The Heavenly Gatekeeper

He used to do it himself. Every soul, face to face, the full appraisal. It was thorough and it was fair. Time-consuming beyond all reasonable measure, but He’d had the bandwidth in the early days when the population of the Earth could fit inside a decent-sized hut and still leave room for the buffet.

Then the numbers grew. Civilisations rose and multiplied and wiped each other out and multiplied again, and the queue for judgement stretched so far back through the celestial waiting room that the last souls in line were arriving when the first ones had already crossed their Sirat bridge, come back for their bags, and crossed it again, others already reincarnated as otters, and St. Peter had stamped so many hands he’d developed RSI and put in for a century’s cloud leave.

The breakthrough, when it came, was divine inspiration. Middle management. Someone (I don’t know who, the filing system up there isn’t exactly what you’d call intuitive) proposed a field-based assessment model. Deployable agents. Funeral attendance as proxy data. The logic was sound: if you have lived a good life, people will show up when you die. They will cry. They will say nice things about you. The sandwiches will be good, because someone cared enough to make them good, or at the very least they won’t be a painter’s table full of Tesco Meal Deals.

He signed off on it. Of course He did. He’d been three billion souls deep at that point. Gabriel wouldn’t stop cc’ing Him in on things, Chitragupta was leaving increasingly agitated voicemails and rumour had it that Raqib and Atid were no longer on speaking terms (but that’s office politics for you).

The North-East of England is my territory, Christian Division, and has been for longer than I’ll get into, though I will say this: I was there when they buried the first man in Jarrow and I’ll be there when they cremate the last woman in Whitley Bay, and the sandwiches at neither will be anything to write home about. The North-East does many things well (sausage rolls being right up there) but egg mayo is not one of them.

My name isn’t important. To anyone really. But it’s written on my lanyard and clipboard and signed at the bottom of every form. The AFL/7, Assessment of the Formerly Living. I have never, in all my millennia of service, had an assessment overturned on appeal. And this isn’t me boasting, it’s me being accurate, because I believe accuracy is the sincerest form of devotion, though Head Office has never seen fit to give me a performance bonus or any additional holiday allowance. Twenty-eight days a century, if you’re interested? Though next year I do accrue one more and I’m already planning a jaunt to Andromeda. I’ve heard their grief is astronomical.

The AFL/7 has categories. I didn’t design them. I’ve made suggestions, but the procurement process for new stationery has been frozen since the Reformation so I’ve learned to work with what I’ve got. Marginalia is where I have my fun. I have been warned it’s discouraged and ignored, but I use it anyway. I think the angels in accounts appreciate a bit of border banter.

Attendance is the first metric. Obviously. Raw headcount, adjusted for the size of the deceased’s known social circle. A room of two hundred means nothing if the man ran a company of four thousand. It means even less if they were instructed to attend. A room of six means everything if the woman lived alone with a cat called Nancy. Whether Nancy was there is by the by (cats being notoriously terrible judges of character). I score it as a percentage. Anything above sixty is respectable. Below thirty and you’re looking at a life lived in a way that made people check their diaries and discover they were suddenly busy.

Eulogy comes next. Now this is where the real craft lives and where my diligence comes into its own. I score on specificity. How many times the speaker uses the actual name of the deceased versus saying “he” or “Mam” or “our dear friend.” I score on detail. Did they mention the time Auntie Edna made toast with them on an open fire or did they just say, “she loved life”? Everyone loves life. That’s a biological imperative, not a tribute. I penalise phrases like “he’d have done anything for anyone.” No, he wouldn’t. Nobody would. The only thing you’re demonstrating here is your own lack of research. The best eulogies contain at least one detail that makes a section of the Church uncomfortable. That’s how you know it’s true. If everyone’s nodding the whole way through, the speaker has written a press release, not a goodbye.

Then music. I have opinions and I’m no longer ashamed of my Spotify playlists. I even include links in my quarterly reports, though I doubt anyone ever listens to them. “My Way” is an automatic two-point deduction. It’s the most frequently selected song at funerals in the English-speaking world and the least frequently earned. I’ve sat through over sixty thousand renditions of a song about rugged individualism played for men whose most daring life decision was choosing an Astra over a Cavalier. “Angels” by Robbie Williams is worse because it tells me the family Googled “funeral songs” at eleven o’clock the night before and picked the one they’d heard of. Also, there’s something about Mr Williams that I find increasingly unsettling. If “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” plays, the Hawaiian version (it’s always the Hawaiian version), then just know that I’ve already started deducting points before the ukulele comes in.

But when someone plays a song that only makes sense if you knew the person, that scores enormously. I once attended a funeral, Dave Teasdale, sixty-seven, a retired postman from Gateshead, where the family played the Countdown theme as the coffin went through the curtains. The full version. De-de, de-de-de, de-de, de-de-de, ticking down as the casket slid forward on the runners at exactly the right speed to disappear behind the curtain right on de-de, de-de, de-de-de-dum. Thirty seconds of Channel 4’s most famous clock, and not a word spoken while it played. Half the room was mortified. A woman in the third row covered her mouth. The vicar looked at his brogues. A metaphorical nine-letter word. I gave it maximum points and Dave came out with a respectable 6.4. Solid mid-tier life. A man who was loved in the right quantities by the right quality of people and whose coffin entered the afterlife to the sound of his favourite programme, on time and under budget. I filed that AFL/7 with a clean conscience.

Not all of them go so smoothly. Three weeks after Mr Teasdale I attended what I can only describe as the saddest of sendoffs. Margaret Jenkins, seventy-one, who was a former dinner lady from Blyth. The vicar got her name wrong twice but corrected himself only once, which means one instance of “Margaret” was actually “Marjorie” and went uncontested, which tells you everything you need to know about the congregation. Fourteen people. Eleven of whom were over eighty and may have been attending out of proximity rather than affection; there’s a sheltered housing complex two streets from the crematorium which I have long suspected operates as some kind of feeder system.

The eulogy was delivered by a nephew who had driven up from Peterborough that morning and still had the smell of the Washington Services on him (diesel with top notes of Double Whopper). He spoke for two minutes. He mentioned her by name three times, once incorrectly using Marjorie again (the family clearly had a nominative consensus problem). He said she “always had a smile” which I scored as a zero because it contains no information and I doubt very much that his presence ever elicited such warmth. He said she “loved her garden” which I scored as a 0.5 because although it implied a garden existed, for all I know it was a window-box and two dying hibiscus.

The music was “Wind Beneath My Wings.” My note in the comments: “Bette Midler. A selection suggesting the deceased’s music taste was either defined by the 1988 film Beaches or, more likely, undefined entirely and filled in posthumously with a Hits of the 80s CD found in someone’s glovebox.”

And the sandwiches were a tragedy in three acts. Cling-filmed, perspiring, and badly arranged on a trestle table in the adjacent room. A buffet not to be remembered. The egg mayo had separated. Bread corners curled. Nobody had made their own, which meant nobody had stood in a kitchen at seven o’clock that morning thinking about Margaret/Marjorie while cutting the crusts off. I scored her a 2.1. One of the lowest I’d filed that century. I put the form in the tray, waited for the confirmation stamp. Three to seven working days, depending on who’s on upstairs and whether Mercury is in retrograde (Head Office denies this is a factor but my data supports it) and moved on.

But there was something the AFL/7 has no box for. A woman in the back row, sat on her own. She didn’t sign the book. She didn’t speak to the nephew. She sat through the whole thing with her hands in her lap and her coat still on, and when it was over she stayed in her seat while everyone else filed out toward the trestle table and the sweaty butties. She was the only one who cried but with no sound that I could hear, no shaking shoulders, just rolling tears that speak of true loss. But I couldn’t fix it for her so I filled in the boxes I had, scored what I could score, and filed the assessment. I think about her sometimes, though. Which is unusual, because I don’t usually think about any of them once the form is in the tray. That’s the discipline of the work you see. You assess, you file, you move on. You don’t, you can’t, carry them with you, because if you do, you start second-guessing the system, and the system is all we’ve got.

Then the memo came. Not a normal memo either. An Advance Notice. These are exceptionally rare. They come from the Senior Operations Directorate when someone significant is approaching. A state funeral, a major public figure, a death that will generate what Head Office calls “high-density grief events.” The Advance Notice gives you time to prepare. Request a larger form if needed and adjust your schedule. Polish your best pen.

This one was flagged as a Category One. I’d never attended a Category One. In all my years on the North-East patch, the biggest funeral I’d covered was a local councillor who’d been extremely popular with the allotment community and whose send-off filled the crematorium to standing room (not helped by all the oversized vegetables), largely because he’d promised everyone a plot and half of them were still waiting. That scored a 7.8. My personal best and I thought, at the time, that I would never see anything like it again.

I requested the assignment, even though it was just outside my area, filed the paperwork and cited my experience, my exemplary record, underlining the fact that I had never, not even once, had an assessment overturned. Operations approved it. I think they were glad someone volunteered. Category Ones make angels nervous.

I arrived earlier than usual. I wanted to see the room fill and watch every data point accumulate in real time. The coffin was gold. Not gold-coloured. Actual gold. I’d never seen a gold coffin before and I didn’t know how to score it, because the form has a field for “presentation and casket quality” but the scale assumes wood and brass fittings and doesn’t extend to precious metals. So I simply stated ‘majestic’ and moved on.

The attendance. Even Heaven itself didn’t seem so crowded in comparison. Thousands lined the streets. Inside, every seat was taken before I’d even finished my coffin assessment, and the people still arriving were pressing against the back wall with the density and excitement of a sold-out fixture at St James’ Park while I observed from the Gallowgate End. I counted heads until counting became pointless. The attendance percentage broke every record I had. I wrote the number and checked it three times because I didn’t believe it the first or second.

The eulogies were extraordinary. So specific, so warm, and so unbelievably funny. Speakers mentioned the deceased by name with a frequency that beggared belief. They told stories that contained such rich details: dates, places, things he’d said and things he’d done in rooms across the country. People were laughing and crying in the same sentence, which is the highest compliment a life can receive and which I score as a separate metric: the Dual Response Index. I had never given higher than a 3 on the DRI. This funeral shattered my scale.

And the sandwiches. Oh my Maker, the sandwiches. Tiered. Varied. Carved ham. Breaded ham. Smoked salmon on brown. Ciabattas and vol-au-vents, which I would normally penalise for fussiness, but the quality silenced any objections. There were caterers, too, which I also usually mark down for inauthenticity, but this spread and silver service knew exactly what it was doing. My pen ran so fast that I was running out of both ink and room on the form.

I marvelled in that magnificent building for two hours and nineteen minutes as I saw what a life well lived looks like. Every metric was breaking records. Every column on the AFL/7 was full to bursting. I used both margins and the back of the form and yet still had observations it couldn’t contain.

I filed it that evening, sat in the car park of my Travelodge with form on knee and pen in hand, shaking as I wrote the number at the bottom of the page.

Ten.

The first I had ever given. The first anyone had given. I checked my maths twice. I checked my methodology against the handbook. The numbers were correct. The assessment was clean. I completed the submission box. Name of the deceased. Date. Location. Final score. I wrote it with utmost care because this one mattered, this one needed to be accurate. I wanted the record to be immaculate when they looked back on it, which they would, because no one will forget my Ten.

I closed the folder, straightened my lanyard and walked back to my room to sleep the satisfied sleep of a being who has finally found the thing it has waited its whole existence for.

The form went upstairs the following morning. I never heard anything back, which is standard. No news is good news in celestial administration. But I imagined the absolute scenes as He welcomed my Ten with open arms.

I keep a small personal log, separate from the AF/7s, in a notebook I bought from WH Smith in 1792. It’s for the ones I want to remember. The good ones. The Countdown coffin. The allotment councillor. The woman in the back row at Margaret Jenkins, though I still don’t know why I wrote her down.

I carry it with me always. To remind me that the system works. That if you do a job properly, if you measure what can be measured and score what can be scored, the truth will always show itself in the numbers. The numbers are never wrong. And now, at the top of the page, in my neatest handwriting, sits my crowning glory:

9th November, 2011.

Leeds Cathedral.

10/10.

Sir Jimmy.