Authors: Ben Elton
There was weeping, there was singing, people tore at
what few clothes they wore until they were entirely naked.
They pulled at their hair, beat their chests and fell upon
the ground. They hugged each other, kissed each other,
rolled about together in great sweaty huddles; many made
love and some began speaking in tongues.
They cried that they
would
make a difference. They
committed their lives to love, to Jesus, to the kiddies and
to themselves, that they might be worthy of the solemn
responsibilities that fate had placed upon them.
The concert ended as it did each week, with the stars
gathering on stage together with the political and spiritual
leaders to sing 'We Are The World'. As they did this, the
screens filled with the faces of dead babies and tens of
thousands of people writhed on the ground, on the carpet
of discarded food wrappings.
Trafford and Chantorria did not join the orgy. They
hung back with those who, while voluble in their
emotional support, could not quite summon enough
ecstasy to have sex with strangers to prove their faith.
Finally, as the last bars of music faded and the last voice
from the stage commanded the crowd to 'go home and
make a difference', Trafford heard another voice calling
out nearby.
'Repent your sins!' the voice shouted. 'You who worship
pleasure in the name of God, repent your sins.'
People turned their faces towards a slight figure in a
loincloth. The man had brought a box to stand on and
from it he was haranguing those around him.
'Jesus cleansed the Temple!' the figure said, waving in
his hand a plain-covered book that looked like no
self-help manual Trafford had ever seen. 'He turned out
the greedy, the gluttonous, the fornicators and those
who sought only bodily pleasure! He believed in modesty
and fidelity . . .'
It was a Chris-lam, a man who purported to love Baby
Jesus but who did so in the shameful, shame-ridden,
life-denying manner adopted by those who worshipped
the anti-God of Islam. Trafford had heard of such people
but he marvelled that any had the courage to show
themselves publicly, particularly among a crowd whose
emotions were running at fever pitch.
'Oi!' screamed a voice at Trafford's ear. 'You fucking
paedo! I find your point threatening! You are making me
feel uncomfortable!'
In a moment the mob turned from a disparate rabble of
angry voices into a single terrifyingly violent scream. The
Chris-lam was torn from his box and if the police had not
intervened there could be no doubt that he would have
been at the very least severely beaten. Instead he was
arrested for inciting religious hatred and disrespecting the
will of the majority and the police led him away.
That night, after they had collected Caitlin Happymeal
from the tenement childminder, Trafford approached the
subject of the Vaccinator once more.
'Did you see the faces on the screen?' he asked
Chantorria as she was tucking Caitlin into her cot.
'Of course I saw them,' Chantorria replied.
'Do you want Caitlin Happymeal to be one of those faces?'
Chantorria looked up angrily. 'Don't you dare speak to
me like that! I gave birth to her; she's part of my body.'
'Then you should want to save her.'
'Only the Lord can save her. How can we possibly
change fate?'
'Well, if everything's preordained anyway what difference
does it make what we do?'
'Don't be a smart-arse, Trafford. That's what people
don't like about you. They know you think you're clever.'
Chantorria had finished with the baby and begun
getting ready for bed herself. Their little fold-out shower
cubicle had long since broken down and was now used
as an extra cupboard. Instead she stood in a washing-up
bowl and sponged her body at the tiny basin that was
bolted to the wall in the corner of their bedroom.
Chantorria usually played footage of splendid waterfalls
on the wallscreen while she bathed but this evening she
did not bother.
'I don't even know why you're so sure that this awful
thing will work,' she said, dabbing at her body with the
sponge.
'I'm not sure. Of course I'm not sure. How could I be?'
Trafford replied testily. It was four in the morning by this
time and his head ached. 'But when I think about it, it
seems possible, very possible. I mean I can sort of
understand
it, the logic. I find that very compelling.'
'Compelling?'
'Yes. Intellectually.'
'Trafford,' Chantorria hissed, 'we are talking about our
daughter. We are talking about heresy! What the fuck has
your intellect got to do with it?'
Trafford took up his communitainer and flicked
through the tenement podcasts. The streams from each
apartment in their building appeared on the wall in turn.
Most of the occupants were asleep. There were a few fights,
one or two couples still having sex, a few others watching
them having sex, or watching porn or reality TV.
Barbieheart was at her post of course, but snoring loudly,
slumped forward over a bucket of fried chicken which was
still clasped between her vast arms.
'Let me ask you this, Chantorria,' Trafford said, sugaring
the rims of two glasses and filling them with Bud corn-syrup
beer. 'Don't you ever get tired of not knowing anything?'
'What do you mean? I know as much as anybody.'
'Which is nothing.'
'Trafford, please don't go off on one. We need to sleep.
Caitlin will want feeding soon, she's only had formula all
night.'
'Let me put it differently. Don't you ever want to
understand
something?'
'I'm going to sleep.'
'The Lord made Heaven and Earth. The Lord made us.
The Lord does this, the Lord wants that. We don't know
how or why, we don't need to know, it just happens.
There's never any explanation, it's all a miracle. Children
are born, some die, it's God's will, we can't change it.
Don't you think that, in a way, that's sort of . . . sort
of . . . ?'
'Sort of what?'
'Pathetic?'
Whatever else Chantorria had expected him to say, it
clearly wasn't this.
'Pathetic?'
'Well, to just . . . give up . . . leave everything to God. I
mean why did he bother making us in the first place if the
only function we serve is to believe in him and then die.
Isn't that a bit pointless?'
'I wish you wouldn't talk this way, Trafford. It's
weird
.
Our job here on Earth is to have faith. Faith is an
acknowledgement that there is something bigger and
more important than us, which I certainly hope there is.
What's pathetic about that?'
'Well, perhaps I want something else in my life, something
other
than faith.'
'What could there be other than faith?'
Trafford struggled to think of the word. He knew there
was one, he had heard it used in different contexts, but this
was the context for which the word had been coined.
'Reason,' he replied.
'A reason? Isn't Caitlin Happymeal a reason? Isn't your
daughter a reason? Aren't
I
a reason?'
'No, not
a
reason. Reason itself. I want to work something
out in my own mind. I want to arrive at a conclusion
because I've thought it through, not because I've been told
to believe it. I want to take part of my life back from God.'
'Trafford,' Chantorria replied, and there was fear in her
eyes, 'you can't deny God! They'll burn you!'
'I'm not denying God!' Trafford said hurriedly. For all
his brave words, he was a long way from wishing people to
think him a heretic. 'Surely you can act independently
without denying God? I would have thought that any God
with half a brain would
expect
that of his children.'
'Trafford!'
'I mean wouldn't faith itself be more valuable if it was
arrived at through question and doubt? What's the use
of blind faith? Seriously, it's not difficult saying you have
faith if the alternative is being burned alive. But does
that mean you
really
have faith? That man this evening,
that Chris-lam.
He
had faith.'
'Trafford, he very nearly got
beaten to death
. You want to
get us both beaten to death? Is that it? That man was mad.'
'Of course he was mad to do what he did. To risk dying
for his faith. You wouldn't do that. I wouldn't do that.
Faith to us is anything we're told to believe. If Confessor
Bailey told us that a cherry alcopop represented the
blood of Diana we'd worship it without a thought. But
that man tonight—'
'Who could have been
killed
—'
'That man had arrived at his faith
despite
what he has
been told. His faith was personal. He'd
thought
about
something and decided to act upon the conclusions he'd
drawn. I'd like to do that.'
'You want to get beaten to death?'
'You're not listening to me! What I'm saying is, wouldn't
it be an astonishing thing to act independently? To think
something through? Decide upon a course of action and
then follow it. Wouldn't that feel good?'
'How would I know? Who's ever done that?'
'This vaccination. Don't you see! I have looked at the
evidence available to me and drawn a conclusion.'
'What evidence?'
'There was once a science that protected children from
childhood diseases . . .'
'You don't
know
that!'
'That's my point. Of course I don't
know
it. It's not a
faith! It's not something in which I can believe absolutely.
It's a conclusion, that's all, a supposition based on the
evidence at hand, which is the mortality statistics for the
year 15BTF. I have arrived at an
independent thought
!
Doesn't that sound exciting to you?'
'I'm not poisoning my baby because you want to have
exciting thoughts.'
'Chantorria,' Trafford said gently, speaking just loudly
enough to be heard above the general noise of night.
'You're an intelligent woman. I know you are, we've lived
together for almost two years and a marriage doesn't last
that long without people really knowing and respecting
each other.'
'Trafford, we have to
sleep.
'
'If Caitlin Happymeal dies, as statistically she has a fifty
per cent chance of doing—'
'Shut up!'
'If she dies,' Trafford insisted, 'do you really believe that
she will be instantly alive again in some sweeter and
better place?'
Chantorria raised herself up on her elbow and looked
Trafford hard in the eye.
'Yes,' she said firmly, 'I believe that absolutely.'
'Then why do you not wish her dead this instant?'
'That's a stupid, stupid question. Go to sleep.'
'Come on, Chantorria. It isn't a stupid question. It's an
absolutely obvious one. What is our life? Nothing. How
was your day? Shit. You spent it at the gym pretending to
be something you're not for fear that people might
discover what you actually are. We live a shit life in a shit
city rammed up against millions of shitty people. Why
would you wish a life like that on Caitlin Happymeal
when she could be in Heaven?'
Chantorria's expression became half angry and half sad.
She did not try to deny the truth of Trafford's words.
'Because I'd miss her,' she said, tears starting in her eyes.
Trafford shook his head. 'Of course you'd miss her but
you're not a selfish person. You'd do anything if you
thought it would make her happy, even let her go. The
truth is that secretly in your heart of hearts you doubt that,
were Caitlin to die, she actually
would
be transported into
the arms of Diana. You know that all those pictures and
paintings on the walls of the faith centre cannot truly be
real. Kiddies die every day, they can't
all
be in Diana's
arms, she wasn't an octopus. You know that Heaven
cannot be full of beautiful angelic people, for most people
who die are infants and the old. Heaven would actually be
filled with screaming babies and fat old crones.'
'It isn't literal! The Confessor always says that.'
'Why isn't it? Everything else they teach us is literal. The
story of creation, the day of judgement, astrology,
speaking in tongues, the miracles, tarot, Hell, the angels.
They're all real according to Confessor Bailey. Why not
Heaven? And if it isn't real, what is it?'
'It's the Love.'
'What do you think will happen to Caitlin Happymeal
when she dies, as statistically she—'
'Stop it! Stop saying that!'
'You don't know, do you! And that is why you fear her
death!
Reason
forces you to dread her dying. If the only
thing that moved you was faith, you'd celebrate the
prospect of her death because Heaven is a better place.
But
reason
makes you suspect that when she dies she
might just be going nowhere and so she'd be better off
alive. And we could save her! Damn it, I understand the
process! The body has an immune system, we all know
that. Even the Temple admits it. It was through the
immune system, they tell us, that God sent a plague to
punish the Sodomites. Vaccination educates the immune
system. It's . . . it's logical.'
'But Trafford, sticking poisoned needles into helpless
babies . . . It just feels wrong.'
'Exactly. It
feels
wrong. You have to decide, Chantorria.
You have to decide between what you feel and what
you
think
.'
Just then Caitlin Happymeal began crying for a feed.
'I don't want to talk about it,' Chantorria said with finality.
Trafford tried repeatedly over the following days to
persuade Chantorria that they had a duty to have Caitlin
Happymeal vaccinated. There had been some terrible
quarrels but he had failed to move her, so by the time the
next Fizzy Coff day came around he had decided to begin
the process without her consent.
He felt empowered, almost elated, as he joined the
appalling crush in the street outside the tube station. Even
the news of a suicide bomb at the local pumping station,
which would mean many hours of delay, could not
entirely dampen his spirits. Nor could the enormous hairy
belly crushed against his back or the enormous hairy arse
crack against which he was crushed bring him down. Nor
the fried chicken being gobbled inches to his right or the
burger to his left. Nor the
duf duf – duf duf
from the
innumerable headphones or the news loop playing on
every plastic coffee bucket. None of the thousand people,
none of the million things that normally made Trafford's
skin crawl and his brow sweat and his heartbeat quicken
with tense loathing, affected him that morning. Because
this was the morning when, no matter what the danger, he
would begin to ensure the future health and well-being of
his daughter Caitlin Happymeal.
But there was a second reason for Trafford's uncustomary
sense of anticipation and elation that morning and it had
nothing to do with saving his daughter. He was in love.
He had been in love before, of course. He had loved his
first crush, he had loved his first wife, and he had definitely
loved Chantorria. He had loved her utterly, in the days
when she had laughed, when she had owned her own
spirit and when her dark eyes had flashed with private
passion and inner merriment. He still did love her, in a
dull, dutiful kind of way, as the mother of his daughter
and for the woman she had been before fear corrupted her.
But this new love was different. It was strange, exhilarating
and exotic. It was unlike any love he had ever known; no
stronger than the love he had felt for Chantorria but
different, different in that he knew
absolutely nothing
about
the woman upon whom his soul had become fixated.
Trafford did not know how old Sandra Dee was, if she
had children or had ever been married. He didn't know
her star sign or her birthstone, her ideal dinner party or
what she would say to God when she met him. He didn't
know what had been her most embarrassing moment, or
what were her big likes or her major turn-offs. He didn't
know what would be her perfect day, ideal evening's
viewing or most exciting sexual position. He didn't know
her favourite colour or her top soccer team. Nor did he
know the reasons why she loved and respected herself or
what it was for which, every day, she thanked the Love. All
this information was available, listed clearly as was
expected on Sandra Dee's Face Space. It was there but
Trafford knew that it was all lies, copied and pasted from
other people's inane waffling, constructed from the
clichés of countless near-identical sites. And that, of
course, was the one thing that he
did
know about Sandra
Dee. She kept secrets. He knew that he
knew nothing
. That
literally every single thing about her, be it minor or be it
significant, Sandra Dee kept private. Trafford thrilled at
the thought, for nothing could be more magnificent,
more bold, more original or more deeply, truly, dangerously
erotic
than secrets.
Trafford did not even know what Sandra Dee's body
looked like. It was incredible, in a world where near-nudity
was ubiquitous, that this woman somehow managed to
keep a significant amount of her skin covered all the time.
Trafford knew more, much more, about Princess
Lovebud's body or Kahlua's or that of any of the other
women in the office, or in his tenement. Trafford knew
more about the bodies of the people who were
surrounding him in the dreadful crush outside the tube
station. There were breasts, stomachs and backsides
everywhere. Convention required that only a person's
genitalia remain covered in public but that they should,
for decency's sake, be properly and fully exposed on a
person's website. Sandra Dee, however, had never once
exposed her breasts at the office. Even her stomach was
rarely shown. Trafford realized with a start that he had
never seen her navel
! She was almost certainly the only
female he had ever met whose navel he had
not
seen. Even
little girls' bodies were universally exposed, for it was one
of the curious inconsistencies of society which Trafford
noted but kept secret that while the community lived in
dread of paedophiles, mothers chose to dress even the
youngest of their daughters in the same highly sexualized
clothing that they wore themselves.
But even on the hottest of days Sandra Dee never came
to work wearing only a crop top and thong. Instead she
chose light skirts, the hems of which sometimes fell as far
as halfway to her knee. Such lack of pride in one's body
was of course severely frowned upon, being seen as
evidence of an absence of self-respect and proper piety. But
Sandra Dee didn't care; she defied convention. Even when
Princess Lovebud upbraided her for her lack of femininity
and inappropriate dress sense, Sandra Dee simply stared
her out. Trafford had once heard her remark that, as a
pale-skinned woman who was prone to freckles, she had
some excuse for wearing a greater expanse of clothing; the
Sun was, after all, little more than a cancer delivery system.
For Princess Lovebud, this had added insult to injury.
Deep mud-brown tans were extremely fashionable among
white women and cancer was surely a risk worth taking in
order to look nice for the Lord.
However, despite peer group pressure, Sandra Dee kept
her body a mystery and it seemed to Trafford that this was
the most all-consumingly erotic thing he had ever
experienced. He was secretly in love with a secret. What
could be more seditious? More illicit? More perfect?
There was much excitement at the office when Trafford
arrived. Bunting had been hung and sparklers and party
poppers had been placed in the pen jars at every computer
terminal. Princess Lovebud was fixing up her 'Praise the
Love' LED blinking banner and the flags of all the Nations
of the True Faith hung from the light fittings.
'What's the celebration?' Trafford asked innocently.
'What's the celebration?' Princess Lovebud replied,
aghast. '
What's
the celebration?
Duh!
What do you
think
is
the celebration?'
'Uhm . . . I don't know.'
'We're
famous
, that's the celebration! All our lives we've
wanted to be famous and now we are! We're all famous
and this is the first time we've all been together since it
happened. Don't you think we should celebrate?'
It had been a week since the Faith Festival at which the
new Wembley Law on fame had been announced and
Trafford had almost forgotten about it. The new statute
had been big news at the time; many spontaneous street
parties had erupted, and the local pubs had been crammed
to bursting with people celebrating their good fortune.
There had been disturbances far into the night, with gangs
of newly famous people hunting for perverts and
conducting running battles with the police.
But that had been a week ago. The world had moved on;
there had been more bombs, more riots, more nightmare
engagements for the peacekeepers overseas. The novelty of
being famous had long since worn off for most people,
though no such evaporation of enthusiasm had affected
Princess Lovebud. This was a very big cake moment
indeed: as she explained, if even
one
member of their
crew had become famous overnight it would be cause for
celebration, so how much more mad for it should they be
now that it had happened to all of them?
The music began and Princess Lovebud led the karaoke
and then the dancing. At first she was content to allow the
more timid souls to hang about on the edges, perched on
desks, smiling with nervously feigned enthusiasm while
she and her acolytes bumped and boogied and writhed
about in the space that had been cleared around the social
hub. Inevitably, though, Princess Lovebud soon became
irritated at the lack of universal party spirit and began to
harangue those who held back.
'Come ON! How boring are you?' she demanded
threateningly as her vast near-naked silicon-stuffed
bosoms swung from side to side to the rhythm of the song.
'This is supposed to be a
party
!'
One by one, each member of the office staff began
to dance, self-consciously mirroring in miniature the
extravagant faux-erotic gyrations of Princess Lovebud and
her friends. Trafford noticed that Cassius joined in quite
early, not so early as to excite Princess Lovebud's suspicions
but not so late as to provoke her anger. He was giving,
Trafford thought, a pretty good impression of enjoying
himself too; a man with as big a secret as his needed to be
well practised in blending in. Trafford and Sandra Dee
were the last to join the dancing. Sandra Dee never made
any effort to court Princess Lovebud's approval, and in a
way that was her defence for it undoubtedly provoked in
Princess Lovebud a kind of grudging respect. Under
normal circumstances Trafford would have joined in
earlier but Sandra Dee's courage inspired him. Together
but separately they defied the brutal social pressure until
Princess Lovebud announced the formation of a conga
line and further protest became impossible.
And so the twenty-five or so Senior Executive Analysts
who occupied the north-west corner of Floor 71 of the
National Data Bank's Degrees of Separation Building
formed a conga chain and Princess Lovebud led them as
they kicked and skipped between the desks and social
hubs and celebrated their fame. Some danced with wild
abandon. Others smiled but only through gritted teeth. A
few, Sandra Dee in particular, did not even bother to smile.
Only Trafford conga'd in a dizzying cloud of joy. For he
had managed to place himself behind Sandra Dee. Her
thick, strawberry blond hair bobbed up and down in front
of him and he could feel her waist through the thin
material of her cotton dress. He wondered if anything had
ever felt so exciting. This was the body that she kept secret,
and yet here he was, almost touching it. Only a thin layer
of hot, damp cotton lay between him and that which
belonged only to her. He was holding a living, breathing
secret in his hands; he was touching her private places
because all of her was private. It was perfect, the exact level
of intimacy required for absolute erotic fulfilment. Any
closer would begin to unravel her mystery, the very thing
which made her so truly beautiful.
When the dance was over Sandra Dee did not turn to
speak to him or even smile, but walked away without a
backward glance. Trafford did not mind. It was her mystery
that he adored. He was in love with everything that he did
not know about her. As he turned away to find a desk he
honestly believed that if she had marched up to him there
and then and offered to disappear with him into the
stationery cupboard or a lavatory cubicle, as couples did at
work from time to time, he would have denied her. No real
sexual encounter could ever match the secret one that he
could nurture in his imagination and of which she knew
nothing. No living flesh could ever be the erotic equal of
flesh kept private, untouchable and unknowable.