The Book of Strange New Things (57 page)

‘
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 . . .

A burst of laughter from the other side of the room failed to disturb Hayes’s concentration. It came from Tuska, Maneely and the guy who’d escorted Peter back from the settlement, what was his name – Conway. They appeared to be playing a game of rudimentary magic with three plastic cups and a rivet. ‘How’d you
do
that? How’d you
do
that?’ Conway kept saying, to Tuska’s delight. Elsewhere, USIC personnel reclined in armchairs, flipping through
Fly Fishing
,
Classic Cartoons
,
Vogue
and
The Chemical Engineer
. Peter remembered Tuska’s ‘Légion Étrangère’ lecture:
It’s best if you’ve got a team of individuals who can deal with being in permanent limbo. People who won’t go crazy
. Maybe Hayes was a prime example of a person who wouldn’t go crazy. Someone who did her job, caused no trouble beyond a few pages torn out of a lesbian porn magazine, and, when she retired to her quarters, could while away the hours and days and months on perpetually erased puzzles.

‘ . . . of Crosby’s fabled modesty that he was able to describe such a sublime work of art as “fluffy” and “a novelty”,’ the DJ was intoning. ‘We’ll now hear an unissued alternate take. Listen out for Bing stumbling on the word “annuity” and other evidences of inadequate rehearsal. Worth it, though, for the slightly closer proximity of Garland to the microphone, allowing us to fantasise that she’s right in the room with us . . . ’

‘Sorry to interrupt you again,’ said Peter.

‘No problem,’ said Hayes, rubbing out just one more numeral before looking up.

‘I was wondering about these music broadcasts. Are they old?’

She blinked, then opened her ears to register the sound. ‘Very old,’ she said. ‘Those singers, I don’t think they’re even alive anymore.’

‘No, I meant, are these shows, with the announcements and everything, put together by someone here at USIC, or did they already exist?’

Hayes cast an eye around the mess hall. ‘Rosen does them,’ she said. ‘He’s not here right now. He’s a surveyor and draughtsman. You’ve probably seen his drawings of the Centrifuge & Power Facility displayed in the Projects Hall. Awesomely accurate work. I still stand and look at it sometimes.’ She shrugged. ‘His music I can take or leave. It’s background noise to me. I’m glad he likes it so much. Everybody’s got to like something, I guess.’ She didn’t sound convinced.

A fresh flush of pain went through Peter – the memory of Bea’s message again. ‘The Mother,’ he said, trying to get a grip.

‘Excuse me?’

‘The nickname you suggested for the Centrifuge & Power Utility.’

‘Facility,’ she corrected him with a smile. She closed her puzzle book and slipped the eraser into a pocket of her shirt. ‘Nobody calls it the Mother. I know that. They still call it the Big Brassiere. Or actually the BB.’ Preparing to leave, she hugged her book to her bosom. ‘No sense getting upset. As my mom used to say, Don’t sweat the small stuff.’

When in distress, don’t self-obsess, reach out
. Bea’s motto. Their motto as a couple, actually.

‘Do you miss your mom?’

Hayes hugged her book tighter, reflective. ‘I guess. She died a long time ago. She would’ve been proud of me, I’m sure, being chosen for this mission. But I had a good job already when she died, so she was proud already. It’s not like I was a deadbeat.’

‘I was a deadbeat once,’ said Peter, maintaining eye contact. ‘Alcoholic. Drug addict.’ Hayes was the wrong person to share such intimacy with, he knew that, but he couldn’t help himself. He was, he belatedly realised, in no state to be here at all, among these people. He needed to be unconscious, or among the สีฐฉั.

‘It’s not a crime,’ said Hayes in her unemphatic monotone. ‘I don’t judge anybody.’

‘I committed crimes,’ said Peter. ‘Petty crimes.’

‘Some people go through that, before they straighten out. Doesn’t make them bad people.’

‘My father was terribly disappointed in me,’ Peter pushed on. ‘He died a broken man.’

Hayes nodded. ‘It happens. You work here for a while, you find out that lots of your colleagues have got real sad case histories. And some haven’t. No two stories alike. It doesn’t matter. We all get to the same point.’

‘And what point is that?’

She raised her fist in a gesture of triumph, if ‘triumph’ was the right word for a fist so loosely clasped, so amiably raised, so unlikely to be noticed in the context of this convivial cafeteria. ‘Working toward the future.’

Dear Peter, wrote Bea at last, after he had spent what felt like an eternity in prayer and worry.

I’m sorry I didn’t respond for so long. I don’t want to talk about what’s happened but I owe you an explanation. Thanks for reaching out to me. It doesn’t change the way things are, and I don’t think you can understand where I’m at now, but I do appreciate it.

A lot of things led up to this. Our church has hit a setback, to put it mildly. Geoff has absconded with all funds. He and the treasurer were having an affair and they’ve flown the coop together, no one knows where. But the accounts are cleared out. They even took the collection bags. Remember how we prayed for God’s guidance to choose a pastor to replace you? Well, Geoff was the one. Make of that what you will.

Opinion is divided on what to do next. Some people want to sort out the mess and try to keep it going and some feel we should just start afresh with a new church. They even asked me if I would be pastor! Brilliant timing.

Two days before this fiasco, I started back at work. I thought it would be bliss with Goodman gone. But the place has changed. It’s filthy, to begin with. The floors, the walls, the toilets. No cleaning staff and no prospect of getting any. I pulled out a mop and got busy on one of the bathrooms and Moira almost bit my head off. ‘We’re nurses, we’re not here to scrub floors’ she said. I said ‘What about staph? What about open wounds?’ She just stared me down. And maybe she’s right – the workload is bad enough as it is. A&E is pandemonium. People running around unsupervised, shouting, scuffling with the orderlies, trying to wheel their sick mums and dads and kids up to the wards before we’ve had a chance to triage them.

All the patients are poor now. Not a single well-educated middle-class specimen among them. Moira says that anyone with money has abandoned the NHS completely. The rich ones defect to France or Qatar, the average folks find themselves a nice walk-in pay-per-service clinic (there’s loads of them springing up everywhere – whole new communities are forming around them). And our hospital gets the dregs. That’s Moira’s word for them, but to be honest that’s what they are. Stupid, boorish, loud, ugly and very, very frightened. Forget about caritas – it’s a struggle to even keep your cool when you’ve got a drunken lout with blurry tattoos yelling straight into your face and jabbing you in the shoulder with his nicotine-stained finger. It’s an endless parade of bloodshot eyes, acne, smashed noses, slashed cheeks, cracked ribs, scalded babies, botched suicides. I know I used to complain that Goodman was trying to fill our hospital with easy cases but there is a difference between offering all levels of society access to medical care and letting an entire hospital be overrun by a pig-ignorant mob.

Time has run out on me, it’s 6.30, I have to go to work now. I haven’t even told you what happened to make me finally snap but it’s hard for me to face it myself and writing takes so long and I didn’t know I would write this much about other things. I thought I would just come straight out with it, but it will cause you so much pain and I wish so much I could spare you that pain forever. I must go now.

Love,

Bea.

At once, he responded:

Dear Bea,

I am so worried about you, but relieved to hear your ‘voice’. It’s true that we all misunderstand each other – only God has perfect understanding – but we shouldn’t let the grief of that frustration stop us trying. My work with the Oasans confirms this over and over.

The news about Geoff and our church is deplorable but the church does not consist of Geoff or the treasurer or a particular building. This setback may prove to be a blessing in disguise. If we owe money we can repay it and even if we can’t, it’s only money. What goes on in the hearts and souls of human beings is the important thing. It’s encouraging that our congregation wants to start afresh with a new church. Ordinarily, people are terrified of change so this is an amazing example of courage and positivity. Why not start a simple fellowship in someone’s front room? Just like the early Christians. Complicated infrastructure is a luxury, the real essentials are love and prayer. And it’s great that they want you to be pastor. Don’t be angry, I think you would do a superb job.

Your comments about the changes at the hospital are only natural given the increased stress but they confirm my sense that maybe now is not the time for you to be working. You have a baby growing inside you. Or at least I hope you do – have you had a miscarriage? Is that what’s shaken your faith in God? I’m worried sick. Please tell me.

Whatever it is, it has taken you to a very bad place spiritually. Those ‘pig-ignorant’ people who are crowding into your hospital are all precious souls. God doesn’t care whether someone has acne or bad teeth or a bad education. Please remember that when you met me I was an alcoholic waste of space. A deadbeat. If you had treated me with the contempt I deserved I would never have been rescued, I would have just got worse and been ‘proof’ that types like me are beyond redemption. And who knows, some of the women you’re seeing on the wards may have family traumas not a million miles away from what happened to you. So please, no matter how hard it is, try to hang on to your compassion. God can make miracles occur in that hospital of yours. You say yourself that these people are frightened. Deep down, they know they desperately need something that medicine can’t give them.

Write as soon as you can, I love you,

Peter

ڇ was finally going down, turning the horizon golden caramel. There would be a drawn-out dusk of almost wearisome beauty and then it would be night for a long, long time. Peter stowed the putrefying Oasan food in his bag and left the compound.

He walked for a mile or so, in the hope that the USIC base would disappear from his view – or, more to the point, that he would disappear from the view of anyone at USIC who might have seen him leave. But the flat, featureless terrain meant that the buildings remained obstinately in sight, and a trick of perspective made them seem less far-off than they were. Rationally, he knew it was highly improbable he was being watched, but instinctively he felt under constant surveillance. He walked on.

The direction he’d chosen was westward into the wilderness – that is, not towards the Oasan settlement and not towards the Big Brassiere. He’d fantasised that if he walked far enough he would eventually reach mountains, streams, or at least some rocky knoll or marshy bog that would let him know he was elsewhere. But the tundra went on for ever. Level brown earth, occasionally enlivened by a clump of whiteflower luminescing in the sunset, and, whenever he turned to look back, the eerie concrete mirage of the USIC base. Tired, he sat down and waited for ڇ to sink below the land.

How long he waited, he couldn’t tell. Maybe two hours. Maybe six hours. His consciousness detached itself from his body, hovered above it, somewhere in the สี. He forgot the purpose of his coming out here. Had he decided he couldn’t spend the night in his quarters, and opted to sleep in the open air? His knapsack could serve as a pillow.

When it was almost dark, he sensed he was no longer alone. He squinted into the gloom and spotted a small, pale creature about five metres away. It was one of the bird-like vermin that had consumed the whiteflower harvest and bitten him. Just one, separated from the rest of its kind. It waddled cautiously in a wide circle around Peter, nodding its head. After a while, Peter realised it was not nodding but sniffing: its snout smelled food.

Peter recalled the moment when the flesh of his arm sprayed blood, recalled the nauseating pain of the bite to his leg. A convulsion of anger disturbed the numbness of his grief. He considered killing this vicious creature, stamping on its body, grinding its sharp-fanged little skull under his heel – not in revenge but self-defence, or so he could pretend. But no. The thing was pathetic and comical, hesitant in the dark, vulnerable in its aloneness. And the food it smelled was not Peter’s flesh.

Slowly and smoothly, Peter extracted the prize from his knapsack. The creature stopped in its tracks. Peter laid the plastic bag on the ground and shuffled backwards. The creature moved in and punctured the bag with its teeth, releasing a sweetish stench. Then it gobbled up the entire pile, plastic shreds and all. Peter wondered if, as a result, the creature would end up dying a more horrible death than if he’d stomped on its head. Maybe this was what the Hindus meant by karma.