop represented the blood of Diana we'd worship it without a thought. But that man tonight—'

  'Who could have been killed—'

  'That man had arrived at his faith despite what he has been told. His faith was personal. He'd thought about something and decided to act upon the conclusions he'd drawn. I'd like to do that.'

  'You want to get beaten to death?'

  'You're not listening to me! What I'm saying is, wouldn't it be an astonishing thing to act independently? To think something through? Decide upon a course of action and then follow it. Wouldn't that feel good?'

  'How would I know? Who's ever done that?'

  'This vaccination. Don't you see! I have looked at the evidence available to me and drawn a conclusion.'

  'What evidence?'

  'There was once a science that protected children from childhood diseases . . .'

  'You don't know that!'

  'That's my point. Of course I don't know it. It's not a faith! It's not something in which I can believe absolutely. It's a conclusion, that's all, a supposition based on the evidence at hand, which is the mortality statistics for the year 15BTF. I have arrived at an independent thought!

  Doesn't that sound exciting to you?'

  'I'm not poisoning my baby because you want to have exciting thoughts.'

  'Chantorria,' Trafford said gently, speaking just loudly enough to be heard above the general noise of night. 'You're an intelligent woman. I know you are, we've lived together for almost two years and a marriage doesn't last that long without people really knowing and respecting each other.'

  'Trafford, we have to sleep.'

  'If Caitlin Happymeal dies, as statistically she has a fifty per cent chance of doing—'

  'Shut up!'

  'If she dies,' Trafford insisted, 'do you really believe that she will be instantly alive again in some sweeter and better place?'

  Chantorria raised herself up on her elbow and looked Trafford hard in the eye.

  'Yes,' she said firmly, 'I believe that absolutely.'

  'Then why do you not wish her dead this instant?'

  'That's a stupid, stupid question. Go to sleep.'

  'Come o
n, Chantorria. It isn't a stupid question. It's an absolutely obvious one. What is our life? Nothing. How was your day? Shit. You spent it at the gym pretending to be something you're not for fear that people might discover what you actually are. We live a shit life in a shit city rammed up against millions of shitty people. Why would you wish a life like that on Caitlin Happymeal when she could be in Heaven?'

  Chantorria's expression became half angry and half sad. She did not try to deny the truth of Trafford's words.

  'Because I'd miss her,' she said, tears starting in her eyes.

  Trafford shook his head. 'Of course you'd miss her but you're not a selfish person. You'd do anything if you thought it would make her happy, even let her go. The truth is that secretly in your heart of hearts you doubt that, were Caitlin to die, she actually would be transported into the arms of Diana. You know that all those pictures and paintings on the walls of the faith centre cannot truly be real. Kiddies die every day, they can't all be in Diana's arms, she wasn't an octopus. You know that Heaven cannot be full of beautiful angelic people, for most people who die are infants and the old. Heaven would actually be filled with screaming babies and fat old crones.'

  'It isn't literal! The Confessor always says that.'

  'Why isn't it? Everything else they teach us is literal. The story of creation, the day of judgement, astrology, speaking in tongues, the miracles, tarot, Hell, the angels. They're all real according to Confessor Bailey. Why not Heaven? And if it isn't real, what is it?'

  'It's the Love.'

  'What do you think will happen to Caitlin Happymeal when she dies, as statistically she—'

  'Stop it! Stop saying that!'

  'You don't know, do you! And that is why you fear her death! Reason forces you to dread her dying. If the only thing that moved you was faith, you'd celebrate the prospect of her death because Heaven is a better place. But reason makes you suspect that when she dies she might just be going nowhere and so she'd be better off alive. And we could save her! Damn it, I understand the process! The body has an immune system, we all know that. Even the Temple admits it. It was through the immune system, they tell us, that God sent a plague to punish the Sodomites. Vaccination educates the immune system. It's . . . it's logical.'

  'But Trafford, sticking poisoned needles into helpless babies . . . It just feels wrong.'

  'Exactly. It feels wrong. You have to decide, Chantorria. You have to decide between what you feel and what you think.'

  Just then Caitlin Happymeal began crying for a feed.

  'I don't want to talk about it,' Chantorria said with finality.

  16

  Trafford tried repeatedly over the following days to persuade Chantorria that they had a duty to have Caitlin Happymeal vaccinated. There had been some terrible quarrels but he had failed to move her, so by the time the next Fizzy Coff day came around he had decided to begin the process without her consent.

  He felt empowered, almost elated, as he joined the appalling crush in the street outside the tube station. Even the news of a suicide bomb at the local pumping station, which would mean many hours of delay, could not entirely dampen his spirits. Nor could the enormous hairy belly crushed against his back or the enormous hairy arse crack against which he was crushed bring him down. Nor the fried chicken being gobbled inches to his right or the burger to his left. Nor the duf duf – duf duf from the innumerable headphones or the news loop playing on every plastic coffee bucket. None of the thousand people, none of the million things that normally made Trafford's skin crawl and his brow sweat and his heartbeat quicken with tense loathing, affected him that morning. Because this was the morning when, no matter what the danger, he would begin to ensure the future health and well-being of his daughter Caitlin Happymeal.

  But there was a second reason for Trafford's uncustomary sense of anticipation and elation that morning and it had nothing to do with saving his daughter. He was in love.

  He had been in love before, of course. He had loved his first crush, he had loved his first wife, and he had definitely loved Chantorria. He had loved her utterly, in the days when she had laughed, when she had owned her own spirit and when her dark eyes had flashed with private passion and inner merriment. He still did love her, in a dull, dutiful kind of way, as the mother of his daughter and for the woman she had been before fear corrupted her. But this new love was different. It was strange, exhilarating and exotic. It was unlike any love he had ever known; no stronger than the love he had felt for Chantorria but different, different in that he knew absolutely nothing about the woman upon whom his soul had become fixated.

  Trafford did not know how old Sandra Dee was, if she had children or had ever been married. He didn't know her star sign or her birthstone, her ideal dinner party or what she would say to God when she met him. He didn't know what had been her most embarrassing moment, or what were her big likes or her major turn-offs. He didn't know what would be her perfect day, ideal evening's viewing or most exciting sexual position. He didn't know her favourite colour or her top soccer team. Nor did he know the reasons why she loved and respected herself or what it was for which, every day, she thanked the Love. All this information was available, listed clearly as was expected on Sandra Dee's Face Space. It was there but Trafford knew that it was all lies, copied and pasted from other people's inane waffling, constructed from the clichés of countless near-identical sites. And that, of course, was the one thing that he did know about Sandra Dee. She kept secrets. He knew that he knew nothing. That literally every single thing about her, be it minor or be it significant, Sandra Dee kept private. Trafford thrilled at the thought, for nothing could be more magnificent, more bold, more original or more deeply, truly, dangerously erotic than secrets.

  Trafford did not even know what Sandra Dee's body looked like. It was incredible, in a world where near-nudity was ubiquitous, that this woman somehow managed to keep a significant amount of her skin covered all the time. Trafford knew more, much more, about Princess Lovebud's body or Kahlua's or that of any of the other women in the office, or in his tenement. Trafford knew more about the bodies of the people who were surrounding him in the dreadful crush outside the tube station. There were breasts, stomachs and backsides everywhere. Convention required that only a person's genitalia remain covered in public but that they should, for decency's sake, be properly and fully exposed on a person's website. Sandra Dee, however, had never once exposed her breasts at the office. Even her stomach was rarely shown. Trafford realized with a start that he had never seen her navel! She was almost certainly the only female he had ever met whose navel he had not seen. Even little girls' bodies were universally exposed, for it was one of the curious inconsistencies of society which Trafford noted but kept secret that while the community lived in dread of paedophiles, mothers chose to dress even the youngest of their daughters in the same highly sexualized clothing that they wore themselves.

  But even on the hottest of days Sandra Dee never came to work wearing only a crop top and thong. Instead she chose light skirts, the hems of which sometimes fell as far as halfway to her knee. Such lack of pride in one's body was of course severely frowned upon, being seen as evidence of an absence of self-respect and proper piety. But Sandra Dee didn't care; she defied convention. Even when Princess Lovebud upbraided her for her lack of femininity and inappropriate dress sense, Sandra Dee simply stared her out. Trafford had once heard her remark that, as a pale-skinned woman who was prone to freckles, she had some excuse for wearing a greater expanse of clothing; the Sun was, after all, little more than a cancer delivery system. For Princess Lovebud, this had added insult to injury. Deep mud-brown tans were extremely fashionable among white women and cancer was surely a risk worth taking in order to look nice for the Lord.

  However, despite peer group pressure, Sandra Dee kept her body a mystery and it seemed to Trafford that this was the most all-consumingly erotic thing he had ever experienced. He was secretly in love with a secret. What could be more seditious? More illicit? Mor
e perfect?

  There was much excitement at the office when Trafford arrived. Bunting had been hung and sparklers and party poppers had been placed in the pen jars at every computer terminal. Princess Lovebud was fixing up her 'Praise the Love' LED blinking banner and the flags of all the Nations of the True Faith hung from the light fittings.

  'What's the celebration?' Trafford asked innocently.

  'What's the celebration?' Princess Lovebud replied, aghast. 'What's the celebration? Duh! What do you think is the celebration?'

  'Uhm . . . I don't know.'

  'We're famous, that's the celebration! All our lives we've wanted to be famous and now we are! We're all famous and this is the first time we've all been together since it happened. Don't you think we should celebrate?'

  It had been a week since the Faith Festival at which the new Wembley Law on fame had been announced and Trafford had almost forgotten about it. The new statute had been big news at the time; many spontaneous street parties had erupted, and the local pubs had been crammed to bursting with people celebrating their good fortune. There had been disturbances far into the night, with gangs of newly famous people hunting for perverts and conducting running battles with the police.

  But that had been a week ago. The world had moved on; there had been more bombs, more riots, more nightmare engagements for the peacekeepers overseas. The novelty of being famous had long since worn off for most people, though no such evaporation of enthusiasm had affected Princess Lovebud. This was a very big cake moment indeed: as she explained, if even one member of their crew had become famous overnight it would be cause for celebration, so how much more mad for it should they be now that it had happened to all of them?

  The music began and Princess Lovebud led the karaoke and then the dancing. At first she was content to allow the more timid souls to hang about on the edges, perched on desks, smiling with nervously feigned enthusiasm while she and her acolytes bumped and boogied and writhed about in the space that had been cleared around the social hub. Inevitably, though, Princess Lovebud soon became irritated at the lack of universal party spirit and began to harangue those who held back.