Good to Be God Read online

  Praise for Good to Be God

  “This is Fischer at his sharpest – a widely original feelbad philosophical hayride.”

  The Times

  “Brutal, dazzling and clever.”

  The Independent

  “Fischer is one of the funniest writers in the business, and his appealing satirical delivery, along with the wealth of zealously polished gags studded through the narrative, ensure a hum of low-level smiling satisfaction throughout.”

  The Daily Telegraph

  “Fischer’s fecund imagination keeps the satire constantly engaging.”

  The Daily Mail

  “The narrative is… propelled by the author’s madcap imagination and inventive language.”

  Times Literary Supplement

  “A spot-on mixture of shady characters and searing insight… as blackly funny as it is profound.”

  Maxim

  “As in all his fiction, Fischer makes comic capital out of the fretful, trivial, even sordid realities that get in the way of five-star ideals.”

  Financial Times

  “There are a lot of funny lines… Good to be God dramatizes the neuroses of a man mired in middle age who is dismally disappointed with the way things have panned out.”

  Sunday Telegraph

  “A born storyteller.”

  Sunday Times

  “The best thinking-person’s entertainer since Iris Murdoch… one of his funniest books to date.”

  Time Out

  “Good to Be God is funny and true, and (not merely because it’s set in Miami) Fischer’s sunniest novel to date.”

  Catholic Herald

  “Tibor Fischer’s surreal morality tale is bullet-riddled with wisdom, but freed from worthiness thanks to his brilliantly dry, warped humour.”

  The List

  “For all their surface shine and fantastical scope, Fischer’s books are often serious investigations into what it means to be good.”

  Metro

  “Tyndale is as bad at being a religious fraudster as he is at everything else. But he discovers that in a world of double-crossing, being a reliable failure can be as useful as being a success.”

  New Statesman

  GOOD TO BE GOD

  GOOD TO BE GOD

  T I B O R F I S C H E R

  A L M A B O O K S

  ALMA BOOKS LTD

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  243–253 Lower Mortlake Road

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  Good to Be God first published by Alma Books Limited in 2008

  This paperback edition first published by Alma Books Limited in 2009

  Copyright © Tibor Fischer, 2008

  Tibor Fischer asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-1-84688-084-1

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-84688-105-3

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

  For Louise

  GOOD TO BE GOD

  You know when you’re in trouble. You know you’re in trouble when you phone and no one phones back. You know you’re in trouble when you get back home, the door’s been kicked in, the only thing stolen is the lock (it’s the only thing worth stealing) and your burglar has left a note urging you to “pull yourself together”.

  This isn’t funny when it happens to you.

  I tried to live my life decently. For a long time. I really did, but it didn’t work…

  Ò

  “Well,” says Nelson. I haven’t seen him for a few years. He’s waiting for me in the Chinese restaurant, patiently turning over the menu. With your school friends, you tend to think of them as they were, and it was unnatural to find Nelson there, not just on time, but early.

  Nelson was the school friend my parents liked. He mastered manipulation young, and my parents were reassured by the state of the nation when Nelson, his hair immaculately combed, would greet them with excessive courtesy. This opposed to the inevitable grunts of my other associates. My mother was often more pleased to see Nelson than I was.

  Only once did my mother have suspicions. One evening, as I walked out to join Nelson in his car, she mused, “He does look too young to be driving.” That was probably because Nelson was indeed two years too young to have a driving licence, but since the car was stolen that didn’t matter much.

  3

  TIBOR FISCHER

  Nelson, Bizzy and I would roll through south London. You’ll never be able to enjoy driving as much as when you’re fifteen and in a stolen car. We’d stop off and have an expensive meal (prawn cocktail, steak, black forest gateau) on one of Nelson’s stolen credit cards. We did this quite often, and we only had trouble one night, but not from suspicious waiters or the police.

  Nelson – normally a conscientious driver – accidentally cut up a vanload of heavies, twice our age, size and number. We were chased around for an hour, and it was the only time I saw Nelson scared.

  “How you?” asks Nelson. It’s a perfectly reasonable, expected question. But it’s one I wish I wasn’t asked these days.

  “Fine,” I say. We both know this isn’t true.

  Every school has a Nelson: the kid who phones in the bomb threats, who steals teachers’ bags and exam papers, who goes off on exotic holidays with complete strangers paying for it or foreign governments arranging for his travel back, under that famed practice of deportation. From the age of about twelve to eighteen I don’t think Nelson went a day without committing an incarcerable criminal act. Yet he never spent five minutes in a police station – in England. It seemed to us that he was destined either for the gallows or stardom in international skulduggery.

  What happened to Nelson? What happened to Nelson was that life kicked the shit out of him.

  Married with two kids, Nelson now works as a rep for a company that manufactures handcuffs. The company does some other things, but its staple is handcuffs. Nelson has some piquant stories about his overseas customers who, for example, ask for their money back when blood jams the cuffs and they can’t get them off the bodies.

  We share the same birthday and this makes him an outlandish 4

  GOOD TO BE GOD

  mirror. We reanimate that night we nearly got mashed and other choice japes. To have a really good laugh about them we need each other. Have we seen anyone from the old days? We haven’t.

  Not for years. But even if we had, they wouldn’t have evented enough to produce a good anecdote. Nothing much happens when you’re forty.

  Not that I need reminding, but when I look at Nelson I see how punishing this marathon is. He’s not slow or lazy. “I haven’t bought so much as a shirt for myself in four years,” he tells me.

  His daughter wants to be a doctor and he has to save up. We both express horror at the price of everything, especially food.

  He can barely afford a restrained night-out in a cheap local Chinese restaurant, and I can’t afford it at all. That’s middle age for men, less hair and more stinginess.

  “Why can’t they do proper coff
ee in Chinese restaurants?” he reflects as he pokes his liquid with a spoon. “You know, my wife does my hair.” He makes clipper movements with his hand. Is ageing a reverse process? You get a few moments in your twenties when you wangle some clout, but then it all closes in on you and you’re back in a saggy version of childhood where you can’t do what you want and someone who doesn’t know how to do it is cutting your hair.

  Nevertheless, I’m well behind in this game. Nelson may have a huge mortgage, but he’s got a mortgage. He has a dire job, but a job. A pension. He has kids. Everyone we know, even the truly dim and unpleasant, has something.

  “Let me pay for this,” says Nelson, and I don’t even feign protest, just in case he changes his mind.

  “So, women?” asks Nelson.

  “No.” Nelson anticipates I’ll be fleshing out this answer, but I don’t.

  5

  TIBOR FISCHER

  “You’re not lucky are you?” If you think you’re unlucky, you may or may not be. It’s hard to gauge the bumps, and typically thinking you’re unlucky is self-pity. But when your friends start telling you you’re unlucky, you’re really in trouble.

  We’re silent as we wait for the waiter to return Nelson’s card.

  “Miami next week,” Nelson sighs.

  “What’s the problem there?”

  “If I were on holiday, Miami’d be great. What it means for me is a generous helping of road rage, a day on a plane, four days in an air-conditioned box dishing out my cards to members of the law-enforcement profession who’ll be behaving as badly as they can get away with, and who, if they were interested in my stuff would know where to get it anyway. My liver’s shot, so I can’t booze. Then a generous helping of delay at the airport, another day on a plane, a generous topping-up of rage on the drive home to be battered by the wife because I was in Miami and she wasn’t.”

  A skeletal Chinese man wanders in with a large shoulder bag.

  From this he produces a fan of pirate DVDs which he submits to the various diners. He doesn’t utter a word of English and I wonder if he has any idea where he is.

  “I’ll happily go for you,” I joke. Nelson studies me.

  “Why not?” he says unjokily. “Yeah, be me.”

  “I can’t pretend to be you. And I’ve lost my passport.”

  “Think about it,” continues Nelson. “Know what I want? I want to sleep. I want to stay in bed until lunchtime, maybe some golf in the afternoon. I want to do that for a week. I was even considering having a sickie to get out of Miami. You. You can go out there, stay in a nice hotel, hand out a few cards, have some fun.”

  “What about the passport?”

  6

  GOOD TO BE GOD

  “Take mine.”

  “I don’t look like you,” I say, but I look at Nelson and I realize while we’re not identical twins, we both have shaved heads and porky, defeated features, and whose passport photo looks like them?

  The more we chew it over, the sounder it sounds. I use Nelson’s passport and credit card and do enough in Miami to create the impression Nelson went.

  “So is it cata, pole or blow?” I ask.

  “Strictly cata. We don’t pole or blow.”

  Two things will happen to you if you’re a salesman, regardless of what you sell. One: you’ll end up at a trade fair in some awful German town. Two: you’ll end up plying drinkers with drinks.

  That’s the entry level. After that, it’s a question of company policy. You can restrict yourself to dishing out catalogues (“cata them up a bit”) or you can take prospective clients to pole-dancing clubs (“bird-watching”) or if you’re in the right city, brothels (“pipe-cleaning”). Selling, sad to say, isn’t a sophisticated business. One year my former company hired a string quartet for their stand at the trade fair. They never did it again.

  Outside we loiter over goodbye and survey the dingy high street where in the distance a sextet of hooded teenagers lumbers towards us, but then retreats howling about something it deems worth howling about. It’s bracing being on the street with an old friend you can count on: a jokefist, Nelson’s contribution to any fight would be to drain his assailant’s energy by absorbing blows, but he wouldn’t run. He’d never run and leave me. He wouldn’t like it, but he wouldn’t run.

  “Look after yourself. And remember,” says Nelson in parting,

  “you can’t have the commission.”

  7

  TIBOR FISCHER

  I go back to my place. It’s depressing at the best of times, because a shitty bedsit in a shitty neighbourhood always is.

  It’s always depressing to come back to an empty home. It’s not where I want to be. It’s not where anyone would want to be.

  There’s an elderly, prick-puce alky who sits outside all day, clutching a can. He’s so purple it defies belief he’s alive. The differences between him and me are few (and diminishing).

  Most importantly, he has the gift of making his money stretch to all-week sipping (I still have a weakness for food).

  In addition, he’s quite happy. Unlike the innumerable winos, junkies and beggars of the neighbourhood who want to be as large as possible in your life, he remains silent and serene. It’s extremely annoying. My colour’s better, my clothes a little less worn, my day more active, but otherwise I’m his understudy, his successor, as I currently appear to be as employable as His Puceness. Very few things are as destructive as a long dose of unemployment.

  I almost didn’t call Nelson, because one of the worst aspects of being fucked is having to pretend that you can handle it, because of course you can’t. If you have one compartment that’s air-tight, you can stay afloat. But when money, marriage, job, home and health go…

  I don’t give myself airs: I know I don’t have a great intellect. I don’t know any languages, I don’t know the dates of battles or kings and queens. My technical knowledge extends to changing the oil in my car. I can’t sing. I can’t dance. Eminence at my golf club has eluded me, but… but I always thought I had some smarts, something, a little fox in the box. And of course the question that comes to mind as you return once more to your sweaty mattress in a shitty bedsit, is if you’re so clever, how come you’ve ended up here partnering His Puceness?

  8

  GOOD TO BE GOD

  I really had no choice about accepting Nelson’s suggestion, because I need to do something. If he’d offered me a week cleaning his toilet, I’d have accepted. Doing anything is better than doing nothing. Nelson may have saved my life.

  Ò

  Bulbs belong in the garden. That’s what they told me on my first day at work. Lamps. Luminaires. Never bulbs. Otherwise, the secret of selling lighting is rather like sprinting, where a hundredth of a second will win you the medal: just knowing a candle more than the buyer will win you the contract.

  I did my job well. Not very well. Not brilliantly, but past okay. You don’t grow up wanting to be a lighting salesman, but for fifteen years I visited factories, offices, shops, schools, clambering around taking measurements, and I realized it suited me. Then business boomed enough for the company to need someone else working my territory. I chose the new rep.

  Some interviewers relish the process. They get off on the grovelling and pleading. I didn’t. I disliked having to interview job-hunters who were mostly decent and desperate for work, because I knew I would disappoint all but one. Clarinda turned up for the interview in a miniskirt so short I couldn’t look.

  From Singapore, she was the most qualified for the job, she was the most ruthless of the interviewees, and she had a miniskirt. The lighting business is very male, and Clarinda may not have been the only woman in it, but she must have been the most attractive. Then the boom, as booms do, stopped. It’s annoying to lose your job because you did your job, and it’s annoying to have hired the one who gets your job.

  Despite my seniority, Clarinda stayed and I went. I don’t think 9

  TIBOR FISCHER

  the miniskirt was a decisive for
ce – the clincher, I’d hazard, was her living with a lawyer considered the foremost expert on employment law.

  Ò

  Of course losing your job shouldn’t total your life, but it did.

  You remember how the big, shiny, billion-dollar space shuttle disintegrated because of one titchy bit of foam?

  I won’t bore you with the story. Highlights include disastrous investment, divorce, fire, an embarrassing medical complaint, lawyers, a substantial selection from the bad-luck catalogue.

  You turn away for a second and that thing you called your life has gone. You probably don’t even need to turn away, it could do it right in front of you even as you’re fretting over it. And I came away without any funny hard-luck stories. At the very least bad luck should give you some anecdotal might.

  G

  There are places that are waiting for you. You may not have learnt this, but there are.

  At immigration, I join the queue manned by a scowling official with a feeble moustache who is suffering a rancour overdose. This becomes clear as he fusses over two Venezuelans, an innocuous mother and daughter. He processes so slowly you can’t tell he’s processing, holding the Venezuelan passports with his fingertips as if they were rotting.

  On my right the queue is run by a jolly, white-haired retiree type with a successful moustache who whisks visitors through every two minutes with a grin and a joke.

  10

  GOOD TO BE GOD

  After ten minutes I know I’ve got a bad case of wrong queue. On my right, a bespectacled woman who was loudly discussing her Caribbean cruise and who had been six or seven holidaymakers behind me has now reached the fingerprinting pads.

  Change queue? But I guess that the Venezuelan crisis has to be coming to an end soon. When after twenty minutes it hasn’t, I decide there’s no point moving, because it really can’t go on much longer; this is a decision I bitterly regret ten minutes later when the Venezuelans are still struggling to maintain their polite smiles.

  It’s a simple class in human nature. My misfortune has made me a connoisseur of discontent, but I don’t need my bitterness skills here; my prospective interrogator has a grievance stoop.