Blind Faith (4 page)

The one thing about Fizzy Coff days that Trafford loathed
with a passion was the Gr'ug. The Gr'ug, or Group
Hug, was a compulsory part of the communal working
experience. Trafford tried to avoid them as often as
possible by being absent on little office errands or
feigning sickness in the lavatory, but he had to be careful:
repeated absences could provoke severe censure and even
denunciation at Confession. Therefore on the majority of
occasions the Gr'ug had to be faced.

'Gather round, everybody,' a cheery voice shouted.

It was Princess Lovebud. Princess Lovebud always
initiated the Gr'ugs, though she had no specific authority
to do this since there were no ranks or degrees of
seniority among Trafford's immediate colleagues.

Officially hierarchy was kept to a minimum in government
workplaces in order to avoid damaging people's self-esteem
and making them feel uncomfortable. Personal aspiration
was of course statutory. It was a Wembley Law.

Any person who is prepared to dream the dream can be
whatever they want to be. By law.

This law was one of the many inconsistencies of life that
Trafford noted every day and which troubled him deeply.
Just as it was against the law to denigrate a person's faith,
it was also illegal to doubt or deny the practical reality of
their ambitions and aspirations, or 'dreams' as they were
popularly known. Trafford could not understand this.
Everybody he had ever met wanted to be hugely rich and
famous and yet not one of them had ever become so. In
fact, as things got progressively harder, hotter and more
crowded in the city, people's lives were quite clearly getting
worse. Nonetheless the concrete certainty that each person
could have everything they ever wanted simply by wanting
it was a statutory human right.

Trafford could see that reality contradicted official
dogma every day and in every way. Yet still people believed
(or claimed to believe) that dreams could and would come
true and it was legally required of Trafford that he believe
in their belief. Something simply wasn't making sense.

To Trafford's mind, nothing made sense, particularly
God. Once he had heard a woman shouting on a street
corner. She had insisted that if God, the Love, the Creator,
the Supreme Being, cared so much about kiddies, why
were so many of them dying in pain? She had been
holding a baby to her lactating breast as she spoke and
when the police finally prised it from her it was discovered
to be dead. The woman had voiced a contradiction
that had occurred to Trafford many times. It must, he felt,
have occurred to everybody. Yet the woman was arrested
for incitement to religious hatred and Trafford never
saw her again.

So many laws contradicted actual personal experience,
which was why, despite the absence of official rank in the
workplace, there was nonetheless a strict pecking order. It
was based on the conspicuous public display of spiritual
orthodoxy and in Trafford's little world Princess Lovebud
was top dog. Princess Lovebud was so filled with faith
that Trafford wondered how there was any room left
inside her for the doughnuts which she consumed
throughout the day.

Princess Lovebud believed in everything. First and
foremost, of course, she believed in the Lord and the Love
and the law of the Temple. It also went without saying
that she believed in Baby Jesus and that Baby Jesus
wanted Princess Lovebud to dream the dream and to be
anything and everything that she wanted to be. But
Princess Lovebud's all-consuming faith went further. She
was a trained astrologer, a tarot reader, a white witch
and a departmental Slimmer of the Year (using the power
of faith). She practised only tantric sex and claimed to be
a Buddhist in that she believed absolutely in the power of
love and the healing strength of being her own person.
All these faiths were entirely consistent with the teachings
of the Temple, since it was assumed that all faith was
simply a faith in the Love by another name. The obvious
exceptions to this law were the designated 'false faiths',
Islam, that great 'other', and of course the dirty Jews.

Princess Lovebud certainly had faith. She was (as she
constantly reminded people) a deeply, deeply spiritual
person. She was also as dangerous as a pit bull if crossed
and would diss you big time on the office blog if she
detected, even for a moment, a lack of respect for her or
her family.

Trafford suspected that she was an informer for
the Inquisition.

'Group Hug!' Princess Lovebud shouted, smiling
broadly and throwing wide her arms, and then, in a
grating imitation of a little girl, she added, 'Wanna hug,
need a hug, got to have a hu-u-u-u-g.'

Trafford and his colleagues dutifully assembled in the
centre of the open-plan office and formed a circle with
their arms entwined and heads bowed solemnly towards
the centre. Trafford, to his horror, found himself standing
next to Princess Lovebud, laying his arm across her naked
back, or at least as far as it would go, for Princess Lovebud
was proud to be a woman of size and Trafford's arm was
not long enough to hook itself around her waist. He was
instead forced to leave it resting across the great folded
muffin top that bulged over her satin thong. This position
was agonizingly ambiguous. How much pressure to apply?
Too little would indicate a lack of joy and commitment to
the communal experience, while too much might bring
forth an accusation of harassment and disrespect. Princess
Lovebud was terrifyingly unpredictable and a charge of
abuse from one rumoured to have contacts in the
Inquisition was too alarming even to think about.

'O Lord, O Love, O Lord of Love,' Princess Lovebud
chanted loudly as Trafford struggled to keep his arm from
shaking, 'grant us the serenity to be ourselves and to love
ourselves and to be everything that we want to be. To
dream the dream and to live the dream as you want us to
do, O Lord. Each day is an open door; let us have the
courage to step through it and not to close it behind us,
that others might step through it also. You made me in
your image, Lord, and so it is my duty to love myself as you
love me. I believe that children are the future. Amen.'

'Amen,' the circle echoed at the top of their voices.

'And speaking of children,' Princess Lovebud shouted,
like some holiday-camp master of ceremonies about to
announce the raffle prize, 'I believe Trafford has some
news for us!'

All eyes turned to Trafford. He should have seen it
coming, of course; obviously a woman like Princess
Lovebud would never allow a big cake moment like the
birth of a kiddie to pass un-caked, and yet he was at a loss
what to say.

'Yes,' he stammered, 'that's right . . . Chantorria has had
a baby girl.'

'Well, don't sound so
happy
about it!' Princess Lovebud
shrieked with steely-edged good humour, adding, 'A little
girl
! A girly girl! May she have enormous proud boobies
and may her daddy buy her even bigger ones!'

Everybody laughed heartily and then cheered. People
shouted, 'Way to go' and 'Bring it on' and Trafford was
high-fived and hugged and kissed.

After this Princess Lovebud assumed an expression of
agonized empathy and invited any previously bereaved
mothers in the group to use the occasion of Trafford's
happiness to share their grief.

'I'll go first,' she added and began to weep.

For five long minutes Princess Lovebud confessed
loudly and extravagantly to a sorrow that would never end
and a pain that would never heal. The agony was real:
Trafford did not doubt that Princess Lovebud missed the
babies that she had lost with the same intensity as any
other bereaved parent. It was simply that she was so much
louder than any of the other mothers. Everybody shouted,
of course; even intimate conversations were conducted at
the top of a person's voice. The Temple believed firmly that
volume was a reliable benchmark of sincerity and that
those who spoke quietly were not sufficiently proud of
whatever it was that they had to say. The Temple expected
those of faith to make a joyful noise unto the Love.
Everybody was loud but Princess Lovebud was somehow
always louder and the harsh, twisted vowels and wilfully
misplaced consonants fell like hammer blows on
Trafford's eardrums.

'I know,' Princess Lovebud concluded, 'I know
absolutely that my little kiddies ain't dead but with Jesus,
safe in the Love and nestling in the tender arms of Diana.
What don't kill me makes me stronger, every journey
begins with a single step and I have been made a more
empowered and a better woman through the pain that the
Love has seen fit to visit upon my woman's breasts.'

When Princess Lovebud had finally ceased to emote and
the cheers and whoops which greeted her speech had died
down, two other women followed in similar noisy vein
but a third, a young black woman who had only recently
lost a five-year-old to the pustules, spoke briefly and,
Trafford sensed, reluctantly. She certainly did not express
sufficient outward fervour to satisfy Princess Lovebud.

'Let it out, Kahlua,' she demanded brutally. 'Lean on us.
Share with us. Let us feel your pain.'

Kahlua raised her face and opened her mouth but no
sound came. She did not cry – her eyes were dry – and yet
as Trafford looked at her he felt as if he was looking
through an almost impenetrable veil of tears.

'Tell us how you feel,' Princess Lovebud demanded. 'I
would have thought that as an African British woman of
beautiful colour you'd want to emote big time and get it
all out so as you can grow stronger and us can too and all.'

The silent, invisible, dry tears fell in torrents; to Trafford
the room was awash with them and he could almost taste
the salt of Kahlua's secret sadness.

'When Duke died,' she said quietly, 'I died.'

Princess Lovebud's expression showed that she was not
impressed with Kahlua's testification but she realized it
was all she was going to get and so she led the applause.
After that, the celebration of Trafford's happiness
began in earnest.

It was a celebration at which Trafford found himself
extremely reluctant to emote in a socially appropriate
manner. This was not just because, like Kahlua, he found
the moral obligation to broadcast his deepest and most
complex feelings at the top of his voice difficult but also
because the sadness of the bereaved mothers who had just
testified had brought back memories of Phoenix Rising.

She had been Trafford's first child, with his first wife.
Phoenix Rising had died of tetanus at the age of four and
no day passed when Trafford did not mourn her.

Fortunately for him, he was rarely called upon to testify to
this because the suffering of fathers did not form a major
part of the emotional fabric of the community. Nor did it
feature significantly in the liturgy of the Temple. It was
alluded to in passing during Mourning Mass but the grief
was considered to be mainly the prerogative of the mother.
As serial marriage was considered the most appropriate
structure within which children might be got and the Love
perpetuated, fathers were transient figures in most homes.
Fathers constantly moved on while mothers remained
with their children. The Temple approved of this; it was in
fact suspicious of long marriages since they seemed to
deny the natural duty of every man since Adam to spread
the Love. The elders of the Temple reserved for themselves
the right of polygamy, conducting their own serial
marriages in a parallel rather than a vertical fashion
(Confessor Bailey had eight current wives), but they
expected the wider community to marry often. After all,
Jesus had blessed the marriage at Cana and what Jesus
blessed must be perpetuated until death.

Trafford was therefore thinking of Phoenix Rising even
as he celebrated the birth of Caitlin Happymeal but
fortunately, as he was among civil servants, the party was
not as loud or as prolonged as it might have been in
another workplace. There was much screaming and
shouting, of course. A huge cake was wheeled in covered
with sparklers, and boxes of assorted iced doughnuts were
also produced. There was a video card in which everybody
appeared wishing Trafford the best, and another cake for
Chantorria which Trafford was expected to struggle home
with on the tube. Nobody, however, suggested that they all
take the afternoon off to get hopelessly drunk and, to
Trafford's relief and Princess Lovebud's loudly professed
disappointment, there was no karaoke.

'What are you like?' she chided loudly. 'This is supposed
to be a party!'

But after little more than forty-five minutes the
celebration was over and people began to gather up a final
doughnut or two, grab another frothy, syrupy latte from
the social hub and begin the day's work.

Trafford's job title was Senior Executive Analyst. Everybody
on his floor was a Senior Executive Analyst. Despite the
fact that there were very few ranks within government
departments, those which there were had, for the purpose
of promoting positivity and self-esteem, the most
wonderfully empowering titles. A Senior Executive Analyst
was an elevated status position, which meant that the
person holding that title was one rung up from basic,
which for purposes of positive self-imaging was designated
'senior'. In an idle moment, of which there were many in
Trafford's working day, he had looked up the words in his
job title in his computer dictionary so he knew that in
fact he was neither senior nor an executive nor an
analyst. After using a thesaurus he had concluded that he
was in fact a clerk and in his private thoughts that was
what he called himself.

He worked in the DegSep Division of NatDat. DegSep
was short for Degrees of Separation and it existed in order
to establish and catalogue the connections (no matter how
tenuous) between every single person, every other person
and every single thing that happened.

It was Trafford's job (along with his many thousands of
colleagues) to establish new links upon which degrees of
separation could be calculated. The DegSep computers
had long since been programmed to link automatically all
those who watched a certain television show with all those
who favoured a certain salt-reduced ionizing energy drink,
but unless a special program was written for it the
computer would not necessarily link those who drank that
particular drink
while
watching that particular show.
Trafford helped to write such programs.

Trafford's department had recently been astonished to
discover that the DegSep computers were not linking
preference in pre-cooked meals with parental star signs;
hence the fact that an individual with at least one Taurean
parent had a very slight statistical likelihood to eat lasagne
more often than a person with two Sagittarian parents had
lain completely hidden.

Once a new link had been established, then that link
had to be cross-linked to all the other links. What, for
instance, was the data on the frozen lasagne-eating
children of Taureans and their weekend travel habits? The
DegSep computers at NatDat knew the answer and
although no one would ever again ask the question the
information was available should they wish to do so.

At the previous election for civil administrators, the
Prime Minister had boasted proudly that the amount of
'information' stored in the NatDat digital archive doubled
almost daily and the number of 'facts' in existence about any
single citizen had long since surpassed the number of atoms
in the universe. The opposition complained that while these
statistics were certainly encouraging, not enough was being
done and what
was
being done was too little too late.

Trafford was hard at work designing a program that
would link choice of nail polish to the number of
consonants in a person's middle name when he heard a
voice behind him.

'Care to join me for a bite of lunch? You know, just to
wet the baby's head.'

Trafford knew the voice: it was Cassius, the oldest
employee on Trafford's floor. Cassius did no actual work;
he was employed to ensure that the government targets
for eliminating age discrimination were met. His job
description required him to sit in the corner and be old,
next to the woman in the wheelchair. It was not that either
of them was incapable – they were both intelligent,
computer-literate individuals – and the work, like all
NatDat activities, was childishly simple and utterly
pointless so it did not matter how efficiently it was done.
It was simply that inputting data was not their job. Their
job was to meet government targets.

'Well,' Trafford replied without any great enthusiasm, for
he had never spoken to Cassius before, 'I'm not sure.'

'Or perhaps you don't want to celebrate, brother?' said
Cassius, and he seemed to Trafford to be staring at him
in a vaguely significant manner. 'After all, one out of every
two babies dies before its fifth birthday. What's to celebrate?'

Cassius spoke quietly. Kiddie death was not a subject to
be discussed lightly, certainly not with a new parent, and
had Cassius made the same remark to most fathers his
reward would have been a punch in the face.

'All right,' said Trafford, rising. 'I'll come.'

He did not know why he agreed to go except that
Cassius had voiced his own unspoken thoughts. One in
two. What, indeed, was there to celebrate? Better perhaps
to let the public celebrations wait until the child had
reached at least the age of five.

To Trafford's surprise, Cassius did not take him to
the nearest burger franchise, which was at the far end of
the open-plan office, nor did he stop at the one next to the
elevator or the one in the lobby of the building.

'Got to stretch my legs,' Cassius explained loudly as they
passed the CCTV camera bank at the entrance. 'Getting
old. Still, can't complain about that, it's my job.'

In fact Cassius did not take Trafford to a burger joint
at all but led him to a small falafel shop in a murky,
semi-submerged backstreet.

Trafford stopped on the duckboards outside the entrance.

'You want to eat here?' he asked.

'You don't like falafel?' Cassius enquired.

'No, it's . . . well . . .'

'That this isn't a Falafel House.'

That was it exactly. The grubby little café outside
which they were standing might sell falafels but it was
not part of the mighty Falafel House chain, nor was it a part
of Falafel House's slightly less popular 'rival', Falafel Munch
(which was owned by Falafel House). This was an
independent business that catered to the local immigrant
underclass. It would normally serve only illegals and the
police. The implications of a respectable citizen eating in a
place like this were clear. By choosing to ignore the falafel
choice of millions of their fellow citizens, they were setting
themselves apart from the people's choice of falafel Clearly
they thought themselves too good for Falafel House, a cut
above Falafel Munch, and anyone who considered
themselves too good for the choices of the people was a
posh snob elitist and they had better watch out.

'Please, it's my treat,' said Cassius. 'I really do love a
proper home-made falafel

Surprised at his new companion's audacity, Trafford
allowed himself to be led into the building, up the stairs
from the waterlogged ground floor and into a little room
above where there were three tables, all unoccupied.

Cassius chose one and motioned Trafford to sit. This
Trafford did, making a point of looking about himself
before carefully positioning his chair so that he had his
back to the camera.

'Do you know,' Cassius continued in a friendly, casual
tone, 'I rather find that if one wishes to go unnoticed the
thing to do is not to
try
to go unnoticed.'

'I wasn't . . .' But Trafford knew it was useless to
protest; his manoeuvring had been too obvious.

Cassius smiled. 'We in our department know that
almost no information that the authorities collect is ever
scrutinized. How could it be? We are all of us under
constant surveillance. They'd need police officers for every
person to watch all that material and those officers would
never be able to sleep. The only time that information is
scrutinized is when attention is drawn to it. Therefore,
clearly the best way to avoid scrutiny is not to invite it.'

'We are sitting in an independent café, mate,' Trafford
replied a little acerbically. He did not like being patronized.

'It's not illegal.'

'No, but only illegals come to places like this.'

'We might be sightseers, researchers for a documentary.
Why, we might be police officers ourselves searching
out foreign rapists – as long as we sit proudly and with
confidence. If, on the other hand, we make obvious,
self-conscious efforts to keep our faces from the camera
then we are clearly up to no good.'

'Or we could have gone to eat at a Falafel House,'
Trafford replied drily. Nonetheless, he straightened up a
little and made some effort to look relaxed.

Cassius ordered two falafel and salad wraps.

'Good?' he enquired as Trafford bit into his.

Trafford grimaced. 'No. It's bitter.'

'Not bitter, savoury.'

'Bitter.'

'Give it a chance.'

Trafford tried another bite and as his taste buds became
more accustomed he found it strange but not entirely
unpleasant to eat something that wasn't sweet.

'All right,' he admitted, 'it's . . . interesting.'

'No corn syrup,' Cassius explained. 'Takes a moment
to get used to, but worth it, I think. They make them
themselves, just chick peas and seasoning. They don't
think that falafels should be sweet.'

Once more Trafford looked about himself nervously.

'Everything should be sweet,' he said, slightly too
assertively, as if speaking for the benefit of a third party.
'That's obvious. Sweet is a treat. So the sweeter things are,
the more we'll enjoy them.'

'Nobody's listening, Trafford,' Cassius said. 'For
Heaven's sake, you yourself work for the National Data
Bank, you're a professional busybody. You must have
keyed in a billion hours of Citizens' TV. Have
you
ever
listened to any of it?'

Trafford smiled. It was a fair point. 'No.'

'Of course you haven't. Nobody listens. This isn't
Nineteen Eighty-Four
.'

'1984? What are you talking about?'

'It's a year from Before The Flood.'

'I know that.'

'And it's the title of a story.'

Trafford's eyes narrowed. Was he being entrapped?
Everybody knew about entrapment. It was always in the
news: young policemen wandering the canal banks
luring sodomites to their doom, drug dealers who turned
out to be narcotics agents, and of course ape-men sites on
the net that purported to offer proof that life on Earth
was many millions of years old but which were in fact
Temple-sponsored mind traps.

'You mean . . . fiction?' he asked cautiously.

'Yes,
Nineteen Eighty-Four
is a story about a society
where—'

'I don't care, mate!' Trafford interrupted. 'I do not want
to know! Stories are blasphemy and fiction is a sin, full of
pretend people created by men. I am a person of faith and
I know that only the Creator can create people.'

'Goodness,' said Cassius, 'you seem to think that I am a
congregation that must be enlightened . . . or perhaps you
think I'm a police officer?'

'I don't think anything,' Trafford replied evasively.

He wanted his position clearly on record. Everybody
knew that Before The Flood it was fiction that had been
the principal corrupter of men. Confessor Bailey reminded
them of it week in, week out. Of that terrible time
when society had been colonized by
made-up people
. When
the television channels had teemed with people
pretending
to be people that they were not! People who were the
creation of a third party,
fictional characters
. A time of
books, and not the sort of books that were still read in
the Enlightened Age, not good books, books of faith, of
personal enlightenment, aspiration and self-improvement,
books that told you how to get rich, make friends, have
great sex and dominate your social group. Not those kinds
of books but
stories
, thousands and thousands of stories
piled high on shelves. A whole nation obsessed with what
was
not true
, corrupted by the delusion that what man
could invent was more beautiful, more interesting than
what God had created. Then, thankfully, even Before The
Flood, a time had come when man slowly began to turn
away from stories in favour of
reality
. A time when,
mercifully, a new generation began to celebrate only
itself
,
to watch only itself on television, to read about only itself
in books and magazines and in so doing to celebrate the
reality of what God had created.

'Please, Trafford,' Cassius said, 'I'm not a policeman.
Why would a policeman sit in the corner of your office for
years trying to trap
you
? Are you more important than I
had imagined?'

'No, of course not,' Trafford replied, feeling slightly
embarrassed. 'But you mentioned
Nineteen Eighty-Four
. You
said it was a . . .'

'A story?'

'Shut up, for Love's sake!'

'I don't think that stories are a sin,' Cassius said.

'They are!'

'Why?'

'You know why. Everybody knows why. Because once
man had begun inventing stories his pride and vanity grew
so great that he thought he could write the story of life
itself – and so came about the greatest sin of all, when
man wrote the story of the Earth and left out God!'
'My, my,' Cassius replied with a patronizing sniff. 'You
must have been an excellent pupil at faith school, Trafford.
Do you really believe all that rubbish?'

Trafford rose to leave. Idiots who wanted to get
themselves arrested for blasphemy could do it without
implicating him.

'Goodbye, Cassius,' he said loudly. 'Thanks for lunch but
I don't think I'll bother again. If you want to speak to me
you can do it at the office.'

'One in two,' said Cassius quietly. 'One in two will die,
Trafford.'

Trafford remained where he stood. This grim statistic
was the reason he had agreed to lunch with Cassius in the
first place.

'Stop saying that!' he snapped. 'Are you pleased about it
or something? Are you a pervert? If you don't watch it I'll
blog you up.'

'Sit down and stop shouting,' Cassius commanded. 'If
you denounce me the first question they'll ask is why you
were having lunch with me at all. Why did you allow
yourself to be brought to a place like this? Guilt by
association is not a stain that washes off. You'd be a
marked man and Princess Lovebud would eat you alive.'