What's Up, God?
A Romance of the Apocalypse.
Gollancz, 1995; Indigo (Gollancz) paperback 1996

Its amazing what you learn to take for granted. Shake rattle and roll on the Golgotha Line. Putting Lovecraft aside, and unfolding the renamed Good News Standard:
U.S. SPECIAL PROSECUTOR TO INVESTIGATE FAMOUS DEAD.
PLANS TO QUESTION JFK, OSWALD, HOOVER.
EXCITEMENT OVER LENNON, MARILYN, ELVIS.
VIGIL AT LINCOLN MEMORIAL, KING, OTHER TOMBS.
The crowd waiting at the Ayatollah Khomeini's grave has swollen to ten million. Everywhere, people are camping in cemeteries, bereaved sons, daughters, husbands, wives, mothers and fathers. Swindlers are selling divining sticks to detect the first signs.
But there are six weeks to go...
Karen left me on the 1st of February. A freezing cold day, black clouds and frost and biting wind. Whatever the Theological Revolution, as the BBC now called it, the weather was having truck with none of it. No change in the customary climatic conditions, say the weathermen. Bully for them.

"I can't live with you, Jerry. You're polluting my mind. I love you, but you're not making the effort. I'll pray for you to be saved, don't laugh at that now, Jerry. I'm going back to The Community."

Back to War-and-wick-shire, the pigs, the loaves and the fishes. Headscarves and non-synthetic legwear and no zips! Its so strange what God decreed. Will every human being who wears a zipper rather than buttons on his breeks be damned? Karen's family certainly think so. That will leave nice wide open spaces in Heaven, a zillion acres for each of the beatified, under their own vine and fig tree. Singing the praises. Planting the eternal seed. Perhaps my plight is not to be feared so...

"But what is it like?" I asked Hoppy, in a break between keying in the missing Council-Tax non-payers of Hammersmith. I unfolding a tuna sand-wich with home made mayonnaise (those liars are for it), he ticking over with his odd catlike purr. One wonders...

"What's what like?"

"Hell, Hoppy, Inferno, Hades, Abaddon, Gehenna, Tartarus."

"Oh, that's not my department, Gerald."

I had been boning up, on Joyce's Portrait of an Artist, the school preacher's exegesis on the abode of the damned, that

...dark and foul smelling prison... filled with fire and smoke... expressly designed by God to punish those who refused to be bound by His laws... the prisoners are heaped together in their awful prison, the walls of which are said to be four thousand miles thick: and the damned are so utterly bound and helpless that, as a blessed saint, saint Anselm, writes in his book on similitudes, they are not even able to remove from the eye a worm that gnaws it...

And so on. All the filth of the world, the vast reeking sewer, the brimstone, the loathsome burning corpses, the lake of fire which is boundless, shoreless and bottomless, the blood seething and bubbling in the veins, the brains boiling in the skull, the leprous corruption and suffocating slime, the yells of the suffering sinners, and the devils, afflicting the damned with reproaches, like one's mother: You see, I told you so, but would you listen? Would you ever. Ever. A word I'm not growing fond of. But why should a Jew end up in a Catholic Hell? Talk to me, I'm working the bloody programme! Trying to disentangle tax evaders from corpses. Show me bugless software and I'll go down on your grandmother! Oops, and there's another notch on my stick...

The Jewish Hell is a far vaguer thing than old Jimmie's. Mostly, it seems to be an absence, a denial of the Next World. More Purgatory than Hell. That suits me fine. I can crawl up the mountain, slowly, like Dante, hoping for escape, away from the pit...

GUMMER SAYS JUDGEMENT DAY NO THREAT TO LAW
ABIDING CITIZENS.
How the fuck would he know? But what is the point of all these lists? Hoppy says we have to register the living so they may have at least a chance to make good. To notch up enough brownie points to push the Balance on the Day a bit towards the plus. The Dead will just have to take their chances with what's been done. But there's still five months for us living to D-Day!

Desperate times and desperate tithes. People are hoovering up the homeless from the streets, feeding them soup, saving Boudous from drowning, dragging old ladies across every street, leading singsongs in supermarkets, tearing off their earings for the starving in Africa. Instead of buskers drilling our ears in the tube with Highway Sixty Nine we have afternoon preachers answering the Call between Gloucester Road and South Kensington. The competition between them is so fierce, they have to rise to new heights of repartee:

"Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this Son of God!"

Smartarse. The one telling absence in this whole affair is The Man, you know, Messiah, Christos. Not a dickie bird. Even Paxman couldn't coax an answer out of the Archangel Gabriel, who simply ducked and weaved and left the whole thing to our imagination. Which was at least a relief, seeing there was not much else left to it. Aside from the conspiracy buffs, who hooked you round the arm in the Castle Tavern and whispered in your ear:

"That whole thing last night on the news: The levitation of the White House. Quantel paintbox. See it a mile away. Its all a con. NATO. Been planning it for years. Discredited governments. Pissed off populations. Recession. Loss of power. Fascism. Its back. Wait till the so-called Resurrection. That's when the mass arrests will start."

All the inevitable theories. Its nothing to do with God. It is, just as Arthur C. predicted, the long awaited Invasion From Outer Space. The Spielbergian Encounter of the Third, Fourth, Fifth kind. Its not Salvation but Slavery. If we could scratch the skin off our Angels we'd find slimy, slithy, reptile carapaces, with wriggling antennas and ten thousand eyes. Some people did attack Angels, with fists, cudgels, axes, knives. But the Angels always anticipated, and could place a finger, just so... Deus jitsu. And weapons, of course, would not fire. But still the speculation slithered. One remembered tales by Philip K. Dick: Seduced to emigrate to star bright utopias, the masses find themselves in faceless barracks, toiling in the dark satanic mines. Not God - but The Other. Some of this was even aired, on my own Channel Four. No bolts of lightning struck the building in Horse-ferry Road, but a devout and terrified crowd gathered outside, sinking to its collective knees in a vigil for all the damned souls inside.

Karen left me on a freezing cold day of black clouds and frost and biting wind. The claps of thunder, the lightning sheering the sky. She couldn't take my jokes any more, even the most everyday and anodyne, like sticking the dinner in the oven and crying out "slam in the Lamb!" They are a habit, these commercial jingles, but Karen accused me of taking the Name in vain. Now that we know there is a price to pay. She had turned into her maternal grandmother, who used to stand on soap boxes outside Lancashire pubs, during the First Depression, crying out: "Strong drink taks thee straight to hell!" One item of sinful consumption whose sales increased dramatically over Yule, as many decided simply to waft themselves wherever upon familiar moonshine fumes.

Repent! Repent! The writing on the wall emerging on that first, neo-Wellesian day. The gathering of the Channel Four wallahs, fingers poised over the abort button of my New Year Eve Special: Blast Out the Past! Six stand-ups on the cutting edge of transmitability spewing up our midnight bile. Then there were the Seven Strumpets of the Apocalypse, an all-female gig. Down the plughole we all went, replaced with a repeat of Kind Hearts and Coronets. So what's wrong with The Sound of Music? That too, gibbered out of the vault. Alone with every meek family flick that flickered since the Flintstones cut rock. Tout le Lassie, Swiss Family Robinson, Ma and Pa Kettle, Old Yeller, Winnie the Pooh, not to speak of the Woodentops, Basil Brush, Snagglepuss, Pinky and Perky and Bertie Bonkers the baby elephant, nudging up from the morning death-slot straightaway to primetime. Christian, the inaptly named, jug-eared Channel director, was rushing into production a twenty-six part series titled Sins of the Century. A massive corporate breast beating ultima culpa. The last episode was to be broadcast the night before the Day of Judgement, with the Day itself to be covered by fifteen camera teams transmitting live, the management fondly hoped, from wherever they might end up, As It Happened. But by the time it was clear the entire executive echelon of the company had descended into tooth gnashing, nose picking drivel, I showed them all a clean pair of my heels...

That's if one could show a clean pair, with every service in the country, big or small, degenerating into futility. Even in the Laundromat, one is assailed by the owner, a fat beefy Venezuelan called Gonzalo, who pins one up against the dryers bellowing in your face like a Prudential salesman: "Haff you redeemed? Haff you redeemed?" His whole place a riot of coloured posters and icons of the Virgin Mary, the Saviour and every conceivable saint he could lay his hands on, from Abachum to Zita. Piped hymns blasted from the front loaders, bells tolled and vapourous incense sent the crazed customers reeling into the street for air.

Escaping the Underground Imams I clatter up the escalator at Golgotha (nee Piccadilly) station, pushing towards the Shaftesbury Avenue exit. Anything but Heaven's Gate, what used to be Eros, the central plaza where every lunatic and his familiar have set up shop to wail their wares. If there is Humour left prepare to use it now... But its too late, the armies of solemnity have flattened all within their path...

A man tugged at my elbow as I pressed up the exit stairs. I tried to pull my sleeve free but he persisted, dragging on to the street corner, dodging with me as I slipped past the ubiquitous pamphleteers. "God's Commands Interpreted by the Reverend Donald Pilbrewer." A likely tale. I look into the man's face. A pinched, horselike frontage, narrow and sallow, a stock-broker's pinstripes and short slicked grey hair. The kind of face that used to stare at us morning noon and night from the box, dispensing economic soothsay, before that all went down the flush.

"Mister Davis. Mister Davis."

Yer middle class twang, Tory sprechen. "I'm sorry to intrude on your time, but if I may..."

"Whadayou want? I'm busy."

"Indeed? Busy at what?"

Touche. I couldn't answer that one without incriminating myself with some sin or other, lethargy, lycanthropy, loucheness. Lovecraft was well hidden in my sidesack. In fact I had been overtaken by an irrepressible urge to see if my favourite quick-serve Chinese restaurant, the Lido, was still serving down at Chinatown. Some things, like won tons and lotus-fried shrimps, might have survived the Dispensation. I paused, by an afternoon rag poster proclaiming: QUAYLE AND LORD TO MEET? Of some things there is enough already.

"What is all this about?" I asked him, but he just stood and blinked at me sadly in the pale winter sun. The self-proclaimed messengers of glory were fulminating beyond the traffic in the plaza, and a plump little Angel was recording their words with a portable cassette machine, for all the world like a Japanese tourist in the days before travel stopped broadening anybody's mind.

"I'm sorry to approach you in this way and without warning," he said, in his plummy patois, "but you will appreciate one has to take precautions. Let us walk among the crowd. Its safer."

Safer than what? We manouevered up the road. Past the once brash theatres now procliaming, hoarding to hoarding, Godpsell, Epistle Time, The Little Shepherd Boy, Joseph and His Monocoloured Dreamcoat, Amazing Grace.

"I will not beat about the bush, Mister Davis. You are a man whose help would be invaluable, in a cause we know you must support."

"I support no causes," I hurried to tell him, in mounting panic, "I already gave at the door."

"I understand your concerns totally," he said, "I know there is no reason for you to accept my assurances. But I would like you to come with me, to a place nearby. By trusting you, we'll hope you will trust us."

"Us?" This was sounding worse and worse. A single fruitcake who can avoid these days. But Us is ominous beyond belief. Still, curiosity killed the cat. A dead feline spoke:

"Who is Us?"

"I represent the Government of the United Kingdom and Northern Island," he said, "I know, it is a defunct concept. The Gummer Regime we can, of course, dismiss. A puppet government of the Occupying Power. We know some things about it that not many do. After all, we have had our resources ready for just such an eventuality, though the provenance of the threat took us, like everyone else, by surprise. But we have survived, underground, in bunkers, nuclear shelters, regional hubs. We need the help of every skeptic, patriot or not, the stakes are far too high. The entire planet is in danger, as you well know. You have a choice: To walk away now and to perish, or to take that slim chance for Freedom."

"I'll walk away, thank you very much."

I walked away, up the curve of the street, towards the restaurant. But after twenty paces I looked back. He was still standing, waiting, by the Apollo Theatre, under a lighted sign for The Apostle's Song. Starring Richard Mayall and Sir Benjamin Elton. How have the mighty fallen. I looked at their names, high above the multitude. I looked at the small, pin- striped, dwarfed Tory, hunched and forlorn beneath the omens.

I walked back, to stand, warily, before him.

"I'm a complete asshole and sucker," I told him. "I don't know what I'm doing."

"Thank God," he said, "an Uncertain Man."

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