God Collar

by Marcus Brigstocke

  There are clearly a great many things, simple and complex, that faith provides which we need and will therefore be preserved. Some of them have already been absorbed into what we do without us even noticing. We don’t accidentally fall to our knees, face east and pray without being aware of it, or sing a butt-kissing song to the Lord unawares, but we do say goodbye. I love the fact that we say goodbye to each other. ‘Goodbye’ came from ‘God be with you’. We said ‘God be with you’ to each other at a time when there wasn’t enough science. Not enough medicine, so people just died a lot. People fell down dead at the drop of a hat. Granted the head was often in the hat and had been severed in one of history’s decisively important wars, but that’s not the dying I mean. I mean the dying we did when we didn’t know how not to, from all manner of ailments that are easily survived today. In the ‘olden days’ if you went outside and it was raining, you would probably die. That’s how it worked. ‘Oops, spot of rain on the way home this evening, darling, sorry, I’m going to die now, because my chest became moist.’ In Jane Austen’s stories, no one went down to the kitchen in the winter. It was too cold, you would die. ‘I’m just going to get some cheese, do you want anything? Uh oh, hello? It’s a mite chilly in here, Mr Darcy. Blast, it’s given me consumption. Bye bye.’ Thud. It was a time when a strong fart could kill you. One of mine within seconds I’m sure.

  When people parted company they said, ‘God be with you.’ What they meant was, ‘Try not to die. We don’t have enough science yet so I’m not sure how this will work. But I’m guessing you’ll be dead by the next time I see you. Sorry about that, but in the meantime the best I have to offer you is “God be with you”.’ I like that we still say that. We didn’t have enough information so superstition stepped in and became a means by which we could wish the best for a friend and comfort ourselves that it was somehow going to be OK. It’s a sweet and very human thing to do. I also like it because it means we crossed the linguistic bridge between ‘God be with you’ and ‘goodbye’. At various stages in history people must have been saying (this is more fun if you read it aloud): ‘God be with you’, ‘God be with yee’, ‘God be we-ye’, ‘Good be wey’, ‘Goobe-weye’, ‘Goobyweyee’, ‘Good bywye’ and eventually ‘Goodbye’, which we now know and trust and use every day. I’d like to have been alive at the halfway point in that linguistic leap. When people parted company and simply made noises at each other. ‘Goooobeeeweeeeyaaeee’, a dialect still spoken in some parts of Glasgow.

  I think that the final ‘God be with you’, the one that comes when we die, is the thing that draws more people to faith than perhaps anything else. Death is the absolute unknown and even the most ardent thrill-seekers are afraid of it. If they offered ‘Actual Death’ at Alton Towers there’d be no queue. Until many of the visitors had been there for half a day, when instant death would come as a blessed relief. ‘To die would be an awfully big adventure,’ said Peter Pan, his jaw set in defiance of the fear it holds for us all. A big adventure, we can imagine, but what if it’s not? What if it’s all pain and confusion or, worse still, nothing? Pain and confusion we can imagine and brace ourselves for, but we never feel truly nothing, apart from when we listen to Simply Red.

  My grandmother is dying at the moment. She’s very, very old. You could argue that it’s her time. That may well be true. Certainly the perverse obsession with the preservation of life no matter what quality it holds is one I am horrified by. The real sadness of it all is that it’s happening very slowly and each day she survives is not so much a gift from God as a sentence from humanity. When my wonderful grandmother is lucid enough to understand it, she is facing death with an idea in her head. Perhaps ‘a hope’ would be a better description of what she feels. She’s facing the end of her life hoping she’ll see my granddad again … Which is odd because he’s still alive. Sorry, I couldn’t resist honouring that ancient joke which is found in amber in certain parts of the world. He’s not alive, he died almost fifteen years ago, and she’s missed him. Now she is looking forward to seeing him again. And I don’t know if she will. I don’t think so, but I hope she does.

  My grandparents were fantastic together. I don’t think I’ve ever known a couple more demonstrably in love with each other than my Nana and Papa. They were beautiful, devoted, funny and they knew how to live. It’s my understanding that they had a lot of sex. They weren’t unpleasant or unnecessary about it, but neither did they see a need to conceal a genuine lust for intimate relations with each other. I think they continued to do it quite late in life. It may have been what killed him.

  I remember, as children my sister and I used to go away on family holidays with them. My parents would drive us all down to the south of France, to stay in a tiny little villa. My grandparents slept in an old caravan out in the garden. At siesta time, my sister and I would sneak out from our stiflingly hot ground-floor bedroom, slip unheard through the window and hide, smiling, in the cool black shadows of the garden. This devious avoidance of an afternoon kip meant that we would often witness our grandparents’ caravan heaving to and fro with enough creaking and squeaking to silence even the relentless chirrup of the cicadas, who I suspect were pretty impressed. The energetic momentum of the caravan was a mystery to us at the time, but we figured it out later. It was the hypnotic rhythm of my septuagenarian grandparents enjoying a bit of ‘afternoon delight’ in the full heat of the day. On occasion my sister and I would crouch beneath the curved end of the caravan and we’d talk about what would happen if on the upwards rock of the suspension springs we whipped the chocks out from underneath the wheels. Our villa was in the mountains, so with that much elderly sexual dynamism, they would have descended the steep Provençal hillside enjoying the shag of their lives and arrived in a tiny French village in time for pastis and pétanque.

  Good for them. I think that’s wonderful and I hope that whatever sort of apple I am, I haven’t fallen too far from that tree. My granddad had a great sense of dignity accompanied by a wicked sense of humour. He was funny and he was clever, a GP who used Brylcreem and Grecian 2000 and made my grandmother very happy. We knew they were having sex; and he knew that we knew they were having sex. Everyone knew they were having sex. The next village knew they were having sex. In the middle of an afternoon in August in the late 1970s in southern France, there were men in berets carrying baguettes in their baskets telling each other, ‘Mais oui, ce sont les vieux Anglais … Ils baisent encore dans l’après-midi. C’est trop chaud pour l’amour, mais les Anglais n’arretent pas. Bravo, les vieux Anglais. Bravo. Moi, je respecte ce commitment.’ Every day after their siesta bonk, my grandfather would emerge, red-faced, from the caravan with a fly swat in his hand, swinging it from side to side whilst casually noting, ‘A lot of flies in there today. Pretty vigorous chase this afternoon.’ And we’d say, ‘Yeah, there must have been some big ones too because when you hit them they sounded just like Nana!’

  She’d tease him too. She had large breasts, my grandmother. She was at that age where she wouldn’t get them out any more. I don’t even know if that was legal in the 1970s. Not during the day anyway, but after dark she would get her breasts out and she’d tease him with them. They were, if memory serves, that extraordinary colour that old lady English tits go. An incredible, almost luminescent white. Like marble. When the moon hit them they looked almost magical. Quite incredible. I remember one night she got into the pool and swayed in the water saying, ‘Look, Mervin, they’re floating.’ He’d dive in and we’d be dragged off to bed saying, ‘What’s going on, they’re only having a swim?’ He went in off the board, for goodness’ sake, and he was in his seventies. I so hope she sees him again.

  At family lunches, when I was young, my grandmother would occasionally leave the room after the main course to freshen up. Then, just before pudding was served, she would pop a freshly lipsticked face round the door and simply utter, ‘Mervin … a word.’ Upon which he would blush and scurry from the room with a slightly bashful smile; only to return a whi
le later with a twinkle in his eye and a renewed appetite for dessert.

  There’s no one in the world who can sit me down and tell me that the idea of her being reunited with my grandfather in some sort of afterlife is a bad thing. The hope she hangs on to, as more and more of her days here with us are marked by only fleeting moments of comfort and calm, is beautiful and benign and it’s my fervent wish that it comes true for her.

  But I have a problem … the idea of a person, beloved by any of us or not, moving on to some other afterlife existence comes from the same set of ideas that made it OK for those men to get into airplanes on 9/11 and fly them into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. The same set of ideas that makes it OK for people to treat this life as little more than a test, because they’re sure they’re going somewhere better afterwards.

  Those particular people who ‘martyred’ themselves on 9/11 were poor. They’d had their education hijacked by religious fundamentalists. The act of them hijacking planes completed that terrible circle. They’d been lied to by people who had attained enough information from the real world to know that dying and killing for Allah would be stupid, painful and frightening, so they got someone else to do it. ‘All bullies are cowards’ might be a cliché but in the case of suicide killings there is always a better-informed mind convincing those without that to die would be an awfully big adventure. It’s easy, we did it at school, we were children and were waiting for better information, so in the meantime we told the hyperactive thick kid that he was the only boy in the school who could jump off the science lab roof and not hurt himself. Danny had over twenty stitches that day. Not difficult. It’s hard to convince an educated person to commit murder or suicide. Many do, of course, because of mental illness, but to convince someone sane to do it becomes harder with every book they read. If they’ve only read the Qur’an, it’s not too tricky, it seems. This lethal and divisive narrowing of educational focus is something we seem keen to bring about in this country with the ghastly spread of faith schools. A vile legacy left behind from the secret Catholic Tony Blair. ‘We don’t do God,’ said Alastair Campbell, his spin doctor. Possibly not, but it seems God was pretty busy ‘doing’ us.

  Islamic suicide bombers are made promises. They’re befuddled with obscure interpretations of Mohammed’s writing, they are pumped full of easy-to-package misinformation and then sent on their way with the promise of glory, the old lie that is ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’ (Wilfred Owen). Joining any fighting force follows a similar process. The severity of the lie depends on how well advanced and accessible education is in that country. The forces don’t function too well if the ground soldiers know too much. Ask any officer and they’ll tell you the same thing. I say this not to disrespect the undoubtedly brave men and women who fight for their countries, but to shame those who would seek to deceive them. Islamic jihadist murderers are told amongst other things that if they martyr themselves and take infidel lives with them, their reward in the afterlife will include seventy-two virgins, to do with as they will. I had no idea that Heaven was so heavily marketed on the promise of hot orgy action. It makes the Islamic afterlife sound more like an 18–30 holiday. I wonder if they do inflatable banana rides round the bay too. It’s all very tempting … until you think about it. Seventy-two virgin girls would be like being awarded the chattering, shrieking, terrified lower school of an all-girls madrassa. No thank you. What a bloody nightmare. What these boys thought they’d do with seventy-two virgins, I don’t know. As I understand it the boys were all virgins as well. There’d just be seventy-two blushing, sticky apologies and a lot of mopping up as far as I can tell. ‘Hello, are you a virgin? Oops, sorry, I’ve gone off. I’m not used to this. Ooh, look at that one. Shit, it’s happened again. Right, how many of you are left? Hands up if you’re still a virgin. Oh bloody hell, I’m on a hair trigger here. I wish I’d read more books. This is awful.’ Many Islamic scholars will tell you that if you translate that part of the Qur’an directly, it isn’t seventy-two virgins they are promised at all, it’s seventy-two raisins. Which is pretty disappointing for your recently martyred Islamic jihadist, I think you’d agree. Seventy-two dried white grapes. Sultanas. Wow, you’d be gutted, wouldn’t you? You kill yourself and several hundred other people, you arrive in the afterlife full of pride, hope and backed-up semen, only to find there’s barely enough there to make a Chelsea bun. The most you can have sex with one of those is twice.

  I’m not suggesting that my dear grandmother has any more in common with the 9/11 killers than to have shared in the collective need to create something we can be less afraid of when we step into the last great unknown. She hasn’t been got at by an insane Mullah and is as we speak planning to blow the dining room of the care home she’s in sky high, shrieking Allah-e-akbah! There’d be tiny portions of apple crumble and custard all over the walls and the Daily Mail would conclude that no one is safe. These stories of what happens after we die are there to comfort the living and embolden the dying. They carry the power within them (like any good story) to encourage action that might not otherwise take place. For many that action is the positive, well-meant response to the promise of eternal life at God’s side and a fear of spending the rest of time in Hell. For others it’s a trivialization of this life and an excuse to act with barbarism and cruelty towards those who don’t agree with you.

  I simply don’t know if there’s an afterlife of any kind. I don’t wish to let go of the hope that there is one. It scares me that there might not be. I realize, thanks to David Eagleman’s exquisite book Sum, that our imagination as far as what happens next has been stifled by the constraints of religious doctrine. He suggests forty possible explanations, including reliving your life with all the common experiences grouped together. Every shower, every cup of tea, all the pain, all the sex, all the love, lumped together into chapters of experience, as if you had just had one experience of each, and then being asked if it made any more sense that way round. I loved that idea and Sum made me realize just how hemmed in by conventional religious teaching our thinking on possible afterlives is. The box containing ideas about the afterlife is sturdy and has a heavy lock; it’s very hard to think outside it. The atheist will tell you that when you die, that’s it. You die and there is no more and it all stops. The zealot will tell you about being judged for the life you’ve led and going on for ever in Paradise or in Hell or in Purgatory, which is Hell Lite and where unbaptized babies go if they die before they’ve had a decision about their beliefs made for them by people they can’t communicate with. I think in some ways that Purgatory is the hardest of all states to imagine. Unless you’ve ever been to Woking in Surrey, in which case I suspect it’s pretty similar to that.

  I hope something else happens after we die.

  My best friend died a few years ago. His name was James; he was an amazing guy. Whenever I talk about him or think about him, I feel a kind of dull ache inside. The space he left in my life had no choice but to flood itself with sadness. There is also happiness, as I remember how much fun we had, but mostly it’s sad now because there won’t be any new experiences to enjoy with James. That’s as it should be, he was my friend, I miss him. I don’t mind feeling sad about James, although I have stalled, procrastinated and distracted myself in the run-up to writing this chapter so maybe in reality I do.

  James died much too soon. He was in his thirties. A husband, a father, a son and my friend. He’d have lived a lot longer if he’d known how to. He didn’t give up, but his heart stopped working and that meant he had to go whether he wanted to or not. He was a little older than I was and had been a friend of my sister’s when we grew up. Then after rehab I became very interested in dancing. I went night-clubbing as often as I could. Clean and sober but looking to all who saw me throw shapes as if I was guzzling ecstasy tablets like Smarties. James had a severe heart condition so, despite loving dancing, he too avoided the chemicals that went with that scene. We both just loved the music and on one occasion were asked to leave a clu
b because we were ‘too far gone’. I suppose the way we danced made it look like we must be on something pretty extreme and possibly dangerous. We became very close and had silly names for each other, which came from a Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer sketch. I called him Gattman. We went on holidays together. I was proud to be his best man when he got married and he was my head usher when I did. I paid for him when I had money and he paid for me when I was broke. I suspect if you did the maths I owe him about thirty pounds.

  He’d have found the idea of his silly, dancing friend writing a book about God and religion preposterous and exciting. He wouldn’t have liked it because he only ever read books whose back-cover blurb included the phrase ‘Trapped behind enemy lines’. He dug McNab and got cross with me for being a pacifist wuss and refusing to watch past season two of 24 on the grounds that it’s a manifesto for torture. I’m tempted to put ‘Marcus Brigstocke is trapped behind enemy lines as he finds himself caught in the crossfire of atheism and faith. Only more reading and a chopper full of wry sarcastic cynicism will save him now …’ just in case he can see what I’m up to and has time to read.