I Am The Local Atheist (30 page)

I could sense Lucas on the verge of saying
“
Yeah – me
,” but
he didn’t. He just went back to eating his sugar bun.

I didn’t want
this sort of tension to get any worse, so I tugged at his sleeve
while looking at Christie. “Hey we gotta go. Thanks for the
buns.”

“
Yeah, okay David. Hope I see you again soon… at Charge
Up.”

I smiled.

“
Where you guys off to now?”

“
Wherever the night takes us.”

“
Cool. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” She winked.

With lots of
confidence Lucas said “we most certainly won’t!”

She rolled her
eyes. “Have fun.”

As we turned
the corner and made our way into a bitingly cold night with even
more drunks beginning to litter the sidewalks, I said to Lucas
“Pretty intense conversation.”

“
Yeah.”

“
Are they always that intense?”

“
Nah, not really. She’s a good girl, and I do like her, but I
just find it so typical that she tries to shift the focus away from
herself, and uses God as an excuse for everything she does when
quite clearly she is making her own choices.”

“
Well, didn’t she say at the end that she lets God choose the
path for her?”

“
God is an abstraction, an excuse, a reason to think that self
doesn’t exist, but self is all there is. You know that as much as I
do.”

I hated being put in that kind of position. The kind where the
other person had made an assumption about my belief system and then
made a statement that equated with that assumption. And as much as
I wanted to say something, as much as I wanted to speak out and
deny that accusation, my mouth felt trapped shut. God
was
absent. I only had
myself to deal with now. And whatever choices were left to go along
with that.

And yet, despite the choice Serene had made for whatever
reason, I couldn’t dislodge the thought that she could have been
saved
if only
Rucker had made the choice to look after her.

But he didn’t.
And that pissed me off.

“
Take note David, the last thing she said was
‘
I
let God choose
the path for me’. That is her ego making that decision.
‘
I
give myself up
to God;
I
let God
lead the way,’ etcetera, etcetera…”

We rounded
another corner and headed down a line of parked cars.

“
Y’ know what it seems to me like Lucas?”

“
What?”

“
It seems to me like you’re building a wall between you and
Christie. I mean, I really think she likes you, but you always seem
to counter her arguments in a way that suggest you don’t have
respect for her.”

“
I can’t not tell her anything and give her the wrong
impression about how I feel. That, to me, would be
disrespectful.”

“
Have you told her that?”

“
No.”

“
Sounds to me like you really do care about how she
feels.”

We arrived at
the car. Dew was settling on the windscreen.

Lucas stood at
the driver’s door looking across the roof at me. “Yeah I do.”

I raised my
eyebrows.

“
But I don’t know how to build a bridge between us.”

He put the
keys in the lock and turned. With a rusty ‘clunk’ the door locks
popped open.

Part VI

–
With purpose, this time
–

So there I was, standing beside a tape machine on one side, a
small table in front of me that empty boxes sat on, a turn-table on
my left and a conveyor belt above it dropping packets of
‘multi-purpose’ sauces down. My job of course was to put the
packets in the boxes, two on each side and one in the middle until
there were twelve in a box. Not hard work. In fact all I could
think of while doing that job was ‘
I can’t
believe they’re paying me to do this!
’

Well fuck it!
I thought.
If this is what working is all about, then I’m
quite happy to be stuck in this shit-stick of a job!

And that made
me happy.

For a
while.

Until managers
came through and demanded more work from me, demanded I work faster
when all I could do was wait for each packet to arrive in front of
me.

And then I was
thinking about how those devices could be used to hurt someone
really badly. Like, for example, ramming someone’s head onto the
conveyor belt above, letting it take them through the water
buckets, nearly drowning them – nearly, but not quite: just enough
to make them think that death would be a relief before allowing the
body to kick in it’s natural breathing reaction again – squeezing
them through the rolling bars that dropped them onto the bottom
conveyor belt before bringing them to the tape machine where their
heads would get wrapped up in tape with all their scars and
desperate gasping breaths mummified for all the world to behold
after the box that had packaged their mangled and taped body was
opened up.

And then each
time I got moved to a new job, I was extrapolating on ways to
punish or hurt somebody within the constraints of that job. And not
just simple things like taking a knife and stabbing someone – that
wouldn’t really do justice to the person I was thinking of; but
really making a sincere job of it so there was little to remember
that person by.

Every packet that ran down the conveyor belt was a part
of
his
body, a
part of
his
being;
a part of
him
that
was being boxed and shipped to a new continent so he could
disappear from existence, so that
his
presence in the world would
dissolve and do no more harm.

I poured
compounds into the giant mixing bowl that would cleanse the sauces
of his excuses, his despicable grins and evil countenance; tempered
the acidity levels so his bones would disappear without a
trace.

“
Not too much David. Check the levels of acidity and keep the
temperature regular. We can’t afford to blow another batch
today.”

But blowing
another batch was hardly any concern of mine. I was only thinking
about the good that I might be doing by ridding this person of his
influence in the world. He wasn’t just a drug dealer that I
despised, or a friend of Tinsdale’s that creeped me out; he was a
human being so selfish that he failed completely to see beyond the
next day, beyond how his actions might affect another person.

“
Hey David, you’re on the cookie slabs today, okay?”

They never expected you to say “no that’s not okay” – no one I
knew of said no to having the opportunity to get sick from swiping
off-shoots of cookie dough into their mouths while no one was
watching. But that sickening feeling from eating too much
pre-cooked butter, sugar and flour was becoming a sickening feeling
of seeing Rucker’s face contorted and squeezed into dull yellow
slabs that I was more than happy to carve a knife through with deep
penetrating gashes as punishment for his inability to take another
person’s life into account. It was one thing to not care when you
have no immediate impact, but when there is someone right in front
of you suffering and you
can
help them, you
can
offer them a couch to lie on, a pillow
to rest their head on and water to drink, then why
wouldn’t you? Why would you just kick them out without caring about
what
might
happen
to them?
That
I
didn’t get.

Dad had tried.
He had tried over and over, but I don’t ever remember Dad thinking
of Mum as anything other than a lost cause. And eventually he had
just given up trying.

“
David
!”

It almost
seemed as though that had been the example that I was living. I had
tried changing that by helping Mum.

“
David
!”

At least I had
tried. At least.

“
What the hell are you doing?” One of the workers had grabbed
my arm and pulled me back from the table. The machines had all been
stopped and the other workers were all staring at me with wide
eyes. My heart was pounding inside my chest.

I suddenly
looked at the demolished block of cookie dough in front of me.
Instead of evenly sliced slabs, I had turned it into a victim of a
brutal knife attack.

They told me
to go back to the mixing bowls: “We can’t afford to have you
picking on innocent bakery products like that.”

But as it turned out, trying to keep my mind on the acidity
levels and the temperature that the sauces were getting mixed at,
completely slipped me by as I stared down into the frothing white
sauce imagining
his
hands and arms reaching up for help and begging me to save
him, but all I could do was look the other way as he was slowly
pushed and dunked by the giant metal beaters until his last
spluttering gasps blended with the sauce and his hands fell limp
and disappeared.

“
Jesus Fucking Christ! What the fuck is going on
here?”

I turned to
see my supervisor staring at the temperature gauge shaking his
head, taking his white cap off, slamming it to the ground and
yelling “Fuck!” for good measure it seemed.

He looked at
me with glaring eyes. “Have you even been watching what you’re
supposed to be doing?”

Of course I
hadn’t been watching what I was supposed to be doing. I kept going
through moments of focussing on the job at hand and then reverting
back to entertaining myself with new and improved ways of disposing
of despicable members of our society. “Why, what’s happened?”

“
Damnit. You fucked up the temperature. It’s gone too hot and
the sauce won’t sit properly anymore. Fuck it we’re going to have
to throw it all out and start again.”

“
Can’t we salvage any of it?”

“
No we can’t salvage any of it! It’s a fuckin’ sauce. It gets
mixed. Round and round.” He stirred his finger in circles. “One
part’s fucked, it’s all fucked. Or couldn’t you tell that?” He
picked up his cap from the ground. “It’s as much of a lost cause as
Jim is. Fuckin’ useless piece of drug riddled rubbish.”

Part VII

–
On a plate
–

The morning
had brought a hot spell with a cool breeze blowing in from the west
but over the last couple of hours torrential rain had poured down
without even slight consideration for those who had dared to leave
the house with just shorts on. I took the occasional glance at
Lucas’ exposed knees noticing the goose bumps beginning to rise
over his skin.

My beer was
sitting in front of me. I wish I had ordered a hot cup of coffee to
help warm my hands, instead of this cold glass that I swear was
turning my fingertips blue. “Weather has turned to custard hasn’t
it?”

Lucas pondered
the rain hitting the streets, pelting down on every car that drove
past, smashing the tin roofs over the road and shaking the windows
that framed inconsolable faces. “Y’ know, it would really make my
day if the weather actually did turn to custard. Great downpours of
custard all over Invercargill; the poor opening their mouths and
praising the Lord for his generosity, lips overflowing with this
great gift from above, throats choking and cutting off circulation
of air through the windpipes; and all of a sudden people bemoaning
the greediness of those who died rather than asking why God didn’t
just bring it to the people on a plate right in front of them with
a spoon handy. No, it’s always the people’s fault as to how they
misuse God’s gifts isn’t it? Never a case of God fucking up the way
he brings his gifts.”

I had never
heard Lucas specifically call faults on God before. Usually his
rhetoric was aimed at religious practice, which I could choose to
agree or disagree with, but never had I openly heard him blasphemy
God Himself as though God was to blame for everything.

I might have been offended by it if I had actually cared that
God might have been paying attention. Or,
hell
, if God was actually there to
pay attention. But I didn’t want to give in to petty name calling,
or dissolving the remark into an attack based on prejudices; I knew
better than this.

I spoke slowly
letting each word come out even and void of any specific criticism.
“Somehow I doubt that if such a scenario were to be visited upon us
that people themselves would be stupid enough to put their lives at
risk just for the sake of free food.”

“
People all over the world put their lives at risk for free
food. Didn’t
we
put ourselves at risk for free food? You think a man who is so
poor that he can’t even afford a single loaf of bread is going to
think twice about opening his gullet to the heavens? You’d think
that if God actually existed then he would do something about the
plight of the poor, wouldn’t you?”

In all my time
as a Christian, Alice and Christie were, probably, the few people
who I had seen really care about what they believed in, really care
in a way that showed their belief.