Good to Be God

Praise for
Good to Be God

“This is Fischer at his sharpest – a widely original feelbad philosophical hayride.”

The Times

“Brutal, dazzling and clever.”

The Independent

“Fischer is one of the funniest writers in the business, and his appealing satirical delivery, along with the wealth of zealously polished gags studded through the narrative, ensure a hum of low-level smiling satisfaction throughout.”

The Daily Telegraph

“Fischer’s fecund imagination keeps the satire constantly engaging.”

The Daily Mail

“The narrative is… propelled by the author’s madcap imagination and inventive language.”

Times Literary Supplement

“A spot-on mixture of shady characters and searing insight… as blackly funny as it is profound.”

Maxim

“As in all his fiction, Fischer makes comic capital out of the fretful, trivial, even sordid realities that get in the way of five-star ideals.”

Financial Times

“There are a lot of funny lines…
Good to be God
dramatizes the neuroses of a man mired in middle age who is dismally disappointed with the way things have panned out.”

Sunday Telegraph

“A born storyteller.”

Sunday Times

“The best thinking-person’s entertainer since Iris Murdoch… one of his funniest books to date.”

Time Out

“
Good to Be God
is funny and true, and (not merely because it’s set in Miami) Fischer’s sunniest novel to date.”

Catholic Herald

“Tibor Fischer’s surreal morality tale is bullet-riddled with wisdom, but freed from worthiness thanks to his brilliantly dry, warped humour.”

The List

“For all their surface shine and fantastical scope, Fischer’s books are often serious investigations into what it means to be good.”

Metro

“Tyndale is as bad at being a religious fraudster as he is at everything else. But he discovers that in a world of double-crossing, being a reliable failure can be as useful as being a success.”

New Statesman

GOOD TO BE GOD

GOOD TO BE GOD

T I B O R F I S C H E R

A L M A B O O K S

ALMA BOOKS LTD

London House

243–253 Lower Mortlake Road

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Surrey TW9 2LL

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www.almabooks.com

Good to Be God
first published by Alma Books Limited in 2008

This paperback edition first published by Alma Books Limited in 2009

Copyright © Tibor Fischer, 2008

Tibor Fischer asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

ISBN: 978-1-84688-084-1

eBook ISBN: 978-1-84688-105-3

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

For Louise

GOOD TO BE GOD

You know when you’re in trouble. You know you’re in trouble when you phone and no one phones back. You know you’re in trouble when you get back home, the door’s been kicked in, the only thing stolen is the lock (it’s the only thing worth stealing) and your burglar has left a note urging you to “pull yourself together”.

This isn’t funny when it happens to you.

I tried to live my life decently. For a long time. I really did, but it didn’t work…

Ò

“Well,” says Nelson. I haven’t seen him for a few years. He’s waiting for me in the Chinese restaurant, patiently turning over the menu. With your school friends, you tend to think of them as they were, and it was unnatural to find Nelson there, not just on time, but early.

Nelson was the school friend my parents liked. He mastered manipulation young, and my parents were reassured by the state of the nation when Nelson, his hair immaculately combed, would greet them with excessive courtesy. This opposed to the inevitable grunts of my other associates. My mother was often more pleased to see Nelson than I was.

Only once did my mother have suspicions. One evening, as I walked out to join Nelson in his car, she mused, “He does look too young to be driving.” That was probably because Nelson was indeed two years too young to have a driving licence, but since the car was stolen that didn’t matter much.

3

TIBOR FISCHER

Nelson, Bizzy and I would roll through south London. You’ll never be able to enjoy driving as much as when you’re fifteen and in a stolen car. We’d stop off and have an expensive meal (prawn cocktail, steak, black forest gateau) on one of Nelson’s stolen credit cards. We did this quite often, and we only had trouble one night, but not from suspicious waiters or the police.

Nelson – normally a conscientious driver – accidentally cut up a vanload of heavies, twice our age, size and number. We were chased around for an hour, and it was the only time I saw Nelson scared.

“How you?” asks Nelson. It’s a perfectly reasonable, expected question. But it’s one I wish I wasn’t asked these days.

“Fine,” I say. We both know this isn’t true.

Every school has a Nelson: the kid who phones in the bomb threats, who steals teachers’ bags and exam papers, who goes off on exotic holidays with complete strangers paying for it or foreign governments arranging for his travel back, under that famed practice of deportation. From the age of about twelve to eighteen I don’t think Nelson went a day without committing an incarcerable criminal act. Yet he never spent five minutes in a police station – in England. It seemed to us that he was destined either for the gallows or stardom in international skulduggery.

What happened to Nelson? What happened to Nelson was that life kicked the shit out of him.

Married with two kids, Nelson now works as a rep for a company that manufactures handcuffs. The company does some other things, but its staple is handcuffs. Nelson has some piquant stories about his overseas customers who, for example, ask for their money back when blood jams the cuffs and they can’t get them off the bodies.

We share the same birthday and this makes him an outlandish 4

GOOD TO BE GOD

mirror. We reanimate that night we nearly got mashed and other choice japes. To have a really good laugh about them we need each other. Have we seen anyone from the old days? We haven’t.

Not for years. But even if we had, they wouldn’t have evented enough to produce a good anecdote. Nothing much happens when you’re forty.

Not that I need reminding, but when I look at Nelson I see how punishing this marathon is. He’s not slow or lazy. “I haven’t bought so much as a shirt for myself in four years,” he tells me.

His daughter wants to be a doctor and he has to save up. We both express horror at the price of everything, especially food.

He can barely afford a restrained night-out in a cheap local Chinese restaurant, and I can’t afford it at all. That’s middle age for men, less hair and more stinginess.

“Why can’t they do proper coffee in Chinese restaurants?” he reflects as he pokes his liquid with a spoon. “You know, my wife does my hair.” He makes clipper movements with his hand. Is ageing a reverse process? You get a few moments in your twenties when you wangle some clout, but then it all closes in on you and you’re back in a saggy version of childhood where you can’t do what you want and someone who doesn’t know how to do it is cutting your hair.

Nevertheless, I’m well behind in this game. Nelson may have a huge mortgage, but he’s got a mortgage. He has a dire job, but a job. A pension. He has kids. Everyone we know, even the truly dim and unpleasant, has something.

“Let me pay for this,” says Nelson, and I don’t even feign protest, just in case he changes his mind.

“So, women?” asks Nelson.

“No.” Nelson anticipates I’ll be fleshing out this answer, but I don’t.

5

TIBOR FISCHER

“You’re not lucky are you?” If you think you’re unlucky, you may or may not be. It’s hard to gauge the bumps, and typically thinking you’re unlucky is self-pity. But when your friends start telling you you’re unlucky, you’re really in trouble.

We’re silent as we wait for the waiter to return Nelson’s card.

“Miami next week,” Nelson sighs.

“What’s the problem there?”

“If I were on holiday, Miami’d be great. What it means for me is a generous helping of road rage, a day on a plane, four days in an air-conditioned box dishing out my cards to members of the law-enforcement profession who’ll be behaving as badly as they can get away with, and who, if they were interested in my stuff would know where to get it anyway. My liver’s shot, so I can’t booze. Then a generous helping of delay at the airport, another day on a plane, a generous topping-up of rage on the drive home to be battered by the wife because I was in Miami and she wasn’t.”