Intro-Part 1 of 2

The following account is the end of the life and beginning of the afterlife for an unlikely hero. He is a man of many talents, with a heart as strong as any soldier and the power to move mountains with but a word.
Interested?
Good, because that first paragraph was merely propaganda. In reality, the ‘hero’ of this story is really just a half drunken, useless sod with no real talents to speak of, besides being able to hold half a bathtub full of cheap lager in his stomach without it returning to haunt him in the morning, and being able to pull like Hugh Hefner. He is a complete wuss, scared of even a girl-scout with a water pistol, and can barely move his own arse off the sofa, except when strongly motivated by beer, and the prospect of more beer to come.
His name is Robert James Napoleon Muse, and the story starts with him, completely pissed, leaving his local drunk-tank, “The Queasy Swan”, with a girl barely out of the community known as ‘jailbait’. The aforementioned former jailbait, it should be noted, was also full of alcohol and one of those girls that, on the cleavage-to-brains ratio, are unable to complete a key stage two SATS paper and has surgery to prevent back problems later in life.
Despite the wedding ring on James’ finger, the ex-jailbait wasn’t his wife, or even a friend out for revenge on the wife. She was someone James had only met and got very lucky with only five minutes ago in a back room, and now they were off to a nice, classy hotel, whose house stock of champagne Robert favoured, to do it all over again.
The unlikely pair were only a few feet from the door of said hotel when James, despite all the alcohol, felt a slight pain in his chest. Within a few seconds he felt the need to throw up, but found himself unable to do so. His chin was poking into something hard. His eyes saw something black and bumpy, with a yellow stripe. A shiny liquid was trickling from somewhere.
Although he did not realise it, because of the incredibly large amounts of alcohol in his bloodstream, he had suffered a major heart attack, leading to cardiac arrest and in his last few moments he had tripped and fallen onto the road. A motorist, travelling at 43mph in a 30 zone, had seen the late Mr Muse fall and in an attempt to avoid the corpse and, more importantly, the lovely girl with the abundant rack, he swerved into the other lane, straight into a Somerfield’s heavy goods lorry. The crash had led oil leaking from the car and the lorry suffering minor scrapes which were buffed out the following morning. Although it is not entirely relevant, nobody suffered in the crash, apart from the late Mr Muse, whose corpse was subsequently sued the sum of £18,000, plus court tax, plus VAT, plus exemption tax, for causing criminal damage. Since he was already dead, his wife, as next of kin, was forced to pay, however she decided to flee to New Zealand to start a new life as a goat-farmer’s wife, under the assumed name of Mrs Elizabeth Moira Hampshire. But I digress…
The late Mr Muse, dead as he was, felt himself separated from, well, himself. To be more concise, his soul, spirit, life-force, mana, whatever, separated from his body. As a result of this he became an impartial observer of the moment in the real world where and when he died.
‘Nice’, he heard a voice behind him say. Turning round to face the source of the voice, Robert tripped up again and found himself this time, facing a pair of Nike trainers, a piece of black cloth and one end of an upright wooden pole. The voice laughed. “Do you want a hand?’ the voice asked.
‘Um…yeah’ Robert replied, barely. A hand extended down and Robert grasped for it. The hand pulled him up and Robert saw the face of the person that pulled him up. The face belonged to a man wearing a black robe and holding a scythe. The face smiled, grinned cheekily, then burst out laughing, falling on the floor and rolling around laughing so much that he started to cry.
‘Oh, man,’ the man said when he got up. ‘You must be the luckiest son-of-a-bitch I’ve ever seen. Dieing while committing adultery, Boss damn it. OK, onto the paperwork, name?’ the robed man asked, pulling a clipboard from the depths of his robes.
‘Um…Rob Muse’ Robert replied.
‘Nice to meet you Umrob Muse, date and time is…’the man stuck out a fist and glanced at the fake gold Rolex strapped to his wrist, then started writing on the piece of paper on the clipboard. After a while the man stopped writing and pulled on one of the sheets of paper on the clipboard, and handed it to Robert. ‘OK, for sheer comedy value, I thought you deserved to go to On High, when you get there and meet Peter, insist she was your wife.’
Robert suddenly felt very warm and found himself falling upwards, if that is at all possible. As he was, apparently, defying gravity with no idea how he was doing it, an elevator materialised around him. The elevator was elaborately decorated, with pearl railings, gilding on the ceiling and three of the walls with mirrors, the fourth wall held a door with a mural of Da Vinci’s ‘Vitruvian Man’. The elevator music, however, wasn’t as fancy. It seemed even the deceased couldn’t do better than the repetitive light jazz music in most elevators used by the living.
The elevator ground to a halt and the doors opened so fast Robert thought they simply disappeared. The white glare from beyond the doors blinded him temporarily and as the light started to dim into more socially acceptable levels, Robert heard, quite literally, an angelic voice.
‘Hello sir, welcome to Purgatory. Please take a seat, the saints will be with you in a moment.’ The woman from which the voice came was dressed in a bath robe and had a tacky fake halo on her head, mounted on a piece of wire attached to a collar, and fake feather wings on her back.
‘Are you meant to be an angel?’ Robert asked. The woman looked affronted.
‘Of course I’m meant to be a bloody angel, why do you think I’ve got these bloody stupid wings and fake halo?’
‘No, what I mean is, why aren’t the wings and halo real?’
‘Oh’ the angel stated simply, ‘we’ve had some minor cutbacks in the budget in the last quarter. Real wings are so expensive these days, and halos don’t exactly form on clouds do they? And Judy was laid off the other day. The redundancy pay she got was crap apparently. And don’t get me started on health and safety; honestly, it’s a bureaucrat’s worst nightmare, and no-one benefits from it.’
‘Oh…Kay, I’m gonna go sit down for a while’ said Robert, sliding past the, somewhat distressing, supposed angel, into a waiting room. The room had very little in the way of decoration, apart from a plaque that said ‘Welcome to Purgatory, literally the Gateway to heaven’. At that moment another voice sounded over some ethereal intercom system ‘This is a general announcement, sinners are reminded to repent quietly, thank you and have a nice afterlife’.
TO BE CONTINUED…