The Book of Strange New Things (25 page)

The whole process of constructing a house was absurdly simple here, yet effective. The mortar-vat, primitive as a cauldron and stirred by hand, was typical of the level of sophistication. In the church walls as they took shape, there was no skeletal infrastructure: no metal stanchions, no wooden framework. The lozenge-shaped bricks were simply glued to the foundations and then fastened one to the other, layer upon layer. It seemed a dangerously simpleminded way to construct a building.

‘What if there’s a storm?’ he’d asked Jesus Lover One.

‘สีรี่orm?’ The upper parts of the cleft in Lover One’s face – the foreheads of the babies, so to speak – contorted gently.

‘What if a very great wind comes? Will it blow the church to the ground?’ Peter puffed hard and loud through his lips, waved his hands, and mimed the collapse of a building.

Lover One’s grotesque face contorted a little further, into a shape that might signal amusement, or bemusement, or perhaps meant nothing. ‘Bond break never,’ he said. ‘Bond สีรี่rong, oh very สีรี่rong. Wind like . . . ’ He reached out and stroked Peter’s hair, barely ruffling it, to show how ineffectual the wind was.

The reassurance was no less childlike than the construction method, but Peter decided to trust that the Oasans knew what they were doing. Their settlement, while not exactly impressive architecturally, seemed stable enough. And he had to admit that the mortar which bound the bricks was amazingly strong. When freshly spread, it looked like maple syrup, but within an hour it was hard as amber, and the join was unbreakable.

There was no scaffolding employed in the construction of this church, no ladders, nothing made of wood or metal. Instead, access to the higher reaches of the walls was provided by a method that was at once grossly cumbersome and beautifully practical. Large carved blocks of hardened moss – the same material as was used for the Oasans’ beds – were assembled into staircases, stacked against the outside of the building. Each staircase was about two metres wide and as high as it needed to be; additional steps could be affixed as the level of the bricklaying moved higher off the ground. Over the last few days, the staircases had grown in scale until they were twice Peter’s height, but despite their bulk they were obviously temporary, a building tool that was no more a part of the final conception than a ladder would have been. They were even portable – just. They could be shifted sideways if everyone pitched in. Peter had helped to shift a staircase several times, and although he couldn’t confidently estimate how much it weighed because of the communal musclepower pushing against it, he didn’t think it was heavier than, say, a refrigerator.

The utter simplicity of the technology charmed him. Granted, it wouldn’t be adequate to the task of building a skyscraper or a cathedral, unless the surrounding area could accommodate a staircase the size of a football stadium. But for building a modest little church, it was blindingly sensible. The Oasans would simply walk up the steps, each carrying a single brick. They would pause at the summit of their makeshift staircase and cast their eyes (or eye, or viewing cleft, or whatever) over the wall’s top layer, surveying it as a concert pianist might contemplate his keyboard. Then they would glue the next brick in its correct spot, and walk down the steps again.

By any standards, the work method was labour-intensive. There were perhaps forty Oasans on site at the busiest time of day, and Peter had the impression that there would have been even more were it not for the risk of getting in each other’s way. The work was conducted in an orderly fashion, unhurriedly, but without pause – until each Oasan reached what was evidently his (or her?) limit, and went home for a while. They worked in silence mostly, conferring only when there was some new challenge to master, some risk of getting something wrong. He could not tell if they were happy. It was his fervent intention to get to know them well enough to know if they were happy.

Were they happy when they sang? You would think that if singing was torture for them, they wouldn’t do it. As their pastor, he certainly hadn’t expected them to greet him with a massed chorus of ‘Amazing Grace’, and they could easily have arranged some other gesture of welcome. Maybe they needed a channel for their joy.

Happiness was such an elusive thing to spot: it was like a camouflaged moth that might or might not be hidden in the forest in front of you, or might have flown away. A young woman, newly in Christ, had said to him once, ‘If you could’ve seen me a year ago, going out on the piss with my mates, we was so happy, we was laughing our heads off, we never stopped laughing, people was turning their heads to see what’s so funny, wishing they could be having as good a time as us, we was flying, I was on top of the world, and all the time underneath I was thinking, God help me, I am so fucking lonely, I am so fucking sad, I wish I was dead, I cannot stand this life one minute longer, you know what I mean?’ And then there was Ian Dewar, ranting about his time in the military, complaining about the cheapskates and the beancounters who’d robbed the troops of essential supplies, ‘buy your own binoculars, mate, here’s one flak jacket for every two guys, and if you get your foot blown off take two of these wee tablets ’cause we’ve not got any morphine for you.’ Fifteen minutes into one of these rants, mindful that there were other people patiently waiting to speak to him, Peter had interrupted: ‘Ian, forgive me, but you don’t need to keep revisiting this stuff. God was there. He was there with you. He saw it happen. He saw everything.’ And Ian had broken down and sobbed and said he knew that, he knew that, and that’s why underneath it all, underneath the complaining and the anger, he was happy, truly happy.

And then there was Beatrice, on the day when he proposed to her, a day on which every conceivable thing had gone wrong. He’d proposed at 10.30 in the morning, in sweltering heat, as they stood at an automatic teller machine in the high street, preparing to do some grocery shopping at the supermarket. Maybe he should have gone down on one knee, because her ‘Yes, let’s’ had sounded hesitant and unromantic, as though she regarded his proposal as nothing more than a pragmatic solution to the inconvenience of high rents. Then the teller machine had swallowed her debit card and she’d had to go into the bank to sort it out, which involved a meeting with the manager and a lamentable episode in which she was grilled for half an hour as if she was an imposter trying to defraud another Beatrice whose card she had stolen. This humiliation ended with Bea cancelling her relationship with the bank in a righteous fury. They’d gone shopping then, but were able to afford barely half the things on their list, and, when they emerged into the car park, they found that a vandal had scratched a crude swastika into the paintwork of their car. If it had been anything other than a swastika – a cartoon penis, a swear word,
anything
– they would probably have just lived with it, but
this
they had no choice but to get fixed, and it would cost them a fortune.

And so the day went on: Bea’s phone ran out of battery and died, the first garage they drove to was shut, the second garage was booked up solid and not interested, a banana they tried to eat for lunch was rotten inside, a perished strap on Bea’s shoe snapped, forcing her to limp, the car’s engine started making a mysterious noise, a third garage gave them the bad news about what a new coat of enamel would cost, as well as pointing out that their exhaust was corroded. In the end it took them so long to get back to Bea’s flat that the expensive lamb chops they’d bought had discoloured badly in the heat. That, for Peter, was the final straw. Rage sped through his nervous system; he seized the tray and was about to throw it into the rubbish bin, throw it with wildly excessive force, to punish the meat for being so vulnerable to decay. But it wasn’t him who’d paid for it and he managed – just – to control himself. He put the groceries away in the fridge, splashed some water on his face and went in search of Bea.

He found her on the balcony, gazing down at the brick wall that surrounded her block of flats, a wall crowned with barbed wire and spikes of broken glass. Her cheeks were wet.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

She fumbled for his hand, and their fingers interlocked.

‘I’m crying because I’m happy,’ she explained, as the sun allowed itself to be veiled in clouds, the air grew milder and a gentle breeze stroked their hair. ‘This is the happiest day of my life.’

11

He realised for the first time that she was beautiful, too

‘God bleสี our reunion, Father Peรี่er,’ a voice called to him.

Dazzled by the light, he turned clumsily, almost falling out of the hammock. The approaching Oasan was a silhouette against the rising sun. All Peter knew was that the voice was not Jesus Lover Fifty-Four’s, the only voice he could put a name to without additional clues.

‘Good morning,’ he responded. The ‘God bless our reunion’ had meant no more than that. Oasans invoked the blessing of God for everything, which either meant they understood the notion of blessedness better than most Christians, or not at all.

‘I come รี่o build our ฐurฐ again.’

Two weeks in these people’s midst had sharpened Peter’s ear; he immediately understood that ‘ฐurฐ’ was ‘church’. He mulled over the voice, matched it with the canary-yellow robe.

‘Jesus Lover Five?’

‘Yeสี.’

‘Thank you for coming.’

‘For God I will do whaรี่ever he wiสีheสี, any thing, any รี่ime.’

Even as he was listening to Lover Five speak, Peter wondered what it was that made this voice different from, say, Lover Fifty-Four’s. Not the
sound
of it, that was for sure. The marvellous variety of voices he was accustomed to back home – or even at the USIC base – was non-existent among the Oasans. There were no sonorous baritones here, no squeaky sopranos, husky altos, nervous tenors. No shades of brightness or dullness, shyness or aggression,
sang-froid
or seductiveness, arrogance or humility, breeziness or sorrow. Maybe, in his clueless foreignness, he was missing the nuances, but he was pretty sure he wasn’t. It was like expecting one seagull or blackbird or pigeon to squawk differently from the others of its kind. They just weren’t designed to.

What the Oasans
could
do was deploy language in distinctive ways. Jesus Lover Fifty-Four, for example, was ingenious in avoiding words he couldn’t pronounce, always managing to come up with a sibilant-free alternative. These evasions (‘lay-a-bed’ for ‘sleep’, ‘give knowledge’ for ‘teach’, and so forth) made his speech eccentric but fluent, promoting the illusion that he was at ease with the alien tongue. By contrast, Jesus Lover Five didn’t bother with avoidance; she just tried to speak conventional English and if there were lots of ‘t’s and ‘s’s in the words she needed, well, too bad. Then again, she made less effort to speak clearly than some of the other Oasans – her shoulders didn’t contort as much when she was coughing up a consonant – and this made her more difficult to understand, sometimes.

Her, her, her. Why did he think of her as female? Was it just the canary-yellow robe? Or did he actually sense something, on a level too instinctive to analyse?

‘There’s not much we can do until the others arrive,’ he said, lowering himself out of the hammock. ‘You could have slept longer.’

‘I wake in fear. Fear you will be gone.’

‘Gone?’

‘UสีIC will come รี่oday,’ she reminded him. ‘รี่ake you home.’

‘The USIC base is not my home,’ he said, fastening his sandals. Squatting to do so, he was almost head-to-head with Jesus Lover Five. She was small for an adult. If she was an adult. Maybe she was a child – no, she couldn’t be. Maybe she was incredibly old. He just didn’t know. He knew that she was forthright, even by the standards of Oasans; that she could only work for twenty or thirty minutes at a time before wandering off; and that she was related to someone who was not a Jesus Lover, which caused her sadness, or something he interpreted as sadness. Actually, he couldn’t even swear that this non-believer was a blood relative of hers; maybe it was a friend. And the sadness thing was kind of a hunch on his part; Oasans didn’t weep or sigh or cover their faces with their hands, so she must have said something to make him come to that conclusion.

He tried to recall other things about Jesus Lover Five, but couldn’t. The human brain was like that, unfortunately: it sifted intimacies and perceptions, allowed them to trickle through the sieve of memory, until only a token few remained, perhaps not even the most significant ones.

He really must write more things down, next time.

‘UสีIC will รี่ake you,’ Jesus Lover Five repeated. ‘I fear you will noรี่ reรี่urn.’

He walked to a gap in the wall that would eventually be a door, passed through it, and stood in the shade of his church, to relieve himself on the ground. His pee was a darker orange than before, making him wonder if he was drinking too little. The Oasans drank sparingly and he’d learned to do the same. One long swig of his plastic bottle first thing upon waking, a few swigs at measured intervals throughout the working day, and that was it. The Oasans refilled his bottle without fuss whenever it ran low, walking all the way back to the settlement with it and back again, but he didn’t want to cause them undue bother.

They’d taken superb care of him, really. An intensely private people, who spent the bulk of their time quietly conversing with close friends and family inside their homes, they had nevertheless welcomed him with open arms. Metaphorically speaking. They were not what you’d call touchy-feely. But their goodwill towards him was unmistakable. At intervals throughout each day, as he worked on the church site, he would glimpse someone walking across the scrubland, bearing a gift. A plate of fried globs resembling samosas, a tumbler of lukewarm savoury gloop, a hunk of something crumbly and sweet. His fellow workers seldom ate on site, preferring to take formal meals at home; occasionally someone might pick a few blossoms of whiteflower straight off the ground, if they were newly sprouted and juicy. But the cooked treats, the little offerings, were for him alone. He accepted them with unfeigned gratitude, because he was hungry all the time.