The Book of Strange New Things

  Anyway, Billy and I kept the conversation light most of the day, but just before his mum came to fetch him, he opened up. I asked him how he felt about his father going to another country. He said, ‘My dad says there aren’t any countries anymore. They don’t exist. England and Romania are just different parts of the same thing.’ For a moment I thought, how nice, Mark is reassuring his kid that we’re all one world-wide community. But no. Billy said Mark asked him to visualise the world map as a huge thick sheet of plastic floating on the sea, like a raft, with crowds of people balancing on it. And sometimes too many people stand together on one bit and it starts to sink. You just run to another bit where it’s better, he said. Then when THAT bit starts to sink, you move again. There’s always places where things aren’t so bad: cheaper accommodation, cheaper food, cheaper fuel. You go there and it’s OK for a while. Then it stops being OK and you get the hell out. It’s what animals do, he said. ‘Animals don’t live in countries, they just inhabit territory. What do animals care if a place has a name? Names don’t mean shit.’ That’s the word Billy used, so I presume that’s the word his father used. Quite a heavy lecture in geopolitics for a little boy to swallow! And of course the bit that Mark left out of his analysis was the bit about going off with a 27-year-old concert promoter called Nicole. Who happens to be Romanian. But enough of that.

  I’ve got a blanket over my knees as I type this. You’re probably expiring from the heat but it’s cold here and I’ve been without gas for a week now. Not because of any accident or failure in the supply, just because of sheer bureaucratic insanity. The gas company we’re with – used to be with, I should say – was being paid by direct debit out of our Barclays bank account. But when Barclays went under and we changed over to Bank of Scotland, something went wrong with the debit arrangement. A computer glitch. And suddenly I got this final demand. I tried to pay it, but here’s where it gets insane – they wouldn’t talk to me, because I’m not the ‘account holder’. I kept offering to pay them, and they kept saying ‘Sorry madam, we need to speak to the account holder’, ie, you, Peter. I must have spent hours on the phone about this. I considered getting the next door neighbour to pop round and talk into the phone in a deep voice, which would have been morally wrong, of course, but they probably would have asked him your mother’s maiden name. In the end, I had to concede that it just wasn’t possible to fix. I’ll wait until they take us to court and hope it gets sorted out then. In the meantime, I’ve signed with a different gas supplier but it will be a few days before they can come and connect it. They say that the freak weather in various parts of England has been causing havoc with utilities and (to quote the engineer I spoke to) ‘there’s engineers dashing about all over the place like chickens with their heads cut off’. Give that man a job in PR!

  Do you remember Archie Hartley? I bumped into him in the cafeteria of the hospital the other day and he

  Again he rested his head back against the seat, breathed deeply. Despite the dry cool of the air conditioning, he was sweating. Droplets tickled his forehead and ran into his eyebrows.

  ‘Finished already?’ said Grainger.

  ‘Uh . . . just a minute . . . ’ He felt as though he might be in danger of passing out. ‘Bad news?’

  ‘No, I . . . I wouldn’t say that. It’s just . . . You know, there’s a lot to catch up on . . . ’

  ‘Peter, listen to me,’ said Grainger, enunciating each word with earnest emphasis. ‘This happens. This happens to all of us.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’re here. She’s there. It’s natural.’

  ‘Natural?’

  ‘The rift,’ she said. ‘It grows and grows, and finally . . . there’s too much of it to cross. It’s like . . . ’

  Words failed her, and she resorted to a gesture instead. Releasing her grip on the steering wheel for a few seconds – a safe enough risk, given that the ground was flat and there was nothing visible in any direction to collide with – she held up her hands, palms parallel, separated by a few inches, as though about to press them together in medieval prayer. But instead, she parted them wider, letting the fingers splay limply, as though each hand was toppling off an axis, falling through space.

  17

  Still blinking under the word ‘here’

  Without Peter inside it, the dishdasha hung like a ghost from the ceiling. Its frayed lower parts swelled gradually with water and began to release drips from the sleeves and hem, slow as melancholy teardrops, even though Peter had wrung the fabric as hard as he could. Never mind: it would dry quickly. He’d adjusted the air conditioning of his quarters, allowing the temperature to rise to the level of the air outside. That was the way he wanted it, even if he hadn’t had wet washing to dry. He felt disoriented enough, back in the USIC environment, without the additionally confusing sensation of being trapped in an artificial bubble of chilled oxygen.

  His dishdasha – clean now, apart from the ink stain which had faded to a blurry lilac – was suspended from an indoor clothesline operated by a simple mechanical pulley. Once again, Peter was struck by USIC’s apparent preference for low-tech solutions. He would’ve expected an electric clothes dryer with a menu of computerised choices; a million megawatts of energy on tap just to rinse the sweat out of a pair of socks. Even the washing machine – which he hadn’t used yet – had a placard stuck to the top saying CONSERVE WATER – COULD THIS LOAD BE HAND-WASHED? To which a previous occupant of the room had added, in felt-tip: ARE YOU OFFERING, LADY?

  Who wrote this? One of the nameless employees who hadn’t lasted more than a couple of weeks before going insane? Mind you, the way Grainger had looked at him when she picked him up, it was clear she wondered if he was going insane too. Or if he was about to disappear over the same horizon as Tartaglione and Kurtzberg.

  Still naked after his shower, Peter stood in front of the mirror and examined the changes that his sojourn among the Oasans had wrought. It was true that the tips of his ears were burnt. There were also ridges of crusted sunburn along the furrows of his brows. Nothing spectacular. Overall, his skin was tanned and healthy-looking. He’d lost weight, and his ribs were showing. He’d just shaved off his beard, and noted that the slight swell of fat under his chin had gone, giving him a sharper facial appearance, a less mild-mannered look. That look had always been deceptive, anyway. In his homeless years, he’d exploited his soft features, radiating an air of bourgeois decency to make people think it was safe to leave him alone in their kitchen or in the back seat of their car for ten minutes. During which he would steal their cameras, their mobiles, their jewellery, whatever was in easy reach. And an hour later he would be selling it, and half an hour after that he would be snorting or swallowing the proceeds.

  All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God. That was one of the main verses that had saved him, in the end: one of those Bible soundbites that everybody knows but nobody really understands until they’re going down for the last time, choking to death on their own filth.

  He sprinkled talcum powder in the clefts of his groin, which were a little sore. His scrotum had a few small scabs on the tender flesh – from scratching, obviously, although he couldn’t remember breaking the skin. The scabs were dark and clean. Within a day or two, they would vanish. The tops of his ears and the furrows of his brow would shed feathery shreds of white epidermis, revealing hard fresh pink underneath. His concave stomach would fill out, if he ate a few hearty meals. The fungal growth between his toes would clear up after a few applications of the lotion Grainger had given him. The pads of oedema in his knees and ankles would shrink away.

  If Bea saw him right now, she might be alarmed at the state he was in. She hated to see his skin broken; she would fuss over the merest scratch on his hand, insist on putting Band-Aids on cuts that would be half-healed by the evening. One of her favourite places to kiss him was on his fingertips, whenever he’d bitten a nail to the quick. She’d have plenty to kiss at the moment.

  He had not yet
written to her. There were at least twenty-five messages banked up. Three or four had arrived in the last few hours, since Bea had calculated he must be back. He was not ready to face her, not even through the veil of the written word. He needed to reacclimatise to life outside the Oasan settlement. He needed to adjust to the complicated trivia of human intercourse.

  ‘So, how were the folks in Freaktown?’

  Tuska was smiling broadly, to show he meant no offence. His beard was quite thick by now, mostly grey, which made him look older, and his neck was red from scratching where the wiry hairs tickled his skin. Peter could tell at a glance that the beard’s days were numbered: Tuska would shave it off very soon. Why did humans have this compulsion to change their outward appearance, only to revert to what suited them? What on earth was the point?

  ‘Uh . . . they were fine,’ he replied, a few seconds too late. ‘They’re good people.’

  ‘Yeah?’ said Tuska. ‘How can you tell?’

  They were sitting at a table in the USIC mess hall. Tuska was tucking into spaghetti Bolognese (whiteflower spaghetti, whiteflower ‘mince’, imported tomato sauce, imported herbs) and Peter was eating a pancake (100% local). The air was full of noises: the sound of rain pelting rhythmically against the windows, the mingled conversations of other employees, the clattering of meal trays, the scraping of chairs, the opening and shutting of doors, and Frank Sinatra crooning ‘My Funny Valentine’. It all seemed a grossly excessive amount of bustle and chatter to Peter, but he knew the problem was his perception, and he must try to get in the swing of it. The metaphorical swing, that is: no amount of effort could reconcile him to Frank Sinatra.

  A pair of fingers clicked near his face. ‘Peter, are you with us?’ said Tuska.

  ‘Sorry. I really dislike this kind of music.’

  It was an evasive answer, but also true. Sinatra’s self-congratulatory gargle, amplified to be audible over the din, was nudging him across a threshold of tolerance, like repeated pokes in the ribs from a prankster.

  ‘I can live with it,’ shrugged Tuska. ‘It’s just ripples in the airwaves, Peter. Molecules getting excited for a few seconds and then settling down again. Nothing to get riled about.’

  ‘Each day is Valentine’s day,’ smarmed Sinatra, as Tuska assembled another forkload of spaghetti.

  ‘Somebody dissing Ol’ Blue Eyes?’ A woman who’d been seated at a nearby table sidled over, carrying her dessert bowl. She was a colleague of BG’s: they had a similar physique, although this woman was white and blonde. She levelled a mock-censorious stare at Peter. ‘Did I hear you blaspheming against the godlike Frank?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I should know better.’

  ‘The consummate American songbook,’ she informed him, deadpan. ‘Never equalled. One of the great achievements of humankind.’

  Peter nodded humbly. ‘Maybe I’m the wrong age to appreciate it.’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Thirty-three.’

  ‘I’m thirty-two!’

  ‘Well, I’m English, that’s another thing . . . ’

  ‘Al Bowlly, Noël Coward, Shirley Bassey?’ She spoke the names as though any British-born person would swell with pride to hear them.

  ‘Oh dear,’ sighed Peter. ‘I’m . . . uh . . . out of my depth here.’

  There was a pause, during which Frank Sinatra launched into a ditty about a little old ant and a rubber tree plant. ‘It’s OK,’ said the woman, indulgently. ‘It’s OK. Not everyone likes the same things. It’s allowed.’

  He remembered her name now: Iris. Iris Berns. She came from a Pentecostal family and was an atheist. She liked to play card games, she once had a sister who drowned in a back-yard swimming pool, she had a running joke with BG about centrifugal force, and she was heterosexual despite her butch appearance. None of these bits of information quite fitted into any sensible remark Peter could think of making at this point. Even calling her Iris might come across as an attempt to show off something he’d recalled too late, and anyway, she might want him to call her Berns like everybody else.

  Why was even the shallowest human conversation so fraught with pitfalls and tricky calibrations? Why couldn’t people just keep silent until they had something essential to say, like the Oasans?

  ‘Give him a break,’ said Tuska. ‘He’s just come back from a long spell in Freaktown.’

  ‘Yeah?’ said Berns, plonking down her dessert and taking a seat at the table. ‘You should take some suntan lotion next time.’

  ‘I’ll do that,’ said Peter. He was aware that he was more red-faced than he needed to be, because he’d foolishly worn a sweater over his T-shirt. It had seemed a good idea at the time: a signal that he was a regular urban guy, not some freaky desert-dweller.

  ‘I’m surprised you got so much sun,’ said Berns, stirring a dollop of dark red syrup through the yoghurt-like substance in her bowl until the white turned pink. ‘They’re not exactly outdoors types, are they?’

  Peter pulled the neck of his sweater down, to let air in. ‘They work outside almost every day,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Growing and harvesting food for us.’

  Berns ate a few spoonfuls of dessert. ‘You know, I’ve driven all the way round that settlement, and I never saw a plantation, greenhouses, nothing.’

  ‘That’s because they’re right in the centre.’

  ‘The centre?’

  ‘Of the settlement.’ Peter took a deep breath. His forehead stung with perspiration. ‘Haven’t we been through this already?’

  ‘Must’ve been with a different woman, honey.’

  ‘Don’t call him honey,’ said Tuska. ‘He’s a preacher.’

  ‘The fields are inside the settlement,’ Peter explained. ‘The buildings are built in a circle around them.’

  ‘It figures,’ said Berns.

  ‘Figures? Why?’

  ‘They’re real secretive.’

  Peter wiped his brow with his sleeve. ‘It’s not because . . . ’ His voice was too soft. A flotilla of children had come along to assist Sinatra on the chorus of ‘High Hopes’. Peter’s motivation to explain the Oasans’ relationship with agriculture faltered under their assault.

  Berns stood up and called across the room: ‘Hey, Stanko! Can we have something instrumental? Our pastor here is having difficulty!’

  ‘No, really,’ protested Peter, as the eyes of everyone in the mess hall turned on him. ‘You shouldn’t . . . ’ But he was relieved when the voices of Frank and the school choir disappeared in mid-syllable and were replaced by the tinkling of a piano and some languorously shaken maracas.

  Berns sat back down and polished off her dessert. Tuska ate the rest of his Bolognese. Peter had consumed only a few mouthfuls of his pancake but felt stuffed. He leaned back in his chair, and the amiable conversation of several dozen people rustled past his ears, a gentle hubbub of engineering jargon, small talk about food, polite disagreements about solving practical challenges, and the Jabberwocky mishmash of half-heard words and phrases, all interwoven with a Brazilian samba.

  ‘What music do you like, Peter?’ said Berns.

  ‘Uh . . . ’ His mind went blank. The names he might usually have rattled off were gone. ‘To be honest,’ he said, after taking a deep breath, ‘I’m not that keen on recorded music. I like music best when it’s performed live and I’m actually there when it’s happening. That way, it’s less like being expected to admire a thing, and more a celebration of the moment, of people doing something together in public. Something that could go horribly wrong, but through a combination of talent and trust and enthusiasm, it comes out sublime.’

  ‘Well, you should join our Glee Club,’ said Berns.

  ‘Glee club?’

  ‘Our singing group. A bunch of us meet up every hundred and eighty hours and sing together. It’s real informal. You’d love it. You a tenor?’

  ‘I . . . I think so.’


  ‘BG is the bassiest bass you ever heard. You gotta hear him in action.’

  ‘I’d like that.’

  ‘We don’t do any Sinatra.’

  ‘That’s reassuring.’

  ‘Well, I hope it is.’ Her tone was sincere. He realised all of a sudden that she was trying to prevent him drifting away from the bosom of their community, to stop him going native.

  ‘How big is the group?’ he asked.

  ‘Depends on our workload. Never less than six. Sometimes up to ten. Anyone’s welcome, Peter. It’s good for the soul. If you don’t mind me saying so.’

  ‘Does Tuska sing with you?’

  Tuska guffawed. ‘No chance. Voice like an extractor fan. A malfunctioning extractor fan.’

  ‘Every person can sing,’ insisted Berns. ‘It just takes practice. And confidence.’

  ‘Oh, I got loads of confidence,’ said Tuska. ‘And a voice like an extractor fan.’

  Berns looked at him pityingly. ‘You got sauce on your beard, honey.’

  ‘Holy shit – pardon my French.’ Tuska patted at his facial growth with his fingers. ‘That does it: this beard has got to go.’

  ‘Clean-shaven suits you, Tuska,’ said Berns, wiping her lips with a table napkin. (A linen napkin: USIC didn’t go in for disposable paper.) Then, to Peter: ‘Your beard looked OK, though. I saw you when Grainger brought you back in. Kinda stylish.’

  ‘Thank you, but . . . I just didn’t have an opportunity to shave while I was away. I use an electric razor, you see, and there wasn’t . . . uh . . . ’ What garbage I’m talking, he thought. Is this the best we can come up with?

  ‘So, ‘said Berns, ‘conditions in C-2 really are as primitive as they say?’

  ‘Who says they’re primitive?’