“So who do you work for now? The West German intelligence?” Tom continued his interrogation.
“There is no West Germany now. And I wouldn’t tell you if I were. They would not employ me anyway. They say that they are different. They say that they have higher standards. But there is plenty of work for people like me.”
“Like what?”
“Work for corporations, of course. Corporations are like states, like small, very powerful republics, and there is no democracy to get in the way. People make decisions in private, and their decisions are final. I can work for such people.”
Tom and Ian looked at each other, and there was nothing reassuring about that statement.
When they got to the outskirts of Glasgow, Ian announced to the driver that his address was in Bearsden. Home was minutes away. But the German was unimpressed. “I will drop you in the centre of the city, okay? You ring your mummy from there.”
Ian worried about the delay in getting to a hot bath, and Tom worried about the German and his intentions. More time in the car was more time to find a solution, but the only way out of the car was to wait for the German to allow them to leave. In the city centre the man circled around close to the motorway exits but was never happy with any of them. He shifted out of the centre, found a slip road, circled a couple of times and then suddenly drew up beside the pavement and shouted, “Out of here, hurry!” The young men obliged and the Mercedes shot away and immediately disappeared down a side road, shortly followed by another car. They turned to each other, and Tom beamed. He was relieved, but his friend was peeved that he still wasn’t home. “After all that, he could have taken us to the door. What was all that going round in circles about, anyway?”
“Let’s get out of here,” Tom said. Some of his anxiety was returning.
On Tom’s advice, they moved to a back lane while they tried to orient themselves in a part of the city they didn’t know. It was one of those places that ooze dampness even on a dry day. Bins were overflowing. Cardboard boxes had been thrown away randomly. Soapy water dribbled out of a blocked drain. It is easier to miss an important detail in such an environment than in a crowded street. The two friends walked briskly with the intention of getting out into another street of shops at the end of the lane, but halfway along, Ian’s phone rang. He took it out and did not recognise the number. He answered, but the line almost immediately went dead. He shrugged and started to move. “That was me, pal,” came a voice. A short man in a smart blue overcoat, with a barely visible white collar and tie underneath, stepped into the light and waved his own mobile phone. “I was just giving you a call. Wondered how you were. Was thinking about your health. Besides, I think we should have a wee chat, boys.” He waved his hand, but Tom was already hurtling down the lane, his feet and his thumping heart almost in unison, terror coursing through his veins. Two men appeared and effortlessly stopped the projectile of quivering human flesh. One of the men punched Tom in the stomach, and when the poor boy bent double the other one kicked him in the teeth. The sequence was so perfectly timed, it had the appearance of a choreographed system for immobilising a running man. It perhaps belonged to a handbook somewhere. The store of human knowledge is now in a state of exponential growth; it is an expanding universe that is also becoming colder.
Ian looked the other way, and saw another two large men. He was struggling to understand what was going on, and why. Tiredness, loneliness and, yes, still only a mild sensation of fear not equal to the nastiness of their predicament. Ian’s world was one in which decency and good manners prevailed; he had no understanding of how things were going to go until he saw Tom’s face. They had brought him back and the first thing he noted was that Tom had lost several teeth. But worse than that was his friend’s expression of absolute terror.
There followed another car journey – a short one to the other side of the city. The smartly dressed man continued his absurd pretence of chumminess and concern. The reality of the criminal profession is unique for its slavishness to fiction: the four goons possibly recognised the cinematic references in the smart man’s speech. Perhaps their minds scanned their own extensive DVD collections in search of the most likely sources. “We had a phone call just an hour ago from a man – I’ve forgotten his name – ‘These boys har very naughty. Mr. Lo Monaco not ’appy. Not ’appy at all. You understand.’ Now Mr. Lo Monaco is not a man you want to upset, boys.” He laughed, and so did his companions in succession. Their laughter was slightly forced. They didn’t seem to extract the same degree of pleasure from their work as the smart man did. “Now, why did you go and do that, boys? Never mind, we get to do him a favour. He’ll owe us one, after you guys dish the dirt on Herr Schmidt. Not his real name, I suppose. The lawyer doesn’t think so.”
Another dirty lane and another back entrance. The seven men climbed the stairs to a sparsely furnished office. Tom and Ian were stood against the wall. “How long have you been working for this Schmidt character? Why was he travelling to Glasgow?” Before the two could answer or even think of answering these bewildering questions, the smart man’s phone rang. He took it out and started an animated conversation during which he lost his jocular tone. “You lost him? … How did you do that? … For Christ’s sake the fucker could be anywhere. … So you’re telling me that all I’ve got for Lo Monaco is these two dumb-asses. I’ll tell you one thing: this Schmidt fella might be sharp but he needs to change his recruiting agency. These guys are shite.”
“Right boys,” he turned to his victims, “I think you got the gist of that: your boss has shaken us off, and that, my friends, makes things worse for you. So let’s go back to my question: How long have you been working for Schmidt and why was he travelling to Glasgow?”
“He was giving us a lift home,” said Ian through a dry mouth.
“And we don’t know him. We were hitch-hiking,” said Tom.
Both got punched in the stomach and gasped for breath.
“So we’ve got a couple of jokers. You want to do this the hard way. And why the loyalty to Schmidt? He can’t be paying you enough.”
The smart man could never understand why the two never gave a thing away. So he never did that favour for Lo Monaco. In fact, Lo Monaco was unimpressed with his contacts in Glasgow. Three days later, the badly beaten bodies of two young men were found floating in the Clyde. The police opened a murder case. The guilty parties were never apprehended. Business was not interrupted.
Paradise, Hotel Accommodation, the Kitchen Staff and Sundry Other Things Most Elevated and Sublime
… and ended up in another world. I had been hit by a car. I knew that much, but I wasn’t in pain. A middle-aged woman jumped out from the driver’s side and a lanky guy from the passenger’s.
“I think you’ve killed him, Mum,” said the man rather too nonchalantly. “You hit him smack on!” And he emphasised this concept by smashing his right fist into his left palm.
“Oh my God, what have I done?” the mother wailed.
The son came over with scientific zeal. He was clearly interested in knowing the actual effects of a metal box with a mass of approximately half a ton travelling at a velocity of approximately thirty-eight miles per hour colliding with a stationary object consisting almost entirely of soft organic tissue. The product of this clash between two opposing and asymmetric forces was, it appeared from his expression, rather disappointing.
The mother began to cry. “He just walked out in front of me.”
“Don’t worry, Mum. He was probably some kind of psycho – wanted to top himself. So you did him a favour.”
Then she started to scream, “Is he dead? Please tell me he isn’t dead! Call an ambulance.” People came over to comfort her, and she was right: I did just walk out in front of her. What was I thinking? I was spooked by that weird guy – the one in the coloured clothing – said he was a narrative voice. I must have been dreaming.
The son crooked his head and studied me with what appeared to be his habitual detachment. “This is
not a computer game, you know,” I said crossly, “I have been injured and I do need an ambulance. Don’t worry, I’m not going to sue your mother. Nothing like that, but could you stop staring at me?”
He didn’t seem to understand or even hear a word I said. “Nope,” he enunciated very clearly in his best mid-Atlantic, “the dude’s not breathing. I’m sure of it.”
So, according to the nerdy type, I was dead. And I had to die before encountering the mildly irritating experience of being called a “dude”.
A suited young man with spiky gelled hair and an officious expression came up: “I saw the whole thing very clearly from the other side of the road. You,” he pointed belligerently at the woman, “were driving far too fast.”
Thankfully the son then left me to go and argue with the spiky hair. That became the area of significant activity and I could enjoy a few moments on my own to reflect on my predicament – or what appeared to be my premature departure from the vale of tears. I would miss the evening shift on the garden sheds, I would miss grey days at home with my parents indulging in their harangues, I would miss the joys of love and parenthood, and I would miss the weight of years turning me into my father. I would miss out on life. Still, it appeared that death wasn’t the end at all, although no one could hear me and it seemed I was unable to move.
“Perhaps I was going too fast,” the driver was saying weepily.
“No, you weren’t, Mum. The idiot just stepped off the pavement. Come on. There was nothing you could do.”
“Listen, you were going fast enough to kill him, and this is a thirty-mile-an-hour zone. I saw it. I’m a witness.”
While I was thinking that there was as little peace in this other world as in the one I had just left, a sober man dressed in black leaned over me. He could have been an undertaker. In fact, that was my first thought, but then I noticed two unusual things about him. His dress wasn’t really modern; he was perhaps a seventeenth-century puritan. And he looked like a slimmed-down and more empathetic version of the man who called himself the Narrative Voice.
“Tom? Tom Cunningham?” he asked.
“That’s me,” I answered with an inexplicable sense of relief.
“Good. Come with me then.” His answer showed that he could hear me. He put out his hand and bid me take hold of it, “We’d better be on our way.”
I took his hand and, to my surprise, I was able to move and stand up. He smiled slightly and said, “I’m going to be your guide. We have a long but not particularly onerous journey ahead.” And so off we went.
We wandered down the nondescript, the plain linearity of Paisley Road West, and he instructed me upon my fate, my journey and my immortal soul. No one saw us as we passed or heard the earnest, sweetly ornate but slightly dull discourse that issued forth from prudent lips – of the companion of my initial passage into the afterlife. I wasn’t a good student and was more curious about my altered state, my invisibility to a busy and noisy world populated by those whose shades were still suspended in their corporeal domiciles, like the battered one I left on the road beside the two modern men who disputed the velocity of the wheeled projectile that had struck me dead.
“What is your name?” I asked.
“What’s it to you?” the wise man said, “what does it matter who accompanies you and puts you right on all the niceties of the other side of death and glosses all the little signs we find along the way?”
“It doesn’t matter much to me, but the bizarre fellow who accosted me before my death and perhaps led me to it would think it useful to release such information at this stage.”
“Very well, I am John Milton,” the man said with his widest smile yet and not without a certain pride, “the great English poet. We’re the sort of people who take on this job.”
I had vaguely heard of this man. “Are you going to show me around hell?”
“Hell no, there’s no hell in the world after death.”
“No hell? Didn’t the narrative voice mention that?” I thought aloud.
“Hell is what you’ve left behind: diseases and accidents that can whisk away your friends and lovers, your parents and your children; pain and torture inflicted by circumstance or intention; cyclones, tsunamis, mud flows, fires and armed men wandering with a lust for cruelty; ghastly dictatorships that are overthrown by frivolous and unprincipled democracies so that oppression is followed by anarchy, the one thing that is worse; minds that wish to construct atom bombs so that the apocalypse, which once seemed the ravings of mad monks and insane prophets, can and probably will become a reality. But that is not all; the unequal world you have left behind has many wealthy people who manage to be as unhappy as or unhappier than those who have every right to be so. Sir So-and-so quarrels over the handsome pension his now defunct bank should pay – how many German motor cars can a man buy in a year? That’s just the big stuff, and then there are the lies, the false gossip, the rivalries and jealousies, the ambitions, the arrogance, the self-delusion, the affronts and rebuffs inflicted by high and low office, the scrabbling around for crumbs from the table and the conspicuous waste of those who let the crumbs fall while also leaving a great wealth of food to rot in their larders. What hell could possibly follow that? We only have a heaven and that is where we’re going.”
“So why the long journey? Why don’t we fly there on wings with a harp in our hands?”
“This world has its rules and its own scientific logic. You have to learn to accept them just as you did those of the world you have just left behind.”
I imagined the heaven that lay ahead of me: high walls like a medieval city, but white and glowing with the goodness of its ethereal power; an adamantine gate shut fast and guarded by angels in Swiss uniforms; and inside pleasure gardens with bountiful orchards and graceful people, all young, glowing with fine thoughts and kindness, promenading by the fountains and through the apple groves, deep in discussion and politely allowing each other to formulate their words, for they have no need to hurry, eternity awaits. Eventually I would be taken to the princely hall whose high vaults depict the histories of all peoples and the glories of holy men and women. Sweet smells of cinnamon and frankincense would lighten my head, already spinning at the divine grandeur of the holy place. At the end of a seemingly endless red carpet, there would be fifty-three steps and above them a throne, and on that throne would sit a vigorous and wise old man – known to us as God. I was filled with joyous energy and ready for my trek. How lucky I was that the poor lady had run me over and released me from the idiocy and banality of earthly existence. I was off on my quest for full knowledge of how the heavens have been built.
“I am ready,” I said a little unwisely, and suddenly Paisley Road West faded and we found ourselves struggling across a desert. My feet sank deep into the sand, and the going was tough. Nothing could be seen for miles. We trudged in silence now that there was no one around not to hear us. “How do you know which way to go?” I asked at length, because we appeared to be going round in circles.
“I don’t,” he replied.
My religious fervour flagged. The afterlife was beginning to look very arduous. “Have you no idea?”
“You are still obsessed with time, which has no worth in the afterlife, but you will only really understand this once you have passed through the sandglass into eternal time. That’s what I am looking for now. If we keep going round in circles here, we will eventually come across it.”
Suddenly he started to sink deeper into the sand: “This is it,” he cried, “follow after me by standing on this very spot.”
Shaken and fearful I stepped on what I thought was the exact place where he had disappeared from view. Vicious currents of sand gripped my legs as if they were tentacles of an unknown and unlikely cephalopod and drew my body down. After the initial shock, the feeling was not unpleasant and was perhaps even the exhilarating sensation a child feels in a swimming-pool chute. I was whisked further and further down into the depths of the boundless sands. I laughed. An
d laughed again when I bounced off a round, balloon-like object in the shape of a black-suited man in a top hat and a moment later off a similar object in the shape of a woman in evening dress, barely visible in the sandy vortex.
Just as I was learning to enjoy the experience for what it was and to be almost unmindful of Milton’s explanation and my eventual passing into a different dimension of time, I bumped against a glass surface and started to slide down along with the rush of sand. Of course, it drew me close to a narrow passage or entrance through which I passed, hitting the hardness as I went and feeling not pain but the discomfort of being jarred. Being thin, I passed through without difficulty, and I think that even a fat man would have managed it, but not a large animal similar in size, say, to a camel. After that I floated down in a rain of sand and landed just next to my guide. Strangely there was no sand on the grassy lawn around me, nor above me could I see any sign of the sandglass, only a beautiful clear sky of aquamarine blue. The countryside in which we found ourselves was of an equally rich green such as painters use to suggest the freedom and luxuriance of the primeval woodland not entirely lacking in menace and hidden spirits.
My master leapt to his feet. “The way is not long.” At times, this prolix man could be laconic. At times, this slow and professorial guide could be energetic and zestful. He started to walk at a military pace, and when I complained, he pointed to the summit of the hill. Finally he waved his hand once more and said, “It’s there. It’s the other side of that hill.” My imaginings were revived. All I had to do was climb to the top of the fertile mound before me, which was covered with vines, olive groves and those dark, abundant woods from whose interiors you could hear the gurgling of plentiful streams, the myriad songs of myriad songbirds and the plaintive pipes of melancholic goatmen.
Can the Gods Cry? Page 13