The Book of Strange New Things (2 page)

‘Crisis!’ he said, and they both laughed. ‘Crisis’ was the word he’d trained himself to say instead of ‘Christ’, when he’d first become a Christian. The two words were close enough in sound for him to able to defuse a blasphemy when it was already half out of his mouth.

‘I mean it,’ she said. ‘Anywhere will do. Just don’t park in a place where another car’s likely to run into the back of us.’

The highway looked different to him now, as they drove on. In theory it was the same stretch of tarmac, bounded by the same traffic paraphernalia and flimsy metal fences, but it had been transformed by their own intent. It was no longer a straight line to an airport, it was a mysterious hinterland of shadowy detours and hidey-holes. Proof, once again, that reality was not objective, but always waiting to be reshaped and redefined by one’s attitude.

Of course, everybody on earth had the power to reshape reality. It was one of the things Peter and Beatrice talked about a lot. The challenge of getting people to grasp that life was only as grim and confining as you perceived it to be. The challenge of getting people to see that the immutable facts of existence were not so immutable after all. The challenge of finding a simpler word for ‘immutable’ than ‘immutable’.

‘How about here?’

Beatrice didn’t answer, only put her hand on his thigh. He steered the car smoothly into a truckstop. They would have to trust that getting squashed flat by a 44-ton lorry was not in God’s plan.

‘I’ve never done this before,’ he said, when he’d switched the ignition off.

‘You think I have?’ she said. ‘We’ll manage. Let’s get in the back.’

They swung out of their respective doors and were reunited several seconds later on the back seat. They sat like passengers, shoulder to shoulder. The upholstery smelled of other people – friends, neighbours, members of their church, hitchhikers. It made Peter doubt all the more whether he could or should make love here, now. Although . . . there was something exciting about it, too. They reached for each other, aiming for a smooth embrace, but their hands were clumsy in the dark.

‘How fast would the cabin light drain the car’s battery?’ she said.

‘I’ve no idea,’ he said. ‘Best not to risk it. Besides, it would make us a sideshow for all the passing traffic.’

‘I doubt it,’ she said, turning her face towards the headlights whizzing by. ‘I read an article once about a little girl who was being abducted. She managed to jump out of the car when it slowed down on the motorway. The kidnapper grabbed her, she put up a good fight, she was screaming for help. A stream of cars went past. Nobody stopped. They interviewed one of those drivers later. He said, “I was travelling so fast, I didn’t believe what I was seeing.”’

He shifted uncomfortably. ‘What an awful story. And maybe not the best of times to tell it.’

‘I know, I know, I’m sorry. I’m a bit . . . out of my mind just now.’ She laughed nervously. ‘It’s just so hard . . . losing you.’

‘You’re not losing me. I’m just going away for a while. I’ll be . . . ’

‘Peter, please. Not now. We’ve done that part. We’ve done what we can with that part.’

She leaned forward, and he thought she was going to start sobbing. But she was fishing something out from the gap between the two front seats. A small battery-operated torch. She switched it on and balanced it on the headrest of the front passenger seat; it fell off. Then she wedged it in the narrow space between the seat and the door, angled it so that its beam shone on the floor.

‘Nice and subdued,’ she said, her voice steady again. ‘Just enough light so we can make each other out.’

‘I’m not sure I can do this,’ he said.

‘Let’s just see what happens,’ she said, and began to unbutton her shirt, exposing her white bra and the swell of her bosom. She allowed the shirt to fall down her arms, wiggled her shoulders and elbows to shake the silky material off her wrists. She removed her skirt, panties and pantyhose all together, hooked in her strong thumbs, and made the motion look graceful and easy.

‘Now you.’

He unclasped his trousers and she helped him remove them. Then she slid onto her back, contorting her arms to remove her bra, and he tried to reposition himself without squashing her with his knees. His head bumped against the ceiling.

‘We’re like a couple of clueless teenagers here,’ he complained. ‘This is . . . ’

She laid her hand on his face, covering his mouth.

‘We’re you and me,’ she said. ‘You and me. Man and wife. Everything’s fine.’

She was naked now except for the wristwatch on her thin wrist and the pearl necklace around her throat. In the torchlight, the necklace was no longer an elegant wedding anniversary gift but became a primitive erotic adornment. Her breasts shook with the force of her heartbeat.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Do it.’

And so they began. Pressed close together, they could no longer see each other; the torchlight’s purpose was over. Their mouths were joined, their eyes clasped shut, their bodies could have been anyone’s bodies since the world was created.

‘Harder,’ Beatrice gasped after a while. Her voice had a harsh edge to it, a brute tenacity he’d never heard in her before. Their lovemaking had always been decorous, friendly, impeccably considerate. Sometimes serene, sometimes energetic, sometimes athletic, even – but never desperate. ‘Harder!’

Confined and uncomfortable, with his toes knocking against the window and his knees chafing on the furry viscose of the car seat, he did his best, but the rhythm and angle weren’t right and he misjudged how much longer she needed and how long he could last.

‘Don’t stop! Go on! Go on!’

But it was over.

‘It’s OK,’ she finally said, and wriggled from under him, clammy with sweat. ‘It’s OK’.

They were at Heathrow in plenty of time. The check-in lady gave Peter’s passport the once-over. ‘Travelling one-way to Orlando, Florida, yes?’ she said. ‘Yes,’ he said. She asked him if he had any suitcases to check in. He swung a sports bag and a rucksack onto the belt. It came across as dodgy somehow. But the logistics of his journey were too complicated and uncertain for a return booking. He wished Beatrice weren’t standing next to him, listening to these confirmations of his imminent departure into thin air; wished she’d been spared hearing the word ‘one-way’.

And then, of course, once he was handed his boarding pass, there was more time to fill before he would actually be allowed on the plane. Side by side, he and Beatrice meandered away from the check-in desks, a little dazzled by the excessive light and monstrous scale of the terminal. Was it the fluorescent glare that made Beatrice’s face look drawn and anxious? Peter put his arm around the small of her back. She smiled up at him reassuringly, but he was not reassured.
WHY NOT START YOUR HOLIDAY UPSTAIRS
? the billboards leered.
WITH OUR EVER-EXPANDING SHOPPING OPPORTUNITIES, YOU MAY NOT WANT TO LEAVE
!

At this hour of evening, the airport was not too crowded, but there were still plenty of people trundling luggage and browsing in the shops. Peter and Beatrice took their seats near an information screen, to await the number of his departure gate. They joined hands, not looking at each other, looking instead at the dozens of would-be passengers filing past. A gaggle of pretty young girls, dressed like pole dancers at the start of a shift, emerged from a duty-free store burdened with shopping bags. They tottered along in high heels, scarcely able to carry their multiple prizes. Peter leaned towards Beatrice’s face and murmured:

‘Why would anybody want to go on a flight so heavily laden? And then when they get to wherever they’re going, they’ll buy even more stuff. And look: they can barely walk.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘But maybe that’s the whole point. Maybe this is a display put on specially for us. The sheer impracticality of it all – right down to the ridiculous shoes. It lets everyone know these girls are so rich they don’t have to worry about the real world. Their wealth makes them like a different creature, an exotic thing that doesn’t have to function like a human.’

Bea shook her head. ‘These girls aren’t rich,’ she said. ‘Rich people don’t travel in packs. And rich females don’t walk as if they’re not used to high heels. These girls are just young and they enjoy shopping. They’re having an adventure. They’re showing off to each other, not to us. We’re invisible to them.’

Peter watched the girls stagger towards Starbucks. Their buttocks quivered inside their wrinkled skirts and their voices became raucous, betraying regional accents. Bea was right.

He sighed, squeezed her hand. What was he going to do without her, out in the field? How would he cope, not being able to discuss his perceptions? She was the one who stopped him coming out with claptrap, curbed his tendency to construct grand theories that encompassed everything. She brought him down to earth. Having her by his side on this mission would have been worth a million dollars.

But it was costing a great deal more than a million dollars to send him alone, and USIC was footing the bill.

‘Are you hungry? Can I get you anything?’

‘We ate at home.’

‘A chocolate bar or something?’

She smiled but looked tired. ‘I’m fine. Honestly.’

‘I feel so bad about letting you down.’

‘Letting me down?’

‘You know . . . In the car. It feels unfair, unfinished, and today of all days . . . I hate to leave you like this.’

‘It’ll be awful,’ she said. ‘But not because of that.’

‘The angle, the unfamiliar angle made me . . . ’

‘Please, Peter, there’s no need for this. I’m not keeping a score-card or a balance sheet. We made love. That’s enough for me.’

‘I feel I’ve . . . ’

She stopped his mouth with her finger, then kissed him. ‘You’re the best man in the world.’ She kissed him again, on the forehead. ‘If you’re going to do post-mortems, I’m sure there’ll be much better reasons on this mission.’

His brow furrowed against her lips. What did she mean by ‘postmortems’? Was she just referring to the inevitability of encountering obstacles and setbacks? Or was she convinced that the mission as a whole would end in failure? In death?

He stood up; she stood up with him. They held each other tight. A large party of tourists poured into the hall, fresh from a coach and keen to travel to the sun. Surging towards their appointed gate, the babbling revellers split into two streams, flowing around Peter and Bea. When they’d all gone and the hall was relatively quiet again, a voice through the PA said: ‘Please keep your belongings with you at all times. Unattended items will be removed and may be destroyed.’

‘Do you have some sort of . . . instinct my mission will fail?’ he asked her.

She shook her head, bumping his jaw with her skull.

‘You don’t feel God’s hand in this?’ he persisted.

She nodded.

‘Do you think He would send me all the way to – ’

‘Please, Peter. Don’t talk.’ Her voice was husky. ‘We’ve covered all this ground so many times. It’s pointless now. We’ve just got to have faith.’

They sat back down, tried to make themselves comfortable in the chairs. She laid her head on his shoulder. He thought about history, the hidden human anxieties behind momentous events. The tiny trivial things that were probably bothering Einstein or Darwin or Newton as they formulated their theories: arguments with the landlady, maybe, or concern over a blocked fireplace. The pilots who bombed Dresden, fretting over a phrase in a letter from back home: What did she
mean
by that? Or what about Columbus, when he was sailing towards the New Land . . . who knows what was on his mind? The last words spoken to him by an old friend, perhaps, a person not even remembered in history books . . .

‘Have you decided,’ said Bea, ‘what your first words will be?’

‘First words?’

‘To
them
. When you meet them.’

He tried to think. ‘It’ll depend . . . ’ he said uneasily. ‘I have no idea what I’m going to find. God will guide me. He’ll give me the words I need.’

‘But when you imagine it . . . the meeting . . . what picture comes to your mind?’

He stared straight ahead. An airport employee dressed in overalls with bright yellow reflective sashes was unlocking a door labelled
KEEP LOCKED AT ALL TIMES
. ‘I don’t picture it in advance,’ he said. ‘You know what I’m like. I can’t live through stuff until it happens. And anyway, the way things really turn out is always different from what we might imagine.’

She sighed. ‘I have a picture. A mental picture.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Promise you won’t make fun of me.’

‘I promise.’

She spoke into his chest. ‘I see you standing on the shore of a huge lake. It’s night and the sky is full of stars. On the water, there’s hundreds of small fishing boats, bobbing up and down. Each boat has at least one person in it, some have three or four, but I can’t see any of them properly, it’s too dark. None of the boats are going anywhere, they’ve all dropped anchor, because everyone is listening. The air is so calm you don’t even have to shout. Your voice just carries over the water.’

He stroked her shoulder. ‘A nice . . . ’ He was about to say ‘dream’, but it would have sounded dismissive. ‘Vision.’

She made a sound that could have been a croon of assent, or a subdued cry of pain. Her body was heavy against him, but he let her settle and tried not to fidget.

Diagonally opposite Peter and Beatrice’s seats was a chocolate and biscuit shop. It was still doing a brisk trade despite the lateness of the hour; five customers stood queued at the checkout, and several others were browsing. Peter watched as a young, well-dressed woman selected an armful of purchases from the display racks. Jumbo-sized boxes of pralines, long slim cartons of shortbreads, a Toblerone the size of a truncheon. Hugging them all to her breast, she ambled beyond the pylon supporting the shop’s ceiling, as if to check out whether there were more goodies displayed outside. Then she simply walked away, into the swirl of passers-by, towards the ladies’ toilets.

‘I’ve just witnessed a crime,’ Peter murmured into Beatrice’s hair. ‘Have you?’