and Eve never had a photographer.’
‘Then where’s the proof they were married? No photos, no God saying he married Adam and Eve, no witnesses, and nothing on YouTube about it. You have no argument! God wasn’t there and neither were Adam and Eve, and there was no Garden of Eden either. Besides the Bible is full of crap. It wants us to believe that Adam stood next to a naked woman and went for a piece of fruit instead. Come on, you can’t take it seriously. Anyways, you and Father did it before you got married; I’m the proof of that. I’m the best thing that has ever happened to you.’
Mother went still, quiet, momentarily confused perhaps, unsure how to react. She sighed, a long sigh, turned and walked deliberately, purposefully to the bedroom door. Here she stopped, and shut it. Father, witnessing the change in Mother’s demeanour, stopped pounding me and backed away, placing the ironing board in front of him, as if for protection. Mother turned, faced me, sighed again, and then went fucking ballistic. She went straight through Father’s security board, knocking him over. Out of the haze of pieces of shattered ironing board falling to the bedroom floor, emerged something I had never seen before. Mother had flames coming out of her nostrils and her ears; she made loud guttural sounds I could not decipher, and this was hurtling towards me.
I said loudly, ‘Oh, bugger!’
Father, covered in the remnants of what had once been an ironing board, looked up at me from the floor and declared, ‘You’re buggered!’
To escape the mother of all cruise missiles, I rolled sideways from the bed and bounced along the floor on my stomach. I stood up to run to the closed door, but stumbled over Father’s slippers and fell. I tried to get up whilst Mother started to kick the living crapper out of me.
Suddenly, Mother realised she was witnessing my fully exposed, naked, fifty-five-year-old body, as I rolled to try and get away from her madness.
‘Hang on; hang on a minute. What do we have here?’ she screamed to Father. ‘Look at him; look at him! He’s got the curse of the donkey! He’s suffering from donkeyitis!’
Father looked and I do recall him saying, ‘Wow! That’s an impressive-looking Johnson, you’ve got there, son. You’re just like your daddy!’
Intent on moving with the same electrifying speed as a Tour de France cyclist does on illegal drugs, I staggered to my feet whilst hollering, ‘It’s a strap-on. I’m wearing plastic; it’s a fake!’
Seeing me trying to escape, Mother went stark raving crazy; her hair stood on end and began to smoke. She started to froth at the mouth, and the veins in her neck looked as if they were going to pop out. Herein lies the problem with my escape plan. I had staggered almost upright to run as fast as a deer would do after coming face to face with a lion. As I did, one of my feet stepped on the strap-on. The elastic band holding the strap-on in place stretched right out and then, as if possessed by a force, the likes unknown to humankind, the plastic doodle holder sprang back with a twanging sound. The strength behind the recoil was exceptional. It was so powerful, it knocked me over backwards and once again I fell. Except this time, the back of my head came to rest on the pointy end of the iron.
My parting thought. Bugger! I wonder if death is a fatal beast.
----3----
You may not be able to put your finger on it straightaway, but when you die, you do realise, almost immediately, something has gone sadly amiss in your life. An early clue to your death is finding yourself floating in a sea of grey mist above your lifeless body. I’ve never been big on surprises, so when I peered below and saw my dead body lying on my parents’ bedroom floor, I was surprised. Most surprised indeed!
Mother rolled me over, removed the iron from the back of my head, and complained, ‘Look what he’s done; he’s gone and died, he has. Never any good that boy; he can’t even die without a making a mess, painful boy.’
Just as I was thinking the Adopted Ones will gloat as soon as they find out I’m dead, the Whinging Aunt from Whining Hill appeared in the doorway.
Standing up with her hands on her hips, Mother said, ‘What a mess he’s left. Messy boy. I always told his father that. Messy because he’s lazy. Blood and gunk over the iron and the carpet. Hopeless lad. Such a bad child; we could have done so much better than him. If only he had been more like the Adopted Ones.’
The Whinging Aunt from Whining Hill moaned, ‘I suppose I’ll have to do all the cleaning; no one else ever helps me do anything, you know.’
I waved my hands and called out, ‘Up here!’ Then I yelled, ‘I’m up here.’
‘I suppose I’ll have to buy another ironing board,’ Mother complained, as she surveyed the shattered pieces lying on her bedroom floor.
‘The carpets will need a clean as well; forever costing money he was, useless boy. He used to do it with women, right in his parents’ bed. No respect for anything that boy. Ah well, maybe the iron still works.’
‘That’ll be left up to me, won’t it?’ said the Whinging Aunt from Whining Hill. ‘It’ll be me who has to go and buy the new ironing board.’
‘Up here!’ I yelled again.
I received no response.
Those below could not hear or see me. What a strange predicament I found myself in, floating in an upright stationary position, unable to be seen or heard. I could turn my head from side to side, move it up and around, and move my arms, but that was it. There was no grey mist below, only daylight.
I stretched my arms out into the grey abyss, but could feel nothing. Hang on, I thought. How do I know I’m dead? This was confusing; dead people couldn’t think, could they? If you were dead, you were dead – weren’t you?
I looked down upon my lifeless body, and could understand how I might have died. The big hole in the back of my head showed me. Not being a religious man, I was under the opinion that when you die, it’s all over red rover. No afterlife, no floating in space or grey mist or whatever; when you die, the lights are out, and there’s no one at home.
I rationalised, perhaps I’m only a little bit dead, you know, partially dead. That must be it. I’m partially dead and I’m floating in an unconscious state. Wait, ludicrous thinking. Soon, my eyes will open; I’ll realise I was having a dream and was never dead, a little bit dead or even partially dead. But what if I wasn’t dreaming? I strained my ears to listen for the sound of blaring sirens. Mother, Father, or the Whinging Aunt, one of them at least, would have surely called an ambulance. The ambulance by now was hurtling towards our house at breakneck speed, ready and able to dispatch its highly trained paramedics to bring my lifeless body back to life.
In death, as in life, the mind plays funny tricks on you. What if I was dead? What if I was wrong and there really was a God in Heaven, and a Devil in Hell? Could I be, right now, in Hell? The grey mist surrounding me could be smoke from the Devil’s furnaces. Though, it didn’t smell smoky; there was no smell. And where were the other dead people?
Did the Greenies convince the Devil to only fire up his furnace every few days instead of leaving it on all the time, polluting the place and contributing to global warming? Is this why I was floating in a stationary position. The Devil is waiting for furnace day. Furnace day must have been yesterday, the other dead people already collected. This could explain why I was here on my lonesome; I was waiting to be collected.
I couldn’t hear any sirens, people! Did they call? If not, why not? By all accounts, Jesus didn’t need an ambulance, a hospital or a doctor.
He popped up a couple of days after he died and uttered these famous words: ‘Hello world, I’m outta here; this Earth gig is like, way too hard for me. Did you see the size of the Cross I had to bear? Damn heavy, I’m telling