The Book of Strange New Things (16 page)

‘You mean the Bible,’ he said.

‘We สีpeak never the name. Power of the book forbid. Flame give warmth . . . ’ With outstretched hands, he mimed the action of warming oneself on a fire, getting too close, and being burned.

‘But you mean the Word of God,’ said Peter. ‘The Gospel.’

‘The Goสีpel. The รี่echnique of Jeสีuสี.’

Peter nodded, but it took him a few seconds to decode the last word from its impeded passage through the Oasan’s head cleft.

‘Jesus,’ he echoed in wonder.

The Oasan reached out one hand, and, with an unmistakably tender motion, stroked Peter’s cheek with the tip of a glove. ‘We pray Jeสีuสี for your coming,’ he said.

Grainger’s failure to rejoin them was, by now, obvious. Peter glanced round and saw her leaning on the back of the vehicle, pretending to study the gadget with which she’d unlocked the trunk. In that fraction of a second before he turned back to the Oasan, he felt the full intensity of her embarrassment.

‘The book? You have the book?’ the Oasan repeated.

‘Uh . . . not on me right now,’ said Peter, chastising himself for leaving his Bible back at the base. ‘But yes, of course. Of course!’

The Oasan clapped his hands in a gesture of delight, or prayer, or both. ‘Comforรี่ and joy. Glad day. Come back สีoon, Peรี่er, oh very สีoon, สีooner than you can. Read for uสี the Book of สีรี่range New Thingสี, read and read and read unรี่il we underสีรี่and. In reward we give you . . . give you . . . ’ The Oasan trembled with the effort of finding adequate words, then threw his hands wide, as if to indicate everything under the sun.

‘Yes,’ said Peter, laying a reassuring hand on the Oasan’s shoulder. ‘Soon.’

The Oasan’s brow – the heads of the foetuses, so to speak – swelled slightly. Peter decided that this, in these miraculous new people, was a smile.

Dear Peter, wrote Beatrice.

I love you and hope you are well but I must start this letter with some very bad news.

It was like running towards an open doorway in a state of high enthusiasm and colliding with a pane of glass. He had spent the entire journey back to the base almost levitating with excitement; it was a wonder he hadn’t floated straight through the roof of Grainger’s vehicle. Dear Bea . . . God be praised . . . We ask for a small break and God gives us a miracle . . . these were some of the ways he’d thought of beginning his message to Beatrice upon returning to his room. His fingers were poised to type at delirious speed, to shoot his delight through space, mistakes and all.

There has been a terrible tragedy in the Maldives. A tidal wave. It was the height of the tourist season. The place was teeming with visitors and it’s got a population of about a third of a million. Had. You know how when disasters happen, usually the media talks about how many people are estimated to have died? In this one, they’re talking about how many people may be LEFT ALIVE. It’s one vast swamp of bodies. You see it on the news footage but you can’t take it in. All those people with individual quirks and family secrets and special ways of wearing their hair, etc, reduced to what looks like a huge bog of meat that goes on for miles.

The Maldives has (HAD . . .) lots of islands, most of them at risk of flooding, so the government had been pushing for years to get the population to relocate to the biggest, best-fortified atoll. By coincidence, there was a TV documentary crew making a film about a few islanders on one of the smaller atolls who were protesting at being rehoused. The cameras were rolling when the tsunami hit. I’ve seen clips on my phone. You cannot believe what you are seeing. One second, an American anchorperson voice is saying something about papaya groves, and the next second, a zillion tons of seawater smashes across the screen. Rescue crews saved some of the Americans, a few tourists, a few of the locals. And the cameras, of course. That sounds cynical. I think they did what they could.

Our church is considering what we can do to help. Sending people over there isn’t an option. There’s nothing we can achieve. Most of the islands are wiped off, there is nothing left except humps in the ocean. Even the biggest islands are probably never going to recover. All the fresh water has been fouled. There is not one fully intact, usable building. There is nowhere safe to land, nowhere to set up a hospital, no way of burying the dead. Helicopters are buzzing around like seagulls over an oilspill full of dead fish. At this stage, all we can do is pray for the relatives of Maldivans everywhere. And maybe, in time, there’ll be refugees.

I’m sorry to start this way. You can imagine my head and heart are full of it. It doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking of you.

Peter leaned back in his chair, lifted his face to the ceiling. The electric light was still on, superfluous now that the sunshine was beaming in, almost too bright to bear. He shivered, feeling the dampness in his clothes turning chilly in the air conditioning. He felt grief for the people of the Maldives, but, to his shame, the grief was mingled with a purely selfish pang: the sense that he and Beatrice, for the first time since the beginning of their relationship, were not going through the same things together. In the past, whatever happened would happen to them both, like a power blackout or a late-night visit from a distressed friend or a rattling window-frame while they were trying to sleep. Or like sex.

I miss you, wrote Beatrice. This Maldives thing wouldn’t have upset me so much if you’d been here. Tell me more about your mission. Is it horrendously difficult? Remember that unexpected breakthroughs often come directly after everything has seemed impossible. The ones who insist they don’t want or need God are the ones who want and need Him most.

Joshua is still playing his tricks. I’m seriously considering slipping him a Mickey Finn in his evening milk. Or hitting him on the head with a mallet when he wakes me up yet again at 4 AM. Alternatively, maybe I should make a life-size dummy of you to lie next to me in the bed. That might fool him. Sadly, it wouldn’t fool me.

The Mirah situation is under control now. I got together with a Muslim social worker, Khadija, who liaises with the imam at Mirah’s local mosque. Basically we’re trying to sell it to the imam as a human decency issue (the husband’s violence/lack of respect) rather than a religion vs religion issue. It’s hardcore diplomacy, as you can imagine, like brokering a peace deal between Syria and the USA. But Khadija is brilliant.

I got a message from USIC saying you’re fine. How would they know? I suppose they mean they can verify you didn’t get vaporised. The message was sent by Alex Grainger. Have you met him? Tell him he can’t spell ‘liaise’. Or maybe there’s a simplified American way of spelling it now? Bitch, bitch, bitch. But I’ve been tolerant all day, honest! (Very difficult new patient on the ward. Supposedly transferred down from Psych for medical reasons but I think they were just desperate to get rid of her.) Anyway, I feel like being outrageously unfair to someone for just three minutes, to let it rip. I won’t, of course. I’ll be very nice, even to Joshua when he wakes me up AGAIN in the small hours.

Seriously, I’m missing you terribly. Wish I could spend just a few minutes in your arms. (OK, maybe an hour.) Weather is better, lovely sunshine today, but it’s not cheering me up. Went to the supermarket for some comfort food (chocolate mousse, tiramisu, you know the sort of thing). Turns out lots of other people had the same idea. Everything I wanted was out of stock, a blank space on the shelf. Settled for one of those rollette things with the fake cream inside.

Head full of Maldives tragedy, stomach full of dessert. What fortunate people we are in our Western playground . . . We watch the footage of foreign dead on video clips and then mosey out to the supermarket in search of our favourite treats. Of course when I say ‘we’, I can’t speak for you right now. You are far from all of this. Far from me.

Ignore this self-pitying prattle, I’ll be fine by tomorrow. Let me know how you’re going. I’m so proud of you.

Kisses, hugs (I wish!)

Beatrice

PS: Want a cat?

My dear Bea, he wrote back.

I hardly know what to say. How dreadful about the Maldives. The scale of such a tragedy is, as you say, almost impossible to imagine. I’ll pray for them.

Those sentences, short as they were, took him a long while to write. A full three to five minutes for each. He racked his brains for an additional sentence that would make a dignified transition from the disaster to his own glad tidings. Nothing came.

I have had my first meeting with an Oasan native, he went on, trusting that Bea would understand. Contrary to my wildest hopes they are hungry for Christ. They know of the Bible. I didn’t have mine with me at the time – that’ll teach me never to go anywhere without it! I don’t know why I left it behind. I suppose I assumed that the first visit would be basically reconnaissance, and that the response would be negative. But as Jesus says in John 4,’ Say not ye, There are yet four months before the harvest; behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes and look upon the fields, for they are ripe already!’

The settlement is not at all what I expected. There is no evidence of industrialisation, it could be the Middle East in the middle ages (with different architecture, of course). No electricity, apparently! It’s also in the middle of nowhere, a long, long way from the USIC base. I don’t think it will be feasible for me to live here and travel there on a regular basis. I will have to go and live with the Oasans. And as soon as possible. I haven’t discussed any of the practicalities. (Yes, yes, I know . . . I really need you with me. But God is well aware that I’m clueless in that area.) I’ll have to trust that everything will fall into place. There seems plenty of reason to hope that it will!

The Oasans – assuming the one I met was typical – are average height and look remarkably like us, except for their faces which are a gruesome sort of jumble, impossible to describe really, like foetuses. You don’t know what to look at when you’re talking to them. They speak English with a strong accent. Well, the one I met did. Maybe he’s the only one who speaks any English, and my original assumption – that I would spend several months learning the language before I made any headway – will still be borne out. But I have a feeling that God has been at work here already, more than I dared imagine.

Anyway, I’m going straight back there as soon as I can. I was going to say ‘tomorrow’, but with the periods of daylight being several ‘days’ long here, the word ‘tomorrow’ is a problem. I must find out what the USIC personnel do to get round that one. I’m sure they have a solution. I’ll ask Grainger during the drive, if I remember. My mind’s a bit over-excited, as you can imagine! I’m just raring to go back to that settlement, take my place amongst these extraordinary people and satisfy their thirst for the Gospel.

What a privilege to

He stopped typing, midway through ‘What a privilege to serve the Lord’. He had remembered the Maldives, or, more to the point, he’d become aware that he’d forgotten all about them in his enthusiasm. Bea’s uneasy, almost anxious mood – so unlike her! – was at odds with his exuberance, like a funeral dirge interrupted by the cheery hootings of a passing carnival. Re-reading the opening line of his letter, he could see that his acknowledgement of her distress was pretty cursory. In normal circumstances, he would have embraced her; the pressure of his arms against her back and the nudge of his cheek against her hair would have said it all. But now, the written word was all he had.

He considered elaborating on how he felt about the Maldives. But he didn’t feel much, at least not about the Maldives themselves. His feelings were largely regret – disappointment, even – that the tragedy had affected Beatrice so badly, just when he wanted her to be happy and all right and getting on with things as usual and receptive to his wonderful news about the Oasans.

His stomach gurgled loudly. He hadn’t eaten since the drive back from the settlement, when he and Grainger had nibbled at the dried-out remainder of the raisin bread. (‘Five bucks a slice,’ she’d remarked ruefully. He hadn’t asked who was footing the bill.) As if by mutual agreement, they had not discussed the Oasan’s extraordinary response to Peter. Instead, Grainger explained various routine procedures relating to laundry, electric appliances, availability of vehicles, canteen etiquette. She was irritable, insisting that she’d briefed him on these things before, when she first escorted him off the ship. The forgiveness joke didn’t work a third time.

Peter stood up and walked to the window. The sun – egg-yellow and hazy-edged at this time of day – was clearly visible from his quarters, right in the middle of the sky. It was four or five times bigger than the sun he’d grown up with, and it cast a rim of golden light along the contours of the airport compound’s drab buildings. Puddles of rainwater, left by last night’s deluge, had been evaporating steadily since then. The vapours twirled and danced as they flew off the ground and past the rooftops into oblivion, as if the puddles were blowing sophisticated smoke rings.

The air conditioning in his room was unnecessarily cool. He found that if he stepped closer to the window, almost pressing his body against it, the warmth from outside radiated through the glass and permeated his clothing. He would have to ask Grainger about adjusting the air-con; it was one of the points they hadn’t covered.

Back at the message screen, he finished typing serve the Lord and started a fresh paragraph.

Even in my joy at this wonderful opportunity that God has laid before me, I feel an ache of grief that I can’t hold you and comfort you. I only realised today that this is the first time you & I have been apart for longer than a couple of nights. Couldn’t I have gone on a mini-mission to Manchester or Cardiff first, as a practice exercise, before coming all the way here?

I think you would find Oasis as beautiful as I do. The sun is huge and yellow. The air swirls around constantly and slips in and out of your clothes. That may sound unpleasant, I know, but you get used to it. The water is green and my urine comes out orange. I’m doing a great job of selling the place to you, aren’t I? I should have taken a course in novel-writing before I volunteered for this. I should have insisted to USIC that we went together or I didn’t go at all.