WAITING AT HEAVEN'S DOOR

If only there were pearly gates and a severe Saint Peter...

There never was such a beautiful gate.

The Prime Minster (deceased, but only relatively recently) stood fascinated by the way it seemed to shimmer with different lights and different colours, opalescent then diamond, always shifting its hues until he thought the very sight of it would excite him to an unwanted orgasm.

He’d heard of this gate before and never believed it existed because the narrow confines of a belief system that really only allowed for himself couldn’t countenance for it.

When he’d been at school and in between games of kicking and punching oval balls on the ancient turves of its historic playing fields he’d been taught scripture and all about pearly gates.

The rector who did the teaching had a clerical collar and a tendency to take clandestine sips from a hip flask that he almost always kept full, and he came out with some classics when he was sufficiently well lubricated.

“If you sin,” he’d said, “and by sin I mean really sin, then on your demise when you roll up at the pearly gates and knock to be let in Saint Peter will put in an appearance and send you packing.”

He never explained what that demise might be, but that didn’t matter because none of his schoolboy audience gave the least of thoughts about gates or demises or anything related to such things. There were ball games to be played. They liked playing ball games because outcomes were clear cut and if you were a bully you almost always ended up on the winning side. Not that the young Prime Minister-to-be would have dreamed of being anything but a bully, so he knew the taste of victory, all right.

And now here he was and this gate, this beautiful shimmering gate in front of him, might well be described as pearly.

He hadn’t sinned, of course. He’d always played the game of life according to his own rules and those rules were fair if you considered that fair play only allowed for one outcome: his own assured victory.

It was how he’d been taught, from his mewling nappy stage, through private school and posh university, into politics where he knew he was born to lead, and then to actually leading. He’d had a few blips on the way, he’d even been sacked a time or two when his mouth had run away with him, but that was only to be expected of a genius.

Because that’s what he was. A genius.

A queue was forming behind him as he stood there, admiring the opalescent gate, almost deceived by its iridescence.

“Hey you, get a move on!” grunted a dishevelled dustman behind him, patting himself down and spraying the deceased prime minister with dust that had once been the bottom of a parrot’s cage.

He blustered a few syllables in reply, and rang the bell.

There never was such a bell! It looked very much as if it was made of glass, but there was a shine and a sparkle to it that spoke of diamond. And the sound it made, the tinkle as he shook it a second time, warmed his heart and made something inside his groin shiver.

“There’s no need for that!” came the cultured tones of a figure who appeared as the gate swung silently open.

“Cor, sorry,” spluttered the deceased Prime Minister’s spirit in deceptively boyish confusion.

And he was confused by the simple splendour of the figure, from the circlet of what looked like gold on his mop of greyish hair, down past his bearded face with its penetrating blue eyes that, and the ex-Prime Minister knew this, could see into every corner of his mind and judge what was fermenting there. Then there was the velvet and ermine robes, the simple sandals, the humility in the air around him. If there was any air, of course, it didn’t seem that anyone was breathing anything or that there was, indeed, anything to breathe. Still, he mumbled to himself, he’d worry about that later after a hot shower and pint of porter.

“That’s alright then,” soothed the other, and his sudden smile shot past snow-white teeth and surrounded the ex-Prime Minister with a sense of wonderment.

“Name?” asked the robed figure.

“Er.. um...” spluttered the public schoolboy with his traditional spray of aromatic spittle.

“That stinks,” grumbled the Saint, “you’ve been decomposing for too long for your phlegm to be anything but rancid. So keep it to yourself if you don’t mind.”

“Just get a move on,” spluttered the dustman, “I’ve got my long dead missus waiting for me, and I still love her to bits!”

“Wait your turn, please,” whispered the noble bearded figure, and the dustman smiled back, feeling the warmth of the love shared by the saint.

“Prime Minister,” gabbled he who had born that title, “Deceased,” he added, as if it wasn’t obvious, what with the bullet hole in the dead centre of his chest and a tribe of maggots making their way out of his nose.

“Now let me see,” drawled the Saint, and he flipped a book that he was suddenly holding until it was open at a very well worn page.

“What’s that?” blustered the corpse of the Prime Minister.

“This is my book of days,” replied Saint Peter, “and it tells me all the good you’ve done, and weighs it against the bad. And, I see, you’ve never been a particularly good boy, have you? Starting with a privileged babyhood and linen nappies so that your dimpled bottom didn’t get sore, past a series of nannies that couldn‘t stand you to an expensive private school where they debated reinstituting corporal punishment in a hope of sorting you out, then into adulthood where you showed remarkable skill with the ladies...”

“They liked me,” he boasted.

“Really? It doesn’t say that here! It says you had a tendency to grope those who didn’t want to be groped… And you were never faithful, were you? To wives and girlfriends and the like. Oh no, you were the most wretched of lovers, which was no surprise bearing in mind your innate nastiness.”

“That’s not fair!” he blustered.

“Then there’s all the misery you caused, the mountains of dead starved to the Hereafter by your policies, your insistence that only rich men were any good… and your lies. Your endless lies, as if truth was something to be avoided.”

“Just let me in and I’ll discuss this with your boss!” snapped the deceased, this time managing to not bumble at all.

“I can’t,” replied the Saint, “not at all. It’s here in red, look. You’re to go downstairs. To the other place. To join he who must not be named. Where the central heating might be considered slightly excessive. He’ll be glad to see you, though. We don’t send many down there, not many at all. The last was a German leader and it was, let me see, quite a few decades ago. You’ve done well to join him. He’s getting lonely. They say that hell can be such a solitary place...”

© Peter Rogerson, 09.10.19