Good to Be God (32 page)

“And, I trust I don’t need to mention that if you help me in this, as they say, I’ll make it very much worth your while…”

Fash said.

“I have no idea what they say, because I’ve never been urged to accept a well-paid job.”

“So you’ll take it?”

“No.”

I explained to Fash that he shouldn’t involve me directly in his plans to block the Fixico sisters. I would go solo, as the jinxer, and web myself into the Fixicos.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“Doesn’t matter. We pride ourselves on being unorthodox 257

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at the Church of the Heavily Armed Christ. But I’ve got some good ideas for your money,” I continued. His money would be better used to build up the Hierophant, buy some advertising and above all to remove the Locketts and Esther from the orbit of the Fixicos. Fash found a leukaemia specialist in New York who’s supposed to be the best in the country, who might help, and in any case New York is a long way from here.

I make a point of standing in the sun. I really like it.

G

“Do you want to talk about it?” asks Sixto.

“No,” I reply.

“Sure?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe I can offer some suggestions.” Sixto has now qualified as a psychotherapist, whatever that means. He is packing his best crockery away, meticulously, into boxes and is eager to practise.

“I don’t need suggestions. What I need is a new life.”

“Maybe I could make you see your life in a new way.”

“Sixto, I appreciate the offer. I have a problem – I’m not stupid enough to believe in nonsense.”

Sixto considers the empty boxes and his remaining bric-a-brac. We rarely go home. What we do is return to a collection of furniture to sleep with. A selection of objects to dust. That’s what centres most of us – our favourite dust-gatherers. Of course, I’d like my own collection of objects to come back to; it’s more comforting than one would like to admit.

Failure gets a bad press. Naturally, you have to fight the laziness for a while before you give up, but failure is the norm.

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It’s a big club. Most attempts end in failure. And all success ends in failure, eventually. Success can make you forget that. One of my neighbours had a mail-order business. I can’t remember the exact figure but I think she said as long as they got a 0.1%

response from their mailshots, that was fine.

Napalm comes in. I study him. Nothing.

“Hey, Napalm,” says Sixto. “We were just discussing the human race. There’s no hope.” Anyone who says this usually doesn’t mean it. Who says, “Have you noticed my nose is in the middle of my face?”

Napalm checks the fridge. He pours himself a large pineapple juice and goes upstairs. Nothing.

“Tell me about your mad love?” asks Sixto. I don’t know why I reply. Perhaps Sixto does have a skill.

“It was mad.”

“Who was she? What did she look like? Why and how did it end?”

“She was beautiful. Clever. Great nose. A great nose.”

“And?”

“She moved. I wrote a long letter, detailing the madness of my love. On very expensive paper. I wrote, and this was the killer line, I had chosen her out of the billions of people on this planet.”

“What happened?”

“The letter didn’t reach her – her mother was forwarding her mail. It ended up in the glove compartment of her mother’s car. A year later her mother discovered it and passed it on. The recipient of my madness got in touch and said how moved she was by the letter.”

“And?”

“I was married by then. I got married two days before she called.”

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“You gave up too easily.”

“No, I didn’t. I talked to her mother. ‘Has my letter arrived?’

‘Yes.’ ‘Have you given it to her?’ ‘Yes.’ I thought she had received it, but wasn’t interested.”

“That’s infuriating.”

“I used to get angry. You always wonder about those roads you didn’t take. How it would have turned out? But now I console myself with the thought that the roads untravelled would probably have been just as disaster-strewn as the ones I took.”

“That’s consolation?”

“Works for me.”

Sixto pulls out some long steel device from a drawer, some costly culinary tool. “You know what’s frightening? Not only do I not remember buying this, I don’t know what it’s for.” He tosses it into a box. I’m glad I travel light.

“So what important truth have you learnt that you would be willing to share with others?” I ask.

“You mean, if I had to distil the wisdom of my thirty-two years on this planet into one sentence? If I had ten seconds to transmit only one important universal truth, as my message to mankind?”

“Yes.”

Sixto pauses. After deliberation, “Most cats don’t like to be microwaved.”

G

“Inexpensive perversions. You have inexpensive perversions, you’re laughing,” says a passing woman, who looks like the last woman to make that remark. Perhaps her husband’s are expensive.

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“We all need a moral code to ignore,” her companion agrees.

As I have succeeded in collecting more in donations than any of the Fixicos’ other street representatives, I’ve been promoted to South Beach.

Calvin is unhappy about this, but cash is cash – and he doesn’t know that I rarely collect any money from the public, I simply hand in a few bills from my pocket. I’m not up against any serious competition: many of the others are so disturbed they would be as likely to eat a dollar bill as spend it.

And the money I am feeding into the Fixicos will do damage

– it’s been Tyndaled. Will I be lucky in being unlucky? Or will I be unlucky in not being unlucky? How should I look at it?

Calvin is desperate to find fault with me, but can’t. Doing your job is often one of the subtlest but most satisfying ways of needling your employer. It can drive them mad when you do exactly what you’re told.

I haven’t been wasting my time completely. My tan is bone-deep and, in my shirt pocket, on a folded piece of paper, is Calvin’s home address. That I know where to find him is very comforting.

If you have to spend hours hanging around a street corner, Lincoln Road is definitely the place to do it. Intriguing pedestrians and good restaurants. An elderly man wearing only a white dressing gown and white slippers comes up to me. I doubt his outfit is a fashion statement.

He is brandishing two huge cigars and a box of matches. He cheerily offers me one of the cigars, saying something in Spanish I don’t understand… I refuse. He persists in a good-natured but firm manner. I accept.

We smoke the cigars while he yacks vivaciously, in Spanish, about the past, I assume. I can’t work out whether he knows 261

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I don’t understand a word or whether he has me down as a listening addict… My guess is he’s some Cuban who’s climbed out of a window at his daughter’s house or a hospital where he’s not allowed to light up. He maintains the gestureful monologue (although I can see he’s ill) for half an hour. Then he shakes my hand, thanks me and shuffles off.

I continue to watch the style warriors trooping by and mentally munch another grouper sandwich. Yesterday, I had a grouper sandwich at Books & Books, and I embarrassed myself by how much I enjoyed it. The grouper must have been swimming around a few hours earlier, it was that fresh. It was fried with mastery by someone who truly cared – although it was the accompanying aioli that made it so out of this world.

My pretensions of holiness have been dropped, so I don’t see why I shouldn’t enjoy a skilfully made grouper sandwich, but it’s bad for a grown man to be so moved by a sandwich. I am a little ashamed of myself for being preoccupied by the sandwich all day, and returning to this end of the Lincoln Road solely to have another.

But when I take my lunch break I discover it’s gone from the menu. I now see how wise I was to over-enjoy the grouper sandwich yesterday. Pig it up while you can. I settle for a tuna ceviche and my phone rings.

“You haven’t heard, have you?” says Dave.

“Heard what?”

“You’re not going to believe this,” he continues. “Do you want to guess what’s happened?”

It depends a great deal on who’s saying to you you’re not going to believe something; some people’s unbelievable is, actually, very believable and not interesting at all. Dishonest Dave’s unbelievable is certain to give the definition a good kicking.

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“Tell me.”

“No, no. You have a guess.”

“Just tell me.”

“News like this, you’ll have to beg. I want to hear some begging.”

“No.”

“Beg.”

“No. I’d say you want to tell me this news more than I want to hear it.”

“You want to hear this news.”

“So tell me.”

“No, you have to guess first.”

“Ludwig van Beethoven, Elvis Presley and Pablo Escobar are alive and well and running a dry-cleaning business with astonishing success in New Jersey.”

“Better than that. The Fixico sisters.” He pauses for me to say, “Yes?”

“The Fixico sisters…” He gives another long pause. “Have been arrested.”

I laugh loudly. For a long time. I can sense Dave is twitching to be asked what for, but I don’t.

“Do you want to guess what for?”

“Fraud?”

“We’ve got fraud. What’s better than fraud?”

“I don’t know, what’s better than fraud?”

“Murder.”

Perhaps I shouldn’t, but I laugh uncontrollably.

“Wait. Wait,” says Dave. “I haven’t finished yet. What’s better than a murder charge?”

“I give up.”

“Twelve counts of murder.”

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In fact there is a bewildering armada of charges, from unpaid parking tickets through tax evasion to murder. The juiciest revelation was that the Fixicos’ start-up capital came from collecting on insurance policies. These insurance policies had been taken out on the homeless of Los Angeles who had a series of fatal accidents under the wheels of cars that didn’t stop and which were driven by drivers unknown. I find it hard to believe they managed to collect money like this, since I never managed to get my insurance company to pay for genuine holes in my roof.

“One charge of murder,” says Dave. “Any blockhead can dodge. Two or three charges of murder – a fancy lawyer can money you out. Twelve? Twelve? You’re kissing goodbye, saying sayonara, auf Wiedersehen, aloha and adieu to the world on the other side of the bars. Yeah. How long have you been working for them?”

“Almost three weeks.”

“Tyndale, you are too dangerous to know.”

Of course, you’ll say to me, Tyndale, my old china, the police must have been on their trail for years, building the case. Okay, but I know the truth.

I dry my eyes. Bitch all you want about life, we all get a few laughs. I drop the boombox and the leaflets in a bin. They’re not needed any more.

I reach into my shirt pocket. Calvin.

G

“Tyndale, how are you?” asks the Hierophant. He was always thin, but he’s still managed to lose some weight. However, the old marine swagger is back. He squeezes past the boxes in the hallway.

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The house has been sold and Sixto has crammed everything into boxes. He wanted a change of scenery and moving away will also help avoid awkward questions about money, should any emerge from Latin America. I don’t know what to do.

Having someone to destroy was nice, it provided a reason to get out of bed.

“For someone who died,” says the Hierophant, “you’re looking good.”

My resurrection made no incursion into the world. Only a few dozen people know about it: Sixto, Didsbury, Dr Greer, Virginia, the various journalists I pestered. I can’t see what I did wrong. Even now, every other day or so, there is a reference to Gert and his mug in a paper, magazine or website somewhere; but I’ve never found one line about me. Perhaps I should have tried to keep the whole thing secret, but you can’t appeal. I pulled off a miracle and no one cared.

“You’re looking good too, Gene,” I say, because it’s mostly true.

“I’m okay. I’m an old man. There’s no getting away from it.

You tell kids how tough old age is, but they won’t listen to you –

they keep on getting older. You get old, you get maudlin. I don’t watch television any more. I don’t read the papers any more. I can’t bear news, because it’s all about the suffering. I can’t take it any more. I see a poster for some kid’s missing dog and it breaks me up – that’s how old I am. I can’t even enjoy the sports channels any more, because sport at its worst means someone breaks a leg, and at its very best even sport means someone loses.”

He pulls out a copy of Scientific American from his jacket.

“This is all I read now. Science is safe. Muons don’t moan.”

Sixto’s been generous, I have a little capital. I have survival money for a year. I also still have my persistent and embarrassing 265

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medical condition. What I don’t have is any idea of what I should do next.

“We miss you at the Church, Tyndale,” says the Hierophant.

“What a man does with his time is his business. I don’t know why we haven’t seen you lately, but I came round to let you know that I’m not sore or disappointed with you for giving your services to the Fixicos. Lots of people were taken in. You’re always assured a warm welcome at the Church of the Heavily Armed Christ.

And we are now the seventy-second most happening church in the country.”

Fash’s money has helped of course. Air conditioning has been installed. Youth activities established. Mike runs a boxing club which has proved popular. “Kids love organized violence.” The Hierophant has a science club, basic physics and chemistry (blowing things up). A weekend barbecue has provoked a huge turnout from the older worshippers, and the cakes at the new Bible-study class have received rave reviews in the local press and have helped a number of former muggers change their lives.

The Locketts have very publicly expressed their thanks to the Church for getting treatment for Esther, who seems to be in the clear.