The Most Amazing Man Who Ever Lived (6 page)

‘Hard
to tell quite yet. The prosecuting counsel has turned out to be a bit of a
surprise. But as I know something about the magistrate that he doesn’t, I think
it should all be over by teatime.’

‘How
many years do you think they’ll give you?’

‘No
years at all. I shall be walking from this courtroom a free man, with my head
held high.’

‘What,
higher than it is now? That’s something I’d like to see. From a first-floor
window, of course.’

‘Truth
will triumph,’ said Cornelius. ‘And why are you so late, by the way?’

‘I had
a phone call from that private detective you employed to trace your dad’s
whereabouts. Apparently he’s done the business and tracked your old fella to
the offices of Transglobe Publishing.’

‘Brilliant,’
said Cornelius. ‘But what is he up to there?’

‘Selling
his autohagiography apparently. It’s called
The Most Amazing Man Who Ever
Lived.’

‘Yes, I
suppose it would be. Anything else?’

‘Indeed.
The stuff you’re interested in. Your private eye bugged the offices, and he
says that your daddy claims to be engaged on some secret government project.
Something very big and hush-hush.’

‘Oh
dear, oh dear,’ said Cornelius.

‘Yeah
and he’s going to—’

‘I do
hate to interrupt your conversation,’ said the policeman who was handcuffed to
Cornelius. ‘But my mate and I would like to get off down to the chippy for some
lunch now.’

‘Oh
yes, of course.’

‘So if
you don’t mind, we’ll just take you back to the cell, give you another roughing
up, then nip off.’

‘No problem,’
said Cornelius. ‘I’ll see you later, Tuppe. Let’s say three-fifteen outside The
Flying Swan.’

‘Inside,’
said Tuppe. ‘I’ll get you a drink in.’

‘Nice
one. Make it a bottle of champagne on ice.’

‘I
will. So long, Cornelius. Be lucky.’

‘I’ll
try.’

‘So long,
policeman.’

‘So
long, Tuppe.’

‘So
long.’

5

The interior of the mighty
building held even less promise for Norman than had the outside. And the
outside had not held very much.

Once
through the revolving doors, he found himself in a large reception area, with a
generous expanse of grey marble floor and much in the way of oak panelling. It
lacked, however, the rays of sunlight that favoured Brentford County Court and
chose to dwell in a gas-lit gloom that Norman found depressing.

There
were some nicotine-coloured columns that dwindled away to an invisible ceiling
far above, a row of lift doors set into a distant wall and a nearby desk with
an antiquated switchboard mounted upon it. Behind this sat a lady in a straw
hat knitting a grey sock.

It was
not the same lady, but, as Norman had not met the first one, he was not to know
this. Yet.

‘Come
on,’ said Jack. ‘Follow me.’

Norman
looked up and off and around and about. ‘Where are we?’ he asked. ‘What is this
place?’

‘All in
good time. Follow me.’

There was
another lift involved. This one rose a great many floors.

Norman’s
spirits did not rise with it.

Then
there were corridors and passageways and doors and doors and doors. At very
great length Jack stopped before one of quite singular anonymity, pushed it
open and announced, ‘We’re here.’

The
room revealed sulked in that kind of half-light you find under kitchen sinks
when you’re trying to clear the blockage in the S-bend. It was not a large room
and it was crowded.

This
room suffered from a severe case of ‘filing cabinet’.

There
were dozens of them, shoulder to wooden shoulder, one on top of the next.
Norman did not trouble himself to count just how many there were, one alone was
sufficient to trouble him greatly.

And
this was not a tidy room. It was to be felt that the ‘order out of chaos’, for
which God is so famous, had not extended itself to this particular neck of the
cosmic woods.

At the
unbeating heart of this room, a sturdy desk offered its support to a bastion of
box files. Many more of these formed towers of varying heights upon a carpet
for the most part invisible beneath bundles of bound documents and discarded
paper cups.

Jack
closed the door, trod a wary but well-practised path between the obstacles,
swept some folders from a chair and sat down upon it. ‘Sit anywhere you like,’
he told Norman. ‘Care for a cup of tea?’

‘I’d
like to go home,’ said the dead boy, ‘if this could somehow be arranged.’

‘It
can’t, mate. Sorry.’

Norman
sat down on a stack of box files and made a glum face. There was a window in
the room. But beyond was only blackness to be seen. A large sign, pasted across
the window’s glass, read ‘DO NOT OPEN THIS WINDOW’. It did not inspire
confidence.

Jack
rooted around in a desk drawer. Presently a Thermos flask and two paper cups
emerged into the uncertain light. Jack shook paper-clips from one cup and wiped
the other upon a jacket cuff. ‘So,’ said he, ‘what do you think of my office?
Pretty fab, eh?’

‘Am I
supposed to work here too?’

‘That’s
it.’ Jack filled the paper-clip cup with tea and handed it to Norman. ‘Sugar’s
already in. I needed an assistant, you see. I’ve got a bit behind. Well, a lot
behind and I saw your name come up, so I put in to be your PLC and take you on.
And so, here you are.

‘Thanks
a bundle,’ Norman said.

Jack grinned
his grin. ‘You don’t seem too pleased, mate.’

‘I told
you. I don’t want to work. I want to doss about. If I’d had the chance to win
that £1,000 at the man-powered flight competition I’d have been able to have
dossed about for years.

Jack
poured tea into his own paper cup and sipped from it. ‘You never would have
won,’ said he. ‘A priest wins it: inflates his stomach with helium and propels
himself through the sky by fa—’

‘What
do you mean, a priest wins it? How can you know
that?’

‘We
know everything here. It’s all in the ledgers and the files. Who gets born and
when. How long they live for, why they die. All that.’

Norman
whistled. ‘You know all
that?’

‘It’s
our job to know. Like when I said I put in an application to be your PLC. Do
you know when I did that?’

‘Last
week when I died, I suppose.’ Norman took a swig of tea, made an alarmed face,
then spat out a paper-clip.

‘Not
last week,’ said Jack. ‘Five years ago.

‘Bummer,’
said Norman. ‘So whatever happened to free will?’

‘You
were free to do whatever you chose. It’s just that we happened to know what you
would choose before you chose it.’

‘And so
who are
you?
And what is this place? Some sort of heavenly records
office?’

‘No,
no, no.’ Jack gave his nose a conspiratorial finger-tap. ‘We’re not that. We’re
the best—kept secret in the history of eternity. This is
The Universal
Reincarnation Company.’

If he
was waiting for applause, he didn’t get any. Norman simply shrugged and asked,
‘The what?’

‘OK,’
Jack finished up his tea. ‘Another cup?’

‘No
thanks.’

‘Please
yourself.’ Jack poured a second for himself. ‘Are you sitting comfortably?’

‘Not
particularly, no.’

‘Well,
I’ll begin anyway. It all began when God created the Heavens and the Earth.’

‘Is
this going to take long?’ Norman asked. ‘Only I—’

‘Only
you what?’

‘Only I
nothing really. Go on, God created the Heavens and the Earth.’

‘He
did, and it was his original intention that only
really
good people
should go to Heaven when they died. The rest all went, you know.’

‘To
Hell?’
Norman asked.

‘We
don’t call it that. It was called the EDF.’

‘Surprise
me,’ said Norman.

‘Eternal
Damnation Facility. You see, God gave Moses the ten commandments, right? Nine
of which are reasonably easy to keep, if you put your mind to it. No killing,
no stealing, no committing adultery — could be a problem that, but no big deal.
But he slipped in Command Number Ten. The one about, thou shalt not covet thy
neighbour’s ox.’

‘I
can’t say I’ve ever coveted my neighbour’s ox at all,’ said Norman. ‘Nor his
ass, come to think of it.’

‘No,
but I’ll bet you’ve been jealous of his new stereo, or his computer system, or
his bike or whatever. Same thing. Few people ever got past Command Number Ten,
I’ll tell you.’

‘Where
is this leading?’ Norman asked.

‘It all
leads to here. In the book of Revelation it states the exact size of the Holy
City, Heaven. It’s described as a cube, twelve thousand furlongs to a side.’

‘What’s
a furlong?’ Norman asked.

‘Search
me, but it’s not
that
big. Listen, it’s all very straight forward.
Hell’s been closed down, and Heaven’s full up. So here we all are.’

‘In the
Universal Reincarnation Company?’

‘That’s
us.’

‘No,
hang about. Hell’s been
closed down?’

‘That’s
it. God had second thoughts, you see. Being the all-round nice fellow that he
is, he began to feel a bit guilty about all those poor souls frying in eternity
simply because they’d coveted an ox.’

‘Or an
ass.

‘Exactly,
so he closed it down.’

‘Good
for God,’ said Norman. ‘It’s nice to know that I won’t be going to Hell,
anyway.’

‘Oh,
you wouldn’t have been going anyhow. You had to be eighteen to get in there. It
was real X-certificate stuff. No minors allowed. And I mean, babies covet
rattles and stuff. Imagine all those eternally frying infants; didn’t bear
thinking about.’

Norman
agreed that it didn’t.

‘Not to
mention original sin.’

‘Original
sin?’

‘I told
you not to mention that.’ Jack fell about in mirth. ‘One of God’s that. The old
ones are always the best, eh?’

‘If you
say so.’ Norman jiggled his bum about. ‘No chance of a cushion I suppose.’

‘None,
I’ve got the only one and I’m keeping it. So, like I say, until the extension
is completed, the URC gets on with the job.’

‘I
don’t think you mentioned “the extension”.’

‘The
one God’s having built onto the side of Heaven to house all the millions of
souls who won’t now be going to Hell. Heaven’s full up now, like I told you. So
until the Celestial Corps of Engineers complete the extension, we have to keep
right on with the job.’

‘Why
can’t God just clap his hands and make the extension appear?’ Norman asked,
which seemed a reasonable question.

‘That
seems a reasonable question,’ said Jack. ‘But he can’t, mate, he can’t. That’s
not the way he does business. He likes to think about things, mull them over.
Remember he’s been here for ever and ever and ever. So it took him an awful
long time before he got around to creating the Heavens and the Earth, didn’t
it?’

‘I
suppose it did.’

‘So,
until it’s all finished, it’s our job to keep the souls of the dead in
circulation. Recycle them. When someone dies we log in their soul and then
reallocate it to someone who’s being born. It has presented us with a few
problems, because the dead outnumber the living by thirty to one. Supply
somewhat outstrips demand. There’s a bit of a queue.

‘Where?’
Norman asked.

‘In a
big ring about the sun. You see, when you die your body leaves your soul.’

‘I
think you’ll find it’s the other way around.’

‘Oh no
it’s not. The moment you die your soul is free of your body. But your soul does
not have any weight and is no longer subject to the law of gravity. So it just
stays still. The Earth moves on around the sun and leaves your soul just
hovering there. That’s why hauntings happen on the anniversary of someone’s
death. The Earth has travelled right round the sun and arrived back in the same
place a year later, where the soul is waiting. So if the soul wants to manifest
as a ghost or whatever, it does. Most don’t, of course. They just hang about in
space, enjoying the sunshine and watching the planets rolling by. It’s very
relaxing. Quite cosmic really.’

‘So
what do these souls look like?’

‘They
don’t
look
like anything. They’re sort of little particles of energy.
Quite powerful energy, after all they power up a human being for all of his or
her life.’

‘So why
not simply leave all these souls to just hang about in space enjoying the
sunshine until the extension gets finished? Why bother with all this
paperwork?’