The Book of Strange New Things

  Peter flexed his fingers, appraised his tattoo of stitches again.

  ‘I thought it was my time for a while there.’

  Adkins chuckled. ‘You’ll live to preach another day. And when you go back, just in case you cross paths with those nasties again, here’s my advice.’ He clamped his hands together, mimed a violent swing. ‘Take a golf club.’

  Peter was too drugged to walk, so someone trundled him out of the surgery in a wheelchair. Two pale hands appeared from behind him and spread a cotton blanket over his knees, tucked it around his hips, deposited a transparent plastic bag containing his sandals in his lap.

  ‘Thank you, whoever you are,’ he said.

  ‘You’re welcome, I’m sure,’ said Grainger.

  ‘Oh, gosh, I’m sorry,’ said Peter. ‘I didn’t see you in the surgery.’

  She wheeled him, straight and steady, along the sunlit corridor towards the big double doors. ‘I was in the waiting room. I don’t like the gory stuff.’

  Peter lifted his arm, displayed the pure white bandage. ‘All fixed up,’ he said.

  Even before she replied, he could sense she was not impressed. Her wrists, gripping the handles of the wheelchair, were tense – tenser than they needed to be.

  ‘You don’t take care of yourself when you’re out there,’ she said. ‘For Christ’s sake, you’re skin and bone. And yeah, I know I’m blaspheming. But look at you.’

  He stared down at his wrists, which had always been bony, he thought. Well, maybe not that bony. The thick bandage made his arm look more emaciated somehow. How angry was Grainger? Just a bit exasperated? Furious? The distance between the medical centre and his quarters would take several minutes to cover, which was a long time when you were in the hands of someone who was upset with you. Weakened by the analgesics and the shock of Bea’s message – which returned to his mind over and over like a wave of nausea – he was suddenly overcome by a belief that other men had often described to him when he’d given them pastoral counselling – a deep, despondent conviction that no matter what they did, no matter how good their intentions, they were doomed to bitterly disappoint women.

  ‘Hey, I made an effort not to let my ears get so burnt this time,’ he said. ‘Give me some points for trying.’

  ‘Don’t patronise me.’

  Grainger pushed him through the double doors, veered him sharply to the right.

  ‘Kurtzberg was the same,’ she remarked. ‘And Tartaglione. They looked like skeletons in the end.’

  He sighed. ‘We all look like skeletons in the end.’

  Grainger grunted irritably. She wasn’t finished chastising him yet. ‘What goes wrong out there in Freaktown? Is it you or them? They don’t feed you, is that it? Or they just don’t eat, period?’

  ‘They’re very generous,’ Peter protested. ‘They’ve never . . . I’ve never felt that I’m being starved. It’s just that they don’t eat a lot themselves. I think most of what they grow and . . . uh . . . process . . . gets put aside to feed the USIC personnel.’

  ‘Oh, great! So we’re exploiting them now?’ Grainger veered him round another corner. ‘I tell you, we’ve bent over backwards to do the right thing here. Bent over backwards. There’s too much riding on this to fuck it up with an imperialist fiasco.’

  Peter wished they’d had this conversation a lot earlier, or that they could have saved it for later – any time but now. ‘Uh . . . what’s riding on this?’ he said, struggling to stay upright in the chair.

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake. Isn’t it obvious? Are you that much of a babe in the woods?’

  I just do God’s work; my wife asks the penetrating questions, he was about to say. It was true. Bea was always the one who needed to know why, who scratched under the veneer of what she was told, who refused to fall into step with the game everyone else was playing. She was the one who read the fine print in contracts, she was the one who would explain to him why an apparently wonderful opportunity was full of pitfalls, she was the one who could see through a scam even if it came disguised in Christian wrapping. Grainger was right: he was a babe in the woods.

  He hadn’t been born one, that’s for sure. He’d turned himself into one, by force of will. There were many ways of becoming a Christian but the way that had worked for him was to switch off his capacity for cynicism, switch it off like a light. No, that was the wrong comparison . . . he’d . . . he’d switched on the light of trust. After so many years of playing games, exploiting everyone he met, stealing and lying and worse, he’d re-made himself into an innocent. God had wiped the slate clean. The man who’d once littered his conversation with casual expletives like ‘Jesus fucking Christ’ became the man who said ‘gosh’. There was no other way. You were either a raging alcoholic or you didn’t touch drink. Same with cynicism. Bea could handle it – in moderation. He couldn’t.

  But then: There is no God. From Bea. Please, Lord, no. Not from Bea.

  Bea, too, had trundled him in a wheelchair once, in the hospital where they first met. Exactly like Grainger was wheeling him now. He’d broken both his ankles jumping out of a warehouse window and had spent several days in Bea’s ward with his legs strung up in the air. Then one afternoon she unshackled him, got him into a wheelchair and pushed him to the x-ray department for a post-op assessment.

  ‘Can you just whizz me through one of these side exits for a minute so I can have a cigarette?’ he’d said.

  ‘You don’t need nicotine, handsome,’ she’d replied, from a sweet-smelling spot behind and above him. ‘You need your life to change.’

  ‘Well, here you are,’ said Grainger. ‘Your home away from home.’ They’d reached the door that was labelled P. LEIGH, PASTOR.

  As Grainger was helping him to his feet, one of the USIC electricians, Springer, happened to be passing by.

  ‘Welcome back, preach!’ he called. ‘You want any more wool, you know where to find me!’ And he sauntered on down the hall.

  Grainger’s lips were close to Peter’s ear as she said softly, ‘God, I hate this place. And everybody who works here.’

  But please don’t hate me, thought Peter as he pushed open the door and they walked in together. The atmosphere that greeted them was stale and slightly sour from two weeks’ lack of air conditioning. Motes of dust, disturbed by the intrusion, swirled in a beam of light. The door fell shut.

  Grainger, who’d had one arm on his back in case he lost his balance, threw the other one around him too. In his confusion, he was slow to realise she was embracing him. And not only that: it was a different embrace from the one they’d had before. There was passion and female need in it.

  ‘I care about you,’ she said, digging her forehead into his shoulder. ‘Don’t die.’

  He stroked her awkwardly. ‘I don’t intend to.’

  ‘You’ll die, you’ll die, I’ll lose you. You’ll go weird and distant and then one day you’ll just disappear.’ She was weeping now.

  ‘I won’t. I promise.’

  ‘You bastard,’ she cried softly, holding him tighter still. ‘You scumbag, you lying . . . ’

  She broke the embrace. The pale fabric of her clothing was marked with dirt from the harvest fields of the สีฐฉั.

  ‘I won’t drive you to see those freaks again,’ she said. ‘Someone else can do it.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Whatever you want.’ But she was already gone.

  There was no further message from Bea. At his command, a network of ingenious technology searched the cosmos for her thoughts and found nothing. Only that same cry of desolation, still glowing on the screen, just those four awful words, hanging in a contextless grey void. No name attached – neither hers or his. Just the raw sentence.

  He sat at the Shoot and prayed for strength. He knew that if he didn’t reply now, and keep it short, he was liable to pitch forwards and go unconscious right there.

  His clumsy fingers were poised to type the words of Psalm 14:1: The fool has said in his heart, there is no God. B
ut then God entered Peter’s heart and cautioned him that this would be stupid. Whatever had happened to Bea, she didn’t need criticism.

  Maybe there had been another natural disaster? Some horrific event in a foreign country that had swamped Bea’s head with the pain of useless empathy? Or maybe it had happened closer to home, in Britain? A catastrophe that had left thousands of people homeless, devastated, bereaved?

  Psalms to the rescue again: Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day; Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday. A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee.

  But what if . . . what if it had come nigh to Bea? What if she’d been hit by an earthquake or a flood? What if, right at this moment, she was stranded and dazed, camped in the ruins of their house? But no, no, be logical, their house must be intact, or else she wouldn’t be able to write to him. USIC had given them a Shoot and it was set up in the study upstairs, connected to a mainframe the size of a filing cabinet. The existence of Bea’s message proved she was safe. Except that a person alienated from God could never be safe.

  As dihydromorphine, chloroprocaine and exhaustion dragged him more and more insistently towards sleep, he began to panic. He must write, and yet he couldn’t. He must say something, break the silence, and yet if he chose the wrong words he would regret it for ever.

  Finally, he let go of any notion of quoting Bible verses or giving advice. He was her husband, she was his wife: that was the only thing he could be sure of.

  Bea, I don’t know what’s brought you to this point but I love you and I want to help you if I can. Please tell me what’s wrong and please forgive me if it’s something I should have already known. I’ve just come out of surgery. A few stitches, nothing serious. I got bitten in the field. Explain later. Will crash for a bit now but please, I’m worried about you, I love you, I know this sounds absurd but I’m there for you, I really am.

  He sent this flying and collapsed into bed.

  A little while later, without speaking, Grainger came and lay next to him. She rested her head on his naked chest, and her shoulder was in such a position that it would have been unnatural not to cup it in his hand. So he cupped it in his hand. She moved closer against him, let him feel the warmth of her flesh. Her small fingers stroked his abdomen, her palm traced the hollow where the ribs began. Then she took hold of his penis, which was already erect. Before he could speak, Bea was there with them, reassuring him with her eyes that it was all right. Grainger lifted her tunic. Her pale breasts were freckled. He kissed one while Bea finished undressing and crawled onto the bed. Grainger held his penis upright, allowing Bea to lower herself onto it. He ejaculated the instant he was inside.

  As soon as he awoke, he smelled the odour of betrayal. He had committed adultery in his heart, and – worse – dragged his wife into his disloyal fantasy, making her an accomplice. He and Bea had always been faithful to each other; he never took advantage of the vulnerable females who passed through his ministry. He was a one-woman man and Bea was his woman. Wasn’t she?

  He lay still for a while, shielding his eyes from the sunlight with his good arm. A hangover-style headache throbbed in his temples. His tongue and lips had dried out. His injured arm felt OK – well, numb – but his shin hurt like a burn. He had no idea how long he’d slept: fifteen minutes or fifteen hours. A memory of the dream lingered, tempting him with its phantasm of love, its enchanted mirage in which all grief and hurt and estrangement was smoothed over by desire.

  Thirst pushed him to his feet. He drank greedily straight from the tap, noisy as a dog, until his stomach sloshed. The doctor had told him to go ahead and take showers, get soap and water on his wounds, but not scratch at the stitches if they got itchy; they would dissolve by themselves when their work was done. Peter unfastened and unrolled the bandages, unveiling the mended flesh. The soft white cotton was hardly stained at all, the injuries neat. He showered, towelled himself dry, carefully reapplied the bandages. He put on jeans and a faded orange T-shirt emblazoned OUTREACH TASKFORCE BASILDON. Both garments felt too big. He rummaged inside his knapsack for some socks, pulled out a small plastic bag with squishy, semi-liquid contents he couldn’t identify at first. It was the remains of a meal he’d been given by the สีฐฉั a long time ago, before he’d grown accustomed to their food: a slab of suety stuff that tasted of vinegar. Loath to offend them, he’d claimed he wasn’t hungry and would eat it later. The bag was a clammy weight in his palm, like an animal organ removed from a carcass. He looked around for somewhere conspicuous to put it so that he wouldn’t forget it again.

  On the table next to the fridge, he spotted something unfamiliar. A plastic medication bottle and a handwritten note. TAKE 2 EVERY 4 HOURS IF NEEDED. G.

  Had Grainger been here while he slept? Or had she brought these with her when she wheeled him back from the surgery? He couldn’t remember her doing anything in his room besides embracing him. But maybe she’d already dropped off the medication earlier, while he was being seen by Doctor Adkins. Forward thinking.

  He picked up the bottle, read the contents. These pills were stronger than any you could get over the counter in an English pharmacy. But the pain he felt was not in his flesh.

  He checked for new messages from Bea. There were none.

  The ghost of Bing Crosby was talking when Peter walked into the mess hall. Mucous membranes in a larynx that had once nestled in a human throat, long since dispersed into the soil of Holy Cross Cemetery in Los Angeles, had made some sounds that were captured on magnetic tape in 1945, and that tape, digitised and lovingly reconfigured, was being broadcast through the cafeteria’s public address system. The dozen or so USIC personnel scattered around the armchairs and tables were oblivious, carrying on their conversations or simply focusing on their food and drink. The disembodied voice of Judy Garland – smaller mucous membranes, vibrating more excitedly – joined Crosby’s in a rehearsed off-the-cuff routine about trying on hats, intended to epitomise the gulf between men and women. Stanko, behind the coffee bar, switched on the smoothie machine, drowning out the ancient voices under a whirr of crushed coffee-flavoured ice.

  ‘What’s good today, Stanko?’ asked Peter when his turn came.

  ‘Pancakes.’

  Bing Crosby, having interrupted the flow of Garland’s prattle, had started singing: ‘When I’ve got my arm around you and we’re going for a walk, must you yah-ta-ta, yah-ta-ta, yah-ta-ta, yah-ta-ta, talk, talk, talk . . . ’

  ‘Anything savoury?’

  Stanko lifted the lid on a metal vat, releasing a hearty smell. ‘Beef stroganoff.’

  ‘I’ll have that. And a mug of tea.’

  ‘Aristotle, mathematics, economics, antique chairs,’ warbled Bing. ‘The classics, the comics, darling, who cares?’

  Stanko handed Peter a plastic plate of richly hued, steaming food, a plastic beaker of hot water, a paper sachet of dairy powder and a tea bag with a minuscule picture of Buckingham Palace on the tag.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Peter.

  ‘Enjoy, bro.’

  ‘Looks good.’

  ‘Best stroganoff you can get,’ affirmed Stanko, deadpan. Sardonic humour? Maybe he was on the level. Right now, Peter doubted his own ability to judge.

  He walked to a free table – there was just one left – and sat down with his meal. While Bing Crosby pretended to annoy Judy Garland with chatter about golf, Peter began to eat the beef, which he knew was whiteflower that had been pounded with a stone and then dried and fried. The sauce tasted wrong – too sweet, too cloying. Fragments of young whiteflower stalk had been dyed bright orange to resemble carrot and there were blanched slivers of half-mature whiteflower leaf that were supposed to be onions. He wished USIC would ditch these faked concoctions and just eat whiteflower the way the สีฐฉั ate it. There were so many good, wholesome recipes going unused here.

  ‘When
there’s music softly playing,’ crooned Judy Garland, ‘and I’m sitting on your lap, must you yah-ta-ta, yah-ta-ta, yah-ta-ta, yah-ta-ta, yap, yap, yap . . . ’

  ‘Mind if I sit here?’ A real, living female voice in competition with a dead, long-ago one.

  He looked up. It was Hayes. He motioned her to go ahead, apprehensive that she would ask him how he was, a question he wasn’t sure he could answer without breaking down and telling the whole story. But as soon as Hayes took her seat, it became clear that she was only interested in the surface of the table, to rest a thick book on. Glancing at the pages as he ate his food, Peter identified the patterns of Sudoku, Kakuro, Hitori, Fillomino and other mathematical puzzles, neatly completed in pencil. Hayes bent over the book with an eraser clutched between her thumb and forefinger. With fastidious care, she began to rub out the pencil marks.

  ‘It’s so nice to close your lips with mine,’ cooed Bing and Judy in perfect harmony.

  Five minutes later, Peter’s plate was empty and Hayes’s iced coffee was untouched, forgotten. She was hunched over, absorbed in her task. Her mouth was slightly open, her downcast eyes had soft, luxurious lashes; she impressed Peter as prettier and more soulful than he’d previously thought. He was touched, deeply touched, deeply moved all of a sudden, by her altruistic labour.

  ‘That’s very considerate of you,’ he heard himself say.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Very community-minded.’

  She stared at him, uncomprehending.

  ‘Rubbing out the pencil marks,’ he explained, wishing he hadn’t spoken. ‘It gives other people a chance to do the puzzles.’

  She wrinkled her brow. ‘I’m not doing it for other people. I’m gonna do these puzzles again myself.’ And she returned to the work at hand.

  Peter sat back and drank his tea. Hayes’s serene focus no longer struck him as attractive. Instead, there was something creepy about it. OK, he wasn’t a puzzle man himself, so the appeal of filling in those squares was already mysterious to him, but he appreciated that it presented a pleasant challenge for other minds. But doing the same puzzle over and over . . .