Ultimate Justice

by Ultimate Justice (epub)

  “Yeah. God won’t force Herself on them against their will. They could always opt out of heaven …”

  “I wonder what it is like in the next world? What Grandma is experiencing, or those unfortunate Thenits. Do you think dying feels like stepping through a white gate that accepts only your spirit?” wondered Kakko.

  “For some people, perhaps. For others it might not be so nice. Who knows?” answered Shaun.

  “But when you get there it has to be good, really good – better than in this universe,” said Tam. “Because if it wasn’t it wouldn’t be just. Our next stop beyond this universe, whatever it is, has to be a step nearer to ultimate justice.”

  “How can you be sure there is a heaven anywhere?” asked Kakko.

  “If there is a just God, there has to be,” replied Tam. “Otherwise God will not be true to Herself. If God is just, there has to be somewhere where the oppressed are set free, somewhere where wrongs can be righted, painful sacrifice rewarded – something for those poor Thenits for example.”

  “And I know God exists from all the other things She does for us,” stated Kakko confidently. “So, therefore, heaven exists…”

  “That’s the logic – it all depends on whether you believe in the existence of a just and loving Creator God in the first place,” said Tam.

  “You’re not bad at this sort of thinking,” observed Bandi. “That makes sense. It fits with what we already know of God through our own experience – ours and those who have gone before us. ”

  “Next year I think I am going to combine theology with my law studies,” said Tam, “Justice is more than law. Law is a tool – an important tool – but in itself it doesn’t tell you what is right or wrong, good or bad. There is a universal justice. I mean those Sponrons had never been to Joh or any of the planets peopled by human beings, nor do they share any of our DNA, but they know what is right and what is wrong – their sense of justice is no different from ours.”

  “It’s all to do with love,” said Bandi.

  “Yes,” said Shaun, “and that comes from God. God has given us the gift of love. She is just. I want to learn more about Her and what She has revealed to us about the universe and ultimate justice. Our human law is OK, but it is only a human attempt at codifying what we sense to be just.”

  “So it’s all common-sense after all?” said Kakko.

  “Yes. It’s all based on a common sense of justice,” said Tam, “but in practice it can get complicated when one person’s interpretation of common sense is not the same as another’s – so we need to write it down and work from precedence. But you’re right, law should always try to interpret universal justice.”

  ***

  They found the white gate where they had entered the Sponron world and within a very short time were sitting in the kitchen at White Gates Cottage eating Matilda’s cake. Life was good.

  “You know, we are so privileged to live here,” said Kakko.

  “I know,” agreed Tam. “And what makes it even more special is that I’ve got you for my girlfriend. I did miss you on that shuttle. Honest.”

  “We need each other,” smiled Kakko.

  “You two are so lucky,” remarked Bandi.

  “Oh. There’ll be someone for you too,” assured Kakko.

  “Duh! I didn’t mean that! What would I do with a girlfriend? I’m quite happy as I am thank you!”

  ***

  Decades later, the Talifinbolindit was found drifting in outer-space. Its cargo was intact and taken on to its original destination. It was empty of life – abandoned by its crew, who in their pain had probably elected to join their victims in the void of space. They may have thought that at least there, there was a kind of freedom perhaps, or maybe a dimension for the soul. They may even have become aware of the presence of God. There was no telling.

  28

  When Matilda noticed the new gate in the garden she was not so surprised. After years of stability, life had now become more of a roller-coaster ride. She didn’t quite know how to break it to Jalli as she entered the cottage.

  “Oh hi, Nan. How’s Ada?”

  “Oh, she’s good. Jalli… there’s a… a new gate.”

  “What? Let me see.”

  She looked out the window, then went into the garden. No white gate. “Not for me, Nan,” she said and then called the children. Bandi spotted it straight away, but not Shaun and Kakko.

  “It’s not fair!” lamented Kakko.

  “Oh. Kakko,” sighed her mother.

  Kakko heard herself through her mother’s ears. “Sorry, I guess I’m acting like a spoiled kid. But why Bandi and not Shaun and me?”

  “Maybe the Creator has got something else for you here,” suggested Jalli.

  Then Jack came in looking for his lunch. “A new gate!” he declared.

  “Yes,” said Jalli, “for your mum, Bandi and it seems you too.”

  “Just the three of us?”

  “We’ll manage,” smiled Jalli. “But you’d better get yourself sorted. Your mum and Bandi are ready. Nan reckons it’s Persham. She has found a reservation for the Red Lion Hotel there, some British banknotes and wet weather stuff including an umbrella!”

  “Right …” whistled Jack. “I wonder how long for?”

  “The reservation is for four nights.”

  “Right,” said Jack again. “That long?”

  ***

  When they stepped through the gate it was raining – on the Persham side that is. The season in Persham was early autumn and the yellowing horse-chestnut leaves of the park hung heavy with raindrops. As they descended the hill, the cars splashed along, spraying muddy water onto the pavements. Jack was glad that the Red Lion Hotel was on their side of the town. When they arrived, Matilda held open the narrow doors as Jack and Bandi staggered through with their luggage. They were greeted by warmth, and the beer-scented conviviality of the bar on their left. There was a small reception desk in front of them behind which sat a young woman in a tight, black blouse to which she had attached a shiny brass badge declaring to the world that she was called Angie.

  “Hi,” Angie grunted still beating the keyboard of a desktop computer.

  “We have a reservation,” said Matilda as she pushed the paper across the desk. The girl forced herself back into the real world – her Facebook friends would have to wait for the moment – and scrutinised the sheet.

  “That’s fine,” she said. “You’re foreign are yah?”

  “From Persham,” stated Matilda with dignified authority, “back for a few days… to see friends.”

  “That’s great. You have two rooms for four nights on the second floor. No lift I’m afraid.”

  “’Course not,” said Matilda curtly. “I can manage stairs without difficulty.”

  “But could you carry my mother’s case for her?” asked Jack politely. “As I can’t see, I need to keep one hand free.”

  “Yeah, sure,” sighed the girl without conviction as she reluctantly tore herself away from the monitor.

  ***

  The rooms were comfortable and old world. The Red Lion had once been a coaching inn and Jack wondered how many countless thousands had slept in his particular room down the centuries. It was Saturday. The three held a mini-conference about their next move and they decided that, as the rain had stopped, they would go for a walk around where Jack and his mother used to live, and see what had happened to the house. Then they would go on to the parish church and check what time the service was the following morning. They would make a beginning there, unless anything else came up.

  ***

  As they turned into Renson Park Road, Matilda was immediately struck by the size of the trees that lined the pavement. When they had first moved in nearly four decades before, they were all so small. By the time they had left for Woodglade they were certainly growing but, now, more than twenty years on, they were majestic. The whole street was dominated by them, but the really impressive thing was that the one outside number 68, where she
and Jack had lived for nearly fifteen years, had also grown tall. It was still a little behind the others but was otherwise indistinguishable from them.

  “Well, look at that!” exclaimed Matilda. “Our tree, it’s huge!” She guided Jack so that he could place his hands on its trunk. Jack shuddered as the memories flooded back. He encircled it. “Well, that has come on! How tall is it?”

  “Nearly as high as the house!” declared his mother. “It really struggled when we were here. It was always in the wars. Seemed to keep getting broken. The vandals were always at it,” she said with a gentle irony – an irony Jack pretended not to notice.

  “Did you ever see them?” he asked. Matilda answered that she hadn’t; which was true. She was out when her son had demolished it for the final time that day in the rain – when he had vented all his anger and heartbreak on it as he despaired of ever seeing his beloved Jalli again. He remembered all that stupidity – and he was once again filled with gratitude that his mum had had the courage to arrange for the elderly Mr Evans to call. That had been the turning point between despair and the joy of his setting off to begin again with Jalli. It was good to know that his mistreatment had not prevented the tree from coming back and being almost as high as the house. Jack placed his hand on the bark as high as he could reach and whispered, “OK, you win.”

  “What you say, Dad?” asked Bandi.

  “Oh. Nothing. Just talking to the tree.” Bandi shook his head. Kakko was always saying their parents were a couple of tree-huggers.

  The front of the house was also transformed. It had received a make-over from caring owners. The garden was a picture – all the old rubbish had gone. There was a border of bedding dahlias and fuchsias surrounding a carefully cropped little square of grass. All the former ill-fitting wooden-framed casement windows had been replaced with contemporary, white, PVC double-glazing units. The front door matched them. Below a semicircular piece of double-glazed stained glass were the figures “6” and “8” in carefully polished brass. Through the front window they could see the outlines of some high-class furniture and a standard lamp behind heavy, deep red velvet curtains. Matilda described what she saw to Jack.

  “Better off than we were, then?”

  “The whole street’s different. It’s quite grand. They’ve got some expensive cars parked outside and there are two skips further down where they are doing up another place.”

  Just then a young woman with two small children emerged from number 70 and saw the trio standing and studying.

  “Can I help you?” she asked in an educated accent that was not Persham. “Sky come here. You know what I told you about the road – stay with Willow! Er, sorry they are quite full of autumn spirit.”

  “No, that’s alright,” replied Matilda, in her best posh English voice. “We used to live here at number 68 and were interested in how things were coming on.”

  “Oh. Your old house is in good hands,” smiled the young woman. “They are excellent neighbours… Sky! Put down those leaves. You’ll mess up all your clothes. Sorry, must move on…” She forced a smile and charged after the child, beating bits of tree off the little girl’s front.

  Bandi laughed and imitated his nan’s posh voice, “We used to live here…”

  “Bandi,” scolded his father. “That’s rude!”

  “Why can’t they call their kids by honest-to-goodness Christian names these days? Willow and Sky! I ask you,” remarked Matilda, ignoring her grandson.

  “What, like Kakko and Bandi?” laughed Jack.

  “Well that’s different. You don’t live in Britain.”

  “We’d have called them the same wherever we had lived,” said Jack.

  “You know what I mean!” said his mother, a bit peeved. “With names like that they’re not likely to be churchgoing are they? They’re not Christian names.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. It doesn’t follow. Names go in fashion. In generations when lots of people went to church they still called their children by names that weren’t in the bible – Amy, Louise, Charles and William. Wasn’t your mother’s family all flowers: Violet, May, and Daisy?” Matilda shrugged.

  “It’s gentrification. That’s what it is,” mused Bandi thoughtfully.

  “What’s gentrification?” Matilda wanted to know. “That’s a big word.”

  “I did it in geography last year. What’s happened here to this street. Streets near the centre of towns become popular with yuppies who are not so interested in large gardens and garages. Small houses get done up and sell for much higher prices while the original occupiers end up moving away further out of town…”

  “Where they have to spend a fortune on bus fares!” broke in Matilda.

  “You’ve read the same geography book?” asked Bandi.

  “Didn’t need to. I’ve seen it happen.”

  “So we moved at the right time,” observed Jack.

  “We did. But I bet there are lots I grew up with who are not so lucky. Come on, let’s go on down to the church.”

  They walked to the end of the street, past more evidence of gentrification, but the church building didn’t seem to have changed any. St Augustine’s, Persham, still looked the same as it had done when it had been built in Victorian times – at least from the outside. On the inside, however, it had been transformed twice since its birth. Once in the period just before the First World War when much of the Tractarian statuary and ornamentation was replaced with vast quantities of carved woodwork, including a chancel screen and a reredos all given in memory of some wealthy parishioner – his family desirous of making a splash. But then, in the minimalist early 1970s, these furnishings were mostly removed, despite a howl of protest from the descendants of the ‘named’ and the threat of a consistory court. The interior of the church building had then become more open and user-friendly, but its reputation had suffered with the local people. The message of Jesus had been drowned out by the controversy over the building at the very time in history that it most needed to be heard, when the rise of popular secularism was undermining faith by calling it ‘unfounded superstition’. What the ordinary people saw was an unholy feuding about furniture, and that just confirmed what they were coming to believe anyway – that the Church was largely irrelevant in contemporary culture. The Church was chiefly about history and conservation. “Tradition” was becoming co-terminus with “living in a quaint period drama” which is nice at Christmastime and for weddings, but not in the rough and tumble of daily life.

  “ The present vicar, however, was a person of vision and he and his congregation stuck to it. As well as opening up the space, the Christ-centred church-goers had also moved away from using the four hundred year old Book of Common Prayer for the main services. Slowly, the Church was beginning to relate the good news of Jesus to current needs and take notice of the prevailing postmodernism. St Augustine’s was making a come-back. In the little garden in front of the church there now stood a giant notice-board proclaiming in large letters:

  MESSY CHURCH

  Every Saturday between 2 pm and 4 pm.

  For children, families and those who have never

  quite grown-up.

  No-one is ever too young or too old for Messy Church!

  The time was now just after two o’clock on a Saturday and there was a wondrous noise from inside, a cacophony of sound. Those who had ‘not quite grown up’ were mixing their voices with children of all ages running up and down. The chairs had been moved to one side and people sat, perched or stood around large, bright-blue plastic sheets, carpets and islands of newspaper, while the kids were all doing something different at the same time. There was painting, cutting out and sticking. Lively children were darting backwards and forwards to large boxes in the centre full of colourful bits of cloth, crepe paper, pipe-cleaners, sticky-back shapes, and a myriad of other attractions the kids could seize on to decorate their masterpieces. Even some of the adults were engaged in painting some kind of mural, while a few ladies huddled in a corner in a se
wing-bee-come-knitting-circle with material off-cuts, cottons and wool. (Matilda learned later they were constructing a child-friendly, knitted Christmas crib.)

  The three visitors from Joh moved around the edge of the activity but were soon caught up by a group of children demanding they admire their frieze.

  “Hi!” It was the same young mother they had seen emerge from number 70. She seemed to be very relaxed in the gathering. (So calling her children Willow and Sky hadn’t meant she was resistant to coming into the church after all!) “Pleased to see you again! Welcome. We’re doing something for Harvest Festival.” Her Willow came up and seemed lost for the moment.

  “What can I do, Mummy?”

  “You can choose between making a frieze over here, help write a prayer (or drawing a picture for one) in the corner over there, or finding a song to sing, or just running around if you’re not ready to concentrate – so long as you keep clear of the paint.” The little girl swung her arms across herself as she rocked in thought, eventually opting to hover around the singing group. She was quickly absorbed within it.

  “Sorry. Nice to see you,” said the mother again.

  “Well, actually, we had just come to see what time the service was tomorrow morning. Does this happen every Saturday?”

  “Yes, but we vary the activities. Sometimes we are more chaotic than others but we do our best not to look the same as school. Free expression is important if people are to find real meaning in their lives.”

  Jack was about to agree and suggest they move to the ‘prayer corner’ when a very elderly gentleman came up to them.

  “Jack,” he said huskily, “Jack Smith?”

  “Yes!” Jack had instantly recognised the man to whom he owed so much. He reached out and took his hand, then the whole of him. “Mr Evans! How are you doing?”

  “You remember me! Not so bad considering. I’m ninety-five at Christmas.”

  “Wow,” said Jack.

  “And how’s it all going with you?”

  “Very well. You know my mother, Matilda,” the old gentleman took her hand, “and this is my youngest, Bandi.”