The Book of Strange New Things (58 page)

After the satisfied animal had left him, Peter sat and stared at the distant lights of the base, his ‘home away from home’, as Grainger had called it. He stared until the lights turned abstract in his brain, until he could imagine the sun rising in England, and Bea hurrying through the car park of her hospital towards the bus stop. Then he imagined Bea getting into that bus and taking a seat amongst a heterogeneous variety of humans, some chocolate brown, some yellowish, some beige or pasty pink. He imagined the bus travelling along a road crowded with vehicles, until it pulled up in front of a store that sold household knick-knacks, cheap toys and other bargains for 99 pence, round the corner from a street with a launderette on the corner, a hundred and fifty metres from a semi-detached house with no curtains in the front windows, and an internal staircase carpeted in threadbare maroon, leading up to a room in which stood a machine on which Bea could, when she was ready, type the words ‘Dear Peter’. He raised himself to his feet and started walking back.

Dear Peter,

No I have not had a miscarriage and please don’t lecture me about compassion. You just don’t understand how impossible everything has become. It’s all about the scale of a problem and the available energy to deal with it. When someone gets their leg blown off by a bomb, you rush them into surgery, mend the stump, fit them with a prosthetic, give them physiotherapy, counselling, whatever it takes, and a year later, they may be running a marathon. If a bomb blows off their arms, legs, genitals, intestines, bladder, liver and kidneys, IT IS DIFFERENT. We need a certain proportion of things to be OK in order to be able to cope with other things going wrong. Whether it’s a human body or Christian endeavour or life in general, we can’t keep it going if too much of what we need is taken away from us.

I won’t tell you about the other things that were freaking me out in the last week or two. It’s current affairs stories that will only bore you. New wars in Africa, systematic slaughter of women and children, mass starvation in rural China, crackdown on protesters in Germany, the ECB scandal, my pension being wiped out, stuff like that. None of it will seem real to you up there. You are spooning Bible verses into the hungry mouths of Oasans, I appreciate that.

Anyway, what you need to know is that last week, for various reasons, I was stressed out and, as usual when I’m stressed out, Joshua picks up on my vibes. He was cowering under the furniture, dashing from room to room, crying, circling round and round my shins but not letting me pick him up or stroke him. It was the last thing I needed and it was driving me crazy. I just tried to ignore him, get on with some chores. I ironed my uniform. The ironing board was at an awkward angle and the cord didn’t have enough slack and I was too tired and hassled to set it up any other way so I just coped. At one point, I set the iron down and it fell off the edge of the board. Instinctively I jumped backwards. My heel came down hard on something, there was a sickening cracking snapping noise and Joshua screamed, I swear he screamed. Then he was gone.

I found him under the bed, trembling and hyperventilating. Eyes wide in pain and terror. I’d broken his back leg. I could see that. There was not one iota of trust in his eyes, he flinched when I spoke. I was the enemy. I fetched the gardening gloves so that he wouldn’t scratch or bite me and I took hold of his tail and pulled him out. It was the only way. I got him into the kitchen, put him on the table and attached the lead to his collar. He was calmer. I thought he was in shock, maybe in too much pain to do anything except sit there panting. I picked up the phone to call the vet. The kitchen window was open as usual. Joshua shot out as if someone fired him from a cannon.

I looked for him for hours. I covered the same ground over and over until I just couldn’t walk anymore and it was pitch dark. Then I had to go to work (night shift). It was hell. Don’t say anything, it was hell. At 4 am I was wearing two hospital gowns because my uniform was covered in faeces. An obese insane guy had been tossing it out of his bed, smearing it on the bedrails, bellowing the place down. The orderlies were off-duty, it was just me, little Oyama and a new girl who was sweet but kept disappearing. The faeces-tossing guy’s mother was camping out in the visitors’ room through the night – nobody had been able to throw her out. She’s in there with a six-pack of Pepsi and some half-eaten takeaway (this is supposed to be a hospital!) and every so often she pops her head in and checks that we’re taking good care of her boy. ‘You a bitch!’ she yells at me. ‘You cruel! I call police! You not a real nurse! Where the real nurses?’ On and on and on and on.

In the morning, I go home, still wearing the two gowns with a cardigan over them. Must have looked like an escapee from a loony bin. I get out of the bus two stops early so I can cut through the park in case I find Joshua there. It’s a long shot and I don’t really have any hope that I’ll see him. But I do.

He’s strung up by the tail from a tree. Alive. Two kids of maybe twelve are hoisting him up and down on a rope, making him spin, jerking him so he twitches. A red haze falls over my eyes. I don’t know what happened next, what I did to these kids, my memory is a blank. I only know I didn’t kill them because they weren’t there anymore when I came to. There’s blood on my fists, under my nails. I wish I’d killed them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know – underprivileged kids, rotten upbringing, in dire need of love and forbearance, why not come to our Outreach programme blah blah blah – THESE EVIL SCUMBAGS WERE TORTURING JOSHUA!

I pick him up. He’s still breathing, but shallowly. The base of his tail is shredded and one eye looks gouged out but he’s alive and I think he recognises me. Ten minutes later I’m at the vet’s. It’s before opening hours but I must have kicked and screamed because they open up for me. He lifts Joshua from my arms and gives him an injection.

‘OK, it’s done,’ he says. ‘Do you want to take him home or leave him here?’

‘What do you mean, take him home?’ I say. ‘Aren’t you going to do anything for him?’

‘I just did,’ he says.

Afterwards, he tells me he had no way of guessing I was willing to pay any amount of money for surgery. ‘Nobody’s bothering with that sort of thing nowadays,’ he says. ‘I can go for five, six hours without anyone coming in, and then when someone finally walks through the door with a sick pet, all they want is for it to be put to sleep.’ He puts Joshua into a plastic bag for me. ‘I won’t charge you,’ he tells me.

Peter, I’m only going to say this once. This experience is not educational. It is not instructive. It is not God moving in mysterious ways, it is not God figuring out exactly what sublime ultimate purpose can be served by me stepping on Joshua’s leg and everything after. The Saviour I believed in took an interest in what I did and how I behaved. The Saviour I believed in made things happen and stopped things happening. I was deluding myself. I am alone and frightened and married to a missionary who’s going to tell me that the fool has said in his heart there is no God, and if you don’t say it it will just be because you’re being diplomatic, because in your heart you’re convinced I made this happen through my faltering of faith, and that makes me feel even more alone. Because you’re not coming back to me, are you? You like it up there. Because you’re on Planet God. So even if you did come back to me, we still wouldn’t be together. Because in your heart you’d still be on Planet God, and I’d be a trillion miles away from you, alone with you by my side.

IV

IN HEAVEN

23

A drink with you

The bites were poisonous after all. He was sure of it. Underneath the bandages, the wounds looked clean, but the damage was done. The network of veins and arteries inside his flesh was industriously polluting all his organs with infected blood, feeding his brain with venom. It was only a matter of time. First he would become delirious – he felt that coming on already – and then his system would shut down, kidneys, liver, heart, guts, lungs, all those mysteriously interdependent globs of meat which needed poison-free fuel to keep functioning. His body would evict his soul.

Still seated at the Shoot, he lifted his face to the ceiling. He’d been staring at Bea’s words so long that they’d burned into his retinas and now re-appeared above him, illegible as mildew. The lightbulb hanging above his head was one of those energy-saving ones, more a coil than a bulb, like a segment of radioactive intestine suspended from a wire. Above that, a thin lid of ceiling and roof, and above that . . . what? Where in the universe was Bea? Was she above him, below him, to his right or to his left? If he could fly, if he could launch himself through space faster than the speed of light, what good would it do him? He had no idea where to go.

He mustn’t die in this room. No, no, not in this sterile cubicle, sealed inside a glorified warehouse of concrete and glass. Anywhere but this. He would go . . . out there. To the สีฐฉั. Maybe they had a cure. Some sort of folk remedy. Probably not, given how loudly they’d lamented when they saw him get bitten. But he should die in their company, not here. And he mustn’t see Grainger; he must avoid her at all costs. She would waste what little time he had left, trying to keep him at the base, trying to drag him to the infirmary where he would die under pointless observation and then be reduced to a storage problem, rammed into a shelf of a mortuary refrigerator.

How long have I got, Lord?
he prayed.
Minutes? Hours? Days?
But there were some questions that one must not ask of God. There were some uncertainties one must face alone.

‘Hi,’ he said to the porky woman with the snake tattoo, the gate-keeper to his escape. ‘I don’t think you ever told me your name. But it’s Craig, isn’t it? “B. Craig”, as the nameplate on your door has it. Nice to see you again, B.’

She looked at him as though he was covered in hideous sores. ‘Are you OK?’

‘Just a bit . . . underslept,’ he said, eyeing the vehicles parked behind her in the bay. There were half a dozen, including the one Grainger used for her drug deliveries. He hoped Grainger was fast asleep in bed, drooling into her pillow, keeping those pretty, scarred arms safe under the sheets. He wouldn’t want her to feel responsible for what he was about to do. Better to put pressure on Craig, who, like everyone else here, would be indifferent to his death. ‘What’s the “B” stand for?’ he said.

The woman frowned. ‘Can I help you?’

‘I would like to . . . uh . . . requisition a vehicle.’ Inside his head, banked up on his tongue, he had a barrage of speech ready to push her objections aside, to steamroller her reluctance.
Do what I want. Do what I want. You were told from the beginning I would require a vehicle; now it’s happening just as you were warned it would, so don’t be difficult, don’t resist me, just say yes
. ‘Just for an hour or two,’ he added, as the sweat prickled his eyebrows. ‘Please.’

‘Sure.’ She gestured towards a black station wagon that reminded Peter of a hearse. ‘How about this one? Kurtzberg used it all the time.’

He swayed on his feet. The victory was too easy; there must be a catch. ‘Fine with me.’

She opened the door and let him slide in. The key was already in the ignition. He’d expected to have to sign papers, produce a driving licence, or at least exert some serious psychological pressure. Maybe God was cutting through the obstacles for him. Or maybe this was just the way things worked here.

‘If you’re underslept,’ said Craig, ‘maybe you shouldn’t drive.’

Peter glanced over his shoulder. Kurtzberg’s bed – actually a small mattress with a floral coverlet and matching pillow – was right there in the back.

‘I’ll get all the sleep I want, soon,’ he assured her.

He drove into the wilderness, towards . . . Freaktown. Its official name escaped him for the moment. Peterville. New Zion. Oskaloosa. Please rescue Coretta from trouble, Lord. May your presence be felt in the Maldives.

His brain felt swollen, bulging out against his eyeballs. He shut his eyelids tight, to keep his eyeballs in. It was OK to do that while driving. There was nothing to collide with, no road to veer off or stay on. Only the general direction was important. And, he wasn’t actually sure if he was going the right way. This vehicle had the same navigation system as Grainger’s, but he had no idea how to use it, no idea what buttons to push. Bea would be able to figure it out, if she were given a –

He pressed his foot on the accelerator. Let’s see how fast this thing could go. There was a time for taking things easy and a time for really moving.

Was he really moving? It was hard to tell in the dark. The headlights illuminated only an abstract swathe of the terrain and there were no landmarks. He might be travelling at dangerous speed or he might be marooned in the soil, tyres churning endlessly, getting nowhere. But no: he could see clumps of whiteflower whizzing past like reflective strips on a highway. He was making progress. Progress away from the USIC base, at least – he couldn’t be sure he was getting any closer to the สีฐฉั settlement.

If only this vehicle were a living creature, like a horse or a dog, it would sniff its way unerringly back to the place Kurtzberg had visited so many times before. Just like Joshua when he –

An ugly sound startled him. It was a human cry, right here in the vehicle with him. It was his own voice. It was his own cry. He bashed the steering wheel with his fists, butted the back of his head repeatedly against the seat. A brick wall would have been better.

He wiped his eyes and peered through the front window. In the distance, dimly, he could see something looming up from the tundra. Architecture of some sort. He’d been travelling a few minutes only, so it couldn’t be the settlement yet. Unless, in his delirium, time had telescoped, so that he’d driven for hours in what seemed like seconds, or unless he’d fallen asleep at the wheel. But no. The looming thing was two huge spherical structures: the Big Brassiere. He was heading in the wrong direction.