Need You Dead

29 Thursday 21 April

The Akashic Records. He’d been thinking about them since last night, amid all the other stuff that was going on inside his head. The Akashic Records were meant to be like a 24/7 video recording of every thought you had, every emotion that you felt and deed that you did during your time on earth. When you died you had to sit in a room with a representative of Big Goddy and talk through every moment of your life — and explain.

He hadn’t been inside a church to pray since he was a child and had been dragged along to Assemblies by his Plymouth Brethren parents, who believed literally in every word of the Bible. The reward for their religious devotion was to be wiped out in their car by a tired French lorry driver who’d come off the Dieppe — Newhaven Channel ferry and had driven on the wrong side of the A26 a few miles north of the port, forgetting he was no longer in France.

His uncle and aunt, also members of the Brethren, had told him they were such good people that God had recalled them early. They were lucky.

Of course! How lucky was that? What could be luckier than for the front bumper of a fully-laden eighteen-wheeler, weighing thirty-six tons, to come crashing through your Ford Escort’s front windscreen and punch both your heads out through the rear window and fifty yards up the road?

He should have been in the car that day, en route to a prayer group. But God had given him mumps, so he was home in bed.

Mr Lucky.

Maybe he’d get lucky with those Akashic Records, too.

Awfully sorry, we had a technical glitch, your tapes got wiped. You’ve arrived here tabula rasa. We don’t know your whereabouts on the afternoon and evening of Wednesday, 20th April. Are you OK with that? Have we missed anything significant?

Just like his parents, he had to hope luck ran in the family. Cling to that thought.

He was clinging to it tightly.

The one thing that worried him — slightly — was how easy he had found it to lie. To now believe completely in his innocence.

He needed to talk to someone, to explain. Someone who would understand, tell him it was OK, that under the circumstances he had done the right thing. Done what anyone would have done.

Perhaps he should talk to a shrink. But were they bound by the Hippocratic oath these days or had that changed? It used to be that if you fessed-up to a shrink, they had to keep it a secret. But did that still apply, or were they now obliged to report it? He was pretty sure the latter.

Maybe a priest would be better? The secrets of the confessional?