I Am The Local Atheist (26 page)

But there was
this one problem: only some of this demon’s tails were cut-offable,
and whenever one of the other tails darted out and stabbed me, at
least twenty percent of my health stats were destroyed instantly
while also stunning me enough to give another tail time to get in
another stab, which would stun me even more and render me
practically helpless to the point where the next few stabs were
impossible to defend against and then it was game over. That
sucked. But that isn’t what sucked the most. What sucked the most
was that there was no manual ‘quick save’ in which you could save
the game each time you attacked the demon and destroyed some of
it’s health stats (a highly unlikely prospect anyway); there was
only an auto save and instead of loading up at the start of the
fight so you could begin fighting straight away again, the game
would load up at the start of the cut-scene so you were forced to
sit there and listen to that interminable ramble all the way
through without being able to fast forward or skip through it. I
hated games that made you sit through shit that wasted the player’s
valuable time!

I decided
that, yes, my time was way too valuable to be wasting hearing the
exact same speech over and over, so I turned the computer off,
found my pipe and loaded it up with a mixture of first-class weed
and some cabbage that I had taken off the hands of my dealer for
cheap.

There are lots
of places you can go to get away from the city and be somewhere
peaceful while smoking. I could have gone to that park just around
the corner from me, but it was in a bit of a bogan area and I
didn’t want to start getting paranoid while I was stoned. I
could’ve stayed in my room, but I could see sunlight creeping
through the curtains as they wavered against the draft, and I knew
that after playing that last game, my thoughts might still be
re-jigged into ‘demon mode’ – something that being stoned had no
defence against (I could only imagine the waking nightmares that
gamers on acid experienced). The museum was far enough away that
walking back afterwards would help assist a gentle comedown until I
reached the perfect plateau where I was void of any true emotions.
I loved that feeling, it was like someone had drained all the
negative emotions from my body, but with the negative went the
positive emotions as well so that I was in this place where human
problems no longer mattered; it was just me and my unfeeling body
going forth into the world. And I say that I ‘loved it’ not in the
way that you love happiness because happiness makes you happy, but
because you know that there’s no chance of falling from the
happiness that you have obtained, that there’s no dyer consequences
of the sorrow that has taken you in its grip; there is just this
feeling of not-feeling, like the plate of your soul has been wiped
clean. I was beginning to find that I wanted that feeling more and
more.

“
According to police reports, Serene had been drifting away
from her parents and anything to do with them. There were also
small traces of THC in her system but a much higher dosage of
alcohol. The police report made it clear that these were probably
the causes for the girl – ” Lisa raised her fingers to quote the
next part with a good dose of sarcasm “ – ‘
terminating
’ her life. They said that
the effect of THC could have put her into a delusional state,
either of being indestructible or making her problems seem a lot
worse than they were.”

I still didn’t
understand why she was telling me this stuff. I had stopped caring
about anything to do with church a long time ago. I had tried
leaving it all behind and had almost succeeded, but Lisa’s re-entry
into my life had suddenly changed all that. I didn’t mind so much
that Lucas harped on with his opinions, or that he, an atheist, had
forced me into thinking on a much deeper level about things I,
probably, had always taken for granted. I didn’t even mind hanging
around the officers of The Salvation Army, but anything to do with
the church that I had once belonged to only made me want to puff my
way deeper into the haze of marijuana, or playing computer games to
reinvigorate my brain afterwards while being worlds away from the
one that I was forced to acknowledge right now.

It was easier to forget, sit down behind some trees in a quiet
peaceful area of the world, light up and drift off into oblivion.
Distance walks itself closer and closer but never touches, the
trees above part molecule by molecule, all is the same but
infinitely changed and the clouds go on as always while the air
around me explodes and contracts; switches in my head get flicked
on and off at random intervals like a scene from a badly edited
movie cutting the walking motion of a character into caricatures,
caracatures…
caro catures… carrots or
shore… carrons foreshore… Karen’s foreshore… Karen for
sure!

Who’s
Karen?

“
Well, what do you think?”

I shook my
head suddenly realising exactly where I was: in the top floor of
the library with Lisa standing before me. I didn’t know what to
say, so she carried on.

“
According to police reports, Serene had been drifting away
from her parents and anything to do with them. There were also
small traces of THC in her system but a much higher dosage of
alcohol. The police report made it clear that these were probably
the causes for the girl – ” Lisa raised her fingers to quote the
next part with a good dose of sarcasm “ – ‘
terminating
’ her life. They said that
the effect of THC could have put her into a delusional state,
either of being indestructible or making her problems seem a lot
worse than they were. Well, the reports say all this and they sound
quite convincing, but I wanted to see what you thought.”

She left an
unasked question dangling there in mid-air but I still didn’t
understand why she was telling me this stuff or why she thought I
would know anything.

I had to sit
down.

I moved to a
set of cushioned chairs next to a window and looked down at the
pavement below. I had no recollection of walking those pavements to
get to the library entrance, I had no recollection of walking down
the main street or even turning at a set of lights to get onto the
main street. I do have a vague memory of walking across a lot of
grass and through some flower beds, but honestly, that could have
been from any other time I had visited the space behind the museum
or the gardens in the adjacent park. It kinda scared me that I had
no memory of walking here, nor how or where I managed to meet up
with Lisa so that we were both here together. I had never had such
a long period of memory lapse before.

“
Well, what do you think?”

What did I
think? I wanted to know what the fuck was in that weed!

I turned away
from the window and placed my arm up on the back of the seat so
that I could run my fingers along a bookshelf that ended next to
where I sat. “What do I think Lisa? I’m not a fuckin’ reporter, I’m
not someone who goes after answers like they were available to be
found in some hidden area of a room. I don’t know what you want me
to say. I don’t even know why you would think I’d know
anything.”

“
Because, David, you are the only person I know with drug
connections.”

“
You make me sound like a dealer.”

She supplied
me with a sarcastic apology. “Sorry.”

I didn’t
appreciate it.

“
Well, it’s not just that. It’s the fact that she was a part of
your church, and you’re the only person I still …”

I was furious. “It was
our
church!
Our
church! You were there too. So what if I was
brought up in it, so what that I had spent my entire life
worshipping in those walls. We were both there together, and you
can’t deny being in that church meant any less to you.” I suddenly
became aware of how loud I was talking and looked around me as
everyone in the library stared at the two of us. I buried my head
in my arms letting my voice fall to the ground. “I was out of there
before you anyway. I haven’t felt a part of anything for over a
year now.”

“
Well, I’m sorry David. But I did invite you to my new church
and that option’s always open to you.”

“
Thanks, but it’s not really my scene.”

She was
silent.

I raised my
head leaning back on the seat. “I was kicked out of church three
and a half months before…” I had to swallow hard to get it out
“…that girl killed herself. For crying out loud, even you were
there closer to it happening – didn’t you see any signs that
something was going to happen?”

“
Well, no, David, I didn’t. But that’s mainly because I had
left also, about three weeks after you. And I never knew her,
anyway. She was in that group that I never really talked to, said
‘hi’ couple of times, but after you were gone, I had no real reason
to stay.” She looked down at the ground between us. “Rickerton
called me into his office and tried to convince me that you were
beyond saving and that I should keep away from you for fear of the
devil taking yet another into his possession.”

“
The bastard.” I fidgeted with the spine of a book on the
shelf. “How long did it take him to get that message to
you?”

“
Oh, it was about ten or so days later, after things had calmed
down. He made random references to it in his sermons but never
directly spoke about it, then he called me in, realising, I think,
that I was the only one of your friends from outside of the church
that he might not have any direct influence over so tried to make
it sound like you were the devil inherent. That’s kinda when the
reins got tightened and I was on my way.”

“
Where’d you go?”

“
I kind of cruised around Sunday to Sunday, looking at
different churches, seeing what each one had to offer. Met Wendy at
a really coolly decorated Anglican church over East, but neither of
us were that keen on their subdued nature. She said to me that she
had come from out of town and had attended other Anglican churches
that totally knew what was going on, and weren’t scared to change
their approach to accommodate the new age, but this one was stuck
in the past. So we kinda got together and did the circuit for a
while ‘till we saw Claire singing her guts out at City Light, then
we knew that we had arrived at the right place! We went up and
introduced…”

At this point
I kind of drifted off and let her ramble on about their meeting and
how the three of them had hit it off straight away. I didn’t really
care. At the most it made me feel like she was giving me more
reason to hate her for finding a new life that had made her happy.
I couldn’t understand why she would tell me all this stuff so
enthusiastically, like I would somehow enjoy hearing about what I
was missing out on. She smiled with so much ignorance as she talked
about all her exploits with her friends, all the stupid stuff they
got up to as they cemented their friendships. Lisa was getting
extremely good at the proverbial ‘slap in the face’. And I was
getting extremely good at remembering the days on end that I had
been stuck in my room hating my life.

But I don’t
think she ever got it. Not then, nor anytime afterwards. It was
like seeing somebody who called themselves a friend, and then never
bothering to include you as a friend – all say and no do.

“…
y’ know they have these rules, really strict about who you can
and can’t see, but they’re designed to help you live a better life,
and that’s cool with me because I know how worse my life could be.”
She ended with a big smile on her face.

“
Congratulations,” I said. “You’ve found a new
life.”

“
Thanks.”

She looked at
me with enthusiasm. I wasn’t returning the feeling.

“
So anyway, what I need to know now, is how Serene Gilligan
might have got her hands on the drugs, who the people were she was
hanging out with.”

I thought for
a moment about random discussions I had had with my dealer over the
last few months. We rarely had much to talk about – he was into
growing, I was into smoking. But there had been some occasions that
we had chatted about random subjects while he prepared either a bag
or a tinny – whatever I could afford at the time – for me as I sat
and waited: the movies, WINZ; other harder drugs I might be keen to
try… fuck, the amount of times I said ‘no’ to anything that might
lead me to an uncontrollable addiction! He was always keen to give
a sample away for free, but fuck, was I going to try it? No Fuckin’
Way! Synthesized drugs were not my cup of tea, thank you very much!
“Go to nature,” as Bill once said.

“
Do you remember Delbo?” I turned my head to look at her
directly. “That guy who used to sell tinnies that were filtered
through with tobacco but he still sold them at normal price? I got
told, not so long ago, that she went to him about two weeks before
she died.”

“
Oh, yeah, didn’t he get his head beaten in almost as soon as
he started selling them?”

“
Yeah, but he carried on selling them to young kids who didn’t
know any better so he got his way in the end.”

“
What did she go to him for?”

“
He was the guy on her block that had all the
contacts.”

“
See, you do know something!”

“
Yeah, but I only remembered this the other day. And only
because you had started talking about it to me. Otherwise there’s
no real reason to remember random shit like that.”