Blind Faith (20 page)

About two months after the measles-plus epidemic had
devastated the Inspiration Towers estate, a second plague
struck. The local authorities had been expecting it, of
course: the circumstances that favoured the incubation of
one virus tended to favour many. Heat, damp, problems
with waste disposal and water pumping, all these things
contributed to the likelihood of a second dose of 'divine
retribution'. Mumps-plus followed on the tail of the
measles, borne once more on coughs and sneezes, and
again the strain that took root among the children was of
a previously unheard-of severity. Even within living
memory mumps had been entirely survivable, a childhood
rite of passage, unpleasant but not too serious. But with
each fresh attack the virus had mutated until it had
become deadly. Suddenly the fevers were back, along with
the headaches, sore throats and telltale swelling of the
parotid gland, and once more the little white coffins began
emerging from the buildings of Trafford and Chantorria's
little community. Most of the babies had been lost in the
measles epidemic, so this time it was the turn of the
toddlers and youngsters.

But yet again, as one by one they died Caitlin
Happymeal seemed only to gather strength. She did not
cough or run a fever and her glands did not swell. It
therefore seemed more certain than ever that the miracle
of the Love was upon the child, and so Chantorria basked
in the undisputed position of one who was truly blessed.

Mothers would bring their sick children to Trafford and
Chantorria's apartment in the hope that if he or she played
with Caitlin Happymeal somehow their child might be
saved too. Trafford had at first been surprised that
Chantorria allowed these desperate, pathetic playmates
into her home; after all, it was one thing to survive a
plague and quite another to tempt fate so boldly by
courting infection. He had been pleased and impressed by
Chantorria's attitude, taking it as evidence that she had
come to view the vaccination as a scientific fact, a process
which could be relied upon. He was therefore most
disappointed to discover that the opposite was the case.
Chantorria had begun to distance herself from the steely
truth of the vaccination. So devastating had been the
plagues and so extraordinary did Caitlin Happymeal's
survival seem that Chantorria simply could not bring
herself to accept that such a miraculous thing could be the
result of a mere pinprick. It was just too big a miracle to
have been produced by the mind of man. Seduced by the
jealous admiration that now surrounded her, dizzy with
the attentions of Confessor Bailey and, above all, humbled
with gratitude for the survival of her child, Chantorria was
fast coming to believe that it had all been the work of the
Lord and the Love.

Trafford was horrified and disgusted. The success of
the vaccination had perversely driven Chantorria into the
arms of the faithful.

'Our baby has survived because of a scientific process,'
he exclaimed angrily on one of the few occasions when he
was able to persuade his wife to mute the broadcast sound
on their apartment webcast. 'The result of the intellectual
activity of man. There's no mystery, no miracle, just cold
hard facts.'

'No,' Chantorria insisted, 'I don't believe it. Have you
seen what has happened to the children? The pain, the
rashes, the fever, the swelling? They're all
dying
, Trafford.
How could one little needle prick defend our child from
that? Only the Lord and the Love could deliver her, just
like Confessor Bailey says.'

'Confessor Bailey does not know that Caitlin has been
vaccinated! You do! What's more, and speaking of little
pricks, it seems to me that Confessor Bailey is rather more
interested in you than he is in Caitlin Happymeal.'

'Oh, don't be ridiculous, Trafford!' Chantorria said, red
with embarrassment. '
As if
. As if an important man like the
Confessor would show an interest in
me
!'

But in fact there could be no doubt that Confessor
Bailey was taking an interest in Chantorria, although his
attentions were always couched in references to the
miracle of Caitlin Happymeal. Each week at Confession,
as more and more mothers gave vent to their grief, the
Confessor would summon Chantorria and Caitlin on to
the stage. Ignoring Trafford, he would kiss Chantorria and
hold up Caitlin Happymeal as evidence of the Love's
deeper plan.

'He leaves us this one child,' the Confessor thundered,
'to show us that there is hope! He has not forsaken us. He
has not washed his holy hands of his children, as we
deserve that he should. He's still there for us! Caitlin
Happymeal is here today to show us that the love that the
Creator holds for all his children still lives! Just as all the
children live! They still live! They live in Heaven and they
live here in this child!'

The congregation would moan and wail and throw out
their arms in worship, and as Chantorria took Caitlin back
to her seat mothers would reach out to touch them.

Within her small community, as the second epidemic
ran its course Chantorria came more and more to be seen
as a living icon, even a saint. Stories began to circulate of
minor miracles that could be attributed to her. Everyone
outdid each other to speak of Chantorria's goodness and
the goodness that flowed from it, anxious to show that
they too stood in the reflected glory of the Love.

'It's like there's an aura,' Tinkerbell told people
breathlessly, 'a sort of glow. Like a really spiritual vibe, you
know what I'm saying? I'm not being funny, right? I had a
terrible headache and I went and had a cup of tea with
Chantorria, not because she's a saint or nothing, but
because she's a mate . . . and my headache just went! It's
true. She cured it! Honest, just by sitting there! I'm not
being funny nor nothing, but she cured my headache.'

Stories abounded of similar extraordinary events. Food
tasted better when eaten in Chantorria's presence, wounds
healed faster, skin seemed smoother, softer and less prone
to wrinkling. Breasts got bigger.

'I swear I was a C cup and now I'm a double D! Go
figure. That is
weird
!'

The whole community beat a path to Trafford and
Chantorria's door to witness the miracle child and be in
the presence of her holy mother. Confessor Bailey himself
took to calling regularly and often laid his hands on
Chantorria's breasts in order to feel the Love.

Trafford stood apart, happy to be ignored. He was
sad that his wife had allowed vanity to turn her head so
ridiculously but delighted to be so comprehensively out of
her loop. Chantorria did not need him any more. More
than that; she actually did not want him around. She
wanted to stay married, of course, because they were the
chosen couple, but she was more than happy for Trafford
to make himself scarce and for her to bask in the light of
the Love alone. She had so many friends now and
Confessor Bailey was being so attentive. Besides, Trafford's
presence seemed to irritate her. He suspected it was
because he was a constant reminder of the dirty secret
about which she was now in total denial.

Trafford therefore had plenty of time to himself, which
was fortunate because he had a very great deal to do. The
more he thought about the plan he had presented to
Cassius and the Senate, the more exciting it seemed to
become. And the government would actually be
paying
him to do the work! That was the thrilling, subversive
beauty of the idea. In its first stage it involved doing
nothing more than Trafford did every day for DegSep
anyway: making connections, constructing perfectly
legitimate DegSep search programs exactly as he had been
doing for years. The only difference was that, whereas
before his activities had been soul-crushingly pointless,
now they meant everything. He was a soldier doing battle
against the Temple, a revolutionary seeking to foment a
spiritual uprising.

Each day, therefore, leaving Chantorria with her friends
and her alcopops, cake and chocolate, Trafford took his
computer out into the stairwell of the building and logged
on to work.

Propensity to doodle
, he entered into his machine and was
surprised to discover that doodling had so far not been
considered at DegSep at all. A Temple banner appeared on
his screen followed by a hologram of a fist punching the
air in triumph. This was the computer's way of letting
Trafford know that he had come up with an original search
idea and that he would be receiving a cash bonus in his
pay packet and a bottle of fizzy wine.

Trafford knew that the massive mainframe at NatDat
would already be whirring. First of all, it would attempt to
compute a series of visual triggers to fit its dictionary
definition of doodling. It would consult the police
body-language program on which psychologists worked,
trying to formalize the visual characteristics that evidenced
a propensity for anti-social behaviour. Then, having
constructed a profile to search the trillions and trillions
of hours of webcam and CCTV footage of the entire
population, it would look for images of people scribbling
with a distracted air.

Words not pictures, patterns or shapes
, Trafford typed into
his laptop and then added,
Whole sentences
.

Then Trafford thought of Chantorria and her little
kitchen palmtop on which she had, in the days before her
religious awakening, written rhyming verses.
Word
processing without uploading
, he wrote, and then,
Pressing
'save' but not 'send'
.

Again he was rewarded with a flag and an air-punching
fist. No one had ever thought to ask DegSep to look for
people who wrote things down but did not then post what
they had written on the net. That was two bonuses and
two bottles of fizzy wine. Trafford's mind wandered for a
moment as he imagined sharing the wine with Sandra Dee
on their next outing together.

Since he had started to lend her books, Trafford had
begun to see Sandra Dee quite regularly. She had turned
out to have every bit as enquiring a mind as he had
expected and every few days, when they could arrange it,
they would go together to the Notting Hill marina and
drift away in her little boat. There they would discuss
history and physics, geography and astronomy, journeying
billions of light years away from the dirty water of Lake
London to the very edge of time.

On one occasion they went to the great Museum of
Creation, where the fossils were kept that proved the
reality of the first flood. Sandra Dee loved fossils. They
would dutifully read the information displays which
explained how these ancient images of fish, set in stone,
had been discovered by early archaeologists at the tops of
mountains, thus proving that the waters on which Noah
sailed had once covered the Earth. Trafford and Sandra
Dee smiled together as they read, sharing the secret
knowledge that in fact those mountains on which the
fossils were found had once been at the bottom of the sea.
Of course it did not take Sandra Dee long to see through
the lie that Trafford was 'finding' the books that he lent her
and demand to know how he came by them.

'I finished these two days ago,' she complained, handing
back
Jane Eyre
and
Sons and Lovers
, 'and I've had nothing
to read since. Why do I always have to meet you to get
my stories?'

'Don't you like meeting me?'

'Of course I do, you know that,' she said, adding with
a laugh, 'I don't imagine sex with every lad I meet,
you know.'

Sandra Dee had indeed seemed happy for them to
continue to explore their fantasy world together and they
talked about sex as much as they discussed the books they
had read. She always appeared to enjoy Trafford's erotic
flights of the imagination and even occasionally
contributed something of her own. Nonetheless, Trafford
sensed that his was the greater commitment and suspected
her of humouring him.

Inevitably the excitement of mystery, about which
Trafford had at first waxed so lyrical, had begun to wear
thin for him. Despite everything he had said, he was tiring
of sexual fantasy and more and more craved the reality
of Sandra Dee's body. Unfortunately for him, though,
whenever he hinted that perhaps they should move their
sexual relationship beyond the realm of the imagination,
Sandra Dee declined.

'Don't spoil it,' she said. 'It was such a lovely idea. No
man ever asked me to imagine sex with him before.'

'Couldn't we imagine it sometimes and actualize it
other times?'

' "Actualize" doesn't sound half as nice a word as
"imagine",' she replied. 'Besides, I'm expanding my mind.
I don't need physical complications.'

'So I'm just a source of books to you then?' he
said, sulkily.

'Of course not. You know very well how much I like you
and how much I love our talks. Things are good between
us the way they are, and things change between people
once they start having sex.'

'They wouldn't with us.'

'Trafford,' she said, wagging a finger, 'things
always
change. Amazing, all that reading and it seems you don't
know anything about people at all.'

'I know enough to worry that if I tell you where I get the
books from you won't want to see me any more.'

'That's a risk you'll have to take because I want to know
and I insist that you tell me.'

Trafford knew that he would have to give in. Fuck
Cassius. And fuck his precious friends. They didn't own
the books; knowledge was universal. He was in love with
Sandra Dee and he wasn't going to lie to her any longer.

'It began when I had Caitlin Happymeal vaccinated,'
he said, and then he told her how he had become
a Humanist.

'My God,' Sandra Dee exclaimed, 'they have an actual
library
!'