The Godawful Misfortunes of Samson O'Christ

By Michael Lawrence

 

When a bomb goes off under his bed, impoverished 23 year old philosophy graduate Samson O'Christ is blown out of his window above a joke shop in Cambridge, England. Waking from a coma four weeks later in Washington DC, he is given a mission by his filthy-rich Trumpian father to travel into a rather backward part of rural America in his wheelchair and buy off the blackmailing mother of a half brother he didn't know he had until now. Some way into his journey, Samson catches a bus, intending to alight at the town of Orifice in Areola County. Unfortunately, he sleeps through his stop, and by so doing sets in motion a series of events unlike any of his previous experience. Very unfortunate, life-changing events.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wordybug
• Release date: Feb 3, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224806171

Michael Lawrence

In his time, Michael Lawrence has published over forty books for young readers. Such books have been translated into more than twenty languages. Some have won awards. One of them (Young Dracula) inspired five BBC television series. 'The Godawful Misfortunes of Samson O'Christ' is not a children's book. Three other adult novels published or soon to be published by 8N Publishing, through Draft2Digital, are: THIS RUINED PLACE THE RAINEY SEASONS THE SILENCE OF BLEAKRIDGE

Book preview

PART ONE

THE ROAD TO NOTHING MUCH

PART TWO

THE ROAD TO EVEN LESS

PART THREE

THE ROAD TO SWEET F.A.

PART ONE

THE ROAD TO NOTHING MUCH

1

Samson was not an old family name. Nor was O’Christ. The latter was the involuntary oath growled by the terminally depressed priest handed yet another squalling brat that child-rich christening day of April 1989. But it had been uttered by the holy man in charge and was duly written down, and from that day forth the lad was known as Samson O’Christ and there was fuck all he could do about it. 

He was born in County Cork, but once named, his Irish mother, Orla Casey-Casey, deCorked him to the brighter lights of Dublin, where she found sufficient employment to keep the pair of them off the streets until she could persuade her stinking rich former husband to send regular funds in exchange for not being trashed to CNN, MSNBC and Fox News as the egotistical philandering shit she often described him as to friends.

Samson’s father was Cyrus J. Underbund, flamboyant proprietor of broadcasting and communications company U-Media, which everyone has heard of. What most people might not have heard is that in its earliest days the organization wasn’t called U-Media but C.U. Enterprises. The name change came about because the Enterprises part quickly found a short form (NTS) and it was the combination of the five resultant initials that were attached to the top of the fourteen-storey headquarters building that Cyrus erected in Washington, DC. It’s been speculated that the inner circle of C.U. Enterprises were too close to the name for the contraction to register, while less charitable commentators suggest that they lacked the balls to point it out to the chief. Bloggers had enormous fun with it, of course, but Cyrus did not read or even hear of such comments. He only realized what he’d given to the world when, jetting into Reagan National one starless night, he saw his banner on the summit of Underbund Tower.

‘Maybe we should have included the periods,’ he mused, staring at the word CUNTS emblazoned in unmissable neon on the Washington skyline.

Next day he changed the company name to C.U. Media, but this too was scrapped when an unsigned note was slipped under his door suggesting that certain individuals would almost certainly call it CUM. Further, more thoughtful reflection, resulted in the name U-Media, which, if also corrupted by abbreviation, was unlikely to cause offence or ridicule. And U-Media it remained.

It was April 2012 now, evening, some days after Samson’s 23rd birthday, and he and his father – who had met face to face just half a dozen times in the young man's life – were speaking on the phone. Samson sat on the unmade bed of his poky little flat above the joke shop in Bridge Street, Cambridge, less than a mile from his old college. In one hand he held a telephone, in the other a signed Erich Heckel woodcut entitled Man on a Plain, dated 1917, which he’d been able to buy only by eating out of cans for a month. The man on the plain was holding his head wearily; or perhaps warily. Weary or wary, Samson knew how he felt. He and Cyrus spoke on the phone every so often because the son felt a sense of duty to phone the father, but their Transatlantic chats were rarely easy or particularly warm.

Tonight's fairly typical conversation would get a shade less typical shortly, but they weren't to know about the bomb lying temporarily dormant under Samson’s bed. Their first awareness of it would be when the flat exploded, flinging Samson through the window and down to the ancient cobbles of Bridge Street in a flurry of jokes from the shop. Before that seismic event, with a full two minutes and fourteen seconds to go, Samson got to the point of his call.

‘Dad,’ he said. ‘I have something to tell you.’

2

It was no metropolis. Wasn’t even much of a town. Never had been, even in the mid-1880s when a head count asserted that its first generation numbered one hundred and twenty-six. Back then it had seemed well named, but any outsider who happened upon it seven or so decades later might have been forgiven for considering the name something of an exaggeration, its population having decreased substantially by then. By a hundred and twenty-six in fact. So it was that the stranger who chanced upon it one fine April day of 1961 found the place not exactly teeming with life. In addition, what little of it that was still standing looked as if it wouldn’t be doing so much longer.

Now this particular stranger had a problem. A problem many would envy. He’d reached a degree of wealth that most impoverished immigrants – as he once was – could only dream of. He’d become too used to buying anything he wanted, doing anything he wanted. Wasn’t such wealth and ability a betrayal of his heritage? Of those who’d gone before him in his country of origin, struggling to get by every hour of their unremarkable lives? Some time before this April day he had concluded that it was indeed a form of betrayal. But what to do about it?  Would he feel easier in his mind if he gave it all away? Returned to the poverty from which he’d come? But how could he do that? It would mean taking his wife down with him, and she wouldn’t like that at all. She loved the position she’d grown accustomed to since their marriage. Loved the money, the trappings and fripperies, having people to do everything for her. As he saw it, there was only one way he could give it all up yet not deprive his wife and young son. A way that stayed with him from the moment it came to him. It was with this in mind that he’d taken a few days out. Driven off alone, putting considerable distance between himself and anyone who might know his face or name. It was bleak country out here. Very bleak. Isolated clapboard dwellings, leafless trees on rocky horizons, a sun that seemed unwilling to clear cloud. It reminded him of the old country. Old country, old ways, the old lack of ambition and expectation.

He got out of the car and walked among the rubble of former buildings. Came to an irregular indentation in the black earth. Nudged it with the polished toe of his rich man’s shoe. A patch of soft earth where all about looked very hard indeed. He pulled a broken length of plank from nearby debris and used it to scoop some of the earth out. Some, then more. Then he stood back, gazed at the space he’d started to make, and around him at the hopeless desolation that had once been a town, and nodded slowly.

Perfect.

He got back in the car. Next time he came here he would ditch the car many miles away. Conceal it. Set it on fire perhaps. He would bring a spade to make the hole wider; longer too, though not the statutory incarceration length. A hole to curl up in, not stretch out in. Maybe he would take some pills. Maybe he would just sit in the hole and wait. But once down there (with the spade, so his action would not be suspected by any who chanced this way) he would haul down as much loose earth as he could reach and stand, trusting to nature and duration to fill the rest. In the succeeding decades the winds that surely howled across the featureless plain of this most rural of backwaters would carry a deal of topsoil and litter, so that in a wink of Time’s eye the only hint that there was anything down there would be the secular cross he would plant on the surface. A cross without a name, without dates, with nothing but a four-word epitaph that no-one but he would fully understand.

3

Cyrus Underbund sat in his office in Washington, DC. ‘Oh yeah, and that is?’ he said, thinking of a bunch of things he’d rather be doing than talking to his son in England. ‘Got yourself a job at last?’

‘I had a job,’ Samson said. ‘Bookshop in Sidney Street. They gave me the push two weeks ago. Not enough footfall to warrant five staff, they said.’

‘That wasn’t a job,’ Cyrus said. ‘It was monkey-on-a-stick work. You spend all that time at university studying for that degree thing and end up behind a counter in a bookstore wrapping novels about people from university who get jobs in bookstores wrapping novels for people from university.’

‘There’s not much demand for philosophy graduates these days. Have to take what I can get.’

Cyrus grunted. ‘How old are you now, boy – twenty-two?’

‘Plus one.’

‘Twenty-two-plus-one, you got a degree in something nobody needs and you’ve lost a menial job in a bookstore. By the time I got to your age I’d had experiences that made other guys weep, and made a pile of dough too.’

Samson sighed. ‘Yes. I heard.’ Many times, he thought, so many times. ‘But on the subject of employment, you might be interested to hear that I have a plan.’

‘Oh yes? Doing what?’

‘I want to open a restaurant. In London. An American restaurant specializing in good lesser-known dishes from every state of the Union, not a burger or French fry in the house. What do you think?’

‘I think you’re a prick.’

‘I know you do. But even a prick needs money to open a restaurant.’

‘So earn it. Whore around, like I had to.’

‘According to Forbes you’re one of the hundred richest people in America. What I need wouldn’t dent your petty cash.’

‘Hundred and eighth as of last week. That makes me practically destitute in this town.’

‘I just need enough for a thirty-seater. I’d pay you back every last cent when it was up and running.’

‘Damn right you would, but how would it look if it got out that a son of Cyrus Underbund runs a crummy little limey food bar? I’d be a laughing stock.’

‘Who’d know?’ Samson said. ‘We have different surnames, don’t advertise our relationship, and the last photograph of us together was taken when I was six.’

‘Things get around. And I’d know. Now was there anything else? I got people to bawl out here.’

‘Yes, there’s something else. I’m getting married.’

‘You’re what?’

‘I’m getting married.’

‘Married? What the hell you wanna do a damfool thing like that for? If you need to get laid I can fix you up right here in DC. We have this red-hot beaver delivery service, any hour, day or night, best hookers in six states, all shapes, sizes, colors, every one of ’em gagged with non-disclosure agreements. You don’t wanna get married, boy.’

‘You did.’

‘I was young, I didn’t know any better.’

‘I’m young,’ Samson said. ‘I don’t know any better.’

‘Hey. Wait a minute. She’s not English, is she?’

‘No, she’s not English, she’s – ’

‘Now you just pay attention to your old man here. Harken unto the voice of experience. Get out while you can. Those English broads, they’re all show, no performance. They only get under the blankets with you so they can read you fucking poetry. I never heard of William Wordsworth till I met your mom, then suddenly I’m spending my nights trying to prise his legs apart.’

‘Ma’s Irish,’ Samson said, ‘and Ulrike’s Danish.’

‘Oolreeka? Who’s that?’

‘Your future daughter-in-law.’

‘She’s Danish? Like the pastry?’

‘Yes. From the city of Aalborg.’

‘Never heard of it. When did you go to Denmark?’

‘I haven’t been to Denmark. I met her here in Cambridge. She works in a little bistro in Rose Crescent. We’ll make a good team. We’re both interested in food.’

‘I’m interested in food,’ Cyrus said, ‘but I don’t feel some Zen compulsion to put on a pinny and serve it to any lardy stranger who shuffles through the door. Hell, kid, I leave you to get on with your life any way you want, and what happens? The moment you grow some body hair you’re in the kitchen rattling them pots and pans and shacked up with some lousy Danish waitress.’

‘We’re not shacked up together.’

‘You’re not? Sam, what’s wrong with you? If you’re gonna do something really stupid take it all the way, that’s what I always say.’

‘She’s very beautiful,’ Samson said.

There was a pause. He’d uttered a magic word.

‘Beautiful?’

He set aside the Heckel woodcut and picked up a framed photo of Ulrike. ‘You should see her eyes,’ he said, gazing at it. ‘Big, wide, gorgeous green eyes. Great figure too, good as any model. Better.’

‘Blonde?’ Cyrus enquired.

‘Brunette. Very long, halfway down her back.’

‘She has a hairy back?’

Samson groaned. Cyrus chuckled.

‘I thought all those Scandinavian gals were blonde.’

‘You thought wrong.’ He put the picture down.

‘What about her ass?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Her ass. How’s it look? In the flesh. How’s it feel?’

‘I really can’t say.’

‘Aw, come on, son, you can tell me.’

‘No, I mean I really can’t say.’

‘You haven’t seen it? You haven’t even stroked it? Are you sure my blood runs through your veins? Maybe we should get a DNA check.’

‘Can we get back to our wedding plans?’ Samson asked.

‘Wedding plans?’

‘Ulrike’s and mine. It’ll be a very small affair. We’re thinking of sometime in August and we’d like you to be there if you can find the time in your busy schedule.’

‘What name you getting married in?’

‘My own, what else?’

‘Bad move. Once the crazies of the world hear that Cyrus Underbund’s kid’s over there, you’re a pool of blood and piss on the steps. I have enemies, Sam.’

‘I’m sure you do. But I don’t.’

‘You don’t need to. Get married under your real name in that hick town and the woodwork’ll be pulling apart at the seams to let ’em at you, get back at me for something they think I did to them.’

‘I managed to get through university intact.’

‘That’s because no-one takes any notice of students unless they burn shit down. But you’re out of the cloisters now. Nasty things happen in the big wide world. You want to watch the news sometime.’

‘You might find it hard to believe, Dad, but no-one over here gives a crap who you are. Most people haven’t even heard of you. I might have preferred a hundred other names to the one you stuck me with, but I’ve had it for so long I wouldn’t feel right using another. I’m not getting married under a false name, OK?’

‘You’re making a mistake, boy.’

‘Well then, it’s my mistake.’

‘You really ought to listen to your father, Mr. O’Christ.’

‘Sam?’ Cyrus said. ‘You got somebody there with you?’

‘No. Who’s there? Who is that?’

The sudden third voice on the line said: ‘Oh, I’m the bad fellow who put a bomb under the bed of Mr. Cyrus Underbund’s son.’

It was hard to tell if the accent was Mexican, Iranian, Romanian or stoned Texas.

‘Bomb?’ said Cyrus, jumping to his feet in Washington, DC.

‘Bomb?’ said Samson, crossing his legs in Cambridge, England.

‘I thought I would tell you,’ the voice said politely, ‘so you’ll know it wasn’t an unfortunate domestic accident and seek reparation from some incompetent privatized industry.’

‘SAMSON!’ Cyrus screamed. ‘GET THE FUCK OUTTA THERE!’

He got the fuck out. Through the window. It was a second floor window. He was only just off the ledge when the flat exploded. So did the shop below. The picture of Ulrike and the Erich Heckel woodcut were never seen again, but there were jokes all over Bridge Street.

4

Some four weeks on from the Cambridge bomb, a man in a chauffeur’s cap drove a shiny black limo out of Washington DC with a single incapacitated passenger strapped in back. The passenger’s name was apparently Mr. Jones. The driver’s name was Bernard O’Flahertie O’Connor O’Rourke Parnell. According to Bernard’s birth certificate, his father was Patrick Declan Parnell of Dundalk, Eire. Patrick wasn’t actually his father, but it had taken the entirety of his wife’s pregnancy and a couple of weeks extra for him to realize this. Thirty-two years ago, returning from a month-long boozing jag, Patrick had lurched into the church just in time to witness his offspring’s christening, which was also his first sight of the boy.

‘Holy Mother of Judas!’ he cried.

Patrick’s justification for this outburst was that he was white and Irish and his wife Sinead was white and Irish, while Baby Bernard had come out black and Irish. Blushing at all the congregational mutterings about throwbacks and mixed genes and the father having downed too much Guinness during the pregnancy, Patrick had fled the church, jumped into the pedophile priest’s BMW, and driven into the nearest lamppost, a very short journey that resulted in two deaths: a German Shepherd (the canine variety, which was using it at the time) and his own.

It was her husband’s timely demise that persuaded Sinead Parnell to quit the Ould Sod with as little ado as could be managed. Cashing in the insurance she’d secretly taken out on Patrick’s life, and with Bernard on her back, she sailed for America along with a number of her countryfolk – men mostly, who had faith that it would all happen for them over there without their having to lift much more than an elbow in a bar. Upon her arrival, Sinead headed for Atlantic City to take residence with a member of the five-man soul group Oyster Lighthouse, who matched young Bernard color for color. This color match wasn’t entirely coincidental, for some ten months earlier Oyster Lighthouse, on a rattletrap tour of the Republic of Ireland, had landed up at Dundalk when they took a wrong turn out of Dublin. Sinead, who loved all-male black American groups regardless of the type or quality of their music, had allowed herself to be penetrated by the member of a member of Oyster Lighthouse. If she had not permitted this, Bernard would not have been born and Patrick Parnell and one urinating dog might have lived to a fairly ripe old age.

Now Oyster Lighthouse was not one of the great musical acts of all time, but it took them some years to realize that they’d strayed onto the wrong career path. When they did, however, they dumped the Little Richard eye makeup and the James Brown wigs, went to college as mature students, graduated, and became a firm of accountants. They were rather good accountants as it turned out, though it wasn’t always easy for them, when explaining to their clients the finer points of screwing the IRS, to keep from jumping up on their desks and waving their synchronized elbows and hands about while going ‘yip-yip, wow-wow, oooooh-waaaaaah’. If the former members of Oyster Lighthouse were happy about their change of direction, Sinead Parnell was not. She was particularly disillusioned with her chosen mate. All right, he could get a terrific boner, which shone like burnished ebony when she buffed it up, but there was a principle involved here. Her background was one in which nobody ever had more than two Irish ha’pennies to rub together and ‘accountants’ was a dirty word. When her lover traded his shiny suit for a pocket calculator, Sinead packed her cardboard suitcase and entered a home for fallen women as a cleanup maid, took to drink, and one night walked under a speeding ambulance responding to a hoax call.

And Bernard? In his teens, he was one of those kids who are brighter than they let on and slouch their way through school and deliberately fail exams they could have walked because nobody likes a wiseass. After he left school, unqualified and surly, Bernard drifted around, taking one dead-end job after another, until, at the age of 32, he applied for a driving position which, to his surprise, he was offered within twenty-four hours. He got the job not because he was such a great driver, or because of the innate Irish charm he didn’t possess, but because CCTV had caught him elbowing a frail old lady aside on the way out of the interview, which suggested that he wasn’t a sentimental type. There was no place for marshmallow-hearts on that menial staff payroll.

So it was, this fine summer day of 2012, that chauffeur-capped Bernard O’Flahertie O’Connor O’Rourke Parnell, at the wheel of the shiny black limo, began the long run to a scripted destination with young Mr. Jones sitting bolt upright behind him – fellow countrymen by birth, had either of them known it.

5

Corso and Dent looked the part. The part they looked was Security Man Dan, fresh out of the box with the transparent window that cuts kids’ fingers when they try to rip it open at Christmas. Their four huge shoulders crowded their four little ears because their shoulders were among the things that had become inflated during their regular workouts at Dweezle’s Gym and their ears were among the bits that had not. (Other things that had not inflated at Dweezle’s were their noses, lips, tongues and penises.)

Corso and Dent wheelchaired their charge into the outer office, one hand apiece on each of the two handles to demonstrate the equality of their status, and sat themselves down on either side of him. Across the room, 25 year-old Madison Stoner flicked her flyaway honey-blonde hair and tilted her head this way and that at a small mirror on her pristine paper-free desk. When a man in his mid-thirties opened the door adjacent to Madison’s desk, Cyrus Underbund’s voice followed him out.

‘He’s all yours, Harl. Your baby.’

The man closed the door, smiled at Madison, and was about to leave when he noticed the wheelchair’s occupant.

He came over. ‘Hi. Samson?’

‘Yes.’

‘Harlan Laudner. Good to meet you. Is there... anything I can do for you?’

Laudner’s brown eyes were warm, his concern so patently genuine, that when Samson shook his head he almost wished he could say instead, ‘Well, yes, there is actually.’

Laudner nodded and walked away. At the door he lifted a hand in a farewell which, while aimed primarily at Samson, managed to take in the three other people in the room as well.

‘What a guy,’ Corso breathed soulfully.

Corso wasn’t the only man’s man to sigh over Harlan Laudner. Whenever he crossed their minds, hetero males all over town fell to dreaming of sipping hot chocolate while watching colorized reruns of I Love Lucy. If anyone had a bad word to say about him they kept it to themselves. The ever-affable Laudner had no love of ostentation, a quality highlighted by his preference for riding around on a motorcycle rather than in a flash limo like other big wheel execs. He’d often been spotted pulling over to watch street performers and throw down a few dollars, pass the time of day with pedestrians, jaywalkers, young mothers with strollers. It was partly for this approachability that Cyrus Underbund had made him his deputy. Laudner was the company’s ‘human’ face. The one people responded to.

The intercom on Madison Stoner’s paper-free desk burped. Dipping her head towards it, her flyaway honey-blonde hair fell over her wide-awake China-blue eyes. ‘Mr. U?’ The small voice in the com spoke and she lip-glossed a smile at Samson. ‘Mr. Underbund will see you now.’

6

Mr. Jones sat in the back of the shiny black limo. He didn’t want to sit in back; didn’t feel right being driven by a man in a chauffeur’s cap. He was sure that a man in a chauffeur’s cap would think that anyone he was driving would feel superior to him, and Mr. Jones didn’t feel superior to anyone. Besides, the front part of the vehicle wasn’t designed to take a wheelchair. He’d begun to despair of ever getting out of that chair, but the doctors had told him that if he attempted to leave it before they gave him the all-clear – or remove the neck brace that held him bolt upright – he could damage his spine beyond repair and be crippled for life. They’d been emphatic about that. He stood a chance of making a complete recovery only if he made no moves to stand up or loosen the brace, they said. Thus, his every bodily function since his return to consciousness had been performed in the presence of hospital staff, usually female, one of the half dozen most humiliating experiences of his life to date. It was almost as humiliating having to ask Bernard to stop the car when he needed to relieve himself, and support him while he did so. No words were exchanged during this procedure, as though silence somehow annulled the actuality of their participation in such a personal exercise.

Initially Mr. Jones had made the odd friendly overture to Bernard, but Bernard was not a friendly overtures kind of man, as his cold heavy-lidded eyes in the rearview made plain, and eventually his passenger gave up. If he’d had a phone, he would have passed some of the time chatting to Ulrike in Cambridge, but it hadn’t occurred to him to borrow one until it was too late. He might have used the car phone if there’d been one, but as there wasn’t he asked Bernard if he had a cell. Bernard frowned in the mirror.

‘Me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Sure I do.’

‘Well, I wonder if I might borrow it?’

‘Nope.’

At one point, spotting a payphone ahead, he asked Bernard to pull over. Bernard cursed, hit the brake, got out, got him out, and wheeled him to the booth. Mr. Jones lifted the receiver, dialed the number he knew by heart, and waited for the operator to tell him how much to insert. When she did, he deposited the coins, of which he had just enough for a minute’s conversation, and waited through a series of clicks and a lengthy pause. Then a rush of elation as he heard his beloved’s divine ‘Ye-es?’. He was about to announce himself when, with a further click, a very decisive one, the connection was cut. He pressed the button to retrieve his money. It stayed in the box.

‘I don’t use these things,’ Bernard said. ‘Used to, never got my money back, lesson learned.’

‘I want to try again,’ said Mr. Jones. ‘What change have you got?’

‘Not enough to waste, and we ain’t got all week, let’s go.’

And that was that. Bernard had spoken.

7

Corso and Dent, one man per handle, pushed the wheelchair into the office, where their boss sat gazing at a monitor on his big shiny Minnesota maple desk. Among the several inconsequential things on the desk was a framed photograph taken some fifteen years earlier of an ex-princess in a white bikini skipping along the equally white beach of a small private island in the Caribbean. Cyrus had taken the picture the week following her decree absolute, when she, keen to escape the British paparazzi, had made the most of both his invitation and his exuberant lust – so refreshing after the inhibited gropings and mumblings of her royal ex-husband.

‘Sam! Good to see you up and about!’

‘This is hardly up and about,’ Samson said frostily.

‘Well, with eye movement anyway.’

‘Why have I been brought here without my consent?’

Corso and Dent looked at one another. Should they smack the kid for taking that tone with the boss? Their dilemma was solved for them, by the boss himself.

‘Leave us, boys.’

‘Sure thing, Mr. U,’ Corso and Dent said in unison. They did everything in unison, these two. Inside of three minutes they would be standing side by side in the men’s room seeing who could whiz the highest. They left the room, sharing the door handle.

Cyrus planted his elbows squarely on the desk and projected his steadiest gaze across folded hands.

‘By here I’m guessing you mean DC, not this office. The answer is because you were in a coma, which made getting your consent kinda tricky. And I wanted to be sure you got the best treatment money could buy, which isn’t over the water these days from what I hear.’

Samson suppressed the cynical retort that crashed against the back of his teeth