Fucking priest, I thought as he ploughed unenthusiastically through his eulogy-by-numbers. I could have been at anybody's funeral. The priest said nothing to indicate that it was my friend lying in the coffin except for when he paused to glance down at his notes because he had, once again, forgotten the name of the deceased.

"It is tragic when someone so young is taken from us but we should not be angry with God because everything that occurs on His earth serves his divine purpose. While we may mourn the loss of... er... Ian who died at such a young age, we must remember that we are all sinners and he, like everybody else, will have to face God's judgement."

I couldn't believe what that sanctimonious, self-righteous little man was saying about my friend. That man of God was passing judgement on my friend, my friend who had never done anything to harm anyone, had always studied hard at school, had always done what was expected of him, had always done the right thing. And this... this person was telling us, the people who knew him and loved him, that he was a sinner, that he had done evil things and would have to throw himself at the mercy of a God in whom he had never believed.

Ian was just another product that had packed and shipped out. That priest just didn't care. He was talking on auto-pilot, racing monotonously through the well rehearsed service so that he could move swiftly onto the next customer. The coffin, Ian's coffin, was just one of many that would be taken on the conveyer belt into the crematorium's furnace. The coffins on that conveyer belt were nothing more than items on a destruction line.

That priest converted me that day; he managed to destroy any glimmer of faith in the church that I may have had.

~

A fundamentalist Christian once said to me, "You don't believe in God? You should. What will you do if you go through your whole life not believing in Him but you discover He exists when you die? You'll go straight to Hell because you denied His existence."

Faith through fear? Is that the message? You can live a good, decent, selfless, honest life but if you don't accept God you'll be damned anyway?

You can't believe in something just because you fear the consequences of not believing in it.

You either have faith or you don't.

~

Sometimes I imagine what Ian would have thought of the service at his own funeral.

"What?" he would have said incredulously. "What is this crap. I've never done anything to anyone in my whole life and yet I'm supposed to throw myself at the mercy of something I don't even believe in? Even if there is a God, who decided that we are accountable to him? Why should we be? Who is God accountable to?"

~

I have a book, the contents of which are so apocryphal that no author or editor will admit responsibility for its creation.

The book is called Dreams: Hidden Meanings and Secrets. It is a dictionary of objects and situations and what it means should you dream about them.

Gravy, for example: If you dream of making gravy, you are sure to pick the winning numbers in a lottery. Or an old maid: Should you have a dream about being an old maid you will marry a fiery, black-eyed musician. You can see the obvious connection there.

Mint is an interesting one, it predicts that the next trip you take will be in a northerly direction.

To dream of fish predicts a death in your family or close circle of friends.

~

I had been to other funerals before his; I had known other people who had died. But the others were not the same.

A grandmother, then a grandfather and then a great-aunt.

I had liked and had been liked by all of them. I remember being bundled into the car by my parents every couple of months so that we could go and visit the grandparents. My sister and I would enjoy the excursions: our grandparents gave us sweets and old toys to play with. My grandfather cultivated runner beans at the end of the garden and, when we were very little, my sister and I would run around between the poles as if we were in the jungle. We imagined that the stalks of the plants that spiralled up the poles were deadly poisonous snakes. I would collapse to the floor, pretending to have been bitten, take my sister's hand in mine and deliver an heroic and impassioned death speech. As my hand slipped from hers, as my eyes closed and my head slumped to one side, my sister would feign grief and declare her woes to the world. And when our elders, summoned by my sister's oh-so-convincing laments, rushed panic-stricken into the garden, we would meekly look up at them and say, "We were only playing."

So it is not as if I did not have any feelings for these people, it's just that I wasn't particularly close to them either. As I grew older I became increasingly aware that my grandparents were growing weaker. When they finally died I was not sure what ! felt, I had been fond of them and I felt for my parents and uncles and aunts. Somewhere, somehow, I felt bad.

But later I realised that this vague sense of pain was not grief or sorrow but guilt; I felt guilty because, frankly, I didn't really care that these people were dead. I certainly wasn't glad that they were dead. I was indifferent. Maybe it was because they had lived a long life, raised their children and done all the things that supposedly make life worthwhile and meaningful. Their funerals were the final chapter of their lives.

The sub-plot within the story, of the world that was Ian's life, however, had been cut half way through the opening paragraph.

~

A month after Ian’s funeral, I had a very odd dream. I was in a stadium with my sister and my ex-girlfriend. There were many flag poles flying the hammer and sickle of the former Soviet Union. The stadium was full to capacity. In the centre of the stadium there was a long, elliptical race track; the inside of the track was flat but it banked exponentially until it was vertical at the outside perimeter, much like a wall of death. The cars were lined up on the grid, old racing cars, Bentley Three-litre's, AC Cobra's, Alvis F Series', that sort of thing.

The expectant buzz from the crowd increased until a klaxon sounded and the race began. Over the first few laps the cars built up their momentum until they had enough velocity to travel around the vertical edge of the track.

People cheered the drivers on as they completed lap after lap. But their cheers turned to screams as one car lost control, crashed through the barrier, arced through the air and came down onto a section of the crowd.

Stewards tried to pacify the crowd and shepherd them out of the stadium as quickly and calmly as possible. My party was situated fairly close to an exit on the opposite end of the stadium from the accident zone and so we were able to leave easily. As we walked out of the gate a voice beckoned me. 1 turned around to see who had called my name. It was Ian.

"Hello there," he said.

I stared at him, unable to speak.

"Exciting, all this," he said.

I felt the sting of salt water in my eyes.

"Hello?" he said again.

"You're dead," I whispered.

And then I woke up.

~

I looked up Automobile, Race, Accident and Flag in my book of dream interpretations and as far as I could ascertain, I was going to come into a large some of money, fall in love and marry so long as I didn't travel in a car for the next twenty four hours. I did travel in a car the next day and none of the other things canoe true.

~

Bummer.

That's what I said when I found out about the crash.

He has been in an accident, I was told. Will he be all right, I asked. No, was the reply, he won't be all right; he is dead.

 He is dead.

And when I was told that he was dead all I managed to say was one word; one stupid, lousy, pathetic word:

Bummer.

~

I dreamt about Ian again a few months later. We were sitting on a cloud, not a real cloud; it was more like an unconvincing special effect cloud from a cheap movie.

"What's it like?" I asked him.

"What?" he said.

"Being dead."

"It's like... like nothing."

"You mean, nothing like being alive?"

He smiled at my naivety, "No. I mean there is nothing. No bright lights, no bloody harps, no glorious magic kingdom, nothing."

I frowned at him.

He shrugged. "I've gone," he said.

~

I looked up Cloud and Dead Folk in my book of dream interpretations. To see a cloud signifies an improvement in your fortunes. To dream of conversing with a dead person is a propitious omen, signifying strength, courage and a clear conscience.

We will see.

~

In truth, to dream is to experience insanity. A dream is an experience of living in a fantasy world in which things happen, emotions are felt, actions are taken, people are present, all with the waking sensations coming and going.

Nightmares can be influenced by day to day stress and anxiety, depressed people often dream of failure or loss. But despite this apparent connection between environment and dreams and the fascinating symbolism and ideas in dreams, there is no evidence that any clearer understanding of personality can be obtained from dreams than from waking behaviour.

But, judging by the amount of dream interpretation books that have been written over the centuries, people do believe that they can foretell the future.

People are prepared to believe anything; they need to believe in something, anything. People can't cope with the idea that their life is meaningless, that they aren't in some way important. That's why they study, that's why they fall in love, that's why they invent religions to believe in. People need to justify their own existence to themselves.

But people aren't important. I'm not important. I realised that as the conveyer belt took the body of my friend away from me. His death served no purpose. His life served no purpose. Like me, he was simply here and then he left. People have this notion that when someone dies they live on in the memories of the people who knew them. I can't remember a single conversation I had with Ian. I don't feel the presence of his spirit or soul or whatever you want to call it. He's gone. That's all. He's just gone.

~

When someone dies suddenly, unexpectedly, it reminds us that we should not take our loved ones for granted. I became acutely aware of this as people left the crematorium. As the furnace belched smoke up into the sky above us, as my friend was being charcoal grilled like an unattended burger on a barbecue, I watched the couples around me cling to each other, console each other. And even though we had all been there for the same reason, to pay our mutual respects, to share our grief with each other, I realised that the ritual was a farce. Nobody there was really sharing their grief with anybody else. Everybody grieves in a different way. A tragedy either strengthens or destroys faith. You thought you knew what life was all about and then suddenly your perspective has been changed. You become confused and isolated. And scared. Scared that you are alone.

And so you grab the one you love, wrap yourself around them and convince yourself that you are not alone and that others feel exactly the way you do.

On that day, when I needed to feel companionship, when I needed to feel like part of a greater whole, when I needed to confirm my place within the central narrative, all I felt was my loneliness, my irrelevance, my total absence of faith in anything.

~

Life isn't preparation for some greater experience after death. There is no single unifying purpose to the universe. It is just an ongoing narrative, a story, a myth with no beginning, middle or end. Ian, like me, like everybody else, was just a minor sub-plot in the story. The tale will not end witl3 some ultimate truth, some great revelation, some cathartic denouement. It is merely the vague ramblings of its author, a collection of ideas and thoughts. And the author does not look down and cherish his creation, he does not love each individual character. They are merely metaphors for whatever goes on in the author's imagination. The characters cannot ever comprehend that which imagines them and they are certainly not accountable to it. They will not be judged by it.

If I do believe in anything, if I do have any kind of faith, then that is it.

And tonight, I have acted upon that faith.

Some will say that I have been selfish. Some will say that I was just weak, that I didn't have the strength to face up to the responsibility of life.

But why should one faith be better than another. Who has the right to decide what faith is the most valid? All I have done is acted upon my beliefs and once the pills and the booze take effect and this minor little sub-plot ends, the narrative will carry on without me.

As I wait, I begin to hum a tune. It is the tune they played at his funeral. When I heard that tune I finally realised that he was dead, that he hadn't just gone away for while and would be back. When I heard that tune I realised that he had gone.

The song was by his favourite band, the band I went to see with him at Wembley Stadium barely a month before he died. It was his favourite song and I remember the look on his face that night when the band performed the song. His head rolled back, his eyes closed and there was the faintest trace of a smile on his lips.

~

I know I will never see that face again. I don't believe that we will be reunited in death. Like him, I will simply be gone. I will be nowhere.

People believe in an afterlife because they cannot cope with the idea of nothing, of being nothing.

Personally, I dread the idea of an afterlife. I'm tired of existence, I don't want it anymore. I just never saw the point.

I don't want to feel anything.

I don't want to be anything.

I don't want to dream any more.

~

As the song began to fade, the conveyer belt cranked into motion. As the final chords of the tune melted into the motorised hum of the machinery I heard a voice in front of me, his grandmother I think, whisper, "Goodbye Ian."

The crimson curtain, taking the coffin from view, closed.

And then they burnt him.

~

I am aware of a noise: the telephone is ringing. Becoming increasingly drowsy, I find the telephone in my hand. I am talking to my sister. I remember those eloquent speeches that I used to deliver to her, all those years ago, whilst laying on my grandparents' back garden feigning death. Now that the rehearsals are over and the main performance has arrived, those words seem like a noble but empty gesture.

"Hiya' Bro. How are you?" my sister is saying

"Fine. How are you?"

"Oh God, I had a really crazy dream last night."

"Really? What about?"

"I don't know why but for some reason I was dreaming about fish."