The Book of Strange New Things

  Anyway: this wasn’t about maggots per se. It was about the vivid memory of Jesus Lover One’s mother, and the unerasable, emotionally charged connection between her and the maggots that had fed on her. His mind boggled at how her own son could bear to eat a foodstuff that had been produced in this way.

  To this question, as with so many others, God organised a very specific and enlightening answer. Jesus Lover One showed up at the church one evening, carrying a hamper of food. Wordlessly he unpacked it in front of Peter as they sat down together on the bed behind the pulpit. The food smelled wholesome and was still warm. It was whiteflower soup in its mushroom guise, and several hunks of whiteflower bread with brown crusts and pale insides, fresh from the oven.

  ‘I’m glad it’s whiteflower,’ Peter said, deciding to be totally frank. ‘I was worried you would bring me something made from . . . the creatures you harvested from your mother’s body. I don’t think I could eat that.’

  Lover One nodded. ‘I alสีo. Other can. Noรี่ I.’

  Peter absorbed the words, but couldn’t interpret their meaning. Maybe Lover One was informing him of the etiquette governing this particular ritual. Or was it an openhearted disclosure? Tell me more, he thought, but he knew from experience that keeping silent in the hope that an Oasan would fill the silence didn’t work.

  ‘It’s a very good and . . . admirable idea,’ he said, ‘to . . . do what you people do. With someone who’s just died.’ He wasn’t sure how to go on. The bottom line was that no amount of admiration could prevent him being disgusted. If he put that into words, he’d be lecturing Lover One on the irreconcilable differences between their species.

  Again Lover One nodded. ‘We do all thing รี่o make food. Make food for many.’ A bowl of soup sat balanced in the lap of his tunic. He had eaten none of it yet.

  ‘I’ve been dreaming of your mother,’ Peter confessed. ‘I didn’t know her as a person, I’m not saying . . . ’ He took a deep breath. ‘The sight of her covered in insects, and then in maggots, and everyone just . . . ’ He looked down at Lover One’s boots, even though there was no possibility of eye-to-eye confrontation anyway. ‘I’m not used to it. It upset me.’

  Lover One sat unmoving. One gloved hand rested on his abdomen, the other held a piece of bread. ‘I alสีo,’ he said.

  ‘I thought . . . I got the impression you . . . all of you . . . were afraid of death,’ continued Peter. ‘And yet . . . ’

  ‘We fear death,’ Lover One affirmed. ‘However. Fear cannoรี่ hold life in a body when life iสี over. Nothing can hold life in a body. Only the Lord God.’

  Peter stared straight into the unreadable face of his friend. ‘There can be moments in a person’s life,’ he suggested, ‘when grief over the loss of a loved one is stronger than faith.’

  Lover One waited a long time before responding. He ate a few spoonfuls of the soup, which was now cold, thick and congealed. He ate some bread, tearing off small pieces and inserting them gently into the lipless, toothless hole in his head.

  ‘My mother very imporรี่anรี่ woman,’ he said at last. ‘For me.’

  In this second sojourn among the Oasans, God took care to keep Peter’s experiences in balance. His first death was followed, not too long afterwards, by his first birth. A woman called ฐสีคน – not a Jesus Lover, evidently – was having a baby and Peter was invited to the delivery. Jesus Lover One, his escort, implied that this was a great honour; it was certainly a surprise, because he’d never been formally acknowledged by the settlement’s unbelievers. But this was an event so joyous that the usual reticence was put aside and the entire Oasan community was united in hospitality.

  The contrast between the death and the birth was striking. Whereas the body of Lover One’s mother had lain unattended in a back yard, mourned by no one except her son, left in solitude to attract insects, then treated as if it was nothing more than a vegetable patch, the woman who was about to give birth was the focus of an enormous amount of fuss. The streets leading to the house were remarkably busy, and everyone seemed to be heading for the same place. When Peter first saw the house, he thought it had caught fire, but the vapour wafting out of the windows was incense.

  Inside, the expectant mother was not lying in a bed surrounded by medical equipment, or suffering the trials of labour under the supervision of a midwife, but walking around freely, socialising. Dressed in a snow-white variant of the Oasans’ usual attire – looser, thinner, more like a nightgown – she held court, accepting visitors’ congratulations one by one. Peter couldn’t tell if she was happy or anxious, but she was obviously not in pain, nor could he detect any swelling in her trim little body. Her gestures were elegant and formalised, like a medieval dance, with a whole host of partners. This was ฐสีคน’s Big Day.

  Peter knew that the Oasans didn’t celebrate marriages. Their sexual pairings were private arrangements, so discreet as to be seldom alluded to. But the day of childbirth was a flagrantly public highlight in a woman’s life, a ritual exhibition every bit as extravagant as a wedding party. ฐสีคน’s house was heaving with well-wishers, dozens of bustling bodies dressed in bright colours. All the pencils in the Aquarelle set, thought Peter, as he strove to discern the difference between one robe and another. Vermillion, coral, apricot, copper, cerise, salmon – those were just some of the pinks he could put a name to; others were beyond his vocabulary. Across the room, weaving through the crowd, a person clad in pale violet was reunited with an old acquaintance clad in unripe plum, and only when they touched each other, glove to arm, did Peter see that two robes which he would otherwise have perceived as identical in colour were, in fact, unique. And so it went on, all over the house – people greeting each other, waving at each other, needing no more than a glance to know and be known. In the midst of this easily intimate hubbub, Peter appreciated he would need to develop a whole new relationship with colour if he was ever to recognise more than a couple of dozen individuals among this city’s multitudes.

  It was a lovely party, Peter might have said, if he’d been asked to describe it for someone who wasn’t there. The only problem was, he felt surplus to requirements. Jesus Lover One had ushered him in, but kept meeting up with friends who drew him into conversations which, to Peter’s ears, were just gargles and wheezes. Asking for translations seemed rude and, in any case, there was no reason to suppose that a stranger would understand much of what was being discussed.

  For a while he felt oafishly out of place, towering over everyone here, literally casting a shadow over them, and yet . . . irrelevant. But then he relaxed and began to enjoy himself. This gathering wasn’t about him: that was actually the beauty of it. He was privileged to observe, but he wasn’t on duty, nothing was expected of him; he was, for the first time since coming to Oasis, a tourist. So, he sat on his haunches in a corner of the room, allowed the blueish fog of incense to go to his head, and watched the expectant mother being garlanded with affection.

  After what felt like hours of meeting and greeting, ฐสีคน abruptly signalled that she’d had enough. Exhaustion had apparently overcome her, and she sat on the floor, surrounded by a puddle of her gown’s white cloth. Her friends backed away as she pulled the hood off her head, revealing livid flesh sheened with sweat. She bent her head between her knees, as though she was about to faint or vomit.

  Then the fontanelle in her head yawned open, and a large pink mass bulged out, glistening with frothy white lather. Peter jerked back in shock, convinced he was witnessing a violent death. One more convulsion and it was over. The baby was disgorged in a slithery spasm, sliding into the mother’s waiting arms. ฐสีคน raised her head high, her fontanelle puckering shut, the fleshy kernels of her face still livid. The whole room erupted in a whuffle of applause and a mass of voices joined forces to make an eerie cooing sound, as loud as a chord pumped out of a cathedral organ.

  The baby was alive and well, already squirming to be released from its mot
her’s grasp. It had no umbilical cord and looked amazingly unlike a foetus: instead, it was a perfect miniature person, its arms, legs and head all in adult proportion. And, like a newborn horse or calf, it immediately tried to stand on its legs, figuring out the knack of balance even while its feet were still slippery with placental goo. The crowd applauded and cheered some more. ฐสีคน ceremoniously acknowledged the ovation, then set about cleaning the gunge off her child’s flesh with a damp cloth.

  ‘สคฉ้รี่,’ she announced. Another great cheer went up.

  ‘What did she say?’ Peter asked Lover One.

  ‘สคฉ้รี่,’ said Lover One.

  ‘Is that the baby’s name?’

  ‘Name, yeสี,’ said Lover One.

  ‘Does that name have a meaning, or is it just a name?’

  ‘Name have a meaning,’ Lover One replied. Then, after a few seconds: ‘Hope.’

  The child now stood firmly balanced on the floor, its arms stretched out like unfledged wings. ฐสีคน sponged the last of the muck off its skin, whereupon someone emerged from the crowd with an armful of soft offerings. A robe, booties, gloves, all in dusky mauve, all tailored exactly to size. Together, ฐสีคน and the gift-bearer, who might have been a grandmother or aunt, began to dress the infant, who tottered and swayed but did not resist. When the job was done, the child was exquisitely smart and adorable, serenely content to be on display. A male, Peter decided. Unbelievable, the craftsmanship that had gone into those minuscule gloves, each finger snug and velvety! Extraordinary, how the child accepted this second skin!

  By this time, Peter was no longer squatting; his legs had begun to ache and he’d stood up to stretch them. The baby, wondrously alert, took the measure of all the creatures in the room, an array of virtual replicas of himself. There was only one creature that didn’t fit the picture, only one creature that made no sense in his freshly configured view of the universe. Head tilting back, the child stood arrested, mesmerised by the alien.

  ฐสีคน, noticing her son’s quandary, likewise turned her attention to Peter. ‘ฐสฐรี่ ฉ้สีฉ้ฉ้รี่,’ she called across the room.

  ‘What did she say?’ Peter asked Lover One.

  ‘Word,’ said Lover One. ‘Word from you.’

  ‘You mean . . . a speech?’

  Lover One inclined his head diplomatically. ‘Few word, many word, any word. Any word you can.’

  ‘But she’s not . . . she’s not a Jesus Lover, is she?’

  ‘No,’ conceded Lover One, while ฐสีคน made an urgent gesture to speed up Peter’s compliance. ‘On thiสี day, all word are good.’ And he touched Peter’s elbow, which, by Lover One’s standards, was tantamount to a shove.

  So there it was: he was an accessory. A bonus performance to enhance the mother’s Big Day. OK, nothing wrong with that. Christianity was used for such purposes all the time. And who knows? – maybe it wasn’t even his status as a pastor that this woman wanted to exploit, but his status as a visitor. He stepped forward. Phrases and themes tumbled around in his brain, but one thing was clear: he wanted this speech to be for the benefit of Lover One, so dignified in his bereavement, as much as for the mother and child. Often in his past ministries, he’d had a sudden insight into a staunch member of his congregation, a member who was constantly declaring the joy of knowing Christ, the bountiful blessings of faith, but who was – Peter would realise in a flash – achingly, inconsolably sad. Jesus Lover One might well be one of those souls.

  ‘I’ve been asked to speak,’ he said. ‘To a few of you, what I say will have meaning. To most of you, maybe not. One day, I hope to speak your language. But wait – did you hear it? – I just spoke that wonderful word: hope. The name of a feeling, and also the name of this child who has come to live with us today.’

  The baby lifted first one boot, then the other, and toppled backwards. His mother caught him smoothly and eased him to the floor, where he sat in apparent thought.

  ‘Hope is a fragile thing,’ Peter continued, ‘as fragile as a flower. Its fragility makes it easy to sneer at, by people who see life as a dark and difficult ordeal, people who get angry when something they can’t believe in themselves gives comfort to others. They prefer to crush the flower underfoot, as if to say: See how weak this thing is, see how easily it can be destroyed. But, in truth, hope is one of the strongest things in the universe. Empires fall, civilisations vanish into dust, but hope always comes back, pushing up through the ashes, growing from seeds that are invisible and invincible.’

  The congregation – if he could be so bold as to call it that – was hushed, as if considering the import of each word, although they must surely be quite lost. He knew he should regard his speech as a kind of music, a brief burst of melody from a foreign guest invited to demonstrate an exotic instrument.

  ‘The most cherished of hopes, as we all know,’ he said, ‘is a new child. The Bible – the book that some of you love as much as I do – contains many fine stories about the birth of children, including the birth of Jesus, our Lord. But this is not the time and place for me to tell Bible stories. All I will say is that the ancient words of Ecclesiastes have helped me make sense of what I’ve seen in the last few days. Ecclesiastes says: To everything there is a season. There is a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to plant seeds, and a time to reap. An old person – the mother of Jesus Lover One – has died. That was a very sad thing. A new person – สคฉ้รี่ – has been born today. That is a very happy thing. Let us honour the equal importance of each: in celebrating a new life we remember losing those who’ve left us, and then in the midst of sadness our spirits are lifted as we welcome new life. So, to little สคฉ้รี่, most beautiful and precious gift to our community, I say: welcome!’

  He hoped he’d invested the last word with sufficient resonance to signal that this was the end of his speech. Evidently he had: the audience emitted a mass murmur, applauded and waved. Even the baby, catching the prevailing mood, extended his tiny gloves. The room, so hushed in the preceding minutes, was once again filled with cooing and conversation; the people who’d briefly been transformed into an audience turned back into a crowd. Peter bowed and retreated to his former spot against the wall.

  For one instant, in the midst of the renewed celebrations that followed, his mind was tickled by a thought of his own baby, growing inside the body of his wife far away. But it was just a thought, and not even a properly formed thought – a half-glimpsed reflection of a thought, which couldn’t compete with all the commotion right in front of him: the brightly dressed crowd, the excited gestures, the unearthly cries, the watchful newborn with its spindly limbs, hero of the moment, king of the day.

  16

  Toppling off an axis, falling through space

  On the fifth day, a day of rain and almost unbearable beauty, it slipped Peter’s mind that Grainger was coming for him.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t want her to come, and it wasn’t that she’d ceased to be real to him. Every now and then, during the three hundred and sixty-odd hours leading up to their scheduled rendezvous, she had been in his thoughts. He wondered, for example, if she would let him help her with her next drug delivery; he recalled the scars on her forearms and speculated about what anguish might have led her younger self to inflict them; and sometimes, at nights before drifting off, he replayed a fleeting vision of her pale, troubled face. However, his life here among the Oasans was very full, and there were so many things he must try to hold in his head. Observe the opportunity, as Ecclesiastes urged him. Be not ignorant of anything great or small.

  Oh, he didn’t forget to pray for Charlie Grainger and Coretta, and he thought of Grainger each time he did so. But when he woke up on the morning of the fifth day, the long night was finished, the sun had risen, and the rains were drawing near – and that was that. His appointment with USIC’s moody pharmacist was erased from his b
rain.

  Keeping track of schedules had never been his strong suit anyhow. The longer he spent among the Oasans, the less point he could see in clinging to ways of telling time that were, frankly, irrelevant. A day for him had ceased to feel like twenty-four hours and it certainly didn’t consist of 1,440 minutes. A day was a span of daylight, divided from the next by a spell of darkness. While the sun shone, he would stay awake for twenty, maybe twenty-five hours at a stretch. He didn’t know exactly how long, because his father’s watch had stopped working, ruined by damp. Sad, but there was no point grieving.

  Anyway, life wasn’t about measurement, it was about getting the most out of each God-given minute. There was so much to do, so much to digest, so many people to commune with . . . When darkness fell, Peter would slip into comatose sleep, his consciousness sinking fast and irretrievable like a car dumped in a lake. After an age spent down on the bottom, he would float up into shallower fathoms where he would doze and dream, get up to pee, then doze and dream some more. It was as though he’d discovered the secret of Joshua – Joshua the cat, that is. The secret of snoozing for hours and days on end without boredom, storing up energy for a future occasion.

  And then when he’d slept as much as he possibly could, he would lie awake, staring up at the sky, familiarising himself with the eighty-seven stars, giving them each a name: Zimran, Jokshan, Medan, Midian, Ishbak, Shuah, Sheba and so on. All those genealogies in Genesis and Exodus had come in useful after all. They had begat a new constellation.

  Mostly, by the light of slow-burning resin candles, he would sit up in bed, working on his paraphrases of Scripture. The King James Bible spread open on his lap, a notepad cradled on his forearm, a pillow for his head whenever he needed to mull over the alternatives. Unto every province according to the writing thereof, and unto every people after their language – Mordecai’s publishing manifesto, sometime during the Israelites’ Babylonian exile. If the Oasans couldn’t have the Gospel in their own words, they deserved the next-best thing: a version they could speak and sing.