Blind Faith

by Ben Elton

  'Help me to understand. I want to understand. I want to be a . . . a . . .'

  'Humanist.'

  'Yes. A Humanist. I don't know what it is but I want to be one.'

  'Why?'

  'Because there has to be more to life than this and I know that it can't be found on the outside, not in this terrible, sweating nest of half-drowned ants we call a city, so it has to be on the inside. I want to explore new worlds and I know that they can only be found inside my head.'

  'Well then, perhaps we shall talk again. In the meantime we have the welfare of Caitlin Happymeal to consider.'

  'What medicines do you currently have access to?' Trafford asked.

  'I do not deal in medicines. This science is about prevention, not cure. I deal in vaccines. Do you understand the difference?'

  'Yes. Yes, of course I do.'

  'Good, because words are important, Trafford. Clear thinking. Logic. Precision. Above all, understanding. You can understand nothing if words can mean anything.'

  'Yes. Yes, I see that. All right. What vaccines do you have?'

  'You are fortunate. My chapter of the faith is currently well supplied. I can help protect your child against what is called the pustules, the hacking rip, the dead shivers, the running sores and the bone lock, or, as they were once known, measles, whooping cough, meningitis, smallpox and tetanus.'

  'When can we do this?'

  'Whenever you can bring me the child.'

  18

  Chantorria was grateful for Trafford's offer to take the baby off her hands for a few hours. She was so busy. Tinkerbell was to be married the following Saturday and the whole tenement was buzzing with the preparations.

  Weddings were a very big deal, absolutely central to the life of the community. There was nothing upon which the Temple placed more importance than the sanctity of marriage.

  'That solemn pronouncement,' Confessor Bailey thundered at every meeting, 'of unity between a man and a woman, that children might be created and family life perpetuated, lies at the very heart of a peaceful God-fearing society.'

  Marriages were good. It therefore went without saying that the more of them a person had, the better, more holy and more filled with love that person was.

  There had of course been a time when the nation's spiritual leaders, in their weakness and ignorance, had misunderstood that which the Lord and the Love desired from the great institution of marriage. Then it had been assumed that Jesus's supportive words delivered during the wedding at Cana indicated that the ideal spiritual course was to stay married. It was now understood that Jesus had in fact stressed the importance of getting married.

  'Jesus did not celebrate a marriage at Cana,' Confessor Bailey assured his congregation, 'he celebrated a wedding.'

  It was the wedding that counted: that special moment when a woman and a man committed themselves absolutely to each other in body and in soul and in the Love of the Lord. This was an event which (for the good of society) simply could not happen too often.

  'Faith is no faith at all if it is mundane and workaday,' Confessor Bailey explained. 'What use has the Lord for a love which has grown so tired that it must be nurtured even to survive? That's not love! That's habit! Don't stumble through life accepting second best. Life is not a rehearsal. You get no second shot! Go for it! Grab it. Take what you want. You deserve more! More of everything! More fervour! More rapture! More ecstasy. More food, more drink! More worldly goods! More sex! Take them, they're yours! Grab them in the name of the Love. What could be better than a wedding? What could be better than food, wine and the pleasures of the flesh? These are gifts from God! At a wedding all three are in abundance, all consumed in solemn observance of our spiritual vows. What's not to like about that?'

  For Trafford, society's obsession with weddings was just another frustrating contradiction which he must keep secret.

  It was obvious to him that the emotional energy of the wedding was based on the absolute certainty that the marriage would last for ever. The day only worked if everybody connived in the fiction that this wedding was the one, the greatest love of all, a union quite literally made in Heaven. Every song, every speech, every tear and every vow was dedicated to the once-in-a-lifetime specialness of the day and the unequivocal, lifelong commitment that the bride and groom were making to each other – while every single person in the room, not least the bride and groom, knew that the union would almost certainly be over within two or three years. Every aspect of society, both legally and spiritually, was geared to the indulgence in serial marriages and yet each of these marriages had to be entered into as if it was to be the only one.

  'I never truly loved Sabre,' Tinkerbell assured her numerous maids of honour. 'Not Supernova either, nor Love Man. All my other marriages have been shams. Lexus is the only man I ever truly loved.'

  Everyone in the building was thrilled for Tinkerbell, filled with outspoken admiration for the way she had turned her life around. She had bigged herself up after her split from Sabre and refused to be a victim, and through the loss of Gucci KitKat she had learned and grown to be a better, stronger person.

  'I've been talking to God a lot,' she assured the crowds of friends who dropped by her apartment and the many more who followed her blog, 'and he's been telling me how beautiful I am.'

  Watching her on the wallscreen, Trafford could not help wondering how deep Tinkerbell's new-found happiness ran. She had lost her child only a few months previously and he simply did not believe it was possible to put such a thing behind one so quickly. Looking into her pixilated eyes as she sucked her alcopops and assured the webcam how happy she was, he saw nothing but sadness. Perhaps he was imagining it, transferring to Tinkerbell the emptiness he felt every day over the loss of Phoenix Rising, but he doubted it. Trafford suspected that Tinkerbell was acting in the manner she was because she believed that was how she ought to act.

  'And the best thing of all,' Tinkerbell stated from the wall, 'is that I know, I just know that my little Gucci KitKat is watching and he just loves his new daddy. In fact I believe that somehow Gucci KitKat found Lexus and led him to me.'

  Did she really believe that? On what possible evidence could she base this colossal assumption? Surely that would be the question Cassius would ask. Which he, Trafford, should ask, but he didn't of course. Like everyone else, he assured Tinkerbell that her dead baby's return to Earth to guide her to the pub where Lexus, a local vermin control agent, had pulled her was the most likely explanation for her sudden, overwhelming happiness.

  'And the sex is just spectacular,' Tinkerbell told her little world for the thousandth time. 'Lex is just the best. He knows what to do for a woman all right. We do everything. I expect some of you will have seen. Wow! I am such a lucky girl.'

  Chantorria was helping with the dress. She had volunteered to hand-staple the thousands of blinking, multicoloured lights required for the train. Tinkerbell, like every new bride, wanted her dress to be the most spectacular dress ever made and ten whole metres of white plastic sheeting were to be used in its construction.

  'I was in cream when I married Sabre,' she explained, 'but I owe it to Lexus to go white this time since he's paying to have my hymen reconstructed so I'll be a virgin again. It means we'll have to go without for forty-eight hours before the wedding. Isn't it romantic?'

  Chantorria was a maid of honour, as was every woman under fifty in the tenement. It was quite clear to Trafford that Chantorria had been invited to make up the numbers; Tinkerbell was a major face in their little community and it befitted her to have a massive wedding. There would be a carriage and matching thrones, of course – the traditional elements of any wedding – but the real status of such an event depended on the number of identically dressed women the bride could gather around her. For the purposes of the big day Chantorria had been enlisted in the ranks of Tinkerbell's closest friends and she was thrilled to have been asked. In Chantorria's mind, this was a level of public acceptance that gave her some security against
bullying. Trafford did not agree with her; he knew that loyalties were paper-thin and that nobody was safe if the mob turned. After all, the one thing people liked even more than a wedding was a burning.

  19

  Trafford left Chantorria alone in their flat with her staple gun and thousands of flashing lights and carried Caitlin Happymeal towards the bus stop, where, after watching several full buses go by without stopping, they were finally able to get a ride to Heathrow Central. There was only one terminal at Heathrow now. At one time there had been seven but as the oil slowly ran out they had been closed down and redeveloped as housing estates. A museum of aviation had also been built and it was here that Cassius had instructed Trafford to meet him.

  They were to spot each other as if by chance, work colleagues who happened to bump into one another.

  Trafford was to introduce his baby and engage in brief small talk, after which they would decide to join the queue for the cinema.

  After nearly two hours of shuffling, during which Trafford cuddled Caitlin Happymeal and she laughed and giggled constantly, as was her wont, they finally gained entrance to the darkened auditorium. At this point, as Cassius had instructed, Trafford gave Caitlin a bottle of infant formula laced with a dose of antihistamine. By the time they took their seats Caitlin was asleep so she missed the looped entertainment, a ten-minute film entitled Global Warming: The Great Lie. 'CO2 didn't cause the planet to be flooded. God did,' said the narrator firmly.

  The film told the story of how man in his vanity sought to claim credit for his own destruction, blaming God's righteous vengeance for man's wickedness on something called greenhouse gases.

  'The simple explanation just wasn't good enough for us,' the stern voice of the narrator continued. 'What could be more clear? Man was wicked, God punished him. Hey, it's that simple. But no, the so-called scientists of this Godless age had a different idea. They said that the floods came from polar ice melted by the heat of the Sun, trapped upon the Earth by the exhaust from oil-fired engines. Yeah, right. That's exactly what happened, I don't think.'

  While they watched this, Trafford was holding Caitlin Happymeal on his knee as Cassius had instructed, and now Trafford sensed the Vaccinator feeling for the infant's leg. Trafford shifted his position a little to allow Cassius to reach her more easily. Looking out of the corner of his eye, Trafford could see Cassius feel for the chubby part of Caitlin's thigh and slip a needle into it. 'Hold her!' Cassius whispered as the pain woke the infant up and she began to scream.

  Trafford struggled to keep her still while Cassius gently depressed the syringe plunger.

  'Poor thing, is she teething?' Cassius asked, withdrawing his hand.

  'Yes, I think perhaps she is,' Trafford replied. 'I'll take her outside.'

  As Trafford got up, Cassius offered him his hand.

  'Good to see you,' the Vaccinator said.

  As they shook hands, Trafford felt something being pressed into his palm.

  'Let's meet up some time,' Cassius continued.

  Later, on the tube home, when he felt safe to do so, Trafford glanced down at what he had been given. It was a slip of paper. On it, as well as an address and a time and date, was a message: Do join us. Reason dictates it.

  20

  When he got home, Trafford found Chantorria still swathed in metres of white plastic.

  'Some of the other girls were supposed to help,' she explained, 'but Tinkerbell needs hugs. She's gone all emotional on us. So I'm doing this on my own while the other girls are there for Tinks.'

  Trafford glanced at the multistream on the wall; he could see that Tinkerbell's apartment was crammed with at least a dozen of the young women from the tenement.

  They were all drinking alcopops and eating crisps and chocolates.

  'She really really needs her mates right now.' Barbieheart spoke up from her corner of the wall. 'Mates and chocolate, a girl's best friends.'

  'Yes, that's right, Barbieheart. She really needs her mates to be there for her,' said Chantorria, her fingers red and sore from stitching the thick plastic. 'We're all trying to do our bit for Tinkerbell.'

  'Yes, you're all lovely girls, in different ways,' Barbieheart agreed. 'Tink is lucky to have such an ace crew.'

  'Well, she's been such a great mate to me and all that . . . to all of us,' Chantorria replied, and Trafford felt wretched to see his wife so needy and so put upon. He understood that she was meekly accepting her lowly position in the social pecking order for fear of having no position at all. He leaned forward over the video table and kissed her.

  Perhaps sensing his pity, Chantorria returned to her work on the bridal dress with renewed energy. She hardly spoke for the rest of the evening but focused grimly on stitching the flashing lights to the plastic sheet.

  Occasionally the prospective bride deigned to drop in over the tenement podcast to see how the dress was progressing.

  'Good on you, babes,' Tinkerbell slurred drunkenly. 'Don't know what I'd do without you. You are so amazing. Do you know that, babes? So amazing. The wind beneath my wings actually.'

  Behind Tinkerbell, Trafford could see the other women laughing and screaming. Inevitably pizzas had arrived and the karaoke had begun.

  'Gotta go, babes,' Tinkerbell said. 'My song's up next. Love you, babes.'

  Having her crew be there for her was clearly working wonders for Tinkerbell's emotional well-being. She had cheered up enormously and, as Chantorria finally put down her stitching and began to prepare for bed, the party to which she had not been invited seemed to have only just begun.

  Trafford had spent part of the evening doing what he had done every night for some weeks, which was to go to his computer and look at what lies Sandra Dee had chosen to upload that day. His secret obsession made him desperate for any connection with her, and although he knew that everything she posted was stolen he hoped that by studying the lies he might glean some truth about her and begin to unlock her secrets.

  For instance, Sandra Dee often cut and pasted items into her blog which had been written by childless women, women writing about their deep desire to have kiddies. Clearly Sandra Dee must be childless herself; she was always careful not to copy blogs which blatantly contradicted the reality of her circumstances. But how did she feel about being childless? Trafford wondered whether her choice of stolen blog indicated that she really did want children or whether she posted it merely for the sake of convention. Could she in fact be happy being childless?

  He had come to the conclusion that it was the latter. Based on no real evidence at all, he had decided that Sandra Dee did not want children. Was she therefore a user of contraception? Condoms and Dutch caps were illegal but readily available, as was the pill for those who were rich enough. The Temple tended to turn a blind eye to this particular vice, especially in the case of women who were already raising large families. But for a childless woman to habitually seek to avoid becoming pregnant was not acceptable, and if the woman was discovered she would certainly be whipped and then placed in the stocks. After that, although the official punishment would be over, she could also expect to become a target for rape.

  If she was using contraceptives, it would have to be with a man who was prepared to go along with the deceit. Or a woman! The Temple of course regarded sapphic sex as the lust of the Devil's whores (except in sex games played out for the benefit of men) and if Sandra Dee was indulging in that sort of thing then it was no wonder that she chose to hide behind a tissue of cyber lies. Trafford knew that the video diaries she posted, purporting to be of her having 'great' and 'amazing' sex, were not recordings of her at all but those of strangers plucked from the net. Did her choice of recordings indicate what she actually wanted in bed? Or was it the opposite? Did she really crave two or sometimes three big men using a woman roughly as the videos she posted often showed? Or was this a double bluff to further protect her privacy? Did she really crave gentleness, sensitivity, perhaps even the touch of another woman?

  There was always t
he possibility that Sandra Dee was celibate. This would be a position acceptable to the Temple as long as it was genuine and consistent. The Temple rather approved of totally non-sexed-up women as long as they practised self-denial for reasons of faith, although it did prefer such women to follow their calling in properly ordered covens.

  'What are you looking at?' Chantorria's voice penetrated Trafford's reverie.

  'Oh, you know, just surfing,' he replied hastily. 'Checking a few blogs and diaries, trying to commune with my community. Isn't that what you want? What the Confessor says we should do?'

  'Sandra Dee,' said Chantorria, leaning over Trafford's shoulder and reading the name on the page banner, 'looks like one hell of a raunchy chick.'

  The video on screen was indeed a raunchy one, in which the head of a girl with similar colour hair to Sandra Dee's could be seen bobbing violently up and down.

  'Yes. A girl from work. She asked me to check out her site. Everybody always wants you to check out their sites. Extraordinary, the pride some people take in them.'

  'So you decided to check out hers,' Chantorria replied.

  'That's right.'

  'Every night.'

  There was a pause, during which Trafford exited from the video Sandra Dee had posted.

  'You've been looking at my history?' he said casually.

  'Any reason why I shouldn't?'

  'No.'

  'So why do you always look at this Sandra Dee girl? Do you fancy her arse or something? It certainly looks like she knows how to work it. I didn't realize you were into those obvious types of girls. Nice bod, too. Of course, kiddieless bitches usually have nice bods, don't they?'

  Clearly Chantorria had been reading some of Sandra Dee's blogs too.

  'I'm just trying to log up some screen time, Chantorria,' Trafford said, trying not to sound too defensive, 'so I don't look so weird. You told me not to look so weird; you told me to spend more time perving.'