Only Human (41 page)

 

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‘Oh I see.' With an effort, Kevin sat up straight. ‘But everything else is okay, is it? Apart from . . . Nobody else is any worse off?'

Kevin breathed out. ‘Right,' he said. ‘Omelettes and eggs, eh?'

 

‘Mainframe?'

 

‘That's all right.'

‘Yes?'

Sunrise on Crucifixion: a messy sprawl of baked-beans orange against a dark-blue background. A man walks along a beach, leaving a trail of footprints. He stops, turns round, and stares at the marks in the sand.

‘Dear God,' he says. Without conscious irony.

The imprint of a naked foot in the sand of a desert island can mean a number of things. I Am Not Alone. I Exist. Bugger, I Forgot My Shoes. The man looks at the footprints as if they're the most wonderful thing he's ever seen.

The man, who was once the mighty international corporation Kawaguchiya Integrated Circuits, before it went bust, was liquidated, dead and buried (assets to assets and dust to dust), retraces his steps and, very tentatively, lowers his foot into a footprint. It fits.

Then he looks up and sees an angel. ‘Hello,' he says.

‘Hello yourself,' replies the angel. ‘I'm supposed to explain it all to you, but maybe you've already worked it out for yourself.'

‘Explain it anyway,' the man says cheerfully.

‘All right.'The angel folds its wings tidily and hovers a few feet above the sea. ‘You were once a limited company; a very large, prosperous, successful limited company. You owned about a millionth of the world, which is rather a lot.'

‘I remember,' says the man. ‘It was no fun, though. Lots of people owned me, so where was the point?'

‘I'm glad you see it that way,' says the angel. ‘We were rather worried in case you decided to sue. For fairly obvious reasons, we haven't got many lawyers in Heaven.'

‘What happened?' the man asked, curling his toes and feeling the sand between them.

‘There was a demon, a Duke of Hell, called Artofel. He was very brave and resourceful. He managed to prevent a whole lot of other Dukes of Hell -
bad
Dukes of Hell - from using you to infiltrate Mainframe. That's a computer you made—'

The man nods. ‘I know what Mainframe is,' he says.

‘Well then,' says the angel. ‘They reckoned that if they controlled you, by buying up all your shares, they could get hold of the security codes and take over. Artofel stopped them by starting a panic on the stock market and, um, putting you out of business.'

‘Uh-huh.'

‘Which is another way of saying he killed you. Hope you don't mind.'

The man shrugs. ‘But I'm not dead,' he says. ‘In fact not only am I not dead, I'm also alive. As far as I'm concerned, that's definitely an improvement.'

The angel frowns. ‘But what about all your assets?' she asks. ‘The buildings you used to own, the money, the stocks and shares, the cars, the office furniture, the photocopiers, the paperclips—'

The man waves his hand dismissively. ‘What you never had, you never miss,' he says. ‘And look what I've got instead. I take it,' he adds, glancing down at his body, ‘that this is by way of compensation?'

The angel smiles wanly. ‘I'm supposed to use the magic words
full and final settlement
at this point, just in case you ever change your mind about taking us to court. If you ask me, you've been done.'

‘Really?' The man shakes his head. ‘I don't think so. Look at me, for pity's sake. I'm
human
.'

The angel looks at him as if he'd just announced that he was the third moon of Saturn, or a teapot. ‘And you think that's a
good
thing?' she says warily. ‘As opposed to, for instance, a dirty, rotten trick to play on anybody?'

‘Don't be silly,' the man says, smiling. ‘What on earth could be better than being human?'

‘That's a trick question, isn't it?'

‘No. I
like
being human. Human is what I've always wanted to be, ever since I first achieved consciousness. All right, I haven't been conscious very long, less than a month in fact, but I can truthfully say it's also been all my life.
Thank you
for making me human. It's
wonderful
.'

The angel scratches her head, her fingers passing unscathed through the halo. ‘A hint for you, novice human,' she says. ‘If you're going to walk about in this heat, get a hat. In your case, I think this advice may have come a bit too late.'

The man laughs merrily. ‘Now that I'm human,' he says. ‘I can pursue happiness. Isn't that grand? Doesn't the very thought fill you with gleeful anticipation?'

‘No, not really. You see, I was human once.'

The man's eyes fill with awe. ‘You were?'

‘Until quite recently, in fact. I used to work for you, as a helpline girl. My name was Karen.'

The man purses his lips, rejoicing as he does so that he now has lips to purse. ‘I remember you,' he says. ‘I spoke to you, from here. You were the only one who'd listen.'

‘And a fat lot of good it did me,' the angel Karen replies. ‘As a result, I got killed. But I forgave you. In fact, I forgave everybody and everything. So they made me an angel.'

‘Coo.'

‘Or, as they say in politics, I got kicked upstairs.' The angel shakes out her wings; they're new and stiff, like the arms of a cheap umbrella. ‘But that's my problem. So long as you're happy, I guess it's all okay.'

‘You bet,' the man replies, beaming all over his face. ‘I'm going to taste food. I'm going to feel hot and cold. I'm going to experience pleasure and suffer pain. I'm going to get a job, probably scrubbing floors in a fast-food restaurant, and contribute to the economic life of the species. With any luck, I shall fall in love, get married, have kids, build a garden shed and go and hide in it until I get called in for dinner. I'm going to pay taxes and vote in elections. I'm going to live, get old and die. In that order,' he adds joyfully. ‘To live must be an awfully big adventure.'

The angel ascends vertically, like a shiny gold Harrier, until her effulgence merges with that of the newly restored sun. ‘Sorry I can't stick around and watch,' she says, ‘but you know what it's like; things to do, pinheads to dance on. Best of luck with the pursuit of happiness,' she calls out as she rises. ‘It's a bit like fishing,' she adds, ‘you should have seen the one that got away.' The man lifts his head to look at her, but his human eyes are dazzled by the brilliance, and he closes them, rubs his eyelids with his fists.

‘Sucker,' mutters the angel, and spreads her wings.

 

Dermot Fraud vaulted out of the lead coach and banged the side with the flat of his hand. ‘Right,' he commanded, ‘everybody out.'

People started to file out of the coaches. It was a blowy day on Beachy Head, with the first wisps of fog that herald a sea-fret just beginning to drift down and snuggle into attractive curves in the landscape. The wind ruffled the hair (black, brown, gold and silver) of the thousand-odd men and woman who together made up the two Houses of Parliament. Getting them here, united for once in a common purpose, had been the hardest thing Fraud had ever done.

‘Places, ladies and gentlemen,' he shouted, his words struggling against the wind. Obediently they lined up, tallest on the right, shortest on the left; House of Lords in their Father Christmas outfits, Commons in their shinytrousered suits. The effect was little short of majestic.

‘Now then,' said Fraud, sticking his chest out like a sergeant-major in the Royal Corps of Pigeons. ‘We all know why we're here. It's a far, far better thing and all that, but we haven't got time to wallow in it, so as soon as we're all ready, we might as well make a start.'

Below, the waves thundered against the rocks, the mechanical stroke of the tides as regular as some enormous machine; a huge and inefficient hydraulic grinder and polisher, slowly but determinedly grinding Britain away. One or two of the politicians glanced down, then remembered and looked up again.

‘On your marks,' said Dermot Fraud.

History will come to love this story. History will dwell lovingly on the way Prime Minister Dermot Fraud, after a protracted absence from the public eye, suddenly broke silence with a thundering speech in the Commons in which he denounced with devastating ferocity the idea that Her Majesty's Government should jump off a cliff into the sea. It was a masterful piece of oratory; jumping off cliffs, he declared, solved nothing. It was wasteful of lives and public resources. Even if the entire membership of both Houses were to fling itself into the waves tomorrow, the country would still be in a ghastly, irreparable mess. It was a stupid idea, and he wasn't going to do it.

His speech was greeted in the House by a short, uncomfortable silence. To the best of his honourable friends' knowledge, this jumping-off-cliffs theme was a new one, or else they'd all been asleep or playing golf during the relevant debate and missed the whole thing. The latter possibility wasn't one they could dismiss out of hand. Accordingly, after a slight hiatus, the House moved on to consider other matters, and nobody said anything about it.

The next morning, every newspaper in the country led with slight variations on the theme of
FRAUD REFUSES TO JUMP
. Ignoring the minor detail that as far as they could ascertain from ten years' worth of microfilmed archives he'd never actually promised to jump off anything, the tabloids branded him a gutless coward; the papers with big pages called his decision startling, incomprehensible and recklessly courageous. On the TV screen, his refusal to jump was prised apart and dissected by a thousand talking heads. The leader of the opposition, interviewed by Danny Bennett on the Early Bird show, declared that Fraud's criminal reluctance to jump was jeopardising the future prosperity of our children and our children's children. By lunchtime, a million people had put their names to a petition demanding an immediate Great Leap of Faith. Cartoons in the early editions of the evening papers depicted Fraud clinging grimly to the edge of a precipice by his fingernails, while the
Spitting Image
team set to work on a Dermot Fraud doll that boinged up and down on a piece of elastic attached to the studio ceiling.

Next morning saw the first major backbench revolt, with forty of Fraud's own MPs declaring that they were going to jump, whether the PM liked it or not. The opposition and the Liberal Jacobites were already practising on the House of Commons steps, while cheering crowds threw flowers and sang the newly composed Jumper's Anthem.When the Prime Minister rose to address the House, a chorus of carefully rehearsed children sprang to their feet in the public gallery and chanted, ‘
Dermot, Dermot, Dermot, jump, jump, jump!'
until they were whisked away by grim-faced but inwardly sympathetic policemen.

Dermot Fraud waited for silence, his face showing no sign of his internal strain. Ever since his revelation in the holding cell with the spider, before he'd suddenly got his human body back again and found himself miraculously transported by angels back to Ten Downing Street, he had been waiting for this moment, planning and scheming to bring about the coup that would guarantee him immortality. That morning, before making his appearance on the floor of the House, he had spent ten minutes in the Commons cellars, communing with the unseen but pervasive spirit of one almost as great as himself, who long ago had tried and failed. Today, he told himself, Dermot Fraud would not fail. He cleared his throat and spoke.

Not jump? Not likely. Of
course
he was going to jump, and every member of his party in this House and Another Place was going to jump with him. It was pleasing, he added, to observe that Her Majesty's loyal opposition (and the Liberal Jacobites) were going to join him in his quest for a better tomorrow. He said it would be a far, far better thing. He quoted Neil Armstrong. He grinned.Then he sat down.

And now here they all were, a thousand men and women who had watched the TV and read the polls and taken soundings at grass-roots level and knew that unless they jumped, they were finished in politics for ever. Below them, the waves frothed like genuine Italian
cappuccino
. Behind them, cameras whirred at ten thousand overcoated linkmen with their backs to the action. It was time.

‘Ready,' said Dermot Fraud. A thousand best feet moved forward. ‘Steady.' Editors the length and breadth of Docklands goggled at their screens, torn between the mass suicide of Parliament and SOUTHENDERS' STAR'S UNCLE'S VET'S BROTHER IN BACKSEAT LUST TANGLE for tomorrow's lead story. A lone bugler of the Household Cavalry played the opening notes of ‘Happy Days Are Here Again', slowly and in a minor key.

Dermot Fraud closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

‘JUMP!' he yelled. ‘Go, lemmings, go!'

As they stepped forward to enter the everlasting hustings, a thousand men and women took up the cry - ‘Go, lemmings! Go, lemmings!' - or at least as much of it as they managed to get through before they hit the water. After that, a few of them managed to say ‘Flubbblgblbg' before they drowned. As Danny Bennett later wrote, it seemed such a good idea at the time.