Next by Keith Gray

Author:Keith Gray
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781849399227
Publisher: Andersen Press Ltd

THE FALLEN

Sally Nicholls

THE FALLEN

PRETTY MUCH EVERYONE I love is going straight to burning hell, so sometimes I wonder why I’m trying so hard to get into heaven.

‘The devil has all the best musicians,’ my dad used to say, but there are times when I think he has all the best people too. My friend Leah, Mr Baksh from the corner shop who used to give me free lollipops when I was little, even the beautiful Jack Harper in Year Ten, who Leah and I are planning on marrying when we’ve worked out a way to get him to notice us. I used to think I could convert all these people to Catholicism like my mum did my dad, and that then they’d be safe, but so far I haven’t even managed to convert Leah. I took her to mass once when we were about eleven, and she spent the whole time trying to make Michael Connor blush and giggling at Father James’s moustache.

I should probably never have taken Leah to mass. If you’re told about Catholicism and you still don’t believe in God, you suffer far worse torments after you’re dead. Leah just laughs at me when I try and explain to her.

‘You don’t really believe all that fairy-tale crap, do you?’ she says.

‘You believe in ghosts,’ I say. ‘And horoscopes.’

She laughs again.

‘Oh, ghosts are real enough. And since ghosts are real, the Bible can’t be, right?’

I wish I believed in ghosts. All last year I tried to believe, and I used to listen for one at night when I couldn’t sleep, but I never saw so much as a shadow or heard so much as a footstep in the hall.

Leah thinks hell is a big joke.

‘Come on,’ she said last week, waving a cigarette in front of my nose. ‘Jesus didn’t have a problem with cigarettes, did he? The Pope hasn’t tacked on an eleventh commandment? Lizzie shalt not have fun with Leah, or do anything except say prayers ever, ever again?’

‘Ha ha,’ I said, and I took the cigarette off her. Cigarettes aren’t a sin, but they are horrible. Leah’s cigarette made me want to throw up. I kind of liked the horribleness, though. It was a bit like punching something when you’re angry – it hurts, but it stops you feeling like you’re about to explode inside. Smoking Leah’s cigarette made me feel sick and slightly wicked, but even that was better than feeling like Lizzie.

‘I wish I could stop being me,’ Dad used to say sometimes, and I never understood what he meant. How could you be anyone except yourself?

I get it now.

Leah doesn’t know what hell means, that’s why she thinks it’s funny. If I could explain it to her properly, she wouldn’t laugh. We had a visiting priest last month who spent the whole sermon talking about hell.

‘Why would a loving God send His children to hell?’ he said. ‘Why would a God who loves His children abandon them? But God doesn’t want to send us to hell, we make that choice for ourselves.

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