Overcome with sudden affection, Lorna placed a hand over Suzie’s. ‘You’re my best friend,’ she said, realising that all drunks said that, and then removed her hand, just in case Suzie had taken her to another gay bar.
Suzie placed her glass with some difficulty on the table and beamed at it, as if not falling over was a clever trick deserving of praise. ‘What’s wrong, babe?’
Lorna had been thinking about MIKE’s watch, a huge lump of metal that not only told the time in Edinburgh but in most of the world’s other capital cities, and which incorporated a stopwatch for lap times and a time-lapsed facility, particularly handy for warning you when your scuba air supply might be running low, an activity that Lorna didn’t think MIKE was capable of pursuing. He was inordinately proud of his ostentatious watch and constantly telling his staff – and presumably family and friends, if he had any – about its endless features. It was, he admitted, a fake. Made in China, or somewhere, he said. Why buy a real one when a fake is just as good?
‘I’m OK,’ said Lorna.
‘No, you’re not, sweetie,’ and then when Lorna didn’t reply, added: ‘Anyway, I’ve got news that might cheer you up. Dad’s given me his old car!’ To add to the effect, Suzie dangled car keys under Lorna’s nose, grinning like a Cheshire cat.
‘He’s given you his old car? Just like that?’
‘Well, he can afford to, sweetie. It’s a kind of twenty-first birthday present rolled into a well-done present. Actually, I think it was Mum’s suggestion. But the good news is that I made him promise to put you on the insurance.’
‘Christ, Suze, I can’t drive a Porsche.’
‘Oh yes, I forgot,’ said Suzie, not smiling. ‘You don’t like rich people, do you?’
Lorna wondered what Suzie saw looking over the table. The young Virgin Mary, perhaps, with a precarious cushion stuffed up her dressing gown? Or the young adolescent trailing in Suzie’s wake, awed by the price of jewellery or clothes, and never being able to buy anything? Or the older adolescent on a visit to the zoo, shouting You’re not an endangered species! at a squirrel in the pygmy hippo enclosure? (Suzie had immediately bettered the joke by running away from the lions’ enclosure screaming They’ve escaped!) Or the young woman, hunched over books in the kitchen, while Suzie entertained Pete/Dan/Rob/Carlo/Dennis in her bedroom? Once she’d emerged drunk in her underwear to announce that one of them (Lorna couldn’t now remember) had dumped her. But only after I’d given him a blow job! she’d complained bitterly. Why couldn’t he have dumped me before I gave him a blow job? Lorna had made soothing noises, and introduced her to her two Uni friends who were also at the kitchen table, now hurriedly putting on coats and scarves.
‘I don’t like privilege, Suze,’ Lorna said, her mind clouded by Passionate Knight and Arthur’s Quest and, for some reason, MIKE’s watch. ‘There’s a difference, you know.’ She forced herself to smile. ‘Are you being serious? About me being able to drive it?’
‘Absolutely, sweetie.’
Lorna frowned into her almost-empty glass. She had always coveted Suzie’s father’s cars, each one more silver and shinier than the last. ‘Wow! I get to be rich by association.’
Suzie pocketed her car keys and looked at her evenly over the table. ‘Lorna, what the hell is wrong?’
‘Don’t know, Suze. Too much to drink, I expect.’ She thought back to MIKE nearly toppling into a cardboard box of cigarettes, an inane smile on his face; the kindly father bestowing a treasured gift. ‘Anyway, I’m also going to be fabulously rich. As an esteemed and highly valued member of the HappyMart family, I have been awarded a second star.’
‘A second what?’
‘A second star. I’ve been promoted.’ She blinked several times, forcing back tears. ‘This morning I was a humble checkout operator. This evening, I’m a checkout supervisor.’
Suzie coughed and smiled uncertainly. ‘Look, you’re only doing the crappy job until you graduate. What the hell’s wrong in that?’ She paused to fill up their glasses. ‘And isn’t getting promoted a good thing? For a start, it’s more money.’
‘I did ask about a company car,’ she said, watching the bubbles in her glass, ‘but I think you need to have about a zillion stars to get one. And even then it would probably be a clapped-out Skoda with splodges of colour all over it. Christ, Suze, I’m pleased for you ... really I am ... but I just feel so fucking miserable.’
Suzie patted her hand absently. ‘I’m still going to pay the rent, if that makes any difference. I don’t intend to actually move to London.’
‘Bollocks, Suze. Famous people live in London. Famous people don’t live in Edinburgh.’
‘J.K. Rowling?’ prompted Suzie. Lorna remembered that Suzie had read at least one Harry Potter book, or at least bought it, or maybe just been given it or simply stolen it.
‘Except her.’
Lorna found her hand gripped suddenly by Suzie’s. ‘But I like it here,’ said Suzie in her little girl voice, the one she would adopt if she was in trouble with her mother. ‘I don’t know anybody in London.’
Lorna lit a cigarette and looked outwards at the shifting water. It was slick with oil and sparkled green and blue. ‘You know tons of people in London. You’re always down there. Anyway, in six months you’ll have forgotten about us,’ she said. ‘You’ll have celebrities drooling over you. You’ll have your photo in the Daily Star.’
Suzie was looking serious. ‘I still don’t want to go.’
‘Of course you do! You’re a tart, Suzie! Now you’ve got the chance to be a real tart.’
‘Moi? A tart? Pot, kettle, black, babe.’
‘Oh, admit it, Suze ...’
‘I still remember Crete,’ said Suzie more loudly, as if their holiday had been years before. She had one eyebrow raised and was waving her glass at Lorna, spilling wine. ‘You and what’s-his-name.’
‘Leo.’
‘Sparrow? Eagle?’
‘Dove, actually.’
‘That’s a film, babe. Also with Hugh Grant in it.’
‘Whatever, Suze.’ Lorna was also going to say Don’t be ridiculous but, in framing the words in her head, she knew that the word ridiculous would be hard to say. Her glass was also somehow empty. Lorna couldn’t remember having drunk it, or if Suzie had drunk it for her. Suzie’s elbows, now on the table, were soaking up slops. ‘You’re forever doing stuff down there,’ Lorna managed, changing the subject.
‘But I don’t know anybody,’ Suzie repeated. ‘Proper people. People I can talk to. Like you, babe. Will you miss me?’
Lorna clicked her lighter twice, two small bursts of flame.
‘Lying toad,’ said Suzie, then looked thoughtful, or as thoughtful as Suzie could ever look. ‘You liked him, didn’t you?’
‘Who?’
‘Leo ... him.’
After a pause Lorna flicked her lighter once.
‘Then call him.’
Click. Click. In any case, she didn’t know his number, or if he was still in Austin’s flat, or if Austin had stabbed him to death and hidden the body.
‘Because of Austin?’
Click.
‘Stupid bloody cow!’ said Suzie. ‘And are we reduced to talking in torch language?’
‘It’s a lighter. Too drunk to speak.’
‘Fuck’s sake!’ Suzie’s arms were held out over the table, dripping champagne. ‘How the bloody hell did this happen?’
Something strange happened to Lorna on their Greek holiday, and not just the interlude with Leo. She’d brought it back with her from Crete, but couldn’t put her thoughts into words. She’d put it down to post-holiday angst, or time of the month, and tried to ignore it. Something had been altered, an inner chemistry displaced, making her question herself and the certainties she had always held firm to. Becoming a lawyer had been everything. Working for Amnesty, perhaps, or Greenpeace, or some-such charitable endeavour – she wasn’t naïve enough to believe that she could change the world, but simply wanted to make a diffe
rence: to do something worthwhile. Was it something Leo had said? The rich boy who wanted to throw away that opportunity, but who hadn’t the courage to say no to his dad? Well, perhaps, she conceded, and felt another trickle of tears at the back of her eyes.
Then she said it. ‘I don’t want to be poor,’ putting into words an alien thought that she shouldn’t have allowed inside her head, but said so softly that Suzie couldn’t have heard, and maybe Lorna hadn’t wanted her to hear. In any case, Suzie’s goldfish attention had wandered again; she had ripped open the packet of peanuts and was demolishing them in small fistfuls, some of which were making it to her mouth. The rest, like shrapnel, were bouncing off the table behind her which, thankfully, was unoccupied. Then Suzie leaned conspiratorially towards Lorna, her forearms once more mopping up the last of the spilled wine, ‘I’m also doing an advert for bathroom hygiene.’ Suzie had dropped her voice, as if imparting a State secret, although Suzie’s stage whisper would have been audible to enemy spies on the other side of the bar.
‘Bathroom what?’
‘Hygiene, sweetie,’ said Suzie. ‘I’m going to be the new face of toilet paper.’ She tried to look serious, then gave up. ‘Lorna, for God’s sake, it’s not that funny!’
Regeneration
It was North Berwick, but it wasn’t. Superficially it looked the same – the same granite, the narrow one-way street, the same cars parked down one side. The air also smelled the same: the tang of the sea and, above, the whirl of seabirds against grey cloud. But it was wrong. The cars were spotlessly clean: everything was scrubbed, immaculate. Lorna touched the bonnet of a car. It seemed like it was made from plastic. She crossed the road and looked up at her house. In the window was a bowl of wilting daffodils but when she tried to push open the door it wouldn’t yield.
It was as if she was home, but couldn’t quite get home: somewhere in limbo, unable to take the final step, to open her own front door. It too felt plastic. She felt tears well up.
‘We thought you might like it,’ said Irene.
‘I don’t like it,’ she said flatly, trying to swallow emotions. ‘It’s not real.’
‘Well, of course it’s not real. That would just be ridiculous.’
‘I’ve no idea what ridiculous is any more.’
‘Oh?’
She gestured around her. ‘I appear to be in the street where I grew up. It’s far beyond ridiculous, Irene! This isn’t Heaven, is it?’
Usually there would be moving cars on the High Street, sometimes long lines of them. Cars parking, cars pulling out; the slam of car doors. But she was now able to stand in the middle of the street, listen to birds calling, hear the distant slap of waves. Irene paused to light a cigarette and nod politely at a Bono who was standing in a shop doorway talking to a Sting. Across the road was someone who was in Franz Ferdinand. All three were wearing blue tracksuits and smiled at Lorna as they walked past. Looking about, she saw that familiar shops had changed their identity and now bore the same labels as in Heaven’s other shopping complex. Where the butcher should have been was Prada; in place of the greengrocer, Dior; a craft shop called Presence was now Valentino.
‘Your memories are nearly complete, young Lorna. Then you will be at peace. Memory integration takes time, you know that.’
‘But I keep getting pains in my arm. I keep having nightmares.’ She was breathing heavily. ‘Irene, I’m frightened. I don’t know what to think any more.’
‘About what, sweetie?’
Lorna gestured to the fake shops and shiny cars. ‘This place. Heaven. It’s not real.’
Irene smiled briefly. ‘What’s real and what isn’t real is of no importance,’ she said. ‘Reality is subjective. You’re in a place where we can artificially recreate anything. The boundaries of reality can therefore be misleading. What is important, petal, is that you learn to decide which is which.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Then think of it like this,’ said Irene, once more extracting a cigarette and momentarily looking upwards. ‘Do you know what a toaster looks like?’ Her lighter flashed; she sucked down smoke and plumed it at the circling seagulls. ‘Of course you do. But what would happen if someone secretly altered your toaster to make it look like a giant mushroom? The next morning, you’d go into the kitchen and find that your toaster had disappeared.’
‘I don’t see what you’re getting at.’
Irene smiled again, this time seeming to mean it. ‘But that’s the point, don’t you see! Your toaster is still in the kitchen. It just doesn’t look like a toaster anymore.’ She waved her cigarette at the shops. ‘That’s what happens in Heaven, Lorna. You’re seeing things that may or may not be real. It’s for you to decide.’
‘That still doesn’t make any sense,’ she said.
‘Probably not,’ conceded Irene. ‘Anyway, God wants to see you.’
They walked on, past the familiar and the unfamiliar, and down to the beach. Here, Lorna suddenly felt both hot and cold. If she turned her face towards the dunes, a chill Scottish breeze touched her cheek. But when she faced the sea, she felt a wall of heat, then a stab of pain in her arm, like a needle. She flinched, thinking she’d been bitten.
At the top of the sand dunes they stopped and looked over the golf course, and Lorna half expected to see her father, bent under his golf bag. Instead, a young Jack Nicklaus was playing up the fairway with a Tiger Woods. Tiger selected a club, addressed his ball, and sent it a few yards into a bunker.
Irene beamed. ‘He may not be very good, Lorna, but last week he could hardly hit the thing.’
On the way, Lorna’s eye was caught by something glinting in the sand dunes. She went closer. It was an empty vodka bottle and, as she watched, it melted back to nothing.
At the other end of the beach, Nico was pushing his barbeque along the sand. Here and there, couples lay on beach towels. Some were bronzed, others lily-white. A fat couple eating cake were burned red. Once again, she felt chilled on one side, a burning sun on the other side. The pain in her arm had subsided.
She was in a jumble of places she recognised, some real and some not so real, and all contained within a spaceship of unimaginable size. It was that which unsettled her. It was what she’d thought when she’d first watched Star Wars, moorhens cackling and Tom puking his guts up over the side of the boat. Why did the evil Empire need such impossibly huge spaceships?
God was waiting for them in the Greek beach bar which had seen Lorna’s welcome party. In front of him was a glass of beer. Music was playing softly from loudspeakers tied to the plastic awning. As always, he was wearing a cream tracksuit. With a start of recognition, Lorna realised that without his beard, he would be the double of Sean Connery. Not James Bond, but Sean Connery as an old man. Now seeing this, she wondered how she hadn’t noticed the similarity before.
He rose chivalrously from his seat and motioned her to a vacant chair. ‘I trust that all your memories are coming back?’
Lorna nodded. Irene placed a white wine and soda in front of her. Lorna looked at it, wondering – not for the first time – what time of day it was or whether it mattered.
‘Memory integration is a bit of a bore,’ he continued, ‘but it’s a process that can’t be speeded up. The human mind is terribly complicated, Lorna. Even Trinity has a hard job understanding it. By the way, how are you settling in?’
‘I don’t know.’ The pain in her arm had returned; she felt momentarily sick. She blinked; again feeling hot and cold.
‘Excellent!’ said God and beamed happily. ‘If there’s anything you want, you just have to ask. Nothing is too much trouble, is it, Irene?’
‘She’d much rather not be here,’ said Irene, who had lit a cigarette and was blowing smoke up to the torn awning. Vines had broken through the plastic; a corner flapped in a gentle breeze from the sea.
‘Understandable, of course,’ said God. ‘Moving home is always traumatic.’
The pain in her arm had blossomed, and shards of memory w
ere spinning, giving her a headache. She wanted to cry.
‘It’s just that I don’t know why I’m here,’ she said. ‘Until I understand that, I can’t believe in anything, particularly you. What I don’t know is why you didn’t bother to invent a cure for poverty or cancer. Or stop illegal wars ... often conducted in your name! A proper God would have done that.’ Lorna looked at him accusingly. ‘I also want to know what’s happened to everybody. Despite TV and blockbuster films, most of the crew have left, haven’t they?’
There was a silence. Lorna looked between them. Irene was staring out to sea, God seemed to be examining his glass and frowning.
‘It’s just that Heaven is too big,’ she said more calmly. The pain in her arm had eased. Under an artificial Greek sun, Lorna again looked from God to Irene. ‘Much too large for the number of people who live here.’ All those empty corridors, a shopping complex that nobody visited ‘Where did everyone go?’ she asked.
‘I told you she was perceptive, God,’ said Irene, blowing smoke towards the hanging loudspeakers. Soft music was still playing. ‘Now there’s no point in not telling her.’
Across the beach, Nico had set alight to his barbeque. Alone on the white sand, he had no customers.
God pointed at Nico with a bony finger. ‘The first sign of trouble, Lorna, is when people start to work. It signifies that they have regained a sense of purpose; that mere leisure and pleasure are no longer enough.’ God paused, took a sip of his drink, and looked at Nico with pursed lips. ‘You see, Lorna, the regenerative technologies aboard this facility were only supposed to work for a year or so. The expectation was that, even if we were stranded in deep space, rescue would arrive relatively quickly. Nobody had ever considered how regeneration might work over many centuries. It isn’t, I regret, the eternal panacea we thought it would be.’
The Things We Learn When We're Dead Page 26