The Book of Strange New Things

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.

‘Christ!’ It was his voice again. He’d slipped and forgotten to say ‘Crisis’. He must calm down. God was in control.

He pressed a button on the navigation screen. It glowed brighter, as if delighted to be touched. The words CENTR POWER FAC manifested near the top, with an arrow that symbolised his vehicle pulsing underneath. He pushed some more buttons. No other destinations came up; instead, he was quoted various data about temperature, water level, oil, speed, fuel consumption. With a grunt of frustration, he wrenched the steering wheel ninety degrees, sending a flurry of damp soil flying. The Big Brassiere, the Centrifuge, the Mother, whatever the damn thing was called, receded into the darkness as he sped into unknown territory.

Within another few minutes, he saw the shapes and colours of the Oasan settlement. It wasn’t possible, it just wasn’t possible, it should be an hour yet before he got here, and yet… the blockish, uniform architecture, the flat roofs, the lack of pinnacles or poles of any sort, the amber glow… As he drove closer and closer, his vehicle’s headlights illuminated lozenge-shaped bricks. Unmistakable. The poison must have deranged his sense of time.

He was approaching from an unfamiliar angle and couldn’t get his bearings. Grainger’s usual arrival point was the building with the white star and the illegible residue of WEL WEL COME clinging to its outer wall like bird cack. But he was not with Grainger now. Never mind: his church was the true landmark. Set apart from the town, it would stand out in the bare prairie, hologrammed into life by the headlights.

He drove around the perimeter, looking for his church. He drove and drove. His high beam picked out nothing more substantial than pallid clumps of whiteflower. Eventually, he saw tyre-tracks in the soil: his own vehicle’s. He’d come full circle and there was no church. It was gone; it had been destroyed and every trace of it removed as if it had never existed. These people had rejected him, cast him off in one of those unfathomable flashes of antipathy that missionary history was so full of — cruel severances that came out of nowhere, revealing that all the intimacy you thought you’d forged was just an illusion, a church built on quicksand, a seed planted in windblown topsoil.

He stopped the vehicle and switched off its engine. He would walk into the settlement, lost and befuddled, and he would try to find someone he knew. He would call ‘Jesus Lover… ’ — no, that would be ridiculous. He would call… ‘คฐڇ๙ฉ้’. Yes, he would call ‘คฐڇ๙ฉ้’, he would call ‘ฐคڇฐฉ้’, he would call all the สีฐฉั names he could remember. And eventually someone — a Jesus Lover or more likely not a Jesus Lover — would be intrigued by his bellowing and come to him.

He opened the car’s door and stumbled out into the humid night. There were no lights in the settlement, no signs of life. Unsteady on his feet, he lurched sideways, almost bashing his shoulder against the wall of the nearest building. He steadied himself against the polished bricks with his palm. As always, they felt warm and sort of alive. Not alive like an animal, but alive like a tree, as if each brick was a bulge of hardened sap.

He’d walked only a few metres when his hand plunged suddenly into empty space. A doorway. No string-of-beads curtain hanging in front of it, which was odd. Just a big rectangular hole in the building, with nothing visible inside but darkness. He ventured in, knowing that at the opposite end of the chamber there would be another door which would open out onto a network of laneways. He moved gingerly through the claustrophobic black space, shuffling one small step at a time in case he blundered face-first into an internal wall, or was apprehended by gloved hands, or tripped on some other obstacle. But he reached the far side without encountering anything; the room seemed to be completely empty. He found the back door — again, just a hole without a curtain — and emerged into the lane.

Even in daylight, all the สีฐฉั lanes looked much the same; he’d never negotiated them without a guide. In the dark, they felt more like tunnels than pathways, and he advanced painfully slowly, hands outstretched, like a man newly blinded. The สีฐฉั might not have eyes, but they had something else that allowed them to move confidently through this maze.

He cleared his throat, willing himself to call out names in an alien language he imagined he’d learned quite well, but which he now realised he had only the feeblest grip on. Instead, he remembered the 23rd Psalm, his own paraphrase of it, carefully devised to remove consonants. He’d sweated blood over it and now, for some reason, it came to him.

‘The Lord be he who care for me,’ he recited as he shuffled through the darkness. ‘I will need no more.’ This voice was the same one he used for preaching: not strident, but quite loud and with each word articulated clearly. The moisture in the atmosphere swallowed the sounds before they had a chance to carry very far. ‘He bid me lie in green land down. He lead me by river where no one can drown. He make my soul like new again. He lead me in the path of Good. He do all this, for he be God. Yea, though I walk through the long dark corridor of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me. Your care wand make me feel no harm can come. You feed me even while unfriendly men look on in envy. You rub healing oil on my head. My cup runneth over. Good unfolding and comfort will keep me company, every day of my life. I will dwell in the home of the Lord for ever.’

‘Hey, that’s good!’ cried an unfamiliar voice. ‘That’s good!’

Peter whirled around in the dark, almost losing his balance. In spite of the fact that the words were friendly, he was adrenalised with instinctive, fight-or-flight fear. The presence of another male (for the voice was definitely male), a male of his own species, somewhere very nearby but invisible, felt as life-threatening as a gun-barrel to the temple or a knife in the side.

‘I take my hat off to you! If I had a goddamn hat!’ the stranger added. ‘You’re a pro, what can I say, sheer class! The Lord is my shepherd without a fucking shepherd in sight. Only a couple of “t”s and “s”s in the whole damn thing!’ Curses aside, the sincerity of the admiration was clear. ‘You wrote that for the สีฐฉั, right? Like, Open up for Jesus, this won’t hurt. A banquet with all the bones taken out, a meal in a milkshake, thesaurus semolina. Bravo!’

Peter hesitated. A living shape had materialised from the gloom behind him. As far as he could make out, it was human, hairy and naked. ‘Tartaglione?’

‘Got it in one! Put it there, palomino! Come va?’ A bony hand grasped Peter’s. A very bony hand. The fingers, though strong, were skeletal, pressing spoke-like phalanges into Peter’s softer flesh.

‘What are you doing here?’ said Peter.

‘Oh, you know,’ was the drawled reply. ‘Just hanging out, shootin’ the breeze. Watching the grass not grow. Happy campering. What are you doing here?’

‘I… I’m the minister,’ said Peter, divesting his hand from the stranger’s. ‘The pastor for the สีฐฉั… We built a church… It was right here… ’

Tartaglione laughed, then coughed emphysemically. ‘Beg to disagree, amigo. Nobody here but us cockroaches. No gas, food, floozies or floorshows. Nada.’

The word was released like a bat into the humid night, and disappeared. All of a sudden, a lightbulb went on in Peter’s brain. He wasn’t in C-2 at all: he was in the settlement that the สีฐฉั had abandoned. There was nothing here but air and brick walls. And a naked madman who’d slipped through the net of human civilisation.

‘I got lost,’ Peter explained, feebly. ‘I’m sick. I think I’ve been poisoned. I… I think I may be dying.’

‘No shit?’ said Tartaglione. ‘Then let’s get drunk.’

The linguist led him through the dark into still more dark, then through a doorway into a house where he was made to kneel and told to get comfy. There were cushions on the floor, large plump cushions that might have been cannibalised from a couch or armchair. They felt mildewy to the touch, like the decaying peel of orange or lemon. When Peter sat on them, they sighed.

‘My humble abode,’ said Tartaglione. ‘Après the exodus, moi.’

Peter offered a grunt of gratitude, and tried to breathe through his mouth rather than his nose. Oasan interiors usually smelled of nothing much except food and the honeydew air currents that continually flowed through the windows and lapped around the walls, but this room managed to reek of human uncleanness and alcoholic ferment. In its centre stood a large object which he’d thought at first was a sleeping crib, but which he now identified as the source of the liquor stink. Maybe it was a sleeping crib, serving as an alcohol storage tub.

‘Is there any light?’ asked Peter.

‘You bring a torch, padre?’

‘No.’

‘Then there isn’t any light.’

Peter’s eyes simply couldn’t adjust to the darkness. He could see the whites — or rather yellows — of the other man’s eyes, a bristle of facial hair, an impression of emaciated flesh and flaccid genitals. He wondered if Tartaglione had developed, over the months and years he’d lived in these ruins, a kind of night vision, like a cat.

‘What’s wrong? You choking on something?’ asked Tartaglione.

Peter hugged himself to stop the noise coming from his own chest. ‘My… my cat died,’ he said.

‘You brought a cat here?’ the other man marvelled. ‘USIC’s allowing pets now?’

‘No, it was… it happened at home.’

Tartaglione patted Peter’s knee. ‘Now, now. Be a good little camper, don’t lose Brownie points. Don’t use the H-word. The H-word is verboten! È finito! Distrutto! Non esiste!’

The linguist was making theatrical motions with his palms, shoving the word home back into its gopher-hole each time it popped up. Peter suddenly hated him, this poor crazy bastard, yes, he hated him. He closed his eyes tight and opened them again, and was bitterly disappointed that Tartaglione was still there, that the darkness and the alcohol stink were still there, when what should be there when he opened his eyes was the place he should never have left, his own space, his own stuff, Bea. He moaned in grief. ‘I miss my wife.’

‘None of that! None of that!’ Tartaglione sprang up, waving his arms about. His bare feet thumped a mad rhythm on the floor, and he emitted a bizarre ‘sh! — sh!-sh! — sh!’ as he danced. The effort of it triggered an extended burst of coughing. Peter imagined loose fragments of lung swirling in the air like nuptial confetti.

‘Of course you miss your wife,’ muttered Tartaglione when he’d calmed down slightly. ‘You miss every damn thing. You could fill a book with all the things you miss. You miss dandelions, you miss bananas, you miss mountains and dragonflies and trains and roses and… and… fucking junk mail for Christ’s sake, you miss the rust on the fire hydrants, the dogshit on the pavement, the sunsets, your dumbass uncle with the lousy taste in shirts and the yellow teeth. You want to throw your arms around the old sleazeball and say, “Uncle, what a great shirt, love your aftershave, show me your porcelain frog collection, and then let’s promenade down the old neighbourhood, just you and me, whaddaya say?” You miss snow. You miss the sea, non importa if it’s polluted, bring it on, oil spills, acid, condoms, broken bottles, who cares, it’s still the sea, it’s still the ocean. You dream… you dream of newly mown lawns, the way the grass smelled, you swear you’d give ten thousand bucks or one of your kidneys if you could have just one last whiff of that grass.’

To emphasise his point, Tartaglione sniffed deeply, a stage sniff, a sniff so aggressive it sounded as if it might damage his head.

‘Everyone at USIC is… concerned about you,’ said Peter carefully. ‘You could get transported home.’

Tartaglione snorted. ‘Lungi da me, satana! Quítate de delante de mí! Haven’t you read the USIC contract? Maybe you need help translating the lingo? Well, I’m your man. Dear highly skilled misfit: We hope you enjoy your stretch on Oasis. There’s chicken tonight! Or something very like it. So settle in, don’t count the days, take a long view. Every five years, or maybe sooner if you can prove you’re batshit insane, you can have a trip back to the festering scumhole you came from. But we’d rather you didn’t. What you wanna go back there for? What’s the point? Your uncle and his goddamned frog collection are gonna be history soon. Everything’s gonna be history soon. History will be history.’ He paced back and forth in front of Peter, his feet scuffling the dirty floor. ‘USIC concerned about me? Yeah, I’ll bet. That fatso chink dude, forget his name, I can just see him lying awake at nights thinking, I wonder if Tartaglione is OK. Is he happy? Is he getting enough vitamins? Do I hear a bell tolling, has a clod been washed away by the sea, is a piece of the continent gone, am I just a little fucking diminished here? Yeah, I can feel the love. Who’s on love duty today?’

Peter dipped out of consciousness for a second or two. The flesh of his brow was contracting tight against his skull, pushing in on the bone. He remembered once having a fever, some sort of forty-eight-hour flu, and lying helpless in bed while Bea was at work. Waking in the middle of the day half-deranged and parched with thirst, he was puzzled to feel a hand on the back of his head, lifting it from the pillow, and a glass of iced water raised to his lips. Much later, when he was better, he found out that Bea had travelled all the way home to give him that drink, and then all the way back to the hospital, in what was supposed to be her lunch break.

‘I would have survived,’ he’d protested.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘But I love you.’

When Tartaglione spoke again, his tone was philosophical, almost apologetic. ‘No use crying over spilt milk, my friend. Let it go rancid and live for mañana. The unacknowledged USIC motto, wise words, wise words, worthy of being tattooed on every forehead.’ A pause. ‘Hell, this place ain’t so bad. I mean this place I’ve got here: casa mia. It’s more cheerful in daylight. And if I’d known you were coming, I’d’ve had a bath, you know. Maybe trimmed the old barba.’ He sighed. ‘I had everything here once. Tutte le comodità moderne. Todo confort. Torches, batteries, shaver for my pretty face, paper to wipe my ass on. Pens, too. Prescription glasses, magnification 3.5. The world was my mollusc.’

‘What happened?’

‘Moisture,’ said Tartaglione. ‘Time. Wear and tear. Conspicuous absence of a multitude of people working round the clock to keep me supplied with goodies. But!’ He rummaged about, and there was the clatter of plastic, followed by a glotch of submersion into the liquid-filled crib. ‘But before they vamoosed, the little fairies in the bathrobes did teach me one of their secrets. The most important secret of all, right? Alchemy. Turning boring old plants into booze.’

There was another glotch. Tartaglione handed Peter a mug, took a slurp from his own, and continued raving.

‘You know the most wacko thing about the USIC base? The one, single, most sinister thing? I’ll tell you: No distillery. And no whorehouse.’

‘That’s two things.’

Tartaglione ignored him, fuelled now. ‘I’m no genius, but I comprehend a few truths. I understand nouns and verbs, I understand the labial fricative, I understand human nature. And you know what people immediately start looking for, five minutes after they arrive someplace new? You know what’s on their minds? I’ll tell you: How are they gonna get laid, and where are they gonna find some mind-altering substances. That’s if they’re normal. So what does USIC do, in its infinite wisdom? What does USIC do? It scours the entire world to dig up people who don’t need those things. Needed them once upon a time maybe, but not anymore. Sure, they crack a few jokes about cocaine and pussy — you’ve met BG, I take it?’

‘I’ve met BG.’

‘Three hundred pounds of bluff. That guy has killed off every natural need and desire known to mankind. All he wants is a job and a half-hour under the big yellow umbrella to flex his biceps. And the others, Mortellaro, Mooney, Hayes, Severin, I forget all their damn names now, but who cares, they’re all the same. You think I’m weird? You think I’m crazy? Look at those zombies, man!’

‘They’re not zombies,’ said Peter quietly. ‘They’re good, decent people. They’re doing their best.’

Tartaglione spluttered fermented whiteflower juice into the space between them. ‘Best? Best? Take your cheerleader pom-poms off, padre, and look at what USIC has got here. What’s the score on the vibrancy meter? Two and a half out of ten? Two? Anybody offered to teach you the tango or sent you a love letter? And how’s USIC’s maternity wing going? Any pitter-patter of piccoli piedi?’

‘My wife’s pregnant,’ Peter heard himself say. ‘They wouldn’t let her come.’

‘Of course not! Only zombies need apply!’

‘They’re not — ’

‘Cáscaras, empty vessels, every single one of them!’ declared Tartaglione, rearing up with such righteous vehemence that he farted. ‘This whole project is… nefasto. You cannot create a thriving community, let alone a new civilisation, by putting together a bunch of people who are no fucking trouble! Scuzi, pardon me mama, but it cannot be done. You want Paradise, you gotta build it on war, on blood, on envy and naked greed. The people who build it have got to be egomaniacs and lunatics, they’ve gotta want it so damn bad they’ll trample you underfoot, they’ve got to be charismatic and charming and they’ve got to steal your wife from under your nose and then sting you for a loan of ten bucks. USIC thinks it can assemble a dream team, well yeah, it is a dream, and they need to wake up and smell their wet pyjamas. USIC thinks it can sift through a thousand applicants and pick the one man and the one woman who’ll get along with everybody, who’ll do their job without being a pain in the ass, who won’t throw tantrums or get depressed or freak out and spoil the whole damn thing. USIC is looking for people who can feel at home anywhere, even in a big fat nowhere like this, people who don’t care, they’re not fussed, no sweat, keep cool, hey ho, hey ho, it’s off to work we go, who needs a home anyway, who cares if the house where you grew up is burning down, who cares if your old neighbourhood is underwater, who cares if your folks are being slaughtered, who cares if a dozen scumbags are raping your daughter, everybody’s gotta die sometime, right?’

Tartaglione was panting. His vocal cords were in no shape for such heavy use.

‘You really believe the world is coming to an end?’ said Peter.

‘Jesus fucking Christ, padre, what kind of a Christian are you? Isn’t this the whole fucking point for you? Isn’t this what you’ve been waiting for for thousands of years?’

Peter leaned back, allowed his weary body to sink into the rotting cushions. ‘I haven’t been alive that long.’

‘Oooo, was that a putdown? Did I detect a putdown? Is this a ruffled godboy I see before me?’

‘Please… don’t call me godboy.’

‘You one of those decaffeinated Christians, padre? The diabetic wafer? Doctrine-free, guilt-reduced, low in Last Judgement, 100 % less Second Coming, no added Armageddon? Might contain small traces of crucified Jew?’ Tartaglione’s voice dripped with contempt. ‘Marty Kurtzberg — now he was a man of faith. Grace before meals, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God”, none of this Krishna-has-wisdom-too crapola, always wore a jacket and pressed pants and polished shoes. And if you scratched him deep enough, he’d tell you: These are the last days.’

Peter swallowed hard on what tasted like bile. Even if he was dying himself, he didn’t think these were the world’s last days. God wouldn’t let go of the planet he loved so easily. He’d given His only son to save it, after all. ‘I’m just trying… just trying to treat people the way Jesus might have treated them. That’s Christianity for me.’

‘Well, that’s just fine and dandy. Molto ammirevole! I take my hat off to you, if I had a hat. Come on, godboy, have some booze, it’s good.’

Peter nodded, closed his eyes. Tartaglione’s rant about USIC was starting to sink in. ‘So… the reason why you guys are all here… USIC’s mission… it’s not trying to extract… it’s not… uh… finding new sources of… uh… ’

Tartaglione scoffed more lung fragments into the air. ‘All that is over, palomino! Over! We’ve got the trucks but no depot, capisce? We’ve got the ships but no harbour. We’ve got the hard-on and the jism but the woman is dead. Pretty soon, all the women will be dead. The earth has had it. We’ve mined all the mines, we’ve exploited all the exploits, we’ve eaten all the eats. È finito!’

‘But what about here on Oasis? What’s supposed to happen here?’

‘Here? Didn’t you get your Happy Pioneer T-shirt? We’re supposed to be creating a nest, a nursery, a place where the whole shebang can start over again. You’ve heard of the Rapture? Are you a Rapture kind of godboy?’

Peter raised the beaker to his face again. He was struggling to remain awake. ‘Not really,’ he sighed. ‘I think it’s based on a misreading of Scripture… ’

‘Well, this project here,’ declared Tartaglione, imperious in contempt, ‘is sorta like the Rapture by committee. Rapture Incorporated. The Department of Rapture. Worried about the state of the world? Your hometown’s just been flattened by a hurricane? Your kids’ school is full of gangsters and pushers? Your mama just died in her own merda while the nurses were busy divvying up the morphine? No gas for your car and the shops are looking kinda zen? Lights have gone off and the toilet doesn’t flush anymore? Future’s looking distinctly caca? Hey, non dispera! There is a way out. Come to beautiful Oasis. No crime, no madness, no bad stuff of any kind, a brand new home, home on the range, no deer or antelope but hey, accentuate the positive, there never is heard a discouraging word, nobody rapes you or tries to reminisce about Paris in the springtime, no sense sniffing that old vomit, right? Cut the strings, blank the slate, let go of Auschwitz and the Alamo and the… the fucking Egyptians for God’s sake, who needs it, who cares, focus on tomorrow. Onward and upward. Come to beautiful Oasis. Everything’s sustainable, everything works. Everything’s laid out and ready. All it lacks is you.’

‘But… who is it for? Who’s going to come?’

‘Aha!’ Tartaglione was in an ecstasy of derision by now. ‘That’s the five-billion-ruble question, isn’t it? Who’s gonna come… Who’s gonna come. Muy interesante! Can’t have vipers in the nest, can we? Can’t have crazies and parasites and saboteurs. Only nice, well-adjusted folks need apply. Except — get this — you’ll need to pay your fare. I mean, there’s a time for planting and a time for reaping, right? USIC can’t invest for ever; time to cash in. So who’s gonna come? The poor schlub who works in the 7-Eleven? I don’t think so. USIC’s gonna have to take the filthy-rich folks — but not the assholes and the prima donnas, no no no, the nice ones with the salt-of-the-earth values. Multi-millionaires who give up their seat on the bus. Tycoons who are happy to hand-wash their T-shirts ’cause, you know, they wouldn’t want to waste electricity. Yeah, I can see it now. Step right up, book early for fucking Raptureland.’

Peter’s brain was closing down, but as he began to drift towards oblivion he recalled the clean corridors of the USIC medical centre, the surgical equipment still shrouded in plastic wrapping, the yellow-painted room littered with boxes marked NEO-NATAL.

‘But when… when is this supposed to happen?’

‘Any day now! Never! Who fucking knows?’ yelled Tartaglione. ‘Soon as they build a baseball stadium? Soon as they’ve figured out how to make pistachio ice-cream out of toenail clippings? Soon as they grow a daffodil? Soon as Los Angeles slides into the Pacific? Search me. Would you want to live here?’

Peter imagined himself sitting cross-legged near his church, with the Jesus Lovers gathered around him, all of them holding their woven Bible booklets open at a parable. The afternoon was going on and on indefinitely, everyone was lambent with sunlight, and Lover Five was bringing a food offering to the newest arrival in their community — Bea, wife of Father Peรี่er, seated at his side. ‘I… it would depend… ’ he said. ‘It’s a beautiful place.’

The room fell silent. After a while, Tartaglione’s breathing grew louder and more rhythmic, until Peter realised he was saying ‘Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh,’ over and over. Then, in a voice thick with disdain, he added, ‘Beautiful. I see.’

Peter was too tired to argue. He knew there were no rainforests here, no mountains, no waterfalls, no exquisitely sculpted gardens, no breathtaking cityscapes, Gothic cathedrals, medieval castles, flocks of geese, giraffes, snow leopards, whatever, all those animals whose names he couldn’t recall, all those tourist destinations he’d seen other people so hungry to visit, all the attractions of the earthly life that he had, quite frankly, never lived. The glory of Prague to him was nothing more than a dim memory of a photograph; flamingos were just film footage; he’d been nowhere; he’d seen nothing; Oasis was the first place he’d ever allowed himself to bond with. The first place he’d ever loved.

‘Yes, beautiful,’ he sighed.

‘You are out of your mind, padre,’ said Tartaglione. ‘Deee-ranged. Loco-loco-loco. This place is beautiful like the grave, beautiful like maggots. The air is full of voices, have you noticed that? Worms in your ears, they burrow right in, they pretend to be just oxygen and moisture but they’re more than that, they’re more than that. Switch off the car engine, switch off your conversation, switch off Bing fucking Crosby, and what do you hear, instead of silence? The voices, man. They never let up, they’re a liquid, a liquid language, going whisper-whisper-whisper, in your ear canals, down your throat, up your ass. Hey! Are you falling asleep? Don’t die on me, amigo, it’s a long night and I could use the company.’

The pungent odour of Tartaglione’s loneliness dispelled some of the fog in Peter’s brain. He thought of a question he should have asked before, a question that would no doubt have occurred to Bea immediately. ‘Is Kurtzberg here?’

‘What?’ The linguist was jolted off course, yanked from the slipstream of his ranting.

‘Kurtzberg. Is he living here too? With you?’

There was a full minute of silence. ‘We had a falling out,’ said the linguist at last. ‘You might say it was… a philosophical disagreement.’

Peter couldn’t speak anymore, but uttered a noise of incomprehension.

‘It was about the สีฐฉั,’ Tartaglione explained. ‘Those creepy, insipid, dickless, ass-licking little pastel-coloured vermin.’ A slurp of the beaker, a glug of the gullet. ‘He loved them.’

More time passed. The air whispered softly, making its endless reconnaissance of the boundaries and emptinesses in the room, testing the ceiling, prodding the joins of the walls, brushing the floor, measuring bodies, combing hair, licking skin. Two men breathed, one of them strenuously, one of them barely at all. It seemed that the linguist had said all he was going to say, and was now lost in his own stoic despair.

‘Plus,’ he added, in the final moments before Peter lost consciousness, ‘I cannot stand a guy who won’t have a drink with you.’

24. The Technique of Jesus

The night was supposed to last longer. Much, much longer. Darkness should have kept him captive for hundreds, maybe even thousands of years until the Resurrection came and God pulled all the dead from the ground.

That’s what confused him, when he opened his eyes. He was supposed to be underneath the earth, or hidden under a blanket in an unlit house in an abandoned city, not even decomposed yet, just a lump of inert material that couldn’t feel or see. There wasn’t supposed to be light. Especially not such dazzling white light, brighter than the sky.

It was not the light of Afterlife; it was the light of a hospital. Yes, he remembered now. He had broken his ankles, running from the law, and he’d been taken to hospital and pumped full of anaesthetic so that mysterious figures in masks could mend his splintered bones. There would be no more running; he would have to take what was coming to him. A woman’s face floated down over his own. The face of a beautiful woman. Bending over him as if he was a baby in a crib. On her bosom, a name tag that said Beatrice. She was a nurse. He liked her instinctively, as though he’d been waiting for her to turn up all his life. He might even marry her one day, if she said yes.

‘Bea,’ he croaked.

‘Try again,’ said the woman. Her face grew rounder, her eyes changed colour, her neck shortened, her hair rearranged itself into a boyish cut.

‘Grainger,’ he said.

‘You got it,’ she said wearily.

‘Where am I?’ The light hurt his eyes. He turned his head aside, into a pale green cotton pillow.

‘In the infirmary,’ said Grainger. ‘Whoah — keep that arm still, it’s got an IV drip in it.’

He did as he was told. A thin tube dangled against his cheek. ‘How did I get here?’

‘I told you I’d always look out for you, didn’t I?’ said Grainger. Then, after a pause: ‘Which is more than you can say for God.’

He let his tethered arm fall back onto the coverlet and smiled. ‘Maybe God is working through you.’

‘Yeah? Well, as a matter of fact there’s medications for thoughts like that. Lurasidone. Asenapine. I can prescribe you some anytime you’re ready.’

Still squinting against the light, he craned his head round to look at the bag that fed his intravenous line. The liquid in it was transparent. Glucose or saline, not blood.

‘The poison,’ he said. ‘What happened?’

‘You weren’t poisoned,’ said Grainger, with a tinge of exasperation in her voice. ‘You just got dehydrated, that’s all. You didn’t drink enough. You could have died.’

He laughed, and the laughter morphed into sobs. He laid his fingers on his chest, roughly where the inky crucifix was or used to be. The fabric was sticky and cold. He’d poured Tartaglione’s vile liquor down his chin and onto his breast, pretending to drink it. Here in the sterile air conditioning, its sweet stench of ferment was bad enough to choke the breath.

‘Did you bring Tartaglione back?’ he asked.

‘Tartaglione?’ Grainger’s voice was augmented by muted exclamations of surprise from elsewhere in the room: they were not alone.

‘You didn’t see him?’ said Peter.

‘He was there?’

‘Yes, he was there,’ said Peter. ‘That’s where he lives. Out in the ruins. He’s not a well man. He probably needs to go home.’

‘Home? Well, fancy that.’ Grainger sounded bitter. ‘Who would’ve thought it.’

Moving out of his range of sight, she did something he couldn’t identify, some emphatic or even violent physical action which caused a clattering noise.

‘Are you all right, Grainger?’ A male voice, half-sympathetic, half-cautioning. The doctor from New Zealand. Austin.

‘Don’t touch me,’ said Grainger. ‘I’m fine. Finefinefine.’

Peter realised all of a sudden that the alcohol he could smell was not emanating solely from his own clothing. There was an additional tang in the air, a spirits tang, which might have been created by tearing open a few dozen disposable surgical wipes, but could just as easily have come from a few shots of whiskey. Whiskey consumed by Alex Grainger.

‘Maybe Tartaglione is happy where he is.’ A female voice this time. Flores, the nurse. She spoke calmly, as though to a child, as though a cat had been sighted in a tree and a naïve youngster was insisting that somebody should climb up to rescue it.

‘Oh, yeah, I’m sure he’s happy as a clam,’ retorted Grainger, her sarcasm escalating so fast that Peter was no longer in any doubt she was disinhibited by booze. ‘Happy as the day is long. Hey, you like that? — “As the day is long”. That’s a pun, right? Or maybe not a pun… Maybe irony? What would you call it, Peter?’

‘Might be best to let our patient recover a bit more,’ suggested Austin.

Grainger ignored him. ‘Tartaglione was a real Italian, did any of you know that? Like, genuine. He grew up in Ontario, but he was born in… I forget the name of the place… he told me once… ’

‘Perhaps not relevant to our work here just now?’ suggested Austin. Masculine as his voice was, it had taken on a slightly whiny edge. He wasn’t used to dealing with unreasonable colleagues.

‘Right, right,’ said Grainger. ‘None of us come from anywhere, I forgot, excuse me. We’re the Foreign fucking Legion, like Tuska keeps saying. And anyway, who’d want to go home? Who’d want to go home when everything there is so fucked up and everything here is so fantastic? You’d have to be crazy, right?’

‘Please, Grainger,’ warned Flores.

‘Don’t do this to yourself,’ said Austin.

Grainger started to weep.

‘You’re not human, you people. You’re just not fucking human.’

‘There’s no need for that,’ said Flores.

‘What do you know about need?’ cried Grainger, hysterical now. ‘Keep your fucking hands off me!’

‘We’re not touching you, we’re not touching you,’ said Austin.

There was another crash of toppled equipment: a metal IV-stand, perhaps. ‘Where’s my daddy?’ Grainger whimpered, as she stumbled out. ‘I want my daddy!’

After the door slammed, the infirmary went quiet. Peter wasn’t even sure if Austin was still around, but fancied he could hear Flores fussing about, beyond his field of vision. His neck was stiff and he had a pounding headache. The liquid in his IV bag drained unhurriedly into his vein. When it was all gone and the bag hung limp and wrinkled as a condom, he asked to be allowed to leave.

‘Dr Austin wanted to discuss something with you,’ said Flores, as she unhooked him. ‘I’m sure he’ll be right back.’

‘Later, maybe,’ said Peter. ‘I really have to go now.’

‘It would be better if you didn’t.’

He flexed his fist. The puncture wound where the cannula had just been removed oozed bright blood. ‘Can I have a Band-Aid on this?’

‘Of course,’ said Flores, rummaging inside a drawer. ‘Dr Austin said he was sure you would be very… ah… anxious to have a confab with him. About another patient here.’

‘Who?’ Peter was itching to get out; he must write to Bea as soon as possible. He should have written to her many hours ago, instead of driving off in a haze of melodrama.

‘I couldn’t say,’ said Flores, frowning her monkey frown. ‘If you’ll just care to wait… ’

‘Sorry,’ said Peter. ‘I’ll be back. I promise.’ He knew even as he uttered these words that they might be a lie, but they had the desired effect: Nurse Flores stepped backwards, and he was out of there.

With nothing to show for his ordeal but a small ball of cotton wool taped to his wrist, he walked to his quarters, unsteady on his feet but stubbornly alive. Various USIC employees passed him in the corridors, looking askance at his pitiful appearance. Only a few metres shy of his room, he met Werner.

‘Hi,’ said Werner, holding two chubby fingers aloft as he passed by. It was a gesture that could have signified any number of things: a wave that was too lazy to employ the whole hand, a casual approximation of the peace symbol, an unwitting echo of a Christian benediction. More likely, it signified nothing except Werner’s determination to get on with his engineering or hydraulics or whatever, without having to concern himself with desperate-looking weirdos.

‘Well, bless you, too, pal,’ Peter felt like calling out to the disappearing Chinese. But that would be sarcasm. He must avoid that, it was a sin to have even considered it, a lapse, a disgrace. He must cling to his sincerity. It was all he had left. There must be no bile in his soul, no barb in his speech. To love without discrimination, to mean all creatures well, even a rabid dog like Tartaglione, even a waste of space like Werner: that was his sacred duty as a Christian, and his only salvation as a person. As he opened the door of his quarters, he counselled himself to expunge all dislike of Werner from his heart. Werner was a poor lamb, precious in the eyes of the Lord, a charmless creep who couldn’t help being a charmless creep, a geeky orphan who’d grown into a specialised form of survivor. We are all specialised forms of survivor, Peter reminded himself. We lack what we fundamentally need and forge ahead regardless, hurriedly hiding our wounds, disguising our ineptitude, bluffing our way through our weaknesses. No one — especially not a pastor — should lose sight of that truth. Whatever he did, however low he sank, he must never stop believing all men were his brothers.

And all women.

And all สีฐฉั.

Dear Bea, he wrote,

There is nothing I can say that would make what happened to Joshua feel like anything other than obscenely unfair. He was a wonderful, delightful creature and it hurts me so much to think of him dead and how he died. It’s awful to be reminded in such a brutal way that Christians have no magic immunity to the evil actions of malicious people. Faith in Christ leads to amazing blessings and strokes of good fortune, as we’ve observed together many times, but the world remains a dangerous place and we remain — merely by being human — vulnerable to the horrors that humans can cause.

I’m angry too. Not at God, but at the sick bastards who tortured Joshua. I should love them, but I want to kill them, even though killing them wouldn’t bring Joshua back. I need time to work through my gut feelings and I’m sure you do too. I’m not going to tell you to forgive these boys because I can’t forgive them myself yet. Only Jesus was capable of that level of grace. All I will say is that I have caused great grief to others and I have been forgiven. I once robbed a house that had boxes of cancer drugs in the bedroom, piles of them. I know they were cancer drugs because I rummaged through them in case there was anything I could use. I stole a box of analgesics and left the rest scattered on the floor. In the years since, I’ve often thought about what effect that must have had on those people when they got home from the hospital or wherever they’d gone that day. I don’t mean the analgesics — they could have replaced those pretty quickly, I expect. I mean the fact that they got robbed on top of everything else they were going through, that there was no mercy, no allowance made for their already impossible circumstances. The boys who tortured Joshua did that to us. What else can I say? I’m not Jesus.

But I am still your man. We’ve been through so much together. Not just as a Christian husband-and-wife team, but as two animals who trust each other. Whenever I think of the gulf that’s come between us, I’m sick with sorrow. Please accept my love. In sermons sometimes, I’ve told people that what I was enchanted by, in that hospital ward when we first met, was the light of Christ that shone out of you. I believed that when I said it, but now I’m not so sure. Maybe I devalued you in order to score an evangelistic point. There is a light in you that’s intrinsic to who you are, a marvellous spirit that would dwell in you even if you weren’t a Christian, a spirit that will continue to make you special even if your rejection of God proves to be permanent. I love you and want you regardless of your religious faith. I miss you. Don’t let go.

I’m sorry if I’ve given you the impression that I’m not interested in what’s going on in the world — our world, that is. Please tell me more. Everything you can think of, anything that strikes you. There is no news here whatsoever — no newspapers, not even outdated ones, no access to any information about current affairs, no history books or indeed books of any sort, just puzzle books and glossy magazines about hobbies and professional pursuits. And even those are censored. Yes, there’s an industrious little USIC censor vetting all the magazines and tearing out any pages they don’t approve of!

I finally met Tartaglione, the linguist who went missing. He’s a very addled individual, but he told me the truth about USIC’s agenda. Contrary to our suspicions, they aren’t here for imperialist or commercial reasons. They think the world is ending and they want to make a new start on Oasis. They’re getting the place ready. For who, I don’t know. Not for the likes of you, evidently.

He paused in his typing, re-read what he’d written, considered deleting everything after Don’t let go. In the end he erased Not for the likes of you, evidently, added Love, Peter and pressed the button to transmit.

For the usual several minutes his words trembled on the screen, waiting to be released. Then, superimposed on the text like a burn from a branding iron, a terse warning manifested in livid letters:

NOT APPROVED — SEEK ASSISTANCE.

He stood at Grainger’s door and knocked.

‘Grainger!’ he yelled. ‘Grainger! Open up, it’s me, Peter!’ No reply.

Without even looking up and down the corridor to check if anyone was watching, he opened the door and barged into Grainger’s quarters. He would drag her out of bed if she was asleep. Not violently, you understand. But she must help him.

The layout of her quarters was identical to his; her space equally Spartan. She wasn’t in it. Her bed was made, more or less. A white shawl hung on the clothesline, hitched up to the ceiling. A constellation of water-drops glimmered on the inside of the shower cubicle. A half-empty bottle of bourbon, labelled simply BOURBON in red block-letters on a white sticker, and priced at $650, stood on a table. Also displayed on the table was a framed photograph of a craggy-faced middle-aged man wearing heavy winter clothes, cradling a shotgun. Behind him, under an ominous grey sky, the Grainger family farm was covered in snow.

Ten minutes later, he found Charlie Grainger’s daughter in the pharmacy, a place where he ought not have been surprised to find her, since she was, after all, USIC’s pharmacist. She was seated at a counter, dressed as usual, her hair neat and still a little damp. When he walked in, she was writing in an old-fashioned ring-binder, with a pencil clutched awkwardly in her short fingers. Honeycombs of modular shelving, mostly vacant but punctuated here and there with petite plastic bottles and cardboard boxes, towered over her. She was calm, but her eyelids were raw from crying.

‘Hey, I wasn’t serious about the anti-delusional medication,’ she joked as he approached. Don’t mention what I said in the infirmary, her eyes pleaded.

‘I need your help,’ he said.

‘You’re not going anywhere,’ she said. ‘At least not with me.’

It was a moment before he realised she was referring to driving, to chauffeuring him somewhere that wasn’t good for his health.

‘I just tried to send a message to my wife,’ he said, ‘and it’s been blocked. I’ve got to get through. Please.’

She put down the pencil, closed the folder.

‘Don’t worry, Peter, I can fix it,’ she said. ‘Probably. Depends on how bad a boy you’ve been.’

She stood up, and he noted once again that she wasn’t very tall. Yet at this moment, he felt smaller still; he was the little boy who’d let his brand-new bicycle get stolen, he was the pitiful disgrace slumped on a vomit-stained sofa in the Salford Pentecost Powerhouse, he was the fumbling missionary who’d reached the end of his rope — and each of these Peters could only throw himself on the mercy of a long-suffering female, a mother who might reassure him that he was more valuable than any expensive gift, a wife who might reassure him that he could break a sacred promise and still be loved, a friend who might be able to pull him out of his latest crisis. When it came down to it, it was not Jesus but these women on whose mercy he threw himself, and who must decide if he’d finally gone too far.

His room, when they entered it together, was a mess. His knapsack, filthy from its trips to the field, lay in the middle of the floor, surrounded by loose balls of wool that had fallen off the chair. Loose pills were scattered across the table next to the upended medication bottle and Grainger’s note about what to take if needed, which was odd as he couldn’t remember opening the bottle. His bed was in a shameful state: the bedsheets were so tangled it looked as though he’d been wrestling in them.

Grainger ignored the chaos, sat in his chair and read the letter he’d written to Bea. Her face betrayed no emotion, although her lips twitched once or twice. Maybe she wasn’t a strong reader, and was tempted to mouth the words? He stood at her side, and waited.

‘I’ll need your permission to change this,’ she said when she’d finished.

‘Change it?’

‘Remove a few… problematic statements. To get it past Springer.’

‘Springer?’ Peter had assumed that whatever had blocked his message was automated, some sort of computer program which sifted language brainlessly. ‘You mean Springer has been reading all my letters?’

‘It’s his job,’ said Grainger. ‘One of his jobs. We multi-task here, as you may have noticed. There are several personnel who check the Shoots. I’m pretty sure right now it’s Springer.’

He stared down at her. There was no shame or guilt or defensiveness on her weary face. She was merely informing him of a detail from the USIC duty roster.

‘You take it in turns to read my private letters?’

Only now did it appear to register on her that there might, in some people’s universe, be anything odd about this arrangement. ‘Is that such a big deal?’ she brazened. ‘Doesn’t God read your thoughts?’

He opened his mouth to protest, but couldn’t speak.

‘Anyway,’ she continued, in a down-to-business tone. ‘You want this message sent. So let’s do it.’ She scrolled through his words. ‘The stuff about USIC censoring the magazines has to go,’ she said, pecking at the keyboard with her stubby nails. Letter by letter, the words ‘And even those are censored’, and the twenty after that, disappeared from the screen. ‘Ditto the stuff about the world ending.’ More pecks. She stared at the glowing text, evaluating her amendments. One or two more words caught her eye and she eliminated them. Her eyes were bloodshot and she seemed sad beyond her years. ‘No end of the world,’ she murmured, in a gently scolding tone. ‘Uh-uh.’

Satisfied with what she’d done, she pressed the transmission button. The text trembled on the screen while, elsewhere in the compound, another pair of tired eyes examined it. Then it vanished.

‘Another five thousand bucks down the hatch,’ said Grainger, with a shrug.

‘Sorry?’

‘Each of your Shoots costs about five thousand dollars to send,’ she said. ‘And each of your wife’s also, of course, to receive.’ She wiped her face with her hands, breathing deeply, trying to suck much-needed energy from her own palms. ‘Another reason why the personnel here aren’t communicating daily with a bunch of pals back home.’

Peter tried to do a mental calculation. Maths wasn’t his strong suit, but he knew the number was appallingly big. ‘Nobody told me,’ he said.

‘We were told not to tell you,’ she said. ‘No expense spared for the missionary man.’

‘But why?’

‘USIC wanted you real bad,’ said Grainger. ‘You were, like, our first VIP.’

‘I never asked… ’

‘You didn’t need to ask. My… guidelines were to give you anything you wanted. Within reason. Because, you know, before you came, things were getting kinda… strained.’

‘Things?’ He couldn’t imagine what things. A spiritual crisis amongst the USIC personnel?

‘Our food supply got cut off for a while. No more whiteflower from our little friends.’ Grainger smirked sourly. ‘They come across so meek and mild, don’t they? But they can be very determined when they want to be. We promised them a replacement for Kurtzberg, but they thought it was too slow in coming. I guess Ella Reinman was ploughing through a million priests and pastors, poking them to see what was inside, then flunking them. Next pastor please! What’s your favourite fruit? How much would you miss Philadelphia? Frying ducklings alive — OK or not OK? What would it take to make you lose patience with my stupid questions and wring my scrawny neck?’ Grainger’s hands mimed the action, her thumbs crushing her interrogator’s windpipe. ‘Meanwhile in Freaktown, our little friends couldn’t wait. They flexed the only muscle they could flex, to make USIC hurry up and find you.’ Observing the bemusement on his face, she nodded, to signal that he must stop wasting energy on incredulity and just believe.

‘How bad did it get?’ said Peter. ‘I mean, did you starve?’

Grainger was annoyed by the question. ‘Of course we didn’t starve. It just got… expensive for a while. More expensive than you wanna think about.’

He tried to think about it and discovered she was right.

‘The stand-off wouldn’t have been such a big deal,’ she went on, ‘if only we could grow stuff ourselves. God knows we’ve tried. Wheat. Corn. Maize. Hemp. Every seed known to man has gone into this soil. But what comes up is not impressive. Vanity farming, you could call it. And of course we tried growing whiteflower too, but it was the same story. A few bulbs here, a few bulbs there. Like cultivating orchids. We just can’t figure out how those guys get it to grow in large amounts. What the hell do they fertilise it with? Fairy dust, I guess.’

She fell silent, still seated in front of the Shoot. She’d spoken in a dull, enervated tone, as though it was a stale subject, a humiliation too pathetic and tedious to revisit yet again. Gazing down at her face, he wondered how long it had been — how many years — since she had been truly, deeply happy.

‘I want to thank you,’ he said, ‘for helping me. I was in… a bad state. I don’t know what I would have done without you.’

She didn’t take her eyes off the screen. ‘Got somebody else to help you, I guess.’

‘I don’t just mean the message. I mean, coming to find me. As you said, I could have died.’

She sighed. ‘It actually takes a lot for someone to die. The human body is designed not to quit. But yeah, I was worried about you, driving off like that when you were sick.’

‘How did you find me?’

‘That part wasn’t difficult. All our vehicles have collars with bells on, if you get my drift. The tough part was getting you into my car, ’cause you weren’t rousable. I had to wrap you in a blanket and drag you along the ground. And I’m not strong.’

The vision of what she’d done for him flared up in his mind, even though he had no memory of it. He wished he had a memory of it. ‘Oh, Grainger… ’

She stood up abruptly.

‘You really love her, don’t you?’ she said. ‘Your wife.’

‘Yes. I really love her.’

She nodded. ‘I thought so.’

He wanted to embrace her, hesitated. She turned away.

‘Write her as much as you want,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry about the cost. USIC can afford it. And anyway, you saved our bacon. And our chicken, and our bread, and our custard, and our cinnamon, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.’

From behind, he laid his hands on her shoulders, aching to let her know how he felt. Without looking round, she took hold of his hands with her own, and pulled them hard against her chest, not as low as the bosom, but near the sternum, where her heart beat.

‘And remember,’ she said. ‘When you mention USIC, keep it nice. No accusations, no end of the world.’

I’ll be back, he’d told Flores, just to shut her up, just to smooth his getaway, but now that he had a chance to think it over, a promise ought to be a promise. Grainger was gone now, the message to Bea was sent. He should find out what Dr Austin had on his mind.

He showered, washed his hair, massaged his scabby scalp. The water swirling around his feet was brownish, gurgling down the plughole like tea. On his two admissions to the USIC infirmary he must have introduced more bacteria into their sterile environment than they’d encountered in all the years previous. It’s a wonder they didn’t dunk him in a vat of disinfectant the size of Tartaglione’s booze bath before consenting to treat him.

Shower finished, he dried himself carefully. The cannula puncture had already healed up. Various scratches from earlier on were crusted over. The bite wound on his arm was doing nicely; the one on his leg stung a bit, and looked a bit swollen, but if it got worse a quick course of antibiotics would fix it. He replaced the bandages and dressed in jeans and T-shirt. His dishdasha was so rank from Tartaglione’s hooch that he considered giving up on it, but he stuffed it in the washing machine instead. The CONSERVE WATER — COULD THIS LOAD BE HAND-WASHED? placard was still in place, complete with its ARE YOU OFFERING, LADY? addendum. He half-expected the graffiti to have been erased by some routine intruder, some multi-tasking engineer or electrician assigned to inspect everybody’s rooms for stuff that might offend the USIC ethos. Nothing would surprise him now.

‘Good to see you,’ said Austin, appraising Peter’s conventional attire with obvious approval. ‘You’re looking much better.’

‘I’m sure I smell better,’ said Peter. ‘I’m sorry I stank up your surgery.’

‘Couldn’t be helped,’ breezed the doctor. ‘Alcohol is evil stuff.’ That was as close as he was going to come to mentioning Grainger’s unprofessional insobriety. ‘You’re walking a bit stiffly,’ he observed, as the two of them moved from the doorway into the consulting room. ‘How are your injuries?’

‘They’re fine. I’m just not used to wearing clothes — these sorts of clothes — anymore.’

Austin smiled insincerely, no doubt adjusting his professional assessment of how well Peter was doing. ‘Yes, there are days I quite fancy coming to work naked,’ he joked, ‘but the feeling passes.’

Peter smiled in return. One of his flashes of pastoral instinct, like the one he’d had about Lover One’s inconsolable sadness, came to him now: this doctor, this ruggedly good-looking New Zealand male, this man called Austin, had never had a sexual relationship with anyone.

‘I want to thank you,’ said Austin, ‘for taking our conversation seriously.’

‘Conversation?’

‘About the natives’ health. About getting them to come to us so we can check them out, diagnose what they’re dying of. Obviously you’ve been spreading the word.’ And he smiled again, to acknowledge the unintended evangelical meaning of the phrase. ‘At long last, one of them has.’

Long last. Peter thought of the distance between the USIC base and the สีฐฉั settlement, the time it took to drive there, the time it would take to walk. ‘Oh my… gosh,’ he said. ‘It’s so far.’

‘No, no,’ Austin reassured him. ‘Remember Conway? Your Good Samaritan? Apparently he wasn’t satisfied with the signal strength of some doodad he installed at your church. So he went there again, and lo and behold — he came back with a passenger. A… friend of yours, I gather.’

‘Friend?’

Austin extended his hand, motioned towards the corridor. ‘Come with me. He’s in intensive care.’

The term stuck a cold spike into Peter’s guts. He followed Austin out of the room, down the hallway a few steps, and into another room marked ‘ICU’.

Only one patient lay in the spotless twelve-bed facility. Tall IV drip stands, gleaming new and with transparent plastic sheaths still hugging their aluminium stems, stood sentinel by each empty bed. The lone patient wasn’t hooked to a drip, nor was he attached to any other tentacles of medical technology. He sat erect against pillows, tucked up to the waist in pure white linen, his faceless, hairless kernel of head-flesh unhooded. In the great rectangle of mattress, designed to accommodate American bodies the size of BG’s, he looked pathetically small. His robe and gloves had been replaced with a thin cotton hospital gown, pale grey-green like stale broccoli, the colour Peter associated with Jesus Lover Twenty-Three, but that didn’t mean he was Jesus Lover Twenty-Three, of course. With a shame so intense it was close to panic, Peter realised he had no way of knowing who this was. All he knew was that the สีฐฉั’s right hand was wrapped in a bulbous mitten of white gauze. In the left hand, he clutched a shabby toiletries bag — no, it wasn’t a bag, it was… a Bible pamphlet, one of Peter’s hand-sewn assemblages. The paper had been dampened and dried so many times it had the texture of leather; the loose strands of wool were yellow and pink.

Seeing Peter enter, the สีฐฉั cocked his head to one side, as if puzzled by the minister’s bizarrely unfamiliar raiment.

‘God bleสี our reunion, Father Peรี่er.’

‘Lover Five?’

‘Yeสี.’

Peter turned to Austin. ‘What’s wrong with her? Why is she here?’

‘She?’ The doctor blinked. ‘Pardon me.’ He reached for a clipboard on which a single sheet was clamped, and, with a scrawl of a pen, he amended the patient’s gender.

‘Well, as you can see from the bandage,’ he continued, escorting Peter to Lover Five’s bedside, ‘she’s sustained a hand injury. A very serious hand injury, I must say.’ He motioned to the gauze mitten. ‘May I?’ This last question was directed at the patient.

‘Yeสี,’ she said. ‘สีhow.’

While the bandages were being unwrapped, Peter recalled the day of Lover Five’s injury: the painting falling from the ceiling, the bruise on her hand, the fervid sympathy offered by her fellow สีฐฉั. And how, ever since then, she’d been protective of that hand, as if the memory of that injury refused to fade.

The white mitten dwindled in size until Austin removed the last of the gauze. A sweet, fermented smell was released into the room. Lover Five’s hand was no longer a hand. The fingers had fused into a blueish-grey clump of rot. It looked like an apple that had sustained a bruise and then been left for weeks.

‘Oh my God,’ Peter breathed.

‘Do you speak his… do you speak her language?’ said Austin. ‘Because I’m not sure how to get proper consent here. I mean, not that there’s any alternative to amputation, but even explaining what a general anaesthetic is… ’

‘Oh… my… God… ’

Lover Five ignored the men’s conversation, ignored the putrid mess on the end of her wrist. With her uninjured hand, she opened her Bible pamphlet, deftly using three fingers to flip to a particular page. In a clear voice unhampered (thanks to her pastor) by impossible consonants, she recited:

‘The Lord give them power in their bed of pain, and make them whole again.’ And, from the same page of inspirational selections from Psalms and Luke: ‘The people learned the good new way and followed him. He welcomed them and helped them know God, and healed all them who needed healing.’

She raised her head to fix her attention on Peter. The bulges on her face that resembled the knees of foetuses seemed to glow.

‘I need healing,’ she said. ‘Or I die.’ Then, after a brief silence, in case there was any ambiguity that should be clarified: ‘I wiสีh, pleaสีe, รี่o live.’

‘My God… my God… ’ Peter kept saying, ten metres down the hall, as Austin leaned against the edge of his consulting room desk, arms awkwardly folded. The doctor was tolerant of the pastor’s emotional incontinence — he wouldn’t dream of telling him that nothing was achieved by all this groaning and fist-clenching and agitated face-wiping. Even so, as the minutes ticked on, he became more keen to discuss the way forward.

‘She’ll have the best of care,’ he reassured Peter. ‘We have everything here. Not to blow my own horn, but I’m a pretty good surgeon. And Dr Adkins is even better. Remember the great job he did on you? If it sets your mind at rest, he can do her as well. In fact, yes, I’ll make sure he definitely does her.’

‘But don’t you realise what this means?’ cried Peter. ‘Don’t you fucking realise what this means?’

The doctor flinched at the unexpected cursing from a man who was, as far as he’d been given to understand, a bona fide Christian minister.

‘Well, I appreciate that you’re upset,’ he remarked carefully. ‘But I don’t think we should jump to any pessimistic conclusions.’

Peter blinked tears from his eyes, allowing him to see the doctor’s face in focus. The ragged scar on Austin’s jaw was as conspicuous as ever, but now, rather than wondering how Austin got it, Peter was struck by the scar’s essential nature: it was not a disfigurement, it was a miracle. All the scars ever suffered by anyone in the whole of human history were not suffering but triumph: triumph against decay, triumph against death. The wounds on Peter’s arm and leg (healing still), the scabs on his ears (gone now), every trifling scratch and burn and rash and bruise, thousands of injuries over the years, right back to the ankle-bones he’d broken the week before he’d met Bea, his skinned knees when he’d fallen off his bike as a kid, the nappy rash he’d probably experienced as a baby… none of them had stopped him being here today. He and Austin were comrades in stupendous luck. The gouge in Austin’s chin, which must have been a gory mess when it was first inflicted, had not reduced the entire head to a slimy lump; it magicked itself into fresh pink flesh.

Nothing shall hurt you, said Luke. When thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned, said Isaiah. The Lord healeth all thy diseases, said Psalms. There it was: there it was, plain as the scar on this smug doctor’s face: the perpetual reprieve the Oasans called the Technique of Jesus.

25. Some of us have work to do

Outside, the sky turned dark, even though it was day. Ominous cloud-masses had formed, dozens of them, almost perfectly circular, like giant moons of vapour. Peter stared at them through the window of his room. Lover One had once assured him that there were no storms on Oasis. It looked like that was about to change.

The giant globes of moisture, as they advanced, became at once more familiar and more alarming. They were swirls of rain, only rain, no different in their motion from the rain-swirls he’d witnessed many times before. But their relationship with the sky around them was not as subtle and freely shifting as usual; instead, it was as though each vast congregation of water-droplets was restrained by an inner gravitational pull, held together like a planet or some gaseous heavenly body. And the spheres were so dense that they had lost some of their transparency, casting an oppressive pall over what had been a bright morning.

There are rain clouds on the way, he thought of writing to Bea, and was hit with a double distress: the memory of the state Bea was in, and deep shame at how inadequate his letters to her were, how inadequate they’d been from the beginning. If he could have described what he’d experienced better, she might not have felt so separated from him. If only the tongue that God lent him when he was called upon to speak in public to strangers could have come to his aid when writing in private to his wife.

He sat at the Shoot and checked for a message. None.

The truth was as plain as a dull blank screen where words had once glowed: she saw no point in responding to him now. Or she was unable to respond — too busy, or too upset, or in trouble. Maybe he should write again regardless, not wait for an answer, just keep sending messages. The way she had done for him when he’d first got here, message after message which he’d left unanswered. He searched his mind for words that might give her hope, maybe something along the lines of ‘Hope is one of the strongest things in the universe. Empires can fall, civilisations can vanish into dust… ’ But no: the rhetoric of a sermon was one thing; his wife’s grim reality was another. Civilisations did not vanish smoothly and easefully; empires did not set like suns: empires collapsed in chaos and violence. Real people got pushed around, beaten up, robbed, made destitute. Real lives went down the toilet. Bea was scared and hurt, and she didn’t need his preaching.

Bea, I love you, he wrote. I;m so worried about you.

Was it right to spend five thousand dollars of USIC’s money to send those nine impotent little words through space? With barely a moment’s hesitation, he pressed the transmission button. The letters trembled on the screen for two, three, then four minutes, making Peter fear that his feelings had been judged, by some jaded shiftworker elsewhere in the building, to have failed a test, to have sinned against the USIC ethos, attempting to undermine the great mission. Staring at the screen, sweat forming on his brow, he belatedly noticed the typo — a semi-colon instead of an apostrophe. He lifted his hand to fix it, but the words evaporated.

APPROVED. TRANSMITTED, the screen said in a wink.

Thank God for that.

Outside the compound, a rumble of thunder.

Peter prayed.

In every Christian’s life there comes a time when he or she needs to know the precise circumstances under which God is willing to heal the sick. Peter had reached that pass now. Until today, he’d muddled through with the same hodgepodge of faith, medicine and common sense that everyone else in his church back in England was likely to rely on: Drive carefully, take the pills as stated on the package, pour cold water on a scald, get the cyst removed by a surgeon, be mindful that a Christian diabetic needs insulin just as much as an atheist diabetic does, regard a heart attack as a warning, remember that all human beings must die, but remember too that God is merciful and may snatch your life back from the jaws of death if… if what? If what?

A few hundred metres from here, confined in a metal cot, lay Lover Five, so small and helpless in that big empty space labelled Intensive Care. Nothing that USIC’s doctors had to offer could fix the rot in her flesh. Amputating her hand would be like cutting the rotten part out of an apple; it was just tidying up the fruit as it died.

But God… God could… God could what? God could cure cancer, that had been proven many times. An inoperable tumour could, through the power of prayer, miraculously shrink. Sentences of death could be commuted for years, and, although Peter disapproved of charlatan faith-healers, he had seen people wake from supposedly fatal comas, had seen hopelessly premature babies survive, had even seen a blind woman regain her sight. But why did God do it for some Christians and not for others? Such a basic question, too simpleminded for theologians to bother discussing at their synods. But what was the answer? To what extent did God feel bound to respect the laws of biology, letting calcifying bones crumble, poisoned livers succumb to cirrhosis, severed arteries gush blood? And if the laws of biology on Oasis were such that the สีฐฉั couldn’t heal, that the mechanism for healing didn’t even exist, was there any point in praying to God for help?

Dear God, please don’t let Lover Five die.

It was such an infantile prayer, the sort of prayer a five-year-old might pray.

But maybe those were the best kind.

What with the thunder in the skies outside and the rumble of worry in his own head, it was difficult for him to recognise the knocking at his door for what it was. Eventually he opened up.

‘How are you feeling?’ said Grainger, dressed for going out.

Like hell, he almost said. ‘I’m very upset and worried about my friend.’

‘But physically?’

‘Physically?’

‘Are you up for going out with me?’ Her voice was firm and dignified; she was wholly back to normal now. Her eyes were clear, no longer red-rimmed; she didn’t smell of alcohol. In fact, she was beautiful, more beautiful than he’d given her credit for before. As well as her usual driving shawl, she wore a white tunic top with loose sleeves that barely reached past her elbows, exposing the network of scars on her pale forearms to public view. Take me as I am, was the message.

‘We can’t leave Tartaglione to rot,’ she said. ‘We’ve got to bring him back.’

‘He doesn’t want to come back,’ said Peter. ‘He feels utter contempt for everybody here.’

‘He’s just saying that,’ said Grainger, bristling with impatience. ‘I know him. We used to talk. He’s a real interesting guy, very smart and charming. And sociable. He’ll go insane out there.’

A naked bogey-man from medieval depictions of the damned leapt around in Peter’s memory. ‘He’s insane already.’

Grainger’s eyes narrowed. ‘That’s kinda… judgemental, wouldn’t you say?’

Peter looked away, too burdened with care to argue. Clumsily, he pretended to be distracted by the demands of unloading the washing machine.

‘Anyway,’ said Grainger, ‘I’ll talk to him, you don’t have to talk to him. Just get him to come out of hiding. Whatever you did last time, do it again.’

‘Well,’ Peter recalled, ‘I was stumbling around in pitch darkness, delirious, convinced I was dying, loudly reciting a paraphrase of Psalm 23. If that’s what it takes, I’m not sure I could… uh… replicate the conditions.’

She put her hands on her hips, provocatively. ‘So does that mean you’re not willing to give it a shot?’

And so they set off. Not in the delivery jeep Grainger preferred for her drug and food runs, but in the hearse-like station wagon Peter had commandeered, the one with the bed in the back. Grainger took a while to adjust to driving it, sniffing at its unfamiliar smells, fiddling with its unfamiliar controls, wriggling her buttocks on the unfamiliar shape of its seat. She was a creature of habit. All the USIC staff were creatures of habit, he realised now. There wasn’t a reckless adventurer among them: Ella Reinman’s vetting process made sure of that. Maybe he, Peter, was the closest thing to an adventurer they’d ever allowed to come here. Or maybe Tartaglione was the closest. And that’s why he’d gone insane.

‘I figure he’s more likely to show,’ Grainger explained, ‘if the vehicle’s the same. He probably saw you coming for ages.’

‘It was night.’

‘The vehicle would have lit itself up. He could’ve been watching it from a mile away.’

Peter thought this was unlikely. He was more inclined to believe that Tartaglione had been watching the twinkles in his vat of moonshine, watching musty memories slowly decay inside his own skull.

‘What if we don’t find him?’

‘We’ll find him,’ said Grainger, focusing her eyes on the featureless landscape.

‘But what if we don’t?’

She smiled. ‘You gotta have faith.’ The heavens rumbled.

A few minutes later, Peter said, ‘May I check the Shoot?’

Grainger fumbled on the dashboard, not sure where the Shoot was located in this vehicle. A drawer slid out like a tongue, offering two repulsive objects that looked like large mummified slugs but which, at second glance, were mouldy cigars. Another drawer revealed some sheets of printed paper that had turned rainbow colours and shrivelled to a fragile tissue resembling autumn leaves. Evidently, the USIC personnel had made little or no use of Kurtzberg’s hearse since his disappearance. Maybe they regarded it as cursed with bad luck, or maybe they’d made a conscious decision to leave it just as it was, in case the minister came back one day.

Grainger’s fingers found the Shoot at last, and swivelled it over Peter’s lap. He switched it on: everything looked and behaved as it should. He checked for messages from Bea. Nothing. Maybe this particular machine was not configured like the others. Maybe its promise of connection was an illusion. He checked again, reasoning that if Bea had sent a message, a few extra seconds could make all the difference between its not-yet-having-arrived and its arrival.

Nothing.

The sky continued to darken as they drove further. Not exactly black as sackcloth, but certainly ominous. Thunder boomed again.

‘I’ve never seen it like this,’ he said.

Grainger glanced cursorily out the side window. ‘I have,’ she said. Then, sensing his scepticism, she added: ‘I’ve been here longer than you.’ She shut her eyes and breathed deep. ‘Too long.’

‘What happens?’

‘Happens?’

‘When it goes dark like this?’

She sighed. ‘It rains. It just rains. What do you expect? This place is one big anti-climax.’

He opened his mouth to speak. To defend the awesome beauties of this planet, or else to make some comment about the USIC project, he would never know which, because as he opened his lips, a fork of lightning split the sky, the windows flared with a blinding flash, and the vehicle was struck from above as if by a colossal fist.

Shuddering from the bang, the car rolled to a standstill.

‘Jee-zus!’ cried Grainger. She was alive. They were both alive. And not just that: they were holding each other by the arm, squeezing tight. Animal instinct. Embarrassed, they unclasped.

No harm had come to them, not even a hair on their head was singed. The Shoot suspended over Peter’s lap had gone blank, its screen reflecting his own bone-white face. On the dashboard in front of him, all the glowing words and symbols were gone. Grainger reached forward to prompt the ignition and was exasperated to find that the engine failed to revive.

‘That’s not supposed to happen,’ she said. Her eyes were a little wild; she was possibly in shock. ‘Everything should still be working fine.’ She kept turning the ignition, to no avail. Fat raindrops began to splash against the windows.

‘The lightning must have blown something,’ said Peter.

‘Impossible,’ said Grainger. ‘No way.’

‘Grainger, it’s amazing enough that we survived.’

She was having none of it. ‘A car’s the safest place to be in a thunderstorm,’ she insisted. ‘The metal shell acts as a Faraday cage.’ Observing the incomprehension on his face, she added: ‘Grade-school science.’

‘I must have been away from school that day,’ he said, as she examined, prodded and tickled controls and gauges that were clearly dead. The odour of fried circuitry began to seep into the cabin. The downpour clattered against the windows, which fogged up until Peter and Grainger were confined inside an opaque casket.

‘I cannot believe this,’ said Grainger. ‘All of our vehicles are designed to take punishment. They’re built like cars used to be, before people started to load them full of dumb-ass technology that breaks down all the damn time.’ She pulled the headscarf off. Her face was flushed, her neck wet with sweat.

‘We need to think,’ said Peter gently, ‘about what to do.’

She leaned her head back against the seat, stared up at the roof. The patter of the rain beat out a military rhythm, like soldiers from a long-past millennium walking into battle with their snare drums slung on their hips.

‘We’ve only been driving for a few minutes,’ Grainger said. ‘The base may still be in sight.’ Reluctant to step outside the vehicle and get soaked, she twisted round in her seat and tried to look out the back window. There was nothing to see except fogged glass and the bed. She swung open the door, letting in a gleeful swarm of humid air, and hove herself into the rain. She stood next to the car for twenty seconds or more, her clothing trembling and flapping as it got pelted. Then she took her seat again and shut the door.

‘No sign,’ she said. Her tunic was drenched, transparent. Peter could see the delineation of her bra, the points of her nipples. ‘And no sign of C-1, either. We must be exactly halfway.’ She stroked the steering wheel in frustration.

The rain passed over. The sky brightened up, casting pearly light on their bodies. Tendrils of air nudged under Grainger’s sleeves, visibly lifting the sodden fabric, travelling underneath like swollen veins. They penetrated Peter’s clothing, too, slipping inside his T-shirt, up his trouser-cuffs, tickling the hollows of his knees. They were especially keen to get past the tight ruck of denim around his genitals.

‘Walking back would take us an hour,’ said Grainger. ‘Two hours, max.’

‘Have the tyres left tracks in the dirt?’

She went out again to check. ‘Yes,’ she said, on her return. ‘Straight and clear.’ One last time she turned the ignition, casually and without looking at it, as if hoping to trick the engine into performing despite itself.

‘Looks like Tartaglione made a deal with God,’ she said.

They packed carefully for the journey. Grainger filled a tote bag with first-aid provisions. Peter found a mildewed old briefcase of Kurtzberg’s, removed a New Testament which had fused into a solid block, and replaced it with a couple of plastic two-litre bottles of water.

‘I wish there was a shoulder-strap for this,’ he said, testing the briefcase in his grip. ‘These bottles are heavy.’

‘They’ll be lighter as we drink them,’ said Grainger.

‘It’ll rain again, twice, before we’re at the base,’ prophesied Peter.

‘What good will that do us?’

‘You just lift your head and open your mouth,’ he said. ‘That’s how the สีฐฉั — the natives — do it.’

‘If you don’t mind,’ said Grainger, ‘I’d rather not do it the way the natives do it.’

The outside of the vehicle, they noted, was disfigured with scorch-marks. A web of damage tattooed the hubcabs, and all four tyres had deflated. The vehicle had ceased to be a vehicle and begun its metamorphosis into something else.

Peter and Grainger followed the tyre-tracks back towards the USIC compound. Grainger was a good walker, shorter-legged than her companion but with a brisk enough pace for him not to need to hobble his speed. They covered a decent distance in a short time, and despite the flatness of the land the vehicle grew rapidly smaller in retrospect and then vanished altogether. As they walked on, the tracks became more difficult to discern in the rain-smoothed soil; there was ambiguity between man-made and naturally occurring patterns. The sky’s ominous pall evaporated and the sun shone bright and constant. Grainger took swigs from one of the water bottles; Peter was OK to wait. He was more hungry than thirsty. In fact, the gnaw of appetite distracted him as he walked.

The ground was not the best terrain for progress on foot, but they must have covered two miles at least in the first hour. In the second hour perhaps the same. The USIC base obstinately refused to manifest on the horizon. All traces of their outward journey were by now erased from the soil. They were, of course, hopelessly lost.

‘If we retrace our steps to the car, USIC may send someone to check it out,’ suggested Peter, ‘eventually.’

‘Yeah,’ said Grainger. ‘Eventually. When we’re dead.’

They were both taken aback to hear the word spoken so prematurely. Even though the mistake they’d made hung obvious in the air, there was an etiquette of optimism to be observed.

‘You came to fetch me,’ Peter reminded her.

She laughed out loud at his naivety. ‘That was on my own initiative, it had nothing to do with USIC. Those guys wouldn’t rescue their own mothers. I mean, literally. Why do you think they’re here in the first place? They’re cool, they might as well have SHIT HAPPENS tattooed on their foreheads.’

‘But they’ll notice you’re missing.’

‘Oh, I’m sure. Somebody will come to the pharmacy for a tube of wart-killer and I won’t be there and they’ll think, Hey, no sweat, a few warts ain’t so bad. And when I don’t turn up to test tomorrow’s food, Hey, it’s just a formality, we’ll eat it anyway. Maybe mention it at the next meeting.’

‘I can’t believe they’d be so unconcerned,’ said Peter, but his voice was weakened by uncertainty.

‘I know these guys,’ said Grainger. ‘I know how they operate. They noticed Kurtzberg and Tartaglione were missing — after God knows how long. What did they do? Did they send vehicles out in all directions, driving day and night until they covered every inch of a fifty-mile radius? Forget it, baby. Chill out and read a magazine. Flex a bicep. The fucking world is falling apart and it still doesn’t rate as an emergency. Do you really think they’re gonna panic over us?’

‘I would hope so,’ said Peter.

‘Well, hope is a fine thing,’ she sighed.

They walked further, and began to tire.

‘Maybe we should stop walking,’ said Peter.

‘And do what instead?’

‘Rest a while.’

They sat on the earth and rested a while. Two cotton-wrapped, pink mammals marooned on a dark ocean of soil. Here and there, a few small clumps of whiteflower grew, sweating in the sunshine. Peter reached out to one near his foot, plucked off a fragment and put it in his mouth. It tasted bad. How strange that a substance which, when ingeniously processed, cooked and seasoned, could be delicious in so many ways, should be so unpleasant in its pure form.

‘Enjoying that?’ said Grainger.

‘Not much,’ he said.

‘I’ll wait till we’re back at the base,’ she said, lightly. ‘Good menu today. Chicken curry and ice cream.’ She smiled, willing him to forgive her earlier lapse of morale.

Not much refreshed, they walked on. And on. Grainger had drunk half a water bottle by now, and Peter drank his fill direct from the sky when, just as he’d foretold, another rain-shower drenched them.

‘Hey!’ called Grainger as he swayed erect and awkward, his head tilted back, Adam’s apple bobbing, mouth wide open to the downpour. ‘You look like a turkey!’

Peter put on a grin, as Grainger’s comment was clearly meant in fun, but he felt his grin falter as he realised that he’d forgotten what turkeys looked like. All his life he’d known, starting from the first day his parents had shown him a picture of one in a book. Now, in his brain’s storehouse, where so many Bible passages lay spotlit ready for quoting, he searched for a picture to go with ‘turkey’, and there was none to be found.

Grainger noticed. Noticed and was not pleased.

‘You don’t remember, do you?’ she said, as they sat down together once more. ‘You’ve forgotten what a turkey looks like.’

He confessed with a nod, caught out like a naughty child. Until now, only Bea had ever been able to guess what he was thinking.

‘Mental blank,’ he said.

‘That’s what happens,’ said Grainger, solemn and intense. ‘That’s what this place is about, that’s how it works. It’s like one huge dose of Propanolol, erasing everything we ever knew. You mustn’t let them break you.’

Her sudden vehemence discomfited him. ‘I… I’m probably just… absent-minded.’

‘That’s what you’ve gotta watch,’ she said, hugging her knees, contemplating the empty tundra ahead of them. ‘Absence. The slow, insidious… disposal of everything. Listen: you wanna know what got discussed at the last USIC personnel meeting? Besides technical stuff and the bad smell in the loading bay behind H wing? I’ll tell you: whether we really need all those pictures hanging in the hallways. They’re just a dusting and cleaning problem, right? An old photo of a city on earth somewhere, way back when, with a bunch of guys eating lunch on a steel girder, it’s cute but we’ve seen it a million times walking past it, it gets old, and anyway those guys are all dead, it’s like being made to look at a bunch of dead people, so enough already. Blank walls: clean and simple: end of story.’

Grainger raked her fingers through her clammy hair: an irritable gesture. ‘So… Peter… Let me remind you what a turkey is. It’s a bird. It’s got a kind of dangle of flesh hanging off of its beak, looks like a big trail of snot or… uh… a condom. Its head is red with little bumps on it, like lizard skin, and its head and neck are in an S-shape, and they go like this… ’ With her own head and neck she acted out the ungainly motion of the bird. ‘And then this scrawny, snake-like head and neck are attached to this oversized, fat, fluffy grey body.’ She looked Peter in the eyes. ‘Ring any bells?’

‘Yes, you’ve… uh… brought it back to life for me.’

Satisfied, she allowed herself to relax. ‘That’s it. That’s what we’ve got to do. Keep the memories alive.’ She arranged her body more comfortably on the ground, stretching out as if sunbathing, using the tote bag as a pillow. A brilliant-green insect settled on her shoulder and began to flex its hindquarters. She seemed unaware of it. Peter considered brushing it away, but let it be.

A voice in his head said: You are going to die here, in this wilderness. You will never see Beatrice again. This flat terrain, these sparse clumps of whiteflower, this alien sky, these insects waiting to lay eggs in your flesh, this woman at your side: they are the contents of your life in its final days and hours. The voice spoke clearly, without accent or gender: he’d heard it many times before, and always been certain it was not his own. As a child, he’d thought it was the voice of conscience; as a Christian, he’d trusted it was the voice of God. Whatever it was, it had always told him exactly what he needed to be told.

‘What’s your earliest memory?’ Grainger asked.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, after giving it thought. ‘My mum strapping me into a special plastic child seat at a Turkish restaurant, maybe. It’s hard to know what’s a real memory and what’s something you construct afterwards from old photos and family stories.’

‘Oh, don’t be like that,’ she said, in the same tone she might have used if he’d declared that love was merely a meeting of sperm and ovum. ‘Tuska’s big on that idea. No such thing as childhood memories, he says. We’re just playing games with our neurons every day, tossing them around the hippocampus, constructing little fairy tales featuring characters named after people we used to live with. “Your dad is just a flurry of molecular activity in your frontal lobe,” he’ll tell you, grinning that smug grin of his. Asshole.’

She held out her hand. Peter wasn’t sure what she wanted him to do. Then he handed her the water bottle. She drank some. There wasn’t much left.

‘My dad,’ she continued, ‘used to smell of gunpowder. We lived on a farm, in Illinois. He was always shooting rabbits. They were just bugs to him, big furry bugs. I’d ride around on my bicycle, and there’d be dead rabbits everywhere. Then later he’d sweep me up in his arms and I’d smell the gunpowder on his shirt.’

‘A very… uh… mixed-emotion sort of memory,’ said Peter carefully.

‘It’s a real memory, that’s the important thing. The farm was real, the dead rabbits were real, the smell on my father’s shirt was gunpowder and not tobacco or paint or aftershave. I know, I was there.’ She spoke defiantly, as if doubt had been cast on whether she was there, as if there was a conspiracy among the USIC personnel to reinvent her as a city kid from Los Angeles, the daughter of a Ukrainian dentist, a German Chinese. Two more insects had settled on her, one on her hair, the other on her bosom. She paid them no mind.

‘What happened to your farm?’ asked Peter, for politeness’ sake, when it became evident that the conversation had stalled.

‘Get the fuck out of my face!’ she exclaimed, clapping her hands to her eyes.

He jerked back, prepared to apologise profusely for whatever he’d said to enrage her, but she wasn’t addressing him. She wasn’t even addressing the insects. With a cry of disgust, she cast a glittering shred first from one eye, then the other. Her contact lenses.

‘The damn air,’ she said. ‘It was trying to get under my contacts, lifting them up at the edges. Creeped me out.’ She blinked. One discarded hydrogel petal was stuck to her shoe, the other lay on the soil. ‘I shouldn’t have done that; my eyesight is not good. You might end up leading me along. Where were we?’

With effort, Peter retrieved the thread of the narrative. ‘You were going to tell me what happened to the farm.’

She rubbed her eyes, experimented with looking out of them. ‘We went broke,’ she said. ‘The farm got sold and we moved to Decatur. We were in Bethany before, we weren’t that far out, but we got ourselves a maisonette in the city, right near the Sangamon River. Well, not like walking distance or anything. But a short drive.’

‘Uh-huh,’ said Peter. He realised, with a deep pang of melancholy, that he was not in the least interested. So much for being a people person… If he survived, if he got back to civilisation, his career as a minister was over. The minutiae of human beings’ lives — the places they’d lived, the names of their relatives, the names of the rivers they’d lived near, the mundane complexities of the jobs they’d done and the domestic squabbles they’d endured — had ceased to have any meaning for him.

‘Decatur is kind of a boring place now,’ reflected Grainger. ‘But it’s got some pretty amazing history. It used to be called the Soybean Capital of the World. You’ve heard of Abraham Lincoln?’

‘Of course. Most famous of all American presidents.’

She exhaled gratefully, as if they had struck a blow against ignorance together, as if they were the only two educated people in a colony of philistines. ‘Lincoln lived in Decatur, way back in the 1700s or whenever. He was a lawyer then. He became president later. There’s a statue of him with his bare foot on a stump. I sat on that stump when I was a little girl. I didn’t think it was disrespectful or anything; I was just tired.’

‘Uh-huh,’ said Peter. Insects were settling on him now, too. In a week or so — maybe in a few days — the two of them would be seedbeds. Maybe, when the time came for them to breathe their last, they should be lying in each other’s arms.

‘I loved what you said at the funeral,’ she said.

‘The funeral?’

‘Severin’s funeral. You made him so real. And I didn’t even like him.’

Peter struggled to recall what he’d said about Severin; struggled to recall Severin at all. ‘I had no idea you were impressed.’

‘It was beautiful.’ She basked in the afterglow of his compassion for a few seconds. Then her brow wrinkled. ‘Too beautiful for those… dickwads, that’s for sure. There was a meeting about it afterwards, and everyone agreed you’d overstepped a line, and if there were any more deaths of USIC personnel in the future, it would be best to keep you out of it.’ The insects were venturing back now. A lustrous jade one settled directly on her forehead. She was oblivious. ‘I defended you,’ she said, staring up at the sky.

‘Thank you.’

Resting on one elbow, he gazed at her. Her bosom rose and fell with her breath, just two lumps of fatty tissue on a ribcage, two milkbags designed to feed children she would never have. Yet to him that bosom was intoxicatingly lovely, an aesthetic marvel, and the rhythmic swell of it made him desire her. Everything about her was miraculous: the downy hair behind her ear, the symmetry of her collarbones, her soft flushed lips, even the puckered scars on her arms. She wasn’t his soulmate: he had no illusions about that. The intimacies he had once shared with Bea were impossible with her; she would quickly find him ridiculous, and he would find her too much trouble. In fact, like most men and women who had made love since the beginning of time, they had almost nothing in common. Except that they were male and female, thrown together by circumstances, and, for the moment at least, alive. He lifted his hand, held it in space, prepared to settle his palm, gently, on her breast.

‘Tell me about your wife.’ Grainger’s eyes were closed now. She was tired, torpid in the heat, and a little drunk on the liquor of reminiscence.

‘She’s turned against me,’ Peter said, withdrawing his hand. ‘We’ve grown apart.’ Although he intended merely to state facts, his words sounded peevish, craven, the clichéd complaining of the typical adulterer. He could do better than this. ‘She’s been having a horrific time back home, everything is falling apart, all sorts of disasters, and she… she’s lost her faith in God. Our cat Joshua got killed, tortured, and I think it pushed her over the edge. She’s scared and lonely. I haven’t been giving her the support she needs.’

Grainger shifted the orientation of her body, for comfort. One arm cradled her head, the other draped across her chest. She didn’t open her eyes. ‘You’re not telling me about Bea,’ she said. ‘You’re telling me what’s going on between you. Tell me about her. What she looks like. The colour of her eyes. Her childhood and stuff.’

He lay down next to her, rested his head on his arms. ‘Her name is Beatrice. She’s a few years older than me, thirty-six. She doesn’t mind people knowing her age. She’s the most… un-vain woman I’ve ever known. I don’t mean in terms of appearance. She’s beautiful and she dresses with style. But she doesn’t care what other people think. She has pride in herself. Not a puffed-up pride, just… self-esteem. That’s so rare. Incredibly rare. Most people are the walking wounded, you know. And Bea really ought to be, with the childhood she had. Her father was abusive, a total control freak. He burnt everything she had several times, all her possessions, I mean everything, not just toys and books and special things, but everything. She remembers going to Tesco’s, a supermarket in the industrial park that was open all night, with her mother. It was about two o’clock in the morning, Bea was maybe nine years old, and she was in her pyjamas, she was barefoot and her feet were blue, because it was January and snowing and she’d had to walk from the car to the store. And her mother took her to the girlswear section and bought her pants, socks, T-shirts, shoes, trousers, the lot. That happened more than once.’

‘Wow,’ said Grainger, without any perceptible awe. Peter guessed she was comparing Bea’s formative sufferings to her own and judging them to be no big deal. That’s what people, unless they were สีฐฉั, tended to do.

‘What does she look like?’ Grainger said. ‘Describe her to me.’

‘She has brown hair,’ said Peter. ‘Auburn.’ It was a struggle to conjure up a vision of Bea’s hair as it really was; maybe he was just recalling mentioning its colour in other conversations. ‘She’s tall, almost as tall as me. Brown eyes, slim.’ These details were generic, unevocative; they would fit a million women. But what was he to do? Describe the mole under her left nipple? The precise shape of her navel? ‘She’s very fit, she’s a nurse. We met at the hospital where she worked. I’d broken my ankles jumping off a ledge.’

‘Ow. Were you trying to commit suicide?’

‘No, I was trying to escape from the police. I was a drug addict then; I did a lot of burglaries. That day, my luck ran out. Or I should say, I got lucky.’

Grainger grunted agreement. ‘She lost her job over you?’

‘How did you know that?’ He’d never shared this with her, he was pretty sure.

‘Just a guess. Nurse gets involved with patient. Who’s a drug addict. And a criminal. It doesn’t look good. Did you ever go to jail?’

‘Not really. Detention in police cells, a fortnight once when I was awaiting trial and nobody would bail me out, that was about it.’ Only now did it strike him that he’d been shown extraordinary leniency.

‘Figures,’ said Grainger, in an odd, philosophical tone.

‘Why does it figure?’

‘You’re a lucky guy, Peter. One of life’s charmed creatures.’

For some reason, this stung him. He wanted her to know he had suffered just as much as anyone.

‘I was homeless for a few years. I got beaten up.’ He hoped he was speaking with quiet dignity, rather than whining, but he suspected not.

‘All part of life’s adventure, right?’ said Grainger. There was no sarcasm in her voice, just a weary, tolerant sadness.

‘What do you mean?’

She sighed. ‘Some people go through heavy stuff. They fight in wars. They’re in jail. They start a business and it gets shut down by gangsters. They end up hustling their ass in a foreign country. It’s one long list of setbacks and humiliations. But it doesn’t touch them, not really. They’re having an adventure. It’s like: What’s next? And then there’s other people who are just trying to live quietly, they stay out of trouble, they’re maybe ten years old, or fourteen, and one Friday morning at 9.35 something happens to them, something private, something that breaks their heart. For ever.’

He lay silent, absorbing what she’d said.

‘I felt that way,’ he said at last, ‘when Bea told me it was over.’

It began to rain again. Without shelter, they had no choice but to lie where they were and get soaked. Grainger just closed her eyes. Peter watched her bra materialising again under her tunic, watched the contours of her breasts take shape. She hitched the sleeves off her arms, let the old injuries breathe. Each time he’d spent time with Grainger he’d wondered if a natural opportunity would arise to ask her about her self-harm. There would never be a better time than now. He tried to frame the question, but none of the obvious words — the whys and whens — would move from his brain to his tongue. He realised that he no longer wanted to know what caused those scars. Grainger’s pain was in the past and there was no point revisiting it. Here, today, lying by his side, she was a woman with faint ridges on her arms: if he stroked her flesh gently, he would feel them. That was all.

When the shower had moved on and the sun was warming them again, Grainger said: ‘Did you get married in a church or an office?’

‘A church.’

‘Was it a big, fancy wedding?’

‘Not so much. No parents or family members on either side, for various reasons. A few people from Bea’s own church, which became my church in the end.’ In truth, he remembered nothing much about the event, but he remembered the light beaming through the windows, the way a grey November afternoon had been unexpectedly transformed by a sunburst. ‘It was nice. I think everyone had a good time. And there was loads of alcohol and I didn’t drink, I wasn’t even tempted. Which was quite an achievement for me because, you know… I’m an alcoholic.’

‘Me too,’ she said.

‘It never leaves you,’ he said.

She smiled. ‘Like God, huh? More loyal than God.’

They lay quietly for a while. Two small insects of the same species found each other on Grainger’s abdomen and started mating.

‘I bet Ella Reinman is a secret lush,’ she said.

‘Sorry?’

‘A lush. American word for alcoholic. I thought you’d know that one.’

‘Never too late for vocabulary building,’ he said.

‘She thinks she’s so damn smart,’ bitched Grainger. ‘Thinks she can look right inside you and tell if you’re ever gonna drink again. Well, she got it wrong with us, didn’t she?’

Peter was silent. Nothing would be gained by telling her that the booze she’d smelled on him when she dragged him out of Tartaglione’s den was all spillage. Let her think they’d fallen off the wagon together. Let her think he’d broken his sacred promise, let her think he’d lost his last shred of dignity. It was kinder that way.

‘I was a different person when I did that interview,’ she said. ‘It was a million years ago. People change.’

‘Yes, people change.’

The insects were finished, and flew off.

‘Tell me about your wife’s wedding dress,’ said Grainger.

‘It was white,’ he replied. ‘It was exactly what you imagine a wedding dress to be, conventional, nothing unusual about it. Except that it was a huge symbolic statement. The whiteness of it. Bea had a terrible past, sexually. She was… let’s just say she was used and abused. And she refused to be destroyed by it.’

Grainger scratched at her arms. The repeated drenchings had activated an allergy in the scars. ‘Not so much of the symbolism. Tell me more about the dress.’

He cast his mind back. He cast it across the galaxy, aiming for the bedroom of his home in England.

‘It… it didn’t have a huge flouncy train behind it,’ he said. ‘It was a proper dress, a dress to move around in. It had puff shoulders, not balloony, just elegant, and then it was tight on the arms, with a brocade kind of texture, right down to the wrists. There was brocade on the… uh… abdomen as well, and on the collar, but the bosom was smooth and silky. The skirt was ankle-length, it didn’t touch the floor.’

Grainger was nodding, humming. She was getting what she wanted.

‘One of the amazing things about Bea,’ said Peter, ‘is that she wore that dress many times afterwards. At home. Just for us.’

‘That’s so romantic.’ There were tears in Grainger’s eyes.

Peter felt suddenly disconsolate. The memory of Bea’s bitter disappointment with him was more recent than these fond memories he was sharing with Grainger. ‘I suppose it’s just a story I’m telling myself, like Tuska says,’ he said. ‘An old story. Life has moved on. Bea is a different person. You know, not long ago, I wrote to her about the dress, about how much I loved her in it, and she… she said I was just being sentimental, focusing on a memory of who she used to be, not who she is now.’

Grainger shook her head. ‘That’s bullshit,’ she said softly. Tenderly, even. ‘Take it from me, Peter, her heart swells up when you talk about that dress. She would be devastated if she thought you’d forgotten about that dress. Can’t you see that? Everybody’s sentimental, everybody. There’s only about fifty people in the whole damn world who aren’t sentimental. And they’re all working here.’

They both laughed. ‘We should try once more to get back,’ said Peter.

‘OK,’ she said, and hauled herself to her feet. Her movements were stiffer than before. His too. They were carbon-based life forms, running low on fuel. An hour or so later, with the USIC base still eluding them, they found a structure of a different kind. It had shimmered in their sights for the longest time, and while heading for it they discussed the possibility that it was a mirage. But it proved real enough: the skeletal remains of a large camping tent. The metal struts were intact, staking out the shape of a house, the kind of house a child would draw. The canvas hung in tatters.

Inside the tent, nothing. No provisions, no bedding, no implements. A square of ground, a blank panel for the imagination to fill.

Behind the tent, planted in the ground and only slightly tilted, a cross. A wooden one, of very modest scale, about knee-height. Where had the wood come from? Not from this world, that’s for sure. It must have been transported, stashed in a ship along with the medicines and the engineering magazines and the raisins and the humans, billions of miles from its point of origin. Just two pine slats, never intended to be nailed together in this manner, two sturdy slices of tree varnished to resemble antique oak. Two nails were driven through the crux: one to join the two pieces of wood together, and another, crudely hammered and bent, to secure two small circlets of metal. Gold. Kurtzberg’s wedding ring, and the wedding ring of the wife he’d lost in another galaxy long, long ago.

On the horizontal slat of the cross, the minister had carved a message, then painstakingly blackened each letter with the flame of a cigarette lighter or some similar tool. Peter expected a motto in Latin or an allusion to faith or Christ or the Afterlife.

FOR ALL THAT I’VE HAD AND SEEN, I AM TRULY THANKFUL, the inscription said.

They stood and looked at that cross for several minutes, while the ragged remains of the tent flapped in the breeze.

‘I’m going home,’ announced Grainger, in a voice shaky with tears, ‘to find my dad.’

Peter put his arm around her shoulders. This was the moment when he was called upon to say the right thing; nothing less than the right thing would do. As a man or as a minister of God, his challenge was the same: to reconcile them both to their fate. There would be no going home; there was no dad to be reunited with; they were lost and soon they would be dead. Lightning had struck them, and they had failed to understand its message.

‘Grainger… ’ he began, his mind blank, trusting that inspiration would lend words to his tongue.

But before he could continue, the dull thrum which they’d both imagined was the wind agitating the canvas shreds of the tent grew suddenly louder, and an olive-green military jeep drove past them, slowed to a stop, and reversed.

A brown head with white eyes and white teeth poked out of the window.

‘Are you guys finished here?’ hollered BG, revving the engine. ‘’Cause some of us have work to do.’

26. He only knew that thanks were due

All the way back, Peter could hear — only hear, not see — the weeping and the laboured breathing and the outbursts of anxiety and anger, sometimes incoherent, sometimes lucid. He was in the front passenger seat next to BG, almost shoulder to shoulder with the big man, although his own shoulder looked emaciated in comparison with BG’s bulge of meat and muscle. Invisible in the space behind them, Alexandra Grainger was going through hell.

BG drove in silence. His normally benign face was a grim mask, frozen under the sheen of sweat, as he concentrated, or pretended to concentrate, on the road ahead — the road that was no road at all. Only his eyes betrayed any stress.

‘They’d better not try to stop me,’ Grainger was saying. ‘They can’t keep me here. I don’t care how much it costs. What are they gonna do? Sue me? Kill me? I’ve got to go home. They can keep my salary. Four years for free. That makes us even, right? They’ve got to let me go. My dad is still alive. I know he is. I feel it.’

BG glanced up at the rear-view mirror. Maybe from his angle he could see more than Peter. All Peter could see was a narrow rectangle of black upholstery which, through the distorted veil of the air currents trapped in the cabin, appeared to be pulsing and throbbing.

‘Four years as a pharmacist,’ Grainger ranted on, ‘handing out drugs to those creepy little freaks: what’s that worth, BG? Worth a ride on a ship?’

BG grimaced. Crises of confidence were not what he was accustomed to dealing with. ‘Chill out, Grainger, is my advice to you,’ he said pensively. ‘The cost ain’t an issue. I been back, Severin went back a couple times, a few other guys took a break too. Nobody slapped them with a bill. If you need to go, you need to go. No big deal.’

‘You really think so?’ Her voice was tremulous, the voice of a farm girl from Illinois who was deeply ashamed to waste millions of dollars of someone else’s money to indulge her own pain.

‘Money don’t mean shit,’ said BG. ‘We play this little game: ten bucks for a bar of chocolate, fifty bucks for a bottle of Pepsi, deducted from your salary, blah blah blah. It’s just a Friday-night card game, Grainger, it’s Monopoly, it’s Go Fish, it’s kids gambling for peanuts. The salary’s a game too. Where we gonna spend this cash? We ain’t goin’ nowhere.’

‘But you did go home,’ said Grainger. ‘Not that long ago. Why?’

BG’s mouth set hard. He clearly didn’t want to discuss it. ‘Unfinished business.’

‘Family?’

BG shook his head. ‘Call it… loose ends. A guy in my line of work needs his mind clear. So I did some stuff and cleared it. Came back to the job a new man.’

This silenced Grainger for a few seconds. Then she was anxious again. ‘But that’s it, that’s the whole point — you came back, you didn’t quit. I’ve got to quit, you understand? I’ve got to leave and never come back. No way, never.’

BG jutted out his chin. ‘Never say never, Grainger. Never say never. That’s in the Bible somewhere, ain’t that right, Peter?’

‘I’m not sure,’ Peter mumbled. He knew perfectly well that the Bible said nothing of the sort.

‘It’s gotta be right there in Chapter One,’ affirmed BG. ‘God’s advice to Moses and the whole crew: Seize the day! Get on top of it, people!’

Peter watched BG’s right hand rise up from the steering wheel and form a triumphal fist in the air. Long ago, in a previous life, BG had no doubt stood among other dark-skinned creatures in his Nation of Islam brotherhood, all raising their fists likewise. Now, their slogans had mingled in BG’s mind with a thousand windblown leaves from the Qur’an, the Bible, assorted self-help books, magazines and TV programmes, combining into a mulch. A mulch from which his self-esteem grew healthy and strong.

The Bible stored inside Peter was pure and unadulterated, not a word of it confused with anything else. And yet, for the first time, he was ashamed of it. The holy book he’d spent so much of his life preaching from had one cruel flaw: it was not very good at offering encouragement or hope to those who weren’t religious. With God, nothing shall be impossible, proclaimed Luke, and that message, which Peter had always thought was the most joyously positive reassurance you could wish for, now turned itself over like a dying insect, and became Without God, everything shall be impossible. What use was that to Grainger? What use was that to Bea? The way things had turned out, they might need to manage without a saviour; they might need to forage and scrabble for whatever future they could get on their own. And the thing about the Bible was, once you asked for a future without faith, the Scriptures washed their hands of you. Vanity, all is vanity.

‘What was it like, BG?’ said Grainger. ‘Come on, tell me, what’s happening back home?’

‘This is my home now,’ BG cautioned her, tapping his chest with his fingers. Maybe, rather than referring to Oasis, the home he meant was his own body, wherever in space it might be located.

‘OK, fine, fine,’ said Grainger, barely controlling her annoyance, ‘but tell me anyway, damn it. It’s been so long since I left. There must have been big changes. Don’t spare me, BG, skip the pep talks, give it to me straight. What’s it like?’

BG hesitated, weighing up the wisdom of responding. ‘Same as always,’ he said.

‘That’s not true!’ yelled Grainger, instantly hysterical. ‘Don’t lie to me! Don’t patronise me! I know everything’s falling apart!’

Why not ask me? Peter thought. She was treating him as if he didn’t exist.

‘Everything’s always been falling apart,’ BG stated calmly. There was no defensiveness in his tone: the facts were too self-evident for dispute. ‘Planet Earth got fucked up a loooong time ago, excuse my French.’

‘That’s not what I mean,’ whined Grainger. ‘I mean… What about your old neighbourhood, where you grew up, your relatives, your house… ’

BG squinted through the windscreen at the expanses of nothingness, then glanced down at the navigation gadget on his dashboard.

‘Grainger, I got another wise old saying for you. Listen up: You can’t go home again.’

Thomas Wolfe, circa 1940, thought Peter helplessly.

‘Yeah? Well, just watch me,’ said Grainger, belligerent in her fear. ‘Just fucking watch me.’

BG was silent, obviously judging that Grainger was on too delicate a hair-trigger for more discussion. But the silence provoked her just as much. ‘You know what you are?’ she wheezed, her voice ugly as if soaked in alcohol. ‘You’re just a little boy. Running away from home. Big tough guy, but you can’t face reality. All you can do is pretend it’s not happening.’

BG blinked slowly. He did not lose his temper. He had no temper left to lose. That was his tragedy, and his mark of dignity too.

‘I faced all the reality I got to face, Grainger,’ he said, without raising his voice. ‘You don’t know what I’ve done and what I have not done; you don’t know where I came from and why I left; you don’t know who I’ve hurt and who’s hurt me; you ain’t seen my scorecard and I ain’t gonna show it to you. You want a juicy fact about my daddy? He died when he was the exact age I am now. A blood vessel in his heart got blocked up: bye-bye Billy Graham Senior. And all you need to know about me is, if I inherited that same blood vessel, and I die next week, well… I’m OK with it.’ BG changed gear, slowed the vehicle down. They were approaching the base. ‘In the meantime, Grainger, whenever you need a ride out of the desert, I’m your man.’

She was quiet after that. The vehicle’s wheels made the transition from earth to tarmac, giving the illusion of airborne cruising. BG parked in the shadow of the compound, right in front of the entrance nearest Grainger’s quarters, then scooted round and opened the car door for her: a perfect gentleman.

‘Thank you,’ she said. She had not acknowledged Peter’s presence for the duration of the drive. Peter twisted round in his seat to catch a glimpse of her as she was manoeuvring her stiff, weary body out of the car. BG’s arm was offered like a metal rung; she took hold of it and pulled herself up. The door slammed shut, and Peter continued to watch through the fogged window: two white-clad USIC personnel shimmering in and out of recognisability like degraded video images. He wondered if they would walk into the building side by side, arm in arm, but as soon as Grainger was on her feet, she broke free and was gone.

‘I figure it’s the lightning,’ said BG when he returned to the car. ‘Can’t be good for a person, being whammoed like that. Give her time, she’ll get over it.’

Peter nodded. He was unsure if he would get over it himself.

It was Dr Adkins who found Peter outside the intensive care unit, on his knees. ‘Found’ was the wrong word, perhaps: he almost tripped over him. Unfazed, the surgeon looked down at Peter’s body, assessing in a couple of seconds whether any part of it was in urgent need of medical intervention.

‘You OK?’ he said.

‘I’m trying to pray,’ said Peter.

‘Oh… OK,’ said Adkins, glancing over Peter’s shoulder to a place further down the corridor, as if to say, Could you try it somewhere where people won’t break their neck over you?

‘I’ve come to see Jesus Lover Five,’ said Peter, hauling himself off the floor. ‘You know about her?’

‘Of course. She’s my patient.’ The doctor smiled. ‘It’s nice to have a real patient for a change. Instead of a five-minute whambam-thank-you-ma’am with someone who’s got conjunctivitis or hit their thumb with a hammer.’

Peter stared into the doctor’s face, searching for evidence of empathy. ‘I got the impression Dr Austin didn’t really understand what’s happening to Lover Five. I got the impression he’s assuming you can make her better.’

‘We’ll do what we can,’ said Adkins inscrutably.

‘She’s going to die,’ said Peter.

‘Let’s not go there yet.’

Peter clenched one hand inside the other, and found that his strenuous attempts to pray had bruised the tender flesh between his knuckles. ‘These people don’t heal, you understand that?’ he said. ‘They can’t heal. Our bodies… your body, my body… we’re living inside a miracle. Forget religion, we’re a miracle of nature. We can hit our thumb with a hammer, we can tear a hole in our skin, we can get burnt, broken, swollen up with pus, and a little while later, it’s all fixed! Good as new! Unbelievable! Impossible! But true. That’s the gift we’re given. But the สีฐฉั — the Oasans — they never received this amazing gift. They get one chance… just one chance… the body they’re born with. They do their best to take care of it, but when it gets damaged, that’s… that’s it.’

Dr Adkins nodded. He was a kindly man, and not unintelligent. He laid a palm on Peter’s shoulder.

‘Let’s take it day by day with this… lady. She’ll lose her hand. That’s obvious. Beyond that… We’ll try our best to figure something out.’

Peter’s eyes stung with tears. He wanted so much to believe.

‘Listen,’ said Adkins, ‘remember when I was patching you up, I told you that medicine is just carpentry, plumbing and sewing. Which doesn’t apply in this lady’s case, I appreciate that. But I forgot to mention: there’s chemistry too. These people take pain-killers, they take cortisone, they take lots of other medicines from us. They wouldn’t take them, year after year, if nothing had any effect.’

Peter nodded, or tried to; it was more of a facial tremor, a shiver of the chin. The cynicism he’d thought he’d banished for ever was coursing through his system. Placebo, all is placebo. Swallow the pills and feel invigorated while the cells die inside you. Hallelujah, I can walk on these septic feet, the pain is gone, barely there, quite bearable, praise the Lord.

Adkins looked down at the palm that he’d laid on Peter’s shoulder a minute ago, briefly appraised that palm as if there was a vial of magic serum nestling in it. ‘This… Lover Five of yours: she’s our way in. We never had one of these people to study before. We’ll learn a lot and we’ll learn fast. Who knows, we may be able to save her. Or if we can’t save her, we may be able to save her children.’ He paused. ‘They do have children, don’t they?’

Peter’s mind re-played the vision of the calf-like newborn, the cheering crowd, the dressing ceremony, the eerie beauty of little สคฉ้รี่, clumsily dancing on his inaugural day of life, waving his tiny gloved hands.

‘Yes, they do,’ he said.

‘Well, there you go,’ said Adkins.

Lover Five, confined to bed in her brightly lit chamber of care, looked just as small and alone as before. If only there could have been a USIC worker laid up with a broken leg in one of the other beds, or a few healthy สีฐฉั sitting nearby, conversing with her in their native tongue, it would have been less awful. Awful for who, though? Peter knew it was for his own sake as well as for hers that he yearned for the pathos to be less sharp. In his career as a minister, he’d visited many hospital wards, but never, until now, to confront a person whose impending death he felt responsible for.

‘God bleสี our reunion, Father Peรี่er,’ she said as he walked in. Since he’d last seen her, she’d gotten hold of a USIC bathtowel and deftly folded it around her head as an improvised hood. It lent her a more feminine appearance, like a hijab or a wig. She’d tucked the loose ends under the neckline of her hospital gown, and pulled the blankets up to her armpits. Her left hand was still naked; her right was snugly bound in its cotton sheath.

‘Lover Five, I’m so, so sorry,’ he said, his voice already cracking.

‘สีorry noรี่ neสีeสีary,’ she reassured him. The absolution cost her an absurd amount of effort to pronounce. Insult to injury.

‘The painting that fell on your hand… ’ he said, lowering himself onto the edge of the bed near the meagre hump of her knees. ‘If I hadn’t asked for… ’

With her free hand she did a surprising thing, a thing he’d never have imagined anyone of her kind doing: she silenced him by laying her fingers against his lips. It was the first time he had been touched by the naked flesh of an สีฐฉั, unmediated by the soft fabric of gloves. Her fingertips were smooth and warm and smelled like fruit.

‘Nothing fall if God have no plan for the falling.’

Gently he enclosed her hand in his. ‘I shouldn’t say this,’ he said, ‘but out of all your people… you’re the one I care about the most.’

‘I know,’ she said, with barely a heartbeat’s hesitation. ‘Buรี่ God have no favouriสีรี่. God care for all alike.’

Her constant allusions to God poked a spear into his soul. He had big confessions to make, confessions about his faith, confessions about what he intended to do next. ‘Lover Five… ’ he began. ‘I… I don’t want to lie to you. I… ’

She nodded, slowly and emphatically, to signal that he need not complete the thought. ‘You feel… in lack of God. You feel you can be no Father any more.’ She turned aside, looked at the doorway through which he had come, the doorway that led to the outside world. Somewhere in that direction was the settlement where she’d first accepted Jesus into her heart, the settlement that now lay empty and abandoned. ‘Father Kurรี่สีberg alสีo came รี่o thiสี feeling,’ she said. ‘Father Kurรี่สีberg became angry, สีpoke in a loud voiสีe, สีaid, I am no Father now. Find another Father.’

Peter swallowed hard. The Bible booklet he’d sewn lay curled up on the blanket near his useless arse. Back in his quarters, there were so many balls of brightly coloured wool still waiting to be used.

‘You are… ’ said Lover Five, and paused to find the right word. ‘… man. Only man. God iสี more big than you. You carry the word of God for a while, then the word become รี่oo heavy, heavy รี่o carry, and you muสีรี่ reสีรี่.’ She laid her hand on his thigh. ‘I underสีรี่and.’

‘My wife… ’ he began.

‘I underสีรี่and,’ she repeated. ‘God join you and your wife รี่ogether. Now you are unjoined.’

In a flash Peter recalled his wedding day, the light through the church windows, the cake, the knife, Bea’s dress. Sentimental daydreams, as irreclaimably lost as a bug-eaten Scout uniform tossed in a bin and taken away by garbagemen. He forced himself to think instead of his own house as it was now, surrounded by filth and debris, the interior plunged into darkness, and, half-hidden in those haunted shadows, the shape of a woman he couldn’t recognise. ‘It’s not just that we’re apart,’ he said. ‘Bea’s in trouble. She needs help.’

Lover Five nodded. Her bandaged hand screamed louder than any words of recrimination that there could be no trouble more serious than the trouble she was in. ‘สีo,’ she confirmed, ‘you will fulfil the word of Jeสีuสี. Luke: you will leave the nineรี่y-nine in the wilderneสี, and look for the one who iสี loสีรี่.’

He felt his face redden as the parable found its mark. She must have learned it from Kurtzberg.

‘I’ve talked to the doctors,’ he said wretchedly. ‘They’re going to try their best, for you and for… the others. They won’t be able to save your hand, but they might be able to save your life.’

‘I am happy,’ she said. ‘If สีaved.’

He shifted uncomfortably on his perch at the edge of her bed. His left buttock was going numb and his back was getting sore. In a few minutes from now, he would be out of this room and his body would revert to normal, restoring normal blood circulation, pacifying disturbed neurological activity, soothing over-extended muscles, while she was left here to contemplate the rotting of her flesh.

‘Is there anything I can do for you right now?’ he said.

She thought for a few seconds. ‘สีing,’ she said. ‘สีing only with me.’

‘Sing what?’

‘Our สีong of welcome for Father Peรี่er,’ she said. ‘You will go away, I know. Then I hope you will come back, in the สีweeรี่ by and by. And when you come back, we will สีing again the สีame สีong.’ Without further prelude, she began. ‘Amaaaสีiiing graaaสีe… ’

He joined in at once. His voice, hoarse and muted in speech, found strength when called upon to sing. The acoustics in the intensive care unit were actually better than in his church, where the humid atmosphere and the throng of bodies always dampened the sound; here, in this chilly concrete cavity, with only empty beds, dormant machinery and metal IV stands for company, ‘Amazing Grace’ reverberated rich and clear.

‘Waaaas bliiiind,’ he chanted, ‘but nooooow I seeeee… ’

The length of her breaths, even though she shortened them for his sake, made the song last a very long time. He was exhausted by the end.

‘Thank you,’ said Lover Five. ‘You will go now. I will remain alwayสี… your brother.’

There was no message from Bea.

She was finished with him. She’d given up.

Or maybe… maybe she had committed suicide. The state of the world, the loss of Joshua, the loss of her faith, the rift in their marriage… these were terrible griefs to bear, and maybe she just hadn’t been able to bear them. As a teenager, she’d been suicidal. He’d almost lost her then, without even knowing she was there to lose.

He opened a fresh page on the Shoot. He must trust that she was still alive, still able to receive his messages. The blank screen loomed so large: so much blankness to envelop whatever meaning he might attempt to put there. He thought of quoting or paraphrasing the bit in 2 Corinthians 5 about the house ‘not made with hands’ that awaits us if our earthly home is destroyed. Sure, it was a Bible quote, but maybe it was relevant in a non-religious context, like BG tapping his own chest to indicate that home wasn’t bricks and mortar, home could be anywhere.

A voice came to him and said, Don’t be stupid.

I’m coming home, he wrote, and that was all.

Having promised that he would return, he was aware that he had no idea how to make it happen. He clicked on the green scarab icon, and the Shoot revealed the three paltry options on his menu: Maintenance (repairs), Admin and Graigner. None of them seemed quite right. He clicked on Admin and wrote:

I’m sorry, but I need to go home. As soon as possible. I don’t know if I’ll be able to come back sometime in the future. If so, it would need to be with my wife. I’m not trying to blackmail you, I’m just saying that’s the only way I could do it. Please respond and confirm when I can go. Sincerely, Peter Leigh (Pastor).

He re-read what he had written, deleted everything from I don’t know to the only way I could do it. Too many words, too much explanation. The essential message, the one which demanded action, was simpler than that.

He stood up, stretched. A sharp sting on his leg reminded him of the injury there. The wound was healing well, but the flesh was tight along the suture line. He would always have a scar, and it would occasionally hurt. There were limits to what the miraculous human organism could repair.

His dishdasha, hanging on the washing line, was dry now. The blurry marks of the ink crucifix had been almost obliterated, faded to the palest lilac. The hems were so badly frayed they looked as if they’d been deliberately manufactured that way, as a fluffy frill. ‘You don’t think it’s too girly, do you?’ he recalled Bea saying, when they first took the garment out of its shrinkwrap. Not only did he recall the words, but also the sound of Bea’s voice, the expression in her eyes, the light on the side of her nose: everything. And she’d said: ‘You can be naked underneath. If you want.’ She was his wife. He loved her. Surely somewhere in the universe, allowing for the laws of time and space and relativity, there must be a place where that could still be possible.

‘Imagine you’re in a tiny inflatable dinghy, lost at sea,’ Ella Reinman had suggested to him, during those endless interviews on the tenth floor of the swanky hotel. ‘Far in the distance, there’s a ship; you can’t tell whether it’s moving toward you or away. You know that if you try to stand up and wave, the dinghy will capsize. But if you sit still, nobody will see you and you won’t get rescued. What do you do?’

‘Sit tight.’

‘Are you sure? What if the ship is definitely moving away?’

‘I’d have to live with that.’

‘You’d just sit and watch it go?’

‘I’d pray to God.’

‘What if there was no answer?’

‘There’s always an answer.’

His calmness had impressed them. His refusal to embrace wild, impulsive gestures had helped him make the grade. It was the calmness of the homeless, the calmness of the สีฐฉั. Without knowing it, he’d always been an honorary alien.

Now, he was pacing his quarters in a frenzy, an animal trapped in a cage. He needed to be home. Get going, get going, get going. The needle in the vein, the woman saying This will sting some, then blackness. Yes! Come on! Every minute of delay was a torment. Pacing around, he almost tripped on a discarded shoe, seized hold of it, hurled it across the room. Maybe Grainger, in her quarters, was doing the same. Maybe they should go berserk together, share the bourbon. He really wanted a drink.

He checked the Shoot. Nothing. Who was supposed to read his message anyway? Some off-duty engineer or kitchenhand? What kind of a fucking system was this, where there was no one in charge, no one with an office you could barge into, no one you could grab by the shirt? He paced his quarters some more, breathing too heavily. The floor, the ceiling, the window, the furniture, the bed: it was all wrong, wrong, wrong. He thought of Tuska, delivering his Légion Étrangère spiel, all that stuff about the weaklings who’d gone crazy, climbing the walls, begging to ‘go ho-ome’. He could still taste Tuska’s sarcasm. Smug bastard!

Eighteen minutes later, on his Shoot, there was an answer from Admin.

Howdy. Forwarded your request to USIC hq. Typical response timelag is 24 hrs (even big shots got to sleep sometimes) but I predict they will say yes. Diplomacywise it might have been good to make some noises about coming back to finish your mission but hey its not my business to tell you how to win friends & influence people. I wasnt scheduled to do my next flight for another month but what the heck Ill make the best of it, maybe get some new tennis shoes, buy an ice cream, visit a steakhouse. Or a whorehouse! Just kidding. Im a fine upstanding pilgrim, you know me. Stand by and Ill give you the word when its time to go. Au reviore, Tuska

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

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

27. Stay where you are

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Goodbye to the what?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Where’s Grainger?’ asked Peter.

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

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

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

‘There are other pharmacists,’ Flores remarked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Sorry?’

‘Explosively pumped flux compression generator.’

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

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

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

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

‘You are alive,’ he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Glad to meet you,’ said Flores. While that may have been an overstatement, she seemed quite free of Grainger’s unease.

‘You bring mediสีine?’ said Lover One.

‘Of course,’ said Flores, and went to the rear of the vehicle to fetch it. Several other Oasans ventured out from hiding, then several more. That was unusual: two or three had been the maximum in Peter’s experience.

Flores carried the box in her sinewy arms. It looked bigger and fuller than last time, perhaps because she was smaller than Grainger. Still, she wielded it without effort and handed it to one of the Oasans with smooth confidence.

‘To whom shall I address the explanations?’ she said.

‘I underสีรี่and more,’ said Jesus Lover One.

‘To you, then,’ said Flores, in a friendly but businesslike manner.

The box, as always, was crammed with a mixture of branded and unbranded medicines. Flores extracted each little plastic bottle, cardboard packet and tube, held it aloft like an auction hammer while describing its function, and slotted it back into place.

‘I’m not a pharmacist,’ she said. ‘But it’s all written on the labels and the leaflets anyway. The main thing is for you to tell us what’s working and not working. Pardon me saying so, but there’s been too much mystery here. Let’s take the mystery out of it, try more of a scientific approach. Think you can do that?’

Lover One was silent for a few seconds, just focusing on the creature standing head-to-head with him. ‘We are graรี่eful for mediสีine,’ he said at last.

‘That’s nice,’ said Flores flatly. ‘But listen: this here is a packet of Sumycin. It’s an antibiotic. If you get an infection in your water-works or your guts, it could fix you. But if you’ve taken a lot of Sumycin in the past, it might not work so well. You might be better taking this one here, Amoxicillin. These two packets of Amoxicillin are generics… ’

‘Name from where all other name come,’ said Jesus Lover One.

‘That’s right. Now, Amoxicillin is fine if you’ve never had it before, but if your body has become resistant to it, you’re better with this purple one here, Augmentin, which has some extra stuff in it to overcome that resistance.’ Flores put the Augmentin back in the box and scratched her nose with a simian finger. ‘Listen, we could stand here all day talking about the pros and cons of each and every antibiotic in this box. But what we really need is to match up specific drugs with specific problems. For example, take you. Are you sick?’

‘Thank God no,’ said Lover One.

‘Well, bring out someone who is sick and let’s talk.’

There was a pause. ‘We are graรี่eful for mediสีine,’ said Lover One. ‘We have food for you.’ The tone was neutral, and yet there was stubbornness, even threat in it.

‘Great, thanks, we’ll get around to that in a minute,’ said Flores, unswayed. ‘But first, can I meet someone who thinks they need antibiotics? As I said, I’m not a pharmacist. I’m not a doctor. I would just prefer to get a little better acquainted with you folks.’

As the two of them stood their ground, more Oasans ventured out from shelter. Peter realised that they must always have been there, in the past, whenever these handovers were done, but had lacked the courage to emerge into view. What was it about Flores? Her smell, perhaps? Peter turned to Tuska. Tuska winked.

‘Obey the mighty Flores,’ he said wryly. ‘Or else.’

Once it had become clear that the handover was going to take some time, Peter excused himself and began to walk across the tundra to his church. It was quite a windy day, and his dishdasha flapped around his ankles, but the breeze was useful in reducing the humidity, promoting the illusion of fresher oxygen. Inside his sandals his feet were already slippery with sweat. He looked down at them as he walked, and recalled the sensation of stepping into crisp snow with thick-soled boots on a raw January morning in Richmond Park with his newly divorced father smoking a cigarette nearby. No sooner had he glimpsed the image than it was gone.

Every now and then as he crossed the plain to the temple that he and his flock had built, he looked over his shoulder, in case Lover One was following. But Lover One was not following, and Peter’s view of the tiny figures near the USIC vehicle grew indistinct through the blur of interlapping air currents.

When he reached his church, he extended his palms and swung open the doors, expecting to find the place empty. But no. There were fifty or sixty brightly coloured souls gathered inside, already seated in the pews, as if by firm pre-arrangement. Not the full congregation, but a healthy turnout — especially considering they’d gathered to worship on their own, with no pastor. Quite a few of them had been working in the whiteflower fields on the day of his downfall, and had witnessed the piercing of his flesh, had watched the vermin’s teeth mutilate him so badly that there could be no hope of survival, even with the Technique of Jesus. Maybe this gathering was a memorial service for Father Peรี่er, and here he was, gatecrashing it.

A murmur of wonder passed through the crowd. Then a swell of communal elation charged the air, taking up palpable space, pushing against the walls, threatening to lift the ceiling. If he’d wanted to, he could have done anything with them at this moment, taken them anywhere. They were his.

‘God bleสี our reunion, Father Peรี่er,’ they exclaimed, first one-by-one, then as a chorus. Each voice aggravated the grief in his chest a little more. Their faith had been buoyed up to the heavens, and he had come to let them down.

The doors thudded shut behind him, their well-oiled motion aided by the wind. Plentiful light beamed through the windows, illuminating the hooded heads of the Jesus Lovers so that they glowed like candle-flames in a votive rack. As he walked between the pews, the surreal montage of paintings on the ceiling hung heavy over him. Lover Twelve’s bright pink Jesus walking hand in hand with a glistening grey Lazarus, Lover Fourteen’s blue and yellow Nativity, Lover Twenty’s Mary Magdalene spewing forth ectoplasmic devils, Lover Sixty-Three’s Thomas the Doubter… and, of course, Lover Five’s painting of the risen Christ and his women, secure in its place, fastened with extra care after the accident that had maimed her. The scarecrow in the loincloth, so different from the kindly mensch of Christian tradition, had suddenly become terrifying. The blaze of light where His head should be and the eye-shaped holes in His starfish hands, which Peter had once taken as evidence that God could not be confined to the iconography of one race, now struck him as proof of an unbreachable gulf.

He took his stand behind the pulpit. He noted that the สีฐฉั had tidied his bed, washed and dried and folded the linen, cleaned the boots that Lover Five had sewn for him, and placed a mislaid pencil on the pillow where it could be admired as a sacred relic by future generations. Now, blessed with his miraculous return, they sat in rapt attention, Bible booklets at their side, awaiting the call to sing the first hymn, which might, according to custom, be ‘In The Garden’ or ‘For God Be The Glory’. He cleared his throat. He trusted, against hope, that inspiration would come from somewhere, as it always had before.

‘สีคฐڇ๙ฉ้,’ he said. ‘คssฐڇ. สีคฐ ฉ้น สีฐฉ้รี่t ฐurฐ ฉ้นรี่ณs ณฉ้ssนรี่ณฐ.’

Some of the congregation made the shoulder-trembling motions he’d always interpreted as laughter. He hoped it was laughter, elicited by his clumsy pronunciation, but maybe he’d never really known what those motions meant after all.

‘สีคssฐڇ รี่tฐ สีssคฉ้ สีค Jesus คฐڇ๙ฉ้s,’ he continued. He could sense their bemusement at his strained and childish speech, so unnecessary when they were only too willing to listen to the holy language of James the King. But he wanted to address them, just once, in a way that they could fully understand. He owed them that much: their dignity at the expense of his own. ‘๙ฉ้ss Jesus สีรี่t สีฐฉั สีค สีค คฐ.’

He finished his exact tally of the worshippers, begun as a habitual reflex: fifty-two. He would never know how many more souls were concealed in the settlement, never know how far away he’d been from bringing the entire community to Christ. He only knew that he recognised each and every person here, and not just by the colours of their robes.

‘รี่ คฐڇ๙ฉ้ss สีฐฉ้ค ฐurฐ สีฐ,’ he said, ‘ฐڇ๙ฉ้ss สีฐณฐฉ้ค the Book of Strange New Things.’ He extracted the King James Bible from his bag, and, instead of thumbing the gilt-edged pages to a selected passage for reading aloud, he stepped out from behind the pulpit and carried the book to the Jesus Lovers in the front pew. With fastidious gentleness — not because of reverence for the book, but because of concern for the fragile flesh before him — he handed it to Lover Seventeen, who cradled it in her lap.

He returned to the pulpit. ‘สีฐ สีรี่ รี่ สีฐ,’ he said, ‘ฉ้ค คssฐ สีssสีรี่ God. สีฐ God คฉ้ สีค คฐฉ้ss ฉ้นรี่ ๙ฉ้ss ณนรี่ณ.’

A thrill of consternation was passing through his flock. Heads tilted, hands agitated. Lover Fifteen uttered a cry.

‘คฐสีฐ ڇสีคss ๙ฉ้ss ฉ้ God ฉ้น คฐڇ รี่ณฐ ๙ฉ้ss,’ he pressed on. ‘ฉ้ค tสีฐ รี่ รี่ฉ้ค สีฐ รี่ฉ้สี ฐ สีฐฉ้ค คssฐڇ๙ฉ้ss Jesus Lover Five… ’ His voice broke, and he had to grip the wings of his pulpit to keep himself from trembling. ‘Jesus Lover Five สีฐฉั สีฐ ๙ฉ้l รี่iฐ สีฐฉัค สีรี่t รี่ณฐ. คฉ้ สีฉ้ สีฐรี่ ณนรี่ณ USIC.’ He took a deep, shuddering breath. สีฐรี่t๙สีรี่ สีรี่ڇ ครี่ฐڇ๙ฉ้ รี่ สีฐรี่t ฐurฐ. คฐ คڇ รี่ณฐ ๙สีรี่ฐڇ สีค Bea. รี่tฐ สีค ฉ้ss… ’

And that was it: he could go no further: the word he needed, the most crucial word, was one he didn’t know in the สีฐฉั language. He bowed his head, and took refuge, at the last, in his own foreign tongue.

‘… forgive.’

He left the pulpit, picked up the canary-yellow boots, one in each hand, and walked stiffly down the aisle, towards the exit. For the first few seconds, which felt like minutes, he walked in silence, alone. Then the Jesus Lovers rose from their seats and gathered all around him, touching him tenderly on the shoulders, the back, the abdomen, the buttocks, the thighs, anywhere they could reach, while saying, in clear, unhampered voices, ‘Forgive.’

‘Forgive.’

‘Forgive.’

‘Forgive.’

‘Forgive.’

‘Forgive,’ each in their turn, until he blundered through the doors into the harsh sunlight.

On the way back to the settlement, as his flaccid, empty bag flapped against his waist, he looked around several times at his church silhouetted against the brilliant sky. No one had emerged from it but him. Belief was a place that people didn’t leave until they absolutely must. The สีฐฉั had been keen to follow him to the kingdom of Heaven, but they weren’t keen to follow him into the valley of doubt. He knew that one day — maybe very soon — they would have another pastor. They’d taken from him what they needed, and their search for salvation would go on when he was long gone. After all, their souls dreamt so ardently of a longer stay in the flesh, a longer spell of consciousness. It was natural: they were only human.

Back at the USIC jeep, things had moved on. Lover One was nowhere to be seen, the medicines had all been distributed, and the food was being loaded into the vehicle. More สีฐฉั than usual were involved, quite a crowd of them. Both Tuska and Flores were available to take hold of the tubs, sacks and tins brought out to them, but Peter noticed, even from a distance, that the สีฐฉั approached Flores first, and detoured to Tuska only when Flores already had her hands full. He figured it out at last: they liked her. Who would’ve thought it? They liked her.

‘Let me carry that,’ said Tuska, as Flores took charge of a particularly heavy bag of whiteflower dough.

‘I’m OK,’ said Flores. Her hair was plastered with sweat, emphasising the smallness of her skull, and blue veins stood out on her temples. Her whole torso was sodden. She was having a grand time.

A little while later, when the three of them were seated in the vehicle and Tuska was driving away from C-2, she said:

‘We’re going to crack them, Joe.’

‘Crack them?’ echoed Tuska.

‘Find out what makes them tick,’ she explained.

‘Yeah?’ said Tuska, clearly not much interested in the prospect.

‘Yes. And then, God willing, we’ll fix them.’

Peter was surprised to hear such words uttered by a USIC employee. But then Flores’s face appeared in the gap between the front seats, like a gargoyle head jutting out from a Gothic wall, seeking out the minister stashed in the back.

‘Just a figure of speech, you understand,’ she said. ‘I really meant, with luck.’ Her face vanished again, but she wasn’t done talking. ‘I guess you don’t believe there’s such a thing as luck, huh?’

Peter turned his face to stare out the window. At the speed Tuska was driving, the dark earth could be mistaken for tarmac, and the occasional outcrop of pale wildflower swept past in a blur like the painted white lines of a motorway. If he imagined hard enough, he might even see M25 road signs estimating the distance to London.

‘I hope there is,’ he answered Flores, a little too late. He was pretty sure the word ‘luck’ appeared nowhere in the Bible, but that didn’t mean there was no such thing. Grainger had called him a lucky guy. And, with Bea at his side, for the best part of his life, he truly had been.

When he got back to his quarters, there was, finally, a message from Bea.

It said,

Peter, I love you. But please, don’t come home. I beg you. Stay where you are.

28. Amen

‘What I like about this place,’ said Moro, making brisk progress on her treadmill, ‘is that every day there’s something a little bit different, but also it’s the same.’

She, BG and Peter were exercising in the gazebo. It was just another day on Oasis, another scheduled break in the task at hand, a few hours of R&R before work resumed on the great project. The canopy was shading them from the sun, but the light was so intense at this stage of the afternoon that it penetrated the canvas, casting a yellow tinge over their flesh.

Moro had worked up a big sweat already; the fabric of her shalwar was sculpted to her thighs as she paced, and her bare midriff glistened. She had announced three hundred steps as her goal and must be about halfway through by now, never letting the rhythm slacken. She swivelled her wrists on the treadmill’s handle-bars, as if revving the throttle grip of a motorcycle.

‘You should try it with just your legs, no holding on,’ advised BG, resting between bouts of press-ups. ‘Better for your quads, your tibs, everything.’

‘I see it as exercise for my hands, too,’ said Moro. ‘People who lose a finger often let the hand get sloppy. I made a decision: not me.’

Peter was lifting a sandbag on a pulley, or trying to. His arms had become quite strong and wiry from working in the whiteflower fields, but the muscles he’d toughened must be a different set from the ones he was straining now.

‘Don’t bust a gut on the lifting,’ advised BG. ‘The lowering’s just as good. Do it slow. Slow as you can.’

‘It’s still too heavy for me, I think,’ said Peter. ‘What’s the bag filled with? Not sand, surely?’ He couldn’t imagine USIC approving the shipment of a sack of sand when, for the same cost-weight ratio, they could transport a sack of sugar or a person.

‘Earth,’ said BG, gesturing at the bare acres around the exercise yard. He removed his singlet and wrung it out in his fists. An arc of puckered scars came to life near his left armpit, marring the smooth swell of his pectoral. He put his singlet back on.

‘I don’t suppose we could let some of the soil out?’ said Peter.

‘I don’t suppose so, bro,’ said BG. His facial expression was unsmilingly serious, but he was amused. Human beings could be read quite easily once you got to know them a bit. It was all in the tone, the cadences, the twinkle in the eyes, so many subtle factors that defied scientific description but which you could, if you wished, build a lifelong friendship on.

Peter tried to lift the sandbag again. This time, he barely raised it above knee-level before his biceps began to hurt.

‘Part of your problem there,’ said BG, coming over, ‘is you need more of a balanced approach.’ He unhooked the sandbag from the pulley, hoisted it without much effort to his chest, then cradled it in one arm. ‘Most important muscle is your brain. You gotta plan what you’re gonna do, warm up to it. Find an exercise that pushes you to the limit but not beyond it. With this sandbag, I suggest a straight carry.’

‘Sorry?’

BG stood close to Peter, transferred the sack from his own arms into Peter’s, carefully as if it was a sleeping baby.

‘Just hug it to your chest,’ he said. ‘Wrap your arms around it and walk. From one end of the gazebo to the other, and again, and again, as many times as you can until you can’t do it no more. Then lower it to the ground nice and easy.’

Peter did as he was told. BG watched. So did Moro, who had finished her three hundred steps and was drinking from a bottle of pale green liquid, possibly rainwater, possibly a small fortune’s-worth of carbonated soft drink from a faraway multinational corporation. Peter hurried past them with the sack in his arms, back and forth, back and forth. He performed reasonably well with the carrying part, but when he reached his limit, the lowering part was clumsy.

‘I need more practice,’ he said, panting.

‘Well,’ sighed BG, ‘you ain’t gonna get it, are you?’ It was the first time he’d alluded to Peter’s imminent departure.

‘I might,’ said Peter, sitting down on a low wooden pedestal whose purpose he couldn’t guess. ‘Nothing to stop me carrying a sandbag when I’m back home. Actually, I might have to, if there’s a flood. There’s been a lot of flooding lately.’

‘They need to put more thought into their sorry-ass water management systems,’ BG remarked.

Moro stood up and smoothed her clothing. Her exercise break was over and duty called. ‘Maybe you should do what you have to and then come straight back,’ she said.

‘Not without my wife,’ said Peter.

‘Well, maybe she can come too.’

‘USIC decided she couldn’t, apparently.’

Moro shrugged, and a flash of defiance animated her normally passionless face. ‘USIC schmusic. What’s USIC anyway? We’re USIC. Us, here. Maybe it’s time the eligibility tests got loosened up a little.’

‘Yeah, they’re tough,’ agreed BG, in a wistful tone, half-proud of himself for having made the grade, half-rueful for all the potential brothers and sisters who hadn’t made it. ‘Eye of a goddamn needle. That’s in the Bible, ain’t it?’

Almost as a reflex, Peter girded himself to craft a diplomatic answer, then realised he didn’t have to. ‘Yes, BG, it is. Matthew, chapter 19, verse 24.’

‘I’ll remember that,’ said BG, then grinned broadly, to signal that he knew very well he wouldn’t.

‘Husband and wife team,’ said Moro, stowing the bottle in her tote bag. ‘I think that would be kind of romantic.’ She spoke in a wistful tone, as though romance was something exotic and strange that might be observed in a tribe of monkeys or snow geese, not in anyone she’d ever known.

Peter closed his eyes. Bea’s final message, and his reply, were imprinted there, as clear as any verse of Scripture:

Peter, I love you, she’d written. But please, don’t come home. I beg you. Stay where you are. It’s safer and I want you safe.

This is the last message I’ll be able to send you, I’m not going to be able to stay in this house. I will be living with other people, strangers. I don’t know where exactly. We’ll be moving around. I can’t explain, just take it from me that it’s best. Nothing here is as it was when you left. Things can change so fast. It’s irresponsible for me to bring a baby into this rotten world but the alternative is killing it and I just don’t have the courage to do that. I expect things will end badly anyway, and it will be much kinder on you not to be here to see it. If you love me, don’t make me watch you suffer.

It’s funny, all those years ago when we first met, people warned me what a hardened, devious exploiter you were, always manipulating people to fall for you, but I know you’re just an innocent little kid at heart. This planet’s too cruel for you now. I’ll take comfort from thinking of you in a safe place, with some chance of a happy life.

Beatrice

To which he had replied, without pause for doubt or deliberation, just this:

Safe or unsafe, happy or unhappy, my place is by your side. Don’t give up. I will find you.

‘You take care of yourself, OK?’ said BG. ‘You’re goin’ to a baaaaad place. Stay strong. Keep focused. You promise me that?’

Peter smiled. ‘I promise.’

He and the big man shook hands, formally and decorously, like diplomats. No bear hugs, no high fives. BG knew how to tailor the gesture to the occasion. He turned and walked away, with Moro at his side.

Peter watched their bodies dwindle and disappear into the ugly exterior of the USIC base. Then he took a seat on a swing, holding the chains loosely, and wept a while. Not big sobs, not even aloud, nothing that Lover Five might have called a very long song. Just tears on his cheeks, which got licked up by the atmosphere before they could fall to the earth.

Eventually he walked back to the sandbag and kneeled down next to it. Without much difficulty, he dragged it up his thighs onto his lap. Next, wrapping his arms around it, he hauled it to his chest. It was heavier than Bea, he supposed, although it was hard to be sure. Lifting a person was easier somehow. It shouldn’t be, because both of you were subject to gravity; there was no escaping that. Yet he’d tried lifting an unconscious body and he’d lifted Bea and there was a difference. And a baby… a baby would be lighter still, much lighter.

He sat holding the sandbag until his knees were hurting and arms were sore. When he finally let it slip to the ground, he couldn’t guess how long Grainger had been standing near him, watching.

‘I thought you were angry with me,’ he said.

‘So you ran away?’ she said.

‘I just wanted to give you space,’ he said.

She laughed. ‘I have all the space I can handle.’

He checked her appearance, unobtrusively he hoped. She looked sober, dressed as normal, ready for work.

‘You’re going home too, right?’

‘Right,’ she said.

‘We’ll be together,’ he said.

The reassurance cut no ice with her. ‘We’ll be in the same ship but we won’t be aware of it.’

‘We’ll wake up together at the other end,’ he said.

She looked away. They were heading for different destinations, and both knew it.

‘Is there… ’ he began, then got stuck for a few seconds. ‘Is there a part of you that’s sorry to leave?’

She shrugged. ‘They’ll get another pharmacist; they’ll get another minister. Everyone’s replaceable.’

‘Yes. And irreplaceable, too.’

The sound of an engine revving distracted them. Not far off, a vehicle had pulled away from the base and was now driving in the general direction of the Big Brassiere. It was the black station wagon, the one Kurtzberg had always used. Mechanics had fixed it, proving that if you were a car, you could be struck by lightning, pronounced dead and yet be brought back to life. Not exactly good as new, but saved from the scrapheap by the grace of experts. The rear of the wagon was crammed with pipes of some sort, which stuck out some distance from the hatch and were secured with rope. The bed must have been ditched. Evidently, now that the USIC personnel knew for certain that the pastor was dead, they no longer felt constrained to keep his car as he liked it, permanently in a bay earmarked ‘Pastor’, but to put it to general use instead. Waste not, want not. And hey, Kurtzberg had even handled his own funeral, instead of causing headaches by dying at the base. What a guy.

‘Are you still praying for my dad?’ said Grainger.

‘I’m having trouble praying for anyone right now,’ he said, gently removing a bright-green insect from his sleeve and launching it into the air. ‘But tell me… How are you going to find him?’

‘I’ll figure it out,’ she said. ‘I just need to be back. Then I’ll know what to do.’

‘Are there relatives who could help?’

‘Maybe,’ she said, in tone that suggested that maybe, in equal likelihood, a Tibetan football team, a herd of talking buffalo or a host of angels might pitch in to assist.

‘You never married,’ he confirmed.

‘How do you know that?’

‘Still called “Grainger”.’

‘A lot of women don’t change their name when they get married,’ Grainger said. The opportunity to spar with him seemed to cheer her up.

‘My wife changed hers,’ he said. ‘Beatrice Leigh. Bea Leigh.’ He smirked, embarrassed. ‘Sounds ridiculous, I know. But she hated her father.’

Grainger shook her head. ‘Nobody hates their father. Not deep down. You can’t. He made you.’

‘Let’s not go there,’ said Peter. ‘We’ll end up talking about religion.’

Kurtzberg’s hearse was a dot on the horizon now. A sparkling constellation of rain hung right above it.

‘What are you gonna call your kid?’ asked Grainger.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It’s all… It’s hard for me to conceive of yet. It’s a bit scary. They say it changes you for ever. I mean, not that I don’t want to be changed, but… You can see what’s happening to the world, you can see where things are heading. The decision to put a child in danger like that, to expose an innocent child to God knows — goodness knows… ’ He faltered and fell silent.

Grainger appeared not to have been listening. She hopped onto the treadmill and swayed her hips like a dancer, keeping her feet still, to see if the thing would move. She jerked her pelvis. The treadmill advanced maybe a couple of centimetres. ‘Your kid will be brand new to the planet,’ she said. ‘Your kid won’t be thinking about all the things we’ve lost, the places that went to hell, the people who died. All that stuff will be prehistoric like the dinosaurs. Stuff that happened before time began. Only tomorrow will matter. Only today.’ She smiled. ‘Like, what’s for breakfast?’

He laughed.

‘Are you packed?’ he said.

‘Sure. I didn’t come with much. Leaving the same way.’

‘I’m packed too.’ It had been a three-minute job; there was scarcely anything in his luggage now. Passport. Keys to a house which might, by the time he got there, have a different lock. Some pencil stubs. The bright yellow boots sewn by Lover Five, each stitch of which had been executed with infinite care so as not to risk injuring her hands. A pair of trousers that fell off his hips, a few T-shirts that would hang so loose on him that he’d look like a refugee decked out in charity hand-me-downs. Anything else? He didn’t think so. The other clothes he’d brought with him were ruined by mildew or sacrificed as rags during the construction of his church. He knew that when he got home it would be cold, and he’d not be able to ponce about in a dishdasha with nothing underneath, but that was a problem for another day.

The weirdest absence from his rucksack was his Bible. He’d owned that Bible since his conversion, it had counselled, inspired and comforted him for so many years, he must have thumbed its pages thousands of times. The weave of the linen-enriched paper probably contained so many cells from his fingertips that a new Peter could be grown from the DNA. ‘Before you came,’ Jesus Lover Seventeen once said, ‘we were all alone and weak. Now, รี่ogether, we are สีรี่rong.’ He hoped that she and her fellow Jesus Lovers would derive some strength from his cherished King James, their very own Book of Strange New Things.

It was all committed to memory, anyway. The parts that were important, the parts he might need. Even now, he was pretty sure he could recite the gospel of Matthew, all twenty-eight chapters of it, except for the Ezekias-begat-Joatham stuff at the very start. He thought of Bea, reading to him from Chapter 6 in the bedroom of her tiny flat when they were first together, her voice soft and fervent as she spoke of the heavenly sanctuary where precious things were safe from harm: ‘For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’ He thought of Matthew’s last words, and the meaning they could have for two people who loved each other:

I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen.