I'm in Heaven
I pinched myself. I felt it. So it couldn’t be a dream. But if it wasn’t, if I really was in Piccadilly Gardens, how have I got here? I couldn’t have sleepwalked all the way from the hospital, it was over two miles, through city streets. Had leaving patients in corridors due to a bed shortage moved up a level? Had one of the nursing staff dumped me here until I wake up? I wouldn’t put it past them - only yesterday a down-and-out who’d collapsed in the street had been left outside in a wheelchair for want of a bed and only prompt action by a security man had stopped the bin men taking him.
Before I could think of another test of my consciousness - I was still far from convinced, despite pinching myself, that I wasn’t dreaming - a tall man carrying a brief-case and a clipboard approached me. He was aged about thirty-five and dressed in casual but expensive-looking clothes. His long, thin, pleasant -looking face smiled down at me as he indicated the place on the bench beside me.
“Mind if I join you?”
I was still too wrapped up in wondering just what on earth was going on to answer. He sat down next to me nevertheless.
“Allow me to introduce myself,” he said. “I’m The Archangel Phil. Your mentor. I’ll be meeting with you from time to time until you’re nicely settled in.” He opened a packet of cigarettes and offered me one. “I believe you indulge in these things?”
My mouth fell open. Slack-jawed I looked from the man to the cigarette packet and back. He indicated the clipboard. “My information is correct? You do like a smoke?” He took a cigarette from the packet and pushed it into my hand.
My mouth opened and shut silently a couple of times. Words eventually came out. “Can you tell me what’s going on here? I mean why am I in the middle of Piccadilly Gardens?”
“You aren’t. You’re in heaven.”
“What?”
“Heaven.”
****
I’M IN HEAVEN
Copyright © Terry Ravenscroft, 2011
Cover artwork by Tom Unwin
About the author
The day after Terry Ravenscroft threw in his mundane factory job to become a television comedy scriptwriter he was involved in a car accident which left him unable to turn his head. Since then he has never looked back. Born in New Mills, Derbyshire, in 1938, he still lives there with his wife Delma and his mistress Divine Bottom (in his dreams).
email terryrazz@gmail.com
facebook http://on.fb.me/ukZ78e
twitter http://bit.ly/t0mVyB
website www.topcomedy.co.uk
By the same author
CAPTAIN’S DAY
JAMES BLOND - STOCKPORT IS TOO MUCH
INFLATABLE HUGH
FOOTBALL CRAZY
DEAR AIR 2000
DEAR COCA-COLA
LES DAWSON’S CISSIE AND ADA
STAIRLIFT TO HEAVEN
THE RAZZAMATAZZ FUN EBOOK
ZEPHYR ZODIAC
(Will be published early in 2012)
Sample pages of each of these titles can be read at the end of this book.
****
I’M IN HEAVEN
PART ONE
ON EARTH
CHAPTER ONE
“Have you moved your bowels today, Mr Smith?” the student nurse had asked me, the previous day.
“I haven’t got any bowels left to move, love,” I replied. “The surgeon moved the lot out when he operated on me.”
I was reminded of the nurse’s faux pas when the book I was reading, The Campaign in the Western Desert, told of a soldier whose entire bowels and a good bit more of him had been removed by a shell from a German field gun. Nasty, but at least it was quick; and without all the farting around I had to put up with before my bowels went up the hospital chimney.
I laid the book to one side. The pre-op sedative was beginning to take effect, doing its job of instilling in me the desired ‘couldn’t care less’ attitude, a state of mind ideal for facing an operation but not for reading about the heroics of British soldiers in the Second World War.
I turned my attention hopefully to the TV in the corner. Hopefully because I had noticed, courtesy of the pre-med I’d been given before my previous operation, how much better the programmes were when viewed in a semi-drugged state. It had certainly improved Strictly Come Dancing. When I felt a bit better, if I ever did, it was my intention to write to the BBC suggesting they might consider providing free sedation out of the licence money so they wouldn’t have to try so hard to make decent programmes. Not that they do try very hard nowadays
Watching the television reminded me that I wouldn’t be able to watch it when I really wanted to watch it; tonight when Manchester United was taking on Juventus in the European Champions League. The ward communal set could only receive terrestrial channels and the match was on Sky. Satellite broadcasts for the hospital’s patients could be obtained on a personal TV, but only at the cost of an arm and leg, even to those patients who already had only an arm and a leg.
I shared the ward with eight other cancer patients. Large parts of the hospital are modern buildings. Of the parts that aren’t most have been modernised. The cancer ward was not one of them, a throwback to the past. Nurse Evans told me the money had run out before they got round to it and they’d probably be modernising it next year. I shan’t be seeing it.
It is a large room dating from the Victorian era, with a high corniced ceiling and inadequate small, high windows, in which the smell of disinfectant habitually loses its daily battle for supremacy with the twin enemies of overcooked cabbage and stale pee. The decor also features overcooked cabbage, the colour of the walls having been painted this same shade of washed-out green. The floor-covering is more or less the same colour, where it isn’t stained brown from the rainwater that leaks in from the roof. One day when I was feeling especially sorry for myself I likened the ward to a giant tropical fish tank, the nursing staff in their assortment of coloured uniforms being the tropical fish, the patients the shit and grit in the bottom. Not the ideal place to die, or even to brush with death, if there is an ideal place to die; Old Trafford or the bar of my local on a Friday night, would certainly be a much better option.
I had learned from conversations with the other patients that three of them, to a greater or lesser extent, had always believed in God. Mr Hussein, pancreas, believed in Allah, which I suppose amounts to the same thing if you overlook the fact that Allah is a lot less forgiving of his followers than the Christian version of the Almighty and consequently has a much longer list of things you can’t do without getting the wrong side of him. The remaining three patients had started believing in God within seconds of being informed of their various cancers. This had only confirmed to me something I had always suspected; that nothing, be it the influence of religious parents, the guidance of Sunday School teachers, travelling evangelists, faith healers, the hearing of strange ethereal voices, the seeing of holy visions, a real tear in the eye of a plaster Madonna, whatever, could make a man start believing in God more, and with greater haste, than to be informed he had cancer. As one of my Second World War books had succinctly put it, there are no atheists in the trenches.
One of the three new Christians, Mr Greening, kidney, whose skin was almost the same colour as the walls, now read the bible constantly. Another, Mr Broadhurst, liver, now not only watched Songs of Praise every Sunday but joined in the singing and encouraged the other patients to do likewise. The third, Mr Fairbrother, liver and onions - actually just liver, but Mr Fairbrother, managing to hold on to his sense of humour even in his adversity, referred to his cancer of the liver as such ‘for a giggle’ - didn’t display any outward signs of being a convert to the faith, but this was probably because by now he was too weak to hold a bible or sing along with Aled Jones of a Sunday evening.
They had been discussing heaven only yesterday. Mr Broadhurst, liver, started the conversation. “I wonder what it’s like?” he speculated. “Heaven, I mean.”
“Oh quite wonderful, I believe, quite wonderful,” said Mr Meakin, stomach, one of the patients who had always believed in God.
Listening to their conversation I wondered why, if it was so wonderful, Mr Meakin was putting himself through painful sessions of radiotherapy every other day in his desire to stave off getting there for as long as possible; but I kept out of their fanciful musings, I wasn’t looking for arguments, life is too short. Life was too short.
“Yes but what is it actually like?” persisted Mr Broadhurst.
“I think it’s all like little white clouds,” said Mr Fairbrother, although true to form he may have been joking. “I think you sit about on little white cotton wool clouds all day. Playing a harp maybe.” He mimed playing a harp to add graphic credence to his theory.
“I hope you do a bit more than sit about on clouds all day,” said Mr Greening. “I sit about all day as it is, I’m a fireman.”
“You get to play cards though, don’t you,” said Mr Braithwaite, testicular and large intestine, a two-time loser, and another who had always believed. “Perhaps you’ll be able to play cards.”
I expected Mr Meakin to quash this notion immediately and wasn’t disappointed. “He most certainly will not be able to play cards,” he decreed, from atop his high horse. “Gambling is a sin in the eyes of the Lord; there will be no card playing when you’re in heaven, you can take it from me. Or sex.”
This prospect didn’t please Mr Fairbrother one little bit. “No sex?” He frowned. “I don’t think I want to go to heaven if I can’t get the legover every now and then; I’m a man who likes his legover.”
“You won’t have the need of the legover, as you call it,” said Mr Meakin, sniffily. “You will be in the state of nirvana.”
“So you will be able to play cards after all, Mr Greening.” Mr Gearing, throat, didn’t speak very often as it made his larynx even more sore than it was already, but had obviously felt constrained to point out Mr Meakin’s error.
“Why will he?” said Mr Broadhurst.
“Well they allow gambling there,” said Mr Gearing, putting his larynx at risk again.
“Where?”
“The state of Nevada. That’s where Las Vegas is, they’ve got slot machines and roulette and all sorts.”
“And the legover,” added Mr Broadhurst. “You can get the legover there too. They have these hostesses. Long-legged hostesses.”
“I didn’t say the state of Nevada I said the state of nirvana,” said Mr Meakin, before the others could get too excited about their prospects of gambling and legover with long-legged hostesses once they’d arrived in heaven. “You will be at peace with yourself.”
“Not if I’m not getting the legover I won’t,” said Mr Fairbrother. “It makes me bad-tempered, you can ask the wife.”
“Neither will I be at peace if I’m just sat on a cloud playing a harp,” added Mr Greening. “I don’t like harps anyway, I’m an electric guitar man.”
“As far as not being able to have sex, I don’t think you’re right there, Mr Meakin,” said Mr Broadhurst, after a moment. “As I understand it Allah is the same as God, it’s just the Muslims’ name for God, and when Muslims go to heaven - well they call it paradise - they get to deflower seventy two virgins.”
“Now that’s what I call heaven, you can put me down for some of that,” said Mr Fairbrother, rubbing his hands together in anticipation. “Pass me a turban and call me Abdul.”
“I think that’s only if you’re a terrorist and you blow yourself up,” said Mr Greening. He turned to Mr Hussein. “Isn’t that right, Mr Hussein?”
Mr Hussein smiled politely and nodded, although whether it was in agreement or that he was acknowledging Mr Greening wasn’t clear as he was listening to Meatloaf on his CD player. (He’s in the next bed to me and plays it very loud. I don’t mind because I quite like Meatloaf. If it was Coldplay I’d have strangled him by now.)
At that point the discussion ended when Nurse Jolley wheeled in the medication trolley, the grisly contents of which were enough to stop a disc jockey talking, never mind a cancer patient.
The exception to the rule of people starting to believe in God once they’d found out they were going to die was me of course. Norman Smith. Even though I now had only weeks to live I still didn’t believe in heaven and a life beyond death. When I’d been informed I had cancer I was tempted to start believing, but only very briefly; deep down I’d known it was all so much nonsense and had dismissed it from my mind almost from the moment it crept in.
The only other time I had considered the possibility of there being a God, apart from when I was very young and hadn’t known any better, was when I was sixteen and still at school. The captain of the school football team, although an exceptionally talented footballer, was both ugly and thoroughly obnoxious; I had conjectured briefly that perhaps God had made him a good footballer to make up for his being so ugly and unpleasant. However there was another member of the team, equally talented and exceptionally good-looking who was as pleasant as they come, and that had convinced me otherwise.
Now, giving up on the television - Mr Broadhurst had used the remote to switch over to ‘Loose Women’ and all the sedation in the world couldn’t make that bearable - I returned to The Campaign in the Western Desert. But I found it difficult to concentrate and in no time at all my mind drifted back five months to the time when the beginning of the end had started.
CHAPTER TWO
A week after the beginning of the end had started I answered the front door to find two Jehovah’s Witnesses hovering there. They smiled at me with their funeral faces and asked me if I had a little time to spare.
Until a few weeks ago I looked young for my age; now I knew that I looked older than my fifty two years. The sight of the Holy Joes, poised like two vultures eyeing a meaty carcass, aged me at least another year. As if the view from my front door wasn’t already a depressing enough sight without two of God’s Messengers adding to it. The other week the milkman had said that with my luck if I’d been a pair of knickers I’d have been bought by Ann Widdecombe. He wasn’t exaggerating.
I cursed. Why oh why hadn’t I looked through the window before answering the door? I knew that Jehovah’s Witnesses had a nasty habit of descending on the estate on Sundays and that Hugh Gaitskill Street, Harpurhey, with more than its fair share of sinners and no-hopers, ripe targets both, was one of their prime targets. My mind though, had been on other things.
The taller of the Jehovah’s Witnesses had a threatening stack of Watchtower magazines in his hand. He offered me one and asked if I wouldn’t mind reading it when I could spare a minute. I wondered if anyone in the world could be so short of something to do as to spend a minute reading such a load of old bollocks. You didn’t even get to have a pint with it; at least when you were more or less forced into accepting a War Cry or Young Soldier from the Sally Army the chances were that you’d be having a pint.
Whenever the Jehovah’s Witnesses trapped me I would always just stand there and let them talk themselves out. Very occasionally it got a bit too much for me and I put a bung in their flow.
“What about Hitler?”
“Hitler?”
“If there’s a God, what about the holocaust? Why did he let Hitler do what he did to the Jews?”
“He was testing their faith.” This was said with absolute conviction.
“Did they pass?”
“Pardon?”
“I mean some test that, gas ovens. If you weren’t one of the fortunate ones who’d been executed and had their skin made into lampshades. No multiple choice there.”
“Millions of Jews still pray at their synagogue on a regular basis.”
“Millions more don’t.” The Barbara Castle council estate had one or two Jews resident in its mean streets and I was pr
etty sure that only birth, death or marriage with a free buffet and bar afterwards would tempt any of them into a synagogue.
The Jehovah’s Witness smiled. “We must all celebrate the Lord our God in our own way.”
They have an answer for everything.
Another time they’d been going on about the miracles performed by Jesus. Tiring of their twaddle I said, “I haven’t actually tried, but I’m fairly confident I can’t walk on water. Can you walk on water?”
The JW looked puzzled. “No. Well of course not.”
“And Jesus was flesh and blood, a human being, just like the rest of us?”
“Oh indeed.”
“So how come he could walk on water while the rest of us can’t?”
He had looked at me as though I were a small schoolboy who had just asked the teacher a very stupid question. “Well because he’s Jesus, of course.”
Priceless.
The only other time I had taken the Jehovah’s Witnesses to task was one day when they’d been banging on about the goodness of God and Mr Swindells from number 30 down the road staggered past. Poor Mr Swindells has suffered from Huntington’s Chorea for years and by now could scarcely walk at all. I pointed at him. “Look at Mr Swindells there. If there’s a God how could he allow people to suffer like that poor bugger has to suffer every day of his life?”
The elder of the Witnesses refreshed his happy miserable smile and said, “God moves in mysterious ways.”
I was about to point out that Mr Swindells moved in a mysterious way too but before I could the younger of the pair chimed in. “God only allows people to suffer who he knows will be strong enough to cope with the suffering.”