The Book of Strange New Things (6 page)

‘Pleased to meet you,’ croaked Peter. ‘I’m Peter.’

‘BG, bro,’ said the black man, extending a hand. ‘You want I pull you outta there?’

‘I . . . I might prefer to lie here a bit longer.’

‘Don’t wait too long, bro,’ said BG, with a radiant white grin. ‘You shit your pants, and it’s a small ship.’

Peter smiled, unsure of whether BG meant this as a warning of what might happen or as an observation of what had already happened. The viscose swaddling of the crib felt damp and heavy, but it had felt that way even when the woman in the lab coat first wrapped him in it.

Another face swung into view. Sunburnt white, fiftyish, with thinning grey hair cut to a military bristle. Eyes as bloodshot as BG’s, but blue and full of painful childhood and messy divorce and violent upheavals in employment.

‘Severin,’ he said.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Artie Severin. We gotta get you out of there, pal. Sooner you start drinking, sooner you’ll feel like a human being.’

BG and Severin lifted him out of the crib as though they were extracting a newly purchased piece of equipment from its box: not exactly gently, but with sufficient care not to tear or break anything. His feet barely touched the floor as they carried him out of the room, down a short corridor and into a bathroom. There they stripped him of the gauzy loincloth he’d worn for the last month, sprayed him with blue foam from neck to ankles, and wiped him down with paper towels. A large transparent plastic waste bag got filled halfway to the top with blue and brown muck before they were finished.

‘Is there a shower?’ he asked, when it was over and he still felt sticky. ‘I mean, with water?’

‘Water is
gold
, bro,’ said BG. ‘Every drop we got, goes into here.’ He tapped his throat. ‘It don’t do nobody no good out
there
.’ And he nodded towards the wall, the outer shell of the ship, the barrier between them and the vast airless emptiness in which they were suspended.

‘Sorry,’ said Peter. ‘That was naïve of me.’

‘Naïve’s not a problem,’ said BG. ‘We all gotta ride the learning curve. I done this trip once before. First time I didn’t know shit.’

‘You’ll have all the water you want when we get to Oasis,’ said Severin. ‘Right now, you’d better drink some.’

Peter was handed a plastic bottle with a resealable nipple. He took a big swig and, ten seconds later, fainted.

His recovery from the Jump took him longer than he would have liked. He would have liked to spring up like a momentarily winded boxer, and impress the other men. But the other men shook off the effects of the Jump rapidly and got busy doing whatever it was that they were doing, while he lolled helpless in a bunk, occasionally managing a sip of water. Before take-off he’d been warned that he would feel as though he’d been disassembled and put back together again, which was not exactly how the Jump worked, scientifically speaking, but was indeed the way it felt.

He spent the afternoon . . . well, no, those words made no sense, did they? There was no such thing as afternoon, morning or night here. In the darkened room where BG and Severin had stowed him after cleaning him up, he woke occasionally from his woozy slumber and looked at his watch. The numbers were only symbols. Real time would not resume until he had ground underfoot, and there was a sun rising and setting.

Once he got to Oasis, there would be facilities for sending a message to Beatrice. ‘I’ll write to you every day,’ he’d promised. ‘Every single day, if God allows me.’ He tried to imagine what she might be doing at this moment, how she might be dressed, whether she would have her hair pinned up or hanging loose over her shoulders. That was what his watch was for, he realised: not to tell him anything useful about his own situation, but to allow him to imagine Beatrice existing in the same reality as himself.

He looked at his watch again. In England, it was 2.43 in the morning. Beatrice would be asleep, with Joshua stretched opportunistically on his side of the bed, legs spread. Joshua, that is, not Beatrice. She would be on her left side, one arm dangling over the edge, the other thrown up, elbow covering her ear, fingers so close to his pillow that he could kiss them from where he lay. Not now, of course.

Maybe Beatrice was awake. Maybe she was worrying about him. A month had passed without contact between them, and they were used to communicating every day.

‘What if my husband dies en route?’ she’d asked the USIC people.

‘He will not die en route,’ was the reply.

‘But what if he does?’

‘We would let you know immediately. In other words, no news is good news.’

Good news it was, then. But still . . . Bea had spent these last thirty days conscious of his absence, while he’d been oblivious to hers.

He pictured their bedroom, lit in subdued tones by the bedside lamp; he pictured Bea’s pale blue uniform slung over the chair, the jumble of shoes on the floor, the yellow duvet with Joshua’s fur all over it. Beatrice sitting up against the headboard, bare-legged but with a sweater on, reading and re-reading the uninformative info pack sent by USIC.

‘USIC cannot and does not guarantee the safety of any travellers on its craft or domiciled in its facilities or in the pursuit of any activities related to, or not related to, USIC activities. “Safety” is defined as health both physical and mental and includes, but is not restricted to, survival and/or return from Oasis, either within the time period specified by this agreement or beyond that period. USIC undertakes to minimise risk to any persons participating in its projects but signature of this document is deemed to constitute acknowledgement of understanding that USIC’s efforts in this regard (i.e., minimising risk) are subject to circumstances beyond USIC’s control. These circumstances, because unforeseen and unprecedented, cannot be detailed in advance of occurrence. They may include, but are not restricted to, disease, accident, mechanical failure, adverse weather, and any other events commonly categorised as Acts of God.’

The door of the dormitory cell swung open, silhouetting the massive body of BG.

‘Yo, bro.’

‘Hi.’ In Peter’s experience, it was better to speak in one’s own idiom than echo the idioms and accents of others. Rastafarians and cockney Pakistanis did not come to Christ through being patronised by evangelists making clownish attempts to talk like them, so there was no reason to suppose that black Americans might.

‘You wanna eat with us, you better get yourself out of bed, bro.’

‘Sounds fine to me,’ said Peter, swinging his legs out of the bunk. ‘I think I’m up for it.’

BG’s massive arms were poised to lend assistance. ‘Noodles,’ he said. ‘Beef noodles.’

‘Sounds just fine.’ Still barefoot, dressed only in underpants and an unbuttoned shirt, Peter waddled out of the room. It was like being six again, when he was spaced out on liquid paracetamol and his mother fetched him out of bed to celebrate his birthday. The prospect of opening presents was not sufficiently adrenalising to dispel the effects of chickenpox.

BG led him into a corridor whose walls were papered with floor-to-ceiling colour photographs of green meadows, the kind of adhesive enlargements he was more accustomed to seeing on the sides of buses. Some thoughtful designer must have decided that a vista of grass, spring flowers and an azure sky was just the thing to combat the claustrophobia of airless space.

‘You ain’t a vegetarian, are you, bro?’

‘Uh . . . no,’ said Peter.

‘Well, I am,’ declared BG, steering him round a corner, where the verdant if slightly blurry scenery was repeated. ‘But one thing you learn when you go on a trip like this, man, is you gotta relax your principles sometimes.’

Dinner was served in the control room; that is, the room that contained the piloting and navigation hardware. Contrary to Peter’s expectations, he was not met with a breathtaking sight when he stepped inside. There was no giant window facing out onto a vast expanse of space, stars and nebulae. There was no window at all; no central focus of attention, just reinforced plastic walls punctuated by air conditioning vents, light switches, humidity adjustors, and a couple of laminated posters. Peter had seen the imagery before, on the USIC pamphlets when he’d first applied for this vacancy. The posters were glossy corporate productions, depicting a stylised ship, a stylised bird with a stylised twig in its beak, and a small amount of text extolling USIC’s high standards of business practice and unlimited potentials to benefit mankind.

The ship’s controls were also less impressive than Peter had imagined: no giant rig of knobs and dials and meters and flashing lights, just a few compact keyboards, slimline monitors and one freestanding computer cabinet that resembled a snack dispenser or automatic bankteller machine. In all honesty, the control room was less a ship’s bridge than an office – a somewhat pokey office, at that. There was nothing here to do justice to the fact that they were floating in a foreign solar system, trillions of miles from home.

Tuska the pilot had swivelled his chair away from the monitors and was staring into a small plastic tub held up near his face. Steam obscured his features. His legs, crossed casually over one another, were bare and hairy, clad only in oversize shorts and tennis shoes without socks.

‘Welcome back to the land of the living,’ he said, lowering the tub to rest against his rotund belly. ‘Sleep well?’

‘I don’t know if I was sleeping, really,’ said Peter. ‘More just waiting to feel human again.’

‘Takes a while,’ conceded Tuska, and raised the noodle tub to his face again. He had a mouse-coloured beard, and was obviously well-practised in the logistics of conveying sloppy food past the hazards of facial hair. He twirled some noodles round his fork and closed his neat red lips over them.

‘Here’s yours, Pete,’ said Severin. ‘I’ve torn the foil off for you.’

‘That’s very kind,’ said Peter, taking his seat at a black plastic table, where BG and Severin were tucking into their own noodle tubs with their own plastic forks. Three unopened cans of Coke stood ready. Peter shut his eyes, recited a silent prayer of thanks for what he was about to receive.

‘You’re a Christian, right?’ said BG.

‘Right,’ said Peter. The beef noodle stew had been cooked unevenly in the microwave: some parts were bubbling hot, other parts were still ever-so-slightly crunchy with ice. He stirred them into a warm compromise.

‘I used to be Nation of Islam, long time ago,’ said BG. ‘Got me through some tough times. But it’s high maintenance, man. Can’t do this, can’t do that.’ BG opened his considerable mouth and forked a quivering freight of noodles in, chewed three times, swallowed. ‘Ya gotta hate Jews and white people, too. They say it’s not mandatory and all that shit. But you get the message, man. Loud and clear.’ Another mouthful of noodles. ‘I make my own decisions who I’m gonna hate, know what I’m saying? Somebody fucks with me, I hate ’em – they can be white, black, aquamar
eeeen
, man; don’t make no difference to me.’

‘I suppose what you’re saying, also,’ said Peter, ‘is that you make your own decisions about who you’ll love.’

‘Damn right. White pussy, black pussy, it’s all good.’

Tuska snorted. ‘You’re making a fine impression on our minister, I’m sure.’ He’d finished his meal and was wiping his face and beard with a towelette.

‘I’m not that easy to scandalise,’ said Peter. ‘Not with words, anyway. The world has room for lots of different ways of talking.’

‘We’re not in the world now,’ said Severin with a lugubrious grin. He cracked open a can of Coke and a frothing jet of brown liquid sprayed up towards the ceiling.

‘Jee-
sus
,’ exclaimed Tuska, falling half off his chair. BG just chuckled.

‘I’ll take care of it, I’ll take care of it,’ said Severin, snatching a handful of paper towels from a dispenser. Peter helped him mop the sticky liquid from the tabletop.

‘I do that every goddamn time,’ muttered Severin, dabbing at his chest, his forearm, the chairs, the coolbox from which the Cokes had come. He bent down to dab at the floor, whose carpet was fortuitously already brown.

‘How many times have you made this trip?’ asked Peter.

‘Three. Swore I wouldn’t go back each time.’

‘Why?’

‘Oasis drives people crazy.’

BG grunted. ‘You’re crazy already, bro.’

‘Mr Severin and Mr Graham are both seriously unbalanced individuals, Pete,’ said Tuska, magistrate-solemn. ‘I’ve known ’em for years. Oasis is the most suitable place for guys like them. Keeps ’em off the streets.’ He tossed his empty noodle tub into a garbage bin. ‘Also, they’re extremely good at what they do. The best. That’s why USIC keeps spending the money on ’em.’

‘What about
you
, bro?’ BG asked Peter. ‘Are you the best?’

‘The best what?’

‘The best preacher.’

‘I don’t really think of myself as a preacher.’

‘What do you think of yourself as, bro?’

Peter swallowed hard, stumped. His brain was still residually affected by the same violent forces that had shaken up the cans of Coke. He wished Beatrice was here with him, to parry the questions, change the nature of this all-male atmosphere, deflect the conversation onto more fruitful paths.

‘I’m just someone who loves people and wants to help them, whatever shape they’re in.’

Another big grin spread across BG’s massive face, as though he was about to unleash another wisecrack. Then he abruptly turned serious. ‘You really mean that? No shit?’

Peter stared him straight in the eyes. ‘No shit.’

BG nodded. Peter sensed that in the big man’s consideration, he had passed some sort of test. Reclassified. Not exactly ‘one of the boys’, but no longer an exotic animal that might be a major annoyance.

‘Hey, Severin!’ BG called. ‘I never asked you: what religion are you, man?’

‘Me? I’m nothing,’ said Severin. ‘And that’s the way it’s staying.’

Severin had finished the Coca-Cola clean-up and was wiping blue detergent gel off his fingers with paper towels.

‘Fingers are still sticky,’ he complained. ‘I’m gonna be driven crazy until I get soap and water.’