Blind Faith (9 page)

Having made his first discovery, Trafford turned his
attention to Sandra Dee's Tube Space. Here she had clearly
had to be more careful and was thus more exposed. As
Trafford knew from recent personal experience, faith
leaders scanned their congregation's video history and
no individual, no matter how anonymous, could afford
to deny the community access to significant digital
documentation of their lives. Sandra Dee had therefore
dutifully posted an acceptable selection of personal and
intimate video diaries.

There were the obligatory early birthdays and adolescent
parties. Gory footage of a teenage appendix operation. The
Cherry Pop vid was there, of course. Trafford had half
expected Sandra Dee to have found a way of avoiding this
one, but she had not: no young woman could afford to defy
convention by keeping private their sacred and celebratory,
life-enhancing, God-respecting moment of 'losing it'.

There were numerous other sex videos, demonstrating,
as custom required, Sandra Dee's energetic commitment to
a series of sexual partners. And like every single other Tube
page on the planet there was karaoke, endless karaoke.

As he punched up video after video Trafford felt let
down. When he had read Sandra Dee's blog, he had, for a
moment, imagined that he had lucked upon evidence of a
genuine free spirit, a private revolutionary who had laid
claim to her own existence and was aggressively defending
it from appropriation by the community. But her blog was
now revealed as a small protest when set against her video
diaries, in which she had been forced to conform in every
way. In reality she was no more liberated than he.

Then Trafford noticed the scars. And the absence of scars.

He was watching Sandra Dee make love, a poor, grainy
video featuring the usual loud and dirty sex. The sort
of sex that was expected in such diary pieces. The sort
of sex that was just 'amazing'. The sort of sex in which
the participants 'did everything' and just 'went for it'.
Sandra Dee was astride some grunting one-night stand,
her head bowed and her body moving like a piston as
she pumped away on top of her lover. Up and down she
went, her breasts bouncing in the opposite direction with
each frenzied movement. They were not big breasts,
of course, Sandra Dee having famously forsworn
enlargements, but as Trafford watched them he thought
them surprisingly dome-like for the naturals he knew
them to be. He knew from personal experience that
natural breasts moved in a different way to surgically
implanted ones. But the ones he was watching did not
move naturally at all; they moved in the jerky, solid sort
of way that suggested enhancement.

He pressed the pause button. Nudging the image
forward half a second at a time, he arrived at the moment
when the two breasts were at the highest point of their yoyo-like movement. Then he zoomed in. The recording was
not of good quality and the light was dim, nonetheless
Trafford thought he could see two small scars at the base
of Sandra Dee's breasts, the unmistakable evidence of
implants. Perhaps Sandra Dee had had her breasts
enhanced after all? Perhaps that was her secret? If it was,
Trafford thought it a poor one, nothing like so exciting an
example of subversion as to actually refuse to do with
one's body what the Temple expected. Except then a
thought struck him and he zoomed out a little until
Sandra Dee's waist came into view.

Something was missing. There was no appendix scar.
The Sandra Dee having sex in the video diary was not the
same person as the Sandra Dee shown having her
appendix out. Trafford pulled out further to bring the
girl's face into view. Except that it did not come into
view: there were glimpses of it but the hair was in the way
and the wild movement of the head made a clear view
impossible. Trafford began to reverse through the videos
that he had just watched. They were all of poor quality, a
little blurred, dimly lit, and they all featured girls with
hair partially obscuring their faces, often with their backs
to the camera. But now that Trafford's suspicions had
been alerted, it was obvious that these were
all different
girls
. They even had different tattoos. What was more,
Trafford was reasonably certain that not one of them was
actually Sandra Dee. Trafford reloaded the Cherry Pop
vid. It wasn't her either: it looked like her certainly, the
teenage girl praising the Lord and the Love as she
squealed in pain had the same pale colouring and
similar features, when they could be observed, but she
certainly was not Sandra Dee. With the childhood videos
Sandra Dee had scarcely bothered to find lookalikes, and
the little girls featured opening presents and bobbing for
apples were clearly all different.

It was incredible, wonderful. This girl, whom he had
scarcely even noticed at the office (which surely, he
recognized now, was a part of her genius), had posted
nothing but lies about herself. Or at least, and much more
importantly, she had failed to reveal one single solitary truth.
As with her blog, she had simply uploaded a few stolen
moments of other people's self-obsession, making a passing
effort to avoid obvious physical differences, and left it at that.

It was clear to Trafford that this extraordinary girl had
come to the same conclusion as Cassius had, that a bold
front was the best disguise. She had guessed that nobody
was interested in her. They were all too interested in
themselves; self-obsession was, after all, high piety. If
anybody – her Confessor, for instance – did happen to
Goog' her or Tube her up, a glance would be enough to see
that she was doing what society expected of her, even if the
footage was of rather poor quality.

As Trafford closed Sandra Dee's pages (or, more
accurately, the pages full of nobodies behind whom
Sandra Dee hid) he was certain of one thing: Sandra Dee
was by an immeasurable distance the most exciting
woman he had ever encountered. He would say nothing,
of course; certainly nothing to her. She had made a secret
of her life and he had no right to intrude on it. Besides
which, he didn't want to, because that would spoil it.

He would keep her secret a secret.

It would be his secret.

Trafford typed 'birthing' on to his computer and
Goog'ed it. Within a second there were millions and
millions of hits. He added 'girl' and halved the number.
Next he chose the ten thousandth Goog' page and began
to punch up the hits. Within three tries he had found what
he wanted, the agonized, screwed-up face of a woman of
similar colouring to Chantorria giving birth to a girl.

Trafford downloaded the tape and then copied it on to his
own Face Space page. He titled the document 'Hello
Caitlin Happymeal and welcome to the world! Trafford
and Chantorria Sewell's birthing video.'

He told Chantorria what he had done when she came
home from the gym. Wanting to get it out in the open, he
risked muting their community podcast long before dusk
had fallen when it would have been socially acceptable
to do so.

He had expected her to be horrified and she was.

'You put up somebody else's birthing diary on to our vid
blog?
A complete stranger's!
Why?'

'Because I wanted to keep ours private.'

'You can't keep things private, Trafford! You'll get us into
the most terrible trouble. They might even charge us with
abuse and take Caitlin away.'

'Abuse?'

'Caitlin has as much right to be bigged up as anybody
else. To be loved and admired. You're denying her
that right.'

'Nobody would have watched it anyway.'

'Why do you have to be so
weird
?' Chantorria wailed.
'You have to upload the real vid right now. Just do it.'

'I don't think that would be a good idea,' Trafford
replied. 'Putting up a hoax tape is one thing but then
swapping it around is quite another. Like returning to the
scene of the crime. That's always what gives people away in
the end.'

'So everybody is going to be staring at our baby and it
won't be our baby at all! Or my cooch for that matter. I
don't want people looking at some stranger's cooch and
thinking it's mine. It's not natural.'

'I've told you, nobody's going to look at it. Don't you see?
That's the point. We could put up any footage of any baby
and it wouldn't matter because no one will look at it
anyway. Confessor Bailey will check that it's been posted for
the sake of orthodoxy but after that it'll never get a hit again.
Who is interested in us? Nobody. Who could possibly want
to see Caitlin being born apart from you and me? Nobody.
We
are
nobodies. Isn't that good? Doesn't that make you feel
just a little bit more free?More liberated?'

Chantorria clearly took no comfort from Trafford's
bleak analysis of their social position. 'Nobodies?' she
said, suddenly more sad than angry.

'Well, aren't we?'

'No! Nobody is a nobody. We're all special. Everybody
is special.'

'Well, if everybody is special then special must be pretty
ordinary.'

'And that's good! Ordinary people are special.'

'Which means being special is completely ordinary.'

'I don't know what you're talking about! I just know
you've done a really stupid, pointless thing and you don't
play stupid games with Confessor Bailey. Privacy is a
perversion, Trafford, you know that and you know what
the Inquisition does to perverts.'

'No one will—'

'What about Barbieheart!'

'Barbieheart does not want to share your joy,
Chantorria. She is only interested in sharing people's pain.
She might glance at it but I doubt it. Please, Chantorria,
think about it. Half the people in our tenement are
uploading their
entire lives
on to the web, fights, fucks,
births, funerals. How can anybody watch any of it?'

'My mother will watch ours.'

'You sent her a file, she's seen it. Why would she
Tube it?'

'She might.'

'She won't.'

'Her friends might.'

'Chantorria, nobody is interested in anybody but
themselves. Besides which, who cares if your mother's
friends look at a fake video?'

'I care!'

'Well, I don't.'

'It isn't your vagina!'

'Oh please.'

'Why do you have to be so
weird
?'

'Stop calling me weird. That's all you ever call me
these days.'

'Well, you are weird.'

Trafford shrugged and turned away.

They did not have time to argue any more as they were
going to a concert that evening. Their tickets had been
texted to them the previous day, and although they were
both horribly tired there was no option but to put on their
ribbons and wristbands and make a banner. Failure to
attend a Faith Festival mega gig when you were lucky
enough to have drawn an e-ticket was unthinkable; it
would without doubt result in denunciation from the
pulpit at the next Community Confession.

The concert, as with numerous previous concerts, was
to be called Big Love Live and it was a major event,
awesome in its scope, its ambition and its line-up of A-list
celebrities. This concert wasn't just for London either: it
was to be global in its outreach and would mark a new
beginning in the way people thought about themselves,
about poverty, about the environment and about their
relationship with God and with their fellow men. After
this concert (plus its accompanying blanket media
coverage) nothing would ever be the same again.

The evening crackled with excited anticipation. It was
most inspiring to live in a world where 'people power'
could mean so much, where a single concert could change
the world irrevocably for the better, where things could be
improved just because the people wanted them to
improve. Simply by massing, cheering, listening to music
and eating enormous amounts of takeaway food everyone
knew they could make a real difference.

News was already filtering through that this concert was
to be even bigger and even more globally life-changing
than the one held the previous week. This was astonishing,
stunning news – particularly in the light of the fact that the
previous week's concert had, up until this point, been
considered the biggest and most epoch-making Faith
Festival of all time, having spectacularly surpassed the
one before.

Crammed in among the mass of sweating humanity,
Trafford wondered in his secret self whether the following
week's Faith Festival might be even bigger and more
significant than the one which he and Chantorria were
attending, but of course he said nothing. The thought was
just another little secret he would keep to himself and
enjoy in private. Outwardly he joined his voice to those of
the quarter million other people who poured forth from
the boats in which they had crossed Lake London and
began making their way up Wembley Hill.

The message which flashed from every street screen and
every communitainer could not have been clearer.

You can make a difference!

If you want it, it will happen.

After endless shuffling and pushing, sweating and
gasping in the dank, fetid, malaria-buzzing air, Trafford
and Chantorria finally gained access to the stadium. The
concert had begun already, of course; everything had
always begun already. Trafford had scarcely ever in his life
witnessed the beginning of any entertainment for which
he had queued. Few people ever did. Only those whose
faith was so fervent that it led them to push and shove to
the front ever saw the start of anything, and as these
people tended to be the largest and most aggressive it was
often not possible to see anything beyond their massive
frames even when you did find a position.

'We can do it!' a well-known pop star was shouting from
the stage. 'It will happen because we want it to happen! It's
up to us!'

The cheer was deafening.

'Here today,' the pop star said, 'right now at this time
and place. We say NO to hunger. We say NO to poverty. We
say to our leaders that it is time they listened to the
people
.'

'Yes! Yes! Yes!' the people replied, punching the air in
massed unison, hamburgers held aloft, hot dogs and
doughnuts crushed into every fist. 'Oi Oi Oi!' they cried,
stamping the ground with feet shod in training shoes that
had been made far, far from Wembley and, coincidentally,
by people who lived in the very poverty which the crowd
were calling upon their leaders to eradicate.

Between each exhortation that the world should be
improved there was music. The biggest bands played the
biggest hits and the people bobbed up and down. This was
the part of the proceedings that Trafford dreaded most, the
part when he was required briefly to carry Chantorria on
his shoulders. It was an important element of the ritual of
Faith Festivals that at some point the girls sat on the boys'
shoulders, their arms spread, their banners held high and
their breasts proudly displayed. Of course most of the
women were far too large and the men far too unfit for this
to be possible, so the Temple organizers provided
aluminium frames like stepladders upon which the
women would sit and inside which the men would stand.
Inevitably there were never enough and of course Trafford
had not been able to grab one and so, like many others, he
was forced to do his best unaided. Chantorria was not
particularly heavy but then Trafford was not particularly
strong and he struggled to hold her aloft even for the
entirety of one song, which was the minimum that strict
piety allowed.

Between each song there were more speeches. Chat
show hosts and reality stars of whom nobody had ever
heard ran on to the stage and exhorted the crowd.

'Each individual can make a difference! Poverty, war,
crime, drugs and intolerance can change! They
will
change
if
we
want them to! Every one of us is important! Every
journey starts with a single step.'

There were films showing people dying in the flood
plains of the Other World, and heartbreaking
mini-features in which major reality stars spoke of the
drug hell they had experienced prior to learning how to
love themselves.

Then came a surprise. It was a wonderful surprise, a
surprise that sent the crowd into even greater ecstasies of
frenzied anticipation than they had so far experienced.
Tonight, if the people so ordained it, there was to be made
a new Wembley Law.

A hush fell as the stage was cleared of the anonymous
celebrities who had dominated it so far and filled instead
with elders of the Temple. Each community that had
been ticketed for the concert was now represented on
stage by their Confessor, and Trafford recognized the big
red face of Father Bailey as it appeared among all the
other big red faces on the massive TV screens which
framed the stage.

Slowly more senior figures of the Temple began to
emerge – evangelists, healers, preachers and latter-day
born-again sinners – and finally, to an ecstatic welcome
from the crowd amid fanfares and fireworks, a member of
the High Council appeared, Bishop Confessor Solomon
Kentucky, High Prophet of the London diocese.

The law which Solomon Kentucky had come forth to
proclaim (should the people so ordain it) was one that
had been a long time coming; a law which was needed
now more than ever before; a law from which the people
could draw the strength they needed in order to go forth
and do the work of the Lord and the Love on Earth; a law
which would make them worthy of the sacrifices that
Baby Jesus and Diana had made for them; a law which
had long since been on the spiritual statutes of the
beacon land across the Atlantic sea and which now finally
was to be proclaimed here, in Great England, in Great
Scotland, in Great Wales and across the water in the
Emerald Country, that it might give strength and succour
to the faithful.

Henceforth, from this time and place and across the
whole land, Solomon Kentucky wished it to be known
(should the people so ordain it) that every single person
would by law and by statute be famous.

'That's right!' Solomon Kentucky bellowed as the
phlegm from his throat danced in the glare of the massive
spotlights. 'As of today, should you wish it, every single
one of you is famous! By law! By statute! By holy writ and
by divine right you are famous! Full stop, no argument.
No back-pedalling. No false witness and no Devil-born
trickery. Famous. Short and sweet. Famous. Simple and to
the point. Famous. Nothing more and nothing less. Do
you want it?'

The response was so thunderous it hurt Trafford's ears.

'I said DO YOU WANT TO BE FAMOUS?' the Bishop
Confessor roared back at them.

'Yes! Yes! Yes!' the answer came in solid walls of sound.

'It's a simple straightforward question, people! I want
a simple straightforward answer. No half-truths. No
wishy-washy demi-faith. Only the Devil procrastinates.
Only Satan drags his feet. People of the Lord BELIEVE! Do
you
believe? Do you believe that you have enough love,
enough beauty, enough FAITH to be famous?'

Once more two hundred and fifty thousand voices
(including Trafford's) screamed the affirmative.

'Then you ARE famous!' the Bishop Confessor replied.
'It's the law and you can't argue with the law. You'd be
a fool to try. Each one of you is famous. Every person
of faith in this city, in this
country
, is famous! Does it
feel good?'

It did feel good and the crowd let the Bishop Confessor
know it.

'Let me hear you say Yeah!' Kentucky shouted.

'Yeah!' the crowd shouted back.

'A'let me hear you say Yeah yeah!' Kentucky demanded.

'Yeah yeah!' roared the people.

'A'let me hear you say Yeah yeah yeah!' Kentucky insisted.

'Yeah yeah yeah!' came the emphatic response.

'I'll bet it does,' Solomon Kentucky replied. 'I'll bet it
feels good. Let me hear you say Love!'

'Love!' they screamed.

'Let me hear you say Everlasting Love!'

'Everlasting Love!' came the reply.

'Ev Love!'

'Ev Love!'

'Ev ev ev Love!'

'Ev ev ev Love!'

'All right!' said Solomon Kentucky by way of conclusion.

And then the great book of statutes was brought forward
and this latest one was duly inscribed therein.

Everyone is famous. By law.

After this stunning and thrilling interlude the concert
reached its emotionally draining conclusion. The only
possible end to a vast gathering such as this one was a
solemn tribute to the departed children, a mass keening
for the born-again babies, those infants who had died
here on Earth but who were most certainly living again
in Heaven.