The Book of Strange New Things (68 page)

As soon as Peter finished reading these words, he leapt up, knocking his chair over, and jumped exultant into the air, clenching his fists like a sportsman granted victory against the odds. He would have yelled
Hallelujah
, too, if it hadn’t been for the searing spasm that shot through his injured leg. Crying in pain, laughing in relief, he fell to the floor, curled up like a bug, or a thief who’d broken his ankles, or a husband who was clutching his wife’s flesh rather than his own.

Thank you
, he breathed,
thank you
. . . but who was he thanking? He didn’t know. He only knew that thanks were due.

27

Stay where you are

His name was Peter Leigh, son of James Leigh and Kate Leigh (née Woolfolk), grandson of George and June. He was born in Horns Mill, Hertford, Hertfordshire. The names of his cats, in the order that he’d owned them, were Mokkie, Silky, Cleo, Sam, Titus and Joshua. When he returned home, he would have another cat, from an animal refuge, if such places still existed when he got back. As for his own child, he would call him, or her, whatever name Bea wanted. Or maybe Kate. They would discuss it when the time came. Maybe they’d wait until the baby was born, and see what its personality was. People were individuals from Day One.

He stood as straight as he could in his soul-destroying room in the USIC base and appraised himself in the mirror. He was a thirty-three-year-old English male, deeply tanned as if he’d been on a long holiday to Alicante or some such Mediterranean resort. But he did not look fit. His chin and collarbones were worryingly sharp, sculpted by inadequate diet. He was too thin for the dishdasha, although he looked even worse in Western clothes. There were a few small scars on his face, some of them dating from his alcoholic years, some more recent and delineated with neat crusts. His eyes were bloodshot and there was fear and grief in them. ‘You know what would sort you out?’ a fellow dosser once said to him as they stood in the rain waiting for a homeless shelter to open. ‘A wife.’ When Peter asked him if he spoke from experience, the old wino only smiled and shook his grizzled head.

The USIC corridors that had once seemed like a maze were now familiar – too familiar. The familiarity of a prison. The framed posters hung in their appointed places, marking his progress through the base. As he walked towards the vehicle bay, the glazen images gazed sightlessly down at him: Rudolph Valentino, Rosie the Riveter, the dog in the basket with the ducks, the smiling picnickers by Renoir. Laurel and Hardy caught frozen, stoic, forever interrupted in their hopeless attempt to build a house. And those 1930s construction workers suspended high above New York . . . they would be suspended there eternally, never finishing their lunch, never falling off their girder, never growing old.

He pushed through the last door and was greeted by the smell of engine grease. For his farewell visit to the สีฐฉั, he wanted to travel to C-2 himself, alone, not as a passenger in someone else’s car. He cast his eyes over the vehicle bay in search of the person who was manning it today, hoping it might be someone he’d never met before, someone who knew nothing about him except that he was the VIP missionary man who should be given whatever he asked for, within reason. But the person bending into the engine of a jeep, canopied by the open hood, had a rump he recognised. It was Craig again.

‘Hi,’ he said, knowing even as he opened his mouth that oratory would get him nowhere.

‘Hi,’ she said, only half-acknowledging him as she continued to slather the engine innards with lubricant.

Their negotiation was short and sweet. He could hardly blame her for refusing to hand over a vehicle, given what happened last time. Maybe she’d been criticised by her fellow USIC personnel for allowing him – clearly off his head – to drive Kurtzberg’s hearse into the night, only to need emergency rescue later, while the vehicle had to be schlepped back to base in a separate trip. Craig was all smiles and casual body language, but the subtext was:
You are a pain in the ass
.

‘There’s a drug and food exchange scheduled just a few hours from now,’ she said, as she wiped her hands on a rag. ‘Why not go along for the ride?’

‘Because this is goodbye. I’m saying goodbye to the สีฐฉั.’

‘Goodbye to the what?’

‘The Oasans. The native people.’
The freaks in Freaktown
,
you fat idiot
, he thought.

She chewed on this. ‘You need your own vehicle to say goodbye in?’

He hung his head in frustration. ‘If I’m shoulder to shoulder with USIC personnel, it might look like I was using you guys as . . . uh . . . bodyguards. Emotional bodyguards, if you see what I mean.’ Craig’s direct yet unfocused stare told him that no, she didn’t see. ‘It might look like I didn’t want to face them on my own.’

‘OK,’ said Craig, idly scratching her snake tattoo. Seconds passed, making it obvious that her ‘OK’ did not mean ‘In that case, I will give you a car’; it did not even mean ‘I understand why that might worry you’; it meant ‘So be it.’

‘Also,’ he said, ‘I’m not sure that Grainger will want to be going out to the settlement today.’

‘Won’t be Grainger,’ said Craig breezily, and consulted a printed roster. ‘Grainger is off-duty for . . . ’ She flipped pages, scanning for the name. ‘The foreseeable,’ she summarised at last, and flipped back to today. ‘It’ll be . . . Tuska and Flores.’

Peter looked over her shoulder, at all the greased-up vehicles he could drive out of this place if only she wasn’t in the way.

‘Your choice,’ she grinned, and he understood that sometimes there is no choice at all.

‘I see you standing on the shore of a huge lake,’ Bea had said, the last time he’d held her in his arms. ‘It’s night and the sky is full of stars.’ And she had shared her vision of him preaching to a multitude of unseen creatures in fishing boats, bobbing on the sea. Perhaps they’d both known that it was a dream, that nothing like that would really happen. It was another sunny, torpid day on Oasis, and the natives were dozing in their cots, or making food for their foreign guests, or washing clothes, or spending time with their children, hoping that their flesh would survive unharmed until the sun set and they were cocooned in their cots again. Maybe they were praying.

Filling in time before the appointed hour for his ride, Peter considered what, if anything, to take with him to the settlement. A stack of half-finished booklets lay on the table, next to some balls of wool. He picked up the nearest, a paraphrase of
Revelation
,
Chapter 21
. He’d reduced the number of ‘s’ sounds to four, and gotten rid of all the ‘t’s: that was probably as much as he could achieve.

And there I found a new heaven and a new earth, for the heaven and the earth from before were gone. And I heard a loud voice from heaven declaring, Behold, God will dwell with you, and you will be His very own people, and God will be your very own God. And there will be no more death, no more sorrow, no more pain. And God upon the throne said, Behold, I make everything new
.

To avoid the need for explanations that might go nowhere, he’d omitted Jerusalem, the sea, the tabernacle, the apostle John, the bride and the husband, men, and a few other things. The God of this pamphlet no longer wiped tears from eyes, partly because those words were too difficult to pronounce, partly because, after all this time, it was still a mystery whether the สีฐฉั had eyes or wept. Peter reconnected with how long he’d sweated to think of an alternative word for ‘true’. All that labour, and for what? The only words he had to offer them now were ‘sorry’ and ‘goodbye’.

‘Beautiful day,’ said Tuska, and it was. The atmosphere was putting on a show for them, as if in honour of a momentous occasion. Two huge columns of unfallen rain, one to the west and the other to the east, had drifted towards each other and were now mingling in their topmost reaches, forming a glistering arch in the sky. It was a long way off yet, miles probably, but it conjured the illusion that they were about to pass under a colossal portal made of nothing more substantial than water droplets.

‘Gotta admit,’ said Tuska, ‘view-wise, that’s a nine out of ten.’

‘Rear windows are shut, I hope?’ said Flores. ‘Don’t want those drugs to get rained on.’

‘Yes, they’re shut,’ said Peter. Tuska and Flores, stationed in the front seats, had barely said a word to him since the jeep had left the compound. He felt like a child stashed in the back, allowed to come along for no better reason than that he couldn’t be left unattended, and with nothing to do on the journey but hope that his parents didn’t quarrel.

The hermetic seal of air conditioning that Grainger tried so diligently to maintain was not Tuska’s style. He kept the front windows open as he drove, allowing the air free access to the vehicle’s interior. The languid agitations of the atmosphere were joined by an artificial breeze from the speed of the vehicle.

‘Where’s Grainger?’ asked Peter.

‘Taking it easy,’ said Tuska, only his shoulder and driving arm visible to Peter.

‘Drunk and incapable,’ said Flores, wholly hidden.

‘She’s been a pretty good pharmacist all these years,’ said Tuska.

‘There are other pharmacists,’ Flores remarked.

‘Well, let’s see what Santa Claus brings, shall we?’ said Tuska, and Flores shut up.

The brilliant arch in the sky had drawn no nearer, so Peter looked out the passenger window instead. The landscape, which he’d grown to love, was still austerely beautiful, but today he saw its simplicity through different eyes, and it disturbed him. He could imagine a farm girl like Grainger scanning the terrain’s serene emptiness, searching in vain for wildlife, plant-life, or any kind of life, to remind her of her childhood habitat.

‘Grainger needs to go home,’ he said, the words springing out of his mouth before he even knew he’d formed them.

‘Yeah,’ said Tuska, ‘I think she does.’

‘Soon,’ said Peter, and recalled, for the first time in years, that
Soon
was the name of a Scripture pamphlet he and Bea had produced ages ago for the Jesus lovers of Arunachal Pradesh. In a flash, in his mind’s eye, he saw his hands and Bea’s moving near each other on the kitchen table: his hands folding the pamphlet in three, with the
Soon
letterhead facing out; Bea’s hands slipping the paper into an envelope, sealing it, addressing it to some mountain-dwelling Adivasi with an unpronounceable name. Cardboard boxes full of
Soon
pamphlets had been sent overseas at six-monthly intervals, an absurd expense in the electronic age, but not everybody in the world had a computer and, besides, there was something special about holding Bible verses in your hand.

How long ago it was. His hand holding a pamphlet called
Soon
, reaching across the table to Bea’s hand.

‘I forwarded her request too,’ Tuska was saying. ‘My guess is you’ll both go together.’ He yawned. ‘Two simultaneous bailouts from our little paradise! Do you guys know something I don’t? On second thoughts, don’t tell me.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with this place,’ said Peter, staring out the window again. ‘I’m sorry to let everybody down.’

‘Some people can take it, some can’t,’ said Tuska lightly. ‘Can’t re-use an EPFCG.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Explosively pumped flux compression generator.’

Those words, which to Peter were as weird and incomprehensible as any arcane Scripture would be to his hosts, were the last spoken for a long while. The illusion that they were about to pass under a vast, twinkling archway faded gradually, as the two columns of water drifted apart and morphed into different, unsymmetrical shapes. Rain splattered against the windscreen and roof, its rhythm strange as ever, determined by physics beyond human understanding. Then the shower passed and the windscreen wipers squeaked annoyingly against clear glass before Tuska switched them off. The caramel façades of Freaktown were only a few hundred metres away now, and Peter could already make out a tiny figure standing in the appointed spot.

‘When we arrive,’ he piped up from the back, ‘I just need a minute, two minutes alone with that person.’

‘OK,’ said Tuska, changing gear for the final stretch. ‘But no tongues.’

Jesus Lover One was waiting in front of the building with the white star painted on it. When he caught sight of Peter, his body jerked in surprise, but he managed to compose himself in the few seconds that elapsed between the revelation and Peter’s deposition from the jeep.

‘You are alive,’ he said.

‘I hope so,’ Peter said, and regretted it at once: the สีฐฉั didn’t do flippancy, and the quip only made it harder for Lover One to adjust to Peter’s miraculous recovery from his mortal wounds.

‘All the otherสี believe you are dead,’ said Lover One. ‘I believe you are alive. I alone have faith.’

Peter struggled to think of the appropriate response to that. An affectionate embrace was out. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

Behind the bead curtains in the doorways of the buildings, shadowy figures had gathered. ‘สีฐฐ ฐณ,’ called a voice. Peter knew enough of the language to know that this meant ‘The task is still asleep.’ Or, to paraphrase:
Get on with it
.

Lover One roused himself from his trance and accepted his official role. He turned towards the vehicle in anticipation of greeting the USIC envoy, the scarf-wearing woman Grainger who abhorred him and all his kind.

Nurse Flores stepped out of the vehicle. As she approached the Oasan, it was evident that there was not much difference between them in size. By chance, their garments – her uniform, his robes – were almost the same colour.

Lover One was visibly thrown by these unexpected parities. He appraised Flores quite a few seconds longer than politeness allowed, but she stared right back.

‘You and I,’ said the Lover One. ‘Never before now.’ And he reached forward and touched her gently on the wrist with his gloved fingertips.

‘He means, Hi, I haven’t met you before,’ explained Peter.