Authors: Ben Elton
'You don't
know
that the flood was a result of God's
anger with man. You've only been told it.'
'We know there was a flood. We know half the world
drowned. We know the Muzzies got it worse than we did.
Who else do you think sent it but God? And why, if not to
punish man for forgetting and denying him?'
'The world got warmer, that's all we know. It's still
getting warmer. Ice melted, the seas rose. That is
all we
know
.'
'We know that we deserved to be punished.'
Trafford did not believe her. He knew that she was
intelligent, that she had an enquiring mind. He did not
believe that she accepted without question the orthodox
teaching of the Temple any more than he did.
Nonetheless, faced with the fear of being accused of
heresy, she had become as pious as any Princess Lovebud
or Barbieheart.
In the end that was how they made people believe.
Through fear.
'Try to think about Caitlin instead of yourself,' he
said. 'Surely we have to give our baby any chance we can.
Any
chance.'
'I don't wish to discuss it. I
won't
discuss it.'
Chantorria refused to speak further on the matter. They
finished their meal without saying another word, after
which Chantorria changed Caitlin Happymeal's nappy
and Trafford threw away the tea things. Then they went to
bed. They were exhausted. Caitlin Happymeal kept them
up most of the night and they had got into the habit of
going to bed as early as her in order to snatch what
sleep they could.
They didn't sleep, of course. Caitlin was whingeing in
the heat just like every other infant in the building. Some
were ill, of course, coughing and sneezing, and it seemed
to Trafford as if all of them were in the same room as him
and Chantorria.
After half a restless hour or so Chantorria turned up the
sound on the video wall.
'Do you have to?' Trafford asked irritably.
'I can't bear listening to those poor kiddies any more.
Not tonight.'
It wasn't just the children who were shouting and
screaming. It seemed as if the whole city was awake and
emoting at the top of its voice. Everybody was up,
shouting and screaming as they fought, shouting and
screaming as they had sex. And those like Chantorria who
were not shouting and screaming were turning up the
sound on their video walls to drown out the noise. But all
there was on all the channels and on every MyTube
podcast was more shouting and more screaming. And the
night rang to the sound of sex, violence, reality cop shows,
talent competitions and endless, endless karaoke – a
cacophony of human excess from the slum suburbs of
Reading in the west across the whole London archipelago
to the shores of Kensington in the east.
The following day Trafford was tasked to work at home
and Chantorria had booked a visit to the gym.
'I've left it a month. People will talk,' she said loudly for
the benefit of the webcam as she sat on the edge of the
lavatory, her knees resting against the opposite wall as she
applied bikini wax.
'You go burn it, girl,' said Barbieheart through a
mouthful of tortilla chips. 'Wish I could be with you but,
as you know, I am a woman of size.'
'I'll do an extra K for you, Barbieheart,' Chantorria
shouted, wincing as she ripped the wax from her inner
thighs.
'You have fun, girl.'
'Will do, Barbieheart. I'm lovin' it.'
Trafford, who was listening in the kitchen, knew that
Chantorria was lying. She was not lovin' it and she would
not
be
lovin' it. Chantorria hated the gym; it was one of her
secrets, and the fact that Trafford knew she hated it was
one of his.
The vast majority of women looked forward to a trip
to the gym as it involved almost no exercise at all. The
vast Temple-funded facilities which all women were expected
to attend after the birth of a child offered a series of
massages, steam baths, inspirational seminars, mass holistic
'treatments' and extravagant communal declarations of faith,
and clients consumed enormous quantities of 'health bars'
and 'health drinks' while sitting about in towels. In fact,
because the gym experience consisted principally of hours of
sloth, personal indulgence and guilt-free eating, people
tended to come out heavier than they went in. Most women
would be pregnant again before they had had the chance to
get their figures back anyway. Nonetheless it was
important to be
seen
to be making a personal commitment
to self-improvement. Pretending to exercise was an
important part of the ritual of self-love and self-love was
of course the love of God.
But Chantorria found the gym a torture. She did not
have the kind of self-assertive personality that made social
situations easy. Trafford knew that she would end up
sitting miserably in her towel on the very edge of a group
before eventually being driven to do some exercise. She
would spend her day with the hard-bod brigade of
confirmed bachelors and honest spinsters, pumping away
on various machines, not even pausing, as most of them
did, to inject steroids.
'Trafford!'
She was calling him from the bathroom.
'You're going to have to shave me. I can't see it while my
tummy's all floppy like this.'
Trafford did as he was bidden. Chantorria would be
using a communal shower at the gym and it was of
course unthinkable that she should disport herself
naked with hair upon her body. Female body hair was
not illegal but it was recognized as having been visited
upon the Daughters of Diana by the Love in order that
their commitment to their femininity might be duly
tested. The adolescent appearance of body hair was
evidence of a loss of purity and what was a woman
if she was not pure? A slag or, worse, a lesbian. Any
woman who was so immodest and lacking in self-respect
as to display her Love-given cooch with hair still upon
it deserved the anger that she would no doubt bring
upon herself.
Deep inside him, in the place where he kept his
secrets, Trafford wondered why the Love had given
women bodily hair at all, if he hated it so. Wasn't there
a better way of testing a woman's purity and goodness
than forcing her to spend so much time and effort
depilating? And why, he wondered, if the most heinous
crime on earth was paedophilia, did society wish grown
women to return their sex organs to the appearance that
they had had before puberty? Trafford had only seen full
female pubic growths once, on a school trip to the
Natural History Museum. The beautifully realized
female figures who were depicted dancing among the
dinosaurs at the dawn of creation were wild innocents,
the first humans, who had not yet come to understand
what the Lord and the Love expected of them. Trafford
had been fascinated and had remained so ever since.
This was what a naked woman actually looked like. If
God had designed anything it had been this, and yet
here he was scraping the stubble from his wife's cooch
until it looked like the cooch of a ten-year-old. Secretly
Trafford longed to see his wife as a woman and not as
half a little girl, but that was out of the question. Only a
heretic woman would let her vagina go covered like the
chin of a bearded man. Therefore Trafford squeezed into
the tiny bathroom, inched himself between the lavatory
and the wall, ducked down underneath Chantorria's
raised legs and bobbed up between them with the soap
and a razor.
Chantorria gritted her teeth and gripped the edges of the
lavatory seat with all her might. The stitches from Caitlin
Happymeal's birth were still red and raw.
'Surely we can skip down here,' Trafford said. 'Just keep
your legs together.'
'You know I can't risk it,' Chantorria gasped. 'You know
what happens to immodest women, particularly if they're
discovered by other women. Just get on with it.'
Trafford did his best and when Chantorria was satisfied
that her appearance was suitably modest she pulled on her
G-string, sports bra and trainers, hung a large plastic
reproduction of her birthstone from the fold of flesh
around her navel, gathered up Caitlin Happymeal, who
was to go with her to the gym in order to be fed, and went
on her way.
For a little while Trafford mooched around the
apartment, throwing away the breakfast things and
drinking a glass of Fanta before finally sitting down at his
laptop. Even before he had focused on the screen there
was an IM from Barbieheart.
Have a good day at work, Trafford
.
Yes, thank you, I'm sure I will
, Trafford wrote in reply
before turning and waving at the wallscreen.
Barbieheart waved back and then typed,
Praise the Love
.
Praise the Love big time
, Trafford wrote back, hoping that
this might conclude their conversation. It didn't.
Caramel Magnum Moonbeam's giving Ice Blade oral sex at
14c
, Barbieheart wrote, completing the sentence with a
series of smiley face symbols. Trafford wondered whether
Barbieheart had IM'd Caramel Magnum and Ice to inform
them that he and Chantorria had not had any sex, oral or
otherwise, for months. He imagined she probably had.
Dutifully Trafford punched up 14c's web stream and
watched as Caramel Magnum's head bobbed up and down
at Ice Blade's waist.
'Great girl, eh?' Barbieheart's voice said through the
speakers. 'She gives him plenty.'
'Yes,' Trafford replied. 'Good on them. But I really
should be getting to work now, Barbieheart.'
It was a mistake, of course, and he knew it instantly.
'So-rry,' Barbieheart said angrily. 'I didn't realize I was
holding you up
, Trafford. You looked in
such a hurry
to get
going, after all!'
'No, it's only that . . . I just thought.'
'Some of us
like
a chat in the morning, Trafford. We are
a
community
, you know. We do all have to live together, so
it might be
nice
if some of us tried to mix a bit more,'
Barbieheart's voice began to rise, 'instead of thinking
ourselves a cut above.
Too good
for the rest of us.'
'No, really, Barbieheart, I didn't mean . . .'
'Whatever. It doesn't matter. It's your loss if you can't be
pleasant, Trafford. Have a great day anyway.'
'Yes, thank you, Barbieheart. Drop in any time.'
Trafford turned once more to the screen and attempted
a smile but Barbieheart had moved on.
'Go, girl, go!' the vast naked woman shouted.
Trafford heard Caramel Magnum Moonbeam's breathless
reply that she adored the taste of Ice Blade's cum and that
taking it made her feel like a natural woman.
'Praise the Love, girl,' said Barbieheart.
'Praise the Love,' Caramel Magnum Moonbeam replied
and Trafford pressed his mute button.
He logged on to DegSep and for a moment managed to
focus on his work. He was working on Location
Information, part of a vast team attempting to construct a
program which would establish the degree of
physical
separation that existed between people. Satellite positioning
was of course as old as NatDat itself. As long as a person
carried a communicator, their location on Earth was
constantly tracked and recorded and had been for two
generations. Should the government, the police or television
researchers wish to find out where any person had been at
any point during the previous fifty years they had only to
ask NatDat. What, however, had never been established
were people's positions in relation to each other. NatDat
knew where Mr A was, it knew where Mrs B was, and it
knew where each had been since the day of their birth.
What it did not know was
the distance that had existed
between them
. Currently that information could only be
established by putting the two locations on to a map and
working it out with a ruler.
DegSep had come to recognize this extraordinary
information gap and had set about filling it. The job was
enormous, involving as it did the construction of a
program that would calculate and record the relative
position of every single person in the country to every
other person in the country on a continually updated basis,
while also delving into the NatDat archive to establish the
relative positions that everybody had had to everybody else
since satellite positioning had first become a part of the
National Data Bank. Once this information was recorded
it would then be possible to search for patterns in the
movements of complete strangers. Was a person destined
to get closer to some people they had never met than
others? If, for instance, one was to study two individuals (D
and E) who at one point had been an identical distance
from F, was there anything to be learned from the
subsequent distances between D and F and E and F?
Equally importantly, what would then be the locational
story of D and E? Would their shared positional
relationship with F in any way affect the relationship that
existed between them?
It was hoped that data of this type would contribute
enormously to the general understanding of the workings
of fate, kismet, chance, the stars and numerology. Trafford
knew that this was unlikely as it was pretty certain that no
one would ever actually study the data.
His concentration did not last long. Within moments
his mind wandered – which it was legally entitled to do
under the Health, Safety and Respect legislation that
protected all employees.
Suddenly, out of the blue, Trafford found himself
Goog'ing Sandra Dee. He had not been planning to Goog'
her, the impulse simply came upon him and there he was,
Tubing her up and reading her blog.
What he read astonished him. After the spirited display
of individuality that Sandra Dee had put up at work he
had been expecting something different, something
interesting, but what he found was simply drivel. The
worst kind of nonsensical, meaningless rubbish.
Another beautiful morning, Praise the Love . . . Feeling very
chilled but also sooo positive about everything . . . Work was
really good and chilled, what a fantastic, magic crew. I'm sooo
lucky . . . just Lovin' it . . . Had my star chart done and it's all
good, very positive with lots of great stuff ahead but I have to be
careful not to give too much, perhaps I'm too trusting but then
that's Geminis for you . . . Tried the new limited edition
barbecue brunch burger at Mac's! To die for. Seriously wicked
. . . Feeling very spiritual, sometimes I wonder if in a previous
life I wasn't a handmaiden to the Queen of Sheba. I don't
know, I just sort of feel it . . .
At first Trafford felt a deep disappointment, but reading
on he soon began to realize that Sandra Dee and he had
something in common.
Like him, she was a keeper of secrets.
Like her face, Sandra Dee's blog gave absolutely nothing
away; it contained token entries self-evidently written to
keep up appearances. Trafford knew that the girl who had
bravely returned Princess Lovebud's stare was not the
empty-headed imbecile revealed in these blogs. He
pressed 'view all entries' and then, on an impulse, copied
and pasted a few sentences on to the 'find' engine.
Instantly his computer informed him that it had found
hundreds of matches. Trafford realized with a chill of
excitement that Sandra Dee did not even bother to write a
blog at all: she just repeated a small selection of previous
entries ad nauseam, changing only the dates.
Next Trafford pasted the same paragraph on to the
general search engine and with mounting excitement
discovered that Sandra Dee had not even written the
entries in the first place. She had simply copied them from
the Space page of a young woman called Cuddlehug.
Trafford was astonished at the audacity of it. What cool!
What sangfroid! Everybody was expected to commit their
thoughts and emotions to a blog at least once a day. It was an
act of faith, a reaffirmation of pride in oneself and in one's
significance as an individual (which was, of course, a
reflection of the significance of the Creator). It was only
through constant openness and sharing that the duty of man,
which was to represent God on Earth, could be celebrated.
But Sandra Dee just didn't bother. She did not even
pretend to celebrate her significance as an individual or
her pride in herself. She did not want people to know
what she had done that day, or, more importantly,
what she
was thinking
.
Trafford was breathless with admiration. By playing the
simplest of tricks, Sandra Dee had in one stroke relieved
herself of the odious duty of the daily confessional and,
above all, she had kept her secrets. Anyone could lie in a
blog; Trafford himself did it all the time, but in making
up a lie one must inevitably reveal something of oneself.
No matter how hard a person might try to cover his tracks
the lie must still be written, it must be imagined and
hence something of its author must be displayed. The
solution that Sandra Dee had found was so elegant, so
armour-plated, that Trafford could not believe it had
never occurred to him. But then clearly this woman had
far more courage than he had. She had the confidence to
trust that nobody ever actually read anybody else's blog,
at least none but the most notorious or popular ones, the
blogs written by stars or local bullies, faith leaders or
close neighbours. If you kept your head down you would
be ignored, and this was clearly the trick that Sandra Dee
had perfected.