“Shut the fuck up, SHUT THE FUCK UP…”

I think the only thing that stopped him shooting into the trunk was the fact that it was Frank’s car and he was touchy about things like that and not because he’d seen one too many F.B.I. specials but because it was a Mustang.

I pushed Pablo away and told him to get some air. He wandered off to the side of the road and kicked a log.

“The Doors,” he moaned, “Kenny Fucking Rogers I could understand but The Doors!”

He was pissed all right. Turns out he’d been driving around all day with Frank looking for the guy. Frank liked his country and he must have heard The Gambler about a hundred times. Lesser men would have lost the will to live.

Frank opened the trunk and fixed the flashlight on the guy. He was still hog tied and his wrists were bloody where he’d been struggling against the rope.

When he saw us he stopped crying and started begging. It was the same old shit they always say.

“…I’ve got money… in my wallet…”

“Do we look like Niggers?”

I pressed my gun against his head and told him if he didn’t keep quiet I’d shoot up his ass ’till I blew his head off and we didn’t hear another peep from him ’til we got to the cabin.

Fat Tony was his name and he’d pissed the boss off by trying to deal out of The Cuba Lounge. Right on our own fucking doorstep. Unbelievable.

At the cabin Mickey Boosh and Marko were out on the porch standing guard. They were bored out of their tiny minds. Friday night in the sticks was not their idea of a good time. If we’d have been a legit corporation in today’s candy assed culture I’m sure they could have sued for ‘meniality’ or something.

The boss came out in a big towelling robe and we hauled Fat Tony out and dumped him on the ground. I don’t know if you ever saw any photographs of De Silva from those days. He was real menacing, even in a dressing gown, and when he stood there in the moonlight with that insane grin plasted all over his face Fat Tony just wet himself and started blubbing. The boss had that effect on people; he looked evil, with his shaved head and that shark like smile. He came to his decision quickly and wasn’t going to bother talking to a jelly all fucking night.

Tossing a cigarette away he turned to Pablo and said: “Shoot him in the head.”

Pablo needed no further invitation and before any of us could blink he put a bullet through his temple and the guy’s head exploded like jam pie onto the back of Frank’s car.

“Shit,” said Frank looking at the mess. Pablo smirked.

“Good job,” said the boss strolling back to the cabin.

I went to ask Carlos where to dump the body. He was playing cards and as usual he was taking a beating. I liked Carlos, he was the boss’s right hand and he was from our neighbourhood. Outside he couldn’t believe we’d killed someone so close to the boss.

“So who the fuck is this anyway?” he asked.

“Fat Tony,” I said, “you know the guy from The Cuba.”

“That’s not Fat Tony. He’d never be seen dead in such a cheap suit.”

“Sure it is, the boss just came out and talked to him,” I said.

“Listen,” said Carlos seriously, “The boss has never even seen him.”

Frank bent down over the body and fished the wallet out of the guy’s jacket. There was about ten bucks and a membership to a gym. It never ceased to amaze me with these fat guys, you never caught them with memberships to ‘The Lard House’ or ‘The Greasy Cake Club’. It turned out his name was Anthony Coen. “Sure, Fat Tony, Tony Coen,” I said hopefully.

Pablo started laughing.

I hadn’t been there when the guys had picked him up. They’d been driving around all day looking for him, slowly pissing each other off and listening to Kenny Rogers when Pablo had jumped from the car and ran down a side street. According to Frank he came back five minutes later dragging the guy by his pony tail. They gave him a bit of a work over and tossed him in the trunk. Then they picked me up.

It turned out Frank didn’t really know what Fat Tony looked like either.

“Why did you shoot him in the face?” asked Carlos.

Pablo shrugged, “The boss asked me to.”

We stood around wondering what to do. Sure, we all knew Fat Tony, he was the guy who was moving in on the Cuba Lounge. We had seen him around a hundred times, whether we took any notice of him was another matter. Could I pick him out in a crowd? No. Could Frank or Pablo come to that? Probably not. He was just this guy. To tell you the truth I knew a couple of Fat Tony’s and when I first heard about the Cuba thing I had to ask which one. It wasn’t Fat Tony who worked for the Chico brothers. It wasn’t Fat Tony from up town. It was Fat Tony from The Cuba, you know, the ‘other guy’. Pablo had probably just jumped the first fat guy who was walking down the road and answered to Tony. UN-FUCKING-LUCKY. But how did we know?

Pablo played it cool. “It sure looked like him,” he said with a big grin. “Maybe his good suits are at the cleaners.”

“I should take you to the fucking cleaners,” growled Carlos.

“He has a point,” I said reluctantly, “you know, if you’re just going off the suit…”

“It’s not just the suit, Tony likes gold, lots of it and he’s bigger and he’s definitely not Jewish.”

“How do you know he’s not Jewish?” asked Frank.

“Because I’ve met the guy and he’s fucking Irish that’s why I know he’s not fucking Jewish.”

“Well how do we know this guy is Jewish?” asked Pablo.

“Because he works at the synagogue you fuck-nut.”

“His name’s Coen,” I explained, “It’s a good bet.”

Pablo wasn’t having any of it. “What if it’s fake ID?” he said with a smile pulling at the corners of his eyes. “I’m no expert,” he continued, “but the name Coen on a couple of bits of plastic don’t mean he’s a Jew. I eat a lot of pasta and it don’t make me Italian.” He was right. We hadn’t a clue.

“If he’s Jewish then that means he must of had the chop,” I said.

Now you’ve got to remember that I was just a kid in those days and I hadn’t learnt yet to keep my mouth shut so when I said what I said I didn’t realise what I was suggesting.

“You are one sick fuck,” said Frank running his hands through his hair.

We stood in silence for what felt like eternity, wishing that I’d kept my big mouth shut. Eventually Carlos nodded at me, “OK kid, go on.”

I looked at Frank and Pablo and they just stared right back, their eyes broadcasting that there was no getting out of it and I’d only myself to blame.

I knelt down on the dirt and undid his belt. It was a struggle even though he’d cut extra holes to accommodate his bloated stomach. I had to sit on his legs and work both my hands around his huge ass and hook my fingers into his flesh to pull down his pants. His skin was clammy with sweat and it was like touching old soap. When I finally got them off a smell of piss and shit punched me in the face.

“Hey!” shouted Mickey Boosh from the porch, “I always knew you Puerto Ricans were Faggots!” He and Marko began laughing.  Friday night was starting to look up for them after all I guess.

Frank and Pablo told them to go fuck themselves and I stood up and gave them the finger.

“The guy hasn’t even got a dick,” said Carlos staring down at the dead guy’s crotch. His pubic hair was like seaweed and he must have had a dick the size of a peanut. “Hey Mickey, why don’t you come down here, we need a hand.”

As soon as Mickey heard the tone of Carlos’s voice he stopped laughing. He was Italian and none too smart, a complete muscle freak. If there’d been a Mr Mob competition he’d have organised it, the big dumb goof.

Carlos was always touchy about what anyone said about us; we were just beginning to get ahead in the organisation at that time and it wasn’t easy. The Italians still ruled as a matter of course and the Irish had their cop connections but what did we have? Our people still bought live fucking chickens for Christ sakes. It pissed him off. Nine times out of ten it was our guys who got their fingers burnt in the fires, it was our guys who got shot first. We were the canon fodder hench men, the first guys to die. That’s one thing the movies did get right.

Carlos had a word in his ear. “What’s that you saying? ” he said real menacing. “It sounded like you were calling us all queer.” Mickey shook his head and stared at the ground. Big dumb guys like Mickey were always like this, deep down none of them had any balls.

” I was just joking with the kid,” he said nervously.

“It didn’t sound like that Mickey, in fact it was pretty fucking insulting.”

“But…” he muttered staring at the ground, “he, uh, pulled the guys pants down…”

“So what, you thought this was like a sex situation?” asked Carlos. Mickey just shrugged. “That’s pretty fucked up Mickey. Is that what you think queers do, cluster around dead fat guys? Queers are just guys like you, they like looking at other men, showering with them. Kind of like what you do down the gym. Are you gay Mickey is that it?” Mickey shook his head. “Well seeing as you’re not gay,” continued Carlos, “you wont have a problem helping us out because we need to know if he’s got a foreskin so we can know if he’s a Jew. So I want you to get down there and find his dick.”

“I ain’t touching his dick,” he said scared.

Pablo pulled out his gun and made sure there were bullets in it, real obvious like, and he sank slowly to his knees. His face was a mixture of fear and disgust and when he found the guys piss wet maggot we made him pull it out so we could see it was circumcised. I don’t think any of us had seen a dick like it before, it’s not like we’re specialists or anything, but it was so small and warty. As he held it out Mickey started crying until tears were flowing down his cheeks.

“You fucking faggot,” said Pablo.

After that night things didn’t go right for him ever again.  He took it personal and it got to him when the guys brought it up for fun. ‘You whacked off any more dead guys Mickey?’ someone would always ask real innocent like. He was scarred for life. Even when it was forgotten he thought people were laughing at him behind his back. He started getting crazy, running around with any girl he could get his hands on, trying to prove to the world he wasn’t gay or something. Then one day he blew his brains out in his mother’s garage. Suicide.

We drove back to town and went straight to The Cuba Lounge. No-one had seen Fat Tony. It was bad news; he was still swanning around somewhere, a huge walking finger in the face of The Boss. We had to find him and bump him off before anything happened. Things could turn nasty for us real quick.

We spent all night driving round, talking to the wise guys, the pimps, the dealers, the whores, the junkies and the johns. Turns out everyone knew Fat Tony and no-one knew him at all. He was the bald guy, the short guy, the black guy with the hat, the Mexican with the limp, the fat queen with the feathers, he wore fur, he had an eye patch, he had a lisp, he was big Al’s bagman, he chewed so much tobacco he had black teeth, he dealt fake ID out this cafe, he sold H in another, either Fat Tony was the busiest crook Manhattan had ever seen or there were an army of Fat Tonys, all of them scum bags, some of them not even called Tony, some of them not even fat. By six the next morning we still hadn’t found him.

The next day word got out about what had happened and some young hoods who were looking to do better than us and impress the boss picked up this other Fat Tony, a small time shill from Coney, and killed him and drove the corpse around to the boss’s downtown club. Needless to say the boss wasn’t pleased. Then some other fat guy went missing from Brooklyn and still another one turned up headless in the park. It got ridiculous. Someone said our boss had a thing against fat guys, that he’d lost his mind. As if he wasn’t pissed enough already. They were all unconnected events but the press got hold of it as they’re liable to do in the summer when there’s no news and before we knew what had happened there was that big panic thing. Fat guys started going around in gangs. Restaurants started closing because their best customers were slimming. It was all whipped up by the media and when that sicko actually started killing fat guys it just got crazy because then they actually did have someone targeting porkers. It was mass hysteria. The killer had probably only started because of all the coverage in the first place. It’s a sick old world.

Somewhere in all the confusion, the Fat Tony from The Cuba disappeared. To his dying  day Pablo swore he’d whacked the right guy. Me, I don’t know what to think. Maybe he didn’t exist so much in the first place.

The boss never really trusted us again after that. Whenever we saw him he mentioned it, like we were just going to keep bringing him dead fat guys or something, like that’s all we did.

Once a year, the leading representatives of planet Earth’s various religions were invited to attend a short personal interview with the Supreme Being. Some called him God, others Allah, Yahweh or even Zeus, but to all of them he was the Boss. It was a time when he laid down the law and allowed each delegate a glimpse of the cosmic master plan in which they were involved. There was only one God, but lots of different brand names and sales territories. Nothing was sold as such but the earth was shaped by their ministrations. Humanity had to be educated somehow.  

Jesus, the leading representative of Christianity and all Bible-based subdivisions, sat in the waiting room before his meeting with the Supreme Being and was ill at ease. He had been to 2003 such meetings and was utterly depressed by the whole scene. This year it was taking place in Binnion’s Horseshoe Casino in Las Vegas. Last year it had been in a series of dark caves in the Hindu Kush. The year before he couldn’t remember. The whole set up was the same: a waiting room, a door to the Supreme Being, the other reps mingling about nearby cracking jokes and making small talk.

Jesus had no time to talk shop with the others, as one of the big three religions he didn’t feel he had much in common with the others anyway. He believed ardently in his own unique path. Sure, the others had similar troubles as he did with stupid followers and such but he thought that was because most of their gospels were obtuse and ridiculous.

They often ridiculed him. They said he had ‘a Messiah complex’. It was all rather childish and immature. Jesus put it down to jealousy; their religions were moribund, their churches forgotten, their ‘miracles’ bizarre and unfathomable to the mind of modern man. His was the true light, the one path to salvation. Look at the figures, look at the number of followers, the number of active churches, the Bible was still a best seller even though they were giving it away free.

He especially disliked Habakkuk the Jewish representative. The man traded as an ex-rabbi these days, ‘just call me Hershel’ he said rubbing his hands together and smiling. He seemed so friendly until you got to know him. This was the guy who’d stood by in WWII while Hitler’s ‘Christians’ fired up the death camps and told him, Jesus, in a heated dispute, that he lacked an eternal perspective.

The Jew came on like he was so much older and wiser than Jesus was and yet what was the Holocaust if not the Roman Persecution all over again? OK so his people had written the Bible but who had learnt what from whom?

Jesus still hadn’t forgiven him. It didn’t help that the guy was constantly making jokes about him. He had hours of material, whole routines built up over centuries. He’d seen them all on TV. All those Jewish comedians, they were ‘inspired’ all right – in the true sense of the word – but was it fitting for the immortal representative of a major religion to be a gag-writer? Jesus didn’t think so.

This year Jesus had been made to pass through the whole casino to get to the waiting room and ‘Hershel’ had been around a Blackjack table with Pan and Satan. Old Gods – the man had no self respect. Jesus had tried to sneak by unnoticed but had still heard a jibe, some joke being wound up with the punch-line: “And the waitress said, ‘he offered to save my soul but he wouldn’t tip!”

Those old gods could laugh. You could hear them miles away and yet they had the cheek to claim he was paranoid. At least it wasn’t the one where he supposedly walked into a hotel and the manager gave him some nails.

It wore down his spiritual envelope, it made his palms itch.

What were they doing here anyway? Those old reps of defunct religions, they treated the meeting like a holiday and they all drank and smelt like goats, well maybe only Pan smelt like a goat but it carried everywhere. Anubus, the old Egyptian guy, didn’t hang around the scene any more. He knew when his time was up and had disappeared with a little dignity but Pan and co were a menace. They’d formed the ‘Pagan Collective’ and went in to see the Supreme Being altogether. Their followers were basically the witchy set that didn’t invoke Satan. A pitiful bunch of wasters and they numbered less than a few hundred worldwide. Not even enough to bother getting out of bed in the morning. No wonder they were so happy and care free, no wonder they could play cards. Jesus was run ragged, so many millions, so little time. How could he stop to play Blackjack and listen to the Jew’s stories? It wasn’t some little game. Mankind’s future was at stake!

Jesus looked at the clock on the wall and sighed. He’d been waiting for almost half an hour. Incredible, as if he had time to hang around. The Buddha was in the office with the Supreme Being. He always went in behind Buddha and he always had to wait. His own meeting had begun to last, on average, between eight and ten minutes. Buddha was sometimes in there for over an hour. What did he do to deserve such special attention? All he did was laugh and take long naps in picturesque Japanese trees. Jesus couldn’t fathom it but the Buddha always came out grinning. Not that it meant anything; the fucker was always grinning, as if the world was nothing more than a goofy cartoon. Jesus thought he was insane. He once caught him floating over the killing fields of Cambodia on a cloud of butterflies in a fit of hysterical laughter. Spooky.

Jesus was starting to have serious doubts about the boss, about everything, about the whole shitty system. Was he being puritanical? Damn right he was. He could see no problem in that. He was after all ‘Gods own Son’, with over 32% of the world’s population allied to his light, singing his hymns, reading his gospel. Pan and co had lost all their followers years ago when mankind went beyond imagining goats as divine. He had supplanted them so why were they still here?

Jesus jumped to his feet and began to pace. What had he done to deserve such a snub year after year? It was almost as if the boss wanted him to be a failure. He never had a kind word for him. It could be because of all the Christian fanatics but that was only to be expected of a massive religion like his. You cast your net wide and you got a good catch but there’s always going to be a lot of sub-normals in amongst the healthy fish. He was an awesome mover of minds, an electrifyer of spirits, a force to enact the Supreme Being’s cosmic plan but was he to be held accountable every time some nut case intoned his name and dhot someone in the head or hung someone from a tree? He’d understood that the mills of the lord were wide -but ground extremely fine. The big mill took in all kinds of misshapen wheat. As long it was all ground to his flour at the end of the process did it really matter? If the boss was that upset with the Christian Fundamentalists why didn’t he just come out and tell him and he’d do something about it. He tried to keep the lunatic fringe from getting too out of control. It was spelled out clearly: ‘THOU SHALT NOT KILL’ but they were such a slippery bunch of bastards. They prayed and then they went out and dropped bombs and bought guns and drove cars into each other without batting an eyelid.

Jesus looked at the clock on the wall. The Buddha had been in with the Supreme Being for over half an hour. He could just Holy Ghost his way in there and check out what was going on but the Boss would spot him immediately.

Jesus sighed and sat down, ‘calm calm calm,’ he told himself. This was the trouble, he was so stressed that felt he wasn’t functioning properly. There were so many evoking his name and miss-reading his scripture that it gave him a constant pounding headache. He knew Mohammed felt the same way.

Just last month there was a new group of followers who were calling themselves ‘The Musical Truth’. They spread the good news and worshipped by performing biblically altered versions of popular musicals. They weren’t a problem as such, just insane. The leader was a transvestite homosexual who liked dressing up as Mary Magdalene and ‘going down’ on the rest of the cast live on stage. It was incredible. Where in the Bible did it mention all-singing-and-dancing sex shows? Yet it was his problem, they were his followers, along with the fundamentalist group ‘The Holy Light’ who were planning to blow the next performance to pieces with ‘Holy semtex’. It was madness, so mad in fact that he was beginning to doubt his own righteous path.

About a thousand years ago, Hershel had told him that doubt was normal when you realized the boss sanctioned other religions and that the doubts only grew with the number and variety of followers you had. They’d been on speaking terms then, the world had been a lot less populated, they bumped into each other often. Now he just took piss. Jesus put it down to jealousy and insecurity. Judaism was pretty big but it was on the down turn, if you looked at world population growth. Jesus looked at the figures constantly. Christianity was showing ominous trends but it would be impossible to tell really for another couple of decades.

The clock on the wall said Buddha had been in the office for over forty minutes! Jesus sighed and pulled out his cell phone and called up a powerful Baptist ministry in the Bible belt.

“Yes,” he said when he was connected, “I want you to check the Buddhists for me – worldwide – I want the latest news, I want financial data and an estimate on their projected growth and current size and don’t forget the Zens but don’t count East Coast Vegetarians.” He clicked the phone off and then made the call two more times to a statistical department in the Vatican and then to the Head of the Russian Orthodox Church.

The door from the outside corridor opened and The Twins entered in their customary black suits. The Twins represented Alien Based Religions. This was only the sixth or seventh meeting with the boss. They smiled at Jesus and sat down on the seats next to him. Jesus nodded his head at them in a way that implied utter serenity. He also upped his aura a few notches gradually so he started to glow.

Jesus despised The Twins. They were little more than cultists and they’d plagiarized all his best lines and given him no credit. If he didn’t have a just reputation for mercy and forgiveness he’d have dropped a rock on them years ago. In fact he’d petitioned the Supreme Being to do just that on five occasions. It was tricky, they undermined his work and therefore the work of God but God’s will was unfolding through the use of many religions so there was no way they could undermine the whole cosmic plan, just the Christian part of it. It was a catch 22.

Jesus was happy working with other religions. Up until now he’d been the hot new golden boy but if new religions came to supplant him then how long would it be before he was joining the Pagan Fellowship and watching Pan rape some drugged Sophomore in the graveyard of one of his abandoned churches? It was a long way off but the fact that it was a possibility was a stunning blow to the Holy Roller. It was a blow that would make the crucifixion and resurrection look like a cheap side-show stunt in a Las Vegas Hotel.

The door to the meeting room opened and the Buddha walked out smiling quietly to himself. He resembled a Chinese peasant. Jesus looked at the clock. He’d been in the room for over an hour. Jesus stood up and bowed his head to the Buddha as he walked past. He giggled and walked out of the waiting room and into the hotel.

“The Buddha Consciousness,” said the twins in unison to Jesus.

Jesus ignored them and walked into God’s office. The door closed behind him.

The boss was sat behind a large desk and had taken human form as was traditional. The past forty or so years had been like this. He wore the robes of some kind of space aged monk with the hood up but where there should have been a face there was nothing but eternal night, a void so black it soaked up light from the room like a beam. In the early days when he had been more supportive of Jesus he had appeared like a wise old man with flowing white hair.

The others referred to it now, jokingly, as his ‘white period’.

“Father,” said Jesus.

“Jesus,” said God.

There were no chairs in front of the desk. It was fine by Jesus; he didn’t need to sit down.

“You’ve had a busy year,” said the Supreme Being getting right down to business. “You still have followers worldwide, you still count as major force on the planet, your churches are rich and their members content and powerful. You are credited with more appearances and miracles than any other religious figurehead, in fact your personal fame and recognition on the planet is number two in all the poles, only fractionally behind that of Elvis.”

Jesus laughed lightly, in what he considered to be a Zen like way. It was well known that the Supreme Being had a sense of humour. For years the Archbishop of Canterbury had been urging Jesus to develop his own lighter side. It was said that if you read certain passages of the Bible in a certain way that he sounded like Jackie Mason.

“Yet,” continued the boss, “millions upon millions of your followers are petty and evil and intone your name only as camouflage for their own selfish interests. Your churches are emptying, the core message of The Bible is being misinterpreted, if and when it is read at all. The poor cling to it but they are getting screwed, quite literally in many Catholic Churches, by your priests.”

“Well if you’d give me a little more room to maneuver, cook up a few huge miracles, then I’ll be able to slam it to Satan and all these other religions you have running around undermining me all the time.”

“Oh Jesus, that is so un-evolved,” said the Supreme Being in a disapproving tone.

“Evolution – that’s another problem to a lot of my people.”

“But not to all of them, a lot of them combine your beliefs with evolution.”

“So what are you saying,” said Jesus, “you don’t want them to believe you created them in seven days no more?”

“That whole seven days business is a bit silly, it was a bit more complex, evolution is a better way of understand the process. Humanity is moving on, it’s ready for more information now.”

Jesus was gob-smacked. Did this mean the end of his franchise? “I’ve always done your bidding,” he stammered, “I think the core message is still good.”

“Look, I’ve been telling everybody but it’s you and Mohammed I’m primarily talking to here, I want you to cut back on all this bat-brained fundamentalism – it’s really starting to fuck things up.”

“But fundamentalism is just a symptom.”

“I know, of a desperation to hold onto a world view that is no-longer tenable.”

“Well only because of other religions and Satan.”

“Satan nothing. I had him in here last night and he’s in pieces, totally washed up. No-ones invoking him seriously anymore and you and Mohammed have followers committing more atrocities than he can keep up with. I’ve told him to take a year off in fact. He’s going to relax and play around with the music scene. He likes that.”

“So what are you saying,” asked Jesus.

“I’m saying Christianity is no-longer tenable. The world has moved on. Humanity has evolved. You’ve been great, you’ve helped them. but a lot of your ideas are medieval.”

Jesus felt weak and a large leather armchair suddenly appeared behind him. He sank down into it slowly, gladly.

“Don’t take it so hard kid, you’ve done well, you’ve given a lot of people comfort, your work has allowed millions to live in relative peace and you’ve allowed Science to flourish which has upped the intelligence notch of the planet a few notches but.”

“But that’s it, so long.”

“You must have seen it coming, look at the ancient religions, look at Pan.”

“I try not to look at Pan,” said Jesus, “I’d like not to be able to smell him too.”

“It’s not the end,” said God. “Just cut back on the fundamentalists, ignorance is sin, make sure they know ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’. Keep things pure and simple from now on.”

“So you want me to lose followers?”

“It’s happening anyway if you’d stop massaging the figures for ten minutes you’d see.”

Jesus turned red. You could never hide anything from the boss. “But what about Islam?” he asked.

“I’ve told Mohammed. The same goes for him, only I’ve given him more time. He has a bigger problem than you do, more followers living in poverty. It’ll be a while before they get the options and education to break the cycle of ignorance. In fact I don’t think he’ll be able to help me much in the long run.”

“You’ve told him that?” asked Jesus in surprise.

“Well not exactly. He knows that a lot of the basic tenets of his religion are at odds with modern life, they’re not even compatible with space travel let alone some of the new stuff coming up.” The Supreme Being leant towards Jesus. “Now don’t tell him, I don’t want him freaking out and turning Jewish or anything.”

Jesus let out a reluctant smile. “So what do you want me to do?”

“Like I say, focus and simplify and you’ll get by into the New Age. I want you to start visiting Buddha every so often, drop by his restaurant. He’s been around four times as long as you and he can help.”

“But he’s still huge,”

“Yes, but only because he’s not radical.”

Jesus began to think about The Pope and all his other priests. What would he tell them? How would he commute his will? There was a new tone in the Supreme Beings voice, a new hardness. He knew he’d want results and see changes within a few years.

Jesus climbed to his feet. The meeting was over.

“And why don’t you start talking to Hershel again, he likes you and he’s worried,” said God.

“Sure,” said Jesus meekly. He walked out of the door, his feet felt like lead.

He didn’t look at The Twins when he walked past them. If he had he’d have probably given them leprosy.

In a hotel room down the strip Jesus calculated that his meeting had lasted a pathetic eleven minutes. He drank four bottles of Scotch and then teleported himself to the edge of the pacific and began to walk slowly out on the water.

“I’ll show them,” said Jesus. He’d resolved to walk right across the ocean carrying a huge wooden cross. He’d be spotted sometime soon and he thought the repercussions would be unstoppable. Christianity would be around for another 2000 years at least.

He didn’t know however, that a science lab in Australia had found a way of manipulating small force fields and in a couple of months people were walking on water everywhere. In fact, the Mediterranean Marathon was the highlight of the 2004 Olympics.

Everything is somehow wrong and to say so or to try and do anything is hopeless.

The bus came, it was full of ugly phantoms. All I could think about was that my electricity bill was unpaid so they had cut me off. There was a newspaper on the floor at my feet. I picked it up and read about how an old man who was nearing retirement died at his desk in an office he shared with four other people. They didn’t realize he was dead for a week, until he began to rot. His colleagues said he was always quiet and kind of slumped over and sometimes he even went to sleep. Even the cleaners dusted around him, corpses were not part of their contract. Everyone was low paid, that seemed to be an important point to the story.

I could understand it. I’d spent my whole adult life working with corpses. They might have actually been able to move their limbs and suck back a cigarette but they were already dead. Disappointment washed out of them like a river of shit. Not bad people but so far from the spark of life as to make waxworks of pointless celebrities seem vital and alive.

When I got off the bus the chip shop queue ran right out outside into the wet night. The FAT BASTARD from up the street bought the last two battered fish before I could get served. How he could afford it was beyond me. He doesn’t work, probably claims sickness benefit for obesity. I felt a rage within me but suppressed it quickly. Before you know where you are you find yourself turning into a Nazi and longing for a strong fascist government to beat him into shape. All it sometimes takes is a sleight disappointment at the dinner table, the shape of someone’s body, an imagined sleight. There is a well of hatred sitting in all of us.

I got home to a dark empty house. The electricity bill was unpaid and they had cut me off. I lit some candles and put some batteries in my transistor radio. I got wet feet from a puddle on the kitchen floor where the fridge had defrosted itself. I cracked open a bottle of cheap bourbon I’d bought from the corner shop. Back in the living room a DJ was gibbering on like a simpleton. I ate my chips and curry sauce and poured myself a tumbler full of bourbon. I left the saveloy. Don’t know why I bought it, odd tasting dubious meat.

After my meal I lit a cigarette and lay back on the settee. The drink slipped into my gullet like a lazy fire through damp twigs. Thoughts circled my head like vultures. I began to feel my loneliness like a heavy oppressive force. Impulsively I went and picked up the phone and trailed it back across the room to the settee. I thought about everyone I knew.

I settled on Bob, my old work mate. We didn’t work together anymore but we’d always gotten along. I dialed his number, I was going to tell him about the beggar I’d watched for about three or four hours in the town centre that afternoon until it had started to rain and I’d gone in a pub near the financial district. The phone rang and rang. He lived alone, he never married but he did have a son somewhere up north. He was originally from Newcastle. He didn’t talk about his old life much, I never asked. I let the phone ring for a while before I hung up. He was probably down the Builders Arms, it was his local. He was a member of their pool team.

I thought about who else I could ring instead. There weren’t many. I didn’t have many friends, none in fact. It was too late to ring Dr Santos at his office. I had his home number, of course, but I wanted to save it until I really needed it. I began to think about everyone I knew. It was a short list so I thought about all the people I didn’t know. They seemed like a much more attractive bunch since talking to them would not involve managing the weary resume of myself. Who was I to those people anyway? None of it made any sense.

I picked up the phone and dialed six numbers at random. I was lucky and made a connection. As the phone on the other end began to ring a strange laugh echoed into the receiver from the back of my throat.

No one answered straight away. I let it ring. Maybe there was nobody home. I began to wonder what I would say if someone picked up. Since I had no actually plan it would probably be determined by the sound of the person who picked up. I’d have about three or four seconds of silence to play with, to stay within the boundaries of normal conversation once the other person picked up and said hello. Any longer and I’d probably not be able to sound right. Not able to sound right? I laughed again, that strange alien sound.

The phone continued to ring. It might be upsetting someone at the other end of the line. With every ring the call was becoming something else, it was growing old, and would be perceived as having lost its innocence. Persistent ringing signals dire circumstances. It is serious enough to interrupt the bath, the lovemaking, and the coma. I looked at the clock on the wall. It was only half- nine so it wasn’t too late.

I let it ring for another couple of minutes and laughed again. If someone picked up I decided I was going to say ‘Is That the Coastguard’ in a panic, as if I was clinging to the hull of a sinking boat. I began to guffaw at my own humour like a stoned teenager playing pranks with the phone book.

I stopped laughing a little while later and hung up. I’d been locked in a game of telephonic chicken with an empty room. I finished my glass of whiskey and poured another. The radio was now playing a ballad from a boy band. I got up and turned it off. When I sat back down I picked up the phone again and dialed another six numbers at random. This time a man answered it on the fourth ring.

“Yes?” he said in a dry raspy voice.

“Hello,” I said. “I was wondering if I could speak to the master of the house.” The words fell from my mouth automatically, gaining me some time.

“What?” said the man shifting the phone from one ear to another. He coughed to clear his throat. I pictured him in my mind’s eye: old, frail, long time smoker, tattoos, eyes narrowing.

“I’d like to speak to the master of the house” I said again, unable to think of anything else to say. He grunted and put the phone down and I heard him pad across the room and open a creaky door. I realized it was an antiquated turn of phrase, something perhaps from the 50′s. That was why he was so wrong footed. If I had said, ‘home-owner’ instead of ‘master’ he would probably have been more comfortable. Unfortunately I felt myself adopting a role, a position that would make it perfectly ordinary and in the run of things for me to call someone I didn’t know out of the blue. I cursed myself. Why couldn’t I just say that I had hit some numbers at random because I wanted to talk to somebody?

After a few minutes someone else picked up the phone.

“Hello?” said a young boy unsurely. The older man, presumably his dad, had come to some kind of conclusion about me in the short time that we spoke. He’d taken ‘master’ to be his son perhaps. It was quite understandable.

“Hello,” I said. A long pause developed. I didn’t mean it to. I just didn’t know what to say and the thought of talking to a kid threw me.

“Who’s there?” the boy asked nervously. I thought about the question and whether or not I should just apologize and put the phone down.

“Can I speak to your dad please?” I said at last. The boy put the phone down and the man came back on.

“Hello?” he said again. This time he was stern. It would not take much for this man to drop from confusion to anger. He coughed and cleared his throat.

“Hi,” I said thinking fast; “I’m calling from Webster, Hume and Goldbuckle.” I paused and took a deep breath.

It came as quite a shock to find I was suddenly representing a firm of solicitors.

“Well whatever you’re selling, I can’t afford to buy,” said the man preparing to put down the phone.

“I’m not selling anything,” I said. “We’re solicitors. I’m calling to find out if either you or any of your family have been involved in an accident or something we could construe as an accident that has resulted in personal injury, memory loss, scarification, amputation, plastic surgery, nasal discomfort, fracture, bowel trouble, tightening of the lung, hearing loss, mummification, severing, fatty deposits, stretching, strangulation, depression, alcoholism, impotence, self-importance, anger, alien abduction, Ebola, scrofula, leprosy, cancer, deja-vu, timidity or any other symptoms of illness or discomfort?”

The man coughed. “How did you get my number?”

I stifled a small laugh and leaned away from the mouthpiece. I coughed and composed myself by pinching my leg and taking a deep breath.

“We’re calling everyone in the area,” I said. “We are looking for clients and we operate on a no win – no fee basis and we could earn you anything from five hundred pounds to seventy five thousand in a successful claim.” The man was silent. I could hear him breathing heavily. I waited.

“And how much will it cost me?” he asked.

“It won’t cost you a penny sir.”

The man was silent again. I could hear him breathing. “Well there is something,” he said, “well two things actually.”

“Good,” I said.

“I used to work at the car plant and well, the doctors are worried about my chest. I’ve never smoked and I’ve always kept myself fit. I think there might have been a faulty ventilation unit on my line or something.”

I froze. I had also used to work at the car plant. A lot of us had. Around a hundred thousand in fact. I worked on the Puma line. “Which car did you work on?” I asked.

“The Puma,” he said.

I didn’t recognize his voice so he must have been on a different shift to me. Maybe even in another area of the factory. You didn’t get to mingle much. Sometimes it seemed like half the city worked there. It probably did at some time or other. Still, even though I hadn’t probably met this man, I knew him. I had shared his labour, kept his hours, sweated in the same rut.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“It err, sounds promising,” I said. The words stuck in my throat. “What was the other thing?” I asked.

“My wife.” he said flatly. He coughed and then continued. “We went on holiday last year to Spain and we went to these caves and it weren’t properly lit and she fell over and landed funny on her spine and she had to be flown to hospital and well, the doctors say she’ll never walk again.”

I put the phone down. I couldn’t take anymore. It was horrible. Everything was rotten to the core. Life was one long grim crawl in the gutter. To look at the stars was deluded, the kind of behaviour that leads you giving a shit about Oscar night, what the Queen wears, what the empty-headed braying DJ says about such and such a millionaire musician. The man on the phone had probably worked twice as long as I had at the car factory. Now he was stuck between colostomy bags and daytime TV, ministering to a crippled wife, fighting for breath with his bad lungs.

We used to work on huge dark automated construction lines that could have been designed for a Fritz Lang film. It was best not to think about it. If you had to think about it you just thought about the money. We built the Mercury Puma 2.5. It was tedious repetitive work. In my basic working day I had to repeat a very intense but simple action a hundred and twenty times an hour. I knew I had to do it a hundred and twenty times an hour because they got a machine to work it out exactly, ergonomically, what I could do. After I did my thing, the part was moved on a conveyer belt to Bob down the line who checked what I had done and filed down a bit of a sharp edge with callused hands. We were imprisoned in a very precise sequence of actions. We got paid for it and that was our motivation.

“Just think of the money,” we often said like a mantra to each other floating around the place like zombies.

I often found myself thinking about clean air, the countryside and rowing boats and how nice it would be if people could row places on lakes and rivers instead of driving everywhere on congested roads, spewing fumes into nature’s face.

Still, it was a job and we were gripped by the thought that we were lucky. We couldn’t really afford high-minded environmental concerns, if we did then there were plenty of other people ready to take our place. I would have liked it if we had made something else though. Something that didn’t fuck up the environment so much.

It was a nice car, a top of the range run around with more than a nod towards sports car excitement without getting carried away. In the advert on television they had it rolling around San Francisco in the soft focus of an old film. The film was called Bullitt. The advert used modern computer technology to superimpose the car into it and at the end they made out it was the actual car from the film and had Steve McQueen climbing out of it and marveling at it with a weird fascination.

They can resurrect dead actors on film, they have the technology.

I don’t know what they were trying to say, they obviously weren’t trying to sell the car to Steve McQueen. I think they were suggesting that driving the car would be akin to being cool like Steve McQueen, not the real man with all his worries over his three wives and cancer, but his film persona. It was just a car though so I don’t know exactly what they were trying to say. I was part of it, the Puma, the dream car. That car that perhaps the dead actor Steve McQueen might like if he was a detective, not afraid to step out of line, in a seedy filmic milleaux.

“Just think of the money,” we giggled as we floated through our daily lobotomy. They name cars after animals because it is the thing to do. They wouldn’t call the car ‘Steve’ because there are lots of Steves in the world and it’s the wrong image. The same goes for ‘McQueen’ which sounds like a cheap fast food burger and also carries with it associations of homosexuality which might affect sales on the forecourt. They employ teams of people to think about these things. They have degrees thinking about these things. You would never find a car called the ‘Nazi Henchman’ or the ‘Fisting Pedophile’. It’s simple marketing. Steve McQueen would never look fondly at a ‘Fisting Pedophile’. Well, not unless they made him do it, after he’d died of cancer and was safely in the ground where he couldn’t sue. The beautiful young go-getter of today would never jump in a ‘Nazi Henchman’ to go down the shops. Well, not without all the right gimmicks anyway. Cars like the Puma took the names of animals to be associated with the animal’s imagined characteristics: strength, speed, ferocity etc. although the car is often stronger, faster and able to kill and crush with more ferocity. It must be a hang over from a previous way of life when we respected animals and had to live and hunt next to them for survival. Times when we couldn’t mess up the world with exhaust fumes. Whatever the advert was saying about the car, it obviously worked because the factory with day and night shifts working for five years had produced somewhere in the region of twenty million cars. It was best not to think about it but if you had to think about it then it was best just to think of the money.

With the money we paid for mortgages on our houses, drove cheap Italian cars to super markets for food, drank beer and supported football teams. We got a few weeks holiday a year and we went to sit on beaches in Greece or shopping in American cities where we compared the prices of Starbucks and McDonalds and brand name clothes with the ones in our own shopping centres at home.

Sometimes the work was easy and you got focused and put your back into it and the day flew past in the blink of an eye and you enjoyed the weight of your muscles and the warm sweat down your back. Other days were a living horror when the sun shone outside, cracking the flags on another day gone from your life and it was all you could do not to scream that you should be somewhere else, somewhere in the fresh air out of the factories fumes and it was only the thought of your family and the fear of failing them somehow and the fear of poverty that stopped you walking off outside. Those were the days when it was no longer a job but a prison sentence and everyone was stealing your time, stealing your life, in exchange for a mortgage on a house you didn’t really like and bad TV and beer. Those were the days when you wonder every slow crushing minute if there hasn’t been some god-awful mistake and you should be somewhere else doing something worthwhile in the fresh air. And you resent everything, the job, the mortgage, your life, the Puma, the fucking car that Steve McQueen might fondle lovingly if he was STEVE McQUEEN and he hadn’t died of cancer…

… But these moments passed and you got worn down into a routine like a cog in a cuckoo clock and somewhere over the other side of the world somebody is driving a car and imagining they are Steve McQueen without the wives and the cancer.

It was best not to think about it but if you had to think about it then it was best just to think of the money. But then the factory gets bought out and shut down by a Japanese company and you don’t even have the money. And then your wife gets crippled and confined to a wheelchair.

Everything is somehow wrong and to say so or to try and do anything is hopeless.

I drank more whiskey and tears welled up in my eyes. I switched the radio back on and was hit by The Rolling Stones singing ‘Tumbling Dice’, filling my head with a scabby image of some sad shanty town revelry and I found myself thinking about suicide again. Just lately these thoughts had been crowding into the small grubby lift of my mind and re-routing everything to the floor where they kept all the pills, razor blades and rope. It was the top floor and you could take the big jump.

I went and got my illustrated encyclopaedia from the bookshelf in the front room. Under knots I found a series of small diagrams showing me how to tie a noose. I cut the long extendible cord out of the vacuum and practiced a few times. It was good cord, not slippy and plastic coated but the old fashioned kind like wire rope. My mum gave me the machine when I’d moved into the place. I tied a noose and pulled it taut in my hands. It was going to be strong enough. It would hold. I unpicked the noose and climbed onto the coffee table and tied it again reaching up towards the ceiling to the dangling light bulb fixture.

That’s all of the novel that you can read at the moment. If you’re interested in seeing more drop me a line at newshooo@hotmail.com .