The Book of Strange New Things

  And so the day went on: Bea’s phone ran out of battery and died, the first garage they drove to was shut, the second garage was booked up solid and not interested, a banana they tried to eat for lunch was rotten inside, a perished strap on Bea’s shoe snapped, forcing her to limp, the car’s engine started making a mysterious noise, a third garage gave them the bad news about what a new coat of enamel would cost, as well as pointing out that their exhaust was corroded. In the end it took them so long to get back to Bea’s flat that the expensive lamb chops they’d bought had discoloured badly in the heat. That, for Peter, was the final straw. Rage sped through his nervous system; he seized the tray and was about to throw it into the rubbish bin, throw it with wildly excessive force, to punish the meat for being so vulnerable to decay. But it wasn’t him who’d paid for it and he managed – just – to control himself. He put the groceries away in the fridge, splashed some water on his face and went in search of Bea.

  He found her on the balcony, gazing down at the brick wall that surrounded her block of flats, a wall crowned with barbed wire and spikes of broken glass. Her cheeks were wet.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  She fumbled for his hand, and their fingers interlocked.

  ‘I’m crying because I’m happy,’ she explained, as the sun allowed itself to be veiled in clouds, the air grew milder and a gentle breeze stroked their hair. ‘This is the happiest day of my life.’

  11

  He realised for the first time that she was beautiful, too

  ‘God bleสี our reunion, Father Peรี่er,’ a voice called to him.

  Dazzled by the light, he turned clumsily, almost falling out of the hammock. The approaching Oasan was a silhouette against the rising sun. All Peter knew was that the voice was not Jesus Lover Fifty-Four’s, the only voice he could put a name to without additional clues.

  ‘Good morning,’ he responded. The ‘God bless our reunion’ had meant no more than that. Oasans invoked the blessing of God for everything, which either meant they understood the notion of blessedness better than most Christians, or not at all.

  ‘I come รี่o build our ฐurฐ again.’

  Two weeks in these people’s midst had sharpened Peter’s ear; he immediately understood that ‘ฐurฐ’ was ‘church’. He mulled over the voice, matched it with the canary-yellow robe.

  ‘Jesus Lover Five?’

  ‘Yeสี.’

  ‘Thank you for coming.’

  ‘For God I will do whaรี่ever he wiสีheสี, any thing, any รี่ime.’

  Even as he was listening to Lover Five speak, Peter wondered what it was that made this voice different from, say, Lover Fifty-Four’s. Not the sound of it, that was for sure. The marvellous variety of voices he was accustomed to back home – or even at the USIC base – was non-existent among the Oasans. There were no sonorous baritones here, no squeaky sopranos, husky altos, nervous tenors. No shades of brightness or dullness, shyness or aggression, sang-froid or seductiveness, arrogance or humility, breeziness or sorrow. Maybe, in his clueless foreignness, he was missing the nuances, but he was pretty sure he wasn’t. It was like expecting one seagull or blackbird or pigeon to squawk differently from the others of its kind. They just weren’t designed to.

  What the Oasans could do was deploy language in distinctive ways. Jesus Lover Fifty-Four, for example, was ingenious in avoiding words he couldn’t pronounce, always managing to come up with a sibilant-free alternative. These evasions (‘lay-a-bed’ for ‘sleep’, ‘give knowledge’ for ‘teach’, and so forth) made his speech eccentric but fluent, promoting the illusion that he was at ease with the alien tongue. By contrast, Jesus Lover Five didn’t bother with avoidance; she just tried to speak conventional English and if there were lots of ‘t’s and ‘s’s in the words she needed, well, too bad. Then again, she made less effort to speak clearly than some of the other Oasans – her shoulders didn’t contort as much when she was coughing up a consonant – and this made her more difficult to understand, sometimes.

  Her, her, her. Why did he think of her as female? Was it just the canary-yellow robe? Or did he actually sense something, on a level too instinctive to analyse?

  ‘There’s not much we can do until the others arrive,’ he said, lowering himself out of the hammock. ‘You could have slept longer.’

  ‘I wake in fear. Fear you will be gone.’

  ‘Gone?’

  ‘UสีIC will come รี่oday,’ she reminded him. ‘รี่ake you home.’

  ‘The USIC base is not my home,’ he said, fastening his sandals. Squatting to do so, he was almost head-to-head with Jesus Lover Five. She was small for an adult. If she was an adult. Maybe she was a child – no, she couldn’t be. Maybe she was incredibly old. He just didn’t know. He knew that she was forthright, even by the standards of Oasans; that she could only work for twenty or thirty minutes at a time before wandering off; and that she was related to someone who was not a Jesus Lover, which caused her sadness, or something he interpreted as sadness. Actually, he couldn’t even swear that this non-believer was a blood relative of hers; maybe it was a friend. And the sadness thing was kind of a hunch on his part; Oasans didn’t weep or sigh or cover their faces with their hands, so she must have said something to make him come to that conclusion.

  He tried to recall other things about Jesus Lover Five, but couldn’t. The human brain was like that, unfortunately: it sifted intimacies and perceptions, allowed them to trickle through the sieve of memory, until only a token few remained, perhaps not even the most significant ones.

  He really must write more things down, next time.

  ‘UสีIC will รี่ake you,’ Jesus Lover Five repeated. ‘I fear you will noรี่ reรี่urn.’

  He walked to a gap in the wall that would eventually be a door, passed through it, and stood in the shade of his church, to relieve himself on the ground. His pee was a darker orange than before, making him wonder if he was drinking too little. The Oasans drank sparingly and he’d learned to do the same. One long swig of his plastic bottle first thing upon waking, a few swigs at measured intervals throughout the working day, and that was it. The Oasans refilled his bottle without fuss whenever it ran low, walking all the way back to the settlement with it and back again, but he didn’t want to cause them undue bother.

  They’d taken superb care of him, really. An intensely private people, who spent the bulk of their time quietly conversing with close friends and family inside their homes, they had nevertheless welcomed him with open arms. Metaphorically speaking. They were not what you’d call touchy-feely. But their goodwill towards him was unmistakable. At intervals throughout each day, as he worked on the church site, he would glimpse someone walking across the scrubland, bearing a gift. A plate of fried globs resembling samosas, a tumbler of lukewarm savoury gloop, a hunk of something crumbly and sweet. His fellow workers seldom ate on site, preferring to take formal meals at home; occasionally someone might pick a few blossoms of whiteflower straight off the ground, if they were newly sprouted and juicy. But the cooked treats, the little offerings, were for him alone. He accepted them with unfeigned gratitude, because he was hungry all the time.

  Less so now. Loath to earn a reputation as a glutton, he’d grown accustomed, over the last three hundred and sixty-odd hours, to a sharply reduced calorie intake, and re-learned something that he’d known well during his wasted years: that a man could survive, and even keep active, on very little fuel. If he was forced to. Or too drunk to care. Or – as was currently the case – happily preoccupied.

  When he rejoined Jesus Lover Five, she was seated on the floor, her back propped against a wall. Her posture rucked up her robe so that her thin thighs and the space between them were carelessly exposed. Glimpsing Lover Five’s nakedness, Peter thought he could detect an anus, but nothing that resembled genitals.

  ‘รี่ell me more from the Book of สีรี่range New Thingสี,’ she said.

  Male and
female created he them, was the phrase that came to his mind.

  ‘Do you know the story of Adam and Eve?’ he asked.

  ‘God bleสี all สีรี่ories from the Book. They are all of them good.’

  ‘Yes, but do you know it? Have you heard it before?’

  ‘Long before,’ she conceded. ‘Now again.’

  ‘Did you hear it from Kurtzberg?’

  ‘Yeสี.’

  ‘Why isn’t Kurtzberg here to tell you the story again himself?’ Peter had posed this same question in half a dozen different ways since arriving at the settlement. He hadn’t got a satisfactory answer yet.

  ‘Father Kurรี่สีberg go away. Leave uสี in lack of him. Like you will leave.’ Her clefted face, usually a healthy pink, was whitish pale in its complicated contours.

  ‘I’m only going for a little while. I’ll be back soon.’

  ‘Yeสี, keep your propheสีy, pleaสีe.’ She said it neither playfully nor imploringly, as far as he could tell. She was matter-of-fact and, although she spoke no louder than other Oasans, emphatic. Or maybe he was just imagining that. Maybe he was imagining everything, perceiving differences that weren’t there, in his keenness to get a grip on these people. He and Bea had read an article once, in some magazine or other, which explained that cats were not really individuals, despite what their owners liked to think. All the distinctive noises and eccentric behaviours that your cat exhibited were merely standard-issue genetic features built into that particular sub-breed. A horrible article, written by a smug little journalist with a receding hairline. Bea had been thoroughly shaken by it. And it took a lot to shake Bea.

  ‘Tell me, Jesus Lover Five,’ said Peter. ‘The person you love who makes you sad, the one who doesn’t believe in Jesus. Is he your son?’

  ‘My . . . brother.’

  ‘And have you other brothers and sisters?’

  ‘One alive. One in the earth.’

  ‘And your mother and father?’

  ‘In the earth.’

  ‘Do you have children of your own?’

  ‘God pleaสีe no.’

  Peter nodded, as if he understood. He knew he was not much the wiser, and that he still had no proof of Lover Five’s gender.

  ‘Please forgive my stupidity, Jesus Lover Five, but are you male or female?’

  She didn’t reply, only cocked her head to one side. Her facial cleft did not contort, he’d noticed, when she was confused: not like Jesus Lover One’s. He wondered if this meant that she was smarter, or just more guarded.

  ‘You just referred . . . You just told me of your brother. You called him your brother, not your sister. What makes him your brother and not your sister?’

  She considered this for a few seconds. ‘God.’

  He tried again. ‘Are you your brother’s brother or your brother’s sister?’

  Again she pondered. ‘For you, I will name me with the word brother,’ she said. ‘Becauสีe the word สีiสีรี่er iสี very hard รี่o สีpeak.’

  ‘But if you could say “sister” more easily, is that what you would say?’

  She shifted her posture, so that the robe again covered her groin. ‘I would สีay nothing.’

  ‘In the story of Adam and Eve,’ he pressed on, ‘God created man and woman. Male and female. Two different kinds of people. Are there two different kinds here too?’

  ‘We are all differenรี่,’ she said.

  Peter smiled and looked away. He knew when he was beaten. Through a hole in the wall, which in the very near future would be a beautiful stained-glass window, he spied, in the distance, a procession of Oasans carrying nets full of bricks.

  A thought occurred to him, and, along with that thought, the realisation that he hadn’t asked anyone at USIC to show him the Oasans’ old settlement, the one they’d mysteriously abandoned. It was one of those oversights which Bea, if she’d been here, would never have been guilty of. The mere mention of a place called C-2 would have made her curious about C-1. Honestly, what was wrong with him? Beatrice, on the rare occasions she became exasperated with these sorts of lapses, would accuse him of having one of his ‘Korsakoff moments’. That was a joke, of course. They both knew that alcohol had nothing to do with it.

  ‘Lover Five?’ he said.

  She didn’t respond. Oasans didn’t waste words. You could take it for granted that they were listening, waiting for you to get around to the part of your question they could answer.

  ‘When Kurtzberg was with you,’ he continued, ‘in the previous . . . in the settlement where you lived before, the one near the USIC base, did you build a church there?’

  ‘No,’ she replied.

  ‘Why not?’

  She thought about it for a minute. ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Where did you worship?’

  ‘Father Kurรี่สีberg came รี่o uสี in our houสีe,’ she said. ‘The whole day, he go from one houสีe รี่o another houสีe รี่o another houสีe. We waiรี่ for him. We waiรี่ a long รี่ime. Then he come, read from the Book, we pray, then he go.’

  ‘That’s one way of doing it,’ said Peter diplomatically. ‘A very good way. Jesus himself said, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”’

  ‘We สีaw never Jeสีuสี,’ said Jesus Lover Five. ‘ฐurฐ iสี beรี่er.’

  Peter smiled, unable to suppress a surge of pride. He sincerely hoped that a physical church would, indeed, be better.

  ‘But where did Kurtzberg live?’ he pushed on. ‘I mean, where did he sleep, while he was here with you?’ He imagined Kurtzberg swaddled in a bathtub-shaped cocoon, sweating all night into fancy pyjamas. As a short man, the pastor would at least have been the right size to fit into an Oasan bed.

  ‘Father Kurรี่สีberg have car,’ said Jesus Lover Five.

  ‘Car?’

  ‘Big car.’ With her hands, she sketched a shape in the air: a crude rectangle that did not suggest any particular kind of vehicle.

  ‘You mean he would just drive off to spend the night . . . uh . . . to sleep at the USIC base?’

  ‘No. Car have bed. Car have food. Car have everything.’

  Peter nodded. Of course. It was the obvious way to tackle the challenge. And no doubt such a vehicle – maybe even the same vehicle Kurtzberg had used – would have been made available for him, too, if he’d requested it. But he’d deliberately decided not to go down that route, and he didn’t regret it. There was, he sensed, a distance between Kurtzberg and his flock, a barrier which no amount of mutual respect and fellowship had been able to remove. The Oasans regarded their first pastor as an alien, and not just in the literal sense. Camping out in his car, Kurtzberg signalled that he was perpetually ready to switch on the ignition, press the accelerator and drive away.

  ‘Where do you think Kurtzberg is now?’

  Lover Five was silent for a while. The other Jesus Lovers were very near now, the tread of their soft boots making only a slight noise on the soil. The bricks were no doubt heavy but the Oasans bore them without grunting or flinching.

  ‘Here,’ said Lover Five at last, waving her hand in front of her. She seemed to be indicating the world in general.

  ‘You think he’s alive?’

  ‘I believe. God willing.’

  ‘When he . . . uh . . . ’ Peter paused to compose a question that was specific enough for her to answer. ‘Did he say goodbye? I mean, when you saw him last. When he was leaving, did he say, “I’m going away and not coming back”, or did he say “I’ll see you next week” or . . . what did he say?’

  Again she was silent. Then: ‘No goodbye.’

  ‘God bleสี our reunion, Father Peรี่er,’ a voice called to him.

  And so the Oasans came to build their church, or, as they put it, their ฐurฐ. Peter hoped one day to wean them off that word in favour of another. Here these folk were,
constructing a church brick by brick, and yet they couldn’t pronounce the name of what they were labouring so devotedly to make. There was something unfair about that.

  Lately, as often as possible without overselling the idea, Peter used the phrase ‘our haven’ instead of ‘church’. ‘We build our haven,’ he’d say (no sibilants at all!), or he would link the two words together in the same sentence. And, mindful to nip any misunderstandings in the bud, he took care to explain that ‘haven’ was different from ‘Heaven’. Both places offered a safe, welcoming home for those who’d accepted Jesus into their heart, but one was a physical locale and the other was a state of eternal spiritual union with God.

  A few of the Oasans had started using the word; not many. Most preferred to say ‘ฐurฐ’ even though it convulsed their bodies. And the ones who did say ‘haven’ pronounced it no differently from ‘Heaven’, despite reassuring him that they understood the difference.

  ‘Heaven there,’ Jesus Lover Fifteen said, pointing up into the sky. Then, pointing at the half-built church: ‘Heaven here.’

  Peter had smiled. In his own belief, Heaven was not located up in the sky; it had no astronomical coordinates; it co-existed with all things everywhere. But perhaps it was too soon to engage the Oasans in such metaphysics. They could distinguish between the place they were building and the God they wanted to be part of: that was good.

  ‘Good,’ he said.