Colin - Tapioca of the gods Part 3

George had never seen heaven, in fact he had never been north of
Romford. He disliked long-distance travelling enormously, but in this
case he didn't appear to have had much say in the matter.
"So, this is it?" he thought "Heaven. I'm actually here. This is the
after-life". He picked himself up off the concrete floor that he had
landed heavily upon which had surprised him because he believed himself
to have been falling upwards. If that was possible.....no. Of course it
was. If God was capable of creating an entire universe from scratch
then surely breaking a couple of natural laws would be a piece of cake.
What surprised George further was that the landing had hurt a great
deal. His backside seemed to have re-materialised in a physical form,
along with the rest of him and was now throbbing rhythmically.
If it was indeed the case that God was omnipotent, then the question
crossed George's mind why He would choose to live in such a dump. Even
if he did, he surely could have tidied up before a visitor arrived? It
was so very cold, though. And dark. So dark in fact that George could
see little more than 50 feet in front of him. He could just make out
some newspapers spiralling playfully in the wind, a rusty wheelbarrow
and what looked like a stack of tyres. The wind whipped his strands of
hair and he rubbed his bruised backside.
"Jesus Christ" he said quietly, and then rebuked himself for
blaspheming in this of all places. Nobody else seemed to object,
however. Perhaps God was cool with that sort of thing after all.
He took a few steps forward into the darkness and semi-familiar shapes
slowly became visible in the near-distance....a set of swings. An old
ford Cortina with three wheels missing. A shopping trolley. And
something big. Very, very big. He approached this very very big thing
very very cautiously as for some very good reasons he had become
suddenly wary of almost everything-especially very very big, very very
dark things. It was unbelievably huge...difficult to tell exactly how
huge as it stretched into the darkness in all directions, but George
had that small, insignificant feeling you get when you stand before
something extremely huge. It was a gate. Heavily rusted evenly spaced
enormous bars were rusted together with even more heavily rusted even
more enormous chains. Each link in the chain was as almost as big as
George. He peered in between the bars but could make out nothing but
endless blackness. He gently placed each hand on a bar. They felt rough
and cold, and surprisingly fragile, like they would crumble in his
fingers if he squeezed them too hard. So, he tried squeezing them too
hard. His hands crunched into the top layer of rust but were soon met
with a solid inner core of enormous strength. The corrosion had only
passed a couple of inches into the bars. He made a futile attempt at
tugging at them, but they didn't budge a millimetre. There was no way
he was getting through them until the rust penetrated them completely
which would take God knows how long. This wasn't a big problem for
George however as he didn't seem to be going anywhere in a hurry. He
would simply sit and wait for nature to take its course. At least it
would give him something to look forward to. He was just about to
resign himself to the fact that he was going to sit for several hundred
years looking at something that would make drying paint seem like the
star attraction of the month when he was surprised to hear what sounded
very much like music - dreadful, tuneless music. Mind-blowingly,
high-pitched, ear-shatteringly godawful music. "Cat being strangled"
did not even begin to describe it.
"Rabid monkey being castrated with a blunt knife" came a bit closer.
George's heart sank into his boots when he contemplated how listening
to it for any length of time would compound his boredom into sheer
agony. He took a few steps in the direction that he thought the music
was coming from (it was difficult to tell as heaven has some very
bizarre acoustics) and as his echoing foot-fall seemed to grow louder,
the music subsided and then stopped altogether.
"WINDOWS?"
George jumped and felt his heart race, but luckily this time it
gradually slowed down without stopping entirely. He spun around.
Nothing. Just the slow creaking of the rusty swings.
It was dementia. He just knew it. A classic case - the pressure had
finally got to him and he had retreated into his own little world. At
this very moment he was probably shackled up in a rubber room having
the dribble wiped from his chin and being fed custard through a straw.
But, still-he didn't feel insane....whatever that felt like, he was
pretty sure this wasn't it. Nothing that had just happened made any
sense, but he was able to recognise that it didn't. He still had a
framework of coherency that gave him ability to judge what was normal
and what quite obviously wasn't. This quite obviously wasn't. Still, as
he was now apparently here for all eternity he figured that he may as
well make the most of it and was just about to have a go on the rusty
swings when he heard a peculiar sound behind him. Once again he spun
around and was confronted by quite possibly the most bizarre thing he
had ever seen. When bearing in mind that he saw people with disorders
such as "Millinerphilia" - a sexual perversion involving hat-making as
a form of foreplay, and "Staksadecomantaphobia" (which was so bizarre
that he tried not to even think about it outside of office hours) on an
almost daily basis, this was no mean feat. For what stood before him
was shocking, hideous....and yet somehow.....comical.
"Hello, Colin" said the creature which was little over two feet high.
It had bright yellow skin and ping-pong ball eyes that seemed to look
in every direction at once. At first George wasn't sure if it was
addressing him, but considering how few people there seemed to be
around it seemed to be the only logical possibility. By all accounts it
looked like something a Blue Peter presenter would make on an off-day.
In its left three-fingered hand it held a small penny whistle which it
waved rhythmically as it talked.
"I'm...st........ffbff...." stuttered George.
The creature turned its head on one side the way puppies do on those
hideously cute greeting cards. It made a strange clicking noise that
seemed to originate from one of its armpits and hopped around
George.
"Why you here, Colin? We no want cleaning windows now."
"Ahma.....wha.....wha.....windows?" replied George.
The creature turned its head on the other side. Then it turned it a
bit more, then a bit more until it had completed a 360 degree turn. It
produced a miniature pair of triangular spectacles from a flap of skin
on the front of its stomach and perched them on a small ledge beneath
its eyes which George surmised must be its nose. It leaned forward and
peered closely at George. He felt momentarily threatened under such
scrutiny and began to nervously fiddle with his hair when the creature
suddenly and without warning leapt roughly 9 feet into the air and
landed with a small slap atop George's head. If he had been any less
petrified he would almost certainly have attempted to fight it off, but
being frozen with terror as he was, he simply stood still and let the
creature massage his scalp. Unbeknownst to George, the little creature
was positioning its penny whistle just above his frontal lobes. When it
was pretty certain it had located George's aural cortex, it jammed the
whistle into George's head.
"AAAARRGGHHH!" screamed George, more with surprise than pain -
surprising because it didn't seem to hurt at all. The creature peered
with one eye down the length of the penny whistle and content that
there was no blockage, began to play the same godawful, tuneless music
directly into George's brain. This time, however, from George's
perspective it sounded like the most divine example of aural
entertainment imaginable. The sort of music that ends wars and opens
legs....it was incredible. George found his pleasure hard to contain
and he let out a little yelp as the creature played a particularly vile
arpeggio.
The creature pulled the whistle out of George's head (which was a
disappointment in as much as he was enjoying the music but a relief in
as much as he no longer had a whistle in his brain) and somersaulted
down onto the ground in front of him. It narrowed its eyes and parted
its lips revealing a set of tiny serrated teeth.
"Hooooorrrrrrwwwwwwww..........you not Colin?"
George felt the top of his head which was surprisingly completely
intact and even seemed to feel more conditioned than usual.
"C.....? No....I'm...." he stammered "I'm George."
The creature narrowed its eyes even further.
"You no here clean windows?"
"No...I'm.....no."
"Hoooorrrrwwwwwwww......me mistake" said the creature and happily
pattered off into the distance.
"W..wait!" said George, but the creature was already disappearing into
the darkness, once again playing its whistle.
This was by all accounts not a regular Tuesday.
He listened until the music was far enough away to be quieter than the
gentle whistle of the wind and stepped once again towards the gate. He
wandered along its length, tapping each bar with his hand. Then
something caught his eye (his right eye to be exact) - something
attached to the gate, a few feet ahead of him. It gently flapped in the
breeze as he approached it....it was a piece of paper, partially
sellotaped to one of the bars. He was very surprised to find that his
spectacles still lay intact in his breast pocket. He removed them, slid
them on and closely examined the piece of paper. There was something
written on it in tiny, impossibly neat handwriting. George peered
closer at it:
"Heaven - Temporarily Closed for Business"