I Dream of Heaven

 

Heaven was shit, and even if it wasn't I was determined to hate it. I didn't want to go there in the first place: as the clever-clogs family sceptic and opponent of spiritual claptrap in general, it was a humiliation I wasn't about to face up to in a hurry. It took me months, or centuries, or aeons - time becomes impossible to gauge in Heaven since nothing changes - to stop insisting I be sent to Hell, once I'd finally accepted there was no such place.

 

The moment I died things went from bad to worse. First the hovering on the ceiling above my body, then the flying down the bloody tunnel towards the white light, then the magical journey to the golden citadel in the clouds accompanied by serene angels: the whole thing was one big cringe, straight out of the mind of an unimaginative child, like a trip sequence from a third-rate TV movie. I was furious by the time I reached the pearly gates, which had all the showy class of a Premiership footballer's gates. Heaven itself looked like a Hello! photo shoot, as though it were designed for Mohammed al-Fayed: pure tack. The more everyone smiled smugly and let me know they understood how I felt, with their intrusive and nosy telepathy, the more I sulked and insisted they were merely part of my dying hallucinations: a long, annoying dream. 

Everything about the place was unbearable. Everybody looked more or less the same: agelessly youngish, nobody very ugly nor very beautiful. The women all had the same nondescript hair, as thought they were wearing sheitels, like orthodox Jews. If you tried it on with any of them they'd merely give you that despicably smug, knowing Heaven look, and patronisingly telepathise with you that there's no need to act that way here, where we're all brothers and sisters. It took me ages to track down my old screen crush, Italian actress Ornella Muti once she was dead, only to find her as blandly sexless and godstruck as my own grandmother, but more than willing to help me improve my prayer technique. 

Everyone was there: good and bad, Christians, Muslims, pagans, nonbelievers, but nobody talked about anything whatsoever except God, and how glorious it was to contemplate Him all day long. Nobody was interested in anything; you couldn't strike up a conversation about football, say, even with an ex-footballer. Nobody was curious, nobody played games, there were no pets, nobody swore and - even more infuriatingly - nobody got upset with me for swearing. I need hardly mention there were no drugs, not even cigarettes. The only break from contemplating the Big Man was when it was Folk Night. Bear in mind there was no way of committing suicide, no sharp edges in Heaven, and not even any way of punching yourself, because God's Holy Love would stay your hand. Folk Night was a nightmarish mass sing-, hum- and strum-along, the mother of all idiot-proof Christian acoustic guitar and tambourine jamborees. Like a smiley Nuremberg rally, but with a namby soundtrack. I'd look down along the rows of these lobotomised worshippers and see people I knew who would have hated that sort of thing back on Earth singing His praises with automaton grins, eyes glazed. Why was I the only one who didn't want to fit in, who didn't even want to acknowledge this stupid, boring place? 

This question really started to obsess me. I spent the next few thousand - or perhaps trillion - years relentlessly probing away, trying to squeeze any information out of everyone I met, slowly mastering my ability to block their telepathy. I thought perhaps that if anyone else felt the way I did, they might have had a reason to learn to hide it. I fantasised about a secret escape plan hatched by fellow wantaways. Then one day when I was idly praying with one of my tiresome relatives (there is literally no escaping them in Heaven), it occurred to me that I hadn't seen her husband, Uncle Roy, for quite some time. She told me "We don't talk about Uncle Roy". 

This was a bombshell, and at the very least something for me to investigate for the next few squillion years. I had never heard anything like that in Heaven - a taboo subject, oh my! Did Roy escape, was he punished? Where could he be? Maybe there were bad angels like Satan after all. There was nothing special about Roy as far as I knew: he was quite a dull, curmudgeonly old fart, but not wicked or evil in any way. Not that wicked meant anything in Heaven: as I've already mentioned, everyone was there, regardless of sin since everybody's soul is pure and pretty much identical, as it happens. Fred West and Jack the Ripper would stand dreamily holding hands in a circle and pass on the squeeze just like everyone else. Eventually, after much patient quizzing, I did manage to find another We don't talk about them person but, like Roy, there was no particular clue as to what was so special about them. 

So the aeons went by, contemplation followed by prayer followed by Folk Night. I'd occupy my time searching for any way to transgress, anything I could do to overstep the mark and go wherever it was uncle Roy went. Then one day it happened. I felt a firm hand on my shoulder, a little firmer than I had ever felt from any of these limp, weedy Jesus freaks, and turned to face a very different sort of angel. This angel wore armour and a helmet with the visor down. No soft telepathy for him: he had a good old-fashioned walkie-talkie to communicate with. This was an archangel! He ordered me to come with him, and although I was thrilled to actually have something to do for once, I couldn't resist telling him to fuck off, since it had become a habit. He reached out and zapped me, sending a searing pain ripping through my whole being like the hellfire I had begged for on arrival in Heaven. That, he told me, was God's wrath, and if I didn't fancy another dose I had better comply. He whisked me away, and we flew into a white cloud. 

We flew for miles, or maybe hundreds of miles, the cloud turning greyer all the time. After some hours, or days, we came to a halt. The cloud was darkest grey, visibility was two or three feet at most. The archangel let go of my hand and lifted his visor: he was a ginger! Picked on for their looks back on planet Earth, they get to be archangels up here where it counts. How typical that the first funny thing to happen to me in Heaven should turn out to be the last. "Here you can moan all you like. Perhaps you'll hook up with your uncle Roy now, eh?" With that he flew up and vanished back into the cloud soup. 

And that was it, he's never returned since. I suppose he's dropped off other people - it'd be impossible to know, since I can barely see my own outstretched hand. In the end I did bump into Roy. What a miserable bore, I couldn't stand him for more than half an hour - or a year, who knows? There are one or two others in the fog too, shuffling about, cursing to themselves about what a pile of shit this is, and if only they could die. But mostly there are lots and lots of babies here in this raincloud prison: stillborns and foetuses, eerily floating around in deathly grey silence, they still give me the heebee jeebees. This woman Svetlana, who, like Roy is a right pain in the arse so I don't normally stand with her either, reckons we're in Limbo, where the unbaptised hang around until Judgement Day. It also seems to be where chronic whingeing party poopers like us end up.

 What happens to us on Judgement Day is anyone's guess. Right now, however, I'd jump at the chance to line up for Folk Night again; I would never ask another silly question and I would never ever complain again, because Limbo sucks monkey dicks. I really have seen the light o Lord, and now I dream of Heaven.