Little Fingers! (3 page)

I am sitting
opposite a considerably older man. He is not attractive. He has
just slipped his wedding ring into his pocket.

He asks me why
money is such a terrible burden.

“
You may not
believe this, Julia, but having too much money is a curse. I feel
cursed. It would be so much easier to be poor”.

That's funny,
I reflect. I can bring to mind one hell of a lot of people who
believe that having a great deal more money would answer all of
their problems instantaneously. I should bring these guys together
for a spot of match-making, and pocket the commission.

It wouldn't
work. While old floppy jaws would be only too delighted to give
away his money, it can only be to someone who already has lots of
money and is trying to get rid of it himself. Those who do not have
all the money they can dream of simply do not deserve it. Those who
are not already trying to give it away lack a moral perspective,
and so don't deserve it either. So he is lumbered with it, which is
of course what he wants to be, plus inside my knickers.

The other
development I had to come to terms with during that period was a
newly acquired gift for unsolicited telepathy. I do not know where
it came from, but it turned up with a flourish, and it stayed.
However much a burden having too much money is, being on the wrong
end of unsolicited telepathy is much worse, I promise
you.

Thoughts come
from everywhere constantly. Not only thoughts - visions.

The first time
it happened, there was suddenly this enormous great Kerblamm! I
leapt four foot in the air, and screamed.

Everyone in
the bar turned round on me and asked each other what was going on.
I didn't have a clue. All I had was Kerblamm!, a blinding flash and
a roaring monster in my ear. And such fear! Not only my fear, but
someone else's fear underneath it.

I searched all
the faces around me trying to work out where the sound came from.
Everyone was looking at me. There were no clues. I only saw what I
saw, a huge explosion that someone else had witnessed, God knows
where.

And what I am
picking up from this man opposite is that he would like to see all
the girls in the bar naked, at least all the pretty ones. The
uglier, fatter ones get to stay as they are. Men spend a lot of
time thinking about sex. It is almost constant. I have now honed my
technique, and I can track down to the square metre who is thinking
what, but it doesn't matter because all men are obsessed by sex.
The fantasies are interchangeable.

I suppose that
any attractive girl guesses that men want to peer down her front
and slide their hands up her dress, but to know it absolutely and
relentlessly is something else. It is like being dowsed in a
carwash of lustful speculation. It is not a light drizzle to be
quietly endured. It is a raging torrent to force you into the
doorway and beg for a passing of the cloudburst. Imagine being
caught in a downpour forever.

I'm sorry if I
am frustrating you, Inspector. I am just letting you know how it
is. It is boring. I want other thoughts. I want stimulation. And
all I ever get are the same thoughts in different
voices.

Well, the man
opposite me has worked up the courage to ask me out for a meal. Is
it true that in America, if you accept the third date, it is like
the third match, you're skewered? No third date for him then, nor
even a second.

“
Sorry,
David. I must go back to do my hair. I have to work tomorrow, and I
am seeing Suzie in the evening.”

So many
non-sequiturs in one statement.

* *
*

The air is
cool outside. It gets me away from all these fetid
thoughts.

The truth is
that I am turning cynical from everything I experience, and I am
becoming excoriated - I am losing my heart.

I have noticed
it in nurses and policemen, such as yourself. You see so much
bloodshed, so many people at their worst, so many injustices, so
many cruelties, so much stupidity.

In the end you
give up caring. You are employed for a special responsibility that
you undertook because these things really mattered to you, and you
become gradually overwhelmed by it.

You have done
better than us, me anyway. You have cared in the first place. You
answered to your vocation. Sorry, Inspector, you have lost. I can
see it in your eyes as we talk, in your whole demeanour. You are no
longer trying to save the world. You are trying to solve a case for
pride and professionalism's sake.

With my now
heightened understanding of the world, born of privileged glimpses,
I am in danger of becoming lost too. That is perhaps what we
recognise in each other. We are the damned as we sit at our table
talking.

I did not
volunteer for this. I did not approach any humanitarian employer
with a bleeding heart anxious to shed my blood. I had insight
thrust upon me virtue of one God Almighty bang to the head, and who
is to say that it was not He who arranged it. I must have been a
prime target, the way I was living my life at the time. Maybe he
decided to make me privy to what was really happening in the world,
to see where I would jump. Would I turn my head away, or would I
address the real world?

I cannot turn
my head away. Turning my head away does not tune down the voices,
the fears, the joys, the passions, the anger, the affliction.
Turning my head away does not allow me to escape for one second
what I admit I should have been paying more attention to many years
ago. If I had paid attention then, perhaps I would not be deafened
now. Deafened without the hope of becoming deaf. All man's
suffering is landing on my plate as a main course, with
Death-by-Chocolate scratched form the menu.

I did not
choose this. Probably it was not chosen for me either. I survived,
and this is my price, not for survival, but for surviving. It is
the package I picked up on the way, and will never put
down.

It is all
humanity screaming for something, and against something
else.

Imagine you
were surrounded by a billion cabbies demanding justice and their
fare. That is where I stand, God love me. And he probably does, not
least for giving him the night off.

* *
*

Every time I
think of God I think of a man (because I am a traditionalist) who
made the world by mistake.

I have no
specific “in” on this, so your guess is as good as mine, but that
is what I imagine.

God is a man
who was absentmindedly rubbing some quarks together, and two quarks
made a quawk. He examined it a bit, and He started rubbing the
quawk, and it made a super-quawk. With a lot more rubbing He gained
an atom, and from an atom eventually He got a molecule, and from a
molecule a cell. Then everything was way out of His
hands.

So I doubt
that He did it deliberately. I do not picture Him getting out His
pens and His papers, muttering “Let's get to the drawing board”,
and intentionally inventing life.

Nearly all
great inventions come about by accident. True, the inventors often
had something in mind, but often not the same something as they
got.

I am not at
all sure that God was after anything at all. He was just
fidgeting.

Then this
thing grew bigger and bigger, like expanding foam except that it
was intelligent expanding foam. It learnt things, and it
adapted.

God watched
all this in awe. It gradually dawned on Him that one day this
tumescent soup would be capable of rocket science and
cloning.

He got very
excited. Well, you would be. Something He had created (His
fidgeting was now reframed as a deliberate act) was taking on a
life of its own. Think about it. Man has been desperate for
centuries to create a new life form, and God had achieved it in the
palm of His hand on an eternity morning while mulling over what to
do that day.

Show any child
a patch of ground, and sprinkle seeds onto it. Take the child back
to the same spot a few weeks later, and there are seeds growing.
The child jumps up and down with glee.

So God jumped
up and down too. He was beside Himself with pleasure at His new
creation. He spent all the hours that He had (so all the hours)
watching it develop. And it got bigger, and bigger, and
bigger.

He lost
himself in time while it grew, and it grew, and it grew.

Then something
alarming happened. It grew differently. It stepped out of the
framework it had started with, and diversified. God bent down and
watched, fascinated. This was even more exciting, this
dysfunctional aberration. Then the aberrations got aberrational,
and out of those by now multitudinous aberrations, life was formed.
Imagine your first sight of life, man or God.

At some point
He must have asked himself “How do I control this?”, and then He
thought “Let's put it off for a few centuries. Let's leave it be
and see what happens.”

And what
happened happened quite quickly, at terrifying speed over millions
of years, which wasn't long for God. And the more it happened the
more He let it happen because it was so fascinating, so many
ramifications and speculations. He tried to work out what was going
on. He became a philosopher. He became a mathematician. He became a
scientist.

He gave things
a little nudge from time to time, and provoked new outcomes. Was He
interfering for the better or for the worse? For good or for evil?
What was good and what was evil? It started out as what He liked
and what He disliked; what He wanted to see happen and what He did
not. After a while God, as a philosopher, examined His own
motivations and decided that they were not enough. There had to be
an objective basis for good and evil. So He travelled the path all
later philosophers travelled down. It is difficult to entertain a
thought that God has not pondered with great seriousness first.
Except that He took a much wider view. He was concerned for the
well-being of all creation, all materials, all formations, all
substances, all life. Each element of His universe got a vote. He
had some complex calculations to make. Did the benefit of 1,000,000
beings that lasted no more than a day outweigh the interests of 100
beings that lived 100 years? How does a life equate to a square
metre of earth?

To answer this
He decided that He had to create an objective for His universe, a
vision (He did not bother to tangle himself up in too many
definitions, worrying Himself over the differences between visions,
missions, goals and objectives. He took an empirical view - was it
over here or over there that we should be striving to attain? He
did not allocate random timelines, milestones and deadlines either.
When He first heard people using these terms with great
earnestness, He roared with laughter because no corporate plan ever
laid down that such and such an objective would be achieved in a
million years, which was often about its realistic timescale.
People laid down tiny timescales - next week, two weeks' time, next
month, by the end of the year, in five years' time - then randomly
hit them or missed them. However, He did notice that applying these
timescales motivated people to do more than they otherwise would
have done. Was that “more” for the better or for the worse? He
could not answer that without His vision).

And this is
where He got stuck. The world was created without a vision. It had
no original purpose. It was a fidget. God tried to superimpose a
purpose. He considered that good was whatever was in the best
interest of the continuation of the universe. You could ask why the
universe should continue, that was a valid question, but
unanswerable. It had to be considered a given. Now He got to the
calculation. How do you calculate whether a tiny activity over here
(say an ant's breath) benefits or not the continuation of the
entire universe in some sustainable fertile form? When you think
that there are more stars in the sky than grains of sand on a
beach, you begin to grapple with the enormity of the
problem.

So God gave
up, and decided that He would just try to keep the volume down
instead. There were all these cries coming up from everywhere in
the universe - cries of happiness, of sadness, of distress, of
exultation, of agony. They were making a huge eternal booming wave
of a noise (as arrives in my head nowadays on a much smaller
scale), and God decided that they were seriously interfering with
His enjoyment of the universe.

So He created
another human being, whom He called His son, to at least try to
sort out human beings, who were disproportionately responsible for
the distress God was suffering because they were so articulate.
Christ came down to earth and delivered his message well - “Love
God, and love your neighbour as yourself (and therefore quieten
down a little - you are making far too much noise!)”.
Unfortunately, the humans started shouting and clapping when he
announced the first two sections, and so never quite heard the
third message in brackets. Human beings have selective
hearing.

Christ said
“God is listening to you (there is no need to shout).” They missed
the second bit out of their excitement over the first.

Christ on the
cross cried out “Father, oh father, where art Thou now in my time
of need?”