The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps (14 page)

Jamie Shapcott, 27 Pinley Grove, Yeovil, Somerset. Please can my BA plane to Newcastle not crash. Thank you
.

Victoria Sams, Tamworth, Staffs. Nice décor but the lights keep going on and off
.

Lucy, Lossiemouth. Bring my man back safely
.

He closed the book. His hands were trembling. He knew that there was quite a decent chance that he would die in the next thirty days, or that, even if he survived the journey, he would never return. This was his Gethsemane moment. He clenched his eyes shut and prayed to God to tell him what He wanted him to do; whether it would serve His purpose better if he grabbed Beatrice by the hand and ran with her to the exit and out to the car park, and drove straight back home before Joshua had even registered that he was gone.

By way of answer, God let him listen to the hysterical babble of his own inner voice, let it echo in the vault of his skull. Then, behind him, he heard a jingle of loose change as one of the Muslims jumped up to retrieve his shoes. Peter turned around. The Muslim man nodded courteously at him on his way out. The woman behind the curtain was touching up her lipstick, primping her eyelashes with her little finger, tucking stray hairs inside the edges of her hijab. The arrow on the wall fluttered slightly as the man swung open the door.

Peter’s hands had ceased trembling. He had been granted perspective. This was not Gethsemane: he wasn’t headed for Golgotha, he was embarking on a great adventure. He’d been chosen out of thousands, to pursue the most important missionary calling since the Apostles had ventured forth to conquer Rome with the power of love, and he was going to do his best.

Beatrice wasn’t in the seat where he’d left her. For a few seconds he thought she’d lost her nerve and fled the terminal rather than say her last goodbye. He felt a pang of grief. But then he spotted
her a few rows further towards the coffee and muffin kiosk. She was on the floor on her hands and knees, her face obscured by loose hair. Hunkered down in front of her, also on its hands and knees, was a child – a fat toddler, whose elasticated trousers bulged with an ill-concealed nappy.

‘Look! I’ve got . . . ten fingers!’ she was telling the child. ‘Have
you
got ten fingers?’

The fat toddler slid his hands forward, almost touching Bea’s. She made a show of counting the digits, then said ‘A hundred! No, ten!’ The boy laughed. An older child, a girl, stood shyly back, sucking on her knuckles. She kept looking back at her mother, but the mother was looking neither at her children nor at Beatrice; instead, she was focused on a hand-held gadget.

‘Oh, hi,’ said Beatrice when she saw Peter coming. She brushed her hair off her face, tucked it behind her ears. ‘This is Jason and Gemma. They’re going to Alicante.’

‘We hope,’ said the mother wearily. The gadget made a small beeping noise, having analysed the glucose levels of the woman’s blood.

‘These people have been here since two p.m.,’ explained Beatrice. ‘They’re stressed out.’

‘Never again,’ muttered the woman as she rummaged in a travel pouch for her insulin injections. ‘I swear. They take your money and they don’t give a shit.’

‘Joanne, this is my husband Peter. Peter, this is Joanne.’

Joanne nodded in greeting but was too bound up in her misfortune to make small talk. ‘It all looks dead cheap on the brochure,’ she remarked bitterly, ‘but you pay for it in grief.’

‘Oh, don’t be like that, Joanne,’ counselled Beatrice. ‘You’ll have a lovely time. Nothing bad has actually happened. Just think: if the plane had been scheduled to leave eight hours later, you would’ve
been doing the same thing as you’re doing now – waiting, except at home.’

‘These two should be in bed,’ grumbled the woman, baring a roll of abdominal flesh and sticking the needle in.

Jason and Gemma, righteously offended by the allegation that they were sleepy rather than maltreated, looked poised for a fresh set of tantrums. Beatrice got on her hands and knees again. ‘I think I’ve lost my feet,’ she said, peering nearsightedly around the floor. ‘Where have they gone?’

‘They’re here!’ cried little Jason, as she turned away from him. ‘Where?’ she said, spinning back.

‘Thank God,’ said Joanne. ‘Here comes Freddie with the food.’

A hassled-looking fellow with no chin and a porridge-coloured windcheater lumbered into view, several paper bags clutched in each hand.

‘World’s biggest rip-off,’ he announced. ‘They keep you standing there with your little voucher for two quid or whatever. It’s like the dole office. I tell you, in another half an hour, if this lot don’t bloody well – ’

‘Freddie,’ said Beatrice brightly, ‘this is my husband, Peter.’

The man put down his packages and shook Peter’s hand.

‘Your wife’s a bit of an angel, Pete. Is she always taking pity on waifs and strays?’

‘We . . . we both believe in being friendly,’ said Peter. ‘It costs nothing and it makes life more interesting.’

‘When are we gonna see the sea?’ said Gemma, and yawned.

‘Tomorrow, when you wake up,’ said the mother.

‘Will the nice lady be there?’

‘No, she’s going to America.’

Beatrice motioned the little girl to come and sit against her hip. The toddler had already dropped off to sleep, sprawled against a
canvas backpack filled to bursting point. ‘Wires slightly crossed,’ said Beatrice. ‘It’s my husband who’s going, not me.’

‘You stay home with the kids, huh?’

‘We don’t have any,’ said Beatrice. ‘Yet.’

‘Do yourselves a favour,’ sighed the man. ‘Don’t. Just skip it.’

‘Oh, you don’t mean that,’ said Beatrice. And Peter, seeing that the man was about to make an off-hand retort, added: ‘Not
really
.’

And so the conversation went on. Beatrice and Peter got into rhythm, perfectly united in purpose. They’d done this hundreds of times before. Conversation, genuine unforced conversation, but with the potential to become something much more significant if the moment arose when it was right to mention Jesus. Maybe that moment would come; maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe they would just say ‘God bless you’ in parting and that would be it. Not every encounter could be transformative. Some conversations were just amiable exchanges of breath.

Coaxed into this exchange, the two strangers relaxed despite themselves. Within minutes they were even laughing. They were from Merton, they had diabetes and depression respectively, they both worked in a hardware superstore, they’d saved up for this holiday for a year. They were none too bright and not very fascinating. The woman had an unattractive snort and the man stank terribly of musk aftershave. They were human beings, and precious in the eyes of God.

‘My plane is about to board,’ said Peter at last.

Beatrice was still on the floor, the head of a stranger’s child lolling on her thigh. Her eyes were glassy with tears.

‘If I come with you to Security,’ she said, ‘and hold you when you’re about to go through, I won’t be able to cope, I swear. I’ll lose it, I’ll cause a scene. So kiss me goodbye here.’

Peter felt as if his heart was being cleaved in half. What had
seemed like a grand adventure in the prayer room now bereaved him like a sacrifice. He clung to the words of the Apostle:
Do the work of an evangelist, make full proof of thy ministry. For I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand
.

He bent down and Beatrice gave him a quick, rough kiss on the lips, clasping the back of his head with one hand as she did so. He straightened up, dazed. This whole scenario with the strangers – she’d engineered it to happen, he could see that now.

‘I’ll write,’ he promised.

She nodded, and the motion shook the tears out onto her cheeks.

He walked briskly to Departures. Forty minutes later he was up in the sky.

2

He would never see other humans the same way again

The USIC chauffeur emerged from the gas station with a bottle of Tang and a spotless, supernaturally yellow banana. Dazzled by the sun, he scanned the forecourt for his tanked-up limousine and its precious foreign cargo. That cargo was Peter, who was using this fuel stop to stretch his legs and attempt one last call.

‘Excuse me,’ said Peter. ‘Can you help me with this phone?’

The man seemed flummoxed by this request, jerking his hands around to indicate that they were both full. In his dark blue suit, complete with tie, he was overdressed for the Florida heat, and was still suffering some residual stress from the plane’s delayed arrival. It was almost as if he held Peter personally responsible for the turbulent atmospheric conditions over the North Atlantic ocean.

‘What’s the problem with it?’ he said, as he balanced the drink and the banana on the sun-blazed surface of the limousine’s roof.

‘Probably nothing,’ said Peter, squinting down at the gadget in his palm. ‘I probably don’t know how to use it properly.’

That was true. He wasn’t good with gadgets, and used a phone only when circumstances forced him to; the rest of the time it would hibernate in his clothing, eventually becoming obsolete. Every year or so, Beatrice would tell him what his new number was, or what her new number was, because yet another service
provider had become too frustrating to deal with or had gone bust. Businesses were going bust with alarming frequency these days; Bea kept up with stuff like that, Peter didn’t. All he knew was that memorising two new telephone numbers every year was not easy for him, despite his ability to memorise long passages of Scripture. And his unease with technology was such that if he pressed the gadget’s call symbol and nothing happened – as he’d just done, here in the blinding limbo of Florida – he couldn’t imagine what to do next.

The chauffeur was keen to resume the drive: there was still a long way to go. Biting off a mouthful of banana, he took hold of Peter’s phone and examined it mistrustfully.

‘Has this got the right kinda card in it?’ he mumbled as he chewed. ‘For calling . . . ah . . . England?’

‘I think so,’ said Peter. ‘I believe so.’

The chauffeur handed it back, non-committal. ‘Looks like a healthy cellphone to me.’

Peter stepped under the shade of a metal canopy that overhung the fuel pumps. He tried once more to tap the correct sequence of symbols. This time, he was rewarded with a staccato melody: the international code followed by Bea’s number. He held the metal lozenge to his ear and stared out at the unfamiliarly blue sky and the sculpted trees surrounding the truckstop.

‘Hello?’

‘It’s me,’ he said.

‘ . . . ello?’

‘Can you hear me?’ he said.

‘ . . . hear you . . . ’ said Bea. Her voice was enveloped in a blizzard of static. Random words jumped out of the phone’s tiny amplifier like stray sparks.

‘I’m in Florida,’ he said.

‘ . . . middle . . . night,’ she answered.

‘I’m sorry. Did I wake you?’

‘ . . . love you . . . how are . . . know what . . . ?’

‘I’m safe and sound,’ he said. Sweat was making the phone slippery in his fingers. ‘Sorry to be calling you now but I may not get another chance later. The plane was delayed and we’re in a big hurry.’

‘ . . . e . . . o . . . in the . . . me . . . guy know anything about . . . ?’

He walked further away from the vehicle, leaving the shade of the metal canopy. ‘This guy knows nothing about anything,’ he murmured, trusting that his words were being transmitted more clearly to her than hers were to him. ‘I’m not even sure if he works for USIC.’

‘ . . . haven’t ask . . . ?’

‘No, I haven’t asked yet. I will.’ He felt a bit sheepish. He’d spent twenty, thirty minutes in the car with this chauffeur already and hadn’t even established if he was an actual USIC employee or just a driver for hire. All he’d learned so far was that the photo of the little girl on the dashboard was the driver’s daughter, that the driver was newly divorced from the little girl’s mother, and that the mother’s mom was an attorney who was working hard to make the driver regret the day he was born. ‘It’s all very . . . hectic at the moment. And I didn’t sleep on the flight. I’ll write to you when I’m . . . you know, when I get to the other end. Then I’ll have plenty of time and I’ll put you in the picture. It’ll be just like we’re travelling together.’

There was a rush of static and he wasn’t sure if she had fallen silent or if her words were being swallowed up. He raised his voice: ‘How’s Joshua?’

‘ . . . first few . . . he just . . . o . . . ink . . . side . . . ’

‘I’m sorry, you’re breaking up. And this guy wants me to stop talking. I have to go. I love you. I wish . . . I love you.’

‘ . . . you too . . . ’

And she was gone.

‘That your wife?’ said the driver when Peter had settled back into the vehicle and they were pulling out of the truckstop.

Actually, no
, Peter felt like saying,
that was not my wife, that was a bunch of disassembled electronic noises coming out of a small metal device
. ‘Yes,’ he said. His almost obsessional preference for face-to-face communication was too difficult to explain to a stranger. Even Beatrice had trouble understanding it sometimes.

‘And your kid’s called Joshua?’ The driver seemed unconcerned by any social taboo against eavesdropping.

‘Joshua’s our cat,’ said Peter. ‘We don’t have children.’

‘Saves a lot of drama,’ said the driver.

‘You’re the second person in two days who’s told me that. But I’m sure you love your daughter.’

‘No choice!’ The driver waved one hand towards the windscreen, to indicate the whole world of experience, destiny, whatever. ‘What does your wife do?’

‘She’s a nurse.’

‘That’s a good job. Better than an attorney anyways. Making people’s lives better instead of making them worse.’

‘Well, I hope being a minister achieves the same thing.’

‘Sure,’ said the driver breezily. He didn’t sound sure at all.

‘And what about you?’ said Peter. ‘Are you a USIC . . . uh . . . staff member, or do they just hire you for taxi jobs?’

‘Been a driver for USIC for nine, ten years,’ said the chauffeur. ‘Goods, mainly. Academics sometimes. USIC holds a lot of conferences. And then every now and then, there’s an astronaut.’