I Am The Local Atheist (19 page)

“
How did your mum take it?”

“
She started drinking again.”

“
Oh.”

I thought Lisa
would have known that, but I guess she had only talked to her once
recently, and knowing mum, she would have done her best to act as
straight as possible when Lisa had come to visit. She used to be
all smiles when my friends had come to visit me while I was still
living at home: whiskey glass hidden in the cupboard under the
sink. After they left out it came again, only this time she had to
make up for the time spent not drinking, so ended up guzzling the
whole glass, topping up moments before she collapsed on the floor
from taking down so much at once. I used to freak out when she did
this, but eventually I got so used to it that I just left her and
walked out the door leaving her to either pick herself up later on
upon waking or wait until Dad arrived home to find her. Not that
Dad did much to help. He did take her to the hospital a couple of
times, but got so tired of dealing with it that even he began
ignoring her and instead of helping her up, simply stepped over her
and went on with his day.

“
She must feel terrible.”

“
Who?”

“
Your mum.”

“
Why? For raising a crap son like me?”

“
No, I mean because she’s an alcoholic.”

“
She’s sick. She’s not a bad person.”

“
I didn’t mean it like that. Dad drank a lot as well, but he
never felt bad about lashing out at the rest of us. Does your mum
ever… y’ know…?”

“
No. Mum never gets violent. Her alcoholism is all about
herself, all about drowning some part of her that she can’t seem to
escape from.”

She looked up
at me. “Your dad?”

“
Yeah.”
And her prodigal
son.

“
We have a lot in common, David.”

“
My dad never tried hitting me.”

She dropped
her sub and looked away.

I regretted
saying it. “I’m sorry.” I rubbed my eyes. “It doesn’t make you a
bad person because you try, or even do, drugs; it doesn’t even make
you a bad person if you’re addicted to a drug; it just means that
you have allowed yourself to be controlled by a false god, a god
who does not care for you, a god that wants to subdue you to its
every whim. That’s what substance abuse does to a person. I’m not
one of those people that smokes pot every day, two or three times a
day; for me it’s just about enjoying the escape from reality, the
same buzz that playing computer games brings, except with weed
there’s no control. I can drift away and let go of all the
problems. Playing games is fun. I can launch into a completely
different world, switch off from the one around me and focus
entirely on the one in front of my eyes, but getting high means
that I can walk through the world that my body exists in without
any of the worries that I would have if I wasn’t high. Some people
think that’s a bad thing. I need it, but I never abuse it. Most of
the time I just stay in my bedroom while getting high, or go
outside and lie down on the lawn. Being outside is great when
you’re high.”

“
Is that the sort of stuff you told your youth
groups?”

“
No, that’d be stupid. No, I just told them that God loved us
unconditionally and to give God back that same amount of love would
make His path for you so much clearer and easier to walk
along.”

“
Simple as that, eh?”

“
It’s never as simple as that. You know that.” I shook my head
and looked out at the random people walking past the window,
resting on the seats in the square. “None of us are perfect. We can
only try to gain perfection through the example of Jesus.” I felt
like I was reciting something I had once read. “So few care to
actually pursue that. I thought I was one of those who would be
strong enough to try, but I have failed. Everything about me is a
failure. Everything about my family is a failure. I simply can’t do
what I once did.”

“
What do you mean?”

“
I can’t help people. I can’t pretend to be some sort of
guiding light to troubled teens anymore.” I could see part of my
reflection in the window. “I threw a stone once. I threw it so hard
that it bounced off its target, came back and hit me in the face.”
I turned away from the window.

It seemed so
much easier turning away.

Part V

–
Transitions
–

My body ached,
but that was only a minor concern; my arms worked like machinery,
moving the bundles of white sheets from the inside of the container
to the trolley waiting by the door frame outside. As a machine I
had no concerns, I could begin to ignore the pain that had
developed around my shoulders and the lower back muscles; the only
concern I had was to move these sheets. With both feet planted on
the floor of the container, I twisted my body like a crane
backwards and forwards as my arms reached out to the bundles,
fingers clasping their grip on the string that held the bundles
together, biceps and forearms working to lift their weight and
casting my whole body into a frame that supported their transition
from the container to the trolley. The movement was very
suggestive: for at one time the white bundles lay piled up
together, almost existing as one mass, and then shifting their
location, one always ahead of the other. From my superior position
above those bundles I could look down on them and watch as they
fell away from their amassed pile and moved to another less
organised pile where they were collected together and shifted yet
again – like drops of water falling from the accumulated mass of
clouds in the sky and landing on a branch or a ledge, and then
falling to collect in the dirt of earth.

Like a kid
being rushed and knocked to the ground by his superiors; like hands
clasping his head, words being spat at him to invest the power of
God within and to cast Satan out…

I closed my
eyes, let an internal scream blast from my mouth and smashed my
head against the container wall. It hurt, but at least the memory
was gone.

I walked out
of the container with the boss waddling up to me and asking if I
was alright.

“
Yeah, I was thinking about something else and fell sideways.”
I rubbed my head to put the point across and with a smile said “My
fault” thus taking any weight off her shoulders as a responsible
boss for the safety of her employees.

“
Okay well, perhaps you need a change. Would you like to go out
to where the laundry gets washed and dried?”

“
What’s involved?”

“
Well, it’ll be the evening shift loading up the washing
machines. It’s a lot of hauling overalls in and out of huge
dryers.”

It didn’t
sound like fun. “Ummm, not really, eh.”

Her shoulders
slumped. “I’m sorry David but that wasn’t the right answer. You’ll
have to start tonight.”

“
Any particular reason why I have to do this?”

“
A couple of my workers are on holiday.”

I looked at
her like that hadn’t answered anything.

“
So guess who I thought of to fill in for them.” She smiled
cheese.

“
Thanks.”

She put her
hand on her hips and winked. “No problem!”

I arrived at
about quarter past four and parked my car where all the other cars
were parked. As I opened the door the stench of meat, blood and
bones began surrounding me and curling itself up my nose. It was
disgusting and I wondered what I had got myself into. I guess I
could have sat back in the car, turned the ignition on and driven
away, but I chose not to. I’m not sure why, but other than having
nothing else to go back to if I was fired from the laundry job, I
still had an inner compulsion to fight. I still felt like I was, in
some way, sparring with Satan, extracting from him the fight that I
had asked for. Here was something that could scare me away just
from the sheer size and smell of it, but I looked over the
buildings that loomed before me, stepped out of the car and closed
the door hoping that maybe here some kind of transformation would
take place, some kind of levelling up of my skills and armour I had
grinded through hours upon hours of gameplay for, some kind of
monolithic discovery that would transport me into a higher state of
being where I could find my way forward without having to rely on
the physicalities of real life anymore.

Finding the
way in on foot was another matter entirely. I talked to five
different people through five different sets of speaker-phones
before anyone actually knew about my boss sending me here.

I was let in through a sliding gate that was reminiscent of
the type of thick bar gates they might have at a prison and walked
down the road that led to open areas to my right while the
buildings remained at my left. Where the road flattened out and the
buildings took on the look of industrial mish-mash slaughterhouses,
I began to feel like I was walking into a scene from the final
showdown in
RoboCop
. Any minute I was expecting Clarence Boddicker and his thugs
to pull up in their vans, start running all over the place with
gleeful smiles and blowing shit up with their assault canons. My
head pulled itself further into my shoulders, trying to look as
inconspicuous as possible. I was no Robocop. I was flesh and bone,
and pain had always slowed me down.

I passed a car
parked outside a corrugated entrance and made my way down to a
housing directly in front of me that had a sign on it mentioning
something about ‘visitors’. As I walked up alongside it I could see
a man sitting in one of the rooms, so I knocked on the door next to
it.

“
Can I help you?” he said after opening the door and staring me
down.

“
Uh, hello, I’m just looking for the laundry.”

He looked at
me like I was stupid. “You got something wrong with you?”

“
Urghh, no?”

“
Yeah, well, you’ve gone right past it haven’t you?” He stepped
out from the door frame and pointed to the car that I had passed.
“See where that car is? His tone was quite forceful. “It’s just in
there.”

“
Thanks for that, they didn’t give me any directions,” I said
smiling as though I had been thrown into one of those situations
without any help and was looking for all the help I could get. He
replied with a blank stare. I made my way back to the car wondering
if the guy could do with finding a new job that was more customer
friendly.

Inside, the
smell of death was dissipated with steam and hot air but it
lingered around just to remind you that you couldn’t escape.

The washing
machines were separated from the dryers – huge industrial beasts
left over from the Fifties. Massive machines that required cords to
be pulled to open the air vents before each load was started. And
then they would rumble on for half an hour or so at deafening
decibels while I and the other worker (didn’t catch his name – the
machines were going when he introduced himself) sat around waiting.
Good to get paid for nothing.

As I sat and
watched the overalls tumble around and around I became extremely
aware of ‘where’ the laundry had come from and saw the tumbling
overalls in the dryers as part of a despicable practice that
contributed to the slaughtering of sentient life by the hundreds,
if not thousands (if not millions!). I had a sudden compulsion to
no longer eat meat for the sake of separating myself from something
I so despised in this moment. I wondered how God could have allowed
us to go so far down this path without any sign of reprimand. How
far did we have to go before God would step in and stop us from
destroying ourselves?

After about an
hour or so the clothes were just clothes tumbling in a dryer and I
was hungry again.

“
If you find money in the dryers dude, just take it.” The other
worker sat with his legs resting on the kitchen sink.

I stirred my
cheap coffee. “I’d feel guilty.” It wasn’t true of course.

“
What’s lost is mine and yours for the finding. Finders
keepers, losers can have a cry about it when they get home.
Possession is nine tenths of the law dude. Those meat workers don’t
have any claim over what we find here if they can’t prove it’s
theirs. And fuck em anyway.” He shrugged his shoulders. “It’s their
fault for being dumb enough to not check their pockets after
they’re done doing their shifts. Overalls come in, we clean them –
none of them have names on them, they are just all generic overalls
that get handed to them at the start of their shift and then get
dumped down the laundry shoot at the end of their shift. Shit, one
night I scored myself a whole video game’s worth of change! Ain’t
like I’m gonna give that up. Not for nothing buddy.”

“
Interesting way of looking at it. I guess I could. I need the
money. And no one’s getting hurt from it.” The words sounded
hollow. It was like I was trying to somehow justify my behaviour.
Up to this point I had only stolen what was being thrown away –
waste not, want not. But –
hell
– let’s face it, God wasn’t exactly paying
attention. I could probably do whatever I wanted and get away with
it. It was like having no barriers anymore, nothing telling me what
I should and shouldn’t be doing. I could just go ahead and do it!
“It would be like my own rumspringa” I blurted out.