The Things We Learn When We're Dead

by Charlie Laidlaw

  God drank more beer and placed the glass back on the table. Lorna watched bubbles rise. ‘The process does keep us young and healthy so, in theory, we could all remain here until the end of time. In Heaven, eternity should mean eternity. But regeneration is about much more than physical renewal. It stops us becoming bored,’ said God with a wistful smile. ‘It allows us to enjoy ourselves for century after century, doing the same things over and over again. But, as we now know, its effects do wear off. As I said, Lorna, the system was never designed to work indefinitely. Trinity has tried to modify the process, but the human mind is just too complicated. The first indication that the process wasn’t perfect was when some of the crew started to work again. At first, Lorna, it was only a small handful, and I didn’t worry much about it. Over the centuries, more handfuls ...’

  He placed a hand on his beer glass. Over His head the torn plastic awning was flapping. ‘When people regain purpose, Lorna, it means that, sooner or later, they put in for a transfer.’

  ‘To where?’ She was mystified.

  ‘Where do you think, sweetie?’ said Irene. ‘To Earth.’

  * * *

  Then Suzie was gone and the flat felt empty and cheerless. Lorna had kissed her off at Waverley Station, heaving great suitcases from the taxi to the train. The Porsche could only have accommodated Suzie’s make-up bag, and only with difficulty, and there wasn’t an aeroplane large enough to take all Suzie’s luggage. She’d therefore decided to leave the Porsche in Edinburgh, at least for the time being. It felt strange having the flat to herself, no longer competing for the bathroom with Suzie’s never ending string of boyfriends, or working against the background of loud rock music from her bedroom. Instead, there was silence, which Lorna initially found discomfiting. In the long summer break, without lectures, tutorials, or dissertations, Lorna opted to work additional shifts in the shop, building up a campaign fund, so she called it, for her last year at university. She didn’t know what she’d spend it on. So most mornings now found Lorna outside the Arthuria Road flat, pausing on the pavement, her eyes always drawn to the silver Porsche in their resident’s space. Lorna loved it, but rationed her outings in it. It drank too much, and working at the HappyMart wasn’t enough to quench its thirst. But she did drive past the shop one afternoon and by coincidence Mike and Vlad were outside having a cigarette. Lorna waved airily to them as she drove past, the roof down, and Suzie’s Versace sunglasses on her nose, then speculated if this might affect her nickname. Nor could she resist driving down to North Berwick and showing it off to her parents. Her mother had insisted that Lorna drive her down the High Street, again with the car’s roof down, while she grandly waved to friends and acquaintances with a big grin on her face.

  In a break from filming, Suzie came north for a long weekend. She now shared a flat with three other aspiring actors in Battersea. The lump of the old power station, now an art gallery, was almost next door. Lorna asked her about Hugh Grant. ‘Is he absolutely gorgeous?’

  ‘He’s very charming and raffish.’

  Lorna leaned over their kitchen table. A bottle of wine had been opened and mostly consumed. ‘That’s not what I meant, Suze.’

  ‘I don’t fancy him, if that’s what you meant. Christ, Lorna, he’s old enough to be my father! Actually, he’s quite sexy,’ she conceded, ‘but in a sleazy way, if you get my drift.’

  ‘So you haven’t slept with him?’

  ‘Not yet, but I’m working on it. And if we get married, I insist on you being maid of honour.’

  ‘Will I get to wear a pink dress?’

  ‘The pinkest of pink, sweetie, like a flamingo, although you don’t have to stand on one leg.’ Suzie wrinkled her nose; in Suzie’s absence, Lorna had been known to have the occasional cigarette inside. That morning had been spent with every window open and Lorna spraying the place with several cans of air freshener. ‘I’ll even make sure you catch the bouquet.’

  ‘Don’t think I’m ready for marital bliss just yet, Suze. Mister Right seems inexplicably to have got lost. Best if I wait til your third or fourth wedding.’

  Suzie kicked off her shoes and swung her long legs onto a kitchen chair. ‘And how have you been? All alone in this place.’

  ‘Oh, you know. OK, I suppose.’

  But she wasn’t OK, not really. There was still that sense of dislocation that she’d unwittingly brought back from Greece. A small but unspecified gathering of doubts, nothing she could pin down, and so ephemeral she was usually able to ignore them, forcing herself to be cheerful, making smiley small talk with her customers, and insisting that she did at least an hour of revision each evening, even if it was still the long university holiday. Maybe it was that which had made her drive past the HappyMart in Suzie’s car, driving round the block several times, knowing it would be Mike’s break, and that he usually went outside for a smoke with The Impaler. Why had she done that? To show off? To somehow say that she was better than them? She’d felt ashamed afterwards, because she wasn’t better than anybody, and it wasn’t even her car.

  In her new solitude, Lorna did sometimes still think about Leo, but he was slipping from sight; a holiday romance that hadn’t properly ignited, although she sometimes wondered if he’d found the courage to disappoint his father. Either way, it didn’t much matter.

  The next morning, Mike emerged from his office He was holding open a copy of The Sun and laid it down on Lorna’s checkout. ‘Isn’t that the loud person who was in here a few weeks ago?’ he said, stabbing a large finger at a showbiz picture. Suzie appeared to be emerging from a nightclub. She was wearing a sparkly silver dress and was smiling over her shoulder at someone just out of camera shot. The caption described her as ‘Suzie Bryce, model and actress, taking a break from filming School’s Out!’ Lorna looked through all the grubbier tabloids without finding other pictures, then texted her.

  U r in The Sun!

  Suzie texted back later. And nt on pg 3

  That evening, Lorna watched a programme on Iraq, the generals and politicians seeming confident that, apart from some insignificant difficulties, life was improving for ordinary Iraqis, despite an unreliable electricity supply and water shortages and the daily risk of being shot or blown up or dying from dysentery. Then, tired and depressed, she made herself a cup of hot chocolate and stood at the window and looked out at her castle, which was usually enough to lift her spirits.

  The phone was ringing.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Is that Lorna or Suzie?’ He had an unfamiliar voice and sounded hesitant.

  ‘It’s one of us,’ agreed Lorna.

  ‘I mean ... sorry ... It’s just that Simone said I should call. To say hello.’

  Lorna had no idea what he was talking about.

  He persevered. ‘Simone. My sister. She runs a taverna in Crete?’ The rising inflection of his voice suggested he was Australian, and Lorna did remember.

  ‘Oh yeah. Simone. Married to Nico.’

  ‘Well, Simone said that you two were cool and that I should look you up when I got to Edinburgh.’ There was a small silence. ‘I’m Joe, by the way. Joe Crowe.’

  * * *

  It was clearly a subject that God found painful. His eyebrows furrowed, he continued in a low voice: ‘The ones who want to transfer have grown tired of eternity. Maybe they feel they’ve lived long enough. But the isotope that protects my crew in Heaven offers no such protection on Earth. They know that, but still they ask for their transfer. Like everyone else, they become prey to illness and disease. If they’re lucky, they grow old before they die. They also know that it’s a one-way ticket. If they choose to leave, they can’t come back. That was one of my rules when the first crew members asked to leave, a decision that even Irene agreed with. I thought it would be a deterrent. Why go on a suicide mission when you can live forever?’ He shrugged, then looked at his glass.

  ‘Your crew is defecting to Earth?’ asked Lorna.

  ‘Not defecting. Merely choosing a different kind of lif
e.’ He sat up straight as he said this, looking her in the eye. ‘But don’t think I just let them transfer to Earth willy-nilly! My purpose, Lorna, is to give them purpose. Only if they agree will I authorise their transfer.’

  Irene had been tapping her foot in time to the music, seemingly lost in a private reverie. ‘God’s primary responsibility has always been to his crew, Lorna. He is God of this facility, and his first concern is for our well-being. This beach, for example,’ said Irene and gestured round with a manicured hand. ‘He authorised its construction for a purpose. To entertain us, yes, but also to recreate a bit of Earth in Heaven. He thought it might stop people wanting to go there.’

  ‘I was wrong, of course,’ said God. ‘I simply wanted to provide my crew with a new form of entertainment. That’s the trouble, Lorna. You can only really enjoy yourself in a limited number of ways, even on a beach.’ Here, mischievously, he winked, making her blush. ‘However, once you’ve tried everything a million times, it does become repetitive. Regeneration was supposed to stop that. For a time, it did.’ Lorna opened her mouth but God motioned her to be quiet. He seemed agitated, pulling at his beard then fiddling with his strings of beads. ‘But I do care, Lorna, and I do what I can. In terms of medical and other advances, my crew have helped your people to develop all manner of things. Lister, Pasteur, Archimedes, Socrates, Alexander Bell, James Watt, Bill Gates, Galileo ... I could go on, Lorna, but I won’t. All were friends and colleagues and I miss all of them.’

  God took a deep breath. ‘As for world poverty, well, it’s your world. I may have created you, but how you choose to run things is your affair. Mine not to reason why, young Lorna.’ He looked again to the beach where Nico was turning hamburgers and wafting away smoke with a small towel. ‘As you well know, there’s more than enough food on Earth to feed everybody, so half your world needn’t starve. So it’s really just a question of organisation and resolve, and your people seem to possess neither.

  ‘I have given Earth electricity and the steam engine, vaccines and the internet. The Wright brothers were both crewmen and, from their humble beginnings, you are now reaching into space. But I can only work within the context of what you know. I couldn’t very well send the Wright brothers back to invent the jet engine, could I? To cure cancer, you have to truly understand the workings of DNA, which you don’t. But you will, Lorna! I have helped you map out the human genome and clone Dolly the sheep, and you are inching ever closer to a final cure. So you see, where I can, I have helped you achieve great things. Many of the miracles of your science have come directly from this space facility. I’m not a bad God,’ said God and stroked his beard. ‘But I am a realist. For every great scientific advance on Earth, I lose a member of crew. However,’ said God more brightly, ‘most of them do achieve the tasks that I set them. In return for mortality, they generally keep their end of the bargain.’

  ‘Not all,’ said Irene.

  ‘No, not all.’

  ‘Not, for example, David Beckham.’ Irene shook her head.

  Lorna had been listening in silent awe. ‘David Beckham’s an alien!’

  God once more furrowed his eyebrows and looked at her sternly. ‘We are both genetically similar, young lady. Please don’t think of us in those terms, as I certainly don’t think it about you.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she stammered. ‘I didn’t mean it to sound like it did.’ Now that God had said it, it made a perfect kind of absurd sense. She’d always thought there was something odd about the Beckhams.

  ‘He was supposed to go to Earth and advance your thinking on free-electron lasers. They have, or will have, both a medical purpose and a central role in faster-than-light space travel. I felt it was about time I gave Earth’s space programme a bit of a jolt. David, I regret, hasn’t yet achieved the purpose I gave him.’

  Irene had fetched two more glasses of white wine and soda from the bar and now handed one to Lorna. ‘He was football daft, even here. Captain of Heaven’s soccer team, always practising, always watching matches on the telly. We have a small stadium on the other side of the golf course,’ she said with a wave of one hand. ‘It was always likely that Earth’s temptations would prove too much.’

  ‘But largely,’ said God, ‘my crew have proved successful. For that, at least, I am profoundly grateful.’

  A few couples were wandering in from the beach, towels over their shoulders. Two girls in bikinis were chatting to Nico, although not eating his burgers. The sun had slipped lower, a cool breeze had sprung up off the water. ‘Why am I here?’ she asked.

  God finished His beer and stood up. ‘So I can offer you a choice, young Lorna.’

  ‘A choice?’

  He was stroking his beard with one hand, running beads through his fingers with the other. ‘When all your memories have returned, your regeneration will be complete. At that point, and not before then, I will reveal that choice to you. It explains why you’re here, Lorna. It explains why I chose you.’

  Star Wars

  She couldn’t rid herself of the small but bewildering sense that her trajectory was wrong, and at first (having ruled out post-holiday angst and the time of the month) she put it down to the long summer break from college, having the flat to herself, and the mind-numbing drudgery of the HappyMart. But eventually she started to admit that some of Leo’s doubts had been passed to her, and it kept her awake at night, staring at the ceiling, feeling confused and lonely. She continued to work additional shifts at the shop, but didn’t socialise with the rest of the HappyMart family, despite being asked to a couple of staff outings, which always involved grotty pubs or a curry, and generally both. Little Miss Clever supposed that the others probably thought her stuck-up. She didn’t really know why she turned down their invitations, and was saddened one Friday evening when it became apparent that they were all off for a few drinks before heading home, and nobody – including Mike – had bothered to mention it to her. She didn’t want to fritter away money on socialising. She liked Vlad and Maggie and the others, and absolutely wasn’t better than them, but she couldn’t risk their fate. Becoming a lawyer had been her only fixed star; and beside that one bright star in her sky, nothing mattered. Those grim back-and-white pictures from the North Berwick museum were still etched into her memory, so too the cupboard under the sink and her mother sinking, exhausted, onto the sofa each evening.

  One night, after a particularly dull evening at the HappyMart, Lorna dreamed she could fly but had forgotten how. She was in the countryside in warm sunshine, in a meadow filled with yellow flowers, with a sparkle of water at the meadow’s margins. She knew she could fly and she had to fly, because she was miles from a railway station or bus stop and had to get back to Edinburgh. It was how she’d got to the meadow in the first place, lifting herself off the ground with the merest flick of a wrist, and floating upwards from the city, turning to the coast by pointing her face towards it, and riding the thermals. Now she was stranded, her feet rooted to the ground. Lorna tried running and flapping her arms, then realised she had a canvas bag over one shoulder and decided it might be too heavy for take-off. She placed it on the ground and ran round it, arms outstretched. Gradually, Lorna realised that the gift of flight had been taken from her and now she was no different from anyone else. She wasn’t horrified by this. In her dream, she merely accepted it.

  Not long after Tom died, Lorna had started to talk to a man with a big grey beard and twinkly eyes. He wore a long black cloak, like she wanted her father to wear, and had a large red nose, like a beacon on a lighthouse. He was very tall, almost as tall as the sky, she used to think. When he smiled, his whole face would light up, and he would bend down and ruffle her hair, and tell Lorna stories about long ago. Sometimes she would ask his advice or just tell him what she’d been doing at school. He had very large ears, so was a good listener. Her mum said that Lorna shouldn’t talk to him, not only because he was a stranger, but because he didn’t exist.

  But he existed to her and together, sometimes, they wo
uld rise up from the ground, Mr Tomkins holding tight to her hand and float off into the night sky. She loved Mr Tomkins and was sad when, after she’d grown up a bit, she no longer thought about him.

  The Chinese believe that a person’s soul lives for as long as they are remembered on Earth. When Lorna found this out, she worried about Mr Tomkins. Had she inadvertently killed him, even though he was a figment of her imagination?

  The next morning after her dream, as she showered, she thought about Mr Tomkins because the dream seemed to signify something, but as the day passed it became smaller until she forgot all about it.

  She decided that some exercise might do her some good and dutifully bought a pair of running shoes. For two days she drove the Porsche to the foot of Arthur’s Seat, a large hill on the fringes of central Edinburgh, and ran around it. The first half of the run was excruciating as it involved a stiff climb; the second half less so as it was downhill all the way. On the second day she was caught in a freezing downpour and lay shivering in the bath for half an hour, her limbs aching and her lungs burning. For a while she vowed to give up smoking, then decided that jogging wasn’t for her. Then she tried swimming and, after her shift in the shop, would walk briskly to the Commonwealth pool and force herself to do thirty lengths. But after two days, despite her love of swimming, realised that she had fallen out of love with swimming pools. Greece had spoiled her, the warmth and silence of an empty sea compared with the shrill mayhem of small children, and the equally shrill whistle of lifeguards trying vainly to keep order.