Idolism

by Marcus Herzig

  In the minds of some people God is as real as Santa Claus was to me when I was five years old. But I’m not five anymore.

  God is alive in the minds of some people, and that’s perfectly fine with me as long as He stays there. I’m not anyone’s judge. If you want to believe in God, fine. If you’re absolutely one hundred percent convinced that God exists, if He talks to you and tells you what is right and wrong and how to live your life, then go on, have a ball. But leave me out of it.

  Religion is a lot like sex, I suppose, in that it’s best enjoyed in the privacy of your own home. I’m interested in public displays of religion just about as much as I’m interested in public displays of sexual intercourse, and that is not at all. I’m ready to accept your religion and tolerate your views as long as you are ready to accept that I’m not interested, so please leave me alone with it. If your God is all powerful, then He doesn’t you to speak for Him. And if He wants to talk to me, He knows where I live and He’s got my number.

  So the Pope had taken a nosedive down the stairs and died, and Julian was glued to the TV. For me the most annoying thing about breaking news stories is that news people keep obsessing over them for ages. I mean, just because everyone is on a 24-hour news cycle these days doesn’t mean that even the smallest bit of news has to be stretched to 24 hours, dissected and scrutinized and analyzed and sucked dry, does it? But then there were TV channels whose job it was to do just that. Like T-Vox, that ultra-conservative, reactionary, racist, homophobic, bigoted channel that had started polluting British airwaves a few years ago and that had since grown into the drug of choice for those parts of the population who were in desperate need of someone to blame for their misery and their own ineptitude. Precariat TV, my dad used to call it.

  85-year-old man falls down the stairs, cracks his skull, and dies. They could have covered that event in depth in five minutes. But instead they were repeating it for hours and hours, and they brought in all sorts of so-called experts. They brought in airline experts and airport experts, church experts and old-people experts, and they all kept discussing every single aspect of the story ad nauseam, and in the end the whole world was none the wiser, except that an old man had fallen down the stairs and died. It was just so pointless.

  Julian loved every minute of it of course.

  It’s not that he was excited about the mere fact that an 85-year-old man in a dress had died a hilarious, tragic death. Julian was excited about the whole baggage that this event was bound to bring with it, all the implications of things to come in the next couple of days and weeks. Luckily, we had our very own pundit, our own expert on all things churchy and popey.

  “So what’s going to happen next?” Julian looked at Tummy.

  “They’ll be taking him to the morgue, I guess,” Tummy said.

  “No, I mean, they will have to elect a new pope, right?”

  “Well, yes, obviously.”

  “So how does that work?”

  Tummy frowned. “Haven’t I told you this before?”

  “Yes, but I want to hear it again.”

  “Right. Okay. Well, the Conclave typically begins 15 to 20 days after the death of a pope. The College of Cardinals gets locked up in the Sistine Chapel and starts voting. A candidate needs a majority of two thirds to be elected. That usually doesn’t happen on the first vote, so they’ll take the ballot papers and burn them, and they add chemicals to make the smoke black, so that the people on the outside know that there is no new pope yet because the smoke coming from the chimney on the Sistine Chapel is black.”

  “And then they vote again,” Julian said.

  “Well yes, but not right away. Having over a hundred cardinals cast their vote and having all the votes counted and verified is a lengthy process, so they’ll have a maximum of four ballots per day, two in the morning and two in the afternoon.”

  “And they keep doing that until a candidate has a two-thirds majority.”

  Tummy nodded. “That’s right. And when that happens they add different chemicals to the ballot papers when they burn them, so the people on the outside see white smoke and know that there’s a new pope.”

  “I wonder who the next pope will be,” Julian mused.

  “Impossible to tell nowadays. Could be anybody. How about you run for pope? Eh, Jules?” Tummy nudged him with his elbow. “They could do with a fresh face down at the Vatican.”

  “I’m not a cardinal, though.”

  “You don’t have to be,” Tummy said. “It’s a common misconception that you have to be a cardinal first in order to become pope. But that’s not true. Well, at least in theory. But you’d have to become a Catholic first of course.”

  “Hey,” Michael said, “don’t give him any funny ideas like that.”

  Julian shook his head. “Thanks, but this time I think I’ll pass.”

  And so on.

  I have never quite understood Julian’s fascination with religion. Maybe it’s because he never came into contact with religion at home. His mum never made him go to church, and for all I know they didn’t even have a copy of the Bible in the house until Julian bought his own one day. I suppose initially Julian was just intrigued by religion the same way he was intrigued by everything else he didn’t know anything about.

  I remember one day when we were 15 or so, when Tummy asked him one of his typically dumb questions.

  “Why do you always have to know everything?”

  “Because it bothers me not to,” Julian said. “Not knowing things makes me feel stupid and ignorant, and I can’t feel stupid and ignorant because it’s not good for my self-esteem.”

  Tummy shrugged. “Works fine for me.”

  “I can’t understand why a person could possibly not want to know everything there is to know; especially in this day and age when it’s so easy to know stuff, what with Google and Wikipedia and all the rest of it. I want to know it all.”

  “I don’t know,” Tummy said. “Ignorance is bliss. God didn’t want us to eat from the tree of knowledge in the first place.”

  “Yeah, but now that we did it, shouldn’t we try and make the best of it?”

  Julian always found it very easy to become fascinated with a new topic. It excited him. Unfortunately, he was never very good at containing his excitement. He had to talk about it. A lot. It was almost as if he felt the need to teach you everything he knew, regardless of whether you wanted to hear about it or not. Learning new things made him feel good, so he assumed it had to make other people feel good as well. So he’d tell you everything he knew, and he thought he was doing you a favour. He wasn’t trying to brag about his great knowledge and make you feel stupid. He wanted you to be as smart as he was.

  “If everyone knew what I know, the world would be a better place.”

  “Yeah, well,” I said, “unfortunately we can’t all be like you.”

  “No no no,” he replied. “That’s not what I mean at all. I’m not saying that everyone should do what I do or think what I think. Everyone has to use their knowledge in their own individual way. The important thing is to have the knowledge to base your decisions on, not so much what those decisions are. We’re information processing machines. Give people knowledge, and they will—by and large—come up with the right conclusions. Give people a good education, and everything else will fall into place.”

  “There you have it,” Michael said and looked at me. “The problems of the world solved for you.”

  Julian nodded. “You’re welcome.”

  It was at around that time that Julian got rid of almost his entire wardrobe and replaced it with additional school uniforms. He only ever wore his school uniform after that. He loved being a student. He took pride in it, and he wanted people to see that he was a student; that he was eager to learn. Even in the afternoons. Even on the weekends. Even during the summer holidays.

  There has always been something messianic about Julian, some inexplicable desire to make the world a better place, regardless of the cost. For the pe
ople around him, us, his friends, it always was a bit of a mixed bag. It could be extremely fascinating and entertaining to sit there and listen to him rambling about an interesting topic for hours. Julian had a great sense for details and a great gift of connecting many little pieces until slowly but surely a big picture emerged that you hadn’t been aware of. He could tell you a complete history of the Tudors and make it sound like it was his own family and everything had happened just the other day. He could also give you a complete lecture about human faeces and why sometimes your poo was dark brown and solid and at other times it was light brown and mushy. Julian didn’t know any taboos and he was able to talk about bodily functions without the typical embarrassed teenage boy giggle whenever he said the word sphincter or something.

  Julian’s ramblings could be extremely entertaining but they could also be extremely annoying because once he had talked himself into a state of trance, it was almost impossible to stop him. He’d just keep talking and talking and talking, and he wouldn’t even notice if the world around him went up in flames. He’d get that mad look in his eyes and he would stare at some imaginary point in the distance, talking to himself, feeding his own knowledge back to himself.

  I remember how one day when he was talking about black holes or the Big Bang or something spacey like that, Michael, Tummy and I just left the room one after the other. Julian didn’t even notice. He just kept talking while we were standing outside laughing our arses off. But when after a couple of minutes he still hadn’t stopped talking, we started feeling really bad about it because he felt so passionate about whatever it was he was talking about. It didn’t feel right to be standing there and making fun of him, so we went back in and listened patiently until the end of his lecture. He never even knew we’d been gone.

  Julian could get fascinated with any topic, obsess over it for a few months or half a year, and then he’d move on. But the one topic that he could never quite leave alone—the topic that wouldn’t leave him alone—was religion.

  One day I asked him why, and he said, “Because it’s everywhere. It's always been everywhere. Every single civilization since the dawn of history had myths about the creation of the universe and the supernatural beings that supposedly did it. And even today there are churches in every little town, there is Christmas and Easter, there are religious conflicts in distant places, and there are suicide bombers who blow up our buses and trains in the name of their faith. I want to know why that is.”

  I had no doubt that he’d eventually find out.

  The Gospel According to Tummy – 2

  Dead Popes always mean a big mess, because it means that there’ll be a new Pope, and new Popes always mess things up. Like back in 1979, when Karol Woytila became Pope John Paul II. He was from Poland. Back then, Poland was a socialist dictatorship, and they had to do what their neighbours, Soviet Russia, told them to do. But some of the Polish people didn’t do as they were told. They acted up, and the Pope backed them. And bam!, ten years later the iron curtain was gone and Soviet Russia lost its Empire and the cold war was over. That never would have happened without a Polish Pope. New Popes always cause a mess. Sometimes it’s a good kind of mess, which makes me think we should have new Popes more often. Because let’s face it, when the cold war was over John Paul II’s job on Earth was pretty much done, and he just should have resigned or something. Apparently, as a Pope you can bring big change only once, and once you’ve done it, then for some reason you’re in the way of newer, bigger change. John Paul II clinging onto his crosier for another 15 years was just a tremendous waste of time. Of course I wasn’t allowed to say that at home, because I’m from a catholic family, and when John Paul II died, me mum dressed me and me sister and me dad and herself all in black and booked us on the next flight to Rome where we had to stand on St Peter’s Square and wait until the cardinals had elected a new Pope. And when that new Pope finally stepped on the balcony and I saw his sunken, dark eyes and his creepy grin, me first thought was that he looked like the devil. Of course I couldn’t say that to me family either, but back then I was only eleven years old and I didn’t know right from wrong, so I just said it anyway.

  “Mum, why does he look like Satan?”

  Without even thinking about it for a second, me mum just turned to me and slapped me face. Twice. Right hand, left cheek, left hand, right cheek. Bam, bam, just like that. Jesus would have loved me for turning the other cheek, except it went so fast that I didn’t really have a choice, and Jesus loves everybody anyway, doesn’t he? Then me mum grabbed me arm and dragged me back to our hotel room where she made us all pack our bags while she called the airline to get us on the next flight home. For the next three months whenever I did something wrong—and in me mum’s eyes pretty much everything I ever did was wrong—she kept reminding me of how I had ruined the happiest day of her life as a Christian, and that I would end up in hell. I believed her, because she was me mum.

  For me birthday a couple of weeks later I wasn’t allowed to get any presents from anyone, not even from me older sister Chloe. The only present I got was from me parents. It was a brand new King James Bible. It was me third, and I hadn’t even liked the other two all that much. So yeah, the old Pope and I didn’t hit it off very well, and the only thing I really liked about his reign was the way he died on the day this whole story started, but I’m probably not allowed to say that either.

  So the goddamn Pope had just leapt to his death. They repeated it in slow motion on the telly over and over again, and it was quite hilarious, but I tried very hard not to giggle, because if God heard me giggle at the death of the Pope, He would surely put me down for a guaranteed place in hell. But at least I wouldn’t go there on me own, because Julian couldn’t stop laughing.

  “You are so going to hell, mate,” I told him.

  Julian chuckled. “If God doesn’t want me to laugh, then he needs to stop letting things like that happen.”

  “You don’t get it, Jules. He gave you free will. This is a test to see how you react. You failed the test. You’re going to hell.”

  “Yeah, well,” Julian said. “I don’t believe in free will. Or hell, for that matter.”

  I felt very uncomfortable. Not only because of the way Julian dismissed my concerns, but also because I knew that before long me mum, who was even more devout a Christian than the Pope himself was, would pick up the phone and summon me home so that all the family could mourn his death together. I had turned off me mobile phone in wise anticipation of her call, but of course me mum called Michael’s dad, and so he came walking down the stairs and told me that me mum wanted me home ASAP. I sighed and said okay and finished the bag of crisps I’d just opened, and then I left.

  On me way home I came by our school because it’s on the way, and since it was already sort of late in the evening I was surprised to see the whole building lit up like a Christmas tree and all those cars and vans in front of it and all those people walking in out of the building. Me first impulse was to just keep on walking, because whatever was going on there probably was, like, none of my business, but then I noticed something funny.

  Me dad’s car.

  It was parked right in front of the main entrance of the school. Me first thought was that Mr Richardson, our head teacher, must have called him in to talk to him about me grades or complain to him that I kept going for seconds in the school canteen at lunchtime. I thought it would be best to go home as quickly as possible and just pretend that I hadn’t done anything wrong, but then Richardson and me dad came out of the building and walked over to me dad’s car. I quickly hid behind a tree because I didn’t want them to see me. Me dad opened the passenger seat of his car and took out his laptop computer, opened it, and showed it to Richardson. That’s when I knew that it probably didn’t have anything to do with me. It must have been work related. Me dad never used his computer for private matters. He barely even knew how to use the Internet. As he kept talking to Richardson and pointing at the screen of his computer, all these m
en in white coveralls were unloading huge boxes from the delivery trucks that were parked in front of the school and carried them into the building. This was all very weird, and I didn’t know what to do. I sort of wanted to ring the others and tell them about it, but I wasn’t sure if that was the best idea, because if something was afoot here, telling Julian, Michael, and Ginger about it might lead to unforeseen and—more importantly—unwanted consequences. You see, me friends were always eager to cause a bit of trouble, so I was a bit reluctant to alert our little sleeper terror cell of what was going on at school in the middle of the night, but in the end I couldn’t keep it to meself, so I called Michael.

  The Gospel According to Michael – 2

  At around 9 p.m. I heard my dad coming down the stairs. He knocked and opened the door.

  “Hey, guys,” he said.

  “Hey, dad.”

  “Hey, Mr Carling.”

  “Hello, Mr Carling.”

  “Good evening, Mr Carling.”

  “Thomas, your mum just called. She shouted at me because you weren’t answering your phone.”

  “Sorry ‘bout that, Mr Carling,” Tummy said. “I must have accidentally switched it off.”

  “Right.” Dad laughed. “Anyway, she wants you to come home right away.”

  “Yes, Mr Carling.”

  “Please don’t make her call me again,” Dad said and winked. “I am begging you!”

  “No, Mr Carling. I’m basically on me way already.”

  Tummy got up and put on his coat. “Your heard it, guys. I have to go. Me mum is probably already dressed all in black and crying her heart out in front of the TV. I’ll see you at school tomorrow.”

  Tummy left and I moved into his space on the couch, joining Julian in front of the TV. Now that the Pope had died, which was something that usually only happened every other couple of years, we were in for lots of strange rituals, including the ritual of extensive media coverage for days if not weeks to come. One of the talking heads was giving us a rundown of all the religious ceremonies we were to expect, from the public display of the dead Pope’s body to his funeral to the election of the new Pope. There were sparkles in Julian’s eyes. He was going to have the time of his life, most of it front of the TV, and I started to think that we wouldn’t get too many band rehearsals done in the few days we had left until our gig at the school anniversary.