The Book of Strange New Things (38 page)

He knew his revulsion was irrational, as the food would no doubt be delicious and probably very good for him too. Moreover he was aware that every country had its culinary challenges which provoked disgust in squeamish foreigners – the Japanese with their giant fish eyeballs and cod semen and still-squirming octopus, the Africans with their goat heads, the Chinese with their bird’s nest soup that was really saliva, and so on. If he’d been ministering in any of these places, chances were he’d be honoured with one of these specialties. Wasn’t there even an Italian cheese that was rotten and maggot-infested? Casu marzu, it was called. (Amazing how he could retrieve that term, which he probably read just once in a magazine years ago, when only yesterday he’d blanked on the name of the street where he lived.)

Of course, he’d never had to eat any of these outlandish substances. All of his ministries, until now, had been in England. The most exotic thing he’d ever been served, at an outreach convention in Bradford, had been caviar, and his problem hadn’t been the fish eggs themselves, but the money that the organisers had channelled into the catering when they were supposed to be raising funds for the city’s homeless.

Anyway: this wasn’t about maggots
per se
. It was about the vivid memory of Jesus Lover One’s mother, and the unerasable, emotionally charged connection between her and the maggots that had fed on her. His mind boggled at how her own son could bear to eat a foodstuff that had been produced in this way.

To this question, as with so many others, God organised a very specific and enlightening answer. Jesus Lover One showed up at the church one evening, carrying a hamper of food. Wordlessly he unpacked it in front of Peter as they sat down together on the bed behind the pulpit. The food smelled wholesome and was still warm. It was whiteflower soup in its mushroom guise, and several hunks of whiteflower bread with brown crusts and pale insides, fresh from the oven.

‘I’m glad it’s whiteflower,’ Peter said, deciding to be totally frank. ‘I was worried you would bring me something made from . . . the creatures you harvested from your mother’s body. I don’t think I could eat that.’

Lover One nodded. ‘I alสีo. Other can. Noรี่ I.’

Peter absorbed the words, but couldn’t interpret their meaning. Maybe Lover One was informing him of the etiquette governing this particular ritual. Or was it an openhearted disclosure?
Tell me more
, he thought, but he knew from experience that keeping silent in the hope that an Oasan would fill the silence didn’t work.

‘It’s a very good and . . . admirable idea,’ he said, ‘to . . . do what you people do. With someone who’s just died.’ He wasn’t sure how to go on. The bottom line was that no amount of admiration could prevent him being disgusted. If he put that into words, he’d be lecturing Lover One on the irreconcilable differences between their species.

Again Lover One nodded. ‘We do all thing รี่o make food. Make food for many.’ A bowl of soup sat balanced in the lap of his tunic. He had eaten none of it yet.

‘I’ve been dreaming of your mother,’ Peter confessed. ‘I didn’t know her as a person, I’m not saying . . . ’ He took a deep breath. ‘The sight of her covered in insects, and then in maggots, and everyone just . . . ’ He looked down at Lover One’s boots, even though there was no possibility of eye-to-eye confrontation anyway. ‘I’m not used to it. It upset me.’

Lover One sat unmoving. One gloved hand rested on his abdomen, the other held a piece of bread. ‘I alสีo,’ he said.

‘I thought . . . I got the impression you . . . all of you . . . were afraid of death,’ continued Peter. ‘And yet . . . ’

‘We fear death,’ Lover One affirmed. ‘However. Fear cannoรี่ hold life in a body when life iสี over. Nothing can hold life in a body. Only the Lord God.’

Peter stared straight into the unreadable face of his friend. ‘There can be moments in a person’s life,’ he suggested, ‘when grief over the loss of a loved one is stronger than faith.’

Lover One waited a long time before responding. He ate a few spoonfuls of the soup, which was now cold, thick and congealed. He ate some bread, tearing off small pieces and inserting them gently into the lipless, toothless hole in his head.

‘My mother very imporรี่anรี่ woman,’ he said at last. ‘For me.’

In this second sojourn among the Oasans, God took care to keep Peter’s experiences in balance. His first death was followed, not too long afterwards, by his first birth. A woman called ฐสีคน – not a Jesus Lover, evidently – was having a baby and Peter was invited to the delivery. Jesus Lover One, his escort, implied that this was a great honour; it was certainly a surprise, because he’d never been formally acknowledged by the settlement’s unbelievers. But this was an event so joyous that the usual reticence was put aside and the entire Oasan community was united in hospitality.

The contrast between the death and the birth was striking. Whereas the body of Lover One’s mother had lain unattended in a back yard, mourned by no one except her son, left in solitude to attract insects, then treated as if it was nothing more than a vegetable patch, the woman who was about to give birth was the focus of an enormous amount of fuss. The streets leading to the house were remarkably busy, and everyone seemed to be heading for the same place. When Peter first saw the house, he thought it had caught fire, but the vapour wafting out of the windows was incense.

Inside, the expectant mother was not lying in a bed surrounded by medical equipment, or suffering the trials of labour under the supervision of a midwife, but walking around freely, socialising. Dressed in a snow-white variant of the Oasans’ usual attire – looser, thinner, more like a nightgown – she held court, accepting visitors’ congratulations one by one. Peter couldn’t tell if she was happy or anxious, but she was obviously not in pain, nor could he detect any swelling in her trim little body. Her gestures were elegant and formalised, like a medieval dance, with a whole host of partners. This was ฐสีคน’s Big Day.

Peter knew that the Oasans didn’t celebrate marriages. Their sexual pairings were private arrangements, so discreet as to be seldom alluded to. But the day of childbirth was a flagrantly public highlight in a woman’s life, a ritual exhibition every bit as extravagant as a wedding party. ฐสีคน’s house was heaving with well-wishers, dozens of bustling bodies dressed in bright colours.
All the pencils in the Aquarelle set
, thought Peter, as he strove to discern the difference between one robe and another. Vermillion, coral, apricot, copper, cerise, salmon – those were just some of the pinks he could put a name to; others were beyond his vocabulary. Across the room, weaving through the crowd, a person clad in pale violet was reunited with an old acquaintance clad in unripe plum, and only when they touched each other, glove to arm, did Peter see that two robes which he would otherwise have perceived as identical in colour were, in fact, unique. And so it went on, all over the house – people greeting each other, waving at each other, needing no more than a glance to know and be known. In the midst of this easily intimate hubbub, Peter appreciated he would need to develop a whole new relationship with colour if he was ever to recognise more than a couple of dozen individuals among this city’s multitudes.

It was a lovely party
, Peter might have said, if he’d been asked to describe it for someone who wasn’t there. The only problem was, he felt surplus to requirements. Jesus Lover One had ushered him in, but kept meeting up with friends who drew him into conversations which, to Peter’s ears, were just gargles and wheezes. Asking for translations seemed rude and, in any case, there was no reason to suppose that a stranger would understand much of what was being discussed.

For a while he felt oafishly out of place, towering over everyone here, literally casting a shadow over them, and yet . . . irrelevant. But then he relaxed and began to enjoy himself. This gathering wasn’t about
him
: that was actually the beauty of it. He was privileged to observe, but he wasn’t on duty, nothing was expected of him; he was, for the first time since coming to Oasis, a tourist. So, he sat on his haunches in a corner of the room, allowed the blueish fog of incense to go to his head, and watched the expectant mother being garlanded with affection.

After what felt like hours of meeting and greeting, ฐสีคน abruptly signalled that she’d had enough. Exhaustion had apparently overcome her, and she sat on the floor, surrounded by a puddle of her gown’s white cloth. Her friends backed away as she pulled the hood off her head, revealing livid flesh sheened with sweat. She bent her head between her knees, as though she was about to faint or vomit.

Then the fontanelle in her head yawned open, and a large pink mass bulged out, glistening with frothy white lather. Peter jerked back in shock, convinced he was witnessing a violent death. One more convulsion and it was over. The baby was disgorged in a slithery spasm, sliding into the mother’s waiting arms. ฐสีคน raised her head high, her fontanelle puckering shut, the fleshy kernels of her face still livid. The whole room erupted in a whuffle of applause and a mass of voices joined forces to make an eerie cooing sound, as loud as a chord pumped out of a cathedral organ.

The baby was alive and well, already squirming to be released from its mother’s grasp. It had no umbilical cord and looked amazingly unlike a foetus: instead, it was a perfect miniature person, its arms, legs and head all in adult proportion. And, like a newborn horse or calf, it immediately tried to stand on its legs, figuring out the knack of balance even while its feet were still slippery with placental goo. The crowd applauded and cheered some more. ฐสีคน ceremoniously acknowledged the ovation, then set about cleaning the gunge off her child’s flesh with a damp cloth.

‘สคฉ้รี่,’ she announced. Another great cheer went up.

‘What did she say?’ Peter asked Lover One.

‘สคฉ้รี่,’ said Lover One.

‘Is that the baby’s name?’

‘Name, yeสี,’ said Lover One.

‘Does that name have a meaning, or is it just a name?’

‘Name have a meaning,’ Lover One replied. Then, after a few seconds: ‘Hope.’

The child now stood firmly balanced on the floor, its arms stretched out like unfledged wings. ฐสีคน sponged the last of the muck off its skin, whereupon someone emerged from the crowd with an armful of soft offerings. A robe, booties, gloves, all in dusky mauve, all tailored exactly to size. Together, ฐสีคน and the gift-bearer, who might have been a grandmother or aunt, began to dress the infant, who tottered and swayed but did not resist. When the job was done, the child was exquisitely smart and adorable, serenely content to be on display. A male, Peter decided. Unbelievable, the craftsmanship that had gone into those minuscule gloves, each finger snug and velvety! Extraordinary, how the child accepted this second skin!

By this time, Peter was no longer squatting; his legs had begun to ache and he’d stood up to stretch them. The baby, wondrously alert, took the measure of all the creatures in the room, an array of virtual replicas of himself. There was only one creature that didn’t fit the picture, only one creature that made no sense in his freshly configured view of the universe. Head tilting back, the child stood arrested, mesmerised by the alien.

ฐสีคน, noticing her son’s quandary, likewise turned her attention to Peter. ‘ฐสฐรี่ ฉ้สีฉ้ฉ้รี่,’ she called across the room.

‘What did she say?’ Peter asked Lover One.

‘Word,’ said Lover One. ‘Word from you.’

‘You mean . . . a speech?’

Lover One inclined his head diplomatically. ‘Few word, many word, any word. Any word you can.’

‘But she’s not . . . she’s not a Jesus Lover, is she?’

‘No,’ conceded Lover One, while ฐสีคน made an urgent gesture to speed up Peter’s compliance. ‘On thiสี day, all word are good.’ And he touched Peter’s elbow, which, by Lover One’s standards, was tantamount to a shove.

So there it was: he was an accessory. A bonus performance to enhance the mother’s Big Day. OK, nothing wrong with that. Christianity was used for such purposes all the time. And who knows? – maybe it wasn’t even his status as a pastor that this woman wanted to exploit, but his status as a visitor. He stepped forward. Phrases and themes tumbled around in his brain, but one thing was clear: he wanted this speech to be for the benefit of Lover One, so dignified in his bereavement, as much as for the mother and child. Often in his past ministries, he’d had a sudden insight into a staunch member of his congregation, a member who was constantly declaring the joy of knowing Christ, the bountiful blessings of faith, but who was – Peter would realise in a flash – achingly, inconsolably sad. Jesus Lover One might well be one of those souls.

‘I’ve been asked to speak,’ he said. ‘To a few of you, what I say will have meaning. To most of you, maybe not. One day, I hope to speak your language. But wait – did you hear it? – I just spoke that wonderful word:
hope
. The name of a feeling, and also the name of this child who has come to live with us today.’

The baby lifted first one boot, then the other, and toppled backwards. His mother caught him smoothly and eased him to the floor, where he sat in apparent thought.

‘Hope is a fragile thing,’ Peter continued, ‘as fragile as a flower. Its fragility makes it easy to sneer at, by people who see life as a dark and difficult ordeal, people who get angry when something they can’t believe in themselves gives comfort to others. They prefer to crush the flower underfoot, as if to say:
See how weak this thing is, see how easily it can be destroyed
. But, in truth, hope is one of the strongest things in the universe. Empires fall, civilisations vanish into dust, but hope always comes back, pushing up through the ashes, growing from seeds that are invisible and invincible.’

The congregation – if he could be so bold as to call it that – was hushed, as if considering the import of each word, although they must surely be quite lost. He knew he should regard his speech as a kind of music, a brief burst of melody from a foreign guest invited to demonstrate an exotic instrument.