The Book of Strange New Things

21. There is no God, she wrote

‘Sคฉ้นtฉ้ณ,’ he said.

‘สีคฉ้นรี่ฉ้ณ,’ she corrected him.

‘Sคฉ้นtฉ้ณ,’ he tried again.

‘สีคฉ้นรี่ฉ้ณ,’ she corrected him again.

‘สีคฉ้นรี่ฉ้ณ,’ he said.

All round him rose a noise like a flock of birds flapping their wings. It was not birds. It was the sound of applause from dozens of gloved hands. The Oasans — no longer Oasans to him but สีฐฉั — were letting him know he was making excellent progress in their language.

It was a perfect afternoon, just perfect. The air was less clammy than ever before, or perhaps he’d grown accustomed to the humidity at last. His body felt free and unencumbered, almost a part of the atmosphere, with no division between his skin and the surrounding sky. (Funny how he’d always been encouraged to conceive of the sky as something that started at some point far above him, whereas the สีฐฉั word for it — สี — recognised that it extended right down to the ground.)

He and the สีฐฉั were sitting outside the church, as was their custom when they were engaged in matters not strictly related to faith. The church was for singing, for sermons (although Peter didn’t refer to his Bible talks as such) and for contemplating the pictures his friends had dedicated to the glory of God. Outside, they could speak of other things. Outside, they could be his teachers.

Today, they numbered thirty. Not because the Jesus Lovers had dwindled in total, but because only certain members of the congregation felt confident to give their pastor instruction. Some of the people he was fondest of weren’t here, and he was forging a new intimacy with others who’d been a closed book to him before. For example, Jesus Lover Sixty-Three — so shy and awkward in most contexts — displayed a flair for linguistic problem-solving, keeping silent for long periods and then, when everyone was stuck, uttering the word they were searching for. By contrast, Lover One — the original convert to Christ and thus a person of some eminence among the believers — had declined Peter’s invitation to take part in the lessons. Declined? ‘Dismissed’ or ‘rejected’ was closer to the mark; Lover One was opposed to Peter attempting anything that might dilute the strangeness of the Book of Strange New Things.

‘Forget the Book for a moment… ’ Peter had said, but Lover One was so wound up that, for the first time, he interrupted.

‘Never forgeรี่ the Book. Never, never. The Book our rock, our hope, our redeemer.’

The words were Peter’s own, specially selected to be easy for these people to say, but the more often he heard the สีฐฉั uttering words like ‘redeemer’, the more he wondered what they really thought they meant.

‘I didn’t mean… I wasn’t saying… ’ Peter floundered. Then: ‘I just want to know you better.’

‘You know enough,’ Lover One said. ‘We are they who need more knowing, more word of Jeสีuสี. Word of Jeสีuสี good. Our word no good.’ And no amount of reassurance could convince him otherwise.

So here they were, a congregation within a congregation, engaged in an activity that had a slightly contentious status — which made it feel more important, of course. They sat on a patch of earth which had been shrouded in shade when they first settled in it, but not anymore. How many hours had they been sitting here? He didn’t know. Enough for the sun to move a significant distance across the sky. The sun’s name, he’d learned, was ڇ. Back at the USIC base, stowed in a drawer in Peter’s quarters, lay a printout prepared for him by some well-meaning boffin, charting the rising and setting of the sun within the 72-hour diurnal cycle. The heavens were reduced to a geometric grid with USIC at its centre; the times of day were represented as incomprehensible multi-digit numbers, and the sun was not dignified with a name. Typical.

Now, under that sun, he sat with his brethren on the mildest, most beautiful day yet. He imagined the scene from above — not very high above, but as if from a beach lifeguard’s observation tower. A tanned, lanky, blond-haired man in white, squatting on brown earth, encircled by small robed figures in all the colours of the rainbow. Everyone leaning slightly forward, attentive, occasionally passing a flask of water from hand to hand. Communion of the simplest kind.

He hadn’t felt like this since he was six and his parents took him to the dunes in Snowdonia. That summer had been the happiest time of his life, as he’d luxuriated not just in the balmy weather but also in his parents’ reconciliation, all coos and hugs and soft words. Even the name ‘Snowdonia’ seemed magical, like an enchanted kingdom rather than a national park in Wales. He’d sat for hour upon hour in the dunes, soaking up the warmth and his parents’ togetherness, listening to their beningnly meaningless chatter and the lapping of the waves, gazing out at the sea from under his oversized straw hat. Unhappiness was a test that you had to pass, and he’d passed it, and everything would be all right from now on. Or so he’d thought, until his parents’ divorce.

The language of the สีฐฉั was murder to pronounce but simple to learn. He had a hunch that there were probably only a few thousand words in the vocabulary — certainly far fewer than the quarter million in English. The grammar was logical and transparent. No eccentricities, no traps. There were no cases, no distinctions between singular and plural, no genders, and only three tenses: past, present and future. Even to call them tenses was a stretch: the สีฐฉั didn’t think that way. They classified a thing according to whether it was gone, or it was here, or it was expected to come.

‘Why did you leave the original settlement?’ he asked, at one point. ‘The place where you were living when USIC first came. You left it. Did something go wrong between you and USIC?’

‘We are here now,’ they replied. ‘Here good.’

‘But was there a problem?’

‘No problem. We are here now.’

‘It must have been very difficult to build everything again, from nothing.’

‘Building no problem. Every day a สีmall work more. สีmall work upon สีmall work, day upon day, then the work done.’

He tried a different tack. ‘If USIC had never come, would you still be living in the original settlement?’

‘Here good.’

Evasiveness? He wasn’t sure. The สีฐฉั language didn’t appear to contain any conditionals. There was no if.

The home of my Father have room upon room upon room, read one of his Bible paraphrases, carefully refashioned to avoid troublesome words like ‘house’ and ‘mansions’. As for John’s next bit, ‘if it were not so, I would have told you’, he’d ditched it and moved straight on to I will prepare a room for you — which in retrospect was a wiser decision than he’d known at the time, because the สีฐฉั wouldn’t have understood what John’s ‘if it were not so’ assurance was supposed to mean. One of the most direct, straight-talking asides in the whole Bible was arcane nonsense here.

And yet, however many problems the สีฐฉั might have with English, it was agreed that Peter would continue to speak of God and Jesus in his own tongue. His flock would have it no other way. The Book of Strange New Things was not translatable, they knew that. In foreign phrases, exotic power lurked.

But there was more to life than God and Jesus, and Peter wanted to share these people’s mundane reality. Just a few days after he started to learn the language, he overheard two Jesus Lovers talking, and was delighted to pick up, amongst the meaningless sussurus, a reference to a child refusing breakfast, or maybe not refusing, but doing something with or at breakfast that the grown-ups disapproved of. It was a trivial detail, and his understanding of it made no difference to anything, yet it made a huge difference to how he felt. In that modest moment of comprehension, he was a little less an alien.

‘Breakfast’ was ‘ڇสีน รี่ณ สค’ — literally, ‘first food after sleep’. A great many สีฐฉั words were composites of other words. Or maybe they were phrases, it was hard to tell. The สีฐฉั made no distinction. Did that mean they were vague? Well, yes and no. He got the impression there was a word for every thing — but just one. Poets would have a hard time here. And a single word might refer to an activity, a concept and a location all in one, as in สสีณ, which referred to the whiteflower fields, whiteflower in general, and the farming of the crop. Pronouns didn’t exist; you just repeated the noun. You repeated a lot of things.

‘สครี่ สีฐ?’ he asked Jesus Lover Twenty-Eight one day, proud that he could manage ‘Your child?’ in the สีฐฉั language. A small person, clearly not yet mature, was dawdling near the church, waiting for her to finish her worship and return home.

‘ณ,’ she confirmed.

Observing the child, he felt sad that there were no children in his congregation. The Jesus Lovers were all grown-ups.

‘Why don’t you keep him by your side?’ he asked. ‘He’s welcome to join us.’

Ten, twenty, thirty seconds went by while they stood there, watching the child watch them. A breeze fluttered the boy’s cowl, and he raised his tiny hands to adjust it.

‘He no love Jeสีuสี,’ Jesus Lover Twenty-Eight said.

‘He doesn’t have to,’ said Peter. ‘He could just sit with you, listen to the singing. Or sleep.’

More time passed. The boy stared down at his boots, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

‘He no love Jeสีuสี,’ Jesus Lover Twenty-Eight said.

‘Maybe in the future.’

‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘I hope.’ And she walked out of the church into the shimmering heat. Mother and son fell into step without a word. They didn’t hold hands, but then สีฐฉั seldom did.

How much did her child’s lack of Christian fellowship grieve her? How contemptuous or tolerant was this boy of his mother’s faith? Peter couldn’t tell. And asking Lover Twenty-Eight about it probably wouldn’t yield much insight. The lack of self-absorption he’d noted in these people from the outset went deep into the language itself: there were no words for most of the emotions that humans devoted endless energy to describing. The sort of intimate confab that longtime girlfriends indulged in, analysing whether a feeling was True Love or merely lust, affection, infatuation, habit, dysfunction, blah blah blah, was inconceivable here. He couldn’t even be sure if there was a word for anger, or if ‘รี่ฉ้ณ’ merely denoted disappointment, or a neutral recognition that life wasn’t turning out as planned. As for ‘ฉนณ’, the word for faith… its meaning was not what you’d call precise. Faith, hope, intention, objective, desire, plan, wish, the future, the road ahead… these were all the same thing, apparently.

Learning the language, Peter understood better how his new friends’ souls functioned. They lived almost wholly in the present, focusing on the tasks at hand. There was no word for yesterday except ‘yeสีรี่erday’. This didn’t mean the สีฐฉั had a poor memory; they just lived with memory differently. If someone dropped a dish and broke it, they would remember next day that the dish was broken, but rather than reliving the incident when the dish fell, they would be preoccupied with the need to make a new dish. Locating a past event in measured time was something they could do with great effort, as a special favour, but Peter could tell they didn’t see the point. Why should it matter exactly how many days, weeks, months or years ago a relative had died? A person was either living amongst them or in the ground.

‘Do you miss your brother?’ he asked Jesus Lover Five.

‘Brother here.’

‘I mean the one that died. The one that’s… in the ground.’

She remained utterly still. If she’d had eyes he could recognise, he suspected she would be staring at him blankly.

‘Do you feel pain that he is in the ground?’

‘He feel no pain in the ground,’ she said. ‘Before he go in the ground, he feel pain. Big, very big pain.’

‘But you? Do you feel pain? Not in your body, but in your spirit? Thinking of him, being dead?’

She shuddered gently. ‘I feel pain,’ she conceded after half a minute or so. ‘I feel pain.’

It was like a guilty triumph, extracting this confession from her. He knew that the สีฐฉั felt deep emotions, including grief; he sensed it. They weren’t solely practical organisms. They couldn’t be, or they wouldn’t have such an intense need for Christ.

‘Have you ever wished you were dead, Jesus Lover Five?’ He knew her real name now, and could even make a fair stab at pronouncing it, but she’d let him know that she preferred him to call her by her Christian honorific. ‘I have,’ he went on, hoping for a breakthrough in rapport. ‘At various bad times in my life. Sometimes the pain is so great, we feel it would be better not to be alive.’

She was silent for a long while. ‘Beรี่er be alive,’ she said at last, staring down at one of her gloved hands as if it contained a profound secret. ‘Dead no good. Alive good.’

Getting to grips with the language brought him no closer to understanding the origins of สีฐฉั civilisation. The สีฐฉั never alluded to what had happened in their collective past and appeared to have no concept of ancient history — their own or anyone else’s. For example, they either didn’t grasp, or considered irrelevant, the fact that Jesus walked the earth several thousand years ago; it might as well have been last week.

In this, they were, of course, excellent Christians.

‘Tell me about Kurtzberg,’ he asked them.

‘Kurรี่สีberg gone.’

‘Some of the workers at USIC say cruel things about that. I think they’re not serious, but I can’t be sure. They say you killed him.’

‘Kill him?’

‘Made him dead. Like the Romans made Jesus dead.’

‘Jeสีuสี no dead. Jeสีuสี alive.’

‘Yes, but he was killed. The Romans beat him and nailed him to the cross and he died.’

‘God iสี miracle. Jeสีuสี no longer dead.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Peter. ‘God is miracle. Jesus no longer dead. But what happened to Kurtzberg? Is he alive too?’

‘Kurรี่สีberg alive.’ A dainty gloved hand gestured at the empty landscape. ‘Walking. Walking, walking, walking.’

Another voice said: ‘He leave uสี in need of him.’

Another voice said: ‘You no leave uสี.’

‘I will have to go home eventually,’ he said. ‘You understand that.’

‘Home here.’

‘My wife is waiting for me,’ he said.

‘Your wife Bea.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Your wife Bea: one. We are many.’

‘A very John Stuart Mill observation.’ At this, they twitched their shoulders in fretful incomprehension. He should have known better than to say it. The สีฐฉั did not ‘do’ witticism or irony. So why had he bothered?

Maybe he was saying it to Bea, as if she were here to hear.

Solemn truth: If Bea hadn’t been OK, he wouldn’t have come. He would have postponed his visit, stayed at the base. The disappointment his flock would have felt was a far less serious thing than the distress of the woman he loved. But, to his enormous relief, she had listened to his pleas and prayed.

And, of course, God had come through.

I went to bed frightened and angry and lonely, I must confess, she’d written to him. I was expecting to wake up in a state of suppressed panic, as usual, my arms folded around my face to ward off whatever nasty surprise the day had in store for me. But next morning, the whole world was different.

Yes, that’s what God could do. Bea had always known that, but she’d forgotten it, and now she knew it again.

I may have mentioned (but probably not), her morning-after-prayer letter went on, that the central heating has been gurgling/thumping/stuttering all day & night for weeks, and suddenly the house was quiet. I figured the boiler must have given up the ghost, but no, it was fine. Everything working smoothly. As if God just laid a finger on it and said ‘Behave yourself’. Joshua seemed more at ease, stroking himself against my shins the way he used to. I made a cup of tea and realised I had no morning sickness. Then there was a knock on the door. I thought it was the postman, until I remembered that deliveries have been coming in the afternoon if they’ve come at all. But it was four fresh-faced young men, maybe mid-20s, very macho. For a moment I was scared they might rape me and rob me. A lot of that’s been going on lately. But guess what? They wanted to remove the piles of stinking garbage! They had a four-wheel drive and a trailer. Their accents were Eastern European, I think. They’ve been driving all over the area doing this.

‘The system is gone to hell!’ one of them said, big grin on his face. ‘We are the new system!’

I asked them how much they’re charging. I expected them to say 200 quid or something.

‘Give us 20 pounds!’

‘And a bottle of some kind of nice drink!’

I told them I didn’t have any alcohol in the house.

‘Then give us… 30 pounds!’

‘And think in your mind that we are good strong amazing guys!’

They cleared the lot in two minutes flat. They were showing off, tossing heavy bags into the trailer with one hand, doing leapfrog on the wheelie bins, stuff like that. It was bitter weather, I was shivering in a parka, and these guys were in thin sweatshirts, skintight so that their muscles were well displayed.

‘We come to your rescue, yeah?’

‘Every day you think, When is somebody gonna come, and today… we come!’

‘Don’t trust the government, it is bullshit. They say, You want the mess cleaned up but it’s too much problem. Bullshit! It’s not problem! Five minutes work! Good strong guys! Finished!’ He was beaming, sweating, he seemed perfectly warm.

I gave them a 50 pound note. They gave me 20 change, then drove off with the garbage, waving bye-bye. The street looked and smelled civilised for the first time in weeks.

I wanted to tell someone what had just happened, so I phoned Claire. I almost didn’t — I’ve hardly used the phone for ages, there’s been this hideous crackling on the line, you can barely hear the other person. But this time it was totally noise-free. Again, I thought it must be dead, but it was just working as it should. Claire was not surprised by my news; she’s heard about these guys. They make a fortune, she says, because they visit maybe forty homes every day at £20 a pop. Funny how a service you’re accustomed to paying a few pence for (in tax) suddenly seems cheap at a hundred times the price.

Anyway, the story gets better. Claire said she’d had a strong mental picture of me ever since she went to bed last night — ‘as if someone beamed it into my head’, she said. She and Keith are moving to Scotland (they got a third of what they originally paid for their house and feel lucky to have sold it) to a much smaller, scummier (Claire’s word) place because at least they have a support network there. Anyway, they packed up their possessions and Claire decided she no longer needs half the clothes she’s accumulated over the years. So, rather than putting them into a charity bin, which is risky nowadays because people use them for garbage, she brought over three huge bin-bags full. ‘Take what you want for yourself, Bee Bee; the rest can go to the church,’ she said. When I opened the bags I almost cried. Claire is exactly the same size as me, if you recall (you probably don’t) and I’ve always loved her taste in clothes. I’m not a covetous person but there were things in those bags that I used to lust after when I’d see Claire wearing them. Well, I’m wearing one of them right now! — a lilac cashmere pullover that’s so soft you keep touching it to make sure it’s real. It must have cost 10 x more than anything I’ve ever had on my body apart from my wedding dress. And there are fancy leggings as well — beautifully embroidered, works of art. If you were here I would give you a little fashion parade. Can you even remember what I look like? No, don’t answer that.

I start back at work tomorrow. Rebecca tells me that Goodman has gone on holiday! Is that good news or what! And my hand has healed up very nicely. There was still some tingling in the nerves before but that’s completely gone now.

I went out to the supermarket today and there was more stock on the shelves than there’s been for ages. I remarked on it to the manager and he gave me such a smile. ‘We aim to please,’ he said. I suddenly realised what a nightmare he’s been living through; it’s only a lousy supermarket but it’s his baby. Speaking of which — did I already mention No Morning Sickness? Just cravings, cravings, cravings. But in the supermarket, I scored — wait for it (I certainly have!) — a chocolate dessert! I suppose it’s kind of trivial to claim that God delivers chocolate when you really, really want it. But maybe he does.

Chocolate and cashmere pullovers. Weirdly exotic things they seemed to him, under the vast sky of Oasis, observing the incremental progress of ڇ from horizon to horizon. And of course he’d been reminded of Matthew 6:25 when he’d read Bea’s letter. But he knew she was touchy lately and might not appreciate being reminded of Jesus’s cautions against getting too concerned with food and clothes. The main thing was that she felt encouraged and restored. She’d been in danger of slipping adrift from God’s protection and now she was back in it. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Lord, he prayed. He trusted she was doing the same.

USIC had promised him that they would build a transmitter for Shoot access right near his church very soon, maybe even before his next visit to C-2. So this was the last time he would be out in the field without the chance to share his day-to-day impressions with Bea. Once the Shoot was in place, neither of them would be unreachable anymore.

Bea’s mention of Claire and Keith troubled him slightly. He couldn’t remember ever having met them. Were they members of the church, or acquaintances from somewhere else? People from Bea’s hospital? She spoke as though their identity didn’t need explaining. Claire, apparently, had a body almost identical to Bea’s. He strained to recall seeing his wife standing next to another female who looked very similar. A woman in a lilac cashmere pullover. Nothing came.

Jesus Lover Nine padded over to him, cradling a small pot of whiteflower sweetmeats. She angled the pot forwards, to indicate: have some. He took one. It was delicious but marinaded in a saucy paste that left dark brown marks on the fingers. Lover Nine’s gloves were filthy; they would need washing when she got home. Her robe was grubby, too. Quite a few of the สีฐฉั were a bit soiled today, because before the language lesson they’d been digging a hole for the transmitter.

Even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these, he thought.

The communion came to an end, and the สีฐฉั went back to their homes, and Peter went into his church and slept for a spell. How long? A while, a while. He’d lost touch with whether it was technically day or night or ‘2200 plus’ or whatever stupid formula the USIC people expected him to use, but he was attuned to the rhythms of the สีฐฉั by now and when he awoke he had a sense that it must be very early morning and it probably was.

A shaft of light illuminated his lower body, emphasising the sharp contours of his pelvis and the concave valley under his ribcage. He was all bone and sinew, like a dancer or an inmate of a concentration camp. The taut flesh pulsed with his heartbeat. He wasn’t hungry, though. Just thirsty. The light was flickering on his abdomen. Why was it flickering? Rain must be on the way. He decided to leave the water bottle untouched by his pillow and to wait for the heavens to open instead.

Outside, naked, he stood watching, his hair flapping with the force of what was approaching. It would be a particularly heavy downpour, he could tell. Four gigantic bodies of water, stacked in a vast pyramidal formation, rolled forwards, constantly threatening to merge into one but somehow remaining discrete. Three of them swirled in slow, stately fashion and the fourth spun with centrifugal frenzy. Best to hold tight to something. He braced himself against the wall.

When the deluge hit, it was exhilarating but also scary. The wind rushed past him through the church and he heard the thump and clatter of loose objects being thrown about. One gust almost lifted him off his feet. But the rain was cool and clean and luxurious. He opened his mouth and let it pour in. He felt as though he was diving and swimming — and surfacing, always surfacing — without having to move a muscle.

When it was over, he was dazed and numb and unsteady on his feet. A cursory inspection of the church interior showed no serious damage. Jesus Lover Seventeen’s painting, a recent arrival he hadn’t yet had time to attach to the ceiling, had been hurled across the floor and the edges of its cloth were frayed, but the picture was unharmed. An Expressionist still-life of a flower, he’d thought at first, but no: what he’d perceived as flower-petals was a circle of robed figures bent backwards in astonishment, and what he’d perceived as the stamen was a man growing from the ground: Lazarus.

He stowed the painting back behind the pulpit, ready for hanging. The rainburst had left him pleasantly sated, and his natural inclination was to lie down and allow his skin to tingle for a while. But he knew there was work to be done. Not the Lord’s work, but manual labour. The whiteflower fields would be sodden, and within a couple of hours many of the plants would have swelled to maturity, while others would be in danger of collapsing into sludge. The time to act was now.

‘God bleสี our reunion, Father Peรี่er.’

He waved, but wasted no time saying hello to everyone he knew. Many of the สีฐฉั gathered here for the harvest were not Jesus Lovers, and they had yet to accept him fully in their midst. It was diplomatic to save the conversation for later. He got down on his knees, and within seconds his hands were caked to the elbows with muck.

The plantation had turned into one big bog, like a pig farm. The soil was more retentive of moisture here than in the open scrublands, and there was also a lot of decaying whiteflower scattered about, from the remnants of plants that had been uprooted last time. A fine, almost imperceptible fog began to rise from the ground, rendering everything less than fully distinct. It didn’t matter. The plant in front of you: that was all you needed to see.

Peter enjoyed working in the fields. It took him back to his younger days of strawberry-picking for cash-in-hand, except that this was honest toil and he wasn’t doing it because he was on the run from drug buddies he’d robbed. It wasn’t mindless drudgery, either, because you had to evaluate each plant to decide whether to leave it alone, tear bits off it, squeeze it, or pull it out.

The สีฐฉั harvested patiently and with quiet deliberation, more like gardeners than slave-driven serfs. They wore their gloves as usual. Whenever these became too muddy, they would stop for a while to wipe them free of excess dirt or adjust the fit. Sometimes they just sat back and rested for a few minutes. When they’d accumulated a basketful of plants, they would carry it to the edge of the field, where half a dozen nets were spread out. Onto these nets they would distribute the different parts of the plants, each part according to its destiny. It had taken Peter quite a while to get the hang of which bits went on which pile, but he believed he had it sorted now. He was no longer a liability; he was a fellow-worker. And he worked harder and faster than any of them.

After an hour or two, despite the fact that there were probably still lots of moribund plants hiding in amongst the resilient ones, the harvesters — mindful of their limited energy — moved on to the next phase. This was the part Peter liked best, because it really did require vigour and stamina — two qualities the สีฐฉั were not overly endowed with. They were all right at carrying the produce from the fields back into the settlement, for each net could be carried as slowly, and as haltingly, and by as many people, as the weight of its contents demanded. But there was a task which allowed no slack: the making of meat. Beefsteak, lamb, bacon, veal: cunning simulacra of these were favourites among the largely carnivorous USIC personnel, but they weren’t easy to create. They required violent effort — not the killing of an animal, but the relentless pounding of whiteflower plants that were on the brink of death. Only the most swollen, senile specimens were chosen. When the water-gorged flesh was pummelled with a stone, the weakened capillaries of the plant diffused a characteristic flavour through the pulpy mess. With each pound, the mess became more elastic and homogenous, until it could be left to solidify into dense lumps which, when carved and seasoned, looked and tasted uncannily like meat. The สีฐฉั pummelled gingerly, one or two blows at a time. Peter pummelled like a machine.

So absorbed were Peter and the สีฐฉั in their work that they didn’t notice, until it was too late, the arrival of the swarm.

One of the สีฐฉั shouted something Peter half-understood, because it contained the same root word for ‘foreign/alien/unexpected/strange’ that was in ‘The Book of Strange New Things’. Smiling in pleasure at this further proof of his progress in the language, he looked to where the person was pointing. At the perimeter of the plantation, barely discernible as anything more than a low mist of pinky-grey, was the horde of bird-like creatures Peter had seen marching past the USIC base.

His first impulse was to whoop with delight and urge his friends to enjoy the spectacle. But the สีฐฉั were obviously alarmed — and with good reason. The creatures waddled silently into the whiteflower and within seconds a large swathe of the field was obscured by their quivering bodies. Peter ran through the fields to get a closer look, but he knew, he already knew. These animals, these adorable critters, these chicadees, duckaboos, woglets or whatever other cute names they might be given, were rapacious vermin, and they were here to eat the crop.

Mindless as maggots, they hunkered into the juicy whiteflower, making no distinction between old plants and young plants, hard buds and flaccid leaves, flower or stalk. In their downy grey heads, muscles pulsed as they chewed and chomped. Their spherical bodies shivered and swelled and were not satisfied.

Instinctively, he reached down and seized the nearest of them and yanked it free of its feast. At once, his forearm got an electric shock. Or that’s how it felt, as the frantic creature lunged round and clamped its fangs into his flesh. He hurled it away in an arc of his own blood. He tried kicking at the creatures, but he was bare-legged apart from his sandals, and a vicious bite on one of his calves sent him reeling backwards. There were too many of them, anyway. If he’d had a cudgel, or a gun… a machine gun, or a fucking flamethrower! Adrenalin connected him with a younger, angrier Peter, a pre-Christian Peter who was capable of punching a man’s nose until it splintered, capable of smashing the windscreen of a car, capable of sweeping a long row of fragile knick-knacks off a mantelpiece in a convulsive gesture of hatred, except that he was capable of nothing now, and his adrenalin was useless, because all he could do was fall back and watch this horde consume the fruits of his people’s labour.

Those of the สีฐฉั who weren’t Jesus Lovers had better things to do than stand and watch. The fate of their plantation was obvious. They hurried to the piles of harvested whiteflower and shouldered the nets, heaving them off the ground. They knew that the pests would eat systematically from one end of the field to the other, so there was still time to carry away what was already in the bag, so to speak. The Jesus Lovers swayed anxiously back and forth, torn between their need to salvage the crop and their concern for Peter. He approached them, intending to help them carry the load, but they cringed and swayed all the more. A weird, disturbing sound issued from their heads, a sound he hadn’t heard before. Intuition told him it was the sound of lamentation.

His arm, stretched out toward them, dripped blood into the soil. The bite was not just a puncture, but had lifted a flap of skin. His leg, too, was grisly.

‘You will die, you will die!’ moaned Jesus Lover Five.

‘Why? Are those things poisonous?’

‘You will die, you will die!’ ‘You will die, you will die!’ ‘You will die, you will die!’ Several of the Jesus Lovers had joined in the moaning. Their raised voices, jumbled together, so different from their usual gentle utterances never spoken out of turn, unnerved him.

‘Poison?’ he asked loud and clear, pointing at the swarm of vermin. He wished he knew the สีฐฉั word for ‘poison’. ‘Bad medicine?’

But they did not reply. Instead they hurried away. Only Lover Five hesitated. She’d been in a strange state all through the harvest, hardly working, mostly watching, occasionally lending just one hand — her left — to a simple task. Now she came to him, walking as if drunk or in a daze. She laid her hands — one glove grubby, the other clean — on his hips, then pressed her face hard into his lap. There was nothing sexual in her intent; he doubted if she even knew where or what his genitals were. He guessed she was saying goodbye. And then she was hurrying after the others.

Within minutes, he stood alone in the whiteflower fields, his injured arm and leg itching and burning, his ears filled with the hideous noise of hundreds of rodent mouths gnashing on slimy pulp that, only a few minutes before, had been destined for transformation into bread, lamb, beancurd, ravioli, onion, muสีhroom, peanuรี่ buรี่er, chocolaรี่e, สีoup, สีardine, สีinnamon and a host of other things.

When Peter limped back to his church, he found a pickup truck parked outside and a USIC employee called Conway sipping from a $50 bottle of pop. A short, bald man in immaculate lime-green overalls and polished black boots, he cut a remarkable contrast to Peter’s filthy, blood-spattered appearance.

‘Are you OK?’ said Conway, then laughed at the absurdity of the question.

‘I got bitten,’ said Peter.

‘By what?’

‘Uh… I don’t know what word you guys finally decided on. Flabbits? Chicadees? Whatever.’

Conway raked a hand through his non-existent hair. He was an electrical engineer, not a medic. He pointed behind the church, at a brand-new structure that resembled a washing machine with a miniature Eiffel Tower stuck on top. ‘Your Shoot relay,’ he explained. In normal circumstances, copious expressions of thanks and admiration would have been in order, and Peter could see that Conway was having trouble letting go of his moment of well-deserved praise.

‘I think I’d better get some treatment for this,’ said Peter, holding up his gory forearm.

‘I think maybe you better,’ agreed Conway.

By the time they reached the USIC base hours later, the bleeding had stopped but the flesh around his wounds was turning dark blue. Necrosis? Probably just bruising. The vermin’s jaws had punched him with the force of a power tool. During the drive, he’d had ample opportunity to examine his arm and he couldn’t see any bone peeping out, so he supposed the injury could be classified as superficial. He’d tucked the loose flap of skin back into place but he guessed it would need stitches to stay there.

‘We got us a new doctor,’ said Conway. ‘Just arrived.’

‘Oh yes?’ said Peter. He was losing sensation in his mangled leg.

‘Nice guy. And good at his job, too.’ It seemed a fatuous remark to make: everyone chosen by USIC was nice and good at their job.

‘Glad to hear it.’

‘So,’ pursued Conway, ‘let’s go see him. Now.’

But Peter refused to go straight to the infirmary, insisting that he must first stop off in his quarters. Conway wasn’t keen.

‘It won’t make any difference to the doctor how you’re dressed,’ he pointed out. ‘And they’ll clean you up with disinfectant and stuff.’

‘I know,’ said Peter. ‘I want to check for messages from my wife.’

Conway blinked in bemusement. ‘Can’t it wait?’ he said.

‘No, it can’t wait,’ said Peter.

‘OK,’ said Conway, and nudged the steering wheel. Unlike Peter, who couldn’t distinguish one concrete façade from another, he knew exactly where to go.

As soon as Peter walked into the USIC building, he was overcome with a fit of shivering. His teeth chattered as Conway led him to his quarters.

‘You’re not gonna keel over, are you?’

‘I’m fine.’ The atmosphere inside the complex was glacial, a vacuum laced with chilled, sterile oxygen lacking any of the other natural ingredients that would have made it air. Each breath hurt his lungs. The light seemed bunker-dim, ghastly. But didn’t he always feel this way, whenever he’d been in the field for a while? He always needed to acclimatise.

By the time they got to his room, Conway was very agitated indeed. ‘I’ll be right outside,’ he said. ‘Try to make it quick. I don’t want a dead preacher on my hands.’

‘I’ll do my best,’ said Peter, and shut him away from view. Fever, or some other disorder, was swelling the vessels in his head, and his teeth were still chattering so hard that his cheeks and jaw ached. Dizziness and lethargy came in waves, trying to knock him off his feet.

As he switched on the Shoot, he wondered if he was wasting precious seconds in which his life could be saved. But he doubted it. If the bite had poisoned him, USIC’s medical clinic was unlikely to have an antidote. The poison would do whatever the poison was going to do, and it would either happen with a bunch of concerned faces hanging over him or it would happen in the privacy of his own space. Maybe he had only hours to live. Maybe he would be the new pathologist’s first challenge, a corpse full of alien venom.

If so, he wanted, before he lost consciousness, to read just once more that Bea loved him and that she was OK. The Shoot glowed to life and a small green light near the bottom of the screen winked on and off, indicating that an invisible net was sweeping through the universe to find any words that might be from his wife.

Her message, when it came, was brief.

There is no God, she wrote.

22. Alone with you by my side

‘Carpenter,’ said a voice floating above him.

‘Mm?’ he responded.

‘When I was a kid, people assumed I’d be a carpenter. I had a talent for it. But then… this is all a con, you know.’

‘A con?’

‘This air of sophistication medicine gets wrapped in. The doctor magician, the great master surgeon. Baloney. Fixing the human body doesn’t require that much finesse. The skills you need… I tell ya, it’s just carpentry, plumbing, sewing.’

Dr Adkins was proving his point by pushing a sewing-needle through Peter’s flesh to add another loop of fine black thread to the row. He was almost done. The stitches formed an elegant design, like a tattoo of a swallow in flight. Peter felt nothing. He was generously dosed with analgesics on top of having been injected with two whacks of local anaesthetic, and this, combined with his exhaustion, put him beyond the reach of pain.

‘Do you think I’ve been poisoned?’ he asked. The operating theatre seemed to be expanding and contracting slightly, in rhythm with his pulse.

‘Nothing in your blood to suggest you have,’ said Adkins, tying the final knot.

‘And what about… uh… I forgot his name. The doctor you came here to… uh… the one who died… ’

‘Everett.’

‘Everett. Have you established what killed him?’

‘Yup.’ Adkins tossed the needle onto the suture tray, which was immediately removed by Nurse Flores. ‘Death.’

Peter laid his embroidered arm across the white linen napkin covering his chest. He wanted to sleep now.

‘But the cause?’

Dr Adkins pursed his lips. ‘A cardio-vascular accident — with the emphasis on “accident”. His grandfather died the same way, apparently. These things happen. You can eat healthy foods, keep fit, take vitamins… But sometimes, you just die. It’s your time.’ He raised one eyebrow. ‘I guess you’d call it an appointment with God.’

Peter flexed his fingers, appraised his tattoo of stitches again.

‘I thought it was my time for a while there.’

Adkins chuckled. ‘You’ll live to preach another day. And when you go back, just in case you cross paths with those nasties again, here’s my advice.’ He clamped his hands together, mimed a violent swing. ‘Take a golf club.’

Peter was too drugged to walk, so someone trundled him out of the surgery in a wheelchair. Two pale hands appeared from behind him and spread a cotton blanket over his knees, tucked it around his hips, deposited a transparent plastic bag containing his sandals in his lap.

‘Thank you, whoever you are,’ he said.

‘You’re welcome, I’m sure,’ said Grainger.

‘Oh, gosh, I’m sorry,’ said Peter. ‘I didn’t see you in the surgery.’

She wheeled him, straight and steady, along the sunlit corridor towards the big double doors. ‘I was in the waiting room. I don’t like the gory stuff.’

Peter lifted his arm, displayed the pure white bandage. ‘All fixed up,’ he said.

Even before she replied, he could sense she was not impressed. Her wrists, gripping the handles of the wheelchair, were tense — tenser than they needed to be.

‘You don’t take care of yourself when you’re out there,’ she said. ‘For Christ’s sake, you’re skin and bone. And yeah, I know I’m blaspheming. But look at you.’

He stared down at his wrists, which had always been bony, he thought. Well, maybe not that bony. The thick bandage made his arm look more emaciated somehow. How angry was Grainger? Just a bit exasperated? Furious? The distance between the medical centre and his quarters would take several minutes to cover, which was a long time when you were in the hands of someone who was upset with you. Weakened by the analgesics and the shock of Bea’s message — which returned to his mind over and over like a wave of nausea — he was suddenly overcome by a belief that other men had often described to him when he’d given them pastoral counselling — a deep, despondent conviction that no matter what they did, no matter how good their intentions, they were doomed to bitterly disappoint women.

‘Hey, I made an effort not to let my ears get so burnt this time,’ he said. ‘Give me some points for trying.’

‘Don’t patronise me.’

Grainger pushed him through the double doors, veered him sharply to the right.

‘Kurtzberg was the same,’ she remarked. ‘And Tartaglione. They looked like skeletons in the end.’

He sighed. ‘We all look like skeletons in the end.’

Grainger grunted irritably. She wasn’t finished chastising him yet. ‘What goes wrong out there in Freaktown? Is it you or them? They don’t feed you, is that it? Or they just don’t eat, period?’

‘They’re very generous,’ Peter protested. ‘They’ve never… I’ve never felt that I’m being starved. It’s just that they don’t eat a lot themselves. I think most of what they grow and… uh… process… gets put aside to feed the USIC personnel.’

‘Oh, great! So we’re exploiting them now?’ Grainger veered him round another corner. ‘I tell you, we’ve bent over backwards to do the right thing here. Bent over backwards. There’s too much riding on this to fuck it up with an imperialist fiasco.’

Peter wished they’d had this conversation a lot earlier, or that they could have saved it for later — any time but now. ‘Uh… what’s riding on this?’ he said, struggling to stay upright in the chair.

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake. Isn’t it obvious? Are you that much of a babe in the woods?’

I just do God’s work; my wife asks the penetrating questions, he was about to say. It was true. Bea was always the one who needed to know why, who scratched under the veneer of what she was told, who refused to fall into step with the game everyone else was playing. She was the one who read the fine print in contracts, she was the one who would explain to him why an apparently wonderful opportunity was full of pitfalls, she was the one who could see through a scam even if it came disguised in Christian wrapping. Grainger was right: he was a babe in the woods.

He hadn’t been born one, that’s for sure. He’d turned himself into one, by force of will. There were many ways of becoming a Christian but the way that had worked for him was to switch off his capacity for cynicism, switch it off like a light. No, that was the wrong comparison… he’d… he’d switched on the light of trust. After so many years of playing games, exploiting everyone he met, stealing and lying and worse, he’d re-made himself into an innocent. God had wiped the slate clean. The man who’d once littered his conversation with casual expletives like ‘Jesus fucking Christ’ became the man who said ‘gosh’. There was no other way. You were either a raging alcoholic or you didn’t touch drink. Same with cynicism. Bea could handle it — in moderation. He couldn’t.

But then: There is no God. From Bea. Please, Lord, no. Not from Bea.

Bea, too, had trundled him in a wheelchair once, in the hospital where they first met. Exactly like Grainger was wheeling him now. He’d broken both his ankles jumping out of a warehouse window and had spent several days in Bea’s ward with his legs strung up in the air. Then one afternoon she unshackled him, got him into a wheelchair and pushed him to the x-ray department for a post-op assessment.

‘Can you just whizz me through one of these side exits for a minute so I can have a cigarette?’ he’d said.

‘You don’t need nicotine, handsome,’ she’d replied, from a sweet-smelling spot behind and above him. ‘You need your life to change.’

‘Well, here you are,’ said Grainger. ‘Your home away from home.’ They’d reached the door that was labelled P. LEIGH, PASTOR.

As Grainger was helping him to his feet, one of the USIC electricians, Springer, happened to be passing by.

‘Welcome back, preach!’ he called. ‘You want any more wool, you know where to find me!’ And he sauntered on down the hall.

Grainger’s lips were close to Peter’s ear as she said softly, ‘God, I hate this place. And everybody who works here.’

But please don’t hate me, thought Peter as he pushed open the door and they walked in together. The atmosphere that greeted them was stale and slightly sour from two weeks’ lack of air conditioning. Motes of dust, disturbed by the intrusion, swirled in a beam of light. The door fell shut.

Grainger, who’d had one arm on his back in case he lost his balance, threw the other one around him too. In his confusion, he was slow to realise she was embracing him. And not only that: it was a different embrace from the one they’d had before. There was passion and female need in it.

‘I care about you,’ she said, digging her forehead into his shoulder. ‘Don’t die.’

He stroked her awkwardly. ‘I don’t intend to.’

‘You’ll die, you’ll die, I’ll lose you. You’ll go weird and distant and then one day you’ll just disappear.’ She was weeping now.

‘I won’t. I promise.’

‘You bastard,’ she cried softly, holding him tighter still. ‘You scumbag, you lying… ’

She broke the embrace. The pale fabric of her clothing was marked with dirt from the harvest fields of the สีฐฉั.

‘I won’t drive you to see those freaks again,’ she said. ‘Someone else can do it.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Whatever you want.’ But she was already gone.

There was no further message from Bea. At his command, a network of ingenious technology searched the cosmos for her thoughts and found nothing. Only that same cry of desolation, still glowing on the screen, just those four awful words, hanging in a contextless grey void. No name attached — neither hers or his. Just the raw sentence.

He sat at the Shoot and prayed for strength. He knew that if he didn’t reply now, and keep it short, he was liable to pitch forwards and go unconscious right there.

His clumsy fingers were poised to type the words of Psalm 14:1: The fool has said in his heart, there is no God. But then God entered Peter’s heart and cautioned him that this would be stupid. Whatever had happened to Bea, she didn’t need criticism.

Maybe there had been another natural disaster? Some horrific event in a foreign country that had swamped Bea’s head with the pain of useless empathy? Or maybe it had happened closer to home, in Britain? A catastrophe that had left thousands of people homeless, devastated, bereaved?

Psalms to the rescue again: Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day; Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday. A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee.

But what if… what if it had come nigh to Bea? What if she’d been hit by an earthquake or a flood? What if, right at this moment, she was stranded and dazed, camped in the ruins of their house? But no, no, be logical, their house must be intact, or else she wouldn’t be able to write to him. USIC had given them a Shoot and it was set up in the study upstairs, connected to a mainframe the size of a filing cabinet. The existence of Bea’s message proved she was safe. Except that a person alienated from God could never be safe.

As dihydromorphine, chloroprocaine and exhaustion dragged him more and more insistently towards sleep, he began to panic. He must write, and yet he couldn’t. He must say something, break the silence, and yet if he chose the wrong words he would regret it for ever.

Finally, he let go of any notion of quoting Bible verses or giving advice. He was her husband, she was his wife: that was the only thing he could be sure of.

Bea, I don’t know what’s brought you to this point but I love you and I want to help you if I can. Please tell me what’s wrong and please forgive me if it’s something I should have already known. I’ve just come out of surgery. A few stitches, nothing serious. I got bitten in the field. Explain later. Will crash for a bit now but please, I’m worried about you, I love you, I know this sounds absurd but I’m there for you, I really am.

He sent this flying and collapsed into bed.

A little while later, without speaking, Grainger came and lay next to him. She rested her head on his naked chest, and her shoulder was in such a position that it would have been unnatural not to cup it in his hand. So he cupped it in his hand. She moved closer against him, let him feel the warmth of her flesh. Her small fingers stroked his abdomen, her palm traced the hollow where the ribs began. Then she took hold of his penis, which was already erect. Before he could speak, Bea was there with them, reassuring him with her eyes that it was all right. Grainger lifted her tunic. Her pale breasts were freckled. He kissed one while Bea finished undressing and crawled onto the bed. Grainger held his penis upright, allowing Bea to lower herself onto it. He ejaculated the instant he was inside.

As soon as he awoke, he smelled the odour of betrayal. He had committed adultery in his heart, and — worse — dragged his wife into his disloyal fantasy, making her an accomplice. He and Bea had always been faithful to each other; he never took advantage of the vulnerable females who passed through his ministry. He was a one-woman man and Bea was his woman. Wasn’t she?

He lay still for a while, shielding his eyes from the sunlight with his good arm. A hangover-style headache throbbed in his temples. His tongue and lips had dried out. His injured arm felt OK — well, numb — but his shin hurt like a burn. He had no idea how long he’d slept: fifteen minutes or fifteen hours. A memory of the dream lingered, tempting him with its phantasm of love, its enchanted mirage in which all grief and hurt and estrangement was smoothed over by desire.

Thirst pushed him to his feet. He drank greedily straight from the tap, noisy as a dog, until his stomach sloshed. The doctor had told him to go ahead and take showers, get soap and water on his wounds, but not scratch at the stitches if they got itchy; they would dissolve by themselves when their work was done. Peter unfastened and unrolled the bandages, unveiling the mended flesh. The soft white cotton was hardly stained at all, the injuries neat. He showered, towelled himself dry, carefully reapplied the bandages. He put on jeans and a faded orange T-shirt emblazoned OUTREACH TASKFORCE BASILDON. Both garments felt too big. He rummaged inside his knapsack for some socks, pulled out a small plastic bag with squishy, semi-liquid contents he couldn’t identify at first. It was the remains of a meal he’d been given by the สีฐฉั a long time ago, before he’d grown accustomed to their food: a slab of suety stuff that tasted of vinegar. Loath to offend them, he’d claimed he wasn’t hungry and would eat it later. The bag was a clammy weight in his palm, like an animal organ removed from a carcass. He looked around for somewhere conspicuous to put it so that he wouldn’t forget it again.

On the table next to the fridge, he spotted something unfamiliar. A plastic medication bottle and a handwritten note. TAKE 2 EVERY 4 HOURS IF NEEDED. G.

Had Grainger been here while he slept? Or had she brought these with her when she wheeled him back from the surgery? He couldn’t remember her doing anything in his room besides embracing him. But maybe she’d already dropped off the medication earlier, while he was being seen by Doctor Adkins. Forward thinking.

He picked up the bottle, read the contents. These pills were stronger than any you could get over the counter in an English pharmacy. But the pain he felt was not in his flesh.

He checked for new messages from Bea. There were none.

The ghost of Bing Crosby was talking when Peter walked into the mess hall. Mucous membranes in a larynx that had once nestled in a human throat, long since dispersed into the soil of Holy Cross Cemetery in Los Angeles, had made some sounds that were captured on magnetic tape in 1945, and that tape, digitised and lovingly reconfigured, was being broadcast through the cafeteria’s public address system. The dozen or so USIC personnel scattered around the armchairs and tables were oblivious, carrying on their conversations or simply focusing on their food and drink. The disembodied voice of Judy Garland — smaller mucous membranes, vibrating more excitedly — joined Crosby’s in a rehearsed off-the-cuff routine about trying on hats, intended to epitomise the gulf between men and women. Stanko, behind the coffee bar, switched on the smoothie machine, drowning out the ancient voices under a whirr of crushed coffee-flavoured ice.

‘What’s good today, Stanko?’ asked Peter when his turn came.

‘Pancakes.’

Bing Crosby, having interrupted the flow of Garland’s prattle, had started singing: ‘When I’ve got my arm around you and we’re going for a walk, must you yah-ta-ta, yah-ta-ta, yah-ta-ta, yah-ta-ta, talk, talk, talk… ’

‘Anything savoury?’

Stanko lifted the lid on a metal vat, releasing a hearty smell. ‘Beef stroganoff.’

‘I’ll have that. And a mug of tea.’

‘Aristotle, mathematics, economics, antique chairs,’ warbled Bing. ‘The classics, the comics, darling, who cares?’

Stanko handed Peter a plastic plate of richly hued, steaming food, a plastic beaker of hot water, a paper sachet of dairy powder and a tea bag with a minuscule picture of Buckingham Palace on the tag.

‘Thank you,’ said Peter.

‘Enjoy, bro.’

‘Looks good.’

‘Best stroganoff you can get,’ affirmed Stanko, deadpan. Sardonic humour? Maybe he was on the level. Right now, Peter doubted his own ability to judge.

He walked to a free table — there was just one left — and sat down with his meal. While Bing Crosby pretended to annoy Judy Garland with chatter about golf, Peter began to eat the beef, which he knew was whiteflower that had been pounded with a stone and then dried and fried. The sauce tasted wrong — too sweet, too cloying. Fragments of young whiteflower stalk had been dyed bright orange to resemble carrot and there were blanched slivers of half-mature whiteflower leaf that were supposed to be onions. He wished USIC would ditch these faked concoctions and just eat whiteflower the way the สีฐฉั ate it. There were so many good, wholesome recipes going unused here.

‘When there’s music softly playing,’ crooned Judy Garland, ‘and I’m sitting on your lap, must you yah-ta-ta, yah-ta-ta, yah-ta-ta, yah-ta-ta, yap, yap, yap… ’

‘Mind if I sit here?’ A real, living female voice in competition with a dead, long-ago one.

He looked up. It was Hayes. He motioned her to go ahead, apprehensive that she would ask him how he was, a question he wasn’t sure he could answer without breaking down and telling the whole story. But as soon as Hayes took her seat, it became clear that she was only interested in the surface of the table, to rest a thick book on. Glancing at the pages as he ate his food, Peter identified the patterns of Sudoku, Kakuro, Hitori, Fillomino and other mathematical puzzles, neatly completed in pencil. Hayes bent over the book with an eraser clutched between her thumb and forefinger. With fastidious care, she began to rub out the pencil marks.

‘It’s so nice to close your lips with mine,’ cooed Bing and Judy in perfect harmony.

Five minutes later, Peter’s plate was empty and Hayes’s iced coffee was untouched, forgotten. She was hunched over, absorbed in her task. Her mouth was slightly open, her downcast eyes had soft, luxurious lashes; she impressed Peter as prettier and more soulful than he’d previously thought. He was touched, deeply touched, deeply moved all of a sudden, by her altruistic labour.

‘That’s very considerate of you,’ he heard himself say.

‘Excuse me?’

‘Very community-minded.’

She stared at him, uncomprehending.

‘Rubbing out the pencil marks,’ he explained, wishing he hadn’t spoken. ‘It gives other people a chance to do the puzzles.’

She wrinkled her brow. ‘I’m not doing it for other people. I’m gonna do these puzzles again myself.’ And she returned to the work at hand.

Peter sat back and drank his tea. Hayes’s serene focus no longer struck him as attractive. Instead, there was something creepy about it. OK, he wasn’t a puzzle man himself, so the appeal of filling in those squares was already mysterious to him, but he appreciated that it presented a pleasant challenge for other minds. But doing the same puzzle over and over…

A burst of laughter from the other side of the room failed to disturb Hayes’s concentration. It came from Tuska, Maneely and the guy who’d escorted Peter back from the settlement, what was his name — Conway. They appeared to be playing a game of rudimentary magic with three plastic cups and a rivet. ‘How’d you do that? How’d you do that?’ Conway kept saying, to Tuska’s delight. Elsewhere, USIC personnel reclined in armchairs, flipping through Fly Fishing, Classic Cartoons, Vogue and The Chemical Engineer. Peter remembered Tuska’s ‘Légion Étrangère’ lecture: It’s best if you’ve got a team of individuals who can deal with being in permanent limbo. People who won’t go crazy. Maybe Hayes was a prime example of a person who wouldn’t go crazy. Someone who did her job, caused no trouble beyond a few pages torn out of a lesbian porn magazine, and, when she retired to her quarters, could while away the hours and days and months on perpetually erased puzzles.

‘… of Crosby’s fabled modesty that he was able to describe such a sublime work of art as “fluffy” and “a novelty”,’ the DJ was intoning. ‘We’ll now hear an unissued alternate take. Listen out for Bing stumbling on the word “annuity” and other evidences of inadequate rehearsal. Worth it, though, for the slightly closer proximity of Garland to the microphone, allowing us to fantasise that she’s right in the room with us… ’

‘Sorry to interrupt you again,’ said Peter.

‘No problem,’ said Hayes, rubbing out just one more numeral before looking up.

‘I was wondering about these music broadcasts. Are they old?’

She blinked, then opened her ears to register the sound. ‘Very old,’ she said. ‘Those singers, I don’t think they’re even alive anymore.’

‘No, I meant, are these shows, with the announcements and everything, put together by someone here at USIC, or did they already exist?’

Hayes cast an eye around the mess hall. ‘Rosen does them,’ she said. ‘He’s not here right now. He’s a surveyor and draughtsman. You’ve probably seen his drawings of the Centrifuge & Power Facility displayed in the Projects Hall. Awesomely accurate work. I still stand and look at it sometimes.’ She shrugged. ‘His music I can take or leave. It’s background noise to me. I’m glad he likes it so much. Everybody’s got to like something, I guess.’ She didn’t sound convinced.

A fresh flush of pain went through Peter — the memory of Bea’s message again. ‘The Mother,’ he said, trying to get a grip.

‘Excuse me?’

‘The nickname you suggested for the Centrifuge & Power Utility.’

‘Facility,’ she corrected him with a smile. She closed her puzzle book and slipped the eraser into a pocket of her shirt. ‘Nobody calls it the Mother. I know that. They still call it the Big Brassiere. Or actually the BB.’ Preparing to leave, she hugged her book to her bosom. ‘No sense getting upset. As my mom used to say, Don’t sweat the small stuff.’

When in distress, don’t self-obsess, reach out. Bea’s motto. Their motto as a couple, actually.

‘Do you miss your mom?’

Hayes hugged her book tighter, reflective. ‘I guess. She died a long time ago. She would’ve been proud of me, I’m sure, being chosen for this mission. But I had a good job already when she died, so she was proud already. It’s not like I was a deadbeat.’

‘I was a deadbeat once,’ said Peter, maintaining eye contact. ‘Alcoholic. Drug addict.’ Hayes was the wrong person to share such intimacy with, he knew that, but he couldn’t help himself. He was, he belatedly realised, in no state to be here at all, among these people. He needed to be unconscious, or among the สีฐฉั.

‘It’s not a crime,’ said Hayes in her unemphatic monotone. ‘I don’t judge anybody.’

‘I committed crimes,’ said Peter. ‘Petty crimes.’

‘Some people go through that, before they straighten out. Doesn’t make them bad people.’

‘My father was terribly disappointed in me,’ Peter pushed on. ‘He died a broken man.’

Hayes nodded. ‘It happens. You work here for a while, you find out that lots of your colleagues have got real sad case histories. And some haven’t. No two stories alike. It doesn’t matter. We all get to the same point.’

‘And what point is that?’

She raised her fist in a gesture of triumph, if ‘triumph’ was the right word for a fist so loosely clasped, so amiably raised, so unlikely to be noticed in the context of this convivial cafeteria. ‘Working toward the future.’

Dear Peter, wrote Bea at last, after he had spent what felt like an eternity in prayer and worry.

I’m sorry I didn’t respond for so long. I don’t want to talk about what’s happened but I owe you an explanation. Thanks for reaching out to me. It doesn’t change the way things are, and I don’t think you can understand where I’m at now, but I do appreciate it.

A lot of things led up to this. Our church has hit a setback, to put it mildly. Geoff has absconded with all funds. He and the treasurer were having an affair and they’ve flown the coop together, no one knows where. But the accounts are cleared out. They even took the collection bags. Remember how we prayed for God’s guidance to choose a pastor to replace you? Well, Geoff was the one. Make of that what you will.

Opinion is divided on what to do next. Some people want to sort out the mess and try to keep it going and some feel we should just start afresh with a new church. They even asked me if I would be pastor! Brilliant timing.

Two days before this fiasco, I started back at work. I thought it would be bliss with Goodman gone. But the place has changed. It’s filthy, to begin with. The floors, the walls, the toilets. No cleaning staff and no prospect of getting any. I pulled out a mop and got busy on one of the bathrooms and Moira almost bit my head off. ‘We’re nurses, we’re not here to scrub floors’ she said. I said ‘What about staph? What about open wounds?’ She just stared me down. And maybe she’s right — the workload is bad enough as it is. A&E is pandemonium. People running around unsupervised, shouting, scuffling with the orderlies, trying to wheel their sick mums and dads and kids up to the wards before we’ve had a chance to triage them.

All the patients are poor now. Not a single well-educated middle-class specimen among them. Moira says that anyone with money has abandoned the NHS completely. The rich ones defect to France or Qatar, the average folks find themselves a nice walk-in pay-per-service clinic (there’s loads of them springing up everywhere — whole new communities are forming around them). And our hospital gets the dregs. That’s Moira’s word for them, but to be honest that’s what they are. Stupid, boorish, loud, ugly and very, very frightened. Forget about caritas — it’s a struggle to even keep your cool when you’ve got a drunken lout with blurry tattoos yelling straight into your face and jabbing you in the shoulder with his nicotine-stained finger. It’s an endless parade of bloodshot eyes, acne, smashed noses, slashed cheeks, cracked ribs, scalded babies, botched suicides. I know I used to complain that Goodman was trying to fill our hospital with easy cases but there is a difference between offering all levels of society access to medical care and letting an entire hospital be overrun by a pig-ignorant mob.

Time has run out on me, it’s 6.30, I have to go to work now. I haven’t even told you what happened to make me finally snap but it’s hard for me to face it myself and writing takes so long and I didn’t know I would write this much about other things. I thought I would just come straight out with it, but it will cause you so much pain and I wish so much I could spare you that pain forever. I must go now.

Love,

Bea.

At once, he responded:

Dear Bea,

I am so worried about you, but relieved to hear your ‘voice’. It’s true that we all misunderstand each other — only God has perfect understanding — but we shouldn’t let the grief of that frustration stop us trying. My work with the Oasans confirms this over and over.

The news about Geoff and our church is deplorable but the church does not consist of Geoff or the treasurer or a particular building. This setback may prove to be a blessing in disguise. If we owe money we can repay it and even if we can’t, it’s only money. What goes on in the hearts and souls of human beings is the important thing. It’s encouraging that our congregation wants to start afresh with a new church. Ordinarily, people are terrified of change so this is an amazing example of courage and positivity. Why not start a simple fellowship in someone’s front room? Just like the early Christians. Complicated infrastructure is a luxury, the real essentials are love and prayer. And it’s great that they want you to be pastor. Don’t be angry, I think you would do a superb job.

Your comments about the changes at the hospital are only natural given the increased stress but they confirm my sense that maybe now is not the time for you to be working. You have a baby growing inside you. Or at least I hope you do — have you had a miscarriage? Is that what’s shaken your faith in God? I’m worried sick. Please tell me.

Whatever it is, it has taken you to a very bad place spiritually. Those ‘pig-ignorant’ people who are crowding into your hospital are all precious souls. God doesn’t care whether someone has acne or bad teeth or a bad education. Please remember that when you met me I was an alcoholic waste of space. A deadbeat. If you had treated me with the contempt I deserved I would never have been rescued, I would have just got worse and been ‘proof’ that types like me are beyond redemption. And who knows, some of the women you’re seeing on the wards may have family traumas not a million miles away from what happened to you. So please, no matter how hard it is, try to hang on to your compassion. God can make miracles occur in that hospital of yours. You say yourself that these people are frightened. Deep down, they know they desperately need something that medicine can’t give them.

Write as soon as you can, I love you,

Peter

ڇ was finally going down, turning the horizon golden caramel. There would be a drawn-out dusk of almost wearisome beauty and then it would be night for a long, long time. Peter stowed the putrefying Oasan food in his bag and left the compound.

He walked for a mile or so, in the hope that the USIC base would disappear from his view — or, more to the point, that he would disappear from the view of anyone at USIC who might have seen him leave. But the flat, featureless terrain meant that the buildings remained obstinately in sight, and a trick of perspective made them seem less far-off than they were. Rationally, he knew it was highly improbable he was being watched, but instinctively he felt under constant surveillance. He walked on.

The direction he’d chosen was westward into the wilderness — that is, not towards the Oasan settlement and not towards the Big Brassiere. He’d fantasised that if he walked far enough he would eventually reach mountains, streams, or at least some rocky knoll or marshy bog that would let him know he was elsewhere. But the tundra went on for ever. Level brown earth, occasionally enlivened by a clump of whiteflower luminescing in the sunset, and, whenever he turned to look back, the eerie concrete mirage of the USIC base. Tired, he sat down and waited for ڇ to sink below the land.

How long he waited, he couldn’t tell. Maybe two hours. Maybe six hours. His consciousness detached itself from his body, hovered above it, somewhere in the สี. He forgot the purpose of his coming out here. Had he decided he couldn’t spend the night in his quarters, and opted to sleep in the open air? His knapsack could serve as a pillow.

When it was almost dark, he sensed he was no longer alone. He squinted into the gloom and spotted a small, pale creature about five metres away. It was one of the bird-like vermin that had consumed the whiteflower harvest and bitten him. Just one, separated from the rest of its kind. It waddled cautiously in a wide circle around Peter, nodding its head. After a while, Peter realised it was not nodding but sniffing: its snout smelled food.

Peter recalled the moment when the flesh of his arm sprayed blood, recalled the nauseating pain of the bite to his leg. A convulsion of anger disturbed the numbness of his grief. He considered killing this vicious creature, stamping on its body, grinding its sharp-fanged little skull under his heel — not in revenge but self-defence, or so he could pretend. But no. The thing was pathetic and comical, hesitant in the dark, vulnerable in its aloneness. And the food it smelled was not Peter’s flesh.

Slowly and smoothly, Peter extracted the prize from his knapsack. The creature stopped in its tracks. Peter laid the plastic bag on the ground and shuffled backwards. The creature moved in and punctured the bag with its teeth, releasing a sweetish stench. Then it gobbled up the entire pile, plastic shreds and all. Peter wondered if, as a result, the creature would end up dying a more horrible death than if he’d stomped on its head. Maybe this was what the Hindus meant by karma.

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.