28 Oct – Fifteen minutes with you, well, I wouldn’t say no.

So, I’ve heard from Friend John. Whether the message comes from limbo, or his fevered imagination before passing, it’s hard to tell. It’s his second message since meeting his end, and, given that he had virtually no followers to tune into his genius, I pass it on, to honour his memory.

It may be AI, it may be something he wrote to amuse himself, knowing that we’d read it when he was no longer here; he may yet have found a way to intercept a scheduled message from the beyond, and edited it to bring us a real-time update of his experiences so far.

I write to you from the steps of the entrance to purgatory, which I have been detailed to keep clean in between sessions.  It’s funny up here —neither winter, nor summer. It feels like a stiff breeze is blowing somewhere behind the building, in the open meadows in which the shepherds and their flocks abide (note the verb).  But it doesn’t blow here, in this little corner. It’s not cold, but it feels like it’s on the point of turning —like a disappointing summer’s day.

“You would have laughed, actually. The other day, three sisters arrived —they’d all died in the same car crash. None of them were married. In fact, I think they all lived together, in the same house in which they’d been brought up. Anyway, the clerk, who stands at the lectern to check them all in as they arrive, and does the basic triage on them, to direct them to the next stage, he calls up the first one. Youngest first, it’s the way they do it for simultaneous deaths up here.

He takes her through all the basic details to make sure he’s got the right person, like in that Emeric Pressburger film, then he starts on the moral questions. Eventually, he asks her, as an unmarried woman, whether she’s ever had sex. She says no, then, he asks, has she ever had any sort of relations with a man or woman.

Well, I started to work my brush up to their end of the steps, and I heard her tell him about this incident at the tennis club. The pavilion was no more than a large shed, she said, and she’d been in there getting changed, ready to play later that afternoon, and she’d been going through her warm-up exercises when it happened. She brought herself back up from a low stretch with her legs wide spread, just as an older man in there turned around, half way through changing, believing he was alone.

‘His thing was sticking out, and it nearly had my eye out,’ she said.

The clerk’s interested now, and he can tell that there’s more to it, and so he asks her to go into more detail. It turns out, it was the first adult version of a ‘thing’ she’d ever seen, and she couldn’t take her eyes off it. She stared at it for ages she said, then she told the clerk, that the man eventually said to her that she could touch it, if she wanted to.

‘Did you?’ asks the clerk.

She nodded her head resignedly. ‘I did,’ she says. Then eventually she adds, ‘For quite a long time, actually.’

The clerk gives her a moment to reflect, then says to her, ‘Right, go over there, to the fountain of eternal purity, and wash your eyes clean, then, only when that’s done, thoroughly wash all parts of your hands, and anywhere else that the thing touched.’

He looked round to find me, expecting to have to call me over, and was surprised to find that I was so close by. He told me to take the young woman to the fountain, and pointedly added, ‘I suppose you’ve overheard what I’ve asked her to do. Stay with her ‘til it’s done.’

I put my broom down, and gestured with my head for her to follow me. She was a little crestfallen, you could see, but I walked a couple of paces ahead of her, and acted like I hadn’t heard all the details, and wasn’t interested —as if I hear all sorts of things like that, and it made no difference to me. Like a nurse in A&E who bears daily witness to the strange things that men do with their ‘things’.

So, we get to the fountain, which is built into a hedge of evergreen shrubs. I sort of swing round to tell her we’re here, and she double takes, because it’s pretty unimpressive. The shrub hedge has brightly coloured flowers blooming in it, but they look like the alien flowers that are considered weeds in the place in which they grow naturally. There’s this gold bowl thing, which is no bigger than a washing up dish, and a slow trickle of water coming out of a plastic-looking brass coloured tap dribbles into it. It runs out, through the bowl, and is pumped back round again, like one of those cheap garden features you find in a DIY store —there couldn’t have been more than a gallon of water in the whole thing.

Anyhow, she does what she’s required to do, then goes to stand on the steps to wait for further instruction. The clerk hasn’t been specific, but the implication is, as they’re related, and died together, they’re all to go into the next stage as one.

As she does, her second sister’s already up there with the clerk, going through her own triage. I leave her, and edge my way back down to where I’ve left the broom, to get myself back in earshot again. And as I pick it up, I see that he’s about to go into the moral issues part of the test. Just before he asks the first question, the third sister, who’s been watching and learning like me, shouts out that she wants to go now.

The clerk tells her that there’s a strict procedure of reverse age order for events like this. ‘It’s been established for millennia,’ he says, then adds something about it having been going for three hundred thousand years, way before God even thought about inventing humans. He makes his point, anyway, then he turns back to the second sister. But again, before he can get going, the third sister starts shouting again, and she works herself up to such as state, that she’s almost crying.

You’re not allowed to lose your temper up here, there’s no point,. You can’t make things go any faster, no matter what you say or do, but you can tell that he’s getting a bit exasperated with her.

‘What is it? Why’s it so important?’ he says.

And the third sister, looking first towards the fountain where she’d witnessed the youngest’s ablutions, then pointing at the second sister, standing in front of him, says ‘I don’t mind going last, but can’t you at least let me rinse my mouth out, before she washes her arse?’

…”