Free The Mechanical Messiah by Robert Rankin Page B

clothed themselves and no longer knew his love. And so it had continued to the present day. The Victorians, so said The Lather of Love, were particularly notable for the over-abundance of clothes that they wore, the amount of flesh that they covered. They were also notable (especially in the case of the Godless working class) for their dirtiness. As such they had lost all physical contact with the brilliance of God that shone down upon them. They were shielded from it by clothing and grime. They could no longer feel and experience his presence.
    The answer was simple, or so said the book. Cast off your clothes, scrub yourself to righteous cleanliness, step out into the radiance focused on the Earth and feel once more the power of the Almighty.
    At the time when this Great Truth was made known to Uncle Charles he was living in Tunbridge Wells. The community there was a middle-class community and not one given to tolerance of those who expressed their beliefs in a manner that lacked for a conservative ethic.
    When, upon a fine summer’s morning, Uncle Charles took a stroll to the shops sporting nothing but sandals and a smile, jaws dropped, eyebrows rose and the law took him firmly in hand. After that Uncle Charles restricted his naked commune with the Godhead to areas of his garden that could not be seen from the road.
    But, to his mind, there was certainly no doubting the efficacy of the system. Uncle Charles felt himself to be twice the man he had been before. He felt healthy. He felt free. He felt alive. And he was developing a lovely tan. His wife, it did have to be said, was a woman of sensitive disposition and modest behaviour and she resisted his attempts to convert her to what she considered to be nothing less than primitive pagan Sun worship. She also insisted that whenever tots came round for him to dandle, he should always wear his trousers.
    Now Alice had been a well-kept child, cleaner than some, less dirty than most. But her father, Captain Horatio, was often away on his adventurous voyages and her mother, a ‘seaman’s widow’, was apt to alleviate her pangs of loneliness with frequent applications of gin. As such Alice did become a little grubby at times.
    So when Uncle Charles offered to take care of his niece throughout the school summer holidays, her mother made no objections. She packed a suitcase for Alice, dressed her in her best bonnet and frock then packed her off by train to Tunbridge Wells.
    Uncle Charles was fully dressed when he met her at the station. But had it not been for the consequences of the aforementioned naked stroll along the high street, the holiday in Tunbridge Wells would probably have been very different for Alice. And not led to her greatly fearing magic.
    As it was, the tradesmen of Tunbridge Wells had taken against Uncle Charles and refused to deliver his groceries. His wife, with no small degree of resentment, now did all the shopping and more than once she ‘forgot’ to purchase soap for Uncle Charles. So when Alice arrived, the well-scrubbed, well-tanned uncle was down to his last two bars of Sunlight. So, as Alice would be encouraged to wash, he did that thing that the British are so noted for: he improvised.
    Uncle Charles understood the basics of soap. That it acted as an emulsifying agent and was mostly composed of animal or vegetable fat or oils. Uncle Charles set out to make his niece some special soap of her own. As a base he used lard from the kitchen and then to add fragrance he gathered and ground together flowers and herbs and suchlike from his garden.
    Amongst the suchlike that he chose to gather was a substantial quantity of rather prettily coloured mushrooms. Unknown to Uncle Charles, these were of the genus Psilocybe.
    These were magic mushrooms.
    At the time of Alice’s arrival in Tunbridge Wells, the local horse and carriage drivers were still in dispute with Uncle Charles, having joined pretty much everyone in the vicinity in a general boycott. Charles