I'm in Heaven

by Terry Ravenscroft

  Following the reception Kristin and I will leave for our honeymoon to an undisclosed destination.

  Originally we were going to have a fairly low key wedding. Just a few close friends of Kristin’s and a few friends I’d made during the six months I’d been in heaven, the Sir Alex Fergusons, the Wayne Rooneys, the Michael Caines, The Archangel Phils. I didn’t want a fuss and Kristin wasn’t bothered either way. But in the way I can never make up my mind who is my favourite actor, Robert de Niro or Jack Nicholson, I hadn’t been able to make up my mind which of them to have as my best man. In the end I’d plumped for de Niro, but as I also very much wanted Nicholson to be there too and didn’t want him to feel he’d been left out of things I asked him to be the usher. Then Kristin suggested it might be a nice idea if all the groomsmen were my favourite actors too. I thought it a great idea. Then I’d come up with the idea of the Elton John thing and before we knew it we had a full-scale wedding on our hands. It didn’t bother me; big wedding or small at the end of the day I would have Kristin as my wife.

  *

  Resisting the temptation to get my best man to do the Rupert Pupkin stand-up routine from The King of Comedy, one of my favourite film sequences of all time, I excused myself. The nuptials were only an hour away. Time to dress for the big day.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I knotted my shot silk grey cravat and checked my appearance in the mirror. The mirrors were very classy at the Savoy, gilt-edged, just like my future.

  I had a deeply satisfied smile etched on my face. It said to me ‘Whoever would have thought this would happen, eh? Humble little Norman Smith from Harpurhey, Manchester, getting married to the famous film star and English Rose par excellence Kristin Scott Thomas? Well he was. And in less than half-an-hour. So put that in your pipe and smoke it.

  I took a few moments to reflect on my good fortune. I recalled what I was just six short months ago, the rough time I’d had of it during the preceding six months, the not much better time I’d had of it before that, the many years after my dad had died and I’d been lumbered with my mother. I compared it to the future I had in front of me with my beloved Kristin. I really, but really, was in heaven.

  Kristin and I had never discussed children. I had never imagined myself as a father. I scarcely imagined I would ever get married; it had never been more than a hope at best. But things were different now and I rather liked the idea of a little Norman or a little Kristin. Or maybe a little Norman and a little Kristin? I was thinking about this, thinking I might bring it up with Kristin after the honeymoon - not before, I didn’t want her going all mumsy on me when making love would be the main item on the agenda - when the door suddenly opened. It was The Archangel Phil.

  I was both surprised and delighted. “Phil! You managed to make it after all.”

  The Archangel Phil had been one of the first names on our wedding list but unfortunately he’d had to cry off at the last minute due to work commitments - an airplane carrying twenty three Roman Catholic priests had crashed with no survivors and six of them were on their way to heaven. Phil had to meet and greet them.

  “No. No it’s something else,” The Archangel Phil said. “Something’s come up.”

  “Oh?”

  He didn’t answer right away. I began to worry; I didn’t like the apprehensive look on his face or the way he kept shifting his weight from one foot to the other. Finally he said, “I’m afraid there’s been a bit of a hitch.”

  A bit of a hitch? What did he mean, a bit of a hitch? It suddenly hit me. Kristin! She’d had second thoughts. My stomach did a somersault. I tasted bile. “Is it Kristin?” I gasped out. “She hasn’t changed her mind, has she? Please don’t tell me she’s changed her mind, Phil.”

  “No. Not that.”

  I breathed a huge sigh of relief. As long as it wasn’t that I didn’t care what it was. I smiled and said, “What then?”

  “You have to go back.”

  “What?” I thought he meant to Manchester. “Back north you mean? Why?”

  “No, to earth. You have to go back to earth.”

  “To earth?”

  “You shouldn’t be here. It was another Norman Smith who should have come to heaven.”

  “Another Norman Smith?”

  “He was in the next ward to you at the hospital. Another cancer victim. It was he who should have died. There was a mix-up and....” The Archangel Phil shrugged and spread his hands in a gesture of apology. “It does happen occasionally I’m afraid. I’m sorry, Norman.”

  I was completely thrown. Completely at a loss. “But....I don’t want to go back.”

  “Yes I realise that, but the other Norman Smith is waiting to come but he can’t until you’ve been safely returned.”

  “But....I mean I love it here, Phil. I love Kristin. I’m getting married. I’m getting married to Kristin, we’re getting married in half-an-hour.”

  “I’m sorry Norman, truly I am, but there’s just nothing I can do about it.”

  I was utterly devastated. My mind raced. What to do? A straw appeared from somewhere. I clutched it. “Let him stay. This other Norman Smith. Let this other Norman Smith stay on earth and I’ll stay here. I’m sure he’d rather do that, nobody wants to die.” This made perfect sense to me and I was convinced The Archangel Phil would go for it. I breathed more easily and forced a smile. “There, that’s settled.”

  But The Archangel Phil’s face told me it wasn’t. He said, “I’m afraid that’s not possible, Norman. Apart from that the other Norman Smith is in a very bad way. Such bad way that he wants to die.”

  “I want to die,” I said. “I want to be dead, Phil. Besides, I’m already dead. I died on the operating table. You told me.”

  “That was my information. But apparently you get better, you respond to the new treatment, your cancer goes into remission and you make a complete recovery.”

  I became desperate and started to rant. “I don’t want to make a complete recovery. I don’t want my cancer to go into remission. I want to be here. I want to be here, with Kristin. I want to be here in heaven and getting married to Kristin.”

  The Archangel Phil stepped forward and put a comforting arm round my shoulder.

  I clasped my hands together and looked up in anguish. “Oh God, please let me stay and get married to Kristin. Please let me stay. ” I wasn’t appealing to God when I said this, I was saying “Oh God, please....” in the way people on earth say it when they’re faced with something they can’t handle. The Archangel Phil didn’t realise this and said, “God knows all about it, Norman. There’s nothing he can do about it either. But I’m sure he’ll watch over you.”

  That only made things worse. “Watch over me? Watch over me? Well I hope he makes a better fucking job of it than he did the last time.” I pushed The Archangel Phil away from me and stuck out my chin. “Well I’m not going.”

  “You must, Norman.”

  Another straw appeared. The final one as it turned out. “All right. But after the wedding, after we’re married. Let me get married first.” I was sure he’d go for this. And after the wedding I’d think of something, we’d run off somewhere, hide, live in a cave somewhere, anything. But he didn’t.

  “I’m afraid it must be immediately.”

  “No!”

  “Let go of that trouser press.”

  In a panic I’d grabbed the first thing that might anchor me in heaven, the wall-mounted trousers press. The Archangel Phil took a step towards me.

  “Keep away from me Phil,” I shouted. “I’m not going. And you can’t make me.”

  “I’m afraid I can, Norman.”

  I suddenly felt a great force pulling at me. My feet lifted off the floor. I clung on desperately to the trousers press. In a shower of splintered wood and plaster it tore from the wall.

  ****

  PART THREE

  BACK TO EARTH

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  As the train pulled out of Piccadilly station I picked up the freebie M
etro someone had left on the seat opposite and settled back with it. Normally I like to look out of the window on train journeys but I’d travelled on the same line a week previously and was aware that the first part of the journey from Manchester to New Mills, passing through the city’s drab and dingy eastern suburbs, is better spent with your nose in a newspaper, or even in the air, than pressed to the window. A Tesco plastic bag, selected by the slipstream of the train from amongst the sundry detritus decorating the tracks, momentarily attached itself to the window, reminded me of this, as though I needed reminding. Only when the train has negotiated Stockport, a town where trees are looked upon as tourists, does the terrain give way to more pleasant surroundings, and by the time you’ve reached New Mills, eight or so miles further up the track, you are in open countryside with wonderful views of the Pennine Chain’s Kinder Scout. It was the first of two journeys I took that day that would end much better than they started. Or so I thought, for a short while.

  *

  There had been no sense of passing through a tunnel on my return to Earth. One minute I had been protesting to The Archangel Phil that I didn’t want to go back, the next minute I was back in Ward 12. Dr Who doesn’t travel faster.

  My first thought on coming round was that it had all been a dream. As I looked around Nurse Baker bustled by. I called to her and asked what day it was.

  “Oh you’ve come round at last,” she said with a smile. “Welcome back to the land of the living. November the tenth, all day.”

  “What time?”

  She checked the upside down watch on her uniform. “Ten past two.”

  “AM or PM?”

  “PM.”

  The same day I’d had the operation. Just three hours had passed since I’d gone down to the theatre. So it must have been a dream.

  “And do you mind telling me what that thing is?” Nurse Baker said.

  “What thing?”

  “That!” She nodded in the direction of the wall beside my bed.

  Propped against the wall was the trousers press that had come away from the wall of my room at the Savoy in heaven. “Only you were hanging on to it like grim death when you came back from the operating theatre; it took two of us to prise it out of your hands.”

  I smiled weakly and shrugged. “Search me.”

  Not a dream then. But then how could it have been? It would have taken a lot longer than three hours to dream of all the things that had happened to me while I was in heaven. And I could remember every last second it. All my time with Kristin, all our love-making, all Manchester United’s victories over Liverpool, all the meals at Michael Caine’s Abode, the trip to Niagara Falls, Friendly’s, The Sopranos, every joke in every performance of my career as a stand-up comedian, the wedding plans, Robert de Niro, the aborted wedding, everything, and all in glorious Technicolor and Stereophonic Sound. But time, as The Archangel Phil had explained to me, was timeless in heaven, so it all must have taken place during the three hours I’d been under the anaesthetic or coming round from it.

  And now I had the cancer ward to look forward to again. I was back in the overcooked cabbage and stale pee smelling giant tropical fucking fish tank again with a colostomy bag strapped to me for the rest of my life.

  My hand had gone to my diaphragm to check if the dreaded colostomy bag was back in place the moment the trousers press confirmed to me that I hadn’t been dreaming. “Shit,” I said, appropriately enough, when my fingers touched its clammy plastic.

  There is nothing, but nothing, in the entire world, worse than having to wear a colostomy bag. For me at least. I’ve always been squeamish about shit; any wife of mine would have been on her own at babies’ nappy changing time if I’d ever married, English Rose or no. It’s the one reason I’ve never owned a dog, even though I’d have loved one. But having to put its shit in a little plastic bag every time I took it out for a walk then spend the rest of the walk carrying it as if it were the shopping was too high a price. And now I had a plastic bag of my own shit to carry around with me every time I went for a walk. At least the dog shit carriers could hang their plastic bag of shit on a tree and collect it on the way back from their walk then throw it in the wheelie bin when they arrived home. I couldn’t even do that.

  I once read somewhere that some deaf people develop an unconscious dislike of their hearing-aids and often punish the offending apparatus by allowing its batteries to run down. This got me to wondering how I could exact revenge on my colostomy bag. Making a hole in it so it couldn’t do its job properly was one of the ideas I came up with. Simply not emptying it until it eventually burst was another. But as both methods of retribution would result in me being covered in my own shit, the first sooner, the second later, but more spectacularly, common sense had prevailed.

  But at least I hadn’t got cancer any more, according to The Archangel Phil, or wouldn’t have when the chemotherapy and radiotherapy and whatever other therapy they’d got lined up for me - shit-scaring therapy probably - had done its vicious work, which was something to be thankful for. Dr Matthews confirmed this three weeks later. My cancer had gone into remission. Chemotherapy would ensure it stayed in remission. It had been a miracle. I had been very, very lucky.

  “Lucky? Oh yes, I’m lucky all right,” I replied to this, in a voice that implied exactly the opposite.

  Dr Matthews had been unable to understand why I wasn’t absolutely delighted with the news, and said as much. I could have told him that a course of chemotherapy followed by living in Harpurhey for the rest of my life with a colostomy bag strapped to me, after having spent the last six months colostomy bag-free shacked up with Kristin Scott Thomas, was not conducive to a feeling of absolute delight. I hadn’t bothered in case he suspected I was losing my marbles and had me moved to the psychiatric wing. Stranger things have happened in National Health hospitals.

  Dr Matthews told me that I was probably still suffering from post-operation depression and that I’d soon snap out of it. I knew otherwise; it was post-heaven depression that ailed me and it would take a lot more than a snap to get me out of it, nothing less than major seismic activity would suffice.

  A positively beaming Reverend Ever told me that my recovery was a miracle. The Lord’s work. But not entirely unexpected, in fact not unexpected at all, as he had prayed for me. While the Reverend Ever was rejoicing I recalled telling The Archangel Phil that I owed the cleric an apology. He didn’t get one. He was unbearable enough as it was, telling all the other patients how his prayers had saved me and that as he’d also prayed for them it was only a matter of time before they too made a complete recovery. This had the effect of perking up the other eight patients no end, but they all perked back down again two days later when Mr Gearing, throat, breathed his last. (Three months later, when I was back at 12 Hugh Gaitskill Street, The Jehovah’s Witnesses didn’t get an apology from me either. When next they knocked on my door I remembered what would be happening to them when they eventually made it to heaven - that they’d very soon be on their way back - and it was all I could do to keep my face straight, let alone apologise. In fact it was the nearest I’d got to a laughing since returning to Earth.)

  Mr Gearing’s demise prompted Mr Meakin to say that he had gone to a better place and Mr Broadhurst to go along with this viewpoint. Mr Braithwaite, Mr Statham and Mr Greening nodded in agreement. Mr Hussein also nodded, but as he had his earphones on he was probably nodding, not to the beat of Meatloaf this time, but to The Kings of Leon, as Mr Fairbrother had mischievously suggested to him that as a vegetarian it was perhaps a bit untoward of him to listen to a band with meat in its name, and Mr Hussein, seeing the error of his ways, had gone along with it.

  At that point I entered the conversation. In the feeling of utter despair that had filled my waking hours since finding myself back on earth, not to mention the chemotherapy, which if anything was even more vicious than the last lot I’d had, I had completely forgotten to tell the rest of the patients in Ward 12 how wonderful it was in heav
en.

  “He’ll be a lot better off in heaven,” I called out to them. “A whole lot better. It’s an even better place than you imagine.”

  Mr Meakin’s head snapped round. “I thought you didn’t believe in God? Changed our minds now he’s cured our cancer, have we?”

  “One of us now, is he,” said Mr Broadhurst, with a self-satisfied smile.

  I took my time before replying. I couldn’t very well tell them I’d been to heaven and returned to earth; they were all believers but even they wouldn’t believe that. After a moment I said, “I’m a believer myself now. God spoke to me.”

  “Go on?” said Mr Greening in disbelief.

  “What did he say?” said Mr Braithwaite.

  “He told me I’d be a lot better off in heaven.”

  “Really?” said Mr Meakin, and added, in case his query should indicate an element of doubt in his belief of the powers of the Almighty to communicate with his subjects, “Well I can’t say I’m surprised. It doesn’t surprise me in the least.”

  “Yes, God said it’s quite wonderful up there,” I went on. “Everything a man could hope for.”

  “Did he say you get the legover?” said Mr Fairbrother, revisiting an old concern.

  I gave a smile of fond memory. “Not only do you get the legover,” I said, and delayed the rest of the sentence a moment for effect, “but you get to have it with anyone you want.”

  “Fuck me!” said Mr Statham.

  “Anyone you want?” said Mr Braithwaite.

  “Anyone,” I reiterated.

  Mr Fairbrother didn’t even need to think about it “I’m going to have it with Cameron Diaz,” he said, licking his lips at the prospect. “Three times a day.”