| The
Auditor
by Richard Travers
This wasn’t at all what I had been expecting.
I had heard about near-death experiences, of course, so the long, dark
tunnel with the bright light at the end was not a particular surprise.
But at the end of that tunnel? What I had really anticipated, I suppose,
was nothingness, oblivion, the end of everything. After all, that’s
what I had set out to achieve and it was a bit disconcerting to arrive
somewhere rather than nowhere.
Where I actually found myself was in a brightly lit office with designer
furniture and a young, smartly dressed woman sitting at a desk. She was
deeply engrossed in a rather slim file. She looked up as I entered and
waved a manicured hand in the general direction of a chair.
‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘I’ll be with you in a moment.’
While I sat and tried to gather my thoughts, she continued to read. Then
she looked up at me and pointed to the file. ‘Life Audit,’
she said. ‘Your Life Audit. I’m Lucy, by the way. Deputy Assistant
Auditor. I’m afraid Peter, the Chief Auditor, had to pop out for
a while.’
‘You are not quite what I expected,’ I blurted out.
‘So what did you expect?’ she asked, one eyebrow raised quizzically.
‘An old man with white hair, a beard and a long, white robe? A halo,
perhaps? Wings? Pearly Gates?’ She sighed. ‘You’re two
thousand years out of date. We do like to keep up with the times, you
know.’
‘No, I didn’t expect that.’ I said, stung by her sarcasm.
‘Actually if I had been expecting anything at all, which I wasn’t,
it would have been much hotter and more unpleasant, with fire and devils
and eternal torture. After all, suicide is a sin, isn’t it?’
‘Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you,’ she said, a little
too sharply, I thought. ‘And yes; suicide is a sin.’ She studied
me for a moment, then held up the file. ‘Not very long, is it?’
she said. ‘To be honest, I really can’t understand why you
are here. Care to tell me about it?’
‘What is there to tell? Everything was going swimmingly until last
week. Then I found out my boyfriend was cheating on me and life ceased
to be worth living.’ Tears came to my eyes as I remembered the pain
I had felt.
If I was expecting sympathy, I had come to the wrong place. She sniffed.
‘That’s a bit dramatic, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Not
everyone who loses their boyfriend chooses to end it all, you know.’
‘Well I did.’ I said. ‘I know I can’t live without
him.’ I experienced again the impenetrable, enervating blackness
that seemed to engulf any thoughts of a future without Pete.
‘Of course you can,’ she said. ‘You just think you can’t.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t be here if I could, would I?’ I mumbled.
She seemed a bit taken aback by that. ‘OK. Point taken,’ she
said, rather grudgingly.
She went back to the file.
‘This Pete, is that his name?’ she looked at me enquiringly.
I nodded.
‘He really isn’t worth it, you know. He isn’t a very
nice man at all.’ ‘Well, he was very nice to me.’ My
eyes misted as I remembered the good times. ‘For a while.’
‘Was he? Oh he’s good looking, I’ll grant you that.
I could quite fancy him myself if we weren’t forbidden to fraternise.
And I’m sure he’s OK in bed, though he is much too self-engrossed
to be a really good lover. And no doubt you were very flattered by his
attentions, particularly as he appears to be very popular with all the
girls. But he never was yours. He has always had two or three girlfriends
on the go at any one time, and he really doesn’t care about any
of them. The only person he cares about is himself. He’s a prime
candidate for down below when he comes through here,’ she pointed
an elegant finger downwards.
The office floor was warm. I had assumed underfloor heating, but now I
wasn’t so sure.
‘You’re really much better off without him.’ she insisted.
‘But I love him,’ I protested. Why couldn’t she understand
that? She ignored me. ‘Was he your first?’ she asked.
‘Pretty much so,’ I had to admit. ‘Oh, there were a
few other boys, but none that I was particularly interested in. Pete was
different. He was the only one I ever really wanted.’
‘So you don’t have much experience of what real love is.’
‘I have enough,’ I said. ‘It couldn’t get any
better than it was with Pete.’ ‘That’s where you are
wrong,’ she said. ‘It can get much, much better than it was
with Pete. If only I could convince you of that.’ She sighed.
By now I was getting annoyed. What was the point of all this? ‘Can
we get this over with?’ I said. ‘I assume this is where you
count up all my sins and balance them against all the good things I have
done in my life, and then decide which way I go, up or down.’ ‘Something
like that,’ she acknowledged, ‘but first we have to decide
whether to accept you. And that has to be my decision, not yours.’
‘Oh,’ I said, then after thinking about that, ‘Well
I’ve made my decision, and I’m not going to change it. It’s
not as if I didn’t think carefully about it, you know.’ ‘Oh,
I’m sure that’s true,’ she said. ‘It’s just
that you weren’t in possession of all the facts.’ ‘Well
then,’ I snapped. ‘You’d better get on and give me all
the facts, hadn’t you.’ She opened a drawer in her desk, and
drew out a much bigger file.
‘Your Life Plan,’ she said. She opened the file and turned
over the first few pages, pinching them between finger and thumb. ‘This
is your life so far, and this,’ she indicated the much thicker remainder
of the file, ‘is your life to come, or at least the life you would
have had if you hadn’t, er, terminated. Aren’t you even a
little bit curious about what it contains?’
‘Not really.’ I shrugged. ‘I expect you are going to
tell me, though. Can we just stick to the highlights?’ I was tired
of the whole business, now, and just wanted it to finish.
‘OK. Well there’s all the usual stuff. A good, satisfying
career, three lovely children, a long and happy marriage, grandchildren.’
She looked at the last few pages. ‘I see a diamond wedding here.’
She looked up at me. ‘It really is a long, happy and fulfilling
life, you know. And think, if you drop out now you will be denying life
to three children, six grandchildren and goodness knows how many future
descendants.’
I shrugged again. I was too miserable to care.
‘And then there is Roger, of course. I need to tell you about Roger.’
‘Roger? Who’s Roger? I don’t know any Roger.’
‘And you won’t if you stay here. Roger is the love of your
life. You’re due to meet him in about,’ she consulted her
watch, ‘twenty minutes.’
‘Pete was the love of my life,’ I said. ‘I don’t
want any Roger.’ ‘Well, think of Pete, and how you felt about
him, and then imagine something a thousand times better. That’s
Roger. Compared to Roger, Pete was just a tawdry little bauble. Roger
is the real thing. With Pete you were flattered, entertained and you enjoyed
the sex. With Roger you will be truly loved.’ ‘I don’t
believe you,’ I shouted.
It was the wrong thing to say.
She seemed to grow then, pulling herself up to her full height and looking
down at me, eyes flashing with anger. Suddenly I realised that I needed
to take her seriously, to view her as something more than just an irritating
diversion.
‘We do not tell lies,’ she thundered. ‘We cannot tell
lies.’ Shaken, I could find nothing to say. I just sat there, mouth
wide open.
She softened. ‘You’ve got to be honest with yourself. You
didn’t take all those tablets to kill yourself; you took them to
punish Pete, to make him feel guilty. He won’t, you know. And you
didn’t expect to end up here because you thought someone would find
you before it was too late. Isn’t that the truth?’
I thought about it. Maybe it was the truth; I wasn’t sure any longer.
It was certainly true, I realised, that what I now felt for Pete was anger,
not love. I nodded, hesitantly. ‘Perhaps,’ I whispered.
‘I thought so,’ she said. ‘Now go. There’s no
place for you here. You have a life to lead. Go back and enjoy it.’
Chastened, I turned to leave the office.
‘Just one more thing before you go,’ she said. ‘If you
should decide to come straight back, then next time it will be the Chief
Auditor sitting here.’ She looked straight into my eyes. ‘Believe
me, you really don’t want that.’
The tunnel seemed much longer on the way back. It was very dark at the
other end.
It began to grow lighter. I ached all over, and my throat and stomach
felt sore. I opened my eyes.
A face swam slowly into view. As focus returned, I could see it was the
face of an angel. It was wearing a white robe. I searched in vain for
its wings.
‘Thank goodness for that.’ a man’s voice said. ‘I
thought we’d lost you for a minute there.’ He pulled back
slightly and I saw, not an angel, but a doctor, a young and rather good
looking doctor.
‘Welcome back,’ he said. ‘I’m Doctor Wellesley.
I’ll be looking after you. You can call me Roger...’
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