Ye Gods!

He filled the sink with water.

This he did in the usual way. The painstakingly simple and boring way. He could have filled that sink in any number of ways, if he’d been feeling chipper, the sink would have been filled in an imaginatively miraculous way and there’d have been nerve strokingly lovely music accompanying this feat of his.

But he just couldn’t be bothered.

So he turned the taps on and watched the purest water imaginable fill the incredibly well fashioned stone sink, and not for the first time he wondered whether his spell of being-down-in-the-dumps was something a little more serious than that.

“Am I depressed?” he asked himself.

Then he wished he hadn’t. Gods weren’t supposed to be depressed. Depression was for mere mortals and was caused by the dark shadow of their mortality and the resultant struggle involved in living. For an immortal being, depression was not an option, for if it was, the very possibility of depression and its coming to stay for an eternity would be a right old buzz kill and gods couldn’t afford to be on a downer. Grumpy gods did bad things.

Gods were prone to grumpiness in any case, and one of the reasons why gods got grumpy was people. People were just so… contrary! They acted like they didn’t know what was good for them. People were part lemming and part donkey, self-destructive and ruddy well stubborn.

What made it all even worse was that the gods needed people. They actually needed people more than people needed them. This was a fairly well kept secret, because if people realised they didn’t need gods, then they might form some sort of collective and rise up against their perceived oppression by the hands of the gods and do something very silly indeed.

If people were a problem, then groups of people really took the biscuit. They took all of the biscuits and they didn’t even eat them. They wasted the biscuits and made life biscuitless and sad and just a little more pointless.

The god turned the taps off. With his hands. That was how despondent he was. Then he stared into the waters he had captured in his bathroom sink until he was staring through them. He stared until he was no longer looking at the water or through the water. He stared until the water wasn’t a consideration whatsoever. 

Once he’d tuned in, the god saw Norman.

Norman cut a fine figure of a man. With a pair of scissors. 

“At least he’s wearing a manly loin cloth,” said the hopefully optimistic god.

It would’ve pained the god to learn that his optimism was blinding him to the fact that Norman was in fact wearing Y-fronts and that he’d been wearing the same pair of Y-fronts for two days now. He was in the midst of an action that he referred to as laying fallow, he justified this rest from hygiene because it was environmentally friendly. He had other justifications for his regular bouts of what was, in the final analysis, mildly horrendous laziness, but he didn’t have anyone to justify himself to, so his justifications were also laying fallow, as was his life.

Norman arose from the table, he held the paper figure before him, it was haloed by the dappled sunlight that streamed in through the window.

The god groaned, not at the very well executed paper silhouette of a dashing hero, but at the form of his chosen hero. Norman was a peculiar fellow who managed to be skinny and wiry, but also portray a state of unhealth that moved the god. Almost to tears. 

Norman’s pot belly was impressive in that it didn’t seem to belong to the rest of him. That belly looked for all the world like an aftermarket upgrade that’d seemed a good idea at the time, having been ordered in the early hours of the morning when Norman wasn’t in his right mind. In comparison, Norman’s limbs were pipe cleaners that looked incapable of supporting the weight of his belly, let alone transporting it across the room.

Norman looked like a bald flamingo chick with a human head.

“Where did it all go wrong?” said the god in an uncharacteristic whine.

Gods weren’t supposed to whine, they were supposed to wine. Full on, proper wine. Barrels of the stuff. Accompanied by song and a bit of the other.

The god remembered a specific bit of the other. The time he’d transformed himself into a swan and made his presence felt amongst the mortals.

This had gone badly wrong. 

He’d drunk far too much wine and awoke in an animal sanctuary. When he pieced the fragments of his memory together he’d just enough to see a tawdry tale of abject failure that resulted in a family of remarkable swans.

Despite his remarkable swan offspring, the god was quite ashamed of his drunken behaviour and he never spoke to mother swan again. He didn’t visit her, he didn’t call and he didn’t even write her a letter. 

Very poor behaviour by mortal standards, but he was a god and he set the standards, he didn’t have to follow them.

He’d resolved never again to take the form of a swan when he walked the Earth. Up here with the other gods, swan-form was very much in fashion, there was still a lot of fun to be had with it. He just didn’t feel it though. And he didn’t want to risk the flashbacks.

When it came to the making of Norman, the god had stayed relatively sober. Just the two barrels of a fine, three thousand year old vintage. He’d made himself known to Norman’s mother, Janet, in human form. Boring, but effective.

Well, it should’ve been, but Janet was having none of it. 

The god had been nonplussed and intrigued in equal measure. Unfortunately, his intrigue went rogue and the god was led on a strange and perturbing journey of courtship that ended in a marriage that came along, threw a hood of bafflement over the god’s head and dragged him to the registry office before he quite knew what was going on.

Having married, Janet allowed the god into her bedroom and that night Norman was made.

The very next morning, the god told Janet that he was going out for some milk and never returned. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time. The god would never admit to having regular moments where he experienced a pang of loss. It had taken him some while to understand that this pang was his missing Janet. He’d never worked out why he missed her. Furthermore, he knew he wasn’t supposed to miss her, but that didn’t help matters.

For a while, everything went swimmingly and the god experienced a growing anticipation for a new age of heroes. A time where demigods would step forth from the mists of obscurity and herald an era of adventure, derring-do and scantily clad goings on. 

He’d had a side bet with several other of the gods that his boy was going to out-hero the lot of ‘em, and in the early years Norman did not disappoint. He was round of face and chubby of limb in the way the cherubs were. He even sported locks of golden hair and eyes of a fathomless blue, flecked with gold for good measure. 

The god watched his young son with an unparalleled joy. Maidens lost coordination of their knees and forgot themselves around the beautiful boy that Norman was. Norman was a promise that made the imagination soar.

But when Norman reached puberty, instead of things getting really interesting, they dulled. Not tarnished. The god could have gone with tarnished. This was complete and utter dullery. Such a low level of dull that monks could only ever dream of aspiring to it. 

For starters, Norman needed spectacles. Norman was supposed to be the spectacle. Instead he wore these thick lensed glasses that were a prophylactic for his eyes. If that wasn’t bad enough, most of his hair fell out. 

Then there was his body. One day he was this beautifully proportioned angel of a boy, the next he had a tragic growth spurt that he never, ever recovered from.

Nonetheless, the god had tried. Oh how he’d tried!

But every time he appeared to Norman, the boy had run away, or fainted. There was no getting through to him.

In the end, the god had relented and appeared to Janet. 

Janet was having none of it.

“You!” she cried, “after all these years!? You have a bloody nerve! You haven’t even remembered the milk!”

The god had made his excuses and left.

There is however, more than one way to skin a cat, so having indulged in a bout of cat skinning to calm his nerves and start afresh, the god attempted more subtle interventions.

Norman won competitions that he hadn’t even entered. The spare room was filled with exercise equipment, protein drinks and a strange suction pump reminiscent of a spare part from a dairy’s milking machine. 

The god had actually cried when he saw Norman using that interesting pump in a failed attempt to clear his sinuses.

Almost daily, the god presented Norman with opportunities to show his true, heroic self. Cats stuck up trees aplenty. Damsels in distress. Flames to draw out the heroic in him. Chaos that demanded order. Chance after chance for Norman to cry “huzzah!” and save the day.

The lad wore blinkers though, he missed each and every moment that the god presented to him. Even when the god nudged those around Norman to prevail upon him to step up and be the hero the god had made, he politely refused and made his way to the offices where he plied his mundane trade as a bookkeeper for a mutual fund.

The god stared through the mystical waters of his bathroom sink and grudgingly came to the conclusion that Norman was a lost cause. The very nature of gods meant that this was a very big deal. More so because this was no mere god. This was the god of war and he was all about the heroic.

But enough was enough. With a sigh that could power a windfarm for a week, the god of war gave up on the man who had never once truncated his name to the slightly more heroic Norm, let alone chosen a Name of Destiny. A name that would go forth into the world and strike dread into the hearts of his enemies and cause fair maidens to succumb to feelings Mr Grey had been aiming for, but had never quite reached.

“I give up,” said the god of war, and with a wave of his hand he erased the image of Norman, his failed hero of a son, for what might be forever.

“In your face!” cried a triumphant voice behind him.

The god of war turned toward the source of this voice, wondering who it was who had broken into his godly palace and had the impertinence to cry triumphantly at his very naked bum.

“Janet?” he said in a manner that fully conveyed his surprise at her presence here.

“None other!” she beamed at him.

“But how…?” he managed.

“Even now,” she said, placing her hands on her hips in an all too familiar show of defiance, “you don’t remember me?”

“Remember me?” echoed the god of war in a way that made him feel quite stupid.

Janet shook her head. It was clear that her head was brim full of disappointment. Some of it spilt over and washed over the god of war, “Bill. Really? You don’t remember me from school?”

Wide eyes of enlightenment fell upon Bob, the god of war’s face, and transformed it, “Janet, Janet the Teacher’s Pet?”

“None other,” said Janet in a defiant and confident manner that was nothing like the girl that Bob had known.

The girl that Bob had known and been really quite mean to. He went rather pale as he remembered the depths of his meanness. He’d not been a pleasant schoolboy. This wasn’t a double negative, for all schoolboys are not pleasant. As a kid, Bob doubled down on his unpleasantness and then some. He liked to think he’d mellowed since then. It was so difficult to tell. He was the god of war and a prerequisite for that was he was as mean as hell. 

“Ah…” said Bob.

“Ah indeed,” said Janet, “do you remember what you did?”

Bob did. It was writ large upon his face, “not sure what you mean…” he mumbled downwards, as though he were talking to his warlike nipples.

“Our very last day at school,” Janet stated.

Bob looked up and found the courage to look Janet in the eye, but he said nothing. Instead he cast his mind back to that fateful last day.

The last day at school was when the powers and attributes were handed out. This was a big day. The biggest of days. Days didn’t get much bigger than this. The key thing was to be front of the queue when they were handing out the “God of…” badges so you got one of the better ones. Being at the back of the queue, or even worse, having a day off sick from school, would be so totally tragic your life would not be worth living, even if you were a god. Who wanted an eternity as the god of lost socks, or the god of walking into a room and forgetting why you walked into the room?

So Bob, ever practical, but also hyper-superstitious, had made sure of two things. Two things being the two sides of everything. The eternal balance that must be acknowledged if things have any chance to turn out alright. Firstly, Bob arranged to be at the front of the queue. He put in a lot of work in this respect. Mostly he beat any notion of anyone else being front of the queue so soundly and thoroughly from anyone and everyone who he considered to be his rival that he was actually ushered to the front of the queue having turned up a couple of minutes late to the badge award ceremony.

Why was he late?

Well, that was the second side. That was the balance. Bob had tricked Janet into an empty classroom and locked her in. In order for Bob to be at the forefront and to get the very best badge, he needed someone to be at the back and take the fall.

That was the natural order of things, at least according to Bob it was anyway. 

There were the victors and there were the vanquished.

“So you didn’t…?” ventured Bob.

“Didn’t what?” asked Janet abruptly.

“Get a badge?” said Bob sheepishly.

At that, Janet laughed. She laughed for quite some while. Janet went beyond the point that anyone should laugh and she made good her point with that laughter. Janet’s laughter made Bob uncomfortable. Her laughter bestowed upon Bob a dread feel. Bob wasn’t a fan of dread feels. Not when he was the recipient of them anyway.

“You couldn’t be more wrong!” chuckled Janet, “you actually did me a favour you silly lummox!”

“How so?” asked Bob, trying not to get too antsy at being called a lummox. What annoyed him most about this was that he had no idea what kind of animal a lummox was. He thought it was probably those hefty cows that were forever licking flies from their noses. Still, he’d been called worse and sometimes justifiably so, after all, war was hell.

Janet smiled a disconcerting smile, “all you popular gods collected your badges and buggered off to drink wine by the barrel load, so by the time I’d climbed out of the classroom window and found my way to the Great Hall, there was no one left. The Head was about to call it a day.”

“And?” asked Bob, knowing that there was always going to be an and.

Janet shrugged, “he said I might as well have all the other badges.”

Bob’s mouth fell open and it was a bothersome struggle to close it again, “just how many badges are we talking about here?”

Janet winked, “oh lots and lots!”

“What sort of badges?” asked Bob.

“All sorts!,” smirked Janet, “but let’s just say that when you have that many badges they add up to something like karma.”

“Karma…” echoed Bob, oblivious as to whether he might look stupid now. He was too busy experiencing a terrible sinking feeling.

“Karma,” said Janet echoing Bob’s echo, “and Sod’s Law, and Murphy’s Law, and providence, and mischief, and a breed of vengeful, malign malice that makes a snake’s toes curl.”

“Oh,” said Bob.

Janet nodded, “and you made me possible, Bob.”

Bob’s brow furrowed as his thoughts twisted sideways and returned to the matter of Norman. He hadn’t sired a demigod he’d…

“What have I done?” he whispered.

“What have we done!” the triumph had returned to Janet’s voice, and with gusto.

“Ye gods!” gasped Bob, “all I wanted was a hero!”

“And that you have,” chuckled Janet, “perhaps not the hero you had in mind… but my boy is so much more than that!”

Down in the world of mortals, dark clouds amassed. These clouds were drawn to a commotion taking place in a grey, nondescript office in Coventry. They came to bear witness. It looked like there was going to be a fight. A certain someone had returned to his desk to find that his box of colour coded post-its had gone missing. Again.

Well, Norman had just about had enough, and there would be hell to pay. His face turned a vivid hue of purple and he fizzed with a powerful and unnatural energy.

Norm really was going to give ‘em hell.

Quite literally.