Last Man in London, page 17
The following morning George woke to find himself alone. From somewhere Edgar again reminded him, ‘don’t try too hard to understand them son.’ He tapped an icon on his hy-dev that turned on both his coffee machine and shower unit. He then noticed a message. Tibha; slept so well, thank you. Didn’t want to wake you, you looked so peaceful, Dickens. Have gone home to shower and change, see you at the wz at H10.’
George was about to head for the shower when he noticed an earlier message. ‘Mira,’ he thought, ‘I will definitely call her this morning.’ But the message was from somebody called Claudine. He didn’t know anybody called Claudine. George tapped on the icon and read;
‘Dear George, I don’t know if you are aware of the tragic death of Mira Bell two nights ago. She was hit by a taxi and died instantly. I am so sorry; I know you two were very close.’
Chapter Eleven
George began shaking uncontrollably as those words sank in. He read them over and over and struggled to believe what he was reading. At one point he even considered it to be a nasty trick that Mira herself had arranged a friend to be a part of. He clearly wasn’t thinking straight. Through the fog of shock he began to remember Claudine. Mira had introduced them once, several years earlier and he had met her on another occasion since. George decided that it was not her style to be involved in a prank so evil. It had to be true. He paced to the window and then into the kitchen. He paced back into the bedroom where the shower was hissing and steaming in one corner, behind an exposed brick wall. He found his tube of diazepam and gulped three of them down and then sat on his bed, waiting for them to start working and so his bones would stop rattling. And when they finally did he carefully read the message again, to be sure he had not misunderstood.
The mistake he had been hoping for wasn’t there. The message read exactly the same way and didn’t change no matter how many times he looked at it. Despite how many times he hoped that it would. That message remained the same with each reading. It was the saddest George had ever felt and every moment he had spent with Mira was repeated, as a full colour movie, in his mind. Over and over again he could see her face and hear her voice. Including those final moments, the most painful of them all. He had never felt more alone.
At midday Tibha looked across at George’s empty work zone and finally decided to send him a message. She received no reply and when she eventually found Hugo in the Mediterranean Dining Room, he also tapped out a message and received no reply. George had curled up on his favourite sofa, wrapped the blanket, which smelt of Tibha, around himself and cried until he thought he may stop breathing. Then he reached for his whiskey and began drinking. He stared at his wall screen and could hear people talking but had no idea what anybody was saying. The fog rolled in across the Complex and George could see nothing from his window, which only added to his sense of isolation and despair. He wished he had never heard of Claudine. He wished it was last week. He wished he was in Cape Town. He wished he had never met Mira. He wished he could meet her again and every time he remembered that was never going to happen, he started shaking.
Eventually his hy-dev pinged a message that somebody was at the front door. When he saw it was Will he had mixed emotions. He didn’t want to see anybody, but Will might know what had happened. He might have even been there and so he let him in. Will looked at the state of George and gave his old friend a hug. ‘You have already heard then?’ George sat down and said nothing.
Will picked up the whiskey bottle and said, ‘this won’t change anything.’ George ignored the remark and Will went to turn off the shower and he then made some coffee.
George reached for his whiskey, topped up the mug and took a long draft. Finally he spoke. ‘What happened?’
Will paused before taking a deep breath and he said, ‘She was out drinking in Long Street with friends in the afternoon. She stumbled out of a bar, slipped on the kerb and fell in front of a taxi. Everybody saw it George. It was horrible, she didn’t stand a chance. She died instantly.’
‘She hated Long Street,’ George shouted. ‘What was she doing there anyway?’
Again Will paused before he carefully said, ‘she was always drinking in Long Street. Gus and Costas had wanted to tell you. She was a regular feature there. It was only you who didn’t know that. They wanted you to know. But nobody could have prevented this; it was just an accident George.’
‘An accident that was bound to happen. Somebody should have helped her. I should have helped her.’
‘There is no point being angry. And don’t blame yourself.’ Will told him firmly. ‘It wasn’t your problem; there was nothing you could do.’
George’s hy-dev pinged him yet another message from Hugo; ‘where are you?’
He threw the device across the room. Will then patiently tapped out a message for Hugo explaining to him what had happened.
‘Who is Mira?’ Hugo asked Tibha.
‘A friend of George’s in Cape Town. More than a friend, I think, why?’
Hugo then read out Will’s message and Tibha gasped.
‘Poor Georgie boy,’ was all she could say.
For the next two days George never left his apartment. And nor did Will. He sent second a message to Edgar who immediately returned to the Complex and arrived carrying a litre of 15-year old Jamesons.
‘He won’t find any answers in that,’ Will told him when he saw the bottle.
‘We are not looking for any son,’ Edgar replied as he brushed past him with a pat on the shoulder.
‘You,’ he pointed his finger at George, ‘get yourself showered and smarten up.’ George did as he was told without argument.
Will then listened as Edgar reminded George of the story about his old friend’s mother and nodded in agreement as he explained that alcoholism was an illness.
‘Without professional help this call was always going to come, one day son. At least it is out of the way now, you can get some closure. Nothing will change what has happened. It is not your fault.’
George was beginning to understand as his thoughts became clearer. It was good to have Edgar around, he always made things clearer.
‘He’s right,’ added Will. ‘Just give yourself some time mate. You need to take yourself through the five stages of loss and grief.’
Edgar looked sympathetically at his grandson before carefully saying, ‘Denial is the first one. Your first reaction to such a shock will be to refuse to believe it. It is a normal response to overwhelming news and it helps carry you through the first period of pain. That’s followed by anger. At yourself and towards anybody who happens to be near you. It could be aimed at anybody. Even the one we have lost or sometimes complete strangers. But you have your diazepam to help you with that. That stuff keeps the anger down, have you got enough or do you want mine?’
‘I’ve taken plenty.’ George said quietly.
‘Good lad. And then comes the self-negotiating, the bargaining. If only I had done this, if only she had done that. What could we have done to prevent this from happening? If only I had done more, or not said that. It’s all part of the process son. This is followed by depression. It doesn’t have to be serious but you are going to feel down for a while. All you need is reassurance and to remember that it was not your fault. There was nothing you could ever have done to have stopped this from happening. Who knows, it may have already happened by now if you hadn’t been there to prevent it. This time you weren’t and you can’t help that. Finally you reach the stage where you accept it. What happened has happened. It is what it is. People come and people go George. I am afraid you just have to accept that.’
‘It’s true,’ Will agreed. ‘It was already time to move on. You already knew that you had to let her go don’t you, after the last time you saw her.’
‘I know, I know,’ said George sadly. ‘I know I didn’t particularly want to see her again, but I didn’t want it to be like this.’
Edgar rubbed his knee and said, ‘Come on you two let’s get down to Harry’s and I will buy you a late lunch.’ George nodded in agreement.
‘Shall I send Hugo a message telling him where we are?’ Will asked him. George nodded again and said, ‘Yeah and tell him to bring Tibha with him.’
Will sent the message.
As the three men left the subway for the short walk to Butler’s Wharf, the fog across the Complex began to lift. George’s mood began to lift along with it and the diazepam he was taking every hour was keeping his anxiety from developing. Will remained quiet whilst Edgar made small talk, pointing out some of the boats moored against the dockside and telling the boys who they belonged to.
‘That one is Harry’s,’ he said, pointing to an elegant three berth, forty-five foot motor boat that was tied up directly outside the bar. ‘We take it up to Putney Bridge sometimes and meet an old friend of ours in the Star and Garter.’
‘Who’s that then?’ asked George without particular interest.
‘Solly,’ Edgar replied, ‘he lives just over the bridge.’
George stopped walking and stared at the back of his grandfather, who paused and half turned towards him.
‘Solomon Abrahams?’ he asked.
Edgar looked puzzled. ’How do you know Solly?’ he replied.
George said nothing and began walking again. As they entered the bar he said, ‘How do you know Dr Abrahams?’ he asked his grandfather.
‘He is an old friend of Harry’s; we met through him, about twenty years ago.’ Edgar didn’t say anything else, he had already said enough.
‘You still haven’t explained Christmas to me,’ George told Edgar as they settled into to their chairs by the crackling fireplace.
‘It doesn’t exist anymore,’ said Edgar, ‘but when I was younger it used to be the day when all Christian families celebrated the birth of Jesus Christ, the son of God, by gathering together on the day somebody once, long ago, assumed was his birthday. That was December 25th each year, just a few days after the Winter Festival.’
‘Jesus Christ, Christians, Christmas?’ George pondered the connection between the words.
‘But most western families celebrated Christmas,’ Edgar continued, ‘you didn’t have to be a Christian. People gave each other presents, made the biggest meal of the year, we stuffed our faces, drank as much as we could and then fell asleep in front of the television. I loved Christmas, especially as a kid, it used to be so exciting waiting for Father Christmas.’
‘Father Christmas?’ Will asked. ‘So Christmas was connected to Christianity and, I guess, was banned along with the religion after Incorporation?’
’That’s right,’ said Edgar. ‘But we then had the Winter Festival instead, on mid-winter’s day a few days earlier. So we still had the big get together, the drinks and family rows so it didn’t make any difference to us at all. All the kids were given a holiday from school between the Festival and the New Year and most of the adults took time off work. It became the two week piss up it remains to this day.’
‘And what about religion in general, what exactly was that all about?’ Will asked the old man.
George and Will listened as Edgar then went on to explain that religion was an organised, irrational belief in a spiritual god who created the universe and everything in it, including Mankind.
‘Although god was man made, not the other way round. And also one of their biggest mistakes,’ he told them. ‘Around two thousand years ago the people told themselves, and anybody else they could persuade to listen, that there would be no morality or peace in the world without embracing and idolising their god. But, in fact, morality predated god by many thousands of years. Religion was the origin of totalitarianism. It was a form of dictatorship that was watching you everyday, following your every move, monitoring your thoughts and could punish you for them.’
Edgar then pointed out that there had never been a society, prior to the forming of the first religion, who considered murder, theft, perjury and child abuse to be acceptable. And none of them had ever needed a God to guide them towards that basic human instinct. Although it should never be said that there is no god, it can be insisted that there is no reason to believe there is one. The idea that religion claims that God made the universe in six days and then rested on the seventh is one of the central pillars of the house of Christianity. But nobody can separate that belief from the fact that human beings inhabited the planet at least one hundred thousand years before that claim was made.
The principal of religion is a totalitarian belief. It was the desire to subject yourself to the status of a slave. It was to believe that there was an unchallengeable, unchangeable dictatorial and tyrannical authority who will subject you to surveillance for twenty four hours, every day, throughout your life. Who creates a path for your life in which everything that happened to you was prearranged, designed and then imposed upon you. It was the ownership of your personality and the limiting of any individuality. It supposed that a person could not know the difference between right and wrong, between moral and immoral, between good and evil, without religious guidance in whatever form that manifested itself.
It was a set of beliefs that were formed in a region of the world populated by illiterate peasants whose understanding of the real world, whose knowledge of the universe was less than that of the average six-year old in modern times. Even a small child has heard of America and Australia. It would be another one thousand seven hundred years before the inhabitants of the known world even discovered those vast continents. Why didn’t they ask themselves back then why god had not guided those who wrote his holy books by intervening and saying, ‘don’t forget to mention the earth is round and that there is still plenty for you to discover.’ Why didn’t he explain that bacteria caused disease at a time when the overall belief was that disease was caused by curses and devils? Because if God created everything, then he would have known about bacteria, and the Mississippi River and Kangaroos. And why didn’t he point out that the earth revolved around the sun and not the other way round.
The truth is that those who established the three main religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, lived in a small area of a barren part of the planet that had been involved in tribal wars for thousands of years. Those people would have believed in anything. But why would anybody still pay attention to any of those two thousand years later? Even if they accepted that the original calculations could be inaccurate? If they now believed that their god had created the universe millions of years earlier than had first been thought, because science had proved it, and then he finally populated it with humans over one hundred thousand years ago, as it was finally estimated, then it would mean they also had to believe that he then sat and watched as human beings suffered from war, disease, tornados, earthquakes, famine, slaughter and any number of persecutions for 100,000 years without intervening. Or, as some people believed, he actually made it all happen.
And then, after around 95,000 years of this carnage on earth, god decided to reveal himself and finally do something about it. And he did so by sending his only son down to be persecuted, tortured and then to die in a horrible manner, in order for people to believe in his presence. And, once they did, and that great Empire of the Romans finally embraced Christianity and founded the Roman Catholic Church, their new leaders were confronted by an entirely new cult who had modified those beliefs to suit their own cultures. Who claimed that a peasant, cave dwelling shepherd, around 600 years later, had been instructed by god to re-establish the original monotheistic faith of Jesus, the son of that god.
This meant that he and his followers believed that the Christians and Jews had got it all wrong and that their own faith was invalid. They claimed the holy lands for themselves which led to great wars and the god, they all believed was their own, encouraged it all. By the time it was abolished by the Corporation the belief in all of this superstition was responsible for most of the violence being carried out across the world. And yet it was a set of beliefs that belonged to the infancy of the human race. Beliefs that should have been outgrown thousands of years earlier, but instead had grown. Not only had it grown but it had separated into many different splinter cults who all made outrageous claims for themselves and who never offered any evidence for those claims.
Their central argument to those who did not believe in their childish superstitions was that the absence of their god could not be proved. Which, as an argument, was in itself juvenile. For the onus of proof should always lay with those making the claims, not for those who remained unconvinced. And the larger the claim being made then the greater the body of evidence should be needed to support those claims. And yet nobody ever did. Throughout the two thousand year history of religion no single piece of solid evidence was ever presented by anybody to support any claim made for the existence of god. And yet, in those days, even to suggest that they may have it all wrong would lead to one particular religion or tribe threatening to discredit, or even kill a person.
‘At the time of Incorporation,’ Edgar explained, ‘that threat was as bad as it had ever been. Banning it and removing any trace from the history archive was one of the smartest things the Corporation did in the early days. It was such a relief to those of us who could think for ourselves and were not governed or controlled by some sort of heavenly dictatorship, as the religious people were.’
The Christian Roman Catholic Church, along with their Pope, considered by Catholics as the vicar of Jesus Christ here on earth, were responsible for some of history’s most brutal and darkest chapters including the Spanish Inquisition, slave trading, the Crusades, serious injustice towards women, the mistreatment of children in almost every country on earth. And for the forced conversion of native people in South America and Africa. For the incitement, from their pulpits, of the massacre in Rwanda and for their silence during Adolph Hitler’s final solution. In the end it had to give away so much ground because ordinary people began to learn so much more. But nobody would ever forget the way that particular cult behaved when it was powerful and when it really did believe that they had god on their side. And as for the Church of England, the main splinter group of Christianity? Why would anybody have any respect for an organisation that was founded on the family values and moral fortitude of Henry VIII?
