The Book of Strange New Things

  Grainger raked her fingers through her clammy hair: an irritable gesture. ‘So . . . Peter . . . Let me remind you what a turkey is. It’s a bird. It’s got a kind of dangle of flesh hanging off of its beak, looks like a big trail of snot or . . . uh . . . a condom. Its head is red with little bumps on it, like lizard skin, and its head and neck are in an S-shape, and they go like this . . . ’ With her own head and neck she acted out the ungainly motion of the bird. ‘And then this scrawny, snake-like head and neck are attached to this oversized, fat, fluffy grey body.’ She looked Peter in the eyes. ‘Ring any bells?’

  ‘Yes, you’ve . . . uh . . . brought it back to life for me.’

  Satisfied, she allowed herself to relax. ‘That’s it. That’s what we’ve got to do. Keep the memories alive.’ She arranged her body more comfortably on the ground, stretching out as if sunbathing, using the tote bag as a pillow. A brilliant-green insect settled on her shoulder and began to flex its hindquarters. She seemed unaware of it. Peter considered brushing it away, but let it be.

  A voice in his head said: You are going to die here, in this wilderness. You will never see Beatrice again. This flat terrain, these sparse clumps of whiteflower, this alien sky, these insects waiting to lay eggs in your flesh, this woman at your side: they are the contents of your life in its final days and hours. The voice spoke clearly, without accent or gender: he’d heard it many times before, and always been certain it was not his own. As a child, he’d thought it was the voice of conscience; as a Christian, he’d trusted it was the voice of God. Whatever it was, it had always told him exactly what he needed to be told.

  ‘What’s your earliest memory?’ Grainger asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, after giving it thought. ‘My mum strapping me into a special plastic child seat at a Turkish restaurant, maybe. It’s hard to know what’s a real memory and what’s something you construct afterwards from old photos and family stories.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be like that,’ she said, in the same tone she might have used if he’d declared that love was merely a meeting of sperm and ovum. ‘Tuska’s big on that idea. No such thing as childhood memories, he says. We’re just playing games with our neurons every day, tossing them around the hippocampus, constructing little fairy tales featuring characters named after people we used to live with. “Your dad is just a flurry of molecular activity in your frontal lobe,” he’ll tell you, grinning that smug grin of his. Asshole.’

  She held out her hand. Peter wasn’t sure what she wanted him to do. Then he handed her the water bottle. She drank some. There wasn’t much left.

  ‘My dad,’ she continued, ‘used to smell of gunpowder. We lived on a farm, in Illinois. He was always shooting rabbits. They were just bugs to him, big furry bugs. I’d ride around on my bicycle, and there’d be dead rabbits everywhere. Then later he’d sweep me up in his arms and I’d smell the gunpowder on his shirt.’

  ‘A very . . . uh . . . mixed-emotion sort of memory,’ said Peter carefully.

  ‘It’s a real memory, that’s the important thing. The farm was real, the dead rabbits were real, the smell on my father’s shirt was gunpowder and not tobacco or paint or aftershave. I know, I was there.’ She spoke defiantly, as if doubt had been cast on whether she was there, as if there was a conspiracy among the USIC personnel to reinvent her as a city kid from Los Angeles, the daughter of a Ukrainian dentist, a German Chinese. Two more insects had settled on her, one on her hair, the other on her bosom. She paid them no mind.

  ‘What happened to your farm?’ asked Peter, for politeness’ sake, when it became evident that the conversation had stalled.

  ‘Get the fuck out of my face!’ she exclaimed, clapping her hands to her eyes.

  He jerked back, prepared to apologise profusely for whatever he’d said to enrage her, but she wasn’t addressing him. She wasn’t even addressing the insects. With a cry of disgust, she cast a glittering shred first from one eye, then the other. Her contact lenses.

  ‘The damn air,’ she said. ‘It was trying to get under my contacts, lifting them up at the edges. Creeped me out.’ She blinked. One discarded hydrogel petal was stuck to her shoe, the other lay on the soil. ‘I shouldn’t have done that; my eyesight is not good. You might end up leading me along. Where were we?’

  With effort, Peter retrieved the thread of the narrative. ‘You were going to tell me what happened to the farm.’

  She rubbed her eyes, experimented with looking out of them. ‘We went broke,’ she said. ‘The farm got sold and we moved to Decatur. We were in Bethany before, we weren’t that far out, but we got ourselves a maisonette in the city, right near the Sangamon River. Well, not like walking distance or anything. But a short drive.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ said Peter. He realised, with a deep pang of melancholy, that he was not in the least interested. So much for being a people person . . . If he survived, if he got back to civilisation, his career as a minister was over. The minutiae of human beings’ lives – the places they’d lived, the names of their relatives, the names of the rivers they’d lived near, the mundane complexities of the jobs they’d done and the domestic squabbles they’d endured – had ceased to have any meaning for him.

  ‘Decatur is kind of a boring place now,’ reflected Grainger. ‘But it’s got some pretty amazing history. It used to be called the Soybean Capital of the World. You’ve heard of Abraham Lincoln?’

  ‘Of course. Most famous of all American presidents.’

  She exhaled gratefully, as if they had struck a blow against ignorance together, as if they were the only two educated people in a colony of philistines. ‘Lincoln lived in Decatur, way back in the 1700s or whenever. He was a lawyer then. He became president later. There’s a statue of him with his bare foot on a stump. I sat on that stump when I was a little girl. I didn’t think it was disrespectful or anything; I was just tired.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ said Peter. Insects were settling on him now, too. In a week or so – maybe in a few days – the two of them would be seedbeds. Maybe, when the time came for them to breathe their last, they should be lying in each other’s arms.

  ‘I loved what you said at the funeral,’ she said.

  ‘The funeral?’

  ‘Severin’s funeral. You made him so real. And I didn’t even like him.’

  Peter struggled to recall what he’d said about Severin; struggled to recall Severin at all. ‘I had no idea you were impressed.’

  ‘It was beautiful.’ She basked in the afterglow of his compassion for a few seconds. Then her brow wrinkled. ‘Too beautiful for those . . . dickwads, that’s for sure. There was a meeting about it afterwards, and everyone agreed you’d overstepped a line, and if there were any more deaths of USIC personnel in the future, it would be best to keep you out of it.’ The insects were venturing back now. A lustrous jade one settled directly on her forehead. She was oblivious. ‘I defended you,’ she said, staring up at the sky.

  ‘Thank you.’

  Resting on one elbow, he gazed at her. Her bosom rose and fell with her breath, just two lumps of fatty tissue on a ribcage, two milkbags designed to feed children she would never have. Yet to him that bosom was intoxicatingly lovely, an aesthetic marvel, and the rhythmic swell of it made him desire her. Everything about her was miraculous: the downy hair behind her ear, the symmetry of her collarbones, her soft flushed lips, even the puckered scars on her arms. She wasn’t his soulmate: he had no illusions about that. The intimacies he had once shared with Bea were impossible with her; she would quickly find him ridiculous, and he would find her too much trouble. In fact, like most men and women who had made love since the beginning of time, they had almost nothing in common. Except that they were male and female, thrown together by circumstances, and, for the moment at least, alive. He lifted his hand, held it in space, prepared to settle his palm, gently, on her breast.

  ‘Tell me about your wife.’ Grainger’s eyes were closed now. She was tired, torpid in the heat, and a little drunk on the liquor of reminiscenc
e.

  ‘She’s turned against me,’ Peter said, withdrawing his hand. ‘We’ve grown apart.’ Although he intended merely to state facts, his words sounded peevish, craven, the clichéd complaining of the typical adulterer. He could do better than this. ‘She’s been having a horrific time back home, everything is falling apart, all sorts of disasters, and she . . . she’s lost her faith in God. Our cat Joshua got killed, tortured, and I think it pushed her over the edge. She’s scared and lonely. I haven’t been giving her the support she needs.’

  Grainger shifted the orientation of her body, for comfort. One arm cradled her head, the other draped across her chest. She didn’t open her eyes. ‘You’re not telling me about Bea,’ she said. ‘You’re telling me what’s going on between you. Tell me about her. What she looks like. The colour of her eyes. Her childhood and stuff.’

  He lay down next to her, rested his head on his arms. ‘Her name is Beatrice. She’s a few years older than me, thirty-six. She doesn’t mind people knowing her age. She’s the most . . . un-vain woman I’ve ever known. I don’t mean in terms of appearance. She’s beautiful and she dresses with style. But she doesn’t care what other people think. She has pride in herself. Not a puffed-up pride, just . . . self-esteem. That’s so rare. Incredibly rare. Most people are the walking wounded, you know. And Bea really ought to be, with the childhood she had. Her father was abusive, a total control freak. He burnt everything she had several times, all her possessions, I mean everything, not just toys and books and special things, but everything. She remembers going to Tesco’s, a supermarket in the industrial park that was open all night, with her mother. It was about two o’clock in the morning, Bea was maybe nine years old, and she was in her pyjamas, she was barefoot and her feet were blue, because it was January and snowing and she’d had to walk from the car to the store. And her mother took her to the girlswear section and bought her pants, socks, T-shirts, shoes, trousers, the lot. That happened more than once.’

  ‘Wow,’ said Grainger, without any perceptible awe. Peter guessed she was comparing Bea’s formative sufferings to her own and judging them to be no big deal. That’s what people, unless they were สีฐฉั, tended to do.

  ‘What does she look like?’ Grainger said. ‘Describe her to me.’

  ‘She has brown hair,’ said Peter. ‘Auburn.’ It was a struggle to conjure up a vision of Bea’s hair as it really was; maybe he was just recalling mentioning its colour in other conversations. ‘She’s tall, almost as tall as me. Brown eyes, slim.’ These details were generic, unevocative; they would fit a million women. But what was he to do? Describe the mole under her left nipple? The precise shape of her navel? ‘She’s very fit, she’s a nurse. We met at the hospital where she worked. I’d broken my ankles jumping off a ledge.’

  ‘Ow. Were you trying to commit suicide?’

  ‘No, I was trying to escape from the police. I was a drug addict then; I did a lot of burglaries. That day, my luck ran out. Or I should say, I got lucky.’

  Grainger grunted agreement. ‘She lost her job over you?’

  ‘How did you know that?’ He’d never shared this with her, he was pretty sure.

  ‘Just a guess. Nurse gets involved with patient. Who’s a drug addict. And a criminal. It doesn’t look good. Did you ever go to jail?’

  ‘Not really. Detention in police cells, a fortnight once when I was awaiting trial and nobody would bail me out, that was about it.’ Only now did it strike him that he’d been shown extraordinary leniency.

  ‘Figures,’ said Grainger, in an odd, philosophical tone.

  ‘Why does it figure?’

  ‘You’re a lucky guy, Peter. One of life’s charmed creatures.’

  For some reason, this stung him. He wanted her to know he had suffered just as much as anyone.

  ‘I was homeless for a few years. I got beaten up.’ He hoped he was speaking with quiet dignity, rather than whining, but he suspected not.

  ‘All part of life’s adventure, right?’ said Grainger. There was no sarcasm in her voice, just a weary, tolerant sadness.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  She sighed. ‘Some people go through heavy stuff. They fight in wars. They’re in jail. They start a business and it gets shut down by gangsters. They end up hustling their ass in a foreign country. It’s one long list of setbacks and humiliations. But it doesn’t touch them, not really. They’re having an adventure. It’s like: What’s next? And then there’s other people who are just trying to live quietly, they stay out of trouble, they’re maybe ten years old, or fourteen, and one Friday morning at 9.35 something happens to them, something private, something that breaks their heart. For ever.’

  He lay silent, absorbing what she’d said.

  ‘I felt that way,’ he said at last, ‘when Bea told me it was over.’

  It began to rain again. Without shelter, they had no choice but to lie where they were and get soaked. Grainger just closed her eyes. Peter watched her bra materialising again under her tunic, watched the contours of her breasts take shape. She hitched the sleeves off her arms, let the old injuries breathe. Each time he’d spent time with Grainger he’d wondered if a natural opportunity would arise to ask her about her self-harm. There would never be a better time than now. He tried to frame the question, but none of the obvious words – the whys and whens – would move from his brain to his tongue. He realised that he no longer wanted to know what caused those scars. Grainger’s pain was in the past and there was no point revisiting it. Here, today, lying by his side, she was a woman with faint ridges on her arms: if he stroked her flesh gently, he would feel them. That was all.

  When the shower had moved on and the sun was warming them again, Grainger said: ‘Did you get married in a church or an office?’

  ‘A church.’

  ‘Was it a big, fancy wedding?’

  ‘Not so much. No parents or family members on either side, for various reasons. A few people from Bea’s own church, which became my church in the end.’ In truth, he remembered nothing much about the event, but he remembered the light beaming through the windows, the way a grey November afternoon had been unexpectedly transformed by a sunburst. ‘It was nice. I think everyone had a good time. And there was loads of alcohol and I didn’t drink, I wasn’t even tempted. Which was quite an achievement for me because, you know . . . I’m an alcoholic.’

  ‘Me too,’ she said.

  ‘It never leaves you,’ he said.

  She smiled. ‘Like God, huh? More loyal than God.’

  They lay quietly for a while. Two small insects of the same species found each other on Grainger’s abdomen and started mating.

  ‘I bet Ella Reinman is a secret lush,’ she said.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘A lush. American word for alcoholic. I thought you’d know that one.’

  ‘Never too late for vocabulary building,’ he said.

  ‘She thinks she’s so damn smart,’ bitched Grainger. ‘Thinks she can look right inside you and tell if you’re ever gonna drink again. Well, she got it wrong with us, didn’t she?’

  Peter was silent. Nothing would be gained by telling her that the booze she’d smelled on him when she dragged him out of Tartaglione’s den was all spillage. Let her think they’d fallen off the wagon together. Let her think he’d broken his sacred promise, let her think he’d lost his last shred of dignity. It was kinder that way.

  ‘I was a different person when I did that interview,’ she said. ‘It was a million years ago. People change.’

  ‘Yes, people change.’

  The insects were finished, and flew off.

  ‘Tell me about your wife’s wedding dress,’ said Grainger.

  ‘It was white,’ he replied. ‘It was exactly what you imagine a wedding dress to be, conventional, nothing unusual about it. Except that it was a huge symbolic statement. The whiteness of it. Bea had a terrible past, sexually. She was . . . let’s just say she was used and abused. And she refused to be destroyed by it.’
>
  Grainger scratched at her arms. The repeated drenchings had activated an allergy in the scars. ‘Not so much of the symbolism. Tell me more about the dress.’

  He cast his mind back. He cast it across the galaxy, aiming for the bedroom of his home in England.

  ‘It . . . it didn’t have a huge flouncy train behind it,’ he said. ‘It was a proper dress, a dress to move around in. It had puff shoulders, not balloony, just elegant, and then it was tight on the arms, with a brocade kind of texture, right down to the wrists. There was brocade on the . . . uh . . . abdomen as well, and on the collar, but the bosom was smooth and silky. The skirt was ankle-length, it didn’t touch the floor.’

  Grainger was nodding, humming. She was getting what she wanted.

  ‘One of the amazing things about Bea,’ said Peter, ‘is that she wore that dress many times afterwards. At home. Just for us.’

  ‘That’s so romantic.’ There were tears in Grainger’s eyes.

  Peter felt suddenly disconsolate. The memory of Bea’s bitter disappointment with him was more recent than these fond memories he was sharing with Grainger. ‘I suppose it’s just a story I’m telling myself, like Tuska says,’ he said. ‘An old story. Life has moved on. Bea is a different person. You know, not long ago, I wrote to her about the dress, about how much I loved her in it, and she . . . she said I was just being sentimental, focusing on a memory of who she used to be, not who she is now.’