Feast and Famine

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  It had been a bit of a joke when this all started. The first twitches came about a month before, and it had provided the jolly end-piece to plenty of news bulletins: Aren’t there a lot of nutters preaching on street corners these days? There had been talk of a reality TV show, “Who wants to be the Messiah?” It had stopped being funny shortly after that, as people and the media had begun to realise that something serious was going on. Speeches in the House of Commons were interrupted by the Labour member for Bradford tearing his shirt off and howling for absolution. A noted business tycoon had emailed the thousands-strong staff of his many companies insisting that true salvation was only to be found by casting out cheese from their lives. The newspapers picked up the story and ran with it. Half the world was infected by some revelatory plague! Later, the situation grew sufficiently bad that they had to shamefacedly bring the story back and state, without hyperbole and in genuine fear, that the Rapture seemed to have driven fully one in four people out of their heads. Every city, every nation was full of men and women who had been spoken to directly by God or gods, and who had cast away everything of their lives, possessed by the overwhelming urge to pass on their incomprehensible or banal vision of divinity to an uncaring world. That was a week ago, and I reckoned that the number had risen to around one in three by now. Farmers, beggars, businessmen, policemen, clerks, estate agents, plasterers’ mates, typists, microbiologists, gypsies and even the actual clergy, every possible stripe of humanity was afflicted, none was spared. The disease struck at random. Everyone left was living in dread that they would be next. That was the worst thing. The actual ranting and preaching was a minor irritation.

  There were a dozen prophets in full flow down the High Street. I walked past most of them without even turning a head. This was now commonplace. They say a prophet is never honoured in his own country. Certainly he’s not when he has so much competition. I stopped for a moment to regard one old man, seventy if he was a day, stripped absolutely naked and waving something over his head. Even in the warmth of the summer morning his skin was goose-pimpled, his chest like a toast-rack, his hips like jug-handles. It was clear that the urgent business of the Lord was leaving him no time to eat. He was telling me, telling everyone, that you needed nothing to live, and to find the Lord’s grace, save this one thing. I couldn’t quite see what he was waving over his head at first, and his mumbled raving was hard to follow, but eventually I made out that it was a toothbrush. Dental hygiene, it seemed, was the Path and the Way.

  There was a fight going on further down the road. This was also common. Two diametrically-opposed faithful had tried to convert one another and now they were scuffling awkwardly. A middle-aged Asian man in a suit and a young, wild-haired woman, both of them were shrieking the Truth at each other. A few people were watching but I just passed on by. I was vaguely aware that amongst those of the population still healthily agnostic, the very British pastime of betting on duelling dogmas had sprung up wherever these tawdry brawls could be found, but I had no interest.

  The church was up ahead and I felt a stab of guilt. I used to turf myself out of bed some Sundays and shamble along, to doze and drone by alternate measures through the service. My religious convictions, hammered inexpertly into me by a Church of England school years before, had long since rubbed off. A vague sense of guilt and propriety had been just strong enough to keep me dragging my feet there one Sunday out of four. Since the Rapture I hadn’t bothered. I felt I was getting more than my share of religious instruction every minute of the day.

  Reverend McRae was sitting on the low wall outside the church, talking to a tall, lean figure I thought I should recognise, the two of them sharing a cigarette. The vicar nodded to me: a little, bearded, melancholy gnome of a man in shirtsleeves, his dog collar awry. I would have walked on by, but these days it seemed that the church was the only place that I could avoid the presence of God.

  The Reverend greeted me and I glanced at his companion, seeing a gaunt face and greasy, combed-over grey hair. The vicar interpreted for me: “You know Mr. Owley, of course,” passing the half-dead cigarette over.

  I didn’t. Then I did. He had cleaned himself up a bit, and of course I wasn’t used to seeing anything of him from neck to knees, but that gaunt face eventually rang bells.

  “Given up the old…?” I made a vague gesture to indicate the sandwich board that had previously been his most notable affectation.

  He shrugged. “You seen what it’s like,” he muttered, returning the fag end to the vicar. “What’s the point of it now? Who cares whether the End is Nigh? Who’ll listen when I tell ’em to repent? Too much bloody competition.”

  Reverend McRae took a long, mournful drag, a tiny auto da fé for the remainder of the cigarette. “Nobody comes to services any more,” he said. It was not directed at me, or no more than at the rest of the formerly churchgoing world. “What happened to demarcation, that’s what I want to know.”

  “Is the Lion still open?” I asked them. It was a dodgy business from day to day, seeing what fragments of society were keeping their heads above the rising tide of sectarianism. So far the pub had persisted.

  We repaired there, the three of us. The owner had to date not given in to the religious fervour, but I reckoned it was close. His jaw was clenched, as he served us, and the sweat that gleamed on his balding head was not just the heat. The old calling and the new were at war within him, but his professionalism won out enough that he was able to serve three pints without spilling any revelations. I asked him to put the TV on. It had become a hit and miss affair, but I wanted to see if we could catch the news.

  The media had a field day at first, as I said. Then they got cagey. Then they got desperate, genuinely desperate. You could see the change daily, the vulturous glee at having such a story to peck at lapsing into a genuine, hollow-cheeked horror as the world turned. Last night I had switched on the news, and the newsreader had stared into camera and got as far as “Lo, it has been shown to me –!” before some quick-witted technician cut him off. Hit and miss, as I say. The media, that had previously made its livelihood out of shock tactics and scaremongering, was now the last bastion of conservatism, desperately trying to carry on as normal, all stiff upper lip, trying to give out the news at the usual times between the endless repeats that they rattled out mechanically to fill in the gaps. Yesterday I had tried to watch the football. Both teams were short-handed, but it seemed that the game was an antidote, that their determination to kick a black and white ball about in front of a patchy, ragged crowd could provide some inoculation against what was crippling the country. Then one side had scored a goal and the exultant team had ploughed to their knees before the goalmouth in their victorious ritual. Only, when they got up, one man remained, some star striker, arms out in rapturous worship of the goal mouth, his ape-like face transfigured by a wondrous, private understanding that put most of the street-corner Isiahs to shame. His life to date had been the usual round of infidelities, club violence and vacuous TV spots, but if you had dropped him, as he had become, into Palestine two thousand years back, the course of human history could have been quite different.

  We drank, Mr Owley, the Reverend and I, and listened to the distant echoes of God’s chosen as each described the vision personally vouchsafed to them for the reclamation of the human soul.

  “We’re not going to make it, let’s face it,” I proposed. “Nobody’s taking out the bins. That tells you when things are starting to run down. Everyone’s trying to carry on as normal, but… starvation, anarchy…”

  “Oh I think we’ll pull through,” Reverend McRae said quietly.

  “It’s the government’s fault,” said Mr Owley, with a spark of his old street-ranting fire. “They put something in the water. Or what got out from a lab somewhere. Germ warfare, that’s what it is.”

  “I don’t think they can do that with germ warfare. It’s a bit… specific,” I said, dubiously. “Reverend?”

  “Oh it’s not the government, I thin
k, Mr Owley. I rather think it’s a higher authority,” said the vicar. Owley and I eyed him suspiciously, waiting for the Rapture, but he just blinked at us, benign and sad-faced. “Do you know why I took the cloth?” he asked us.

  “A free house and no heavy lifting,” I put in. I had considered the career myself, the once, for exactly those reasons.

  “I had a calling. When I was at university, studying law, I had a moment… just a moment of sudden clarity. I heard the voice of God, or so I’ve always tried to believe, and I’ve done my best, since then, to do His will. Insofar as anyone can in this world.” He lit another cigarette. The barman had overwritten all the ‘no smoking’ signs with ‘no preaching’.

  “Well.” I shifted, uncomfortable with this unsolicited confession, exchanging glances with Mr Owley. “Still…”

  “I look in their faces, all these people, and I see the same. I believe, I truly believe, that this is God’s work.”

  “Driving people mad? I saw a greengrocer conjure Heaven and Earth to insist that wire coat-hangers were the only means to eternal life,” I objected. “God did that? Why?”

  “Mysterious ways.” The vicar mouthed the standard cop-out. He shrugged. “I can’t tell. Yes, everyone who gets the Rapture is convinced of something… random, meaningless, and yet… they believe. They truly believe, the faith that moves mountains. There must be a purpose…”

  Mr Owley made a dismissive noise, but then the news intro was starting, the familiar glitter of computer graphics, and we waited to see what those remaining at their posts at the BBC had managed to scrape up for us.

  There was only one subject for the news, of course: the Rapture and its effects. The harassed, bag-eyed newsreader was hunched over her paper notes, perhaps for fear of what words the autocue might suddenly put into her mouth. There was widespread looting, she was saying, naming towns, boroughs, counties. Local authorities were attempting to institute food deliveries. The Prime Minister had made a statement. She tried to go live to Downing Street, was left looking awkward and unscripted as nothing happened. “Perhaps – then – do we –?” looking offscreen at someone, “A report from our correspondent in – our – Peter, can you hear me?” Her hand was to her earpiece, as though ready to rip it out the moment the dogma came through, as though you could catch it, or avoid catching it, like that.

  Then we had Peter, or someone I assumed was Peter. He was somewhere sandy and dry, walking down a street between low, whitewashed buildings under a sky of cloudless blue, speaking earnestly, silently into camera. It was somewhere in the Middle East, certainly, but no subtitles, no labels came up. We watched his miming progress curiously. He was pointing to a burned-out car, a tiny haze of smoke or dust still rising, and we gathered that there had been a car bombing, from the look of it, somewhere in – was this Israel? Iraq perhaps? It was difficult to know. The Rapture was on that place as it was on Kingsbury High Street, and men and women with lean desert-prophet looks to them were calling and proselytising their personal brands of divinity all around. In the distance there was a scuffling, awkward struggle just like the one I had passed on the way to the church. In between the howling, mad-eyed ranters, the local people went their way, ignoring their babbling neighbours, ignoring Peter, ignoring the burned-out car, bustling about their lives without much regard for any of it. For a moment we had sound, and Peter’s voice, off-sync with his lips, came to us, “Not an unusual sight here, perhaps, although this is the first such incident since the advent of the Rapture…” and then static, and then, “...is believed that the victim was also a Rapturist, and that the home-made device was…” and then his voice, corroded by distance and failing engineering, was lost. The last we saw of Peter was a look of indescribable awe on his face, his hand raised, trembling, to point at something beyond the cameraman. Then static, white snow, for more than a minute, so that we thought that it was over and went back to our drinks.

  Then we had our newsreader back again, with a new sheaf of papers. She had been crying, I thought, although she was putting on a brave, a professional face. “Well we seem to have lost Peter there,” she said, and my heart went out to her: an unwilling war correspondent in the face of the unthinkable. “Yesterday we heard that the Pope had made his first public address since the commencement of the Rapture. Today, other religious figures across the globe…” but then we had lost her voice as well, and watched as the mutely mouthed at us from the screen, before being replaced by a montage of images: the Pope on his balcony, pontificating to a St Peter’s Square that rattled with only a handful of supplicants, his robes whipped at by the wind; the leader of a London mosque well known for controversy gesturing furiously, angrily decrying idolatry; an Evangelist, starved of the donations of the faithful, trying whip up a fire and brimstone sermon to an empty television studio; an orthodox Rabbi standing in the doorway of a synagogue on a Sabbath day, pleading with passers-by who were doing their best to ignore him; the Archbishop of Canterbury running his hands through his thinning hair; the Prime Minister again, making a statement to two journalists and the unseen cameraman, his hands insisting that everything was under control, the rest of him taut with panic…

  We exchanged glances, Mr Owley, the Reverend and I, and then we went outside, took our drinks to the tables and chairs out front, and lounged there in the balmy weather, watching the insistent ranting of the common people of London, each one touched by some absolute conviction. We watched them demanding that we find the kingdom of Heaven by paperclips, by sandals, by the flight of London’s filthy pigeons, whilst elsewhere the religious figures of the day fought for elbow room in which to set out the market stalls of their own exclusive philosophies.

  That was the height of the Rapture. I remember it well. Looking back, it is that lazy afternoon I recall as the apex, and I wonder if the turning point was simply that enough people had come to the same understanding that we did, and that whatever inflicted the Rapture was satisfied, its purpose complete. People began to recover, in ones and twos, and then in droves. Three weeks later there was barely a lunatic still preaching and, a month after that, you could almost guarantee that someone haranguing you from the pavement was probably genuinely disturbed, and not touched by God at all.

  All in all, the whole globe-trotting mess – which had seemed to be the very End Times such a short while before – dissipated into the prolonged wet raspberry sound of a hundred experts using as many words as possible to say that they had no idea. We had a sweepstake, at the pub, about when the first pundit would give up entirely and start talking about mass hysteria.

  It seems incredible now, that life can go on as normal after all that. Of course, that sort of business can make you appreciate just how much ‘as normal’ means to you.

  Or not quite as normal. There’s one thing changed. You do still hear the old voices of religious extremism, it’s true. The media still gives them airtime, and they have their websites and their meeting places. Even so, these days, when there’s someone out there telling us that God wants our money, or that God has an abiding loathing of homosexuals, or abortion clinics, or just of people who hold slightly different views on what God likes or dislikes, you start to see a certain expression appear on the faces of the listeners, no matter where in the world you are. An embarrassment, really. An awkwardness, like fidgety children sitting through a dull assembly speech on road safety. In the midst of the proselytising and the dogma and the insistence that God wants one such irrational thing or another there comes a certain feeling of, Haven’t we heard all this before? And everyone remembers when a bank manager used the same stale rhetoric for the greater divinity of the footspa, and then sometimes people laugh, and sometimes they leave, but these days it is relatively seldom that they listen.

  Mr Owley is once again a fixture of Kingsbury High Street, but his sandwich board remains immaculately blank, and I have watched the shopping crowds slow as they near him, ready to mock. Then they depart, puzzled and thoughtful, perhaps recognizing the only true mess
age that we can ever receive from the ineffable. As for the Reverend McRae, he stands each Sunday before his sparse congregation still, swelled somewhat by the title of his first sermon after the Rapture: ‘Not in My name’.

  * * *

  This is one of my readers, stories I take along to author readings because slices of a fantasy epic are not necessarily the best fare for that sort of thing. It’s also been deployed to hook the interest of short story collection editors, and so in some way could be found responsible for the volume it currently inhabits. Rapture is a story that grew out of a single protest placard, and I can’t even remember what the protest was about, whether it was some Western move in the Middle East or something completely different. The idea of people protesting that some development taken for national security, or in the name of a faith or culture group, is “not in their name” is fairly widespread, but this placard was definitely placing the words – the last words of the story – into the voice of the Divine Itself. Also, a bit of digging on the internet reveals it’s apparently a song by Kris Kristofferson, which is a bit of a double take. Great minds, apparently…

  Care

  When I picked Dad up from the hospital he had only a glower for me.

  “What took you? Been waiting ages.”

  I checked with the staff. Had there been any problems? There had not. He’d had his telly and his private room, his meals brought to him. He’d been able to shuffle about the garden and complain to the nurses. They’d even let him smoke outside. It was a very obliging private hospital and I’d paid them a lot of money for the three weeks they’d had Dad, in order to make things as smooth as possible for everyone involved. Even so, I got the distinct impression that a fourth week might have seen things begin to fray. Dad could be like that.