The Calculator

The silver solar-powered calculator seemed harmless enough where it was.
It rested high up on a neat pile of unsent letters and unopened bills at the table where he worked as an unknown comedy sketch writer. The table itself was as cluttered as a table can get. Even the mouse struggled for room.
It was a small table, but Dave seemed bent on making it even smaller, perhaps a sign that his defeatist attitude towards selling an idea was getting the better of him.
Everywhere he looked, he saw bills with red ink and bank statements with ‘DR’ or ‘Interest’ on every line. Empty disposable lighters, his treasured Ritz ashtray (not that he’d ever been) and red Rizla packets took up the space to the right of his browned 15’ CRT monitor while a pyramid of cups clambered for space on top of the hard-drive.
Dave felt trapped, cheated, sitting there knowing that tomorrow was the day when all this might well be taken away from him.
The record player, the hard-drive, the browned monitor; all these prized possessions could fetch the month’s rent. With them would go his only form of income, which had not been forthcoming since he wrote a short piece on the environmentally high cost of cheap, disposable lighters made in the far east for Time magazine entitled ‘No smoke without toxins’. That was over a year ago and they still hadn’t processed his fee (his agent pocketed the money).
What could he do to keep the tools of his trade, though? He couldn’t ask for his job back at the petrol station after his last tantrum, and he certainly wouldn’t be welcomed back at Wine Odyssey, the local off-licence. With all those bottles around, he’d be sure to tuck into some Smirnoff and the CCTV camera never lies, especially when the alcoholic owner spent whole days on end watching upstairs.
Work seemed unlikely to Dave. He was, after all, a genius, and genies didn’t work. Fools and horses did that and Dave knew he was neither.
He looked around the room for other things to sell, but last month had seen to that. The sofa, the tea-chest and the built-in fireplace were no more. He looked at his bookcase and struggled when he caught a glimpse of his Lewis Carroll collection. No way could he sell those. They were from his Mum and she always looked to see if they were still there when she came round. She hadn’t really let them go at all.
Dave eyed the skirting boards and wondered how much they might fetch if he ripped out the lot and offered to skirt Mrs Grimsdale’s dining room for her.
‘Two hundred quid, maybe,’ he thought to himself.
Then the doors came to mind. If they were stripped down to the pine, he could get sixty quid for the lot. But then came the thought of the baby. With no door to cushion the crying and the stench, he’d surely go mad.
‘No chance,’ he said to himself.
Hopeless and weary, he peered across to the bay-window with its beautiful glazed antique insets.
‘If I ripped those out, I could get two months’ rent for sure,’ he thought. Again, sanity kicked in quickly after delusion. ‘But then someone would nick the PC.’
‘Bugger it!’ he shouted, wondering in the wake of the shout whether the conviction of his words might squeeze out a worthwhile plan from his brain.
It didn’t.
Scratching his head, his eyes fell upon the empty cardboard box that until three months ago housed his lifelong record collection. Dave shook his head. There was no light. There would be no way out.
But Dave’s a pretty intelligent guy. He doesn’t just give up when the going gets tough.
Whilst making a cup of tea, he thought more clearly. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that he’d actually removed one of the cups from the pyramid for the first time in three weeks. In his mind, he was going all the way to recovery.
‘I don’t need the record player because I haven’t got any records. What if I ripped up the skirts and sold them with the record player and the headphones?’ A little sneer slid onto his left cheek as he totted up the available funds.
But it still wasn’t enough. If he included the doors, it would be fine, but he needed the money tomorrow and it would take him three days to strip them. Even unstripped, the magic £450 would still elude him.
With a sigh, he looked out of the kitchen window and began squeezing the third-hand tea bag into his British Heart Foundation mug with the plastic spoon he acquired from Wimpy.
As he was squeezing the tea bag, the spoon broke in his hand and flicked up a jet of hot tea into his face. Dave’s expression was priceless. Film directors and photographers would have paid the moon for a glimpse of his hideously solemn gaze into nowhere.
Moving on but staying still, Dave saw the fence that Jay from next door had recently installed. They were away for two weeks. They’d even told him so, but, wrestling with his mind, he couldn’t bring himself to stoop to theft. Dave was above that. Some people could rise above guilt, but not Dave.
As he trudged through to his studio, as he liked to call it, another brainwave offered itself up to him, but it disappeared back into thin air as he sat down, and so he started looking for a place to put his British Heart Foundation mug.
‘Shite!’ he shouted, spilling the tea in his hand as he lowered it to the carpetless floor. That had gone to finance a week’s worth of tea, sugar and milk. The baby didn’t need Pampers. If the baby had Pampers, the doors and skirts would have been long gone. Instead, it shat, pissed and puked into its bed to the point of saturation, at which time, when the sun decided to show its face, Dave would slide the soggy thing out of the window, nail it to the sill and let it drip down to the patio until it stopped.
His wife, forever the optimist in Dave’s writing future, always listened to reason when something had to be sold. With the sale of the carpets (£15 for the lot to a wise old Indian landlord of student accommodation), he’d promised to strip down the floors to the original wood, but it had only been a verbal gesture. It didn’t mean he’d have to actually do it.
The thought trapped somewhere between his mind and his subconscious continued to elude him, so he sat there pretending not to care in the hope that it may float back to him. It didn’t budge.
Reverting to the bills, Dave picked one up. It was the student loan from three years ago that now stood at £4882.38, which each month rose by £9.39, except for February, when it rose by £8.93.
How many letters had he written complaining about the intensive course on creative writing to the Student Loans Company? And how many times had they written back to say that he had to pay the loan back, otherwise he’d run the risk of being blacklisted for the rest of his life, which didn’t bother Dave one bit.
This little battle of wits with the SLC went a long way to explaining Dave’s incredibly limited portfolio of comedy sketches over the past year. He spent more time thinking of new complaints to make to the SLC than he did comedy sketches, using all kinds of twists and turns to convince them that he was right and they were wrong. This was Dave’s crusade, and he stood as much of a chance of letting it go as a bull terrier did a stick in the midday sun with a good audience. He would continue to gnaw at their heads for allowing this course public financial assistance, to which he was now responsible, until good prevailed. Only when they let him off could he return to his life as a comedy sketch writer.
All correspondence had been filed and, in his mind, the day would come when his court appearance with the SLC would prove him to be the innocent party to a vile education system. He dreamt of that day when a photographer for a local newspaper would shoot him in his true light. He even knew what the headline would say. It went; ‘Crusader rights wrongs of local literary school.’
Oh, yes. He’d do it, alright. But until the £80 court fees could be found to take them to the cleaners, he would carry on writing his repulsive, wordy, transparent letters to the SLC and miss out on any comedy sketch writing. He’d grow from the struggle.
Little did he know, but the person he wrote his vitriol to at the SLC had used his correspondence as a favourite in-house e-mail ever since his first one, to which all members of staff would crease up on a weekly basis. This was comedy, but Dave didn’t see it that way.
He wouldn’t let them get away with it until they realised the extent to which they had made his life a misery. At the SLC, Dave’s misery was their hilarity. Nothing made them laugh as Dave did. He just had that knack.
Itching to write them another letter (it was about time), Dave rubbed his hands and thought about switching on the mini-tower. Forgetting where he’d put his tea, he looked to the pyramid of cups and then imagined that he’d remembered forgetting it altogether.
‘Must have left it in the bloody kitchen again,’ he said to himself. Getting up, he knocked the tea over. It was all over the floor now.
‘Oh God!’ he shouted, imagining himself actually getting down there and wiping it up.
Back in the kitchen, Dave sifted through the bin-liner on the floor for the old tea bag.
The kitchen was a mess, and could only be called a kitchen because that was what it used to be. You could see that it had been a kitchen a while back with the scum left in the area where the cooker used to be and the lino cuts where the second-hand washing machine used to judder. The only remaining items that suggested it was still a kitchen were the sink in front of the pokey little window, the Breville mini-oven and the Belling electric ring (the type that landlords buy so that they can advertise their bedsits ‘with kitchenette’). Everything else had been smashed, sold or part-exchanged for roll-ups with the cleaner who lived at 16a. The lino was so worn that Dave had started using ripped up corn flakes packs to give it that little bit of continuity.
His only pan he placed over the electric ring that refused to die and there he waited, watching for bubbles to appear at the bottom of the pan. The PC took longer to warm up than the water, and he was fully aware of this, so he went back to the studio, as he liked to call it, and switched the thing on. Then, he began to relieve the ashtray of its lesser smoked roll-ups so that he could make one to stop the suicidal thoughts running amok in his mind.
‘I haven’t even got a sharp knife,’ he thought.
But the roll-up tasted good, so good that he just sat there smoking in harmony waiting for the viruses to cancel themselves out in his mini-tower. By the time he got back to the kitchen, the pan had dried up.
‘Jesus,’ he called out. ‘When will it all end?’
The nicotine sat heavily in his blood. The pan was empty again. Looking down at the exhausted tea bag, he caught a reflection of himself in the Fray Bentos-stained window above the sink.
‘Is that me?’ he wondered. He had a beard and long hair. He stared into himself for a while and then flicked out of it at the point where desperation turned into insanity. He could hear things in his head, little zings that were getting louder and louder. He shook his head and concentrated on the pan.
‘All I have to do is fill it up again. That’s all I have to do. I’ve got to carry on. I can do this,’ he said to himself.
But he couldn’t. Something vital had changed in him and he knew that he couldn’t fill that pan up again. It was just too painful.
Looking back at himself, he imagined that Jesus was there in the glass of the window. His mind’s eye had reconfigured his own face to reveal Jesus. He was there! It was him!
Dave had been a strict atheist up till that moment but now, surely, he’d seen the light. Jesus was there, and the least he could do was acknowledge the man.
‘Hello, Jesus,’ he said, looking deep into his eyes.
His own reflection hadn’t budged. There was no lip-movement at all. It had to be Jesus.
But Jesus hadn’t replied.
‘Lord, why don’t you say anything? You can see my pain, so why don’t you speak to me?’
And as he said this, the reflection smiled brightly back at him. It didn’t speak. It just smiled brightly, but that was enough for Dave.
He collapsed onto the lino and the ripped up corn flakes packs and whimpered like a dog. His hands he arched together in prayer.
‘Lord Jesus. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!’ and almost immediately, Dave felt the spirit of Jesus enter into him.
His wife, Grace, stood at the edge of the lino with her mouth wide open in disbelief. ‘What the fuck are you doing, David?’
But Dave didn’t hear her. He really was out there with the spirit of Jesus, whimpering like a dog on the floor.
He’d pissed his pants but it didn’t matter. Jesus had smiled brightly at him.
The pan was red and its non-stick surface had cracked but it didn’t mean a thing. Jesus had smiled brightly at him. Even the splatters of Fray Bentos steak and kidney pies could not deny that. They had seen him smile, too. The love of Jesus had entered into each mouldy bit of sauce on that window pane.
As Grace stood there watching her husband whimper, she wondered if now was the time to have him sectioned. It had been a long time coming, and she couldn’t see him changing for the better.
‘David?’ she said. ‘Do you want me to call anyone?’
But he couldn’t hear a word she was saying. He was filled with the love of Christ and no matter how much she wanted him sectioned (which meant an eight-week holiday from his madness and an extra £34.25 a week from the social), his newfound love for the Great Man could never be ignored again.
‘Thank you, Lord,’ he whimpered, with a little more clarity. ‘Thank you so much.’
And then, powered by this new force, he got up and walked over to the electric ring to switch it off. The non-stick surface had cracked but it didn’t matter one bit. The love of Jesus was in him.
Gliding past Grace, who moved aside to let him pass, he sauntered back to the studio to sit in front of his colourful monitor. He stared at the stars on his screen-saver as they moved towards him, glistening with true meaning.
There was a permanent grin of stupefied beauty on Dave’s face. Everything had meaning and everything made perfect sense. The love of Jesus could save him from torment where writing had failed. His hatred for the SLC dissolved and he laughed freely, placing the unsent letters onto his seat to soak up the piss in his nylon pants. Although Grace was standing next to him, she had not made her presence felt at all. In fact, she may as well have been up in the bedroom for all he cared, picking her nose, ignoring the baby, thinking about chocolate and living in Spain with GMTV on the black and white portable as usual.
Dave stared at the bills and shook his head.
‘Why on earth had they meant so much to me?’ he asked himself.
The pyramid of cups to his left stood tall, but that wasn’t a problem. All he had to do was take them through to the kitchen and wash them up. It was that simple.
He looked down to the skirting boards and leant forward, chuckling to himself.
‘What was I thinking? I must have been mad,’ he said.
Grace tried to get through to him. ‘David, you are mad.’
Obviously, that went straight over Dave’s head and out into the wilderness where all the other disbelievers’ words went to rest.
Suddenly, Dave dwelt on the past and became tearful. All those years of disillusionment came to mind. All those lost, wasted years of wanting. How could he ever forgive himself for the things he’d done, the pain he’d caused, the letters he’d written and the comedy sketches he’d never recorded? How could he have spent the child benefit money on roll-ups and Fray Bentos steak and kidney pies when little Attila deserved Pampers, cotton pads and Vaseline? How would anyone ever accept him as the new man he now found himself to be?
As he watched the stars floating towards him through glazed, wet eye-rims, Dave shook his head once more.
‘Why did you show yourself now, Lord, when all is lost?’ he cried out loud. ‘Why, Lord, why?’
Grace shook her head and stomped off up to the bedroom for a cry. Dave didn’t notice.
The stars had lost their glamour and without too much trouble Dave’s mind backtracked to the skirting boards, which were scuffed but still in remarkable condition for their age. He still had his Sugar Soap and his claw-hammer.
‘Two twenty, maybe, at a push,’ he thought to himself.
Then he realised what he was thinking and thumped the keyboard in front of him to stem his anger.
‘There’s no way out of this!’ he whimpered, looking down at the floor and the spilt tea dripping through the floorboards.
But even as the revelation wore thin, he couldn’t help thinking about what had happened in the kitchen. It was the most beautiful thing that had ever happened to him and he wasn’t about to put it down as any ordinary memory. It had happened and he couldn’t ignore it.
With as resolute a sniff as one can imagine, Dave watched the stars and wondered how best he could please Jesus. He wriggled in his seat but his eyes never left the stars.
As he continued to focus on the stars, Dave went unknowingly into a state of transcendental meditation. Only the stars mattered. Life outside of the stars disappeared and then, slowly, even the stars lost their form. Dave was staring straight into God’s dustbin, the abyss of the universe and everything else that mattered.
But fear of the unknown set in quickly again and he looked away, stricken by what he’d seen and imagined.
‘Your power is in me, Lord,’ he said, shaking.
He was certain of two things; one, that he’d met Jesus in the kitchen window, and, two, that he’d managed to meditate with his screen-saver. Both were firsts and one had happened only minutes after the other.
‘This is no coincidence,’ he said to himself. ‘If it hadn’t been for Jesus, there’s no way I could have meditated like that. It just makes too much sense.’
Dave was now sure that he was onto something amazing. Any thoughts of selling those skirting boards had left for good. The skirts would stay where they were. He was a changed man. Even his skin had changed colour. There was an assurance to his eyes that hadn’t been there since he lost his virginity, and an overall feeling of well being had revitalised his every pore.
Again, the stars sparkled gloriously in front of his eyes and something inside him told him to meditate with them once more. It said, ‘Be a star. Don’t just stare at them. Be one and listen to what they say to you.’
This sounded fair enough to Dave, although the voice that had spoken to him had a distinctly American twang, which to date had always made Dave’s skin crawl. Not today. Not now. Anyway, the accent was secondary. Only the message counted.
As he concentrated his new visual powers and crossed his eyes on the stars of the screen-saver, he soon enough found himself meditating.
Everything surrounding the stars fell away from his vision and, as before, even the stars began to dissolve slowly into his mind.
He was now a star. The stars had entered into him. Even the fear of being a star was gone.
Suddenly, the voice came back. He continued to be a star and somehow listened to the American voice at the same time.
It said, ‘David, I have chosen you to be my satellite. You now have the power of the universe and the universe has embraced you.’ The voice stopped for a moment so Dave waited for instructions, which he somehow knew would follow shortly.
‘Good,’ the voice said. ‘All you have to do now is concentrate your power and use it on your calculator.’
Without looking over at the calculator to the left of his monitor, he saw it. The silver solar-powered calculator was now in his mind’s eye.
‘This calculator can save the world from extinction, David,’ the voice continued. ‘All you need to do is become one with it and the calculator will do the rest. Believe, David. Believe.’
The voice then disappeared, as Dave knew it would.
‘Thank you, Lord,’ he said with confidence.

So, in what is undoubtedly one of Britain’s most grotesquely unkempt houses, the fate of the world now came to rest with one of Britain’s most prolific madmen, Dave Davison, aged 41.
The silver solar-powered calculator and Dave became one. All sorts of information came from it, which he recorded and sent to the various pillars of the commercial world who had invented and sold the information to governments around the globe for its own ends. Dave now held that information and intended to make it known in the best way possible. It was incredible stuff, Macchiavellian to the extreme, but difficult for the world community to chew on in big chunks.
Dave’s powers weren’t confined to the calculator, though. He could meditate into the future and so backed horses with his dole-cheques.
With his winnings, he upgraded his PC and bought numerous software packages to communicate via the internet, which he never thought he’d do in a million years. He got BT to install a phone line and bought a new futon and Pampers galore for little Attila. Otherwise, nothing really changed. He couldn’t care less that the house was a hovel but he did buy a new kettle and a stand-up oven with four hobs and a grill. Oh, and he got the Breville sandwich-maker he’d been after for years. Apart from that, though, nothing really changed.
In under two months he’d set up a system whereby the pillars of the commercial world could not find out his positioning so that he could be comfortable in their pursuit.
His e-mails, itemising their own information to the finest detail, had these ogres of power on the rack within weeks, he assumed, and they all replied in the sort of way that an untrustworthy liar responds to someone they need to convince. They all denied his accusations and advised him to seek help from a specialist.
‘A specialist what?’ he kept asking himself. It did seem odd that their e-mails were almost entirely identical; short and sharp bulletins denying any knowledge of his ‘findings’ and ending with something like ‘You really should seek help elsewhere, perhaps a specialist.’
Maybe they were all in on it together, he thought. Maybe they met up for conferences and belonged to a huge underground club. Maybe they’d all got in touch with each other when they received Dave’s e-mails and decided to write back in the same fashion to discourage him. Maybe they knew where he lived and Bill Gates was in on it and cracked the software program that Dave had bought to hide his global positioning. Maybe they ate flesh and vomited over the bodies of virgins as they entered them.
Dave spent all day and all night at his new PC, collecting more information from the silver solar-powered calculator that needed no light to work.
He found that the strangest collection of devilish acts came from a council flat in Peckham where the calculator told of five old men in their eighties sat in front of a dozen televisions, running the day-to-day rulings of the British government and its media. Even the Prime Minister, who treated them like royalty, kept daily contact with the old sods.
He had to laugh when he read the information from the calculator’s liquid crystal screen. It was unbelievable. These old boys acted as the country’s power elite from that council flat, condemning innocent people to years of imprisonment in the same breath as freeing wicked criminals of the underworld and The City. The calculator described these five old men as ‘wolves feeding off the vulnerable’ and placed them high up on God’s hit-list, not that he’d ever have one.
Information on the basic principles of arms dealing were difficult to understand at first, but it appeared that the depopulation of third world countries in order to repatriate them with first world peoples at a later date went a long way to explain why the western world was so eager to help with weapons. The war in Afghanistan was a farce, and the calculator said in no uncertain terms that the only reason the war had cropped up was because Britain and America wanted cheaper heroin and hashish. The Afghans had told them to take a hike, so the Yanks and Brits just went over there and stole the drugs instead.
Probably the most awful act that Dave became privy to was that Aids had been spread across Africa by way of aid back in the Eighties, mostly from America and Britain, and that the world’s poorest countries were being held to ransom in order to breed further turmoil and division amongst their own. Dave couldn’t hold his tears back when he read this, and again felt the all-powerful love of Jesus enter into him as he ploughed on in search of more material to make his findings known to the world. For the first time in his life, he felt he had a purpose in the world, yet at the same time he wanted to be swallowed up and sent to hell for being a part of the human race.
It also appeared that industrial and commercial heavyweights were acting without due care and attention in a plot that Dave had always been aware of. Fridges, freezers, TVs, ovens, hi-fis and the rest of it had been made faulty from the start, again back in the Eighties, in order to increase sales and production. CFC gases and other indestructible waste needed to find new homes, or new planets, because they were contaminating the world.
Marketing skulduggery, engineered by professors held in high regard, had ripped off the consumer for years. Pricing, placement of product and special offers that actually were no cheaper than before, were crippling small businesses and allowed the big boys to get away with it, dressing up big tax-breaks as promotional offers for the public good.
The computer age had brought forth other forms of trickery that, with the touch of a mouse, hid charges and staggered interest payments from bank account holders the world over, making billions from absolutely nothing on a daily basis.
The calculator provided a whole thesis on capitalism and listed all the major contributing factors that went to abusing the system for the good of those who invested to the detriment of the world community.
Human extinction, on the whole, was imminent, the calculator said, projecting 2010 as the last date for any possible reversal of fortune and 2035 as the time when only the rich would survive.
Drugs were an issue to which the calculator gave light. The news made Dave shudder as he recalled his own intake, which included almost every illegal upper and downer on the market. The calculator described how every western government shipped in heroin, cocaine and hashish from some of the world’s poorest nations, only to further poison the drugs with far more lethal substances in an attempt to lessen the antisocial faction in their own population. LSD was full of strychnine, heroin had large amounts of rat poison thrown in whilst cocaine and speed weighed in with large traces of horse tranquilliser. Perhaps the worst was hashish, Dave’s long-term favourite, which was full of plastified goodies that rotted the stomach and lined the liver to slow but imminent failure.
There were plenty more of these gems, and Dave was very thorough in their recording.
He kept all his readings on a software program that was uncrackable, just in case. It had cost him £2400, which he earnt with a one-pound bet backing six winners in an accumulator at Wincanton.
One day, about a month after Dave became one with the calculator, he was given a short message from the calculator to call by telephone what it described as the ‘God of Exploitation’, Max Clifford. This man was known for his worldly tenacity as well as his own lip-licking greed, and the calculator saw him as their best chance of letting the people know what the world was heading for. Clifford had to be approached with caution, though.
The calculator had a Plan B but this could only be used in an emergency, it said.
‘Can I speak to Max Clifford, please?’ he asked, suddenly shaken by an overwhelming feeling of insignificance for the first time since becoming one with the calculator. He’d always been useless on the phone.
‘Of course, sir,’ came a voice. ‘May I ask who’s calling?’
‘Yes,’ he replied, wondering whether to give a false name. ‘It’s Dave Davison.’
‘From?’
That stumped him. Where was he from? He couldn’t tell her the truth. Who in their right mind would believe that he was God’s world-saving messenger.
Dave looked at the calculator. ‘From Sharp Electronics. Technology department.’ His own words surprised him.
‘Thank you, sir. I’ll put you through now.’
With his spare hand, Dave nervously plucked out a Rizla and took a pinch of tobacco from the pouch.
‘Hello, Max Clifford speaking. How can I help?’

Their conversation went well, thought Dave, picking out a Marlboro to congratulate himself with. It was short and sweet and, who knows, that call may just have saved the world, he wondered hopefully.
When Clifford asked for ‘hard proof’, Dave replied that he’d send an e-mail with three or four detailed samples of tyranny.
He felt good. Finally, he was someone. He’d talked personally to Max Clifford, God of Exploitation, who’d expressed great interest in Dave’s findings.
When Clifford received the info, he read it and got in touch with his friend at News International, who told him to let it go if he wanted to keep his body parts intact. Although Clifford lived for challenges of death-defying public kudos, and Dave’s findings were the best to date for him to rise to the status of World Saving Martyr, he couldn’t bring himself to run with Dave. His man at News International advised him to write a short letter back, thanking him for his correspondence and perhaps suggesting that he may need help from elsewhere, perhaps a specialist.
‘Why say that last bit?’ he’d asked his man.
‘Because he might, Max,’ came the reply. The phone clicked off.
So, Clifford did as he was told and wrote back to Dave by e-mail.
When Dave searched his engine for replies, the look on his face said it all. In a trance of depression, he logged off and stared at the calculator.
What could he do next? Did the stars have any idea what they were dealing with? What was the Plan B the calculator had talked about? Would he ever know? Now that Plan A was dead in the water, what could he do to save the world?
The kitchen seemed far away. Even the thought of a toasted cheese and onion sandwich in the Breville made no marked change to his sorry face.
He sat there staring into space for a full hour, too deflated to communicate with the calculator, too sad and depressed.
In the hour that passed, he meditated only hatred and anger, resentment and hopelessness. He had played with the snakes in his mind and wrestled them to the pit of his stomach four thousand times. His soul had chewed them up and spat them out. In fact, having drained himself of all negativity, he now felt completely invigorated.
Striding across to the kitchen, Dave made himself a cup of Earl Grey with the new kettle.
‘There’s still a Plan B so there’s still a chance!’ he shrieked, punching the air with his fist.
He hadn’t bothered looking into the Fray Bentos window above the sink since for ages, but, suddenly, an overwhelming need to look into it touched him.
He stood at the little window and stared at his reflection, just as he had the last time. As before, he saw himself staring back, his face a large brown mass of hair. By the time the kettle clicked off, Dave’s face had been transformed into that of Jesus.
An electrical wave of ecstacy wriggled up his spine as he recognised the face in front of him.
‘Holy holy holy,’ he stuttered. ‘Lord God almighty.’
Just as before, his lips hadn’t moved at all.
‘It must be you,’ he whispered.
Jesus smiled brightly back at him and, again, Dave was filled by the love of Jesus.
Grace had a funny knack of turning up at the wrong time and, again, there she was, standing at the door with six mugs and a nappy sack in her hands.
‘Oh, Dave,’ she said. ‘Are you at it again?’
But Dave heard nothing. ‘Thank you, Lord,’ he said quietly.
With a huge grin on his face, he returned to the kettle, placed a new tea bag in his cup, poured in the piping hot water and strolled past her back to the studio.
Every muscle in his body was relaxed apart from those in and surrounding his brain. These muscles were tight. They were ready to reach for the stars and carry out Plan B. Whatever it was, Dave would do it. He would dissect any given information and implement the orders of Jesus to the best of his ability.
The Earl Grey cooled and with it the smooth taste of Moroccan hash washed itself down.
Dave stared into the stars and they responded within one minute of meditation.
‘Plan B is simple, David,’ the American voice said. ‘But, without the God of Exploitation, it may well fall on deaf ears. The media dampen truth the moment it is released, and they will certainly want to stop the information that you are about to implement into every computer on the planet.’
Dave asked how he could do that and the voice asked him to become one with the calculator again.
‘All you need is the calculator, David.’
He became one with the calculator and recorded all the programs that he would need to crack the worldwide web and place his information at the hands of the people so that they could make up their own minds as to where they wanted the world to go.
The calculator told him how to set up a website that would immediately register itself as a new incoming e-mail on every computer in the world. He would call the website ‘noworneveragain.com’.
The day he carried out full implementation and his website was posted to every computer in the world as a harmless incoming e-mail, Dave opened a bottle of Chablis Premier Cru and relaxed. He’d done all he could to save the world. Now the world had to respond.
All he had asked of the people was a tick in a box on his website to confirm their allegiance, and thus bring down capitalism from the concrete at its very heart.
He waited. And he waited.
Then he got bored of waiting and took a look to see how many hits he’d had.
‘Nine million, ninety-two thousand, six hundred and twelve! Ooooeee!’ He was jumping for joy.
‘How many ticks?’ he wondered, scrolling down and finding that only four hundred and twelve people had ticked the box.
‘What?’ he scowled. The screen flickered slightly and this got Dave’s back up.
He kept tabs every half-hour and found that, even as the hits rose and rose as the seconds ticked by, actual ticks were few and far between.
By tea-time, he’d had forty-three million, one hundred and sixty four thousand, two hundred and eighty nine hits with only six thousand, one hundred and two ticks.
Dave flicked on the radio. Maybe they’d heard of the website.
Five Live droned on about soccer and how the pundits were killing the game. English football fans as young as six were becoming parodies of the pundits, apparently, and the game was pricing itself out of ‘real fans’.
Then came the news, and Dave listened hard as they went through the main topics of the day. Then it came. The newsreader’s words took a full three seconds to sink in.
‘And finally,’ he said. ‘Widespread criticism at computer software manufacturers today embarrassed the wizards of modern technology after an anonymous newsletter condemning capitalism entered every computer linked to the internet. It registers itself on your computer as an incoming e-mail and manufacturers advise all those who have not yet found it to avoid doing so at all costs. The e-mail, from noworneveragain.com, which was only registered yesterday as a domain, can apparently wipe all material from your hard-drive, rendering your memory dead, so it does sound like a good idea not to open up that can of worms.’
Dave sat there trying to decipher what he had just heard. When he did, he realised that Plan B hadn’t worked.
By the time he woke up the next day, everything was back to normal. He sat down at his studio and saw that he hadn’t written to the Student Loans Company for four months. There were bills to pay, after all. Life went on, as Dave knew very well. The stars didn’t interest him and he had no use for the silver solar-powered calculator. It could sit there for the rest of his life, which he knew would end by 2035 at the latest.
‘I’ll probably be dead by then, anyway’, he thought.
His matters concerned comedy sketch writing. That’s where he belonged, in the upper echelons next to Sullivan and Groucho. That would be his way of saving the world from extinction.
The letter he wrote to the SLC was a cracker. When he read it through for typing errors, he got the giggles at twelve different sections. He was back to his level best. His writing was excellent. He deserved recognition and now he knew it.
Those skirting boards looked tempting for a while, but when he got in touch with the landlord to see if he’d give him an extra week to stump up for rent, he found that he’d already paid till next January. Dave didn’t question this for a minute, but never did find out where he’d got six months rent from. Maybe his Mum had paid it for him. Maybe not.
Where did that oven come from? And where the hell had Grace got that new digital BT phone from? That’d have to go. What was that hulking great computer doing and why were all those wires sticking out the back of it? It took about a second to warm up now and he had a new kettle that really did the business.
‘Maybe I should just count my blessings,’ he thought.
As he nailed up the new futon out of little Attila’s window to drip-dry, he thought of a few more things to put in the SLC letter and smaned to himself. He was a comedy sketch writing genius and now they’d all know his name.