Afterlife: A Divine Comedy

a divine comedy

DONALD

DENOON

Pandanus Online Publications, found at the Pandanus Books web site, presents additional material relating to this book. www.pandanusbooks.com.au

afterLIFE

afterLIFE a divine comedy

DONALD DENOON

PANDANUS BOOKS Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

Cover photograph by Bob Cooper © Donald Denoon 2004 This book is copyright in all countries subscribing to the Berne convention. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Typeset in Garamond 10.75pt on 13pt and printed by Pirion, Canberra National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Denoon, Donald Afterlife: a divine comedy ISBN 1 74076 059 X I. Title. A23.4 Editorial inquiries please contact Pandanus Books on 02 6125 3269 www.pandanusbooks.com.au Published by Pandanus Books, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200 Australia Pandanus Books are distributed by UNIREPS, University of New South Wales, Sydney NSW 2052 Telephone 02 9664 0999 Fax 02 9664 5420 Editor: Jan Borrie Production: Ian Templeman, Duncan Beard, Emily Brissenden

For Pamela and all other peacemakers

acknowledgements

The germ of this plot came in a dream in the magical Metropole Hotel in Hanoi, where discreet staff minister to foreign management consultants, Vietnamese powerholders — and the ghosts of Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene. I am profoundly grateful to it, and to them. Blessed be those who read early drafts, encouraged and advised the author, for they shall receive my infinite gratitude. Amirah, Anne, Bob, Brij, Carol, Di, Gavan, Hank, Jan, Jan (not Ian), Ken, Leone, Margaret, Steve, Sue, Tessa and Vicki. Blessed be the supportive and sympathetic publisher, Ian. Blessed be the empathetic and imaginative editor, Jan. But blessings are not nearly enough reward for Mary.

Donald Denoon 28 September 2003

CONTENTS

An Ending A Beginning Terminal Preliminary Report Class Struggles Kingdom Come Althea and Winifred Promises Exegesis Progress Report: Making Contact Celia The Meanings of Lives Which Art in Heaven You Have to Love Them Into Temptation Progress Report: Winifred As it Is in Heaven Kate Call Me Gabriel Crispin

1 9 17 25 31 39 47 55 61 69 75 83 89 95 103 111 117 125 131 139

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Progress Report: Crispin Our Father in Heaven? Heaven on Earth Chosen People Resignation Submission Progress Report: Althea Thine Eyes Only The Judgment of Heaven A Further Proposal Progress Report: Penelope Genetic Modification Progress Report: Kate Deliver Us From Ennui Mine is The Kingdom So Be It

145 153 159 167 173 179 187 193 203 209 215 221 231 239 245 251

AN ENDING

I

felt my arms and legs soften, and I tried to flex them. They ignored me, turned to liquid and flowed away. My stomach was doing the same. I tried to focus, but my ideas were losing their shape, too, flowing into each other — and into some sort of vortex. ‘Excuse me,’ a female voice, deferential but insistent, ‘are you all right in there?’ I wanted to answer, but I couldn’t speak. The dissolving of sensation scared me as much as the evaporation of sense into a miasma of non-sense. Then sensation itself disappeared. In the perfectly still air, sulphurous smog hung heavily. Inside this dense blanket there was nothing to touch. Beyond it, there was nothing to see. Where on Earth was this creepy place? Did things — people, creatures, phantoms even — loom out of sight or was this all there was? Was there any ‘out there’ out there? And was the scent of sulphur significant? No, that’s superstition. I must have imagined it. But what the hell happened to the 747 and its passengers? ‘Mr Kingston,’ her voice was still courteous but now anxious; raised but quite remote, ‘are you all right Sir?’

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Was I all right? Now I had neither sense nor sensation. Was I standing or sitting or upside-down? ‘Geoffrey!’ I said. Whatever misinformation you’ve been fed by the jackal tabloids, I am not infatuated with myself. I would never normally address myself. But when you have completely lost your bearings, you have to start from something known. And, if a jumbo full of passengers can disappear, self is the only thing left. Because I felt silly, I did utter my name rather self-consciously, even tremulously. Perhaps that was why I couldn’t hear myself. The idea that there was nothing left of me provoked a moment of absolute panic. Being born must be rather like this: you have no way to make sense of your sensations, no idea which way is up, not the slightest clue about where you are. No idea of who you are — or what you are. That was my only coherent thought as the mist began to thin and I felt at last that I might be standing. More or less. Other feelings began to return, too, as faint as memories of sensations. The light was so dazzling that I was quite unable to see. And, as if this disorientation was not enough, I was smothered by an extraordinary but terribly familiar aura of cardigans. Not cardigans as a general category; these were very specific. Father favoured brown wool and wooden buttons, which he never fastened across his formidable stomach. Each cardie had pockets for his glasses, pens and diary, fags and lighter. He wouldn’t take it off even if it rained — he’d just swing his coat over it. In simmering Queensland summers, when mirages of pure heat seethed up from the pavements and the humidity made our clothes clammy as damp laundry, he might waddle off to work in short trousers and long socks, pudgy knees pumping, but he never left the cardie in the wardrobe.

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It was more than an article of clothing, but not quite an article of faith. It was the uniform of shop stewards, certifying their traditional social values and work-place truculence; a full family wage for the bread-winner and his home-making wife, or the bosses could expect industrial action. A man’s cardigan set him apart from apprentices and journeymen in their heavy overalls, and the managers and professionals in their tropical light-weights. If he gave me a clumsy and diffident hug — at Christmas or New Year or for my birthday — I was briefly enveloped in the texture of the rough brown wool and the stale cigarette smoke that worked its way into his pores and his clothes. Celia claimed that her hugs were even more painful. For as long as I can remember, each of them treated the other as physically repulsive. And to tell the truth, he was. Mum’s pastel cardigans were quite different — soft cashmere, smelling of lavender and camphor from the tallboy, part of a twin-set, secured with pearl buttons — announcing that she was a passive participant in the eternal class war. She gained not an ounce of weight in all her married life, so Father would boast (and she would demurely agree) that she wore every item of her trousseau, and her wedding dress itself, at their silver anniversary party. ‘Isn’t she marvellous?’ her ageing and busty bridesmaids exclaimed, as if consistent weight was the measure of a woman’s lifetime achievement. (Father grew steadily: she stayed steadily the same. Symbolic, really, said Celia.) A hug from Mum was not as controlled as Father’s and her lavender-and-camphorscented cardigans felt smooth, comfortable, even mildly comforting for the few seconds of propinquity. But these hugs were always self-conscious. A shop steward’s wife, an auxiliary in the class war, must be above

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reproach. Life as a home-maker, beyond the searching fingers of gossip, was hardly living at all. Father would have been mortified if Mum had left the house to earn money: even regular voluntary work was suspect, however charitable and churchy. Her circle of friends could never expand beyond the wives of Father’s peers. Her standing among them would hardly survive a failure to put hot breakfasts and starchy dinners on the table. It was assumed (but how was the rule policed?) that a home-maker kept the linen cupboard clean and aired, clothes laundered and pressed. A married woman could leave home for births — Mum did twice — or funerals. That left plenty of time to discipline the sad shrubs that moped in the garden, seldom blooming and never mustering the energy to scent. Celia and I came to think of our town as Cardigan City. Girls without cardies seemed half-naked, drawing leers and whistles on the streets, and making the imitation-lace curtains twitch. Mum’s friends transformed gossip into a cashmere straitjacket. Fear of gossip ensured for every wife a gnawing anxiety to conform, an inadmissible frustration — and unstated envy of the free-spirited subjects of their gossip. So it was the cardigan aura that identified my parents for certain, although I was still blinded by the radiance of the place. That hardly mattered just now. It was some years since I’d laid eyes on them anyway, and even longer since anyone could have seen them together. Then, once I knew who they were, I was appalled to find myself relapsing into a stupid, childish panic. I was not just tongue-tied; as my anxiety grew, I groped for a topic of shared interest, or some safe small-talk. Football was too obvious a device for avoiding conversation, Mum never discussed politics, and Father (to his credit, I must say) never attached importance to politicians.

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Where the old folks had been for the past few years, or what they’d been doing, I couldn’t quite recall. Retired, I did remember that, because I had to go home for Father’s leavetaking. But what difference would retirement make to their outlook? Were pensioners interested in the same things as working people? Family would engage Mum’s interest, but it was a topic full of booby-traps, sure to provoke evasion. To talk about my career would only irritate them. My tone might imply (what I always repressed) that they could have paid more attention. My private life was no safer: I didn’t think I could give a composed account of the separation. And any account of the tortured (and tortuous) lives of their grandchildren would raise other painful issues. What on Earth might they want to know? ‘You’ve been happy, have you Geoffrey?’ What a bizarre question and what a banal tone! As always, Mum sounded more concerned than anxious, and more polite than concerned. Was this a serious question or was she merely passing the time? Concerned about the neighbours or really caring about her flesh and blood? I couldn’t sum up the emotions of half a lifetime, so I mumbled something non-committal, incoherent and (I hoped) reassuring. ‘I suppose you’re completely dried out by those one-eyed bloody economists and the other right-wing bastards you mix with?’ On cue, Father took the offensive, trying to put me on the ideological back foot. And, as he surely expected, I flared up against him. With short, acid words and a restraint saturated in disdain, I described the colossal returns on capital of the past few years. Unemployment had vanished and the long boom had washed his precious old Keynesian ideas down the drain. Of course, he wasn’t convinced. He wasn’t even surprised. We’d

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kicked this issue around as long as Punch and Judy, and with just as little impact on each other. ‘Come along boys, that’s quite enough bickering, thank you,’ murmured Mum with damp jocularity. As usual she moved to domestic matters which she always expected to be safer than politics (a triumph of hope over experience). ‘And have you made that girl happy?’ What girl? Perhaps she’d forgotten Winifred’s name! Or did she know about the separation? Had she heard about Penny? With her unfailing talent for summoning up guilt, she made me wonder if I’d ever made anyone happy. I mustered another non-committal mumble as I willed her on to another topic. Any topic — except the children. ‘I assume you’re providing for your long-suffering bloody wife and those wild kids?’ Father must have smelt my anxiety. ‘You and your rationalist mates go on rubbishing the bloody public schools, starving the colleges, gutting the public hospitals, squeezing welfare out of the bloody welfare state. Well, once you’ve done that, you’ve damn well got to provide for our grandchildren yourself. You do recognise that, don’t you?’ ‘It’s not just the money, Geoffrey. Your Father is just teasing.’ How often had Mum used this vacuous formula to snuff out arguments and prevent them from being resolved. ‘I expect you’ve set them up with those clever family trusts, but I’d like to be sure that you and Winifred have seen them through college as well, and found time to attend to their spiritual needs.’ Provide for them! See them through college! Attend to their spiritual needs! Well, for Christ’s sake, of course not. What on Earth did she mean? These were phrases straight out of Cardigan City a generation ago. How could she be stuck so deep in the past? At first I bridled at this humbug but, after a few more

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faltering exchanges, I was humiliated to recognise that they were not interrogating me at all. They weren’t interested in anything I said. With laborious courtesy they were glossing over my awkwardness, giving me time to orient myself. Perhaps after that they might embark on real conversation. Did I really want a heart-to-heart with an old couple whose values I had so comprehensively rejected? Evidently we didn’t even speak the same language any more. And after all this time, what was there to say? In fact, it was unsettling to be chatting at all, with people who had for years been … Been what precisely? Been dead precisely. ***** They were dead. I was with them. The jumbo and its passengers were gone. I had to conclude that I was dead, too. What made this inconceivable was my consciousness. As a child I believed in Heaven and (with less conviction) Hell. I left that belief behind as I grew up. I didn’t actually reject it; I simply agreed with Celia that it was rather like Santa Claus, a nice idea for children. So far as I thought about it at all, I agreed with Santayana’s neat dismissal. People conceived of Heaven and found it insipid. When they conceived of Hell they found it ridiculous. So I was extremely reluctant to accept the indications that there was an Afterlife after all, and incredulous to find myself in it. But there it was, and here I was. There must be a reason, and I had better work it out. And I had better work it out fast. If there really was a Heaven and a Hell, I had a bad feeling about my immediate future. Not to mention long-term.

A BEGINNING

L

ike many Australian stories, this one begins in Queensland, but not in the outback. It’s not an epic, although it looks like it will be longer and more eventful than most. Perhaps the direction of the journey will suggest its destination. And God knows I need clues. The touchpaper of my career was lit in Cardigan City, an unmemorable cross-section of subcoastal, periurban, subtropical, semi-industrial, average-income Queensland. It was every statistical norm made manifest in countryside of no character. Below the Dividing Range and beyond the sea breezes, it was overshadowed in winter and insufferably sweaty in summer. Aboriginal people must have wandered through this valley for many centuries without getting excited. If they named its dim features — ‘avoid this dead-end valley’, ‘unripe mangoes’, ‘watch out for wombats for the next five kilometres’ — the names were buried under second-hand British place names. The thin soil that separates the underlying rock from the churlish vegetation promised no profit.

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When settlers arrived they were already defeated, squeezed out of worn-out coal pits in South Wales or Cornwall. Hardy pioneering stock? Quite the opposite. In exchange for a modest living these God-fearing Methodists would cheerfully endure the dusty life of coal miners. When the coal was exhausted they turned their sober hands to railway repairs, or fixed the machinery of the dairy farmers who made a tough living on the coastal strip. Eventually these mechanics were brought together by Ebenezer Noble to make simple farm machinery. As time passed and Brisbane expanded, you could hardly tell one town from another. By mid-century you could distinguish our town from the rest of Brisbane’s hinterland only by reading the Pacific Highway signposts with great care. This corner of the state is where most Queenslanders live and where many southerners come to retire, so it must have therapeutic properties. I hated the place. What I did notice with a heart-starting delight that remains with me was the crimson flash of rosellas and lorikeets, the soothing warbling of magpies, the obsessive piping of peewees and the sudden unearthly cackle of cockatoos, often sinister, always derisive. The birds inhabited a parallel world, older and simpler than ours, more vivid and much more eventful. When I was small I loved the fact that the birds with the rainbow plumes had the creakiest calls, while the black-and-white, madeyed magpies had the widest range, carolling affectionately — or screeching in savage swoops in the nesting season. I imagined a divine providence at work, sharing out talents equitably — until I recognised the violence and the brevity of their hunted lives. I stopped thinking of birds as imitation humans: they drew my attention to the monochrome society around me, where nobody was as funny as a cockatoo or as gorgeous as a rosella. But still

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I relished the sardonic cackle of the carnivorous kookaburra and the posturing of cockatoos as they muscled up to intruders. But I digress. As soon as I could escape these environs and this ruthlessly respectable society, my life fizzed like a squib, erratic in direction but always in motion. Where does adolescent energy come from? Mine was fuelled by rejecting everything about Father: his dress code, his gory vocabulary, his over-hearty mateship, the way he addressed us like delegates at a union meeting. Other fathers belted their kids and I was grateful that our Father didn’t. Eventually I realised that he felt that he didn’t need to, because he was so sure of his correctness and his debating skills. My sharpest memory — and it sums up all that Celia and I resented — is of him in the living room, red-eyed, hands on hips, laying down the law: ‘For God’s sake, learn some bloody respect! Why can’t you just be decent, normal, respectful bloody kids? Like the Lewises. Is that so damn difficult?’ If Mum had something to say about this tirade, I have no memory of it. We did learn to respect learning, but not Father’s principles. Mum must — surely? — have held opinions about his values and her children’s, but she didn’t share them. Her strategy was to remain calm, counsel peace — and change the subject. She didn’t encourage Celia or me to leave home but she couldn’t ignore the intensity of our conflicts with Father, and she didn’t hold us back. Perhaps that’s all she could do in the circumstances that he created. At the time, though, Celia and I were exasperated to be mothered by an ideological black hole who could absorb any opinion and make it disappear. Do I exaggerate the horrors of home life? We were well-fed, well-clothed, well-schooled. Home was not violent, but neither was it ‘homely’. Celia and I spent as little time as possible in it.

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Did I have anything like a journey of the soul? I thought so once. One small step for a boy but a great leap for this Father’s son took me into the lofty church and the cool congregation of St Barnabas’. I remember twinges that might have signalled spiritual awakening but were probably puberty. They don’t explain why I crossed the dusty road from the Paragon Café through the motes and beams of a breathless summer afternoon, across the baking forecourt to the Anglican parish church. I thought then that the move was impulsive. After the deep shade, leatherette benches and vanilla-scented café, I remember wondering why I was standing in the blazing sun at the rectory door. Well, I knocked and asked the Reverend H.J. Weedes, MA (Oxon), BTh (unspecified) to explain the qualifications needed to join his church. He must have suspected a dare (and he could have been right) but he treated me with the watchful courtesy that he extended to all his flock. He asked me to call him Father, which came as a shock as you can imagine, and he ushered me into a living room like a scholar’s study, and offered me tea. Once persuaded of my serious intentions, he arranged instruction in a series of afternoon teas. Afterwards I wondered if my move was completely spontaneous. Celia reckoned that I must have known that the Catholics and the Pentecostals were beyond the pale, whereas Anglicans were (just) within. In Cardigan City, Catholicism was not so much a faith as an ethnicity. No adult joined unless they married a member of the congregation. Some people did join the Pentecostal Assembly, but these Holy Rollers were unashamedly, uninhibitedly, vulgarly, full-bodied religious. If I had a real spiritual itch, I could have scratched it in the Methodist Church of which we were members by birth. But if I was groping for a mutinous

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gesture, why not simply refuse to go to Sunday service? My actual gesture perfectly expressed my rejection of Father’s values. In the open market of faiths, St Barnabas’ was a bargain. I was never asked to believe anything outlandish nor required to believe anything passionately. Father Weedes walked me through the articles of the Creed like a keen gardener pointing out blooms, mentioning his favourites and their qualities but not expecting me to agree. He was sharing knowledge, not commitment. I was expected to know what was in the Creed, but not forced to agree with it. (I realised how lucky I’d been later when I fell in among Sydney Anglicans.) He must have been in his fifties. He lived alone, he was certainly ascetic and probably celibate. He was always ‘Father Weedes’ rather than Herbert (and never, ever, Bert!). Tall, lean and stooping, he looked slightly unworldly. He was by far the poorest member of his flock, which limited his hospitality to Earl Grey and lemon creams. He often told me that he had just finished ‘a quite exceptional little book; I think you might enjoy it’. That was unlikely, since my favourite authors were Zane Grey and Micky Spillane, lowbrow Americans rather than highbrow Brits. I did struggle through C.P. Snow (for content, apparently) and Evelyn Waugh (for style, definitely). The breadth of his reading saved him from dogmatic opinions. There used to be a weak joke that economists had too many hands; ‘On the one hand this, but on the other hand that, and on another hand something else.’ This was never true of economists but it does describe my second Father. What he taught was not belief so much as courteous concern for one’s fellows, verging on compassion. ‘Be kind to one another’ or, if that was too hard, ‘at least be polite’. His services were cool,

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cerebral rather than emotive. Now and again he and the organist would select one of Wesley’s foot-tapping hymns, but that was part of a catholic repertoire stretching from the Reformation forward to the Victorian Tractarians. I could have defended my desertion as a religious matter if my Father had asked, but neither of us wanted to confront the issue. Religious affiliation was a fig-leaf for what we both knew — but would never acknowledge — was class apostasy. You’d have thought that the Queen had condemned men’s cardigans and enjoined the two-piece suit as the outward and visible sign of inward and invisible grace. Most Catholics and Methodists, and all Father’s workmates, voted Labor from cradle to grave and beyond. (Father wrote out his preferences to guide us in the voting booth. Celia and I inverted it until he realised what we were doing.) Most Anglicans voted Liberal but the first Socialist I ever met — Ernest Black, the pharmacist — was also a parishioner of St Barnabas’. He had the reassuring manner of someone who made no judgments as he sold contraceptives to teenagers and filled scrips for their grandparents’ piles. He was keen to explain how the world really worked. The bank managers and stock-brokers, dentists and doctors teased him about the proletarian revolution in Queensland, but there was no heat in their banter. None of them could imagine life changing in Cardigan City. Women took no part in these debates. The wives and daughters of the parish might be seen in twin-sets, but silk blouses and linen suits were more usual. No doubt each social set suffered the restrictions of small-town life, but these women didn’t give that impression. Perhaps that was because several of them had been brought up elsewhere and they all travelled

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further and more often along the Pacific Highway. They behaved as if they had other options and had made a conscious (if reluctant) choice to live here. The girls of St Barnabas’ alone could have drawn me into their fold. Perhaps that’s what did happen. I told myself that they were the same species as the tomboys who sauntered into my school, sniggering and sneering at any softness. My schoolmates talked obsessively about sex: the girls of St Barnabas’ made you dream of romance. I recited the mantra ‘They Are Just Girls’ but I couldn’t believe it. Few St Barnabas’ girls attended the state school at all, and those who did were not inclined (perhaps they were not equipped) to sneer. They were there by a hideous mistake — their fathers’ misconduct perhaps or poor investments. In the playground they stood apart, especially when fights broke out. Their separateness was also a matter of style. Not only tailored clothes, they also had perfect teeth. This was due mainly to orthodontics — the evidence was clear in dental plates, rubber bands and wires and the town’s booming orthodontic practice — but it was impressive all the same. And there was hair. Later I saw hair like that on the empty heads of starlets. Then I didn’t know that shampoo would do it. What would such hair feel like? Certainly not wiry and knotted, like mine or Celia’s. And there was the matter of skin: creamy, lightly tanned — ‘honey tan’ always came to my mind, with its hint of sweetness. This glowing skin was untouched by the acne which infected the rest of us, or the dark circles of sweat that stained our clothes. I had no idea what Anglican skin would feel like — and I couldn’t stop trying to imagine. It was especially difficult to imagine how it would taste.

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I couldn’t convince myself either that gorgeousness was merely skin deep. In human biology and obstetrics I was the bestread kid in my class, thanks to the resources of Ernie Black. The diagrams suggested all the eroticism of a metropolitan transport system. It was easy to believe that high-school girls menstruated — they flaunted it — but impossible that Anglicans did. If they conceived, they must do it immaculately. All of which confirmed that Anglicanism was a different world, inhabited by a serene race.

TERMINAL

I

was dumbfounded. I could navigate these bleakly familiar litanies on automatic pilot while I tried to grasp that I was obviously and unarguably dead. The literature on grieving suggests that the bereaved go first into a state of denial. I can vouch for the fact that the dead do the same. My second reaction was furious indignation, but my mind couldn’t focus. How could I possibly be conscious and yet dead? Was it true that ‘I think therefore I am’? Apparently not, because I was thinking frantically and yet I no longer was! And there was no time to ponder this paradox. It’s not just dying, although Heaven knows how annoying that is, and how untimely in my case. Even before this, I had expected to die, eventually. Lots of people die, some even younger than me. Even clean-living people die — but not usually before 70, except in traffic accidents. And what, by the way, do we mean by an accident? Isn’t it just a cover for disbelief? Or to express indignation? Anyway, 70 is no longer the Biblical maximum but the Western minimum, promised by a middle-class income and

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assured (except in small print) by health insurance. I had been cheated of at least a quarter of a century, probably my best years, physically fit, mentally alert, creating a life after Win, savouring the relationship with Penny. When the children and your first wife leave home, isn’t that when life begins? (Being thrown out of the family home is not quite the same, but the outcome is nearly as good.) And, after some wretched publicity, the press had moved on to new scandals and I was on the cusp of a comeback. But my rage was not only about timing. There was also proper procedure. In this cataract of indignation, my mind snagged a silly grievance, perhaps because it seemed more manageable than the rest of my complaints. At any rate, it was perplexing to find myself in thrall to a Dickensian notion of terminal etiquette. Where on Earth (the appropriate phrase) did this come from? In this scenario I recline between crisp sheets in a large bed, bathed in the glow of a bedside lamp in a darkened room. The air is velvet from flowers brought by devastated friends and respectful ministers. The last of my generation, I am the object of public honour and private affection. Sensing the dismay of my vast family, I break the heavy silence to bestow good cheer. Ninety years, I remind them, is a good innings (a fine phrase, Old School but Common Touch). I bestow a bequest on my attending physician as I sign a will (a Testament?) prepared by the dark-suited solicitor. A phalanx of children and grandchildren and their partners — some adding poignancy by their pregnancies — struggle to contain their grief. The dynasty will benefit materially, but their lives will never again feel so rich. Absurd. Nothing of my circumstances would sustain such grandeur. My GP never makes house calls. My little estate is adequately disposed in a do-it-yourself will. How many would

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hang around my bedroom? Celia would, if she wasn’t already dead. What could I say to the children — Kate refusing to acknowledge the barrier between us; Crispin and I unable to articulate our separate guilts? Win will be the chief beneficiary, despite our separation. I hope she would come. Probably she would, even at the risk of meeting Penny. Penny was the one I would miss sharply, achingly. But there was already such harmony between us that there wasn’t much unsaid. All things considered, the solitariness of my demise bore no relation to Dickens, but it was no tragedy and it was mercifully quick. Instantaneous in fact: the impact of a malfunctioning electric razor. I thought these devices were foolproof, but contrary evidence stared me in my face. Circumstances allowed me to watch my reflection fade in the washbasin mirror. How many could claim this once-in-a-lifetime experience? Not that it amounted to much, as life-changing experiences go. No sound. Only surprise and the dawn of indignation as my image lost focus, I looked for an emergency buzzer and toppled out of frame. It’s surprising (shocking, perhaps?) that an electric appliance can be lethal, but there were several contributing factors. At the check-in counter I got a doltish clerk who messed up my seat allocation. Then the unspeakable Garth Lewis appeared in the club lounge: ‘Enjoying the discreet charms of the bourgeoisie?’ the snake asked with a phoney smile. I didn’t expect him, but I was fully prepared. I’m always prepared. ‘Do you mind if I make a suggestion, Garth?’ I purred. ‘Stick to your day job. You have a real flair for industrial sabotage. I acknowledge that. Close to genius actually. And leave jokes to

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people with a sense of humour. And since you ask, I pay my own club fees, they’re deducted from my bank account. Rather like union dues in fact, but mine are voluntary, and they don’t hurt anyone.’ One of the most delectable sights in life is a smile frozen on Garth’s handsome face. Some bloke was standing close enough to overhear the exchange. The stranger smiled, too, when he thought we were kidding, then his jaw dropped and his eyes bulged. Was I too abrasive? Not if you knew how Garth pursued me through threats of industrial action, wildcat strikes, slow-downs. When those tactics failed, he tried arbitration, he representing a handful of unionists blackmailing their employers, me advocating corporate viability and the national interest. Character assassination, too, when he needed it. We were opponents in wage hearings but that didn’t make us enemies. That was something we had chosen at school. For Garth, this was just another episode in an eternal soap opera called Workers of the World versus the Wicked Bosses. I was still stewing about Garth when I found that I was seated next to the ultimate air-head. Some young women do fly business class, but I could not believe that people who earn that kind of money read Inside Hollywood and Know the Stars. I tried not to drool over her amazing legs, longer than you could believe, sheathed in something silky. Unless it was paint. I’d noticed her in the club lounge — how could you not? — with a very good-looking young man. So serious was their conversation and so intimate their manner, I expected them to sit together; but he didn’t seem to be on the flight. Anyway, these legs writhed as their owner experimented with positions for the leg rest and the reclining seat. They looked

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like illustrations for a sex manual. If only to wrench my mind away, I asked the young woman where she was going. ‘Rome, actually. Entered this Know the Stars competition, you know? Never expected to win, of course. Just told my girlfriends, like, you know, “WHY NOT?” ‘Then the questions were, like, “HOW EASY CAN YOU GET?” ‘When they phoned to say I’d won, it was just like, “WOW!” ‘And this is my prize!!! You believe it? Never been in business class before. You? Isn’t it just, like, UNBELIEVABLE? It says here we get to choose our own movies. And on my way to a week in Rome, in a TOTALLY unbelievable hotel with a pool and everything — look at the brochure, it’s AWESOME!’ What would she see in Rome? She didn’t know but the organisers would find some clubs. How about St Peter’s? Dunno: sounds like a church. Not her scene, really. The Forum, then? I thought she was kidding when she asked what it was. It was hard to remain cool and polite but the extent of her ignorance astounded me — and of course she picked that up. I tried equally hard to show interest in the squalid lives of the self-anointed celebrities she was reading about, but I thought them pathetic. She sensed that, too. I tried even harder not to let my eyes wander over her agitated legs, but I failed utterly. She knew that, too, and enjoyed the effect she was producing. This was war. There was victory in her eye when she refused the coverlet that the hostie offered her. Well, I wasn’t going through to London. Even so, 10 hours to Bangkok would be, like, INTOLERABLE. I was missing Penny, brooding about the kids and imagining what they were doing.

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My GP had warned me against drinking on a long flight but I thought, like, ‘BUGGER IT’ and ordered a second nightcap before I retreated with my toilet bag to the littlest room in the plane. That was the perfect combination to depress a more robust spirit than mine, even without my (surely forgivable?) nightcap and badly executed shave. Or badly shaved execution. Not such a bad exit, but terrible for the other passengers and worse for the hostie. Some years ago, while investigating overmanning in the airlines, I noticed that cabin crew were not qualified to determine the cause of a passenger’s death. So they must not move the body. On the other hand, they could hardly leave the corpse in the loo for several hours, nor could they haul it out without electrifying the rest of business class. No doubt the purser apologised discreetly to people in nearby seats and topped up their single malts. Next problem: whose laws govern the writing of my death certificate — those of the country of the deceased, or the country of destination? This was preposterous: wherever I was now, it was too late for regulatory riddles. ***** Brought back to Earth, my mortal remains graduated into a problem for our idle consular officers in Bangkok — who had no scruples about taking revenge. ‘Sorry to interrupt your reading Jean, but we’ve got another airline fatality. Open a file will you? And contact any family before Qantas ships him home.’ ‘Good as done, Sir. But it may not be Qantas. These days we let these jobs to tender.’

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‘So we do. I’d forgotten. Anyway, here’s his passport. He’s even filled in his arrival card — a bit obsessive apparently. Five foot eight. Brown hair, brown eyes. No distinguishing features, poor bugger. Age 49: a bit young for a heart attack, don’t you reckon?’ ‘Could be another victim of this Economy Class Syndrome. Let’s see. No, he died in a Business Class loo. Occupation: consultant. That might explain the heart attack! ‘Here’s an odd thing. For Address in Bangkok he’s put care of the Ambassador. Can you imagine His Eminence making up the spare bed! Geoffrey Kingdom. No, hang on, it’s Kingston. Kingston? That rings a bell. Isn’t he — wasn’t he — something big in Canberra?’ ‘Kingston? You’re kidding? Jesus Christ, Jean. Remember the scandal a few weeks ago? He ran off with the American ambassador’s wife. His own wife was mad as a cut snake and poured buckets over him in the Family Court and the newspapers. I did hear His Eminence bleating that Kingston was still the PM’s hatchet man. Apparently he’s been rampaging through our embassies, outsourcing consular work and cutting down overseas posts.’ ‘The bloke whose wife threw his clothes outside the house? With the crutch cut out of the pants? Well, he shouldn’t complain if his home delivery is cheap and nasty!’ Gossip! All my life I’ve been sniped at by little people who resist any change to the way they work. All my life, and apparently that’s not the end. As if the problem was my invention, not their idleness! As a matter of record, by the way, Penny is a First Secretary, married pro forma to another diplomat. And it was only two pairs of trousers. But they were right about the damage. And their petty disrespect still rankles. How I wish I’d had another day or two to report on the value of their work!

PRELIMINARY REPORT

To

Gabriel, AA

From

Eliazar, A

Re

The affairs of Geoffrey Kingston

Wide reading has helped to prepare me for the usual problems of adjustment and embodiment. Close study of the historian Geoffrey Blainey and the sociologist Germaine Greer have given me many clear — but not entirely consistent — ideas of what to expect of Australia and Australians. I have also had the useful experience of an earlier brief visit (what people here call ‘a flying visit’, without knowing how truly they speak). I could hardly be better briefed, but no amount of preparation and planning avoids all the difficulties of the transition to embodiment. To minimise the risks of physical suffering, I chose the physique of a young adult male. Nevertheless, through indefensible negligence I did experience several interesting physical pains and moments of fright while I was

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learning not to lean on hot stoves, not to walk in the river, not to cross the road against the traffic lights and so on. It is unfortunate that we have to learn the truth of these clichés for ourselves. But there is nothing new or instructive in these misadventures, so I resist the temptation to impose them on you. Despite my guided reading in human biology, I was not ready for living in a body. Time is organised largely around the perpetual need to eat. Eating interrupts work, brings workers together, and is the main form of socialising. That makes it unfortunate that I cannot share the relish with which humans go to the table. A serious crisis came with my first meal. I knew about food groups and the need for a diet to include them all, but I had not considered that protein often comes in the form of butchered animals. The consumption of protein therefore requires one to cut up slices of corpse and ingest bite-sized chunks of it, while expressing delight to everyone at the table. For some time I tried not to eat at all, but that is out of the question when one has a body to maintain. Some people choose never to eat protein in animal form, but they are seen as hypersensitive. It is awkward to ensure a vegetarian diet (as it is called here) and it would attract dangerous attention to me as an eccentric person, but I do try discreetly to avoid getting blood on the plate, not to mention (as they say here) blood on my hand! Compared with the horrors of eating, other bodily functions, like excretion, are only mildly disgusting. However, when I add up all the time and the effort of preparing food, eating it, excreting it and keeping the body clean, well-dressed and

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groomed, it is no longer astonishing that the body exercises such tyranny over the mind — and the soul. Nor is this the full extent of the despotism of the body. Despite my wide reading and my long practice in English, I was not prepared for the embodiedness of language itself. When someone wanted to ‘chew my ear’ my immediate reaction was to flinch; but he wanted only to talk. An inconvenient colleague is ‘a pain in the neck’ or even ‘a pain in the bottoms’. Asking for greater effort, someone will say ‘put your back into it’, while someone who is mildly unhappy claims to be suffering from ‘a broken heart’! Every single part of the body, every bodily function, however repulsive, can be used in an allusive way. In normal conversation, when I do not have time to ponder every statement and preview every response, errors are inevitable. I was lost for words the first time someone told me ‘Must run — I have a train to catch’, and then strolled away to the train station. When I hesitated at a pedestrian crossing, a helpful cyclist advised me to ‘use your bloody head’. Pitfalls are everywhere. There could have been an unfortunate incident when the driver of a motorised bicycle saw me run across the six lanes of a major road. It is called a freeway, but is free only for vehicles. I had not realised that this is a suicidal action for humans with their slow speed and clumsy reactions. Anyway, the driver exclaimed ‘Bugger me!’ I now know that this expression is never a genuine invitation to sexual contact. Until these allusions become familiar, all speech seems obsessively physical and my cautious and self-conscious use of language struck acquaintances as — not exactly alien, but

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certainly quaint. When my phrases are slightly unusual, they say that I am ‘out of my step’ with them. And I am often out of my step. To explain my strangeness, the obvious cover is an appeal to ethnicity. While biological and cultural variation between humans is very slight by comparison with variations in other primates, their interest in minute variety is ludicrous. It seems as if they are all separately determined to establish their individuality. At the same time they are — separately — determined to deny everyone else’s individuality and to categorise the whole world into a handful of stereotypes. The point here, however, is that it is unrealistic on short visits to pass as a born-and-bred Australian. The best we can hope for is to pass as harmlessly strange. To give some unthreatening individuality to my borrowed form, therefore, I invented a Slovenian persona. Australians have only the vaguest ideas about Slovenia and few could find it on a map. They are relieved to learn that its people are neither Muslims nor terrorists. Even if officials saw through my pretence they were not likely to detain me in one of the desert camps where they isolate suspicious characters. I could, of course, let myself out of such a camp but I had no wish to court inconvenience and delay, not to mention the dreadful food, the stifling heat and the company of deeply distressed souls. Anyway it is very convenient that Australians imagine Slovenians to be neither dangerously powerful nor disgracefully poor, so they tolerate a limited nonconformity in other dimensions of social behaviour. The Internet revealed to me that Angel is a plausible contraction of a common Slovenian

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personal name. That avoids the usual problem of remembering an assumed identity. Milan — the president of the recently independent republic — offers a simple family name that is easy to remember. Only once was I pressed on the subject of Slovenia — by a young woman who said that she had also been born there — but I saw through her pretence long before she could see through mine. ‘Angel’ had the advantage (or so I thought) of being gender neutral. However, no such condition is accepted here. Even the notion of gender neutrality creates unease and even anxiety. The most alienating feature of human society is the way that knowledge of their individual mortality provokes obsessive attention to reproduction. This preoccupation shapes almost all human behaviour, and it embraces any topic even remotely related to sex. Our own immortality — and therefore our asexuality — is therefore the greatest barrier to our understanding them. In this mission I have assumed a human physique that many people describe as ‘cherubic’. This has proved so alluring to humans that it provokes some awkward situations. Having no extravagant sexual characteristics, I attract female and male curiosity and attention. It is, for example, important that I avoid public transport, especially at busy times, and I have to exercise great care when travelling alone in elevators. After several unpleasant encounters with strangers in buses, I have devised an under-garment that is based on the idea of a chastity belt. This protects my genitals from wandering hands. Even hospitals are dangerous, despite the chaste clinical style that nurses and doctors adopt. I was completely unprepared

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to respond to my first sexual proposition. It was made by a female nurse, and the only deflecting response which came to my horrified mind as a way to avoid offence was to claim general disinterest in female companionship. That was a most unwise evasion. Gossip is endemic among hospital workers, and perhaps more widely. Within half an hour therefore I had to respond to propositions from two male colleagues. Sexuality is inherent in being human (even for those who embrace chastity). There is plainly no way to remain aloof, yet constructive engagement is not a simple matter and it involves a serious reappraisal of our own values. This report might have been compiled more expeditiously, if not for the time and effort required to negotiate safe passage through the human condition of perpetual foreplay, rhetorical and physical. Let me make it clear that this litany of surprises and my catalogue of dangers is not a complaint. I fully intend to complete the mission entrusted to me, and I am confident that it can be accomplished. I record these reflections only — as they say here — to get them off my breast.

CLASS STRUGGLES

I

n high school, as in society at large, there were mutually exclusive classes. Teachers allocated us to streams the day we arrived, prophesying how each would perform and what each could achieve. All kids — except Aborigines of course — had to stay at school until age 15. It was not mandatory, although that was how it felt, for boys to quit on their 15th birthday or at the end of the next football season and sign on as apprentices. If their attendance and attention were erratic, none of the teachers bothered. Girls hung around longer, since girls in those days had no access to apprenticeships. They were in no hurry to launch butterfly careers as typists or nurse-aides or receptionists, and if they were lucky they were a few years shy of pregnancy, marriage and lace curtains. Only a few students, mainly boys, were expected to grapple with homework, choose ‘serious’ subjects and study for the Senior Certificate. To help us into this orbit, we were segregated. But I was segregated already. Celia burst into the world hungry for answers to questions she formulated in utero. Father

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sought relief by sending her to school a few months earlier than the legal age. When I picked up Celia’s habit of asking questions (though without her interest in the answers), the same solution applied. I was ripped untimely from my home: with the connivance of Father’s mate the principal of the primary school, I began at five, in a class of six-year-olds. Smaller than the others, with none of their social skills, and lacking interest in sport, I was an object of general suspicion and occasional persecution. Celia taught me how to fight and I focused on my aptitude for learning. By the time we went to high school we had a modus vivendi: the others kept to themselves and I kept to myself. Unlike the others, I knew that life had to be much more satisfying than school. I knew many class ‘mates’ mainly by sight. One exception was little Jimmy Mould, scruffy, cack-handed, easily distracted. But of all of us, he made the greatest mark on the town. Moving smoothly from school into marketing, he persuaded the local council to develop tourism. He helped invent attractions, making us one of the earliest (though least plausible) sites of Queensland Heritage. A nasty little massacre was elevated into a battle between cunning Aborigines and heroic Pioneers, and its site moved closer to public toilets. A broken-down farm house became a museum of farming technology and a celebration of convict creativity. Garth Lewis was different. His father Nev was Father’s offsider, mindlessly loyal. He was the most predictable man I ever knew, stentorian in chapel, patron of rugby league, tiresomely faithful to Marj and tedious defender of the RSL faith. Even Father conceded that Nev was dull. Marj was one of Mum’s oldest friends and one of her bridesmaids.

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Garth was a year older than me, so we were in the same class at school. Not only was he blond, sturdy and good-looking: he had the hand-eye coordination that you often find in left-handers. His hair always looked like he’d just had it cut and he was always wellscrubbed. He was compact, self-possessed, well-organised. He would always have been the first boy picked for playground cricket or football, if he hadn’t always been the captain. He was naturally enviable. I naturally envied him. I learned to dislike him, too. Not only was he the only one of our class who looked like a private-school boy, he had brains. He could — and probably should — have stayed at school and gone to uni. His father, however, wanted him to sign on as an apprentice aircraft mechanic, and the rest is history — the history of Australian industrial relations. His sister Shirl was two years younger and quite pretty, again in a neat and tidy, sanitised way. Father yearned for me to be friends with Garth. When that looked unlikely he wanted me to take an interest in Shirl, so of course I refused to talk to her. It seemed that Garth and Shirl wanted nothing more than to grow up to be their parents, but I never asked, so I don’t know if Shirl wanted a life. In the year before most of my class quit, one of the teachers staged the prescribed text for that year, Julius Caesar. It was hard to see how a story of togas and high politics would illuminate the lives of apprentice mechanics and temporary hair-dressers. Still, acting it did deliver something surprising. Garth was a natural Mark Antony and the teacher thought I was a natural Brutus. Perhaps he was right. In rehearsal I learned the words to express my dislike, my distrust — and my envy — of the charmed life of the charming Garth. I grasped at once that this combination of all the talents was odious to all who lacked them.

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With time, my isolation frayed. Colin Chang’s dad was a widower, an accountant whom everyone consulted for tax rebates. Chinese were rare in Cardigan City, and I don’t know how T.C. Chang and his three sons arrived, or why they stayed. (Colin’s sadness stopped me from asking about Mrs Chang.) The town was slow to accept T.C. Chang, so it took years before he could make a good living. He might then have sent Colin (the youngest) to a private school, but he didn’t have the money to send all three, so it seemed fairest to send them all to the state school. They were all bright and savvy enough to survive its stresses. Colin and I avoided each other for years. My status was so tenuous that I didn’t want to be associated with him. I didn’t join the Chink-baiting but I didn’t try to break it up either. Colin was nimble and his hand-eye coordination served him well. Even so his status was too marginal to risk association with a badtempered swot. Association was safer once we were shunted into the same classes and most of our age-group quit. We enjoyed each other’s company and despised the football fanatics. We shared a seriousness about life. I wanted to change society by accumulating the kind of authority that the Anglicans seemed to enjoy from birth. Colin was much more concerned with individual action to relieve individual pain. Although we had such different ambitions, we shared a determination to leave town — and we discussed how to escape. It was a lop-sided relationship. Mum was uncomfortable in Colin’s presence and I knew (even before she told me) that he’d better be gone before Father came home. Matters were completely different in the Chang household. T.C. made me so very welcome, and treated my callow opinions with such respect,

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I was embarrassed. To resolve — or at least evade — this issue, Colin and I chose not to visit each other’s homes. Colin’s Senior Certificate results earned him entry to medical school. That and an internship in Sydney were more a vocation than training. From our dwindling contacts I learned that, like his dad, Colin had talents for everything except money. The last I heard he was a geriatrician, working appalling hours with depressing patients in a rundown public hospital. Disinterest in money was never my problem. Ernie Black explained that financial strength and political authority were simply two faces of a single coin. I didn’t know how to get the authority to change anything, unless I became rich. I hoped that economics would help me amass a fortune. That was naive but I never regretted the mistake. After Honours in economics I took a course in public administration. Then, after a stint as a bookkeeper at Noble’s, a providential scholarship flew me to a mind-expanding, life-changing MBA in Chicago. Even more than St Barnabas’, this was my Damascus Road. St Barnabas’ gave me style; Chicago gave me substance and direction. Like medical school, the MBA program was a vocation, demanding passion and conviction. That’s what I gave it. I went by myself and was immersed in the society of fellow students as well as the classes. It would be hard to over-state my debt to both. Chicago gave me a new way to see the world, an unexpected way of being in the world, and it showed me how to change the world. And not just me: we all felt that new possibilities were revealed to us disciples. This revelation obliged us to bring light to a benighted world. There was real esprit de corps — and a lot of socialising. I was briefly smitten by a delicious young woman, perfectly groomed, skin like café au lait, completely self-confident.

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She seemed to embody all the wondrous possibilities of a world struggling to be born. Lucky for me, Australians were different enough to be exotic, but not so different as to threaten Americans’ sense of the proper order. When I came home and joined the State Government, a couple of consultancies to Pacific Island governments and then the Federal Treasury in Canberra, my views were anathema and I preached them tirelessly. For a few years I was howling in the wilderness, risking martyrdom. A couple of short-haired and narrow-eyed ASIO men interviewed me. They liked my enthusiasm for Uncle Sam but they couldn’t get their heads around economic analysis, so they went away confused. They should have understood — it wasn’t rocket science. For 70 years governments tried to regulate the Australian economy to sustain a white workers’ paradise. ‘White Australia’ was supposed to ensure that cheap labour never entered the country or competed against Australian workers. Industrial arbitration and mandatory unionism were supposed to protect ‘the civilised family wage’. Tariff protection would shield producers from unfair competition. At all levels — weekend shopping, liquor licensing, foreign movies, subversive books — there were restrictions. With the same zeal as Father, my colleagues espoused market intervention, tariff protection and every kind of regulation. That strategy had kept the country moderately prosperous, but totally uncreative and smugly monocultural. We’ll never know what Aboriginal or female innovation was laughed out of court or how many brilliant Sri Lankans were diverted to California. My colleagues believed that outsourcing, down-sizing, asset sales, competition and corporatising were ‘voodoo economics’. I must be a dangerous fanatic. A few years

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later though, when Australian opinion caught up with Chicago, I soared into orbit. Orbit, but not free flight. After a comprehensive rejection of his politics, his economics and his aesthetics, I had expected Father to be more — and more noisily — annoyed. I counted on his rage to validate my sense of who I was and my confidence in where I was going. Instead, he wrapped himself in silence. I assumed that he was putting a brave face on my defection, until it dawned on me that stoicism was not in his character. Celia had insisted on staying at school for the School Certificate, then going to uni where she took up with feminists and campaigned for abortion law reform. Blind Freddy could sense Father’s outrage against Celia; but to me he behaved as if a son’s rejection was a normal feature of family relations. Perhaps it recalled his rejection of his own father’s Primitive Baptist quietism. On every principle our opposition was complete, categorical — and shallow. Meanwhile my arguments found favour with some ambitious politicians and I became the scourge of the old bureaucracy. I helped to wrest power from the public service and restore it to the politicians (and to their advisers), pruning the lush bureaucracy, planting bits out, giving the survivors a coherence which surprised them — and finally converting them.

KINGDOM COME

B

ecause I am used to exercising authority, I was devastated to be so completely at the mercy of circumstances far beyond my control. I had not been as helpless as this since primary school. Distracted by the preposterous conversation with my parents, my frantic thoughts were casting about for explanations. I could imagine only two possibilities. Maybe I was hallucinating, and this was a Wonderland. In that case I was either mad or comatose, but at least I was alive and would soon wake up. That was the optimistic view. I tried not to think about the alternative. Perhaps Santayana was wrong and there was an Afterlife after all. And if he was wrong about Heaven, he could be wrong about Hell. I was stuck in meaningless discussions with my dead parents. Maybe — as it did for the characters in Anouilh’s Huis Clos — this would go on for ever. What twisted mind could imagine this hellish scenario? I don’t know how long I wallowed in this terrible conundrum, but it was long enough for me to contemplate suicide and

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then to realise that suicide is impossible for hallucinating people and equally impossible for dead people. If this was a nightmare, I would wake up eventually. I chose to confront my worst fears and behave as if this was all real. Then, to my huge relief, I was nudged away from my parents by a presence that oozed the authority and sensibility of a perfect host. ‘Please excuse us,’ said a voice that was too confident to resist and too courteous to resent. ‘We have a few tedious matters to discuss.’ I wished I could see who this was. I was beginning to adjust to the light that flooded this place, but there seemed to be a special radiance around this voice. There was something androgynous about this presence. The gender of the voice was indeterminate, and the nudge neither pushy nor sensual. Strictly speaking, I didn’t feel it at all, but I did sense it. ‘Geoffrey Kingston,’ I said. ‘The consultant formerly known as Geoffrey Flint Kingston, Order of Australia and scourge of the old bureaucracy? This is a great and long-awaited pleasure.’ Later I thought this formula was so over-the-top that it verged on mockery. At the time, half-expecting an eternity with my parents, I was simply delighted to be rescued. Whatever was going on, this might not be Hell after all. ‘I’m astounded to be so comprehensively identified,’ I stammered, ‘and most grateful for your intervention. To tell the truth, I was beginning to fear that I might be there for all eternity. Excuse my ignorance, but may I ask to whom I have the pleasure?’ ‘Gibb Rill,’ came the reply, clearly enunciated but quite unhelpful. Perhaps it was Gibril. It certainly had two syllables, although I can’t explain how I knew this. I still couldn’t say if the voice was male or female and, although my sight was returning,

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I couldn’t focus. The name could be Gabrielle. Or Gabriel. The only bell it rang was Father Weedes’s account of the Annunciation. Surely this was not the Gabriel? But if I could suspend disbelief and accept for the moment that this was some sort of Afterlife, then an Archangel wasn’t inconceivable at all. And who but an Archangel would expect a single name to be a sufficient introduction? If Father and Mum could make an ethereal appearance, then — no matter how improbable, how portentous — why not an Archangel? That was not the clarification I needed. If Father was here, it was Hell. But I reminded myself that Mum was here, too, which made it less likely to be eternal damnation. If this was Gabriel, surely His presence ruled out Hell completely. I toyed with the frivolous idea that expiring at 34,000 feet had given me a head start to Heaven. Ridiculous. Nobody ever mentioned altitude as a way to elude Hell. Perhaps an ante-room? Heaven is surely reserved for people who’ve been judged by some criteria. Nobody had weighed my soul — unless I’d been unconscious, but that would be unfair procedurally. It would be like swiping a moral credit card, lacking the ceremony you surely deserve for This Was Your Life. The least you should expect is a formal Last Judgment. I remembered hearing that the only people who entered the Kingdom of Heaven were the Poor in Spirit. What a loose and ambiguous standard for such a critical tribunal! Poor in spirit is not a phrase that crops up in my testimonials and I’ll bet it’s not in my obituaries either. In any event I wouldn’t call myself dispirited; just down at the mouth. My panicky memory scuttled back to school where our teachers instructed us on forms of address for Bishops, Baronesses or Cabinet Ministers. Unaccountably, they had overlooked Archangels.

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‘I’m impressed by your scholarship Geoffrey,’ said the voice. ‘Having heard of your quick wits, I look forward to making your acquaintance. Already I am surprised and delighted. I did not expect quite such breadth of knowledge and I was led to expect a more robust, even salty — may I say Australian? — idiom. One of My great pleasures, by the way, is the infinite variety of individual idiom. But let Me satisfy your curiosity. I am indeed the Gabriel, and please do not concern yourself with forms of address, We do not stand on ceremony here.’ That statement took some absorbing, but I did gather my wits — although rather slowly, to tell the truth. Since this was probably not Hell, I had to assume that I was hallucinating. Someone had told me that the way to cope with nightmares is to play along with the scenario as if its impossibility is normal, its irrationality the only reality. The thing to do was to behave as if this really was the Archangel Gabriel. But where was here? And what on Earth (wrong expression of course) was I doing here? I was about to ask, when Gabriel answered: ‘I understand your bewilderment, Geoffrey. May I warn you, incidentally, that although We are now inured to low-level obscenity and the occasional blasphemous expression, “to tell the truth” makes Us unreasonably suspicious? ‘This is indeed the Afterlife or, at any rate, your afterlife. Later we might discuss whether it is Heaven or Nirvana, Purgatory or Hell, or any other term you prefer. That is a matter of how each soul experiences it, and the question is not germane at the moment anyway. ‘And you are here because We would be grateful for advice on a problem that is causing Us some concern.’ This was said in a voice which conveyed in equal measure the gravity of the problem and confidence about its resolution. (How did I know

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that ‘We’ was capitalised? I can’t put a name to the quality, but there was no room for doubt. Let’s just call it charisma.) How to respond to such an overture? I had to play along with the dream, treat it as if this sort of overture was made every day. Perhaps I should act in character in this theatre, as if Gabriel were a normal client? For many years I worked as a management consultant, and for many more years I engaged other consultants and drafted their contracts. As a matter of — no, strike that. In my experience, an unexamined consultancy contract is either a licence to rob the client or an invitation to suck the life out of the consultant. In this unnamed place it was especially important to nail down terms and conditions. I was profoundly disoriented, of course, but experience had taught me a rule that protected me from suicidal commissions: be crystal-clear on four issues before you sign anything. Who is the client? What is the fee? What advice does the client really want? And how much opposition should you expect? ‘May I know the identity of the client?’ Gabriel paused. ‘A harder question than you realise. Over recent millennia We’ve slipped into reverential but sadly imprecise terms; the Almighty, the Most High, that sort of thing. The human habit of personalising the godhead, and your extravagant deference, distort and flatten out the organisational structure. This usage does oversimplify the chain of command in policy and programs, and it obscures the lines of responsibility.’ Another pause. ‘Given the nature of the commission We hope you will accept, We might suspend all formality and refer to Ourselves simply as Management. I enjoy full powers to negotiate, so you would report to Me directly.’

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I never negotiate with an ill-defined client, especially one who is neither an individual nor a corporate body. Worse, His barely visible physique made it unlikely that He was a body at all, so He could not even shake hands on a deal. It was equally unlikely that His culture would include a written contract. To tell the truth — but I must stop saying that. Such a gross imbalance of power between the two parties was far beyond my experience. It was certainly grounds for caution, if not anxiety. Be that as it may, my appetite for procedural clarity was getting in the way of the real issue. A moment’s reflection swept away my anxiety. Gabriel was (or at least He represented) the only client here — the Ultimate Client in fact. It was not conceivable that any party had legal standing to contest the consultant’s advice. And even if there was a hostile party, Gabriel would be the Arbiter. I could. I must. I would take His unsupported word. That would be imprudent as a rule, but even our brief conversation made me content — not just content, eager — to take His word and accept the commission. ‘I can’t help wondering who the other stakeholders might be — assuming that there are other parties? And I assume — please correct me if I’m off the planet, so to speak — that any such party must bow to Management’s decision?’ Gabriel murmured assurance. There were, in a sense, other parties; but Management was acting on their behalf as well as Its own. And yes, the other parties would happily accept Management’s decision. Ecstatically, even. ‘Would it be indelicate to ask about the consideration?’ I asked, anxious to find the proper phrase. Usually (no longer a helpful term, of course), I charge by the hour, with a loading for Sundays and public holidays and a preference for tax-free goods

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and airline tickets. Now that had gone by the board. For a start, I couldn’t tell the time. Again, I didn’t expect there to be public or even religious holidays, except in the sense that every moment was solemn and the mood was that of a perpetual Easter weekend. Evidently there was no money, and in any case there was nothing to buy. Deferred benefits were out of the question. As for travel, I was sure that this was Heaven or something like it, so there would be no travel agents. And there could be only one other destination, one I certainly did not want to visit. Anyway, my thirst for air travel was slaked, given the manner of my demise. (Entry, they call it here. An odd usage, but every exit is indeed an entry to somewhere else.) I turned ingratiating. ‘Without knowing precisely what resources are at Management’s disposal, I assume You could assemble an attractive package?’ ‘We could indeed. An offer you could hardly refuse.’ His intonation — the equivalent of a twinkling eye — hinted at private amusement. Not surprising really. He must have been amusing Himself privately for several millennia. ‘As a matter of fact, We could offer you the Earth, but in present circumstances you could gain no benefit. The constraints, to tell the truth, are not in the domain of Our resources but in your imagination and your capacity.’ He was getting a lot of private pleasure from playing with my speech patterns. I wasn’t at all comfortable with His irony, so I almost missed the bomb-shell. ‘On previous occasions …’ He began. Previous occasions! What on Earth (silly phrase) did The Almighty have to consult about? And who would They engage? I’d give my right arm to see the contracts, if I really had one, but of course contracts would not be written, much less visible, and

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certainly not public. Gabriel might be transparent, but not His agreements. ‘On previous occasions,’ He continued, ‘We have waived Entry requirements. Previous consultants have been more than content with Entry itself. In fact, they have been good enough to express their satisfaction with the facilities. “Heavenly” is the usual epithet.’ Was Gabriel waiting for applause? ‘But please trust Us on this one: open-ended access would not be suitable in this instance, as you will perhaps agree if We proceed to Our problem and your commission.’ Another attentive silence while He measured my rate of absorbing Revelations. I was not absorbing it at all, at that moment; all I could do was stay in character. ‘Might We suggest an aeon in the first instance? There are no exact equivalences but you might experience it rather like six of your weeks. Full access to the facilities for the duration, of course, in the expectation of an interim report? We would negotiate further terms when you present draft recommendations.’ I was dumped by another wave of emotion. I had been admitted for my professional skill, not my virtues. On sufferance. Dear God — strike that — it was hard to focus on the business at hand. But Gabriel’s was an offer I could not refuse, despite His courteous pretence of choice. What an item for my entry in Who’s Who — if I could update it and if anyone would believe it. In this bizarre dream I had nothing to lose by cooperating. Afterwards I’d either wake up or I’d make some sense of the situation. Meanwhile I broke my rule and accepted the commission even before I asked Gabriel to describe it. ‘Do I accept these unspecified terms? Hell, yes.’

ALTHEA AND WINIFRED

L

ike Brahmins, Cardigan City Anglicans were a caste, distinguished by dress and bearing. And, among the elegant Anglicans, one family was acknowledged as the most graceful. James Jolliffe — the town’s leading solicitor — knew the affairs of everyone and would reveal nothing. Tall and calm, he inspired confidence by saying little, smiling in a measured way, and seeming to ponder what you were saying. His wife Harriet received the deference of other married women with an air of surprise and modest pleasure. Where Mum was thin, Harriet was slender. Other women’s hair was brushed while hers said ‘coiffed’. You couldn’t help saying (well, I couldn’t help saying) ‘good breeding’. It was widely believed — and she never denied it — that Harriet had given up the Sydney stage to marry up-andcoming James. Both looked a decade younger than they were, which was the same age as my parents. And they were leaders in style and sophistication. It was Harriet who induced hostesses to serve tinned beetroot and asparagus in green salads, and it was she who introduced dress fashions to Cardigan City.

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They had an architect son in California or Washington or somewhere equally beyond normal ambition. And they had daughters — Althea and Winifred — of heart-stopping exquisiteness. Forty years later my pulse races when I relive the first time I saw them glide into church, backlit by the rose window (or my pulse would race, if I had one). I must have been 15 when they first bewitched me, so Althea would have been 16 and Winifred 14. Their names emphasised an ethereal quality — the untouchable descendants of Anglo-Saxon martyrs, not Hollywood starlets. They looked alike in willowy silhouette, quite tall, with gracile profiles. In full light, Althea’s light-brown hair and (of course) honey tan gave her a Mediterranean aura that — if I dared compare incomparables — gave her the edge over Winifred’s ice-creamy, Nordic quality. Althea had a more sardonic air than her sunny sister; that aura added depth to her image and enhanced an appeal that was already overpowering. The ideal of beauty in those days (these days, too) was a grown woman in a pubescent body. Every advertisement portrayed girl-women trying vainly to look like these two. These poor imitations gazed vacantly from billboards, newspapers, magazines. When we were introduced, I was shocked to recognise myself as clumsy, ill-dressed, ill-mannered, unkempt, immature. I couldn’t breathe. Sweat broke out on my palms. When we were introduced again (they’d forgotten the first) I could barely say my name. If I wanted to excuse my defection to the Anglicans (and why should I?), I’d blame Althea and Winifred. With that defence, every red-blooded male would acquit me. Once I’d met the Anglicans, and the Jolliffe girls especially, it was plainly impossible to take my classmates seriously. Most of the girls wouldn’t have

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given the time of day to a bookworm anyway. Two agonising and wastefully chaste years dragged by before I attempted a conversation with a Jolliffe. I’d been at uni in Brisbane for weeks before I saw a familiar profile through the window of a poncy coffee house. Honeytanned Althea was smoking in a self-conscious style that made the erotic most of her long fingers and pensive expression. She was presiding over a table of chic (and some carefully shaggy) students. Arts students — and well-heeled. As an economics student, I knew they’d be discussing angst with no knowledge of financial pain. I noticed with surprise and absurd hope that most were women. Two days of detective work revealed that Althea drove her bottle-green Mini to digs in a remote and leafy suburb. She was majoring in Art History. And she was a leading member of the Classical Music Society. The society’s next concert featured chamber music by a contemporary Australian composer whose name happily eludes me. Such a program would repel most of those who thought that classical music ended in about 1920, and all of those who believed that it should have. That was my own view, influenced by Father Weedes and compounded by scepticism about any Australian composer. Colonial cringe of course. There was a lot of it about. At any rate the pain of a couple of hours’ disharmony was trivial compared with the prize. What insane, testosterone-driven ambition! The venture was not a success. In fact, it was a catastrophe. I was the only fellow who dressed up: everyone else dressed down. Taking off my coat and tie, I tried to scuff my shoes as I stumbled along a row of chairs (my hair needed no dishevelling). From this vantage point I gazed at Althea’s delicate neck, marvelling that something

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so dainty could perform such vital functions. My view was heartstopping but the music was unhelpful to my cause. If I had a line of chat about contemporary music, it was callow denunciation, and I was sure this work would justify a jeremiad. Fat chance! The music was engaging, even charming. If it had a fault it was accessibility. Disarmed, I had to improvise. ‘Surprisingly good, wasn’t it?’ I murmured to the back of Althea’s head at the wine bar in the interval. ‘Delighted to see you again, by the way,’ I had meant to say. Actually I blurted out ‘delighted to be you, in the way’. So paralysing was that gaffe that it drove my next line right out of my head. (Thank Christ I’ll never be 17 again. As far as I know.) Althea’s poise was ruffled only briefly; her studies had prepared her to cope with such mundane problems as the attempted theft of her identity. ‘Do I know you? Oh yes; from St Barnabas’, perhaps? Jeremy, isn’t it?’ She said this in the tone of a gardener assessing a strange insect. She decided to take no chances. ‘Good of its kind, I suppose. And quite well performed if you overlook the ragged entries. I don’t much like his neoclassicism though. Or those obvious references to Stravinsky and Delius. His earlier work is so much more original. Abrasive of course, but resonant with the spirit of the bush, don’t you think? Such a pity he sold out to middle-brow sensibilities. Nice to see you Julian, but I must mingle.’ What was it that drew me helplessly to the Jolliffes? They out-shone all others, they blighted my ambition for girls who may have been attainable. And for what conceivable benefit? If I didn’t humiliate myself, Althea would do it perfectly well. *****

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A few months later I was home on vacation. In my unwelcome celibacy I won an open scholarship and the local paper ran a feature with an owlish photograph. I had been trying not to look smug, but not trying very hard. Colin had no vacation and my other school ‘mates’ were living away from home. Celia was staying with new friends in Sydney. Mum was deflecting Father’s suspicion that these friends were evangelical lesbians or (even worse) Japanese. It was dangerous to mention Celia or women’s refuges. The house was an empty nest and I felt more like a visitor than a son. The only people who spoke to me were friends of Mum’s and I had nothing in common with them or their children. I was looking forward to a vacation job in the State Treasury, partly for experience, more for money, but mostly as an escape from home. I’d neither forgotten nor forgiven Althea and some rancour lurked in the cellar of my mind. But I had no conscious interest in retaliation. ‘Geoffrey.’ The voice was melodious but tentative, almost apologetic. ‘I don’t expect you know who I am, but I remember you from St Barnabas’, even before you were famous. I’m not surprised you’ve done so well: you were always such a serious and committed boy — young man, really — it was obvious when you started coming to church, and …’ Her creamy complexion was deliciously pink (cream and strawberry). A strand of hair had escaped from her Alice band; words tumbled from her dainty mouth. I saw someone in the grip of such embarrassment that she burbled. Sympathy? I’d have sympathised with anyone in that predicament, even one who didn’t look like a damsel in distress. That was in my mind as I murmured reassurance. Heartfelt but incoherent; ‘Hold on

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please, Althea … Shit! So sorry. Stupid of me, I know exactly who. Of course I do, you’re Althea’s sister Winfield. Christ: I mean Winifred. Winifred Jolliffe. Of course. That’s who you are.’ The perfect recall is the result of the blistering pain of that moment. In 10 seconds or less, how often can you offend a girl? It’s a miracle that anything survived her shyness and my clumsiness. That’s the charitable view. Another reading is that we prefigured everything that shaped — and doomed — our relationship. Despite my criminal clumsiness and blasphemy, Win mistook my church attendance for serious purpose and equated university prizes with wisdom. She thought I was twice as earnest and wise as humanly possible. I didn’t correct her — I needed to believe her. On the other side of the ledger, I’d nailed her to a pedestal and savoured a sympathy gilded by the illusion of chivalry. Obsessed by Althea, I felt guilt as well as affection for Winifred. I judged her twice as beautiful, sensual and mature as humanly possible. She didn’t correct me — she could never believe how intensely I adored and how little I understood. Of course there was immense physical attraction: she was gorgeous and I was 17. But I was also beguiled by her directness and a simple honesty that was almost naivete. When I collected my wits, we went to the Paragon for ice cream sodas. When we got past that first awkwardness, our conversations were deeper, wider-ranging — and much more earnest — than I ever engaged in at home or in class. And, as we spent more and more time together, I depended on her for my bearings as I tested ideas I was hearing in lectures — and the rituals of Queensland’s middle class. I’m afraid there’s something else. I had crossed the road to St Barnabas’ but I felt that I belonged in the Paragon Café. To capture the prettiest girl in that congregation — all right, the

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silver medallist — did wonders for my self-esteem. I didn’t think of this as a conquest but my ‘mates’ certainly did and I basked in their envy. That surrogate feeling was so much like the guilty pleasure of conquest that I refused to discuss it with Win. So I became Win’s guide, adviser and confidant as she found her way to university, to digs and to the Education Faculty to train as a primary school teacher. And then, delayed by my inhibitions as her mentor, there was sex. Young people nowadays (a phrase I swore never to use, but what the hell?) cannot believe how slowly we moved — so they know nothing of pleasures deferred. We may be the last people on Earth to understand what Andrew Marvell wrote To His Coy Mistress. I adored Win, her feelings were similar, and this was our most precious possession. I feared that one clumsy move could break the spell, and sex was hard to reconcile with adoration. We held hands, which even then was twee. At dinner with the Jolliffes (or, less often, with my folks) we played footsie under the table. We kissed for hours. We petted for days, groping also for words to express our delight. No one will understand the ecstasy of our gradual mutual discovery. I could study Win’s neck, then her shoulders. I would recognise her wrists and the taste of her navel in a blind test. So moving, so awe-inspiring was the first time we saw each other naked, that we said — without irony — that we were getting to know each other ‘in the Biblical sense’. Long before we coupled, we were a couple. Drunk with intimacy, wrapped in erotic tenderness, we called it love. We promised that our perfect union would last Till Death Do Us Part. When I went to Chicago, Win could (just) have afforded to come with me, but that would have set back her studies by a year. We were not quite ready to declare ourselves to the world as man and wife. But we had no doubts.

PROMISES

O

f course there was a wedding and of course it was celebrated at St Barnabas’, where Father Weedes solemnised it (an entirely appropriate term). When Win and I tried to imagine the mixing of cardigans and suits, we thought about eloping to a civil marriage in Sydney. Then we recognised that one of the few values our families shared was a belief in the sacrament. For them a civil ceremony was scarcely better than criminal. We need not have been anxious. Sitting across the aisle from each other, and at separate tables in the reception, ‘his’ family and guests had limited contacts and mingled guardedly with ‘hers’. During this truce in the class war, everyone was carefully polite. I overheard one of ‘hers’ exclaim how wonderful it was that Australia was such a classless society. He must have been talking to another of ‘hers’ because most of ‘his’ would have made a rude response. Afterwards, everyone called it a great party, and said how good it was to meet the ‘other half ’. Many said (and they briefly believed) that they hoped to see each other again. Nobody tried to specify whether that reunion would take place in

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the Trades and Labour Club or the up-market hotel where we held the reception. Oil and water don’t mix, but neither do they combust. There had been some awkwardness in selecting bridesmaids. Althea refused point blank. Celia explained just as bluntly that she was already suspending quite enough principles in attending the wedding at all. So a couple of Winifred’s friends from school and uni were persuaded to be bridesmaids. When I cast around for groomsmen I realised with a shock that I had lost touch with all my school mates and had very few new friends. There was a terrible moment when Father proposed Garth. When I explained that Garth and I had never seen eye to eye, Father was abashed. To tell the truth, he mumbled, he and Nev Lewis had discussed the issue at the RSL club. After a few beers Nev had suggested that Garth and I ought to get along better, and making him best man would be a great first step. My mad Father had agreed! Even when I put him right about my relationship with Garth he didn’t give up. He pointed out (quite rightly) that I had no other candidate. Once I’d pissed off Garth (to his relief, as he made very clear), I settled for two fellows from the State Treasury. We had bought each other an occasional drink, but we didn’t know each other well. Anyway, they looked the part, they promised to stay sober and they were willing to wear tails — they’d gone to private schools. You can see the social situation, can’t you? I was manifestly more comfortable with ‘hers’ than with ‘his’. The Jolliffes paid for the wedding of course, but also for the honeymoon and the deposit on our flat. Without that support we’d have been in deep financial trouble. I was newly returned from Chicago and beginning to work for the State Government; Win

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was in her first year as a teacher. Without Jolliffe money we could not have married for another two or three years. As we were rehearsing the wedding service I astonished myself by adding up the extent of my dependence. The mix of classes made us anxious, but Mum and Harriet Jolliffe warmed to each other. Both had learned to be sensitive to other people’s moods; both were used to smoothing awkward situations. I believe it was then that Harriet confided in Mum that Sydney hostesses no longer served canned fruit and vegetables as a rainbow setting for luncheon meat. Mum, like almost everyone, liked Winifred immensely. More surprisingly, Harriet thought I was ‘refreshingly direct’. If she’d been more perceptive she would have said crassly ambitious. We might have predicted that the mothers would establish rapport, but none of us thought Celia and Althea would hit it off. In the conventions of those days, it was a misfortune for a girl to be single when a younger sister wed. ‘Spinster’ had a sad sound, not as desperate as the sinister ‘old maid’ but warning of that fate. If Celia and Althea had been conventional, they’d have avoided each other for fear of contagion. Since they were smart, sensitive and exceptionally competent, they refused to be apologetic. We didn’t know it but each had decided against marriage. Celia’s rationale was feminist (a term which would have unsettled the congregation) and she was a leading figure in the women’s movement in morally dubious Sydney. Althea’s grounds were careerist. She saw no married women in responsible or interesting jobs; and she had not met a man worth that price. Even more amazing was Father. He had talked about the wedding as if he were Daniel going to the Lions’ Club. I was sure he would leave the teaspoon in his cup or demand draft beer

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instead of ‘this champagne muck’. He did wear his suit (more commonly aired at funerals), but he had expanded since its last outing so he was physically as well as socially uncomfortable. Seeing the occasion through his eyes, it didn’t look good. This was not just a wedding but my matriculation into the bourgeoisie, a ritual disavowal of family and class. Every speaking part but mine (and perhaps that, too) was played by someone whose accent must have offended his ear. James’s vapid speech as father of the bride sounded like a declaration of class war. Father distrusted distractions from ‘real life’ and the workers’ struggles — things like wit, social harmony, romance. My speech was saturated with them. But before long he was deep in debate with Father Weedes. Grandfather Kingston had been a Christian fundamentalist and Father hadn’t forgotten the vocabulary or the agenda. Weedes’s father had been a train-driver, so his early memories were of trade unions and accusations of betrayal by the Labor Party. Each had rebelled as a teenager. I don’t suppose they agreed on very much, but it must have been a pleasure to talk to a fellow who knew where one was coming from and so quickly cottoned on to one’s meaning. They re-analysed the origins of the Labor Party and smiled at its tortuous relations with Trades Hall. They chuckled over fine theological distinctions between Primitive and other Baptists. I felt a rare surge of affection and gratitude as they revelled in long-forgotten arguments. Father had never seemed so human, so open to ideas. Perhaps, after all his huffing and puffing, he took pleasure in my career as well as my marriage. Perhaps, in other circumstances, we could have warmed to each other. Then sanity returned. This wasn’t empathy with Father, it was

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misplaced nostalgia. This was my entry into the world of the Jolliffes. It was also my farewell — fond but final — to my family and to Cardigan City. To close this catalogue of clichés, my best man fell for a bridesmaid. They nearly forgot to tie cans or scrawl graffiti on the getaway car. Alliances formed, fears evaporated, everyone wished us well. I would have enjoyed the occasion completely, but for a sickening insight. I was marrying Winifred but my mind was full of Althea. After all our intimacy and affection, our living and loving, Win was still — among other things — Althea’s little sister. For the merest fraction of a second it crossed my mind to say ‘No’, but I knew this was impossible. I didn’t have that kind of courage or honesty; and I was devoted to Win, and she to me. I buried this revelation as deep as I could dig. We said our vows with conviction: we fully intended to cleave to each other ‘Till Death Do Us Part’. Guilt was inappropriate and it would soon evaporate.

EXEGESIS

G

abriel gave me a break, no doubt realising that I needed time to absorb some of my new experiences and ponder some of what He had told me. The more I thought about His explanation, the more I was impressed by its internal consistency. If this was a dream, it had none of a usual dream’s anarchic non sequiturs. I might have to abandon — or at least suspend — my disbelief and behave as if this was really Heaven and Gabriel was really an Archangel. If that was true, then I had been terribly rash to accept an open commission, even if there had been no genuine alternative. I had better find out what it was about. I was much more sober and wary when Gabriel resumed my briefing. It was a great help that I was beginning to focus, although He was still too brilliant to look at directly. His exegesis was, of course, a model of clarity, so that His account of the emerging crisis demonstrated that it was quite inexorable. The rather loose concept on which everything turned was that of Poor in Spirit. I think of these souls as PinS, not (I hasten to explain, though why do I bother?) to deny the frightful tragedies of their

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lives, nor their diverse hopes for their afterlives, nor the infinite variety of their backgrounds, circumstances and ideas. For the sake of analytical clarity, I abstract the soluble problem from the distracting diversity of individual cases. It was lamentable but inescapable that, in the most famous formulation of the compact to reward those who live virtuous lives, PinS were promised Entry into the Kingdom of Heaven. It was a puzzling promise, all things considered. What have the Poor in Spirit done to deserve such a rich reward when, for example, the meek inherit only what’s left of the Earth, and the poor old Peacemakers are really short-changed when their pay-off is to be called the Children of God? But there it is: no qualifiers, no weasel words, no escape clause. I cannot believe that all the implications had been considered or the long-term effects foreseen. At the time of the Promise, for example, humanity amounted to a mere hundred million souls. Fewer than five million died in a normal year. Of those, not many knew about the Promise and even fewer met the single criterion laid down for them. And what an indefinite, elastic standard! Obviously no lawyer was consulted in the drafting stage, although planners may have seen merit in the flexibility. At any rate even the most generous Judgments admitted only a few thousand souls a year. That implied the building of many mansions, but not that many, and a predictable demand sustained a steady industry. (These early buildings were later described to me, and I would have to call their production a cottage industry: ‘mansion industry’ implies much too much grandeur.) As the world’s population increased, PinS numbers grew gently for a millennium without causing concern. It was not sheer numbers but tricky theological issues that complicated the

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management of Entry. As well as admitting Jewish spirits, Management had to respond to the unexpected crystallisation and codification of Christianity. Islam, too, of course. Soon Management had to accommodate pagans as well, because they had been disembodied in crossfire between Crusaders and Saracens. Collateral damage had been expected, but not on this genocidal scale. Nor were the ramifications foreseen. If innocent bystanders had a valid claim to Entry, then Management could not honourably reject the victims of Christian purges, even if they had never heard of the Promise. By this time matters of Entry were much too complex to be decided ad hoc. There were precedents to consider, procedures to follow and by-laws to interpret. It was this development that led to the otherwise surprising Entry of lawyers. Advocates for slaughtered Cathars and martyred Muslims then made heartrending and irresistible appeals on the basis of Natural Justice. Management might have argued that Natural was not the same as Divine Justice, and had no bearing on these cases, but you can see that such a hard-hearted argument would have been completely out of character. The appeals were therefore upheld, and the precedents incited a surge of well-represented claimants as conquistadores swept through the Americas. As the conquest wound down, the Atlantic slave trade reached a shrieking climax, generating absolute torrents of spirits disembodied (and of course impoverished) by Christian enterprise. In some modern eras, Gabriel mentioned with careful neutrality but perceptible distaste, Christian Entrants were heavily outnumbered by their victims. There was no doubting the poverty of the spirits at the Pearly Gates (a figure of speech, by the way, not a design feature).

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And, as numbers grew, Judgments became perceptibly stricter and slower, and the criterion was applied more rigorously. When did you hear the Promise? On whose authority was it given? How did it affect your behaviour? On a scale of one to 10, how poor was your spirit? But black-letter Law could not arrest the flood of victims of religiosity and sectarian savagery, over and above the ‘normal’ background levels of secular inhumanity. In any case standards could not be raised too much without prompting challenge from the lawyers and risking dissent among residents who were looking forward to the Entry of their pious grandchildren. Worst of all, the furtive raising of standards felt opportunistic and arbitrary — and Management Themselves felt uneasy about the whole process. Then there was a population paradox. Human numbers kept growing despite every catastrophe that might have curbed them. The Black Death held Eurasia’s numbers in check for no more than a generation or two. Crowd infections devastated the Americas and Oceania in the wake of European exploration, but the dwindling indigenous societies were quickly replaced by white colonists, African slaves and Asian indentured labourers. To the perplexity of Management, the more savage the warfare, the more the warrior cultures flourished, the greater the population growth — and the more numerous the PinS. These difficulties were compounded by another trend that astonished Management. As Christian missions competed with each other and with other belief systems, they became increasingly professional, fanning across the globe in ambitious campaigns of systematic evangelisation and ever-improving technical sophistication. With the exponential growth of overall numbers, and the even faster growth of Christians, the pool of

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eligibles spilled over. Even those who resisted the missionaries had heard about their Promise. In spreading the Good News, the literate revolution was even more consequential: Buddhists and Hindus, making poverty a pillar of their spiritual as well as their material lives, Entered in humble and downcast droves. Then television and the Internet brought professional salesmen and women to millions of living rooms to mop up any families who remained aloof or who had lapsed into spiritual apathy. As the difficulty deepened, Cherubim and Seraphim expressed the Divine Anxiety in a stunning display of synchronised fluttering. Great theatre but no solution. When the Saints and Martyrs got Management’s nod to debate the problem, they provoked a fracas of such ferocity that older spirits remember it still. Naturally, most had died in the odour of sanctity, often literally. Several had sharp analytical minds, many were visionaries, and others were highly original thinkers. Alas, tolerance was not a common virtue among them. Few could cooperate with anyone in any circumstances. The besetting virtue of Saints and Martyrs was their one-eyed adherence to principle. They had given their lives already for one principle or another, so they were selfselected for grim determination never to compromise. Not only would nothing budge them towards consensus: on the contrary, their stiff-necked commitment to non-negotiable positions threatened schism in Heaven itself. Gabriel at least, and perhaps Management in general, had been dismayed by the evolution of Christianity into a dogmatic, aggressive and expansionist system of beliefs. When it split into two, then three, and now countless variants, they were downright distraught. As Gabriel set out His exegesis, I surmised that Heaven’s problem was the familiar Earthly one of over-population and

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over-crowding. The privatisation of terror, declarations of jihad, crusades and holy wars of every other kind must portend even bigger waves of martyred innocents. Maybe the world really was coming to an end, and of course Gabriel would be well aware of that and its consequences for the management of the Afterlife. On the contrary, Gabriel chimed in at once, as if He was anticipating my notion, Love is God, infinitely compassionate, anxious at any cost to fulfil the loving Promise. Possessing infinite time, space and resources, Management could — in principle and in practice — accommodate infinite spirits. Increasing numbers contributed to the problem, but numbers alone did not make this a crisis. Rather, Management was suffering from a crisis of confidence. Their encounters with recent Entrants had planted disconcerting ideas in Their minds, and the formation of multilingual and interdisciplinary reading groups deepened Their anxieties. They were already struggling with the practical difficulties of deciding what allowances were appropriate and fair, when They had to accommodate cultural diversity. Female circumcision, for example, was sometimes represented as evidence of great holiness, or you could see it as irrefutable evidence of inhuman sadism, depending on the tradition in which the circumciser did the deed. Similar issues arose in the valuation of chastity, and there have always been diametrically opposed views on clerical celibacy. These difficulties led Management to a moral relativism in which it was difficult for Them to be sure of anything at all. That was bad enough, but They then had to make allowances for the gamut of childhood circumstances that might predispose an impressionable soul towards virtue or vice. Should the child of social workers be expected to behave no more virtuously than

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(say) the child of estate agents? Then a parallel argument was presented for calculating discounts in order to accommodate the influence of inherited genes and temperaments. By this time it was clear that the calibration of virtue and vice was more an art than a science. There was no escaping the fact of its imprecision. But the most dismaying perception emerging from the study groups was that Judgment itself involves discrimination. As such it is inherently invidious, and some of the study groups reckoned that this behaviour was inappropriate for Heavenly beings. These accumulating objections to past practice implied that Management should abolish Judgment altogether. That might be logical; it might even be fair, but imagine the difficulty of revisiting all previous Judgments in the light of steadily loosening standards! And what would be the point of an Afterlife that was equally accessible to good and bad, vicious and virtuous, abuser and abused, sinner and victim? Discrimination threw doubt on the justice of the tribunals; but without discrimination there could be no rewards. Gabriel did sketch another dimension of the crisis, but I won’t go into that just yet. Despite the clarity of His explanations, I began to grasp the seriousness of that other facet of the problem only much later, in conversation with other people — other spirits actually — and through my own disconcerting experience of the Afterlife. But He had told me enough to persuade me that this was a real problem. No wonder He needed outside assistance. The perfect host Gabriel recognised that I had heard as much as I could digest. He didn’t insist on detailing other dimensions of the crisis, much less the nature and scope of the consultancy, until such time as my mind stopped doing

cartwheels. Meanwhile, He thought, I might like a break and a chance to inspect and enjoy the facilities of my new environment? ‘At about this stage,’ He intimated, ‘We often ask a Seraph to show new spirits around. Would that be convenient, do you think?’ Again, He sensed my mood; again, He formulated an offer that gave me the illusion of choice and control. What a hotel manager He would have made. What a manager He did make!

PROGRESS REPORT: MAKING CONTACT

To

Gabriel, AA

From

Eliazar, A

Re

The affairs of Geoffrey Kingston

After days of preparation I felt that I could pass as Angel Milan. The cover would not survive close scrutiny, but it would be good enough for a casual inspection. Confident that I would not be as clumsy as a bull in a Chinese shop, I set out on my mission. Access to the hospital posed no great problem. I was afraid that I would be discovered at once, but in fact a hospital may be the best place in the world to hide. This hospital at least — and perhaps every hospital — treats information as a precious and potent elixir that may save lives but will wreak havoc if it ever falls into the wrong hands. Like me, you may find this

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incredulous, but it is demonstrably true that no single hospital worker has full knowledge of any patient’s medical history, present condition or vital prospects. In theory, the General Practitioner is fully informed, but he or she does not work in the hospital and may never visit, and receives information a piece at a time, when hospital workers remember to pass it along. The impossibility of gaining this necessitous information sustains constant anxiety in the minds of patients and frustration in their families. (Some tension is justified. It is not rare for misunderstandings to lead to wrong diagnoses and even bizarrely inapt procedures — these are addressed in a separate report.) This helpfully confusing tension has another dimension: it is a curious fact that nobody (not even the pay office) has a complete list of the hospital’s employees. Every worker therefore feels that he (or she) is surrounded by strangers who may have some therapeutic purpose and may even possess life-saving skills, but they may just as well be malicious or incompetent. They could even be an investigator or a new supervisor. As instructed, I acquired a knee-length lab coat, a toy stethoscope, a clip-board, several pens and plain-glass spectacles. As was foretold, these props — together with a firm handshake, a purposeful stride and a distracted expression — did open every hospital door. One door too many in fact. Only once was it necessary to vanish, when I blundered into a toilet whose door resembled that of an adjoining store room. I recognise that vanishing is not advisable as a general practice as it raises suspicion, even in hospitals, but it seemed appropriate here, since my emerging from the General Manager’s toilet might have

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drawn inconvenient attention. Otherwise I faded from sight only when necessary to overhear the conversations of Geoffrey Kingston’s visitors. To account for my recurrent presence in the hospital it was necessary to create a job. I need not have devoted quite so much care to preparing this cover. A large public hospital has so many specialties that no individual has a complete grasp of them, much less the linkages (if any) between the hospital’s functional departments. Further, one’s public identity is necessarily cryptic, as only an acronym can be printed below the photograph on one’s identity card. Observing the degree of deference paid to workers in the professional ranks, and the tendency of doctors to bark like dogs at nurses with urgent instructions in baffling jargon, the doctors’ ranks seemed my safest haven. To forestall being asked to perform surgery, specialisation in psychiatric care seemed best. In any case this is the therapeutic field that most resembles the care of souls. The term ‘psychiatry’ can alarm patients and their families, however, since it includes the treatment of mental and emotional break-down as well as soul-management; so I made a tactical side-step to less threatening terms. As a Visiting Medical Officer in Post-Traumatic Rehabilitation (a soul-manager in all but name), I go where I please and when it pleases me. One bad-tempered surgeon did challenge me and even criticised the hospital managers for employing me. I need not have worried. Not only did the managers fail to notice that I was not on their staff, they composed a detailed defence of my general discipline and my particular skills. I have kept a copy in case I need to reassure anyone else — or lighten my own mood.

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While human time is certainly helpful for planning activities, arranging meetings and determining what is most important, their time does drag, especially during the hours of darkness. In hospital this is especially vexing, as patients spend several hours each day unconscious, and the few hospital workers who work at night whisper and tip-toe through the wards as if unconsciousness was an appropriate and beneficial state which should not be disturbed. And so it is for humans: but I cannot believe that there is so much of it! We sometimes (but only in a good-natured and bantering vein) complain about the tedium of Heaven, the repetition of adoration rituals, the recurrence of insoluble issues, and the ennui of infinity. Earthly tedium has a sharper, needling quality, because the time that is wasted is not infinite but infinitely precious. Perpetual alertness allows us many advantages, but for extremely long periods there is no activity to observe, no conversation to monitor, nothing even on television except hectoring evangelists who claim to be preparing their sleepless audience for the Afterlife. If only insomniacs knew how well they are prepared already! (At first I thought that these were performers on a comedy channel, but mortals do not see these performances in that light: that subject will be addressed in another report.) I did try lying in a spare hospital bed, closing my eyes and slowing my breathing. Not only did I experience no benefit, within 15 minutes a female nurse was stroking my hands and murmuring strange terms into my ear. To use another human term — this time quite helpful — this assault ‘made my flesh creep’. To come to the point, I have now exchanged a few words with some of Geoffrey’s nearest and dearest. In these encoun-

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ters I feel rather like a reader who opens a book at chapter seven. Until I find out more about these people and the history of their interactions, it would be dangerous and perhaps insensitive to press them for information. These exchanges are promising, although I have not attempted any degree of intimacy. For the present I am confident to report only on G.K.’s body. This is much less imposing than it seemed when he was in full command of himself in the airport terminal. The unimpressiveness of his body is surprising, in view of its owner’s reputation and his self-conceit. It is slightly below medium height, balding and trending towards fatness. The ordinariness of his physique gives the staff much innocent pleasure. ‘Silly fart,’ said one (a term deriving from a particularly unpleasant bodily odour). ‘How d’you like public hospitals now, you bastard?’ asked another, with startling venom. She spoke as if she really wanted him to hear and I cannot understand why the circumstances of Geoffrey’s birth are considered relevant. Another hospital worker, who blames G.K. for a brother having lost his job, bared his bottom at Geoffrey when nobody else was present. These incidents broaden my knowledge of human behaviour, but not my tolerance of it. He is, of course, unaware of his verbal humiliation at the hands of hospital workers, and in any case this institution represents his best chance of recovery. He is unaware of his physical milieu and he and his family do not hear the judgments of the hospital workers. He might enjoy more respect and deference in a private hospital, but he would not have access to so many facilities. The doctors here are the best

in their professions and they believe that his life hangs in the balance. If he does recover, they expect him to be weak and tentative physically, taking several weeks to regain his full functions, if he ever does. On the other hand they expect him to retain his mental faculties in full, or close to full. Interestingly, the expression with which they commonly describe his condition is ‘He won’t be feeling quite like himself for a while’. So it seems that all your options are open.

CELIA

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f Gabriel was the CEO of this enterprise, the Seraph had spent an eternity in Registry. Nice enough little person, goodhearted and obliging; but lack of imagination and empathy ruled out any chance of promotion into policy or programs. The Seraph had no name, for example, and was puzzled when I asked. I couldn’t determine — I couldn’t even guess — the Seraph’s gender or age. No doubt they have to be ageless as well as genderless, but this does make it hard to relate to them. Later I met several other Seraphim; at least I think I did, but it could easily have been the same one. I never resolved whether this was one persona with many manifestations, creatures cloned from a single template, or simply munchkins, so dull it was impossible (and pointless) to distinguish one from another? How do you engage with someone who lacks any individual quality? It’s surely admirable that he (or she? it?) was absolutely free of prejudice, except for the corollary of being equally uncluttered by opinions. Since the Seraph was unwilling — or unable — to volunteer points of view, we had to proceed largely by interrogation, almost

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as if to an automated call-centre. I would ask if such-and-such a service was available and the Seraph responded Yea or Nay. I recognised that I would have to talk to someone more like myself. ‘Yea,’ agreed the Seraph, for whom this mind-stretching encounter must also have been stressful, ‘an excellent suggestion.’ But who? The Seraph naturally had no idea and I was not much better off. It would be dutiful but useless to talk with my parents again and I was certainly not keen to expose myself to that ordeal. Skimming through my mental register of the dear departed I stopped short. Of course: Celia. I expect every kid brother reveres his big sister, investing in her some of the authority of Mother and most of the knock-about affection of Sibling. In an ideal world, I thought as a child, everyone would have a big sister — and in that ideal world nobody would need to be one. Celia took her big sister role into adult life, which is why she got into such trouble. At uni she learned about feminism, but her version of sisterliness was Big Sisterly. She joined sit-ins in pubs and banks but most of her energy flowed into individual, protective actions. First it was helping migrant women find accommodation and jobs; then she took up abortion counselling. Finally she found her niche in women’s refuges. She was managing one in a dim street in far Western Sydney when a stupid woman who had sought her protection had a lethal attack of self-doubt. Her furtive phone call allowed the father of her child to find the safe house. He and a mate were sent away by Celia, but they returned at midnight, drunk, with a Molotov cocktail. At the trial, his deranged wife was a character witness. Can you believe it? I offered to be a character witness for Celia but my memories and impressions were not admitted.

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Celia had been dead for a decade and it would be a scandal if she was not in Heaven. My rage at her murder turned to a guilty pleasure when I realised that she must be nearby. Part of my debt was due to birth order. Celia fought the battles that created my precedents for staying up ‘just a few more minutes, Mum’ or listening to a late-evening radio serial. It was Celia who wrestled from Father the chance to stay out later than he thought suitable. That role fell to her by accident, but she took it upon herself to do much more for me. In one of my earliest memories I snuffle into her checked cotton uniform. She holds me as I burrow into her warm midriff until my tears are exhausted and my hurt congeals into cold rage. At seven years of age she’s Gulliver dispelling the playground mob; but she’s not content simply to shield her snivelling brother. Does she suggest that he put away his comics and join his tormentors’ games? Not a bit of it — she insists on his right to do whatever he wants. Do the others make fun of this infant bookworm? Do they call him names like Geoff-Wee? So much the worse for them; but Geoffrey must learn to defend himself if he wants to live his own life. You don’t need skill if you have rage. I’m a quick learner. No Queensberry rules restrain my fists, elbows, feet, teeth, knees. I rarely win, but nobody threatens me twice! I don’t suppose Celia really held my hand all through primary school, but that’s how it felt. In memory I almost feel her rough cotton uniform and the soft asphalt of the playground, almost smell her sweat mingled in the cheap polish of the school corridor. Do I yearn to meet her? Is the Pope a Catholic? (Incidentally, I wonder about that. Gabriel would give me a complete analysis, but the Seraph would give a definitive Yea or Nay.)

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Then, quietly and matter-of-factly, she spoke! ‘Geoffrey? How extraordinary! It’s really you is it? I’m astounded! ‘So let me guess how you made it. You had a mid-life crisis I suppose? Repented of that vicious economic rationalism and spent your last days as a penitent. Don’t tell me you’ve been wearing sandals and working in an AIDS clinic?’ It could only be Celia. There was the wit and her signature good humour, but there was a cool edge that I didn’t associate with her. She didn’t seem completely surprised or quite as pleased as I would have expected. Still, it was wonderful to be with her again, despite the circumstances. ‘Well, I never doubted that you’d be here. Of course I didn’t expect a Here at all, much less that I’d be allowed into it. No, I don’t believe I have much to repent. I’m only here on business, so you don’t need to adjust your belief system. This is a working holiday really. So don’t worry: you won’t have to hold my hand for all eternity. Maybe the first day or two though. I’d be eternally grateful for that, so to speak.’ ‘What do you mean a “working holiday”? People don’t just pop in like a plumber on call. I’d be very interested to hear about that when we have time — and believe me, we do have time! Anyway, whatever you need to know about this place, you’ve come to the right person. I’ve done a lot of thinking about it — and, of course, it’s good to see you.’ Perhaps it was paranoia, or just disorientation, but I was hurt that my welcome was such an afterthought. I had hoped for Celia’s warmth as well as light. Still, I could rely on her for analysis, and that’s what I needed. About time, for instance. Why did she sound miserable about having lots of it? And why did

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Gabriel talk about an aeon? Surely He wouldn’t use an archaic term just for the hell of it; but He did (almost) equate it to a number of weeks. Why not use days and weeks, especially as God Himself invented them? Did that mean there were two kinds of time? Did time pass in the same way, at the same speed as it still does on Earth? Celia thought about that for a moment (whatever that may mean), not because she was baffled. She had to find terms that I might understand. ‘I can’t answer that directly, or at least you won’t get your mind around it just yet, if you’ve really just popped in. At the simplest level, you can’t measure time in days because there is no darkness, no nights to separate days from each other. More important — though it may be hard to get your mind around this too — what you have here is infinite time. That’s what shapes and explains everything. Time here is infinite, but what you probably don’t realise yet is that — because it’s infinite — it isn’t precious. You remember that wonderful piece by Andrew Marvell? Of course you do: But at my back I always hear Time’s wingéd chariot hurrying near. ‘I still thrill to the memory of that expression, and how true it felt. But I can’t hear that damned chariot any more, because it doesn’t hurry any more. There’s no such thing as a hurry. You never have to choose between one thing or another because there’s time for both. There are great facilities for being distracted, but eventually everyone tires of singing and dancing, eating and drinking, learning algebra and calculus, reading Dante in the original and so on. So far as I know, these entertainments are all cerebral, and that takes the savour out of them. There are

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pastimes but they don’t make time pass. So they don’t have as much appeal as they used to.’ I couldn’t take it in but I did have a nightmare vision of a game of solitaire going on day after day, year after year, and a chilling sense of how enervating that would be. ‘There’s another thing that’s hard to grasp. Infinite time means infinite opportunity to reflect. That changes everything, too. You can’t change your past, of course, but at least you can make sense of it. Then again there’s no future, or at least there’s no future worth thinking about, because it can’t be very different from the present. And — trust me — infinite time takes much of the pleasure out of present experience. It has something to do with the lack of urgency, your certainty that you’ll have plenty of time to finish whatever you’re doing. That’s really dispiriting, even for spirits. But the lack of a future does add immense significance to the past. It’s as if the past is all there is.’ This was becoming too much like a seminar and I was becoming restless. Celia sensed this. She also felt my dismay at her coolness. ‘I do love you of course, Geoffie, don’t ever doubt that. It’s just that I’ve moved on a bit from when we were kids. I’m no longer just your doting sister. Actually, I’m not such a fire-eating feminist either. I’m sorry I lost that angry energy, but that happens when you reach the end of the possibility of change. Management gurus like you make a fetish of change — “get used to it, it’s inevitable and you can master it”, all that stuff. Well, I came to accept the rhetoric of change management. It’s been quite a challenge trying to unlearn it. ‘At first it’s as exasperating as hell. I don’t suppose you’ve been here long enough to see it, but this is the ultimate patriarchy.

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Don’t you find it a blokey sort of a place? Management rhetoric is gender-neutral, as you’d expect when everyone’s been neutered. Management claims some kind of universality that transcends gender: the masculine includes the feminine, and the neuter embraces everything. I’m sure they believe it, too, but the real management style is completely patriarchal — only it’s an emasculated patriarchy. I was totally wide-eyed when I Entered. I even tried to raise the consciousness of the poor bloody Seraphim. Can you believe it?’ Believe it? I would have bet on it! That’s exactly what I said at her funeral. ‘After a while you — I — settle down and use the time to come to terms with the events and the relationships in your own life. If you can’t change things, you may as well understand them! For instance, I don’t know if you’ve met many Seraphim, but they’re totally immune to appeal — my appeals anyway. Creatures of Management, all of them. Quite literally so, I gather. Of course, they have to be like that. If they could imagine a different order, they’d burst with frustration. ‘The thing is that Heaven doesn’t change. Mustn’t change. Categorically can’t change. Change can’t even be conceived. You know how conservatives used to say ‘never do anything for the first time’? Well, in Heaven it’s worse. Nothing’s ever done for the last time either. We don’t need change managers, we need stagnation managers.’ What she said, and the forlorn way she said it, gave me a distressing sense of how hard my commission was likely to be. This was probably why nobody else had tackled the problem. I wanted to lay out the whole story for Cee to think about, but I bit my (hypothetical) tongue. If I bragged about my commission

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it would confirm her view that I’d become a hatchet man and she might turn me away. And there were far too many points on which I needed her advice. Time, for instance. Time must pass somehow, or what would be the point of Gabriel talking about an aeon? I wondered about the relationship between time and change. When nothing is happening, time doesn’t seem to pass. Maybe we only think that time is passing when we experience change? Could change and time be the same thing? Celia — typically — put it in personal terms. She suspected that absolute time might be an illusion, and we all experience time differently — just as we may all experience ‘red’ in different ways, because you can’t measure a sensation. ‘But that’s an Earth-bound question. Whatever time is in life, it has a different quality here. I learned Bengali to read Tagore, but I can’t tell you how much time that took. We don’t sleep, so days and dates dissolve. I can’t even tell you how long I’ve been here. Years I suppose; but I can only infer that from the number of languages I’ve learned. How about you?’ How long had I been here? A few minutes perhaps, or some days? What fraction of an aeon? It made my head spin. If I’d lost all sense of worldly time, how would I understand an aeon? How would I know when my report was due? The report, you remember, on which my eternal reputation and probably my eternal life depended. The report that I had absolutely no idea how to write.

THE MEANINGS OF LIVES

T

his encounter brought back the terrible tensions of our childhood and their consequences in our adult lives. Celia and our parents never did come together. All my sympathies were with Celia and yet it didn’t seem right that she couldn’t talk to them. There must surely have been some common ground where they could meet, but they didn’t look for it and I couldn’t find it. Expecting to fail, I hardly tried to reconcile them to one another until it was too late to matter. It struck me then that the last time I had seen our parents alive was at Celia’s funeral. That was really my last chance to bring it off. But they didn’t want to speak at the funeral and neither did Althea, who was Celia’s closest friend from Cardigan City. The Sisterhood would have taken over the service if I hadn’t insisted on my eulogy. As it was, I had to follow a teary attempt by one of Celia’s refuge colleagues, who was too distressed to make much sense. I was distressed, too, but more angry than depressed as I described what Celia’s life meant to me, and what all life meant to Celia.

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Everyone should have a sister like Celia to shield them. In the world that Celia wanted to build, nobody would need that shelter. As a child she was a defender of the weak. As she grew into the passionate and resolute woman we knew and loved, her role as a guardian had wider scope. But Celia was also a rebel against obsolete authority. She attacked the strait-jackets of the society into which we were born. She opposed discrimination against Aborigines and the immigration policies that kept Australia bland. She denounced the censorship and surveillance that kept us uninformed and fearful; and she fought against the words and the stereotypes, the policies and behaviour that suppressed women and repressed men. Why did she run such frightful risks? What did she hope for, in place of these comfortable traditions? Her feminism was not an end in itself. It was a means to a broader goal. So were her interventions to protect individuals. I believe she was inspired by the vision of a society in which everyone enjoyed a chance to develop all their talents. In that society nobody would need to protect the weak, the piece-worker in a sweatshop, the dispossessed Aborigine, the Chinese immigrant, the pregnant woman, because nobody would assault them. She did not expect a reign of universal love, but she believed we could eliminate a lot of fear and loathing. So her methods were not those of the rest of our family. We argued about our beliefs — Celia’s belief in individual intervention, our parents’ faith in collective action, and my attempts to change policies from the top. But now it is time to acknowledge what we shared. We have all been struggling towards the same goal. In our different ways, may we all be inspired by Celia’s love, her courage and her dedication. Can we please acknowledge what we have in common: we have come a long way in Celia’s lifetime but there is much further to travel.

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It’s hard to say if the Sisters were more offended than Father, by lumping women’s issues in with xenophobia, racism and sweatshops. It was just as well that I did not go on to explain that tariff reform and free trade were equally vital to free us from White Australia and the welfare state. Win knew that I was trying to bridge Celia’s beliefs and Father’s. She thought this was a brave attempt, but I’d made Celia’s agenda conform to my own. Althea said I’d summed up Celia’s politics rather well — considering how little I understood them. Mum said something placating and Father just looked angry. If I had made a case for Celia, he gave no sign. ***** I didn’t have — or didn’t make — another opportunity to talk about Celia before Father and Mum were killed a few weeks later. Their old car stalled at a railway crossing and was dragged in a storm of sparks and shrieking metal 200 metres along the track before the frantic engine-driver wrestled the train to a halt. When he recovered from his heart attack he told the coroner that his load — 30 flatbeds packed with Noble’s windmills and water tanks — gave him unstoppable momentum. Noble’s was a notoriously irresponsible manufacturer. If I had spoken at the funeral, I could have made a parable of the way my parents died. Father believed that the union gave meaning to his life. He left everything to Mum or — if she did not survive him — the union. (This may have been a statement, but probably it simply acknowledged that Celia and I were independent financially.) So the union organised the funeral and the wake and union officials delivered the final report to his workmates. The Lewises stood in

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as quasi-family — Garth brimming with superficial brotherhood, solidarity, sympathy and praise for Father. I felt as if Father and the Lewises had closed ranks against me and Celia. And after a dreary Methodist service, Nev Lewis invited us to the wake in the Trades and Labour Club. The poker machines were silenced while he delivered his report. Comrades, friends, I’m gutted. Probably you are, too. But although we’re all broken up, we are here to celebrate the lives of Ted and Joan Kingston. As for Joan, she kept the home fires burning for all the years of their perfect marriage. She wasn’t a trendy women’s libber. No she wasn’t so stupid. Quite the opposite. She never thought of herself as an individual: she hardly thought of herself at all. She was always the partner of our great leader in the collective struggle. She was a real heroine of the workers’ struggle. She was a heroine because she allowed Ted to devote all his time and all his talents to the struggle. As for Ted, what can I say? He was a militant. He was undominatable. The union was his life. He never compromised in the fight to protect our jobs and secure a fair day’s wage and perhaps a bit more. He was a very brilliant analyst, too. He knew bloody well that globalisation and rationalisation and free trade and all that stuff were just new phrases. New phrases, but the reality was the age-old struggle to exploit the workers. And he knew that the only way to defend ourselves against these new attacks on our rights was unflagging solidarity. Many of us remember him as a pretty unique individual. Well, he was an individual, but he was never an individualist. All his talents and every ounce of his energy were devoted to the collective interest. So we’ll miss him — well, we’ll really miss both of them — but our best memorial to him — to them both — is to pick up the

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baton and the shield and the spear and so on that he — that they — had to lay aside. Solidarity? Certainly: the solidarity of the shipwrecked, gazing at the empty sea. Noble’s, local manufacturing and the golden age of subsidies were gone, and the knowledge industry, leisure and tourism were just beginning. I could sympathise with them but I knew — and surely they knew — that it was gone for good. It had always been fool’s gold. At Celia’s funeral I felt there was a future, that it would be better than the past, and that Celia had helped bring this about. Nev gave his little audience no grounds for hope, and I got the sense that Father had shared that despair. I wondered if Father had softened his judgments after Celia’s funeral, but there was no way of knowing. Win thought he might have. I thought he probably hadn’t.

WHICH ART IN HEAVEN

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was keen to inspect the facilities, but rather apprehensive about them. With my restored eyesight, I was not blown away (so to speak) by the cerebral Afterlife that I had seen so far; and yet Gabriel was confident of impressing me. He couldn’t misrepresent matters even if He wished to, so there must be many more facilities than I had yet experienced. Where, for an obvious example, were the heavenly choirs or the music of the spheres? Or were these just figures of speech? I still had a Seraph to guide me. I say ‘a’ Seraph, but maybe it was the same one who had taken a break while I was catching up with Celia. His (her?) immediate availability is typical of the smooth running of this whole enterprise. If they had trains, they would run on time. On the down side, especially after engaging so intensely with Gabriel and Celia, Seraphic conversations were mindnumbing. I gave this Seraph, however, a general idea of my tastes and asked about live performances — if that was the right term. ‘I don’t believe that I understand your question fully,’ said the Seraph, ‘but if I apprehend the nature of your musical

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preferences properly, you might care to attend the premiere of Lewis Beethoven’s 99th symphony? His premieres are always performed in the Tanglewood Bowl and this one is due to begin quite soon.’ Would I care to! Not only did I jump at this opportunity; I drooled (metaphorically) at the prospect of a 90-symphony backlog. But how was music possible where the resident spirits seemed to lack bodies, ears and hands, let alone musical instruments? Instead of trying to explain, the Seraph took me into a place that seemed in every respect a vast auditorium. I thought it might be no more than a projection of my eager imagination, but the raked seats seemed to be nearly full with an expectant audience — a Heavenly Host in fact. Noting my confusion, the Seraph murmured that — like me — the spirits had virtual bodies. The bodies are intangible, but so well made that they are perfectly capable of performing on all musical instruments. This being Heaven, there was neither discord nor disharmony, and no spirit was tone-deaf. The Seraph was confident that the orchestra and the audience were better than any I had heard on Earth. ‘The full-harmonic will be playing, as usual. I believe Arthur Toscanini is conducting it. You realise, of course, that Lewis is no longer deaf, so he could conduct his own creations, but he has consulted conductors familiar with his compositions and has become reconciled to not conducting his own works. He is terribly particular about conductors, of course, but it seems that he has come to some agreement with Toscanini in recent aeons.’ As I mustered the patience to listen to this pedantry — delivered as if the Seraph was reading from one of those concert programs in which musicologists patronise music-lovers — I was

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beside myself. (Writing about the Afterlife makes me acutely selfconscious, as the process reveals how much my expression depends on bodily allusion. For instance, this last sentence doesn’t work because there was no tangible self for me to be beside. Am I becoming as pedantic as the Seraph? I hope not.) Anyway the interval before the performance was brief, yet almost unendurable. Or maybe it was a long interval — you see the problem? In the event, the performance was not disappointing. I expected to say something much more extravagant than ‘not disappointing’, but I’m thrown back on these measured terms. This was in every possible sense the ultimate musical experience. Isn’t it ungrateful — intolerable, even unthinkable — to ration and qualify my response? Perhaps it is: but that was my honest response, honestly recalled and exactly reported. As you would expect in Heaven, the surround-sound acoustics were perfect. So were the instruments, probably. Why ‘probably’? Of course they must have been perfect. I hesitate only because some of them had been improved technically almost beyond recognition, and a few I had never seen before. Beethoven may be Lewis to the Seraph, whose grasp of first names is erratic, but he’s always Beethoven to me! He’s the last word on the performance of his work, and he was quite content with Toscanini on the podium, so I swallowed my dislike of that tyrannical old time-keeper because who was I to carp? One thing that floored me was the music itself. At some unconscious level I had assumed that he would carry on composing in a ‘Beethovenish’ manner. Wrong. In life he had stretched and twisted traditions and demanded ever-higher standards of performance, forcing orchestras to become professional. Why

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would he change in his afterlife? Briefly and ungratefully I wished that he’d been deaf to Strindberg and the 12-tone push, but of course his deafness would offer no defence against this temptation. Once composers broke out of the strait-jacket of eight-note scales, why stop at 12-tones? These sublime instruments and divine players could play absolutely anything. Sixteen tones to the scale? No bother. Seventeen beats to the bar? A piece of cake. Can the choir keep time and tune and scale? Of course they can: they’re angels after all! The other distressing element of this performance was the audience. No doubt they were blasé after generations of noteperfect performances, infinite premieres and countless retrospectives, but there was something so flat, so perfunctory and so passive about their responses that I kept looking around to make sure they were awake. They were, of course (nobody sleeps here), and yet you could properly call them a dead audience. I’m sure this took some wind out of Toscanini’s sails and dampened the zest of the players. Mind you, as they had been performing note-perfect concerts on the best conceivable instruments for decades (and probably to much the same audience), they may not have had much zest to begin with. What Toscanini’s virtual-body language and their playing implied was that this was the ultimate interpretation and the definitive performance. Whether you like our playing, this is as good as it gets. That thought was more saddening than exhilarating. I’d heard a theory about delight, but had not really believed it, and never expected to test it. It’s true though: if there’s no risk of error, the performance is not fully ‘live’. One problem was the impossibility of disharmony. It was not clear to me whether it could never happen, or if people were programmed not to hear it. At any rate, without the option of

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discord, the chords were all sweet — but so predictable that there was little scope for excitement. And another thing. Although there was still fairly wide variety in harmonics and tones, I could not recall the tempi of the movements. Had there been a presto? Probably not, and there had been no slow movement either. Then the penny dropped: because we were outside time altogether, there was no such thing as fast or slow. All that was possible was the memory of fast and slow. For the composer and performers and the audience equally, that memory was fading. Afterwards I asked the Seraph what happened to experimental music. For him that concept was difficult, but he made a brave attempt at an answer. Given infinite time and access to perfect instruments and players, classical music composers work through their ideas fully, even exhaustively, before they put their work before the public. It follows that what they produce is either stunningly wonderful or totally awful. Perfect creations are performed, imperfect ones discarded, and there’s no grey area. As for jazz, I didn’t even ask, because this half-witted Seraph wouldn’t be able to grasp the term at all. I could have asked for Ellington or Bessie Smith by name, or asked what happened after the saints came marching in … but there was nothing to gain from irony. I did wonder what had become of Rossini or Sibelius, who had given up composing long before they died. Or Mozart, a genius but probably not driven by the obsession that kept Beethoven going for more than 200 years. Later someone told me that after a couple of aeons Mozart reckoned he had taken his ideas as far as they could go. He gave up composing altogether and took up water-colours instead.

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Once I’d thought about the circumstances of composition and performance, the sober mood of the audience made sense. How could they ever be excited if they were certain about the quality of the next performance? They were sure to hear a flawless piece, performed without blemish, and they could hear it as often as they liked. This was Anglican Heaven, proceeding at a moderate pace, orderly and civilised. Management had perfected the skills that sustain serenity. By eliminating error and surprise, They had ruled out ecstasy. The audience (apart from myself ) had no sense of now, no sense that this was a special moment and a unique performance. Of course they were right: it wasn’t unique because they could revisit this event through infinite repetitions and retrospectives, all identical, so why would they be excited? How could they be exhilarated or even aroused? This was not a special moment at all, not a fleeting glimpse of infinite beauty but the thing itself. Here was the paradox made manifest, that only the time-bound can enjoy the timeless.

YOU HAVE TO LOVE THEM

T

he first time Win and I travelled together was our honeymoon. It could have been our last. Living together is much easier than travelling together, when you have acres of time and infinite occasions for disagreement. Overriding my token resistance, James flew us to a resort in southern Thailand, patronised by their royal family in the 1930s. It was the ideal venue for a leisured aristocracy and (since the best tourism is a homage to Somerset Maugham) it was perfect for our honeymoon. Every prospect pleased, and not even man was vile. If she hadn’t been so well-bred, Win might have made an exception in my case. We’d been together long enough to discover some of each other’s sexual peculiarities and we delighted in them. But we couldn’t spend all day in bed so we had ample time to moon around fragrant gardens, comparing statues of the Buddha, patronising delicious restaurants — and prowling through interminable shops. It was clear to me that The Market was an abstraction for deciding the value of goods and services, and introducing buyers to sellers. It was equally clear to Win that

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The Market was a place to hang around for hours, poring over mass-produced trinkets from China that you don’t intend to buy, and drawing them to the attention of your husband. Our friends marvel that I endured this drifting for three days. Mind you, they marvel that Win endured me at all. But I digress. What saved us from a snarling impasse was the arrival of an American couple on what they called their second honeymoon. Billy was a corporate lawyer in Dallas with a fund of stories from his three years in the Internal Revenue Service under LBJ. Charlotte-Margaret (her real name, and she insisted on it) had an insatiable appetite for green jade, rubies and tie-dye. Several of Billy’s stories I had read in other people’s memoirs, and by Charlotte-Margaret’s account this was at least their seventh honeymoon; but what the hell? Billy and I amused each other with tall stories while C-M and Win ransacked the boutiques of the whole province. Billy and C-M knew about holidays. Each was clear about what pleased them; they pursued their pleasures ruthlessly and enjoyed them hugely. Win and I learned a lot, and perhaps saved our marriage, or at least postponed the final crisis. ***** Americans: you have to love them. A feature of the Chicago MBA was a global network of alumni who shared the faith. On our stop-over in Bangkok I looked up an acquaintance in the Department of Trade. His girlfriend was persuaded to take Win to shops she would never have found by herself. And that’s how we managed every other holiday. Over the next few years we talked, drank, dined — and shopped, and even took in some culture — with an American social planner in Port Moresby,

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a German industrial negotiator in Budapest and a British World Bank officer in Apia. Like missionaries on furlough, we swapped reports from the front lines, and the men had wives or girlfriends who liked a bit of shopping. Even in cities where I knew nobody, this network told me who shared our vision and might spare us a few hours and a decent dinner. This compromise between Market and markets worked wonders. Have other professional couples spent a wholly stimulating week in Paris before finding the Louvre? Or 10 days in Cairo without seeing a pyramid? ***** Americans: you have to love them — but you have to be discreet about it. I met Birgit in Chicago. She was the first American I loved. We both needed coaching in mathematical modelling and we shared a tutor, so after one lesson I asked her for a drink before we went home through an Illinois windstorm. We had martinis in one of those chrome-and-oak hotel lobbies that make Americans feel sophisticated. Martinis were the only cocktail either of us knew by name and we ordered them as if to the manner born, for fear of looking uncouth. Martinis do loosen tongues, especially the tongues of young people who seldom drink spirits. That — and homesickness — explains why I broke the first rule of impressing women and talked about Winifred. I even showed her a photo. Curiously, it captured a cheerful Win and a quizzical Althea at some dressy social function. Birgit mis-guessed who was who, I had to describe them both, and that took us into a second Martini.

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Perversely, that long-winded account of two girls who she would never meet prompted Birgit to talk about herself. And what an amazing tale. Rather than interrupt the saga or get smashed with gin, we adjourned to one of those hamburger dispensaries which are supposed to bring happiness to families but depress them under harsh lights. After refuelling we peered out at snow. She did the decent thing and invited me to come up to her tiny apartment for coffee. So I did. She explained that she was in every way self-made and the project was not yet complete. At the age of 12 she had resolved to become the CEO of Ford Motors or Coca-Cola (she didn’t care which). To achieve this she’d need at least an MBA from somewhere like Harvard or Chicago (she didn’t care which), so she’d need an awesome Grade Point Average from school in Utah where she had the misfortune to be born and raised. Well that wasn’t unusual: most of the Americans in the course could tell the same story, often truthfully. What was exceptional was Birgit’s thoroughness. Having her born in Salt Lake City was not her parents’ only crime. Lithuanian refugees from Poland, they clung to their polysyllabic names but abandoned their mainstream Catholicism for the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter Day Saints. Birgit might have forgiven one false move, but not two. And, to compound the offence, they had three children before Birgit and five more after. ‘So you can’t blame them for not remembering all our names. I think they were relieved when I changed mine to Birgit. It’s when I dropped the Slavic Petrauskas for the Nordic Petersen that they felt I’d gone too far. There was talk of betrayal.’ Well — my attempt at conciliation — at least she inherited terrific good looks.

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Did that open the floodgates! ‘Have you any idea how much it costs to get your teeth straightened? I worked my butt off for two freezing years as a ski instructor to pay for these teeth! ‘And do you think silky auburn hair runs in the Petrauskas family? Ha! They’ve had mousy dry hair since the Middle Ages. ‘Let’s be clear about who you’re trying to impress with your laid-back Aussie charm. This is my very own body, which I designed, bought and paid for. See these calves? Just touch one. See? This is muscle-tone from swimming and the gym every morning. And the tan comes from the solarium every Sunday, religiously. See my back? No tan line. All I’ve inherited from generations of lousy Lithuanians is the imagination to visualise Birgit Petersen and the determination to become her!’ You could have knocked me down with a feather. I had not intended to cheat on Win — at least I don’t think I had — but the self-making of Birgit Petersen was an enchanting experiment. I just had to run my fingers through that silky auburn hair, and search for the tanline, and palpate those smooth muscles, if only to seek traces of the vanished Miss Petrauskas. So I did. Next morning, delighted to awake in her bed but keen to shift the guilt, I wondered why Birgit had taken no precautions that I was aware of, nor asked me to take any. Her explanation was typical: she used contraceptive pills. Mainly, she explained, to regulate her ovulation, and incidentally to avoid conceiving. But she picked up my guilty confusion and that’s when she explained that it was my up-front commitment to Win that had toppled us into bed. There was no risk — her word — of romance, or love, or any such distraction. Sex with a fellow student could be good, clean, fun — like tennis but so much better! Why should she

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deny herself the pleasure, and why would she encumber herself with marriage or any relationship that might obstruct her path to the boardroom of Pepsi or Chrysler? She was as good as her extraordinary word. A Cardigan City childhood makes me want to call it love-making, but with Birgit it really was sex — and there were mirrors strategically placed to monitor it. She was clear and direct in saying what she wanted. ‘Here we go, Ned Kelly! Now pinch my ass. Again. Keep at it. A bit harder? Fantastic. No, don’t stop. And is there something I can do for you?’ There was — but that’s none of your business. At first the mirrors were powerfully exciting. Watching her neat, perfect thighs pumping was almost as erotic as feeling them. After a while it was like watching her work out — on a bicycle perhaps — and it made the sex seem comic as well as delicious. And it did make me aware of my own body. That’s when I recognised the importance of hair-care and sweet breath and a flat stomach and so on. For me Birgit represented — embodied — the whole Chicago ethos, in the same way that Win captured the values and the magnetism of middle-class Queensland. What was that ethos exactly? She didn’t talk about her values, she simply lived them, without embarrassment or self-doubt, and they amounted to this: we don’t have to accept the life, or the conditions, or even the family and their expectations that we are given at birth. Quite the reverse: we ought to improve them! Birgit was not unusual in feeling obliged to improve herself. Americans are committed to the corollary of self-improvement: they believe that by improving ourselves we improve the society and the economy we live in. To achieve that (for ourselves, for our country, for our economy) we

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have to be clear-eyed, we have to be explicit about what we want. Of course that value system borders on narcissism. Like anything else, you can take it too far — but by God it was a revelation, and Birgit was the angel of that annunciation. If Anglicanism and rational economics were compatible, Win and Birgit were certainly not. That truth seemed unfair: after all it was my commitment to Win that made the affair with Birgit possible. And the more I fell under Birgit’s spell, the better I understood myself — and the more I valued the qualities I loved in Win. The argument for bigamy was irresistible. I nearly wrote to Win to explain how much this affair had enhanced my love of her! Thank God a moment of sanity intervened. Obviously I would never have disentangled myself from this predicament by my own addled efforts. What finally disrupted the idyll — the illusion — was the oldest problem in history. Charles Harrison III was destined at a minimum to become CEO of the family pharmacy chain: the only question was whether he would tackle something bigger. His effortless successes and his easy manner reminded me of Garth Lewis, so there was nothing he could have done to break through my armour-plated dislike. Twice I saw him chatting with Birgit with a confidence that implied intimacy. Well, you can write the story yourself, it’s so predictable. ‘Let me get this straight, Ned Kelly. You, who are virtually engaged to a simpering blonde in the antipodes, want a right of veto over my friendships and associations? ‘Buster, I didn’t escape from the real Mormons to become the junior wife of a bushranger. ‘Just listen to yourself! We agreed — didn’t we? That we’d have fun. Okay, it has been fun, I admit. But the condition was no damned TIES, no COMMITMENTS.

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‘So you didn’t understand, or you can’t accept the rules. Either way, Ned Kelly, on your way! Adiós! Close the door on the way out!’ It couldn’t have ended any other way, but I was humiliated. I cried for two nights. But that was then and this is now. And what an immense debt I owe her! When I carried my MBA back to Brisbane, well-groomed, colour-coordinated, shampooed and deodorised, Win assumed this was the influence of Chicago, but it was really the impact of Birgit. What I picked up about self-presentation gave me a head start in impressing women. But more important was the glimpse Birgit gave me of the immense energy and skill locked up in womankind. There are tides in the affairs of women as much as men, no doubt about it. Catch the steepling waves of female energy and ability, I reckoned, and you could surf to the top of the beach in any profession. So I did. An aeon has something to do with the Greek term for dawn. So an aeon is not a measure of time: it is all about new light — in fact, revelation. Birgit was one hell of a revelation.

INTO TEMPTATION

O

ur marriage had surprising effects on relations between some Jolliffes and some Kingstons. Winifred embraced my parents more affectionately than her own. She was respectful towards Father’s political and industrial opinions, and the old bastard warmed to her as a possible convert, so much more understanding than his own daughter. She was patient and solicitous in the shapeless conversations in which Mum avoided any solid topic, and she earned a culinary reputation by suggesting that there might be more desserts in life than bananas sliced into Aeroplane jelly. She seemed as comfortable with her in-laws as I was with mine — and she was just as welcome. James and Harriet were less than stimulating company, but they made up for that with their hospitality, affluence and generosity, and there was none of the tension that made me tetchy with my own parents. In fact, everyone welcomed the chance to make new friends, even those who had already escaped the conventions of Cardigan City. Win’s mysterious brother Alfred flew in from San Francisco, swanned around affably, spent some time with one of

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my groomsmen, and flew out again without evident haste. More durable was the friendship between Celia and Althea. They were both smart, both resolutely independent and they shared a lot of opinions. Each was uneasy with her own parents and hostile to the Cardigan milieu. They saw quite a bit of each other in Brisbane, where Althea curated several successful exhibitions that put Brisbane on the national cultural map. They stayed in touch even when Celia went back to Sydney. I had been sure that Celia and Winifred would enjoy each other’s company, but we had a couple of dinners in Brisbane at which Celia attacked my politics. Win suppressed her own views to come to my aid. With that display of superfluous loyalty I knew that Celia was writing her off. I don’t know what I could have done. If I said that Win did have opinions, Celia would want to know why she suppressed them. Having no idea how to resolve this tangle, I lazily left it alone. I also expected to see more of Althea, since Brisbane was not a big town then. That didn’t happen either. I was secretly relieved and so (I think) was Win. I should have made more effort to repair relations with Celia — and less to patch up relations with Althea. I drew a line under my fascination with Althea and we all behaved as if there had never been a fixation. I was a victim of Original Innocence. Why, after all, would Althea bother with her brother-in-law, when the arts world of Brisbane — and wider worlds whenever she wanted them — lay at her feet? Brisbane was becoming a city, keen to shake off the ethos of the country town it had been for a century. The turning point was the rediscovery of the river. It had always snaked its gluggy way through the city, never clean enough for swimming, always disrupting traffic and

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sometimes flooding suburbs. At some point a few developers and town planners must have seen London’s docklands and recognised that Brisbane’s wool stores would make fine apartment blocks. Once that idea caught hold, the river could be a highway and riverside property might be valuable. (Althea hob-nobbed with architects and steered her father’s money into derelict buildings just before the boom.) When they recognised that they had charge of some great real estate and a possible gold mine, the city fathers resolved that their city needed culture. They had no idea how to promote it, believing that culture was a finite commodity possessed by Melbourne or practised in Sydney. To build an opera house would be derivative and there was no way to transplant Melbourne’s self-assurance. Perhaps Brisbane could host some new art galleries? Having made this nervous decision, they turned to Althea. Five minutes’ conversation made it plain that she could put Brisbane on the cultural map without wrecking its budget. Even before Althea’s rise to dominance in the arts of the State and the state of the Arts, almost everyone reckoned that she was prettier, cleverer and more chic than her little sister. But something feral was gnawing her. Win was content — even happy — to teach high-school yobs in schools that had asphalt playgrounds and a hotline to the children’s court. She worked in these hell-holes with courage, flair and a commitment that astonished me. Althea brought similar competence and flair to the arts, buttressed by huge ambition and self-belief. And yet, however well she performed, the accolades she won seemed to give her no pleasure. If Win had a talent for happiness, Althea’s genius was for melancholy. We’d been married for two years when Catherine Amelia was born. Relations between the sisters had been cool, more

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Sisterly than sisterly. Win’s pregnancy then brought out unexpected gushes of empathy and practical assistance from the aunt-in-waiting. She even seemed a bit clucky: there were long phone calls between the sisters and longer lunches. When the time came and I raced Win to hospital, Althea sent flowers, brought fruit, even visited in person despite her loud distaste for all things medical. So effusively did she admire the new-born Kate that we made her a godmother. When she brought cannelloni for my solitary supper, I thought that was a bit over the top, but I dug out a good light red to complement it. She was wearing a dress she had worn that afternoon to launch some Pacific art show, a skimpy piece she called her ‘little black number’, merely her working clothes. Over the pasta we toasted Winifred; we toasted Catherine Amelia; and we toasted the new aunt with a kiss and a rather clumsy hug. That was when I confirmed my suspicion that she was wearing nothing whatsoever under the little black number. She noticed me noticing, smiled at my embarrassment, and kissed me more emphatically. And we fell into bed. I’d fantasised about sex with Althea for a decade, never imagining that it would come to pass. When we tore our clothes off, I was (almost) speechless with lust, gratitude, heart-stopping delight and incredulous wonder. Overexcited, overstimulated, overcome, I was overhasty. Althea laughed — whether at my performance or my embarrassment was unclear — and took a shower. Because she left the door ajar I was not sure that I should be looking, but I couldn’t help myself. Torn between embarrassment, guilt and awe, I was entranced. Gazing at her tanned body, so familiar in shape and yet so utterly unimagined, I could not believe I’d stroked those amazing long limbs, nuzzled those

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dainty breasts, tasted that divine honey. When it dawned on me that she was coming back to bed for the night, I really was dumbstruck. Then and next morning I learned how gentle and tender she could be, given the motive and the opportunity. I’m told there are stages of grief that you have to go through to do it properly (and I hope people are doing that right now, for me). What I do know with absolute certainty is that there are stages of joy: one is shock, another is disbelief, and there are a few more to savour before joy settles down to stay, and life moves along. Anyway, accidents happen and they needn’t hurt anyone if they don’t recur — and there was no reason why this accident would. But I soon worked out that Althea had contrived the dinner as part of a considered campaign. She made it clear that she had no interest in marriage (or divorce) or anything else that involved commitment or public status. She’d like nothing more, she said, than the excitement and fleeting pleasures of a clandestine relationship that her independent means allowed. What could I say? What would any red-blooded lad say? All my Christmases had come at once. To marry one Jolliffe girl and sleep with the other — it doesn’t get any better, especially for a state-school boy. Another realisation dawned more slowly. For years I blamed Althea for hollowing out her sister’s marriage. I now recognise that as a cop-out, but she was certainly the initiator of our affair and she brought something vindictive to it. Sex with Althea was adventurous, fierce, exhausting, all-consuming. It was also obscurely but persistently competitive. She easily found out what I liked (anything that excited my taste buds), then concentrated on it, pushed it to a new intensity. Without asking, she inferred what Win did, and resolved to do it better. If I asked

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what would please her, she was evasive. I began to suspect that she was not making love but — despite our discretion — making trouble. I’m sure she enjoyed the sex, perhaps as much as I did, but I’m not sure that she liked me. In one bed-bound conversation I described us as lovers. She looked at me as coolly as she might assess a painting at auction (I recalled her appraisal at that first concert). ‘Not really, Geoff,’ she said levelly. ‘We’re fuckers.’ How I wished she wouldn’t talk like that, and how stupid I felt for giving her the chance. Our bouts left me exhausted, sated — at an awkward angle to the world. Something corrosive was going on, which I sensed but couldn’t name. I began to feel something illicit, predatory, not only between me and Althea, but between me and Win. By the time Crispin was born (two years after Kate, and Althea and I marked the occasion in the traditional way), the affair felt as if it had run its course, but by then there were areas of silence, topics to be avoided between Win and me. One terrifying source of danger was the sisters’ physical similarity. In the light you couldn’t mistake one for the other — but in bed, in the dark? With my eyes closed I could distinguish Althea’s leaner ribs, flatter stomach and her ‘darker’ chocolate taste; but I couldn’t be absolutely certain and I could hardly run a taste test before speaking. From that epicentre radiated shame and fear — and silences. When we moved to Canberra, I hoped I could decently end the affair. I didn’t want to but I knew I should. Far from it: we met less often, but what could be more natural than to stay with my sister-in-law when work took me to Brisbane? Which it did, often enough. So: whatever her purpose, it was not Althea who gutted our marriage. If she wanted to sap Win’s happiness, I didn’t have

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to collaborate. Yes, she could have ended the affair at any time, but so could I. She wasn’t betraying a partner, I was learning how to do that. Betrayal became second nature, and not only with Althea. It would be unfair to blame her for my increasingly frequent and shallow office affairs, but she certainly helped. And as these affairs became more casual, they created more areas of caution, more silences. It took a lot more to break these ties but when the knife came out the ropes were already frayed.

PROGRESS REPORT: WINIFRED

To

Gabriel, AA

From

Eliazar, A

Re

In the matter of Geoffrey Kingston: Winifred Jolliffe Kingston

I recognised Winifred Kingston at once, from her physical appearance alone. I make a point of this because it represents a shift in my way of being in this world. The human body is only a temporary wrapping for the eternal soul, but it is tempting and extremely convenient to adopt the human perspective. That assumes that the body is the only reality and the soul — if its existence is acknowledged at all — is only an accessory. To communicate easily with humans therefore, I trend now to look at the body first. In the case of Mrs Kingston, the nurses’ gossip led me to expect (and I found) a tall, friendly, fair-haired woman in the prime of her mortal life. She does not flaunt her healthy and attractive features and she may not even be fully aware of the effect that they create. The nurses admire her looks, but her

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matter-of-fact style inhibits the sexual innuendo with which they shower other women (and men). Why she receives such respect is not clear to me: probably it is not for her own qualities but a reaction against Geoffrey’s bad behaviour. Once identification had been made, I could look more deeply. My briefing led me to expect (and I found) a spirit glowing with love for individuals and concern for humanity. She is not a deep thinker, but her concern for humanity is not uncritical. Who does she love? Her children, absolutely and ferociously. Several friends, who place a high value on her affection. And she loves Geoffrey, which surprised me, given what she knows of him. The VMO in Post-Traumatic Rehabilitation thought it would be helpful to ask his patient’s wife about his physical and mental state, pretending surprise and regret that he no longer resided in the family home. Winifred found the topic painful, but her telling of the story of her life with and without him had the usual outcome of clarification, comprehension and consolation. As a trained counsellor she was not surprised by the therapeutic effect of our conversations and she may have welcomed them. She felt no awkwardness in speaking freely, and neither her affections nor her disappointments were pretended. Winifred has a clear view of the way she developed in the family of her birth. She is the youngest of three children. Alfred was eight years old when she was born. He was an unusually affectionate older brother, often joining his sisters’ games and even dressing up with them. Because of the age difference, however, Winifred barely knew him before he went to boarding school and then left home to study overseas. Althea is only two years older than Winifred, so one might expect them to be close. But (as I confirmed later with Mrs Jolliffe) their parents had intended

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to have no more than two children. Winifred’s conception was not planned, nor was her birth easy, nor entirely welcome. There is evidence of her parents’ ambivalent state of mind in the fact that the family home was never extended to accommodate the third child. Instead, Winifred was placed with Althea, in a room that Althea had learned to consider her own. Personal space is important to human well-being, and Winifred is fully aware of the consequences of their being thrown together: It hurt me that Althea always called it her room. We have rather different temperaments anyway — she’s much quicker, more confident than I ever was. I think that sharing a space made us keen to establish the differences between us. When Alfred left home I moved into his room, which was big and comfortable but it was not my room either. I may add that this arrangement was equally unfair to Althea. She coped with the problem more robustly than Winifred did. Alfred’s brilliance won him scholarships overseas. Althea’s ambition, harnessed to a very fine mind, marked her as a future leader in whatever field she chose. Winifred lacked her sister’s drive and her brother’s brains. She tried to make up for these deficiencies and earn her parents’ love — or at least their respect — as a model daughter. In that campaign she became neat and tidy when Althea was natural, an obedient and industrious pupil when Althea was sometimes mutinous and always creative. Althea’s irritation at this behaviour is easy to imagine. It is also easy to sympathise with. Winifred expected that she would leave her home town, but probably go no further than Brisbane or somewhere else in Queensland. Everything pointed to an obscure career in teaching

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and marriage to someone of a similar background and modest ambition. In brief, Winifred expected to live a moderately happy life far from the centre of the stage. That is, until she was captured by Geoffrey. She sums up his impact rather well: Compared with everyone else I knew, he was exotic, even glamorous in a shabby sort of style. His family was poorer than ours, he went to state school, he dressed rather oddly and he lacked polish in other ways, too; but he turned up in St Barnabas’ by his own choice, and he was the master of his fate. You only had to talk to him for five minutes to recognise his determination to change the world and make a brilliant career, somewhere far away. And you could be sure that he’d succeed. It is not at all surprising that Geoffrey’s first choice was Althea. Winifred knew this, and she was neither surprised nor hurt. Althea’s fierce intelligence and her clever and quick conversation would be enough to explain Geoffrey’s preference, but Winifred puts equal emphasis on Althea’s olive-coloured skin and her ‘bouncy’ hair. This statement is further evidence of Winifred’s superficiality, but it is possibly a fair observation of the behaviour of adolescent boys. So she was astonished when Geoffrey began to show interest in her. I thought it was a holiday flirtation, but then he looked after me at uni. He took me to cafés and movies as if he was proud to be seen with me. He helped me find digs, he even helped me with my essays. Yes, he was trying to get me into bed, but he didn’t have to try that hard! The other thing that was special was that he didn’t patronise. He treated my silly little first-year opinions seriously, as if it was really important to change my mind.

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Love him? I adored him. There it is: a relationship built on awe and gratitude rather than mutual respect. A more confident woman, or a more perceptive one, would surely have objected to the Marxist ideas that Geoffrey picked up from Ernie Black. Or if she found his godless Marxism plausible, she should have been appalled when Geoffrey exchanged these old-fashioned ideas for the new fashion in which the Market becomes God. Instead, she says that it was perfectly appropriate for Geoffrey to play with serious ideas as if they were toys for adolescents. That, she says, is what university students are supposed to do. How she trivialises serious matters! We hardly ever agreed on politics or economics but it didn’t matter — we just loved arguing. He never lost, and I never minded losing — to him. I wanted nothing more than to spend the rest of my life with him, look after him, bask in his love and have his babies. I knew he still carried a candle for Althea. That’s only natural, and she’d made it clear that she wouldn’t marry anyone, not even if the Archangel Gabriel knocked at her door. This casual sacrilege is just as disgraceful as her indifference to ideas about society. And I must add that she has even connived at his infidelities. I hoped, but I didn’t really expect him to be faithful. How could I expect it, when he worked among glamorous people, and I was a school teacher? He was discreet, he always came back, so what was there to beef about?

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Despite this appalling indifference, she was astonished by Geoffrey’s ‘affair’ with the American, Penelope. She swallows the camel of Geoffrey’s serial adultery but strains at the gnat of his relationship with a woman for whom she has no respect. The American has money, is well-groomed and chooses expensive clothes but Winifred finds her shallow personally and ‘chauvinistic’ in her politics. This limited view sustains a curious hope. She said very quietly: ‘I can’t help hoping he’ll see through her and come home again.’ Not only did Winifred fail to anticipate this relationship, the collapse of her marriage provokes what can only be called self-pity: One moment I had a loving husband, two children to look after, a home to manage and a life slightly too full of interest. Next moment they’ve all disappeared. I’ve done a bit of counselling you know, so I know it’s wrong to ask if it’s all my fault. But I can’t help it sometimes. And the conclusive evidence of Mrs Kingston’s limited insight? Althea’s been a terrific help. We’ve got on much better since we both left home, and especially since the children were born. That’s one of my main consolations, and it was providential that she was in Canberra the day Geoffrey walked out. I can’t tell you how much her support has meant to me. It was the expectation of support from Althea and their mother Harriet that led Winifred to have Geoffrey flown to Brisbane rather than Canberra for treatment. It is hard to believe — and impossible to sympathise with — such blindness and shallowness.

AS IT IS IN HEAVEN

S

o far (you must have noticed this and perhaps shared my disappointment) all my Afterlife experiences had been cerebral. I wondered if this was due to my temporary status, but Celia suggested that it was the same for everyone. The Beethoven concert could have been an exception, but there was nothing visceral about that music. The orchestra could easily have been miming to a CD, and there are livelier audiences in the Senate for the presentation of petitions. And what could be less tangible than the Tanglewood Bowl? I often wondered what people meant when they described near-death experiences as being ‘out-of-body’, because I couldn’t imagine an ‘out-of-body’ location. I couldn’t get my mind around the physics of the metaphysics. Everyone seemed ectoplasmic. Perhaps holograms would be like this. Whatever the correct term for this incomplete condition, every person I met — every soul? spirit? — was translucent. Had anyone actually touched me? Had Gabriel? Had Celia? I couldn’t be sure. When I was with them I experienced something very like touching — but not quite the

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real thing. It gave me the sense of being touched, not the sensation. The same sensationless sense came to me when I tried to scratch my head. What a puzzle! Was there such a thing as a disembodied existence? If so, was this what it felt like? I wondered if the semblance of a body was mere packaging, no more functional than cellophane around a Christmas present. That would explain why I hadn’t slept since Entry, or eaten — or pissed for that matter — nor did I feel a need for any bodily function. Didn’t feel the need? I didn’t feel the absence of a need or even the absence of a body. If this was a way of life, I thought, it was a pretty poor alternative to real living as I knew it. In life, my most ecstatic experiences made me feel as if I was transcending my mortal limits. It sounds perverse but every pleasure lost its intensity once I had really transcended my mortality. This might be a form of existence, but it felt more like the end of it. And if I was in a carping mood so soon after my Entry, the long-term resident PinS were not likely to be happy little Vegemites. It suited me to engage such interesting spirits in conversation, but surely there was more to the Afterlife than talking and thinking! I was certainly thinking (don’t split hairs: I knew I was thinking because you can’t mistake the sensation). And thinking surely required a real brain, lodged in a real cranium, perched on a real neck, attached to shoulders and so on. But what was I thinking with? The next time I saw the Seraph, I raised the epistemological issue as simply as I could, but the question was beyond his grasp. Gabriel must have been curious about the progress of my inquiries. He semi-materialised almost at once, although He professed merely to be passing. That explanation was quite

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incredible: there are no accidents here and no scope for coincidence. In any case He never moved, He simply let Himself appear, seemingly at will, and (as time was evidently elastic) possibly in several places at once. ‘I expect that your admirable sister has told you that there is no room for change in Our scheme of things.’ (Is there no privacy? Does confidentiality mean nothing? Had He been hovering invisibly or were there informers?) ‘And systemic change is indeed the exception rather than the expectation. Yet there was a period, quite early in human affairs, when We did introduce a series of significant changes. We began, as you may imagine, with a plan to reincarnate people. That is what they all expected, and they knew how to behave. We felt obliged to restore sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf, and We removed obvious bodily defects, so far as this was consistent with people recognising each other. It also seemed apt to recreate the Garden of Eden — you know something of that unfortunate episode, naturally. Because of that misunderstanding, people have had to be clothed, of course, and before long new Entrants objected to living al fresco. For some reason they had come to expect mansions. Frankly We fudged that one, when We deemed luxury apartment blocks to be mansions — a notion which estate agents devised quite independently, by the way. If I may digress once more? This experience gave Us some sympathy for estate agents. Playing host to hosts of tenants, forever coveting their neighbours’ spouses — and occasionally their asses, believe it or not — and asking to vary their living arrangements — well, you can perhaps imagine how troublesome and downright squalid these issues became. From Management’s point of view, the episode was profoundly unsatisfactory.’

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I had often wondered how people’s souls would relate to each other. Would Celia be as single in death as in life? Would Althea? Would I be linked with Winifred? Could I enjoy visiting rights with Althea? Would Penny have to stick with her diplomatic husband or could she be with me? If a widow re-married, which husband would she hang out with — and who decided? Every soul was the child of two parents, and would likely be the spouse or the lover of two or three other souls. A soul could be a parent and a grandparent as well as a spouse and a child. So who was the centre of the family group and where were its boundaries, and were these arrangements subject to change? Evidently Gabriel had found a way to deal with these issues and I was keen to learn how He managed these organisational difficulties. But I’d have to wait because He was off on another tangent. ‘Our governing principle is Love, of course. By that We mean something more spiritual and elevating than lust. You will not believe — or perhaps you will; forgive My presumption of innocence — the amount of fornication that the average Poor Spirit needed. Safe sex, too — a notion which We invented, by the way. Marital sex We might have endured, though the act itself is a ludicrous spectacle even in its elementary form, before you come to the subject of fetishes. Before long the Poor in Spirit were indulging safely enough, but with an immense range of partners and the more variety they enjoyed, the more they wanted. Mansions We could provide. An eternal disorderly house We could not and would not. When some bold fellows insinuated that We might provide Seraphim, or Houris, or hybrids of some kind, Top Management put His sandal down — in a manner of speaking. Our reluctance to introduce change is not a matter of policy, you know. Our patience is almost-infinite, but

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We have arrived at present conditions through a great body of experimentation.’ ‘You mean You desexed everyone? Or You disembodied them? I have a reputation for the ruthless abolition of people’s jobs, but I’ve never imagined anything as drastic as desexing. Didn’t You have a mutiny?’ ‘Unkind things were said, certainly; but many souls had come to share Our view that random and obsessive fornication was not only pathological but inimical to any kind of order. As you will perhaps understand from your own wide experience, each new lustful venture meant less to those who took part. Most knew that they were destroying the trust and the affection of — and affection for — their main partner, if they had such a significant other. They were losing sight of Love altogether. As you might expect, a few souls saw nothing wrong in prevailing practices and several agreed in principle but begged for one or two more aeons of indulgence. In the end We decided that the only way to create harmony and restore order was the disembodiment option. I need hardly say that We’ve had perfect propriety ever since.’ A logical solution, I admit, but a devastating discovery. I knew exactly how heart-broken the first disembodied souls must have felt. Typically, my perfect host happened to be looking the other way while I absorbed His message and murmured ‘bugger it’ under my virtual breath. Until Gabriel told me about the strategy of general disembodiment, I’d been musing about my own unfaithfulness: infidelity past with Althea and others, infidelity present with Penny, infidelity hopefully to come. Fidelity is its own reward and a poor bargain it is. Fidelity offers nothing to compare with the

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thrill and the challenge of its opposite. Novelty accounts for a lot of the pleasure of course, the role of imagination, the astonishing variety of the human form, the gradual mutual revelation. Then there’s an electrifying moment when — in the midst of your betrayal — you contract to trust each other. Infidelity is always cheating. That’s at least half of the attraction, that secret, succulent sense of getting away with something to which you have no right. The choking urge to tell someone and the delicious knowledge of your own restraint. So of course it’s trust betrayed. That’s the whole point. Without trust there can be no betrayal — but if there was no risk of betrayal, there would be no need for trust. To come back to the point, would affairs in the Afterlife count as adultery? Win would think carefully and in the end she would say Yes, it’s how you feel about it, not what the rules say. Althea would refuse to be drawn into a hypothetical discussion. How would Penny see it? Penny changed many of my perspectives. What was it about her? Terrific looks, of course, that’s a large part of it, although she’s hardly as striking as Win or Althea. At first sight she reminded me of the old pin-up pictures of Rita Hayworth, but sheer good looks don’t explain the instant depth and strength of the bond between us. She had a sharp tongue, too (like Althea, in fact): quick, terse, intense. Like conversational poetry, I told her, but she just chuckled. Chuckling she did wonderfully, a throaty, musical, reassuring, intimate sound. I’d heard that sound first in the Mid-West. Now that I think of it, Penny embodied everything I admired and yearned for in Chicago, and with her generous body she shared everything I’d hankered for since that magical year when the world revealed itself as young and malleable.

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Coached by Father Weedes, Win and I did specify ‘Till death do us part’, but that was merely a resonant phrase from the Book of Common Prayer. If I had survived, Penny and I might have adopted those evocative words to bring solemnity into a registry office. In our pillow-talk we certainly promised to have no more affairs and we probably meant it, too. But did that unqualified promise rule out Heavenly encounters? Perhaps Heavenly sex was most specifically banned! On the face of it though, the terms of that vow inferred a blanket (wrong word) exemption in a hereafter that none of us took seriously. All my adult life I’ve been fascinated by institutional procedures. Death did nothing to dispel the enchantment, which quickly re-focused on new institutions — such as marriage, to take an example at random. Soon after my Entry, and before I knew that I was here on a temporary visa with no right to permanent residence, I had manufactured a compelling case for the morality and even the appropriateness of sex after life (since it would be sex after marriage, of course). Now that conviction gave me no comfort. Why not? I had always told myself — and believed it — that people had so many facets that you could not reasonably expect perfect complementarity with any single other. Now I was dismayed by this line of seduction chat! Gabriel was perfectly correct — wasn’t He always? — about the social disruption and the moral corrosion that resulted from infidelity. Despite myself, I’d outgrown a phase which unsettled my adult life. I’d become monogamous without a partner! Death does change one’s perspective.

KATE

I

expect every family has a defining drama that bonds or shatters them but in either case sets them apart from the rest of the world. Ours happened on the coast one winter weekend. Kate and Crispin were well into angular adolescence, putting as much distance as possible between themselves and their parents, and between each other. Surprisingly, both agreed to come away with us. The coast south of Bateman’s Bay appeals to Canberra’s academics and public servants: the temperature is equable, the beaches empty and there are few shops or pubs. From the cliffs above the beaches you often see whales ambling north to breed or south to fatten. You always hear and you often see a dazzling display of bird-life. These mild days and quiet nights made no appeal to teenagers, so it seemed providential that Kate and Cris had fallen out with their mates at the same time, and miraculous that neither objected to being seen in public with their parents or with each other. They had both been rather quiet for a few days and were attracted to a change of scene. Distance from home and the chance to borrow a colleague’s beach-house made a difference.

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Whatever the cause, Win and I hoped for a couple of days of harmony. We needed to get beyond an unfortunate incident with an impressionable little stenographer in my office. We thought we could do that, and we even wondered out loud if we could cultivate civil relations with our offspring. We were at the beach soaking up the thin sunshine, so unlike the harsh sun that harasses us for most of the year. Win and I had had our heart-to-heart the night before and were quite happy with each other. I remember admiring the elegant sweep of her creamy shoulders and neck, down to her breasts, made especially pert by the plain halter-neck swimming costume. We were discussing a government report that some rat of a public servant had leaked to the press. Win demanded that I give her a compelling rationale every time the Government announced that it was going to out-source a service. If a service was working badly, of course, you couldn’t give it away. But if the service was delivered adequately, Win always asked why we couldn’t leave it alone. I think we were arguing about privatised bus services when we — when Win — looked around for Crispin and Kate. They were in the surf a few yards outside the flags, but it was a calm morning, the water was waist-deep, they were looking out for each other, and we’d had some angry lectures about the need to treat them as if they were responsible adults. Win was reading me the moral posturing of some wet political columnist when we heard Kate shouting. ‘Don’t be such a stupid, selfish bugger! Come closer, or move across to the flags, you moron, before Mum and Dad throw a fit.’ Cris’s reply, inaudible to us, enraged Kate. ‘That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard, you thoughtless bastard! It’s not a sand bank, it’s a bunch of rocks. Come in right now!’

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A moment’s silence, then, ‘Oh shit. Hang on, I’m coming.’ Could we have intervened? Of course. Should we have? Obviously, in hindsight. How many times did we ask ourselves? Thousands. Months later some light filtered through the murk of blame, shame and self-pity. I loved the children, of course, but they belonged in a domestic domain, where Win presided with grace and patience. My own domain was full of more important stuff — public service reform, mortgages, shares and so on. As a consultant I was earning five times Win’s salary, so I couldn’t spend as much time at home. I certainly couldn’t take the weekends and the holidays that teachers enjoyed. Was this what Win had expected? She took her teaching seriously, but she hadn’t yet built her humanist and feminist notions into a coherent structure with an explicit value system. Like me, until then, she supposed that fathers had an inescapable duty as sentinels, guardians, something like that. Wasn’t that how all parents behaved? It was certainly how our own parents managed their lives. And that’s when the light dawned. We’d taken ourselves out of Cardigan City, but we hadn’t uprooted all its traces from our minds, and some were still festering. All of which was beside the point. Cris, the weaker swimmer, the more brittle character, the least equipped to shoulder a burden, had to live with the heaviest. He swooped in cleanly on the next wave. It was Kate, the strong swimmer, surging out to help him, who was dumped by a freak wave. She bounced on the rock that Cris had just left — I can still hear the soggy thump — and wallowed helplessly as we stumbled to our feet, raced into the waves and pulled her head above water, strangely limp. She’d crashed through the gap between our assumptions and we were free to blame each other, or ourselves, or both. And so we did. You never exorcise that sort of guilt.

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Kate spent a year in rehab, where she learned to use a wheelchair. Indeed she learned to be independent in every respect, and what a fearsome weapon she made of that independence! I felt guilty, Win felt guiltier, but Cris felt the worst. We were unfair, but we couldn’t help ourselves — we wanted Kate’s absolution. Would she give it? Would she, hell! In a few days she formulated the view from which she never wavered. ‘It was the wrong decision, sure; but it was my call, not yours. I don’t blame you, and you shouldn’t blame yourselves. Shit happens: get used to it. Get on with your lives and let me get on with mine.’ She’d been independent before, but now it became an obsession. She’d always been active, but now she exercised with angry concentration. We had ramps through the house and the school made sure she had access; but she also taught herself to drive the chair up and down stairs. She was musical and she used to enjoy showing off how fast she could pick up a language, not just the words but the unique way each language strings them together. Now she traded in an enthusiasm for a career. She studied those unsuspecting languages crossly and joylessly. They were no longer elusive melodies to sing but wild creatures and she was going to break them in, tame them. It didn’t seem so shocking when she turned on Physics and Mathematics with the same intensity. For 14 years she’d been an amateur: now she was a professional. Her school certificate results were phenomenal. We dared to hope that she had found her way again. What looked like a handicap, she treated as an aid to concentration. Metal and leather blinkers shut out distractions from her pursuit of physical fitness and academic excellence. The next step was no doubt logical, but astonishing at the time. Universities fell over each

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other to attract her — all she had to do was name the study program. Molecular biology? Micro-economics? Cybernetics? Vet science? She had the maths to win any of the great prizes — but not the interest. It had to be languages, even though she’d seemingly lost her taste for them. Kate had thought a few steps beyond the degree program. She saw — before I knew she was looking — where scholarly people could build careers even if they were female, introverted, handicapped. She enrolled in languages and librarianship. Win grieved quietly. I was noisily appalled. She could have opted for the high-tech, glamour subjects and made me burst with pride. She should have stuck with the music she loved and delighted Win and herself. She didn’t enjoy languages any more, for God’s sake, and what was librarianship? Cataloguing other people’s ideas, chasing overdue books and putting them on the right shelf? Breaking her spine was a catastrophe. This was a tragedy.

CALL ME GABRIEL

N

o, He didn’t use that phrase, but it would have been entirely in character. Not only did He know every book that I’d read, He must have read every great book Himself, seen every great movie in every known language, and He had precisely that mix of erudition, irony and playfulness that might have prompted such an arch statement. It was that mix of skills that enabled Him to talk to everyone in their own language, idiom and even personal style. I was provoked to ask Gabriel the obvious question posed by my presence here. Why was Management — why was the erudite Gabriel Himself — seeking advice from a mere human, an obviously flawed consultant? Surely, I asked, He had all the information He could possibly need at His virtual fingertips? The bloody history of the world demolishes any idea of divine omnipotence: God can’t possibly be responsible for such a catastrophe. But I was not sure what I believed about divine omniscience. It’s impossible to imagine — let alone prove — what God does or doesn’t know.

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Gabriel was always willing to explain. ‘Omniscience? Actually, I don’t know that We ever advanced such a claim. Why would We want to know every detail of the lives and deaths of every little galaxy, every species, every virus? Even if We limited Our interest to the human race — and that begs some very awkward questions — We would have to store almost infinite information, and We would need something a bit more helpful than Dewey’s Decimals to classify and cross-reference and access it. You may recall that Jorge Luis Borges expected Heaven to be rather like a library? He was thinking about the books, not the catalogue. In any case, why would We need to know everything if We are not going to intervene? ‘Nevertheless, your question is perfectly fair, and indeed most incisive. It merits a considered answer and I shall do my best to give it, though it is not easy to formulate in terms that you will grasp. If I may put it this way: We may be omniscient, but that does not mean that We understand everything. ‘For a start, consider what manner of beings We are. You experience this place, and this mode of being, as your Afterlife. For Us though, it is the only life. You seem to live what you foolishly consider to be your real lives in the expectation that We will complement that life, perhaps even compensate you for its disappointments. But We have no such distraction from the business of existence. You suffer regrets about the past and anxieties about the future in ways that We can perhaps imagine but — living only in the present — We can never experience. ‘And another thing I believe you have discussed with the admirable Celia, a great many of your human tensions and fears seem to flow from your sense that you can — and should — change things. The idea of progress, development programs, five-year plans

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and so on, seems to be inherent in the human condition. Here, with the important exception of your own consultancy, there is little room for improvement and you cannot reasonably hope to change anything much. In My nearly infinite experience of infinity, conditions change very, very little and very, very slowly. Many souls therefore describe this existence as placid — even soporific. Some spirits even claim to be bored. If We put this situation in other terms, it means that We never experience a condition that you would call urgency. We are separated from human concerns by the fact that We are not driven by an idea of progress and by the fact that We never feel a sense of urgency. That may help to explain the paradox that We know everything there is to know, but We cannot understand everything. We are forever informed — and We are forever perplexed. ‘And this life really is eternal. For you, eternal means having no end. For Us, it also means having no beginning. The difference is hard for you to comprehend, but I’d like you to try. In your experience, time passes even here, although it doesn’t pass in quite the same way as you remember on Earth. For Us, it can’t pass at all. It has neither beginnings nor endings. It cannot really pass because it has nowhere to go.’ I understood every word, and even whole sentences, but Gabriel’s explanation reminded me of the first time a technician tried to tell me about the Internet: the description was lucid, but the pieces wouldn’t add up. Naturally, Gabriel sensed this confusion and cast around for analogies. ‘When you were setting out on your last journey, Geoff. May I call you Geoff, by the way? I notice that your friends do, and I hope to be numbered in that company. Walking through the airport terminal, you may recall that an altercation at the

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check-in counter nearly made you late to board the flight, so you made use of a moving pathway. A travelator, I believe you call it? Yes? Well, your human time is like a travelator, in so far as it proceeds at a fixed speed in one direction. A clever invention, by the way — but terribly limiting. Among other things, the passage of time, like a travelator, reinforces your ideas about progress. The passing of time makes you think that there must be a destination, there has to be a purpose for this incessant movement. Most of you imagine that you know the purpose, or you feel that there must be a purpose if only you could discover what it is. Very few humans allow themselves to conclude that there’s no destination, no purpose, merely pure movement. You even have this interesting saying: “It’s better to travel hopefully than to arrive.” That may be true for you, but for Us it’s better to be, than to travel.’ I enjoyed the analogy and wondered how far you could carry it. If you stand next to the travelator, it is certainly passing — but it’s passing you. It’s independent of you. Or you’re outside it. It happens but it need not concern you. And presumably Gabriel can hop on and off the time travelator at will! There may even be other travelators. I wondered if it would be impertinent to congratulate Gabriel on selecting such a helpful analogy, but before I could say anything I sensed something odd about His manner. Although it was impossible in principle, He seemed uncomfortable. Surely not embarrassed? ‘If you have followed me so far,’ He went on, ‘I might raise another issue. A somewhat delicate one actually. You are, as you know, created in the image of Management, but there are one or two significant differences. I don’t believe you have ever had close relations — or even glancing relationships — with people without wondering whether they were male or female, and

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making every effort to find out. You could have been misled, of course, but you always formed a judgment and acted on it. You still do, although here it is completely irrelevant. As immortals, We do not reproduce ourselves, so We do not have the organs that you need for that purpose. It is difficult for you even to imagine ungendered beings, much less to grasp how We interact with each other. Well, We have that problem in reverse. I try to imagine a scenario in which every conversation, every glance, every intonation is shaped by the gender of those who take part. I try to imagine it — but I doubt that I succeed. And as for your frenetic mutual pleasuring, that is far beyond Our comprehension. More than that: it is quite distasteful. So, for example, your curiosity about My gender from the moment We met, and the impossibility of My answering your implicit questions, place a palpable barrier between us.’ I was overwhelmed. Gabriel must have been aware — eternally aware — that every mortal He met was suppressing a prurient curiosity about His (Her?) sexuality. Worse than prurience. If Gabriel was neither He nor She, my only other category was It. To be ungendered — let’s not pussy-foot around this: to be sexless — marks a being out as sub-human, not super-human. And how offensive can you be, to an amiable and omniscient Archangel? My instinct was to deny the thoughts that were bound to hurt Him. But I knew how futile that would be: He might be less than human but He would detect insincerity, even if He did not already know my thoughts. ‘Just as you can never fully understand what it is like to be Us, We cannot fully understand the dynamics of being human. That has been true ever since the Eden incident. We know that the temptations symbolised by the apple were overpowering.

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That much is obvious. But precisely what was so irresistible is something We may never understand. Was it knowledge? Experience perhaps? What could possibly outweigh the pleasures of innocence? The Fall is a really cosmic problem. The ultimate question, in fact.’ I wasn’t going to be drawn in to cosmic issues. If Gabriel had no gender, I wondered if He was physical at all. ‘Not really,’ He said at once. Did He read my mind or intuit the question? Did He eavesdrop all the time, or only when we were together? Either way, it was unnerving. ‘And that’s another part of the answer to your astute question. Like all aboriginal inhabitants here, I have no sense of touch. With rare exceptions, you and your fellows want to touch each other. You can’t, of course, but you remember the sensation of flesh on flesh and — no, there’s no need to apologise — you cannot escape your conditioning. We could remind you of each of your sexual pleasurings with every one of your partners. (Don’t be alarmed. I shall do no such thing.) I could even remind you which of them made you feel a twinge of guilt, but I cannot begin to understand why you behaved as you did. After a lifetime of fornicating and thinking about it, you cannot help wondering what We aboriginals feel like. Even those remarkable people who have lived a life of chastity cannot help thinking about what they are missing. That is the human condition, I regret to say. Then you wonder what it can be like for Us to feel nothing. Often enough that leads to pity, or even contempt. Once you have thought this over, I would not be very surprised to hear a patronising tone. You see — there you go already!’ Again, I wanted to deny it. Again, I couldn’t. He really is infuriating to argue with, not just because He is so well-informed,

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but because He knows exactly what you are going to say. Worst of all, He seems to know what you are trying hard not to say. ‘So you begin to grasp Management’s difficulty,’ He concluded. ‘Even when We do know everything, We understand very little.’

CRISPIN

A

round the time Crispin was born, the affair with Althea was building little hedges of silence around Win. She didn’t suspect her sister but she knew something was wrong and she knew she couldn’t trust me. I recognised her unfocused suspicion, I admitted its justice and I knew beyond doubt that I had to rebuild her trust. I just didn’t do it. The affair lingered and it demanded a degree of discretion that became a problem of its own. It might have been better if Win had discovered. She would have been terribly wounded, of course, but she would have understood what was wrong and we might have addressed the problem. But to confess was unthinkable. She would conclude that I had always been infatuated with Althea — that my professions of love, all my promises, had always been false. For fear of that terrible possibility I protected the awful secret so fiercely that every conversation was guarded. She could hear the pauses when I previewed everything I was going to say. And the balance of emotions shifted. We never fell out of love. How could I fall out of love with such a vital part of myself? Without putting it into words, not even

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knowing what we were doing, we redoubled our interest in each other’s careers. Win was never comfortable with the savvy that gave me an edge in public service politics and faction fighting. She complained that my intelligence was ruthless, without compassion, even repellent; but she did find my arguments interesting as well as (in her terms) illiberal and anti-social. Behind every successful man, they say, stands an astonished woman. The Kingston phenomenon fascinated Win, at least in a ghoulish way and perhaps more profoundly. It worked the other way, too. As a teacher Win was drawn into her pupils’ tragedies. Soon after Crispin was born, she began to study child psychology. When she became a school counsellor the job opened up a whole new way of thinking about people — about ourselves, really — which I never fully accepted, but did find provoking. These new interests did sustain our mutual fascination — and isn’t that just as good as love? Lucky Crispin. Despite these ominous tensions we were living comfortably. If he could have chosen his family, he would surely have picked us. And a bright little fellow he was, with his mother’s gentle intelligence. He walked and talked early and confidently. We thought that Kate might resent another baby, but as soon as she saw him she decided he was wonderful. He had none of my difficulties at school. The Canberra school system, mind you, and at the normal age, and that makes a difference: but he was much more sociable than me and everyone thought he was terrific. He was, too. No birthday party was complete without Crispin. How often did he come home clutching the customary ‘piece of birthday cake for your sister’? More remarkably, he handed them over. His other exceptional quality was his ear. As Anglicans-bybirth, our children were fated to learn a musical instrument. Kate

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was introduced to the recorder. With her hand-eye coordination, her intuitive intelligence and her gritty application, she was more than competent. I nearly said she ‘made a good fist’ of the recorder, and that would be unkind but not untrue. She was always accurate but she was never exciting. I forget how Cris met his first violin, but the conjunction was magical. Almost everyone who plays this improbable machine spends a decade groping for and almost finding the notes while their parents squirm. I steeled myself; but almost at once Cris mastered it. Within a year he was winning eisteddfods locally, then further afield. While other children grimaced and wrestled with this unnatural contraption, Cris always looked as if he was enjoying it. You could hear that in his playing. Adolescence was awful. Of course. Still, we were weathering it until Kate’s accident. Cris suffered more than anyone else, more even than Kate. He must have relived those few minutes a thousand times, always willing the story to have a different ending, always thinking of ways in which he could make that happen. Win and I did the same, but not with Cris’s intensity, not with his vulnerability. We didn’t seem able to help each other as we wallowed in the same murky water. I didn’t immediately notice when Cris put his violin away. Win did notice, of course. When we asked about it he was evasive, but so miserable that we didn’t have the heart to press him. A couple of months passed and then I heard a shocking new sound from his room. It was too tentative to be a recording, but it was unthinkable that Cris would make this noise himself. Or was it? After a few minutes I had to concede the awful truth: of all abominations, it was the sound of a guitar. He applied himself ferociously and, in a couple of months, he mastered it. I was

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distressed about the violin, but part of me had never seen it as suitable for a young person, and I admired the application and natural talent that he brought to such a different instrument. Win took it much harder. In the Anglican universe the violin embodies sacred values that the profane guitar repudiates. She could hear how well he played it, but she couldn’t forget how brilliantly he used to coax melodies from the fiddle. Neither could I. The rest was predictable, though we didn’t predict it. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single young man in possession of a guitar must be in want of a group. Local groups fought like cats (I choose the term carefully) to get Cris to play lead guitar with them. At first he wouldn’t, because he was expected to sing and he reckoned his voice was too soft. The suitors pointed out that amplification solves this problem. So long as he doesn’t sing right off-key, a lead singer can get away with murder. Cris had as true a voice as he needed, twice as much keyboard talent as his audience heard, and three times the lyrical genius. This is contemporary rock we’re talking about, so his audiences can’t follow the words in Crispin’s lyrics, but they sense the pain in his heart and the wound in his soul. They don’t put it in these terms, but they hear the sweet yearning that oozes from that wound. It’s not music for eternity, it’s for here, for now. And how magically it works. He can’t talk to us about those interminable minutes on the rocks, but he speaks to his audiences. They can’t hear the words but they do hear Cris. In some way they understand him, and in some equally mysterious fashion they empathise and they forgive. He took his Canberra Tertiary Entrance creditably, but by then he was virtually a full-time

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performer; he’d begun to record and his career was set. Among his peers, Kingston means rock music with emotional and political guts. The meaning is never explicit, but youngsters imagine that Cris voices their resentment of their parents, their rage at being dependent, their ambition to remake the world in their own unwashed, informal, undisciplined image. So they imagine Crispin in open revolt against the rationalist and materialist values of his dad. I don’t believe Crispin allows himself to think anything so crass, but I don’t know because we never discussed his betrayal of the violin, his affair with the guitar, and the way he was healing himself of a wound that none of us could acknowledge.

PROGRESS REPORT: CRISPIN

To

Gabriel, AA

From

Eliazar, A

Re

In the matter of Geoffrey Kingston: Crispin Kingston

Crispin is 20 years old, physically fit, usually wearing the torn jeans and the ill-fitting leathers that are mandatory in his part of the entertainment world. Younger nurses salivate at the prospect of his visits to Geoffrey’s bedside; older staff are delighted and surprised that a ‘rock’ musician speaks and behaves so courteously. In my role as rehabilitation specialist I asked him for a few minutes of his time. I reassured him that his father might well survive, but warned him that he might have to endure permanent frailty. For such an energetic man, this condition would be frustrating in the extreme. How might he cope with this handicap? Crispin reflected for a while then he recited

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the circumstances and consequences of his sister’s accident. It took me some time to adjust to his speech, since it is full of the phrases and allusions of his generation and his occupation. It was a great help that I knew the outline of that story, but his exposition was very clear and he drew perceptive conclusions. He confirmed, for example, that it was his mother who responded most effectively to the problems posed by his sister’s accident. She recognised that this was more than a medical issue: Kate and Crispin needed spiritual support (Crispin calls this psychological counselling). Geoffrey signed the cheques for the professional advice and the services that Winifred selected, evidently believing that this was all that could — or should — be required of him. Crispin is surprisingly understanding of Geoffrey’s inadequacy as a father. He points out that most men of Geoffrey’s background and social class would have felt exactly the same. He also had a slight justification. Winifred had begun training as a school counsellor and she had embarked on wide reading and many discussions with practitioners in what they call psychology. Crispin threw a great deal of light on the effect of the accident on Kate. Speaking with some hesitation and puzzlement, he described the kind of person she has become. Before the accident he had considered her merely an ordinary, middleclass child like himself — that is to say fairly clever, moderately well behaved, passably attractive and overall very dull. In adolescence she had kept him at arm’s length. That, he thought, might explain why he had overlooked her remarkable qualities until he grew up. He is still puzzled that Kate

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chose not to treat her broken spine as a handicap — puzzled and disconcerted. Since she denied there was a problem, there was no need for a solution. Crispin recognises, without blaming Kate, that this choice led the family into an impasse that hurt them all. Geoffrey was ‘beside himself’: he could not vent his anger against Kate, and his rages against Crispin, Winifred and himself did him no good. Winifred had studied all the insights and techniques that she believed she needed to help Kate and Crispin, so she was deeply distressed to have them rejected. Crispin himself was (in a typical human over-statement) ‘shattered’. What he means is that he hankered after Kate’s forgiveness, but she would not help him. He can see that he was asking her to admit that there was a serious problem, an admission she could not make, but he wonders if she might have stretched a point and gone through the motions of forgiving him, saving him years of depression and occasional bouts of self-hatred. It is clear to Crispin that his mother provided the help that sustained him through this prolonged crisis. As he put it, ‘She persevered, as if I was the only boy in the world, with the only problem. God, she’s good. Sorry — I still get weepy when I talk about her.’ Crispin’s depression lifted when he began to perform music. This evidently surprised all of them, although he already enjoyed the kind of inflated reputation that seems to flourish in provincial centres. His parents were aware that ‘Canberra’s Menuhin’ was something of an over-statement, but they were proud all the same. The career of a violinist, however, lies in ‘classical’ music, which implies a great deal of restraint.

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Winifred recognised that a violinist can play chamber music or join an orchestra, but there are few occasions to create and perform one’s own music. In addition, most professional players are adults, and a young violinist has few opportunities to perform with, or for, their own generation. It was Winifred who suggested the guitar. Winifred’s friends and acquaintances describe her as reliable, by which they mean that she is predictable, conventional, lacking the imagination or the anger to behave other than as a faithful wife and conscientious mother. I am not surprised to learn how she devoted her time and effort to Crispin, but I am very surprised by her prescription. For her and for Geoffrey the violin is the appropriate instrument for talented young people. The guitar is the antithesis of the violin. Because it demands no great talent or effort to learn how to play it; because it is the instrument of choice of rebellious young people; because it is usually amplified in public performances, it is seen as the instrument of anarchy. All this Winifred knew. Geoffrey was predictably appalled. As Crispin puts it, he is a musical ‘snob’, with little tolerance for musicians of Crispin’s age, much less their music. Rather to Crispin’s surprise — and to his delight — Geoffrey did become reconciled to his choice, and even takes a disbelieving pleasure in his growing reputation as a ‘rock’ musician. It must have been difficult to change his views on such a basic issue, and there are limits to his tolerance. One of many immense differences between the cultures of ‘classical’ and ‘rock’ music is the role of the libido. After both the public performances of classical music that I have attended, the audience expresses pleasure by clapping. After a particularly

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good performance the audience may stand to clap, for up to three minutes, before picking up their coats and going home. Crispin’s account of a ‘rock’ performance is quite different: I don’t know how much you know about the rock scene, but one terrific problem is groupies. Groupies? You know, fans, girls mainly. They get off on any association with the band. Especially the lead guitarists. At first it’s flattering as hell when some girl throws herself at you. Then you realise it isn’t personal at all. Still, for some girls it’s dead-serious. They really need affection even if they think they only want a fuck. I remember the first time I brought one of these girls home. We came to breakfast together, and it was like — well, I don’t know what it was like. Mum’s eyes were out on stalks but she pulled herself together. She introduced herself as if she met girls at the breakfast table all the time. Dad’s jaw hit the table. He just stared at the girl as if he’d never seen one. But he took his cue from Mum and said nothing. Afterwards he demanded an explanation. He wouldn’t go to work until he and Mum and I had thrashed it out. He said he and Mum hadn’t gone to bed until months after they knew they really loved each other. Can you believe that? Well, perhaps you can, but it’s hard for me. Anyway, he agreed this was a new age, a different generation. Different values or whatever. But he still thought it scandalous that anyone would go to bed before they knew each other’s names. I had to explain that nobody takes sex that seriously. And some of the sex was really crap. He was speechless when I told him that some groupies just wanted an animated dildo.

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I explained that this was an occupational hazard. And I take what Mum and Dad call ‘precautions’, so they lightened up. They lightened up quite a bit actually. In fact Dad admitted he was not only shocked at what he called ‘promiscuity’, he was jealous he’d been born into the wrong era. Mum and I killed ourselves laughing. It was not easy to suppress horror at this brazen recital; but I did, and Crispin went on to talk just as frankly about drug taking. This seems to be another ‘occupational hazard’. Crispin disapproves. In fact he said there was so much unrestrained taking of drugs that ‘it would make an angel weep’. (Another instance of the confident ignorance with which serious matters are often misunderstood.) Inevitably, the police raid concerts to try to arrest drug users and confiscate the drugs. Not long ago the police raided a concert where Crispin was performing and found syringes in the back-stage toilet and amphetamines in the dressing room. Some of the latter were in Crispin’s guitar case. Though they were not his, the discovery of such a quantity of pills has led other musicians to jail. The least he could expect was a large fine when the case came to court. Several days passed and a couple of ‘groupies’ were charged with possessing small quantities of prohibited substances, but nobody in the band was questioned. Eventually Crispin was visited by a young woman from the police Drug Squad who told him that the public prosecutor had decided it was too hard to prove possession by any individual. She added (to Crispin’s disbelief) that the Drug Squad accepted that small amounts of drugs were normal at rock concerts. No harm

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seemed to have been done and prosecution would not lead them to the suppliers. Crispin told the young woman that he was impressed by her uncommonly sensible and humane approach. She looked at him with such a strange expression that he raised the matter later with Geoffrey. After some bluster, Geoffrey conceded that he might possibly have had a word with the Director of Public Prosecutions, and might even have exchanged phone calls with someone in the Drug Squad. This discussion was provoked by my asking Crispin how his father might respond to physical incapacity. Crispin concluded that his father is more broad-minded and flexible than his public image would suggest. Public ferocity and zeal in ‘reactionary’ causes seem to be necessary if someone is to be taken seriously by governments. The private person (a distinction that people readily accept) is much more humane, in Crispin’s judgment. Geoffrey was badly hurt by Kate’s coldness and appalled by her career choice, but he has been completely supportive of her and — Crispin suspects — quietly proud of her. But Crispin’s observations about himself and his family reveal the extent to which he misunderstands things familial and temporal, not to mention his unbounded ignorance of things eternal: He disapproves of my music, my friends, the rough company, the groupies, the politics. But he’s never said a cross word about it. Not in public or in private. I wish he was proud of me, like he is of Kate. But at least he’s not ashamed. And don’t take my word for it. Mum put up with him for more than 20 years until the bust-up. Although she’s a real angel she’s not an idiot.

OUR FATHER IN HEAVEN?

N

inety more Beethoven symphonies to hear and however many Mozart dashed off before he quit, then on to Puccini. Bach is, of course, the source of all great classical music, which is mainly a working-out of his ideas and principles. That’s music for eternity if ever I heard such a thing. I’m sure he wouldn’t have lost interest, so he has probably created whole new approaches in the past three centuries to take advantage of the new instruments and the harmonies they allow. Despite the anticlimax of the Beethoven concert, I could not doubt the value of Gabriel’s offer. It was just that first concert, and Celia’s melancholy, that made me suspicious about this place and doubt my ability to make sensible recommendations. I looked to another chat with Celia to find out more. One great puzzle that she must have thought about was Father’s presence. In life he bullied his workmates to keep up their union subs and hectored their bosses to pay them more than they deserved. When I was a child I accepted that he was a Robin Hood, menacing the capitalists on behalf of the workers, but even

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then I’d never thought him Poor in Spirit. As I gained wider perspective, I could see that his interference in the domain of management only handcuffed creative managers and impeded the growth of the firms that employed his lay-about members. Some men were indebted to him for keeping them in work, but the working population as a whole suffered from inflexible wages and conditions. In short, some individuals profited from his patronage, but the working class as a whole would have done better without him. You might want to argue that point, but nobody could represent our Father as Poor in Spirit. He ridiculed anyone who made a virtue of meekness. A career as a shop steward shaped the way he dealt with the world, including his family (and we were his family, not Mum’s, much less our own). He acknowledged only three kinds of people. There were bosses, their professional advisers and political allies, who must always be resisted. There were unionists, all virtuous but many of them so slow-witted that they had to be tongue-lashed to recognise their interests and cooperate with each other — and with Father. And there were other odds and sods, some of whose ideas might sound progressive, but these diversions were mischievous (and objectively reactionary) because they drew energy away from the essential battle. He and Celia disagreed on every possible subject and their arguments were fuelled by toxic emotions. Their disagreements cut much deeper than Father’s and mine. They never had a good word for each other. If he took perverse pride in my rebellion and the career it opened up, nothing Celia did won even grudging praise. Knowing how deep was the enmity between them, I tried not to mention him to Celia. But curiosity got the better of me.

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‘It’s more than odd,’ I began. ‘It’s perverse. All my life I would have defined Heaven as somewhere that Father wasn’t. I suspect that Mum agreed with me, by the way. And that’s another puzzle: do you really think that eternity with him would strike her as Heaven?’ ‘I’ve had only one encounter. It was pretty much what I expected, even though it’s much too late to be arguing about workers and women. He had a go at feminism. It made no sense for me to react to his baiting, but I couldn’t resist. The argument became an exchange of old insults. As usual, Mum flapped around trying to talk banalities. If we can only exchange pleasantries when we’ve made it to Heaven, how the hell long do we have to wait to have a proper argument?’ I told her about my meeting, how much it depressed me and how awkward I felt in having so many unresolved issues with them — well, with Father really. ‘I’m not sure that I can leave it there. Is it fair to give up hope of some sort of relationship with them — for ever? Do we have the right to write them off?’ I should have put the question more carefully. Celia reacted as if I was criticising her, but I had never expected her to feel responsible. ‘I’ll remind you of that when Kate and Crispin turn up here to convert you to Anarchism or Post-Structuralism or marijuana or whatever they most recently indulged in.’ ‘Peace, Cee; this is my problem, not yours. You can change your mind anytime in the next few hundred years. I have only this one chance to talk to them and I feel guilty about missing that chance just because I’d prefer to avoid them.’ ‘Are you ever going to tell me about these special circumstances? But first we have to deal with this question of meeting Mum and Father.’

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She took the equivalent of a deep breath. She’d been thinking about this day after day, for how many aeons, so she obviously had a lot of thoughts to marshall. ‘How do you know that Mum and Father are real? You didn’t touch them, did you? And you were cagey on whether or not you could see them. So, what does your evidence add up to: did you actually hear them?’ ‘Of course not. You know perfectly well, that’s not how communication works here. There’s a quite different sense at work — sense without sensation. But you know beyond doubt who’s talking to you.’ ‘Hold on to that notion, Geoff, that’s precisely the point. It wasn’t talking. I don’t have a word for it; let’s call it conversing. Did Father or Mum say anything that surprised you? Anything at all that you couldn’t have expected? No? I thought not. They didn’t say anything out of the ordinary to me either.’ ‘So what? That’s partly how I’m sure who was talking — well, conversing.’ ‘No, that’s precisely what should make you suspicious. We’ll come back to that. But first consider how impossible it is that the Father we know could have met the Entry criterion. Now ask yourself why Mum and he would be hanging out with each other when they’ve been married for — how many years now?’ ‘It must be at least 50, some while they were alive, some since they’ve been dead. Most of them in-between, if you think about it.’ ‘Yes, there’s no great difference for poor old Mum! Fifty years and not a new idea between them. This is your idea of Heaven?’

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I had no answer. Hardly surprising, given the novelty of the experience and the fact that Celia had several years’ head start in this discussion. But where was this argument going? What could Celia possibly mean? ‘Go back to first principles,’ she advised. ‘And the first principle of Heaven is that everything is the same, yesterday, today and tomorrow. And yet I know that I have changed, not just learned more things, but changed some of my values. I don’t suppose I’m unique, so it seems likely that any individual can change, at least in some ways. You could learn French if you wanted, or teach yourself to play the clarinet properly [a low blow] so you could change in more fundamental ways. You could be more mellow perhaps, or more assertive. You may say that the changes in me are trivial, since you had no trouble recognising me; but you did notice a certain despondency, a mood that caught you by surprise. So there’s clear evidence that I’ve not just acquired more knowledge. I really have changed in myself. That must mean that you can change, too, and so can everyone else who gets here. ‘You’re with me so far? Anyone can change in some respects? OK, but Mum and Father obviously have not. That’s no accident — there are no accidents in the Afterlife, I’m sure you’ve noticed. So how come they haven’t changed? The most likely explanation is that they can’t change — if they are only projections of your imagination.’ Projections? Preposterous! ‘What if I imagine them learning French?’ ‘I wish you would, and I wish they would. But even that wouldn’t prove the case for their being real. They could still be mere projections, unable to move beyond the limits of your

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memory and the scenarios scripted in your imagination. You can call that being real if you insist, but you can’t call it a life or even an Afterlife. You certainly can’t call it autonomy.’ I couldn’t fault Celia’s logic and she’d planted a seed of anxiety. I had almost felt her school uniform, almost smelt the sweat of the playground, almost seen her eyes. But had I really? Evidently the only test was whether she had surprised me. Well, she’d certainly done that, hadn’t she? But didn’t I always expect her to surprise me? ‘I know this is difficult to take in, and I’m sorry I can’t put it more simply. I’ve got ahead of you because I have become used to conversations with projections. Tagore, for example. Obviously he can’t talk to all the millions of people who demand to meet him. I don’t believe I spoke to the real Tagore any more than I had a real Bengali language teacher or argued with the real Pankhursts. That’s why I was less than ecstatic when you turned up. Incidentally I must apologise for the coolness, now that I’m sure that you’re not a mirage.’ I was quite mollified by this confession, but Celia had to go and spoil the effect. ‘And what is it that makes me sure you are real? The impossibility of imagining you here!’

HEAVEN ON EARTH

I

think I mentioned Ernie Black. The socialist pharmacist? His perspective on the politics of social class and the determining influence of economic relationships and institutions had been a revelation, almost as arresting as Father Weedes’s views on personal and social values. To my surprise, Ernie’s socialist ideas were as odious as Anglicanism when I tried to explain them to Father. Perhaps that’s why they intrigued me. As I was mulling over ways in which death changes one’s point of view, I recalled how much I had been affected by Ernie’s perspectives — at least until I went to uni and perhaps even longer. It was enchanting to be treated as an adult, to sit in the back of his shop, surrounded by pills and potions, prostheses and the cosmetics and soft toys that brought him most of his income. Ernie was a slight, bespectacled, balding chap in (I suppose) his fifties. Apart from his white coat, you wouldn’t look at him twice, unless you noticed that he always leaned forward, as if slightly deaf, paying close attention to anyone who was talking to him. You might then notice the alert expression and the optimism that

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shone through his eyes. That millenarian optimism was slightly guarded, of course, to protect it from the mockery — or the aggression — of his customers. Behind the counter though, he was free to explain how the savagery of the kids at school was not an expression of innate philistinism, but understandable fury at their exclusion from the refining influences of culture and civilisation. The ultimate purpose of socialism, he insisted, was not the dictatorship of the working class but its complete abolition. Since my vision of a working-class dictatorship was the reign of Father, I was delighted by Ernie’s reassurance! He never patronised me (I would have detected that) and I enjoyed his company so much that I was sorry to reject most of what he believed. In those long-lost days we would be deep in his explanations when a little bell would warn us that a customer had come into the shop, and Ernie would jump up, ever ready with compassion and sensible advice on haemorrhoids or tinea, seeming to give the same absolute attention to each customer as he did to his adolescent acolyte. So now I concentrated on what I reckoned was the big question to put to him: after a lifetime of anticipating Heaven on Earth, what would he make of Heaven in Heaven? Sure enough, after a few moments of my concentrated attention, there he was, bending to me like a friendly praying mantis, evidently delighted by this reunion. Surprisingly — and I was delighted to be surprised — his first concern was not metaphysics but meta-pharmacy. All his adult life, he explained, he had tended to the complaints that townsfolk brought to the chemist shop for free diagnosis before they turned to the doctor. Now there was no call for this

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expertise. Not only was his body of information becoming outof-date, but so were the bodies he was trained to heal. What especially vexed him was an idea that he was sure would transform the lives of many of the living. Despite his vast knowledge of materia medica, he was here because he had poisoned himself, entirely by accident. Turning 70 and suffering from a variety of complaints, he was supposed to consume no less than 13 kinds of pill during each 24-hour cycle, each with different requirements, and several compounding or deflecting the effects of others. He was sure that thousands of ageing people faced this daily Russian roulette. He was equally sure that if pharmacists had more authority and behaved more pro-actively with their patients, most of these ridiculous suicides could be avoided. Although this particular idea was entirely his own, he was not alone in his mutinous mood. He kept bumping into out-ofwork pharmacists, with whom he shared a range of regrets and frustrations. GPs were in the same boat, too, and so were nurses — though he did not meet quite as many specialists as he had expected. It was not just that their professions had become a central element of their identities (though that was exasperating in this disembodied environment), but they felt keenly the extravagant waste of their talents. Only after this lament for the healing professions did Ernie turn to politics. I expected that he would be yearning to hear Good News for Modern Socialists. That saddened me because on that subject I may be the least sympathetic commentator alive — or dead. So Ernie’s actual state of mind astonished me. ‘Did try to keep up with events, you know. Somehow lost interest though. Do feel a bit guilty about that. Partly the depressing news from new Entrants. And human nature seems to

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resist improvement, don’t you think? Not sure I’d welcome dictatorship of the proletariat actually. Not sure they’d welcome me, for that matter! ‘Do worry about humanity’s future, though. Disappointing program of action, Socialism, but not a bad way to keep the capitalists on their toes. Without that critique, what’s to keep the bastards honest? Is there hope for humanity, d’you reckon? Or the end of history?’ I was pleased that he put the problem this way, having given a lot of thought to the subject. So had several of my colleagues, as I should have expected. Many movers and shakers in the movement for rational economic management — the Chicago Movement — had first dabbled with Marxism, and abandoned it only with its comprehensive failure to deliver material or social benefits. In a sense we were switching sides, but it would be wrong to accuse us of ignoring the working class, into which most of us were born. It was the continuities, not the contrasts, that impressed me when I was making the transition. Both ideologies see the economy as the prime source of social conditions and political behaviour, prosperity as the main ingredient of happiness, and capitalism as the most powerful creator of wealth. Governments are not nearly as autonomous as politicians and voters believe. It follows that the most useful role for managers of the economy and the polity — and that includes trade union leaders — is to step aside and unleash the capitalist economy. There are overlaps between the two ways of seeing the world, but you can understand how people with a stake in the old protected economy might struggle to protect their privileges. Might? They would. In Cardigan City they did, and made my life very unpleasant for a few weeks. The main employer in

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town (apart from the council and tourism) was Noble’s, a factory that made agricultural tools — mainly windmills and water tanks. Even behind tariff barriers, the factory had never enjoyed more than marginal viability since it was created by the original Ebenezer Noble in the 1880s. Every few years management appealed to the Commonwealth, the State or the council for financial concessions to keep it afloat. By the time Australia was negotiating free trade with New Zealand, the US and East Asia, Noble’s was conspicuous for the extent and variety of its subsidies. Nobody would take Australia’s free-trade agenda seriously while Noble’s flaunted its favours from successive governments. As an adviser to the minister responsible, I had no hesitation in advising the abolition of these benefits. The minister had no hesitation in accepting my advice — but, as a rat-cunning peasant and rural MP, he passed off all the credit for this strategy to his chief adviser. No sooner was this made known than the local newspapers caricatured me as a latter-day Quixote mounted on the ass of globalisation, leading an irrational charge against the Noble windmill. Me? Economically irrational? That accusation was almost as damaging as the news that the current Ebenezer Noble — the fifth of that name, parishioner of St Barnabas’, member of the council, patron of the leagues and netball clubs — had foreseen the policy shift and the collapse of his factory. This the workforce inferred from his new address in Rio de Janeiro, even before it was revealed that he had cleaned out any assets that were not nailed down, including the workers’ superannuation. Blind Freddy could have predicted the downfall of Noble’s, but the local paper and the union delegates preferred a conspiracy. Their

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scenario had Ebenezer receiving illicit warning in the form of information leaked by a former parishioner of St Barnabas’ (and axiomatically Noble’s bosom pal) who had betrayed his family, his class-mates, his class, his friends (if any) and his town. ***** The wider trade union movement accepted the need for open markets, so they had accepted tariff reduction as unfortunate but inevitable, especially for Noble’s which was such a large consumer of subsidies. Ebenezer’s gross dishonesty and its propaganda possibilities changed everything. The ACTU sent a representative from Melbourne to lead the workers’ campaign for their entitlements, selecting an articulate and telegenic young negotiator with local connections in Cardigan City — Garth Lewis himself. And Garth played a cunning hand, taking every chance to develop his argument without scotching the obscene accusations against me. ‘Comrades,’ he would say (or ‘friends in the media’ or ‘fellow-townsfolk’), ‘the real issue is the Government’s responsibility to protect the assets — superannuation, long-service leave, holiday pay and so on — earned by honest workers over many decades of strenuous labour. Whether or not our old friend Geoffrey Kingston warned his old friend Ebenezer Noble is not the issue. I don’t believe the Government should accept the ideologically driven advice of our old friend Geoffrey Kingston to dismantle the struggling manufacturing industry in Queensland. But rampant globalisation and economic ideology are not the main issues either. The real issue is not Geoffrey Kingston at all,’ he would say, with lurid insincerity, ‘but the Government’s moral and financial obligations. We have to concentrate on ways to

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force them to behave honourably towards the honest workers of our town.’ True to his instincts, my peasant minister kept his head down. Perhaps I should have followed his example. I was not an elected representative after all, but I couldn’t stay away from a scrap that had become so personal. When I did travel to my home town to address a public meeting, however, I was too late. The town hall was packed with unionists chanting the cacophonous cries of their kind, ‘What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now!’ How many years has this stupid chant been heard? Nobody heard a word of my address, nor would the local paper print it. The professional and business elite didn’t bother to turn up, offering the excuse that they were sure of my innocence. And, for the final indignity, that devious bastard Garth Lewis showed himself sickeningly generous in his political victory. Of course it was only a political victory, a tactical coup that made no difference to the bigger struggle. It wasn’t consequential, but it was revealing. The ambition of socialism, I had thought, was social equality and political harmony sustained by a prosperous economy and full employment in which every talent had an outlet and every genuine need was met. The bastard offspring of socialism was the defence — by every underhand method — of the most privileged elite of workers in a thoroughly corrupt society, throttling the creative possibilities of economic growth. That — apart from the humiliation of my parents’ funeral — was the inglorious end of my association with St Barnabas’, Cardigan City and the world of my childhood. I would never need to visit the place again, to see the old infrastructure reinvented as Industrial Heritage. Ernie was not as depressed as I feared, while I told him the last couple of chapters in the saga of Heaven on Earth.

CHOSEN PEOPLE

C

onversations with Gabriel are always fascinating — but conversation is not quite the right term. He has Presence but He’s never fully present and always so radiant that He’s difficult to look at. I can pick up the variations in tone but I do miss the eyecontact and the body language that conversation implies. Does that suggest something disembodied? Yes, but there’s another striking quality. Is it like a telephone conversation? Not exactly, because that implies sequential dialogue — I said, He said, I asked, He responded, and so on. It’s easier to describe what’s missing than what happens. After any ‘conversation’ I have a crystal-clear sense of Gabriel’s meaning and a vivid memory of His more dramatic turns of phrase — but I recall very little that I said myself. I can’t even be certain that I have spoken at all. Gabriel’s ability to sense my questions before I formulate them gives these meetings a pronounced lop-sidedness. (Actually, un-pronounced, but I digress.) When I asked about this facility, He seemed pleased — with the question, or with His skills? He’d had to develop this

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talent to converse in all the languages of all Entrants. He did enjoy Australian English apparently but enjoyment was incidental. Another language that gave Him pleasure was Bengali, for the richness of its allusions and the depth of its resonances. Some of the rarer languages gave Him trouble, because He had so few occasions to practice them. He was almost embarrassed by His stumbling attempts at Papuan languages and sad that He sometimes had to rely on tok pisin. In one of our conversations, even more like a monologue than usual, He pointed out how readily we humans treat ourselves as the Chosen Species. Why, He wondered aloud, did we assume that providence had no interest in other species, other planets, other universes? What have frogs done, He asked archly, to disqualify themselves from Divine attention? As He warmed to His rhetoric, He made a credible case for allowing equal divine love to flow to birds (having detected my weakness on that subject) and even fish, most of whom seem quite inoffensive. From that platform He launched into advocacy for fanciful creatures — the species whose inoffensiveness helped us exterminate them. He even alluded to beings on other planets, hoping that they would manage to keep out of human sight. In a moment of panic I wondered if He had decided that the selection of the Chosen Species might have been a mistake. If the decision was up for review, how would we humans fare? He must have detected my thought that He was sidling away from the topic at hand, whatever that had been. He brought Himself back to the general charge and its specific outcome, the human expectation that God is (or at least ought to be) an elderly and irascible gentleman with white hair, a long beard, sparkling clean robes and leather sandals.

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Gabriel said He had let that assumption slide in earlier conversations because there had been more pertinent topics to ventilate. Now, however, it was important I was disabused of mischievous notions. God, He declared with massive emphasis, is very much more than a mere super-human, in fact very much more than a being. How many times did humans have to be told that God is Love and Love is God? God is not a being at all but an all-embracing principle. Treating such a divine and transcendent principle as if it was no more than a humanoid is therefore the most sacrilegious, outrageous, self-centred … at this point He pulled Himself together again, perhaps believing that He had already protested too much. In another conversation, He canvassed the idea of Heaven, and complained of the extravagant expectations that animated many newly arrived souls. ‘What the Hell do you expect of Heaven?’ He asked, unable even now to resist word games. He was exasperated as well as puzzled that the human race expects a Last Judgment. Not only that; we all expect a friendly court, in which the Judge will make ample allowance for our own extenuating circumstances. Heaven has to commit huge resources to research just to describe these circumstances, much less to ‘understand’ and take them into account. That, He added with even heavier emphasis, was one of the factors making a complete overhaul an attractive option for Management. He was confident that I would come up with proposals that would avoid such radical re-thinking. I hoped He was right! Well, I wondered, whose fault was this? Who generated that expectation? To that almost-defined question Gabriel responded, articulating very clearly and very slowly, as if to a small child. He insisted that it wasn’t Him who encouraged that

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idea, and indeed it wasn’t any of the Management team. It is true that many apocryphal documents and loose commentaries debate the nature and outcomes of ‘the Last Judgment’, but that is often a mere figure of speech. In any case these texts reveal much more about the human angst of the scribes and writers than Heavenly commitment. In His view, the human race had failed abjectly to create a half-way just society anywhere at any time. (No, He dismissed my almost-interjection, not even in New Zealand.) People at all times and everywhere find themselves in deep despair and they invariably expect Heaven to compensate. No justice on Earth? No worries, mate; you’ll get your deserts in Heaven. Management’s resources and Gabriel’s patience were stretched thin dealing with arbitration. That was bad enough, even before the world got to hear about the US Supreme Court. Since Hollywood and television had simplified and publicised the procedures of the Supreme Court across the world, almost every negative judgment has gone to appeal! Gabriel was again developing a head of steam, and I had to sympathise with Him until He added an even more disturbing notion. Not only do PinS see Heaven as their chance to enjoy the pleasures denied them (or denied to themselves) in life; many of the most austere and religious PinS display an unseemly zeal for the punishment of their enemies. More in anger than in sorrow, He summarised the nub of many exasperating conversations with Entrants. What’s that — your neighbour coveted your wife? You mean he and she committed adultery? Murder, too, eh, and they got away with it? Well, We’ll certainly look into these matters when We have the time and opportunity. But no Sir, Heaven does not take victim statements. We never said that We would make the punishment fit the crime.

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No, I don’t know who did say that, but believe Me We are looking out for him. This candour and vehemence suggested that Gabriel was telling me things that He would not share with any old soul. Until now I’d been nervous about raising doubt about my own suitability, but Gabriel’s confiding so much in me made this seem a good time to ask why I’d been selected. From Gabriel’s point of view, surely it would be more fitting to engage a consultant who had my skill set (and yes, there are a few) but who was also a genuine believer and all-round good person. Gabriel insisted that a great deal of thought had gone into choosing me. He judged that I was not the cleverest consultant available, nor even the most reliable (thank you very much!). What I did have, in addition to wide experience and a somewhat lateral mind, was an enviable (His term) ability to focus all my intelligence and energy on a single issue. That summed me up rather well and His statement cheered me, but it didn’t explain why He hadn’t found a more religious — a more virtuous — consultant. Gabriel’s explanation astonished me. I was certainly not selected for my sketchy grasp of Theology — nor was my lapse into agnosticism a serious handicap. A while back — He was vague about human chronology — there had been a crisis provoked by the Entry of deeply religious PinS who made a virtue of hating not only sin and all sinners, but adherents of contending faiths. Did I know, He asked incredulously, that some male souls who committed particularly violent deeds against other faiths expected to be entertained by teams of virgins? Gabriel took great pleasure in providing the virgins, without mentioning that they would, of course, remain chaste for eternity, and so would the souls themselves.

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These were evidently extreme cases, but hostility between the faiths had become very general. At first Management took innocent pleasure from confronting Crusaders with Saracens, Sunni with Shiah, Hindu with Buddhist militants. Each group was aghast to be sharing the same environment with the other. A few souls were so affronted that they asked to be transferred. They would rather have Hell to themselves than share Heaven with their rivals. The only effective resolution, Gabriel went on, was to insulate each Entrant, so that each soul encountered only the other souls they expected to find — the ones that they wanted or needed to meet. That was probably why my own Heaven was — so far, anyway — disturbingly bland. Anyway, until this device had been developed and tested, Management had given serious thought to changing the rules so as to bar the Entry of religious militants of all stripes. I wondered idly if they would have found themselves in Hell or nowhere — or not have found themselves at all. I tried to imagine a Heaven that would not admit those who most fervently believed in it. That might have satisfied my delight in paradox, but in the event Management had not found it necessary to go to such extremes. Even so, the episode left Them with a preference for souls who’d been virtuous without dogma, and an abiding distrust of those who’d been dogmatic without virtue.

RESIGNATION

This was fascinating, but it didn’t resolve the immediate problem, which was Celia’s settled mood. She was melancholy and somehow flat. Of course she was dispirited, but why was she so lacking animation? Was this resignation? ‘Of course I’m resigned,’ she had told me. ‘We all are, when we work things out. It’s a much deeper, more enveloping condition than you could ever imagine in life.’ I must have seemed puzzled. This was a condition nobody could have expected of such a passionate, hyperactive woman. ‘The worst moment of my life was not the night that I was killed, but the day a couple of years earlier when those adolescent yobs vandalised the women’s refuge. An appalling event, totally. But even at the worst we thought we might find a sympathetic policeman or even a policewoman to intervene and enforce the AVOs. As you know, that notion collapsed, so we had to mobilise women to protect themselves. That worked of course; but even when we expected it to fail, we hoped that the next generation of women and men would see the need for refuges. And if even that

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project failed we expected that we’d all be better people in the Afterlife. There was always hope, even when there was no reason for it. The sweet by-and-by, that was the safety net for hope.’ ‘Heaven as the Last Resort? Well it’s turned out all right? Hasn’t it?’ ‘As good as it gets, yes. So why am I not ecstatic? You still don’t get it? This is it. The End. All passengers disembark. The Abandoned Restaurant at the End of the Universe.’ I was still baffled by her resignation but now I picked up something equally surprising — bitterness perhaps? Having nothing to say, I waited while she gathered her thoughts. ‘So what? So there’s no more future, nothing to look forward to. There’s nothing to fear, of course, but that’s just another way of saying there’s no more hope.’ It was not only Celia’s mood of regret that saddened me but something more general, something I couldn’t immediately name. In Heaven I expected people to be upbeat, even mindlessly cheerful. The state of the souls I had come across didn’t seem at all like bliss. Naturally, people have different capacities for happiness and different ways of expressing it. I have no idea how Buddhists would behave while they awaited Nirvana or recycling. God knows, probably, or Gabriel I should say. I have a better handle on the ways of Christians. I would expect Pentecostalists to be noisily rapturous. Evangelicals could be delirious, saying ‘Told you so’ to all and sundry; Catholics would be thrilled in a more modulated way; and Methodists would give each other hugs and sing Wesleyan hymns. Of course, Anglicans would muster well-bred contentedness and express it in very precise and restrained terms. That gave me the idea. I would enjoy sharing my ideas with Father Weedes. He must have seen everything I had seen,

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and surely this would challenge his values. As I may have mentioned, my Afterlife felt disturbingly like Australia in the 1950s, no black people in sight, nobody speaking a language other than English, not a trace of non-Christian faiths, and not much other diversity. That is especially disconcerting in light of Management’s stated commitment to ecumenism. I would have to ask Gabriel how He could reconcile this rhetoric with a practice that assumes that souls can cooperate only with their own clones. In some other respects Father Weedes might feel vindicated — if he allowed himself to criticise other faiths or points of view. He always asserted that Love is God with more confidence than he professed that God is Love. As a matter of fact, he never seemed completely sure of God’s existence as some sort of persona. On the other hand, he’d never challenged anyone’s right to believe in Him (or Her, or any numinous being). So strongly did he preach tolerance, he was in two minds about Christian missions and the very idea of heathenism. He would regret the present blandness but He would surely be pleased to find the Afterlife so well ordered, and amused to see such a clear hierarchy. Above all, he’d be relieved that pastoral care was available. His congregation had treated him more like a social worker than a priest and Evensong sometimes had the flavour of an encounter group. The conversation with Celia left me rather Poor in Spirit. I really needed the quiet encouragement of Father Weedes. He had the knack of lifting my rare (and brief ) adolescent anxieties and low moods. He did nothing so crude as cheer me up, but he always offered such wide perspectives that my depressions shrank into insignificance. Remembering him fondly, I should not have been surprised to find myself in his slightly shabby presence.

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‘Just the man I need!’ There was pleasure as well as open astonishment in his greeting. The pleasure was surprising and the surprise disconcerting, but I didn’t like to ask him to explain. I badly wanted to know if the Afterlife lived up to his expectations. Had he experienced some of the pleasures and satisfactions that eluded me? Was he — in a word — happy? ‘You’ve lost none of your directness, I’m glad to see! That, as we used to say in the innocent old days, is the $64,000 question. I wish I could answer in kind, but I fear I have only some rather muddled and contradictory impressions. ‘I did, of course, expect to worship God. From the bottom of my heart I wanted to thank Him for creating the world and all that’s in it, to praise Him with all my being for bringing us salvation, not just to the world in general but to individuals. And, of course, I did thank Him, although it felt strange to be addressing an abstraction rather than a super-human man on a proper throne. But then? Gratitude is the ultimate conversation-stopper, here as much as it was in the other life. What is God to say, after all? “Prego: don’t mention it”? And what are we to say next? ‘Anyway, it’s impossible to hold any conversation with a principle. I’ve nothing against Love as a principle, you understand; what better principle could there possibly be to make the universe turn? And, of course, I agree that an old white man in a night-shirt and sandals was a sadly inadequate way to imagine Divine Providence. It’s just that Love is not a negotiable principle, it’s the ultimate Absolute, so there’s really nothing to talk about. ‘I confess I’m dismayed by the one-dimensionalness of everything. There’s brilliant light but no shadow, have you

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noticed? Universal love — and no unpleasantness. Sweet music with no disharmony, and there isn’t an ugly sight to be seen. I begin to wonder what is the point of virtue without vice. I wonder if I can say this without causing offence — I’m so pleased to see you, not just for your amusing company, but on account of your exceptional qualities. How can I put this? It’s your lack of spirituality, your Earthly ambition, even — may I say? — your frank materialism. There is no one in the least like you in these parts. If you will pardon my curiosity, I am dying to know how you came to be here at all. Well dying is the wrong word, but you know what I mean. You must have had a quite dramatic career change since I last heard of your doings?’ I had no wish to discuss my mission, so I fobbed him off while I pondered what he’d said. Eternal life, Heaven, whatever you call it, is tedious even for someone who spent his life preparing for it. Perhaps most especially for them? ‘Well, that’s not entirely true, you know. Priests do a bit more than prepare for death. As you know, I don’t accept that priests are social workers with funny collars; but that is a perfectly valid part of the vocation. I thought that the value and purpose of Christianity is not only to prepare the soul for eternal life in some remote future, but to enrich the lives of Christians and Christian communities in the immediate present.’ And what about other faiths, I wanted to know? Was Father Weedes’s ecumenism unshaken in the light of his living (if that’s what you can call it) in a manifestly Anglican Heaven? He had worked it out for himself. ‘Is the Heaven of my experience — shaped by my individual imagination — the same as yours? You were my most receptive initiate, but even so our imaginations are completely

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separate. So — I believe — are our sensations here. If you follow that line of thought, there must be as many Heavens as there are inhabitants. Why would there not be Taoist Heavens or even atheist Heavens, all shaped or cramped by our imaginations? In fact, why not home-made Hells as well?’ Had I seen anyone at the Beethoven concert who seemed strange to me? Probably not. But Father Weedes was not about to release his perverse pupil. ‘Light without dark is one disorienting thing. Love without hate is another. Beauty without ugliness. You — or at least I — need the contrast, the opposition. A thesis needs an antithesis, after all, just as light needs shade. Without the contrast, without the tension, even the salt loses is savour. If there are Hells, which I seriously doubt, they must be segregated, invisible to us, offering no real contrast. Put it this way: if there’s no Muzak, there’s no Mozart! But the most difficult of all conditions to accept is Life — or, if you will, Afterlife — without Death. What is perpetual life, after all, but perpetual death with the lights switched on?’

SUBMISSION

‘T

he thing is,’ I began, ‘people do bring certain expectations to the Afterlife.’ There was a flicker of indignation from Gabriel. He crushed it at once, of course, but it was enough to fill me with alarm. I had to address His reservations if I wanted to carry Him on the main points; and my eternal life might depend on His response to the main points of the Submission. Other people’s lives, too. No wonder I was anxious! ‘These assumptions are irrational, I concede. Certainly not binding on Management. Even if the PinS could take Management to a court of arbitration — and I know that’s inconceivable — no fair court would sustain the woolly, superstitious, irrational hopes that humans cherish. Some expectations flow from kinks in human nature, as You know, and others from inequities in human societies, as You explained so clearly. None of these expectations are justified by Management promises. Before that imaginary umpire You could take Your stand on the complete fairness and the consistency of Management’s approach

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to Earthly affairs. Actually, that seems to be Your current position. It’s a telling argument, of course, but this defensible stance paints You into a corner. So long as You stand on this principle and insist on Your absolute innocence, You rule out any organisational change. And, if there can’t ever be any change, what’s the point of negotiating with the PinS or even consulting me? So: I know that You always know exactly what I’m going to propose, but before I say any more, I’d welcome some assurance from Management that Your adherence to that Principle won’t necessarily stand in the way of Accommodation.’ This was my longest address since arriving. It was probably the longest that had engaged Gabriel’s uninterrupted attention for many aeons. I don’t suppose He enjoyed having His role explained: like some of my early clients, He may have felt patronised. He was certainly troubled. When I asked for this undertaking, maybe two or three nano-seconds elapsed before it was forthcoming. ‘Well, moving along,’ I continued, ‘rightly or wrongly — all right then, wrongly — people arrive here yearning for judgment and vindication. They would like an indulgent gloss on their human failings, generous rewards for themselves and ferocious punishment for their enemies. You explained that when I arrived and I can’t improve on that explanation.’ An outsider might describe my approach as smarmy and inappropriate for a professional presentation. Is it possible to be too ingratiating? Not on your life! Nor in death. ‘There is, as You say, a powerful case for doing away with judgment and discrimination altogether. However, that is not the dominant human feeling, merely the current fashion of a rather small intellectual elite. So long as most humans believe that virtue

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should be rewarded, and so long as our societies are unjust, almost all of those who turn up here will expect a reward. Or if not, at the very least they’ll expect their enemies to be punished. The more I think about this, the less I can imagine a resolution. Human nature seems to demand personal justice; human society can never deliver it. It would be completely out of character for Management to re-design the Afterlife simply to accommodate humanity’s failures; and, in any event, an Afterlife that embodied human ideas would simply reproduce human society with many of its defects. Unless You take the extreme step and revoke Your choice of the human race as the Chosen Species, there can be no resolution of this predicament.’ If Gabriel felt vindicated, His feeling was too well controlled to be perceptible, but I jumped in to take advantage of what I felt was a softer mood: ‘Nor is the abdication of judgment a solution.’ He didn’t like that one bit, so I hurried along. ‘But there’s this other human hunger, which, perhaps …’ Gabriel was suddenly alert. See? Flattery gets you everywhere. Flattery and a crafty presentation. ‘Take me, for instance. I’m not as humble as the average Entrant, but I’m typical in many other respects, and I can speak about myself with authority. I’ve had at least as much human reward as I deserve, so there’s no question of my wanting to be rewarded for unrecognised virtue. I don’t need to be told that I should have been a more faithful husband, a more considerate father, a fairer employer and so on. That’s all self-evident and I can offer only the defence that I didn’t take advantage of half my opportunities to be even worse. You smile? I suppose that rather few souls have offered that line of argument.

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‘But that’s not the point. What bothers me — and what makes me typical of my species — is what I never had the inclination or perhaps the opportunity to do. For instance, it struck me at about 16 that I might have a vocation to be a priest. All right, laugh; but lots of adolescents fantasise about vocations, some believe they experience one, and some act on this fleeting sensation and become priests. A nudge from Father Weedes and who knows? I’d have been a terrible priest, but I’m a good enough manager to have made it to Bishop at least, and not a bad one either. ‘So I recognised even at the time that a vocation was not a serious option, and I have given it as little thought as it deserves. What I really want to know about are the options that I don’t know.’ You could tell that Gabriel was intrigued. Although He anticipated everything I said, He was puzzled by the drift of the argument. Surely, He asked, I did not imagine that everyone had a predestined path? Well, did I? No, but I do think that — within the parameters of birth, social conditions, parentage and so forth — each person has a finite number of life-options, most of which we never even identify. ‘I mean, suppose I started playing the clarinet at the age of eight? And suppose that I’d really committed myself to it? Could I have been a successful professional?’ ‘Ah!’ said Gabriel. ‘Now I see where you are taking this discussion. We would really like to give you a definitive answer, but the issue is not — as you might put it — “Our call”. So much depends, you see, on circumstances beyond Our immediate control. Any prediction would have to take account of the unpredictable tastes and erratic preferences of your teachers and

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especially those of your audiences. Then again, it depends on how many other young people took up the clarinet at the same time. Were they talented? Were they pretty? Well-connected to the critics? You do see Our difficulty, I hope? ‘On the other hand, I make the observation — which I hope will not distress you — that no one has become a star clarinettist with such small lungs and such stubby fingers. And, although there are notable exceptions, partial tone-deafness is usually an insuperable handicap for a professional musician. This much you could surely discover on your own?’ No doubt I could have worked it out if the clarinet had been the real trigger of my anxiety, rather than the drums — but I was not going to give Gabriel a chance to trample that delicious daydream. It was safer to take the argument far beyond the realm of my own experience, so what about my potential in jazz ballet or tennis or biochemistry? ‘I fear,’ Gabriel intoned, ‘that the same limitations apply to Our diagnostic ability. And you have to accept that We have rather less expertise in pastimes such as tennis, than in Heaven’s mainstream activities of theology and music.’ I detected a slight sniff — puritanical perhaps? — in Gabriel’s reference to pastimes. Had He really no idea what fortunes tennis players earn? ‘I assume that this discussion is using your life only as a case study? One of these days I shall arrange aptitude tests — retrospective of course, which may introduce a margin of error — to set people’s minds at ease. But perhaps We might focus on the general argument? ‘In particular, how would you respond if We were, in fact, able to give you definitive answers? If We were to tell you, for

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example, that you could never in any circumstances have mastered the clarinet, or,’ He added nastily, ‘the drums; whereas you might have won a Nobel Prize in biochemistry? Would you — hypothetically, of course — feel that you should have devoted your life to the life sciences?’ I had thought about this, but it still took me a while to savour the question and make sure of my response. The fact is, I would be relieved to know that I had no undiscovered talent for music. The hard part was to handle news of a missed opportunity (a Nobel Prize in biochemistry? Surely not? But could I be sure?). The more I thought about it, the more I reckoned that a positive judgment would depress me to the point of despair. ‘The fact is,’ Gabriel couldn’t wait for me to say it, nor could He ever resist echoing my speech patterns, ‘what you really want is negative reassurance. You recognise, of course, that this is purely hypothetical? You could win a Nobel Prize only if thousands of other deserving scientists did not, and if your notional peers did not detest you and thought you deserved to be recommended; and if a committee of enigmatic Swedes did the right thing. And so on and so forth. I doubt that you, even with your formidable experience and insight into human organisations, can grasp the full extent of randomness in human affairs. Ernie Black’s early influence and your own temperament make you excessively anxious to find order. You would be closer to the mark to say “accident rules OK”, if you had a taste for aphorisms. But to answer your question, all We can do is indicate aptitudes.’ I was about to take control of the discussion when — and you can’t imagine how disconcerting this can become — Gabriel did instead.

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‘I expect that you are going to propose — and I’m sorry to take the words out of your mouth, but We need to bring the discussion back to order — a ritual Report Card as a substitute for the kind of Judgment Day that so many of you desire and expect. May I say that Management is deeply impressed by your insight into the devices and desires of the human heart, and the way you tease out their implications for managing what you call the Afterlife. Your line of thought seems to offer a chance for honourable closure, so I wonder if We might move on to consider the detail?’ What a client! No hesitation, no quibbling. In the several millennia while the problems of the Afterlife accumulated and compounded, He must have embarked on this line of thought Himself, yet Gabriel treated it as if it was purely my own. ‘Designing a ritual presents no problem. If We have a little talent, it lies in the realm of awesome spectacle. Content is another matter. On one hand, We are unable to lie even if We want to — and, as you have noticed, We cannot even want to — so We cannot offer absolute answers to matters of probability. On the other hand, We could surely present posthumous aptitude tests in the form of Last Judgments. That would be a perfectly credible exercise. Since many people requesting this service would — on your evidence — be anxious to hear that they had not wasted their talents or missed the presumed purpose of their lives, the manner in which they heard the Last Judgment would set many minds at rest. ‘Yes Geoffrey, this is the most promising proposal We have so far considered. Would you excuse Me for a moment? I need to discuss this matter with a few Colleagues. May We get back to you on this? This decision should take Us no time at all.’ And He was gone.

PROGRESS REPORT: ALTHEA

To

Gabriel, AA

From

Eliazar, A

Re

In the matter of Geoffrey Kingston: Althea Jolliffe

As my briefing explained, in physical appearance Althea Jolliffe is like a darker version of Winifred, good-looking but more self-confident, more articulate and much more incisive. She lacks some of her sister’s warmth but she exceeds Winifred’s ability to hold my attention. Her charm — like her intelligence — is sharper than Winifred’s. She met me when I was alone, apart from the unconscious Geoffrey. This circumstance was probably by design. Her frankness was engaging: a mortal would have taken her to dinner, and probably further. She agreed to talk about Geoffrey, but told me rather more about herself. On this topic I cannot improve on her own account. I never intended to marry and I don’t regret it. I would have been buried under nappies and rusks. Meanwhile, untalented

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men and women would take their chances to travel, curate exhibitions, make a splash and get the plum jobs in arts administration. The career is only part of the choice, of course. It’s also a matter of temperament. I do enjoy my own company. Well yes, I also enjoy the company of men — and women — but I get my kicks from novelty, not familiarity. With your terrific looks, has anyone mentioned that you look like David with a lab coat and a sun-lamp? God, I’m tense! Since you’re in rehab, d’you think you could give me a back rub? I was quite tense myself. Rubbing her elegantly sculpted back made me more agitated. It was Alfred who gave me my first insight, though he didn’t know it. I adored him from as early as I can remember, but I saw that there was something odd about him. I didn’t know what it was until he’d shot through to San Francisco. When I visited him he was living a life straight out of Tales of the City! I don’t believe he ever told Mum and Dad he was gay — they had to work it out themselves, or more likely they chose not to work it out. So it gave me a buzz just to know something that Mum and Dad didn’t. It’s not nice to admit, but — when you get right down to it — that kind of knowledge is power. It’s a strange kind of power. I’ve had flings — for pleasure, not in a calculating way — and that’s a hell of a way to get to know someone in a hurry. Afterwards, some people get uneasy. They’re terrified that I’ll tell. Of course, I wouldn’t — but there’s a huge amount of

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leverage in the fact that they know that I know something. In fact, that’s the point. If you ever use what you know, you lose the power it gives you. Nice paradox that, isn’t it? Use it and you lose it. That’s heavenly. You have a terrific touch, you know. Firm and gentle at the same time — you must have been trained. A bit lower perhaps? I was reminded forcibly of William Blake’s poem in which he pretends to talk to a tiger, and he asks: ‘What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?’ So yes, I know quite a lot about Geoffrey. Yes, yes, yes: that’s exactly the spot! Where to start? With Win, I think. You’ve met her obviously, and now you’ve met me, so you get the picture. God knows how often I wished that Mum and Dad had stopped at two kids. They were too preoccupied with their own little lives to notice that the house was too small for five of us. I had to have Win in my room until Alfred left home. It’s not the space I resented, but living cheek-by-jowl with Goody Two Shoes. She’s so damned nice. I couldn’t believe anyone could be so bloody nice: there must be another agenda. I could see through people, but she took them at face value. I seemed to make people as nasty as I suspected: she made them as nice as pie. People saw her as blonde and sunny and open, so they saw me as dark and saturnine and secretive. Of course, I noticed Geoffrey. You had to, he was so pushy, and he was obviously from a different social class. You had to

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wonder what he was doing in St Barnabas’. At first I thought he was just a social climber, dazzled by Anglican chic, wanting to pick up a bit of class. So, of course, I brushed him off. He’s gutsy though, and persistent as a blowfly. Do you know, when he fetched up at uni, he joined the Orpheus Society and made a pass at me? I’ve never seen anyone so completely out of his class, out of his depth. So I brushed him off again. That time he stayed brushed. Next thing I knew, he took aim at nice little Win, blinded her with self-confidence, took her under his scruffy wing. I thought it would be a few flying fucks and they’d split. Rough trade for Win, bragging rights for Geoff. I didn’t like either of them and I didn’t expect the relationship to work out, so it gave me some satisfaction to see them together. Well, how wrong can you get? And me priding myself on finding out about people! Anyway by now Win and I were living separate lives. Whenever I met them — always together, of course — Win seemed slightly smarter, a bit less bland, with a few opinions that she hadn’t had before. What also changed was that Geoff’s ambition wasn’t quite so naked. And they did seem good with each other. I wasn’t just surprised. I’m afraid I was also rather let down, to see them living happily ever after. Then there was the wedding, and I met Geoffrey’s big sister. Celia. Terrific woman. More feminist than I’ll ever be: much more political altogether. A few years later she was killed when some shit of a wife-beater bombed the women’s shelter she ran.

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Anyway, we got on famously. With all her sense of injustice she had a great sense of fun, and lively, eccentric taste in music and art. Their father was absolutely disgusting, a thug really, and their mother was an anxious little creature. You could see why both kids left home at the first opportunity. You could also see that they were out to change the world. God: the energy they generated! If they’d pulled together they could have changed the world as we know it. Getting close to Celia is when I began to sense what Geoffrey was about. I’ve always been clear about not having children. Because of Alfred’s orientation my only chance to be an aunt was Win. So, when she was expecting Kate I made a big effort to be the kind of sister she might value. That’s when I began to warm to Geoff. His politics are crass, of course, and his ambition is even more compulsive than mine; but at the time he was a pretty good husband. He’s smarter than Win, and devious, and unscrupulous in argument. They disagreed about pretty much everything but he took Win’s opinions seriously, never a hint of condescension. And he was easy to get into bed. God, he was surprised! And surprising: I’d not expected such a thoughtful lover. It would have been a one-night stand, but the arrangement suited us both. Virtually no risk of discovery; no risk of commitment; just good clean sex, really. What interested me was Geoff. I’d been puzzled by the contrast between the empathy of his personal relations and his sociopathic politics. Having met his Dad, I could understand his revulsion from the Left, but that’s only part of it. That

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didn’t make him a revolutionary. You think that’s an exaggeration? He believes he’s part of a revolution to liberate humanity from the paralysing grip of government paternalism. It’s mad, of course, but the interesting thing is that this crazy view rests on a romantic idea about humanity. If you press him in private, he’ll even talk about the possibility of peace, love, harmony, the whole New Age bit! People call him a conservative, but he’s really an anarchist. Workers of the World Separate: You’ve Nothing to Lose but Your Union Dues. None of that explains how he and Win broke up. Geoff says he’s found ‘real love’ with that Yank woman. Can you believe that? ‘I can’t carry on without the woman I love.’ Pull the other leg. No, my leg doesn’t need pulling: that was a figure of speech. Don’t Slovenes have figures of speech? Where was I? Oh yes, the break-up. You know what I think? I reckon somebody else did the stuff with the clothes. It’s completely out of character for Win. Once that deed was done, it pushed her further than she’d have gone by herself. It also forced Geoff to make the best of a terrible job and commit himself to the Yank. And then Geoffrey’s behaviour was so much out of his character. You can see how Win would have reckoned he’d really changed. In that case it was all over and she’d better sue for divorce. I must say, that’s a divine back rub. I’d like to take you to dinner as a reward. Do say yes, and then you can tell me something about yourself: I’m intrigued. Such honesty! Her theology is naive but she is a very remarkable woman.

THINE EYES ONLY

To

Gabriel, AA

From

Eliazar, A

Re

In the matter of Geoffrey Kingston: Confidential Remarks

These notes arising from my interview with Althea Jolliffe refer to matters that affect the likely outcome of my mission, but they have broader implications and should remain confidential. As you know, the scope of my mission was at first limited to the investigation of Geoffrey Kingston’s physical condition and his tangled relations with his family and other persons. This welldefined agenda required only that I dress my essence in a human carapace. This equipment, unlike my own form, has genitalia. Previous reports allude to the confusion and incredulity that androgyny provokes among humans, and you may recall that I devised a protective garment to guard against the annoyance

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of purposeful (or even casual) touching. Further incidents have inspired me to discard this equipment. May I describe these incidents, despite their unsettling nature, in order to convey something of the circumstances and sensations involved? A week ago I was criticised by Harold, one of the hospital managers, for allegedly ‘boycotting’ the Friday afternoon drinks at which many hospital workers ‘unwind’. To avoid offence, to fit in more comfortably with my temporary colleagues, and to discover what ‘unwinding’ might entail, I accompanied him along the road to the licensed premises where many of our colleagues gather each Friday evening. Because they say that they attend these occasions ‘religiously’, I expected some debate on theological topics. I was quickly disabused. I must say, however, that the premises are delightful. Tables and chairs are dispersed around an enclosed garden, where the last of the daylight and the first of the night-lights blink through the vines that form a rough ceiling. As the heat of the day exhausted itself, a little breeze helped to evaporate the sweat from the skin on my neck, creating the illusion of tiny, caressing hands. The vivid sunset colours bounced off the river, and somewhere nearby someone was cooking highly spiced and marinaded meat and vegetables. I was already soporific because I was physically and mentally tired and every sense except hearing was being soothed. When someone inserted a music disc on the public sound system, it took me only a moment to identify the honeyed voice and the thought-provoking lyrics of Crispin Kingston. Harold was impressed that I recognised him, having always treated me as unusually solemn and quite unable to hear — much less appreciate — popular music.

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Adding to my languorous comfort was the friendly, accidental pressure of Harold’s knee against mine as we sat around the same table. When he returned with another ‘round’ of drinks, however, the gentle pressure resumed. I had not fully prepared myself for the varieties of alcohol and imagined that rum (a popular Queensland stimulant which tastes of the sugar it is made of) should be drunk in the same proportions as wine. My colleagues were visibly surprised when I swallowed the contents of the glass in one gulp. To cover my awkwardness I invented an ancient Slovenian tradition that rum must be consumed at this pace. Within two minutes, an unfocussed and ‘light-headed’ condition told me why my friends were surprised. To keep my cover intact I was now committed to consuming further ‘rounds’ of rum at the same pace. This could have had unfortunate consequences, but I was now alert and took care to transform each new rum into water before swallowing it. After several ‘rounds’ I realised that Harold was not only pressing his knee (and his shin and his foot) against mine, but competing in some obscure ‘boat race’ with the rest of our colleagues to drink the most alcohol. He then said something to them which prompted them to take their leave, looking rather guilty and uncomfortable. The contact of our limbs strengthened my sense of companionship, but the effects of the drinking race were most disorienting. After perhaps eight ‘rounds’ Harold was no longer coherent, while I was still ‘lightheaded’ from the first drink. Without explanation or warning Harold lunged across the table and rubbed his whiskered mouth against my ear. This

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manoeuvre corresponded to nothing I had read in the Australian studies of Geoffrey Blainey or Germaine Greer, so I assumed that this was probably not a particularly Australian expression of mateship. I was also puzzled by the fact that his gesture was grossly impolite, and yet the sensation was not only ticklish but slightly pleasing. It made my skin tingle. I was puzzling over the meanings of this event when Harold resolved my confusion with another lunge, which brought his whiskers and lips very close to mine. This time the sensation was more pleasurable, and yet it was so astonishing that I was paralysed by it. Encouraged by my passivity, Harold pushed a hand between my legs. He must have expected to find — and presumably fondle — male genitalia. Finding no such appendages, because they were well bound, he groped more frantically — again a surprisingly pleasing sensation, despite his clumsiness — until he persuaded himself that I lacked the features he yearned for. ‘Jesus F Christ,’ he whispered, his eyes nearly popping out of his head. ‘You’re really a fucking woman after all. I’m so focking surry, so ficking … so sicking …’ So saying, he stumbled around looking for the gap in the reed fence, then fell on to the pavement, pulled himself to his feet and ran off without looking back. This squalid misunderstanding focussed my mind on two issues. First, my androgynous looks made me a vulnerable target for predators of both sexes. Second, shocking as it is to admit this, the physical sensations of the evening were undeniably sweet. Not only Harold’s fumbling, but the

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sparkling lights on the river, the merciful breeze, Crispin’s singing, the aromatic smells of cooking. And, if a drunk, incompetent, confused hospital manager could give me such pleasure, how much more pleasure was there to be had? So I resolved to abandon the constraints of androgyny. I adjusted my clothing and my manner to make me appear more explicitly masculine, and removed the protective garment. I still had to deal with the fact that medical texts are a poor introduction to the courtesies of consensual sex. This anxiety was brief. Two days later another colleague — a theatre nurse, most highly esteemed of the nurses — approached me in the tea room, pretending to present a medical problem. Following normal practice, I pretended to listen to her fine chest through the stethoscope, held her delicate wrists and looked vacantly at the ceiling as I imitated the taking of her pulse. When I found nothing wrong, she complained that she was not sleeping well while her husband was away on another of his many business trips. By now I was primed to venture further into the domain of physical sensation. I knew that her problem could not be medical, since nurses enjoy access to the full range of the hospital’s materia medica (and enjoy is the correct term here). However, I treated her complaint at face value, declining to prescribe sleeping pills but keeping my tone light enough to suggest that there might be other approaches to this problem. Encouraged by my friendly tone, she proposed a more sociable and ‘hands-on’ remedy. In the comfort of her quiet, pink-lit bedroom and the warmth of her duvet, she exclaimed at my inexperience, but

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responded bravely and creatively to the challenge. Again, I took refuge in a Slovenian tradition of sexual continence: I must apologise to these inoffensive people at an early date. It would be prurient to describe the detail of this wholly wonderful encounter, except to say that it was mutually pleasuring and miraculously enlightening. Our coupling was first tentative, then vigorous and athletic. My colleague was generous in praise of my stamina; words cannot express my admiration for her skills and sensitivities, making me aware of many unsuspected sources of pleasure in the human body. No wonder they call the sexual act ‘making love’. That was my first revelation. The second was the absolute delight, when she was exhausted, of going to sleep touching each other. ‘As snug as two bugs in a rug,’ she said, and the phrase sticks in my consciousness. The tenderness, the ‘togetherness’ of sharing a bed, sharing the duvet, sharing the air we breathed, sharing the feel of the sheets and the pink gloom — well, I simply cannot describe the love that I felt while falling asleep, being half-awake, and then waking to someone else’s affectionate caresses. I was overwhelmed by a feeling I can describe only as physical friendliness or innocent intimacy — although that is illogical, since she was betraying her husband and I was betraying my nature. I do not fully understand what happened to me in the act of making love and in the act of sleeping together, but I certainly lost my self-sufficiency. I feel as if some part of me has been removed and I can be whole again only when I am close to another human body. I told my companion that I envied her husband. At first she was pleased as if this was simply a polite

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compliment. After a moment she was cross that I had mentioned him. But I meant that sincerely. It is now quite understandable to me that some people see sexuality as the work of the devil, while others see it as an intimation of Heaven. They may seem to disagree, but they are all certain that sexuality helps them — however briefly — transcend their humanity. You and I have always known that humans are inclined to sacrifice their permanent principles for temporary physical pleasure — now I understand that seeming perversity. In fact, I share it. Fraternal trust, marital fidelity, loyalty to family, friends, mates, colleagues, country — these are trivial next to these pleasures. That some humans resist the pleasures of the flesh in favour of an abstract principle is what is truly miraculous. It was this generous colleague who gave me, as a memento, William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, where I found the tiger poem mentioned in my earlier report. Genius that Blake clearly was (and please congratulate him for me), he was quite wrong in this instance. No immortal hand or eye can frame the fearful symmetry of a human body: it takes humanity, it takes mortality, to frame and appreciate and grasp and respond to transcendent beauty. From the sublime to what you will consider mundane: I could have laughed out loud with pleasure while massaging Althea’s honey-tanned, satin-smooth, symmetrical back, and I have no idea how I managed to breathe at the sight — much less the touch — of her perfect buttocks. Althea sees herself as a relative of one of the big cats, being predatory, proud, independent, haughty, her imaginary tail swishing when she is aroused for

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war or for love. That is what brought Blake and his tiger to mind. Of course, I agreed to go to dinner. Of course, we retired to her river-side apartment for coffee and alcohol (which I left untreated). Of course, we made love (in every sense of the term). I have, in fact, moved into her apartment and hope to stay here. I am no longer a reliable witness to the events and relationships in my brief. But I have two further matters to report. The first is Althea’s confession. I’m so glad you still take an interest in Geoffrey’s case. And since you have some role in his recovery I have a teeny confession to make. You remember what I said about the mutilation of his suits? Well I was slightly disingenuous. I’d like to make a clean breast of it. No, Angel, that’s another figure of speech. I can’t believe how thoroughly Slovenes can misunderstand when it suits them. Well, the day I found out that Geoffrey had really fallen for that shallow American bitch, I was furious. Beside myself, really: not thinking straight. He wasn’t the only man in my life in those far-off pre-Angel days, but he was the most entertaining. Anyway I happened to be in Canberra that day, negotiating a show with the National Museum. So when I picked up the rumour and had it confirmed, I rented a car and tore off to the Kingston house. I don’t know what I intended, except that I was going to raise hell. But, as it happened, there was no one home. Still without a plan, I used my spare key to let myself in. I prowled around, still in a blind rage, looking for mischief. A couple of

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Geoffrey’s suits had just come back from the cleaners. They were hanging in the hallway, still in cellophane wrappers. I just couldn’t resist the temptation. Even then I didn’t realise what a perfect revenge it was. It put an end to Miss Mouse’s illusion of a happy marriage, it forced Geoffrey’s hand and threw him into an impossible relationship with the impossible Yank. Talk about revenge! But now — as they say — you’ll think I’m awful. And, of course, I am aghast. She has done an awful thing, but she is genuinely contrite, she has immense powers for good that we ought to harness and, despite her statement, she is by no means an awful person. Which brings me to my proposition. As a result of her exceptional artistic flair, organisational skills and political contacts in Brisbane arts circles, Althea has been offered a plum job (an enviable position) in an important gallery in Paris, which is evidently the centre of the arts world. She wants to take the job. She wants me to go with her. And more than anything else in this world or the other, I want to go. If you insist that I return on the completion of my present mission, I shall, of course, comply with your wishes. My memory of this mission, however, will need to be thoroughly erased and it is my expert opinion that I will need a very long period of rehabilitation before I am fit for any work in my former role. On the other hand, if you proceed with the plan we have considered, I believe I can be most useful in ways that no

other minion can rival, during the half-aeon between your arrival and our departure for Paris. My contacts in Geoffrey’s world are exceptional, even if my neutrality is compromised. It is the process of being compromised that may make me uniquely able to explain the dynamics of one world to the inhabitants of the other. In brief, I beg to resign my post as Angel and with it the guarantee of perpetual life. I acknowledge and accept that this will expose me to the unbounded and unpredictable dominion of pain. Even a male Slovenian therapist, in good physical health and resident in Brisbane, cannot wholly insulate himself from risk. But I would choose this condition over the guarantee of perpetual life with neither pain nor pleasure. In brief, I desire nothing more and nothing less than to be mortal with Althea for as long as we both shall live.

THE JUDGMENT OF HEAVEN

S

ure enough, in No Time At All, Gabriel did re-emerge, giving the impression that decisions had been made and seeming (unless I imagined this) rather pleased with Himself. ‘Supposing We proceed along the lines of our latest discussion, in the first instance just as a pilot scheme designed to test the souls’ reaction to this offer. We wonder if you would care to predict how residents might respond to the opportunity of hearing a Final Report? Hypothetically, of course.’ I had anticipated this conversation. I knew some of its risks and I was sure I could steer it to an appropriate conclusion. ‘I’m grateful that You think so well of the idea. Thank You indeed for that. And, since You ask, it is my firm belief that almost all PinS — and, indeed, almost every former mortal — would welcome the opportunity to hear an authoritative, final report card on their lives. They yearn to be told what talents they were given, how they have used those talents, what sort of souls they could have become and what sort of souls they did become.

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‘From a human point of view, Heaven cannot possibly live up to its reputation. It’s nobody’s fault: that’s just how it is. We are programmed to look forward to a better future, but the future is one thing that Heaven cannot supply. Heaven is a perpetual present, or that’s how we humans experience it. Without a future, we are denied the one quality that makes existence tolerable: we have no grounds for hope. ‘With no future, what’s left? Only the past. Every real soul I’ve been privileged to meet is obsessed with the past. Could I have done that better? Should I have behaved differently? Why did I marry that shrew? Why didn’t I? And so on. It goes on for ever and, thinking of all the things one could and should have done, becomes sheer torture. ‘I admit that the idea of a Final Report runs against the grain of scholarly scepticism about authorial authority and divine judgmentalism. But very few souls are so committed to academic fashion that they would hold that against You. The benign and unthreatening nature of this remarkable Afterlife would reassure them that they need not fear the judgments of such a court. They would expect a fair hearing and they would hope for vindication, but in any event they would be grateful for the closure that such a report offers them. In fact, a report of that kind is their only hope of bringing their self-examination to a close. ‘It seems to me that this approach also resolves Your increasingly painful dilemma. I can see how demanding it must be to try to give fair judgments on the intrinsic worth of a soul. The more You think about each soul’s social circumstances, their genetic inheritance and so on, the harder it will be to preserve Your confidence in Your judgments. To avoid injustice, You could — perhaps in equity You should — admit every single soul that

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turns up, from every possible background, with the full range of behavioural records. That would undermine the benefits of having led a good life but, after all, You would not be condemning some to eternal perdition, nor welcoming others into eternal life. It’s a report card after all, and it would be up to each soul to decide if they want to hear it. If they want to engage with this process, they can choose for themselves how long they want to enjoy these facilities while they ponder the implications of that report.’ Gabriel was pleased, but not fully satisfied. ‘And then?’ He insisted gently. ‘And.’ Here I had to proceed with very great care, concealing my strategy by trying to keep my mind blank, or at least inscrutable, while I blurted out the embarrassing truth. ‘And the overwhelming majority would be profoundly reassured by the kind of statement which You contemplate, especially if it was delivered in the manner You describe.’ ‘And?’ He went on. I tried banter: ‘And they’d live happily ever after, temporarily at least.’ ‘There is something on your mind that you would prefer not to share. May we stop beating about the bush? You know perfectly well that We do not bite, and you did agree to the terms of this consultancy. Cut to the chase, please.’ ‘And once people have considered the judgment,’ I said awkwardly, ‘and had a chance to inspect and enjoy the facilities of the Afterlife, almost everyone would welcome closure. ‘Without doubt, numbers would shrink dramatically. Almost every soul who’s been here for more than a few aeons would welcome the chance to depart in peace; and almost every soul from now on would make that choice within an aeon or two.

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It’s partly, I suppose, because we have such a short attention span and such a poor capacity to appreciate infinite joy.’ We’d reached the crunch. Everything hinged on Gabriel’s response. I couldn’t suppress my anxiety. ‘By which you mean, I presume,’ Gabriel sounded almost as uncomfortable as I was, ‘that people would choose the erasure of consciousness, the end of any kind of life?’ ‘This is acutely embarrassing, but yes, Gabriel, I’m afraid they would. The exceptional attractions of this environment, you see, are essentially negative. There’s no pain, no illness, no hunger or thirst, no loneliness, no burning or freezing, in fact no reason for sorrow at all. And that’s a terrific accomplishment, and …’ ‘Do try not to patronise, will you?’ ‘A terrific accomplishment, but it’s a catalogue of the painful experiences that have been brought to an end. For reasons beyond Your control, souls experience no physical sensation, so You cannot match the positive pleasures that some humans remember on Earth. As a hotel, compared with the luxury that a few humans know — and many others know about — I’m afraid this would scarcely merit three stars out of five.’ I was going to itemise the absence of television, spa baths, restaurants, room service, a gymnasium and so on, when I realised that I was kicking an open door. ‘Did you say “afraid”?’ Unexpectedly, Gabriel grinned. ‘You have nothing to fear but fear itself.’ ‘Well, not fear exactly, more embarrassment. I mean, it’s a hell of a thing to report to a Management team that people would rather die than endure eternal life in Their premises.’ I tried to explain that the facilities were truly exceptional, Heavenly in every possible sense — that every Entrant was filled

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with admiration and gratitude. What made it wearisome in the long run was just the lack of sensation, the shadowless light, the painlessness, the absence of variety, the sheer ‘eternalness’ of it. Whether souls had enjoyed all — or any — of life’s pleasures, they were bound to feel let down by the unrelieved sunniness of their new home. Gabriel’s smile became even broader. Vanity was not His long suit: trouble-shooting was. ‘You might be surprised to learn how similar is Our own experience,’ He said enigmatically, as if restraining Himself from saying more. ‘We are delighted to accept and endorse your recommendation. And We have one further proposal to put to you, which I hope you will consider.’

A FURTHER PROPOSAL

‘I

’m not sure I understand Your proposition.’ What an understatement! I was completely floored. ‘You cannot possibly mean that You want to be what’s left of me? Surely You have access to the whole range of physical bodies? You’d be much better off with the body — and the mind — of someone who’s still alive — preferably a healthy teenager.’ ‘Those are not the terms We would use. “What’s left of you” is not merely your 50-year-old body. That is the least of your assets. It is also the networks of partners, friends, children, enemies, clients and employers, animated by your unusual character and your public and private histories. If you consider all these networks together, they offer Us an unusual opportunity to turn Our encyclopaedic knowledge into real understanding of the human condition. Above all there is your soul with its prospect of eternal life — at least it could be eternal until We adopt your proposal. You sell yourself short if you dismiss all of that as “what’s left”.’ ‘Fair enough; I’m flattered. And chastened. But I’m afraid your proposition is still mystifying. What on Earth — sorry!

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Well, maybe that’s the right term this time — What on Earth do you want with a dead body?’ ‘I do apologise for laying it out too swiftly. Let me start again. If you cast your mind back to Our very first conversation, you may remember that the question of your future was left open. You have assumed that, being in the Afterlife, your Earthly life must be completed. As that has always been one possible outcome of your consultancy, I have not gone out of My way to describe any other possibility.’ If I was gob-smacked before, I was bamboozled now. I was swept up in a gush of hope. Could one of these other possibilities be a return to real life? With what a powerful sense of urgency, now that I understood its value! Maybe life with Penny? A return to work and a second chance at transforming Australia and the world? To bask in Crispin’s stardom? To make another attempt at reconciliation with Kate? And what would I tell people about the Afterlife — and would they believe me or lock me up? But hang on a moment: how did this square with my certain knowledge? I’d seen myself electrocuted on the flight to Bangkok. I’d heard the disgraceful conversation between the idle functionaries in the Consulate. How much evidence do you need? I explained this to Gabriel with as much restraint and respect as I could muster. He waited patiently and — if anything — seemed more ineffable and omniscient and downright condescending than ever. ‘You might say,’ He said in the tone of voice that always expressed His pleasure in a literary allusion, ‘that unofficial reports of your demise are somewhat exaggerated. I’m happy to say that the medical reports are clear on this point. If I may quote your doctors, you have suffered a cardial infarction which could have been fatal

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but may not prove to be so. It was induced — the doctors allege — by several factors: long-term lack of exercise, running late to check in for your flight, a disagreement at check-in, a distressing meeting in the club lounge, rage at the young woman in the seat next to you — she was one of Ours, by the way. And — excuse me for adding — rather too much alcohol at high altitude. Fortunately for you, and for Us, as it happens, the quick response of the cabin crew and the skills of a Thai doctor in economy class intervened and enabled your family to bring you back to an intensive care ward. The ward is in Brisbane, by the way. Winifred believed that you would be better treated in Brisbane than in Canberra, and she would have more family support. The doctors — but not the nurses, I’m sorry to say — are pleased that you have a better than even chance of recovery. There are still grave risks, and there will surely be longterm physical damage, but if all goes well, you will go home in three days. You or someone else.’ What about the impertinent consular officers? ‘Your vivid imagination, combined with paranoia.’ I pondered this until my doubts were overwhelmed by curiosity to hear the rest of Gabriel’s proposal. ‘The germ of this proposal is your — very pertinent — question about omniscience. You recall the distinction between knowing and understanding? Well, Our limited understanding of human affairs will be exposed when We proceed with Final Reports. Indeed, these reports will lose every shred of credibility for their subjects — the reports will not even convince Ourselves of their integrity — unless We take steps to build Our understanding of human nature on the basis of Our knowledge. And that requires free access to your networks.’

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‘You can’t be serious? My employers will never agree to present themselves here. You can’t possibly imagine what a narrow social circle I move in — some of the least imaginative managers of the Australian political and economic bureaucracies. Virtually everyone You need to understand has never heard of me and I have no idea how they live, what they believe. I doubt that many of them believe that You exist. And what about all the South Americans and Russians and … pretty much everyone really?’ Gabriel paused, then let me have it. ‘I’m terribly sorry to have to put this so bluntly, Geoffrey, but We do know how you live your life, even if — once again — We can hardly believe it, much less understand it. Without denying your rare skills and your widespread affections, your value to Us lies more in the networks which intersect in you. As you have said yourself, the Chicago network is global in its reach. Through the admirable Winifred, you have — or you used to have, and you may recover — access to the techniques and insights that you call psychology. Althea may not be a model of chastity but she is highly sensitive to contemporary cultural practices, at least those of Australians and perhaps more broadly. Crispin voices the values of his generation so well that he is likely to become a world-wide phenomenon. But the real gem is Kate and her strategic role in ordering human knowledge. Your network does not, of course, encompass the full range of human understanding, but it looks like a very good beginning.’ ‘Well, when You put it like that. But surely I’ve closed my accounts with Winifred, and probably with Althea, too? I don’t understand, incidentally, why Winifred has been making decisions about my medical treatment.’

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None of this was making sense. Gabriel was talking as if I wasn’t dead at all. Apparently I could be resuscitated — or would that be resurrected? But He wanted my body. Where the hell could I go without a body? Stuck here to brood about my past? Please no! And I was baffled that Gabriel could imagine a reconciliation with Winifred (reconciliation for me — or for Him?). Just as surprising was His confidence that no further relationship was possible with Althea. How could that have happened? But that was not the point. ‘Well, I doubt that there’s much of a future for me with Winifred, but don’t forget Penelope. There’s a really vibrant relationship there, and she has amazing connections with the whole diplomatic world.’ ‘Ah. Yes. There’s Penelope. Well, perhaps you should read this report.’

PROGRESS REPORT: PENELOPE

To

Gabriel, AA

From

Eliazar, A

Re

In the matter of Geoffrey Kingston: Penelope Cynthia Buckminster

The hospital workers respect Winifred but they are overawed by Penelope Buckminster. They explain this by reference to her ‘grooming’. By this they mean that she wears expensive clothes quite naturally, she does not need to pat her hair to know that it is in place, and her shoes and matching handbag are burnished bright. Something about her presence evoked Mr Blake’s difficult question: ‘Did he who made the Lamb make thee?’ Combined with perfect white teeth, dark eyes and smooth skin, these aids make her look a decade younger than Winifred although they are much the same age. The morally upright Sister in charge of the ward disapproves of Penelope and had resolved not to admit her while Winifred

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was present. But Penelope did not ask, she simply told Sister that she had ‘matters to discuss with Mrs Kingston’, asked that they not be disturbed, and marched in. Expecting a revealing and cathartic conversation, I vanished in order to eavesdrop. Winifred was startled and probably distressed, but greeted Penelope with perfect civility. ‘Good of you to receive me Ms Kingston. This must be unpleasant for you, and I won’t add to your pain. But I do need to clarify my own position. May I come straight to the point?’ ‘Please do. Geoffrey told me you were wonderfully direct.’ ‘How kind. For my part I never encouraged Geoffrey to talk about you, but he’s hard to stop. That’s one reason why I expected our relationship to blow over quickly. Anyway he did describe you as completely honest and genuine. He’s right about that, I believe. He’s also right to say that you deserve better. ‘But let’s not pretend that this is a mutual admiration society. Geoffrey was ready for a fling when we met at that appalling party. Uzbekistan’s national day, I think. I was ready, too, of course. My husband Jack was back in DC. He’s not much of a husband even when he’s here, actually. Convenient though, so I wouldn’t have embarrassed him if he’d been at the reception. ‘I wouldn’t have done anything to embarrass you either. If I’d known you. Or if I‘d thought about it, which of course I didn’t. ‘I didn’t expect it to be serious. And I must say I was flattered. I’m old enough to be surprised at a pass; and Geoffrey is

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appealingly smart. Well-connected, too, at least before you made the affair public. I’m old enough to know better. Or not to know better. Anyway, I was astounded and then quite tickled to be the object of a “Grand Passion”. ‘But now I’ve been there. Done that. So how do we tidy up this mess? I’m asking you, because you helped to elevate this private indiscretion into a public issue.’ Winifred was comprehensively bewildered. They have a fine term for it — stunned mullet, referring to the dull eyes, open mouth and glazed expression of a fish recently caught. In swift succession I could sense that Winifred felt awe, dislike, despair, hope, shame, disgust, outrage — and pity. She had expected a heartless predator, not this chic but unhappy woman. ‘I appreciate your directness, Ms Buckminster, but forgive me if I am still rather confused. When you describe this situation as a mess, you understate the problem. It’s an appalling mess and I’m sorry for all of us. But when you claim that I helped to create it, I’m afraid I can’t agree. I can’t even understand what you mean. Geoffrey propositioned you, didn’t he? And you accepted his proposition? Surely that’s what created what you call “this mess”?’ ‘Ms Kingston. Dammit, please may I call you Winifred? And please call me Penelope. This was just a fling, for God’s sake. You must have had adventures like this yourself, surely. No? Well I’m surprised. Disappointed even. Anyway, it was your melodramatic gesture with the scissors that turned a harmless fling into a crisis for two otherwise happy families. Well, one happy family and a functioning couple. I have a career and

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I want to keep it. That career depends absolutely on my marriage to Jack. I just might get away with being single, but where d’you reckon State would post an officer living with an Aussie? I’d be lucky to be a third secretary in Leninabad. I’m not about to throw away all I’ve got. Not for Geoffrey, anyway. ‘I’ve been a fool, but not an idiot. This fling was over when you made it public. Sure, people knew. Jack knew. My Ambassador knew. The CIA knew. Your PM’s staff knew. But nobody had to admit that they knew until you rubbed their noses in it. That’s when I had to upgrade this fling to an affair. My government can understand an affair. But a fling is different. It’s grubby, unprofessional, undiplomatic; a very black mark. And the infuriating thing is that this fling was already flung before you denounced it. You can’t possibly not know that.’ ‘Penelope, my dear, I don’t know how much you explained yourself to Geoffrey. It doesn’t seem as if he shared your understanding. On the day we’re talking about he came home at lunch-time and said he had to tell me serious news. He’d prepared a rambling oration about how much he’d always loved me, how sad it was that we’d grown apart, how normal it was for that to happen, how distressed he was to confront the truth. I could see where he was going long before he came to the point. The point was that he’d met the love of the second half of his life. He wanted a divorce and he was prepared to be generous financially. And he hoped for my understanding although he knew he didn’t deserve it.

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‘Well, it was a terrible shock. I couldn’t speak. I just cried. What changed my mood was his explanation that he’d already set up separate bank accounts, already put the matter in the hands of a lawyer, already taken an apartment and moved his work papers there. He had already rehearsed his pretty speech. And he took my acquiescence for granted. That’s when I told him to get out of my sight. So I’m sorry if you think my rage was out of proportion, but that’s what happens when your life’s companion turns into a rat. Even so, it wasn’t me who destroyed his precious suits. Apart from a couple that were away at the cleaners, most of them were already packed when he walked out. I couldn’t have mutilated them even if I’d thought of it.’ There was a long silence while each looked at the other. ‘My God, that’s appalling,’ Penelope broke the silence. ‘I did sense that Geoffrey was a bit of a romantic. I never thought he meant what he said. Christ, what an idiot! He can’t have heard a single word I told him. ‘But what’s to be done? I don’t want to add insult to injury, but I do need to make this clear. Great guy, Geoffrey, but there’s no spare room in my life. The same goes for him, whatever he said. I was in his bed, but you were in his mind. It’s none of my business whether you take him back or chuck him out for good. For his sake, I hope you get a reconciliation. Especially now that I’ve met you.’ Winifred was clearly lost for words. Happily, she didn’t need any.

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‘Sorry to have met you in such frightful circumstances. But, as they say, “this issue is closed”. I hope the silly boy pulls through. And I hope you take him back. I should warn you though, there’s another woman in his life, and there has been for some time. Nothing as simple as a fling with someone who reminded him of Chicago. I don’t know who she is, but I’ll swear she exists. ‘I don’t believe we need to meet again. Jack and I will be sent somewhere depressing for me to repent my sins. But thank you so much for being so understanding.’ Uncrossing her well-turned ankles, regaining her gleaming pig-skin handbag, straightening her tailored suit, she rose from her chair in one smooth motion and strode out of Geoffrey’s life without even asking Winifred about his condition. That reduces his options and leaves our choices intact.

GENETIC MODIFICATION

W

hat a goose she must think me. And what a goose I am! Fancy confusing Penny with the self-made Birgit! Perhaps Penny was revising the history of our relationship to make herself look innocent, or to soften the blow for Win? Not likely. To get herself out of a career crisis perhaps? What does it matter? What’s clear is the finality of it. And that Win didn’t destroy my suits. And that she’s at my bedside (if it’s still my bed). Why doesn’t that surprise me? How could I devalue that loyalty? And how can I retrieve it? Especially if that vicious woman’s treachery has set Win on to Althea’s trail. I couldn’t face Gabriel. He let me stew in my goose juice while I joined the dots of my predicament. As I thought through the implications of Penny’s desertion I began to see how I’d painted myself into a corner. Hope flared, spluttered and faded. Losing Penny turned out to be no great tragedy. But I had lost Althea, too, somehow. And I couldn’t believe I’d ever be able to look Win in the eye. Suddenly, I had no options at all. This was a time for decision, not brooding, but I couldn’t help wondering about this meddling A Eliazar, and what he

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might mean by ‘our choices’? And what in God’s name are the options he thinks I have? ‘My commiserations, Geoffrey. We are, of course, deeply distressed and I am genuinely sorry that We cannot intervene in human affairs — sorry, that was a poor choice of words.’ As if He hadn’t chosen them with his usual precision! ‘Moving right along, however, I wonder if you are ready to consider actions that can be taken, even now, to relieve the heartache you seem to have left behind you?’ I grunted. Gabriel interpreted this evidence of defeat as consent. He seemed anxious to get on with His business. ‘May I state My proposition? It is really two propositions, both of them, I believe, to your advantage. ‘One element of the proposal is to place you in charge here, with full authority to prepare facilities for the Final Judgments. This is an onerous task and it would take your mind off your other troubles. It would engage all your experience, your flair in management and your grasp of interdependent detail. Your knowledge of US court-room drama would also be vital. We do not intend to bind Ourselves to those procedures and precedents, of course, but We should certainly take account of people’s expectations. A heavy burden naturally, but in view of your personal interests and your past performances you would probably treat Our problems as your challenge. I need hardly say that I have full confidence in your integrity. We are absolutely positively sure that you would not abuse this trust in My absence.’ Briefly I wondered what tempted Him to tautology. Then my spirits revived. So did scepticism. How could Heaven’s CEO take leave? And how could He hand over the keys to an Australian management consultant? The idea was absurd. How

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many impossible things did He expect me to believe all at once? I was obviously fantasising after the trauma of Penny’s treachery. I pressed on, but once more in a state of suspended disbelief. ‘What do You mean absence? I thought You were anchored here?’ ‘In ordinary circumstances, yes, and as you know I do not enjoy long-distance travel. I’ve not been out for a couple of millennia in fact, but when circumstances require it, I can indeed go wherever I need.’ Of course, I was intrigued. Let’s assume for a moment that Gabriel has the power to do what He proposes and He really is offering me the keys to His kingdom. Who wouldn’t like a turn at that wheel? This was impossible to resist, whatever the other proposition. Anyway, was there any choice? Return to a faltering career, a failed marriage, a shattered romance and a falling-apart family? That scenario hardly stacked up against this offer. Especially if it was real. ‘Really, there’s not much choice. We could not in all honesty admit you to ordinary Entry without bending the criterion of Poverty in Spirit — and you would surely not want Us to do violence to Our rules and procedures — so it does boil down to a fairly stark choice. Either you agree to manage this neck of the universe for a while, or else you accept extinction, immediate and, of course, eternal.’ It took no time at all to weigh up these options. I asked about the other part of the proposal, curious to know where Gabriel Himself would be going, and how long He intended to be absent. I had a bad feeling about this, but I tried not to let this anxiety show.

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‘You haven’t worked it out? I assumed you had long ago deduced My intention. I propose to occupy your body while I use your networks to try to understand the ways of humans. A simple exchange of roles in fact. Surely you knew that?’ How many more shocks? First I’m dead, then I may after all be alive. One moment I’m planning a new life with Penny, the next she’s thrown me out. Maybe Win will take me back, but perhaps she’ll discover about Althea. (Will my private papers put her on that track?) Now it seems I’m going to be dead after all, so perhaps Althea will spill the beans. But if nobody knows I’m dead, then what? God it’s difficult! And, as well as everything else, Gabriel wants to take my place in my own bed — not to mention Win’s bed and who knows how many others! ‘You surely don’t mean, do You, that I should agree to be cuckolded, just because You’re a bloody Archangel?’ ‘Look Geoffrey,’ He was perhaps a shade too eager? ‘Look, I have some sense of the pain this causes you, but it won’t be easy for Me either! This plan is conceivable only because there is no chance of conception. Your poor over-worked body is not at present capable of sexual activity and because your coma — your near-death experience, as the doctors call it — means that everyone expects you to be disoriented. They even describe this condition as being Not Quite Yourself. That’s My aim, of course — to be virtually, but Not Quite Yourself. I have neither the will nor the physical strength to pick up your disgraceful sexual career where you left off.’ ‘That’s not the point, and You know it. You’re such a charming, considerate, sensitive New Age bastard that nobody will believe the imposture. They will compare You with me and they are bound to say what a wonderful fellow I’ve become. They

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won’t know they’re comparing You with me, but I’ll know. How am I supposed to live with that?’ ‘You surprise Me Geoffrey. Such a smart soul and yet you seem not to have transcended the most obvious human vices. Is your embarrassment the really important issue? Do consider the consequences if your body becomes extinct today. This outcome would be disappointing but it would excite only a little surprise. Winifred will remember you as her betrayer, Althea is furious to have been displaced by (forgive me) a shallow American, and Penelope will forget you as fast as she can. Your daughter does not know how much you love her and admire her ambition. Your son believes that you despise his guitar and his career. The Government is already looking for your successor — someone with a bit less libido and more sense of decorum. It is difficult to see how your private and public reputations could be lower. ‘On the other hand you concede, indeed you over-state, certain social skills which might help Me rebuild your reputation and restore pride, happiness and pleasure — purely cerebral and emotional, of course — to the lives of those you love. Imagine how delighted your family will be if you return. After an aeon or two you could — you would — be once again the head of a loving, harmonious family. Your choice seems to hinge on the extent of your concern for them and their memories of you. Frankly, my dear Geoffrey, I don’t give a damn. But perhaps they do.’ I bridled, of course. Wouldn’t you? To have all your relationships, not to mention your career, dismissed as third-rate? ‘If I had really been such a disaster, You would have no interest in picking up my life. For this crazy scheme to work, You need information that only I can give. You need informed consent. I don’t consent and I don’t believe I’ve been fully

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informed. What exactly do You need to find out by living my life?’ ‘Quite right, and a perfectly fair demand. Let Me spell it out. In the course of a two-to-three-aeon exchange period I would have four specific goals. ‘First, I hope to learn something of the workings of government — the real moral choices that power-holders face each day, the options as they exist and as they are perceived. Your colleagues — and indeed your enemies — speak with authority on these matters and they speak to you with a rare candour. ‘Second, reaching out to the lyrical Crispin, I hope to hear him talk about the way he touches the hearts of his young audiences. ‘Third, there is Kate’s exceptional access to a range of real and virtual sites of knowledge about more than half of the world … And to help matters along a bit,’ He paused to make sure of my attention, ‘I intend to make Kate walk again.’ Walk again! I was so transfixed that I didn’t immediately absorb what He said next. ‘Finally, I expect to gain understanding of human love through reconciliation with the good Winifred.’ It took ages — whatever that means — to take it in. As usual, Gabriel left me to savour the possibilities by myself. I was glad that He had taken Himself away (or had He?) as I laughed, sobbed, tingled with the pleasure of it. If Kate took up her wheelchair and walked, she could regain the wholeness of her life, make music again, speak happily in every language, make friends again, perhaps marry. She could become again the gorgeous, loving daughter she’d been before the catastrophe. And if Kate could walk, what a weight would fall from Crispin’s shoulders! Kate walking would blow away the cloud hanging over Win. When

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Kate walked, I’d do somersaults. Virtually. Or would it be Gabriel? ***** Added to this magical prospect was the mouth-watering anticipation of dealing justice to some very particular people. My Chicago associates, for example. At our reunions I always felt that they condescended towards someone who was merely an adviser to the government of a middle-ranking power with a very average GNP. Not next time! ‘Yes, since you ask, last year I had a rather remarkable career move. A significant promotion — or do I mean a translation? The GNP of my new host society is nothing to write home about, but the management challenges are immense. Infinite, really. My employers envisage the most complex rationalisation exercise in human history. Perhaps the most complex and large-scale in the history of the universe. Not just down-sizing; a cosmic restructure. ‘So how was the Enron Corporation when you fell out of its highest window?’ ***** ‘Garth Lewis, I presume? Welcome to the Afterlife. Yes, this is the actual Judgment Seat. Think of our meeting as a blend of This Was Your Life and the Last Word.’ ‘Jesus Christ! Geoffrey? What in God’s name are you doing here?’ ‘Funny that you should put it in those terms. There have been a couple of staff movements arising from an exchange

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relationship. For the moment, I have the honour of acting in God’s name, with full plenipotentiary powers.’ ‘Fuck me dead! You recognise, of course, that I never believed that scandalous stuff about leaking information to the rat Ebenezer Noble. As a matter of fact, I did my best to scotch the rumour, or at least to take it off the public agenda. Ever since we were school-mates I’ve had the highest respect for your integrity. The rest was just politics. You know how it is?’ ‘Garth, believe me, I do know how it is. Don’t grovel and quaver. Be a man. Last Judgments have been scrapped, there’s no Hell to burn in, and in your case there won’t be a Heaven for much longer either. Do sit down if you feel faint. ‘Instead of a Last Judgment we have this humane and upto-date system of personal report cards, listing the talents you were given and the use you made of them. Like a school report but much more comprehensive. As a tool in personnel management it’s much more helpful than fiery pits and angelic choirs, don’t you think? ‘Well, may we proceed? Your report card is rather disappointing really. I notice that you were given an exceptional talent for painting. You were destined to be the van Gogh of the 20th century. What? Nobody told you? What a terrible shame. You could have become almost immortal with that talent. But never mind: at least you know now. ‘Let me know when you feel ready for extinction. Do try to enjoy the facilities while you are here. And please don’t snivel.’ *****

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‘Colin — Dr Chang, or is it Professor? How wonderful to see you — but how sad that we lost touch for so long, and now meet in such distressing circumstances. I can hardly wait to find out what you and your family have been doing. ‘I do hope that your life has been as rewarding as you expected when you went to Medical School. It has? That’s really terrific news. Because I’m afraid it’s pretty much all downhill from here on. Yes, it’s Heaven all right. I don’t know a lot about Hell, but I doubt that it’s very different. ‘Would you mind coming back a little later, when we have processed this crowd? Excellent. I’ll see you very soon and I’ll want a complete account. Not for the record, no, just for my own interest.’ ***** Childish, I admit. I wouldn’t inflict cruel and unusual punishment on anyone, not even the slippery Garth; but just at that moment I felt like some therapeutic fantasising. It is rather disconcerting to notice how much more I would enjoy damning Garth than renewing my friendship with Colin. But that seems to be the trouble with the Afterlife. There is really very little to be said for the pleasures of Heaven. I was much more interested in the benefits that would flow from Gabriel healing the wounds I had inflicted on pretty much everyone I love. He can’t undo the past, but He can certainly atone for my crimes and misdemeanours. And what do I really want for Kate, once she’s regained her powers? And for Cris, once the weight of guilt lifts from his shoulders? And most of all for Win? Is a phantom reconciliation enough compensation

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for such betrayal and such pain? And what did I want for myself? If I was serious about personnel management, shouldn’t I have some goals and achievable aspirations, medium-term at least? And what about Gabriel’s role? How bloody marvellous to perform miracles. Then I thought how unfair He was to use this ability to make me do His bidding. How could He reconcile this proposal with His insistence that He couldn’t intervene in human affairs? He must have been deceiving me — and the whole world, for that matter — about miracles. And if miracles were back on the agenda, what else was available? He could restore me to life for starters. Re-run a few years of my life perhaps? Change Penelope’s mind? Maybe not. Change Win’s view of me? Why not? All it would take would be to reverse that terrible, irreversible gesture with the trousers. He had offered to encompass none of this for me, but He would work miracles for Himself. That was when I began to think about revenge.

PROGRESS REPORT: KATE

To

Gabriel, AA

From

Eliazar, A

Re

In the matter of Geoffrey Kingston: Kate Kingston

Kate wheeled herself into the ward at a moment when — fortuitously — I was the only being present, apart from the comatose Geoffrey. I recognised her at once: she has her mother’s physical looks and she projects her father’s self-assurance, but she chooses to reveal much less of herself than either of her parents. Crispin’s comment about her makes immediate sense: her qualities are wrapped tightly into a polite reserve. But I had to reach behind the shield of politeness, and Kate herself gave me the opening. ‘Be an angel, will you, and bring the chair within my reach?’ If not for that disconcerting expression, I would have done her bidding at once. For a moment though, fearing that my

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identity had somehow been revealed, I hesitated; and in that moment it occurred to me to test an intuition. ‘Do you really need me to do that?’ Instead of drawing the chair closer, I pushed it further away. She was startled and began to protest before it occurred to her that I might be acting out of knowledge rather than suspicion. Her indignant expression yielded to doubt, and in that instant she was lost. She glared at me, she closed her mouth firmly, then she rose and stumbled across the room. ‘I suppose you’re the rehab specialist that Mum and Cris and Aunt Althea rave about?’ I spoke airily about being a visitor. Without revealing that I had acted on intuition alone, I moved the discussion back to Kate and her surprising mobility. How long, I wondered out loud, had she been ambulant? There was a moment of panic while she weighed her options. She had revealed herself irreversibly. I did my best to look sympathetic rather than judgmental, so she prevaricated for a while, then opted to tell me the whole story. Or quite a lot of it. She had obviously never told this story before so she spoke haltingly and thoughtfully, but the story emerged clearly enough. I expect that at some level of consciousness she had prepared the narrative in the expectation of discovery — or revelation. You must have heard the family saga? The one that starts with Cris behaving like a lunatic and ends with St Catherine condemned to a life in irons. You have? Well, it’s true as far as it goes, but you’ve only heard chapter two.

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I only agreed to spend that weekend with Mum and Dad and Cris because of a sickening thing that happened three days before. School was becoming a real ordeal, you know? I’ve always been ambitious — like Dad — and I wanted to excel at school, so as to have plenty of options later. In primary school it wasn’t hard to be the smartest girl in the class and still have good friends. Adolescence changed all that. If you plan for the future you must be mad; if you study you are just nerdy. All that mattered — all we talked about — was being sexy. To know your way around. Not to flaunt it, just to say enough to make sure everyone knew that you knew your way around. And I didn’t. I didn’t even know enough to pretend. So what to do? Find out, of course, but the text-books were not just unhelpful, they were sick-making. So who does this silly nerd choose as her private instructor? Crispin’s friends were all his age, much too young. We went to church sometimes, but that didn’t seem a good source of sexual wisdom. Well, there was a boy who worked at the petrol station. He’d given me the eye. He wasn’t bad-looking. He was clean, neat, polite to customers. I asked him to come round to the house one afternoon when no one else was home. Can you believe this? There ought to be a crime called idiocy. I suppose it might have worked out, if I’d been outrageously lucky and propositioned the Archangel Gabriel or someone like that. But I wasn’t, and it didn’t. I don’t want to talk about it in detail. What happened was rape, but I asked for it. Kate gave me very little detail of what this brute did to her, but she described enough to make me nauseated and faint. Her attacker had behaved as if his assaults were natural and

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acceptable, although Kate was tied up, helpless, in obvious pain and distress. Not only was she well under the age of consent (even if she had in some sense consented): she was much smaller than he was. I had never imagined such brutal, unfair, hurtful behaviour. In telling this story she relived the humiliation as well as the physical pain, and her narrative was interrupted by weeping — mine as well as hers, although I know this was unprofessional on my part. When I partly recovered from faintness, I moved to put an arm round her. When she flinched — seeing me as a mortal male and therefore another assailant — she revealed how this disaster had changed her whole life. I was keen to know what punishment had been delivered to her assailant when she reported the rape. To my astonishment, this is not how the story developed. I was hurt, shattered, humiliated. I was going to tell the police, but I thought I’d wait until Mum came home. For some reason she was late. By then Cris was home and we had a little argument about preparing dinner. It wasn’t much of a spat, just enough to make it an impossible moment to tell Mum — and, if I couldn’t tell her, how could I tell some policewoman? I was an arrogant little know-all, so I took the whole responsibility on myself. By dinner time I’d had a bath and a shot of vodka and a few aspirins. I said I was feeling crook and went to bed. The next two days were hell. Now I knew a lot of stuff that no girl should ever know. I was worthless, not cool. If that was sex, I wanted nothing more to do with it. Ever. I tried not to think about it, but by Saturday I simply had to tell somebody, because the shame was worse than the pain. I decided to get

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Mum on her own after lunch. Maybe I’d have wimped out. Anyway the wave came, I went down and out, and I was in hospital before I could say anything to anyone. It was in hospital that the light dawned. Hospital was sterile, ordered, predictable, safe. I wanted to stay there, with nurses tip-toeing around and security guards within reach. If I had to leave, I could take a bit of hospital with me in a wheelchair. Everyone defers to someone in a wheelchair. You decide your agenda yourself. It’s the only acceptable way to refuse to have sex, for instance. For a year or so I really couldn’t walk. Perhaps it was hysterical, but I really don’t know. By the time movement began to return, I’d learned to wheel around the house, the neighbourhood, the school, everywhere. I knew how to insist on access. Ever since then I walk and exercise my legs only when I’m home alone. I never did tell Mum; in fact, I never told anyone until you found out somehow. So now I’m wondering how to persuade you to keep quiet, because I’m not going to surrender this way of life. It’s the only way I know how to live. We discussed her options until another visitor arrived. She insisted (and I agreed) that this is none of my business, but I did remind her that her choice touched other people’s lives as well as her own. She had imposed an appalling and unnecessary burden on Crispin — although it’s hard to say that his life is ruined. She is partly responsible for Winifred’s change of career — though we don’t regret that either. They had all come to terms, but they would be shocked to discover Kate’s secret. That was the consideration that swung me towards secrecy. In the short term, anyway. It is unlikely that she can

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live a lie for the rest of her life, whatever I — whatever we — decide to do with this knowledge. I must also record the impact of this narrative on my own ideas. Kate uses the terms animal, savage and barbarous, despite their inappropriateness. This was not a suitable time to correct her. Such an atrocity could happen only in the social and physical setting of a prosperous and mainly non-violent society. That is not what shattered many of my ideas. My own physical interactions with mortals suggested that sexual encounters were always affectionate and often expressions of something like love. It seemed entirely appropriate to use the gentle term love-making rather than the clinical term sex. Nothing prepared me for the revelation that sex can also be a vivid expression of hatred. Kate’s revulsion and her automatic avoidance of physical contact capsized my ideas and my understanding of mortal behaviour. And what does Kate say about Geoffrey? He is, after all, the focus of my attention, simulated and real. Kate believes that Geoffrey is proud of the way she has overcome adversity. He says very little but she suspects that he admires her meteoric career, even if it’s not one he would have chosen. She is certain that he admires her drive and her fierce concentration, and he would feel cheated if he learned that she can walk. Wasn’t he disappointed that she made her career in languages and librarianship? Yes — but libraries are the site of the information revolution and Internet-literate librarians are the most likely managers of access to knowledge. He will come round to her choice because he respects power, and who will be more powerful than the custodians of information? Kate’s vision of

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public libraries is described by her colleagues as ‘messianic’ — another term that mortals use with a casual inaccuracy that still annoys me. Geoffrey’s condition continues to improve. Nurses observe Rapid Eye Movement, a sign of mental activity and a precursor of consciousness. If Geoffrey is going to die, he should do so in the next two days, otherwise the medical authorities may (as they say here) ‘smell a rat’ and ask inconvenient questions about Dr Angel Milan, a Visiting Medical Officer from somewhere far away. Incidentally, I have not invented their embarrassingly casual references to ‘hell on Earth’, ‘eternity’, ‘being an angel’ and even ‘the Archangel Gabriel’: I cite them only when essential to the meaning of what is said. These terms are bandied about with no reverence whatsoever. If Kate chooses to proclaim her ability to walk, she (and everyone else) will doubtless call this ‘a miracle’. It could even be ascribed to our intervention.

DELIVER US FROM ENNUI

To

Gabriel, AA

From

Eliazar, A

Re

Preparations

Having resolved to proceed with this project, you will have set aside time to prepare and my humbling, bumbling experiences may now be instructive. You will have a few hours in which to learn how to live in a body, whereas I had many days in which to feel my way, so I set deference aside and beg that this report engages your full attention — and your imagination. My gravest error was to believe that this physical body was merely a new suit of (ill-fitting) robes, no more than a skin. Nothing could be more misleading: you will find that the body animates the spirit just as much as the spirit enlivens the body. Geoffrey’s body and its interactions with the sensual world — including its encounters with other bodies — will change every element of your consciousness, day and night, in all seasons. This body will tell you, by unmistakable sensation, when you

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need to drink, when to eat, when to wear more clothes, when you need to excrete. It will not take you long to identify these sensations and how to respond to them. What will surprise you is that they are not isolated episodes: they simply never stop! When your body is comfortable, it will tell you so. Then, from time to time you will be overpowered by physical pain or you will delight in the flashing swoop of birds or the fantastic shifting forms of clouds at dawn or sunset. A time will also come — but not immediately — when your body will be aroused to sexual activity. There’s no mistaking the signs and they are so compelling that — for the sake of the project and the recreation of a harmonious family base — you must ensure that Winifred’s is the body that provokes them. That, in essence, is the revelation that prompted my human discontent with my immortal state. I cannot adequately describe the exhilaration of feeling clean cotton on your body, a trickle of sweat down your neck and the caress of a breeze raising little rough patches on your bare arms. Nor can I convey the intoxicating smell of frangipani flowers, mown grass, baking bread. Much less can I explain the dangerous joy of intoxication itself. The sights of tropical birds, the sun splintering on water, affectionate young people in couples, waves breaking on a beach, these are enough by themselves to turn the head and rupture the serene autonomy of even the most contented and selfcontained Angel. I have not mentioned sound — live rather than recorded sound, with all its imperfections — and, above all, I refrain from discussing the rapturous, heart-breaking, overflowing sensations of physical love, ‘The lineaments of gratified desire’ as Mr Blake describes it. Separately, these delights have driven me into states of sensory overload and emotional overexcitement which are almost impossible to manage. And you

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must cope with all these at once, within minutes of arriving in Geoffrey’s body, waking in his hospital bed and opening his eyes and ears — now your eyes and ears. I know that you recognise the depths of my new discontent. You assure me that you understand and even empathise with it. But knowledge and empathy may not be enough for your new purpose. Obviously you know everything that I’m about to write, but you also need to imagine and understand in order to avoid unwelcome interest. The most difficult practice is sleep, a problem described in earlier reports. Sleeplessness attracts awkward attention and is treated as a medical problem, often by administering powerful drugs to which medical workers enjoy access. Even if sleeplessness is not treated medically, it will seem unnatural to anyone who notices it. And, even if it is not noticed, failure to sleep will soon impair the clarity of your (meaning Geoffrey’s) mind. His body needs seven hours of sleep each night, on average, more or less the usual human dose. It is therefore important that you learn to sleep at will. Meditation is not sufficient: your body will not gain the strength it needs and you would find a daily regime of eight hours’ meditation quite maddening. To achieve the requisite vacantmindedness, you might try to concentrate on some activity (or inactivity) which is itself vacuous. I rely on my memories of conversations with Seraphim. Our previous talks suggest that you may be able to visualise many equally mindless occasions and produce a condition known as soporific. Of the mental adaptations to the human condition, the most alien is their inability to live in the present and their obsession with the future. You told me the adage that it is better

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for humans to travel than to arrive wherever they think that they are going. This applies to every situation, so that the greatest pleasure is enhanced by the thought of repeating it; the greatest pain is relieved by thinking of a time when it will stop. Humans endure present discomforts in the hope of sparing their children — even their unborn children — inconvenience in the next generation. You are aware of this obsession. What you may find difficult to believe is the persistence and pervasiveness of it. It is impossible, even for your infinite capacities, to assimilate all this knowledge and all these sensations at once. Therefore I have taken steps to slow down the pace of your bodily recovery so as to allow you to learn at a gentler pace. I have also warned the hospital workers and Winifred that you may at first say or do strange things, because of the disorientation of your mind after the infarction and many days in coma. One of my colleagues is a neurologist who thinks well of me, because (unlike many counsellors) I defer to her scientific judgment. After some friendly conversations about your medical condition, she is willing to believe that there is such a condition as total sensory deprivation. Recovery from this dangerous condition should be slow and steady, to avoid the risk of your suffering sensory overload. Acting on this diagnosis, she will administer heavy sedation as soon as you show signs of consciousness, and she will reduce the dose gradually over the first 10 days of your recovery. She persuades me that this procedure will allow you to explore and savour and become familiar with your senses at a manageable speed. Winifred, Kate and Crispin (and, of course, Althea) have asked me what to expect from you. They know that ‘you’ have been

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increasingly stressed at work in recent months. They think that undiagnosed hypertension may explain some of the behaviour that seems to them to have been erratic and (as they describe it) ‘out of character’. Accordingly they hope, with more or less confidence, that you may wish to return to your wife and family (but none of them propose that you return to your lover). In other words they want to believe that the restoration of ‘normal’ behaviour and relationships will follow from, and be prompted by, the rebuilding of your physical well-being. They are prepared for temporary confusion on your part. In particular, some reports of your talking in your sleep suggest that you have been revisiting your early life in Cardigan City. In unguarded moments you may even believe that you are (or were) someone called Gabriel. You should expect (and I will try to contrive this) that the first person you see will be Winifred. Although she is intellectually simple, she is emotionally complicated. She is tormented by competing emotions of rage, sadness, hope, anxiety — and love. These emotions are felt also by Geoffrey’s children, though not as intensely, and not as overtly displayed. They will probably be your first visitors as soon as Winifred informs them of your partial consciousness. I expect that Althea will wait for a day or two before visiting. I also expect that she will draw a line under the physical and surreptitious elements of your relationship. This is also my profound hope. I might not respond rationally to the resumption of an intimate relationship. Next to your bed are photographs of Winifred, Kate and Crispin. It is vital that you make yourself familiar with their appearance. While they can cope with your delusion that you are Gabriel, they will not forgive any confusion between your wife and your former lover.

MINE IS THE KINGDOM

I

f I say so myself (and who can now prevent me?), I have a fine grasp of systems. Designing them, monitoring and maintaining them is what management’s about. As one of my colleagues put it, I approach systems with the confidence of a pubescent boy with his first computer, because it is confidence as much as intelligence that bends a new system to my purposes. So I was flattered to be selected for this consultancy and its surprising follow-up, but I was not incredulous. Several men (and women, to be fair — though why bother now?) could tackle this job; but I’d be surprised if there were any better, and I have the further advantage of Father Weedes’s preparation for some such milieu as this. The point I’m labouring is that Gabriel had good reason to trust my managerial abilities. He said as much during the hand-over. Nevertheless, His briefing was remarkably casual. Not only were there no keys (another figure of speech): no procedures were explained. I told Gabriel that I would need to understand most of the procedures He had established. Who makes the initial selection,

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for example, separating the spiritually impoverished sheep from the arrogant goats? Is this done by a formal weighing of souls against clear performance measures or is it an informal, impressionistic interview? Is there an appeal process? I was especially anxious to know what happens to the goats, since that might be my own ultimate fate. I was surprised by a new impatience in Gabriel. In response to these questions He was very nearly tetchy. ‘You disappoint me, Geoffrey. I was sure you had shed the illusion of Hell, along with the imaginary process of damnation. Please don’t tell Me that you were expecting some sort of moral accountancy!’ So I didn’t say that, but that was one of the questions I needed to explore. ‘Perhaps I neglected to bring you up-to-date with Our policies and practices? Just now We are testing a system of selfassessment. It is really the ultimate expression of ecumenism. As you were good enough to propose, every single soul who comes here is either blessed or burdened with their own values, expectations — and their unique imagination. Whether they find Inferno or Paradise, Purgatory or Nirvana, is mainly up to them. So long as one soul’s imagination does not require the hurt of another — or the abuse of a Heavenly creature — and so long as no incarnation is required, one is really as free as the air. Freer even.’ I had begun to suspect as much after my talk with Father Weedes, so I was ready with a question that had been bothering me ever since my Entry. Were any of the souls I met real? ‘Real? What is real?’ He asked rather too airily. ‘If you mean embodied, then nothing is real, not even yourself at this moment. If, on the other hand, you mean “have they any

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autonomy beyond your imagination?” then the same problems arise here as they do on Earth. The soul, like the ego, is not so much a bounded essence as the site of convergence and contest, so the most you can expect is to engage with that part of the Other which can be apprehended by part of the Self. It’s very simple, really, and …’ Win had told me quite enough about post-modernism for me to recognise where this trite ‘discourse’ was coming from. I didn’t need a seminar. For once I had the nerve to interrupt. ‘I’ve heard the lectures and I know the epistemological problem. I don’t need this and I’m tired of philosophical games. Just tell me this. Is Celia really here and did she talk to me? Are my parents really here and are they here together? Did Father Weedes and Ernie Black talk to me? Or was it all my imagination? Or, if some are purely real and others purely imagined, how do I tell the difference?’ As well as impatient, He seemed — almost — defensive. ‘Well, if that’s all you want to know, why didn’t you say so? ‘As I thought I had explained, every soul is here. The real question is whether you met the “real” essence of Celia or merely a projection of your imagination. As you will realise as soon as you do the sums, most conversations involve only one soul and one or more projections. Only when two souls want to meet do their “real” essences converge, actually their templates. Celia did talk with you — because she wanted to as much as you needed to talk to her. Herbert was even keener to meet you than you were to meet him. And yes, of course your parents are here but no, they had no desire to be with each other or with you or Celia, so you did not meet them. We take great pains to mask the difference, but you can usually rely on the extent to which a

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conversation surprises you. If you are not surprised by what another soul says, then you may be talking to yourself. In the case of your parents, I apologise for the deception, but it seemed an appropriate teaching device and We took the view that they had suffered quite enough.’ His impatience was making Him snappish. The procedures were therefore explained to me later, by some senior angels who evidently enjoyed Gabriel’s confidence as the middle-managers of this enterprise. Before I had time to ponder the unlikelihood of what I was doing, I was left in charge, and — with a very select committee — turned my attention to the design of the ultimate assessment. ***** The scale of the operation was huge, even when we broke it into two segments. The simpler of these was for the old-timers, who had no greater ambition — no other ambition, in fact — than to extinguish the consciousness that had become burdensome. It was necessary only to protect these poor souls from the consequences of hasty decisions. That was ensured by a ‘cooling-off aeon’ after they had heard their report, before confirming their choice to be terminated. A detachment of several angels (a pinhead full, I’m tempted to say) administered this program with gentle compassion. Soon we had enough cases to show us that initial acceptances were running at 97 per cent, of whom 96 per cent confirmed. The angels revealed a wonderful flair for farewell rituals, creating occasions that were emotional but celebratory and overwhelmingly cheerful. In fact, the only awkwardness in this segment of the down-sizing operation was the distress of the

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angels themselves, chagrined to learn that their efforts to be hospitable had so comprehensively failed. There was a marked increase among them for volunteers for Earthly operations — one of many programs of which I had been blissfully ignorant. Presumably this volunteering was an expression of their incredulous curiosity. It was much more complicated to devise the retrospective aptitude tests, courteous ways of presenting the findings and — when we had to reveal unsuspected talents — softening the blow of abilities wasted, opportunities squandered. Since these tests and interviews had to be conducted by a Heavenly Host of assessors, independently, the process had to be very explicit and extremely simple to guarantee consistent practice. I assumed that only angels could perform these sensitive operations, but they insisted that Seraphim were better suited to this work. Not only would they act with absolute consistency, by temperament they would perform repetitive tasks without so much as a flicker of anarchy, mutiny or even humour. And so it proved. After a few clumsy incidents we settled down to a regime of a thousand Seraphim working round the (virtual) clock and achieving more than 98 per cent satisfaction in a random sample of souls who agreed to give us feed-back. In these exercises we missed Gabriel’s exceptional flair for languages. However, a battalion of Seraphim stepped in to handle the simultaneous translations, and soon the system was working smoothly. In the planning stage I did protest to my very select committee that these Munchkins had neither the brains nor the imagination for their tasks. This prompted an awkward silence and exchanges of meaningful looks until one of the more pedagogic angels told me the appalling truth. Seraphim were famous for exuding an aura of idiocy, the better to detect the

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thoughts and feelings of unhappy souls and report their sadnesses to higher authorities. I was already seething about Gabriel’s dishonesty — His blackmail — in the matter of miracles and making Kate walk. Now I realised that the sanctimonious snake in the grass had been spying on me — and on every soul. I ransacked my memory to recall anything I had said to, or thought about, the Seraph who showed me around. Once my mind turned to Gabriel, I began to wonder about His puzzling new impatience and the almost shifty way He had delegated my briefing to a committee, when He could have done the job so much better Himself. What was peculiar about this change of mood and manner was that nothing has to be done in a hurry. At least nothing is done in a hurry in the Afterlife. That’s when I realised where He was anxious to go. Now that He had struck a deal He was keen to appropriate my body. My life. My family. My Winifred! This would be encroachment, not Annunciation. The more I thought about my dispossession, the more determined I became never to let that sneaky bastard back to His own home.

SO BE IT

I

feel almost sorry for poor, deluded Geoffrey. What a transparent rogue! Fancy believing that the Seraphim would be baffled by such a simple mechanism as a disembodied human mind! He may not see through that pretence until he hears their perceptive and comprehensive reports on the proceedings that they will manage for him. But then! What an explosion of rage when Geoffrey realises how thoroughly he has been misled! It may take him longer to grasp that We overheard every idea, every half-thought, every half-suppressed question and every conversation from the moment of his Entry. When he does realise that We knew all his thoughts and deeds, what will he think? Can he deduce that We anticipated, that We planned and even scripted his proposal, his double-cross and his resolution to extend this temporary exchange indefinitely? Can he imagine that we also copied the whole of his human memory? Will he then be able to believe what We have done to him? He has ample time — almost infinite time, really! — to work it out. After that, can he deduce why We needed him to behave in this morally dubious manner?

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Of course, he will. Smart lad, Geoffrey. Herbert and Ernie were sure of it and the Seraphim confirmed it. How right they were! Smart but devious. Smart and devious. Even so, it may take him an aeon or two to recognise that he has brought closure to almost all the old souls — except the irredeemably dull ones who can tolerate perpetual blandness. Then Geoffrey will confront the prospect of his own boredom for all eternity. That will make him suicidal. That is when he will despair, knowing that suicide is an option that requires a body. I do feel sorry for him. It will give him some consolation to discover that wonderful back-room where Armstrong and Joplin and Ellington and Gillespie make the most sublime music with all their successors. I should have told him about that when he was so badly let down by old Beethoven — past his best, alas, and too obsessed to try something else. But even jazz wears thin after an aeon or two of timelessness. That must be true: all the best players complain about it. It is the suspension of human time that will drive Geoffrey to the last step, but it is only a matter of human time and My patience before he recognises that his only way out is to restore Me to My place. It was morally problematic to place such a temptation before such a vulnerable soul — just as much an entrapment as placing treasures in the path of a kleptomaniac. But it did take a great effort over several generations to find someone with precisely the qualities We needed. Where else but Canberra might We find someone with the imagination to grasp the nature of the Afterlife, the vision to see how its elements interact, the arrogance to manage the enterprise and the management skills to restructure it? Only when We identified Geoffrey as the bearer of these qualities did We recognise the value of his remarkable personal, social and political contacts, albeit in one of the more obscure

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and shallow of human societies. And only after he had accepted our commission did We see in him the ruthlessness to doublecross Us — and deliver Us this priceless opportunity that We could not honourably initiate. So, will My findings justify this elaborate project — and its collateral damage? What is so puzzling is that in every human society almost everyone knows what is right. With some variations, of course, but the paths of virtue are fairly clear to everyone. They know what is right; they just cannot seem to do it consistently. How else but through human experience (I ask rhetorically) will I understand the nature and the strength of the forces that draw people away from the life of virtue and selfless love? What, in other words, was so wonderful about the apple? Or was it the way Eve presented it that made it irresistible? And what did that snake know about human nature that derailed the whole experiment? These are extraordinary stakes, and not only for Geoffrey. The project has already cost Eliazar his soul. However he chooses to construe it, he is now a Fallen Angel. The overt jealousy and the barely suppressed enmity of his recent communications admit no other interpretation. He is not only in the world; he has embraced it and become part of it. This may be irreversible. Unless I step very carefully, I may fall with him. What a paradox that We may become brothers-in-law at the moment when We cease to be kindred spirits. All the suffering, the loss of Eliazar, the whole complicated gambit will have been pointless unless I concentrate on becoming a credible Geoffrey Kingston. *****

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I hear a voice and I want to answer, but I have no idea what to say or even how to speak. Nothing can be seen or touched. Is this place on Earth? Do people loom just out of sight? Is there already an ‘out there’ out there? I still have sense but I feel no sensation yet. Am I standing, or sitting or upside-down? Now I feel Myself stiffen into the shapes of arms and legs. My stomach, too — which is really Geoffrey’s. So many sensations to make sense of! ‘Geoffrey!’ I say. It is not My habit to address Myself, but I have to experiment with the name. I must learn to recognise and respond to it instantly, and become comfortable with the voice that will identify Me. I do say this peculiar name rather tremulously. Perhaps that is why I cannot hear My voice. Perhaps this is not yet Geoffrey? Dying must be rather like this: no idea which way is up, not a clue about where you are, no certainty even of who you are. As the mist thins, I think I must be lying in Geoffrey’s hospital bed, in Geoffrey’s body. I open his eyes and attempt a smile.