The Book of Strange New Things (34 page)

He uncapped the bottle and drank deep. The colourless liquid was chilled and it tasted harsh – so harsh that he almost coughed. As discreetly as he could, he glanced at the label, which read, simply,
WATER
: $50
PER
300ml. She was giving him an expensive imported gift.

‘Thank you,’ he said, trying to sound chuffed, while actually thinking how strange it was that someone who’d lived on Oasis longer than him could fail to appreciate the superiority of the local water. When his mission was over and he had to return home, he would certainly miss the taste of honeydew.

Near the end of the long drive, Peter decided that the Oasan settlement deserved a better name than C-2 or Freaktown. He’d tried to find out what the Oasans themselves called it, so he could refer to it by that name, but they appeared not to understand the question, and kept identifying their settlement, in English, as ‘here’. At first he assumed this was because its real name was unpronounceable, but no, there
was
no real name. Such marvellous humility! The human race would have been spared a great deal of grief and bloodshed if people hadn’t been so attached to names like Stalingrad, Fallujah and Rome, and simply been content to live ‘here’, whatever and wherever ‘here’ might be.

Even so, ‘Freaktown’ was a problem, and needed fixing.

‘Tell me,’ he said, when the settlement was within sight. ‘If you had to give this place a new name, what would you call it?’

She turned towards him, still wearing her dark shades. ‘What’s wrong with C-2?’

‘It sounds like something you’d see on a canister of poison gas.’

‘Sounds neutral to me.’

‘Well, maybe something less neutral would be an improvement.’

‘Like . . . let me guess . . . New Jerusalem?’

‘That would be disrespectful to the ones who aren’t Christians,’ he said. ‘And anyway, they have a lot of trouble pronouncing “s” sounds.’

Grainger thought for a minute. ‘Maybe this is a job for Coretta. You know, the girl from Oskaloosa . . . ’

‘I remember her. She’s in my prayers.’ Anticipating that Grainger might have trouble with this, he immediately lightened his tone. ‘Although, maybe this
isn’t
a job for Coretta. I mean, look at “Oasis” – it has two “s”s in it. Maybe she’s really hooked on “s”s. Maybe she’d suggest “Oskaloosa”.’

The joke fell flat and Grainger remained silent. It seemed his mention of prayer had been a mistake.

Abruptly the wilderness ended and they were driving into the town’s perimeter. Grainger steered the vehicle towards the same building as before. The word WELCOME, in man-sized letters, had been painted afresh on the wall, although this time it read
WEL WEL COME
as if to add emphasis.

‘Just drive straight to the church,’ said Peter.

‘The church?’

He doubted she could have failed to notice the construction site last time she picked him up, but, OK, fine, she needed to play this game and he would indulge her. He pointed towards the horizon, where the large, vaguely Gothic structure, still lacking a roof or a spire, was silhouetted against the afternoon sky. ‘That building there,’ he said. ‘It’s not finished, but I’ll be camping out in it.’

‘OK,’ she said. ‘But I still have to do my drug delivery.’ And she jerked her head towards the paint-daubed building they’d just left behind.

Glancing backwards, he noted all the vacant space in the rear of the vehicle, and the box of medicines in the middle of it. ‘Sorry, I forgot. Would you like some moral support?’

‘No, thank you.’

‘I really don’t mind staying with you for as long as it takes. I should have remembered.’

‘Not your job.’

She was already steering the car across the scrubland towards the church. There was no point trying to persuade her to turn back and get her drug delivery over with first, even though he was convinced she’d be less stressed if she had company, less spooked if someone of her own kind was at her side. But he couldn’t push. Grainger was a touchy character – and getting touchier the longer he knew her.

They slowed to a standstill, alongside the western wall of the church. Even without the roof on, the building was big enough to cast shade all over and around them.

‘OK, then,’ said Grainger, removing her sunglasses. ‘Have a good time.’

‘I’m sure it will be interesting,’ said Peter. ‘Thanks again for driving me here.’

‘All the way to . . . Peterville,’ she quipped, as he unsealed the car door.

He laughed. ‘Out of the question. They have trouble pronouncing “t” sounds too.’

The humid atmosphere, kept at bay for so long, swirled gleefully into the cabin, licking their faces, clouding the window, slipping into their sleeves, stirring the locks of their hair. Grainger’s face, small and pale inside her swaddle of headscarf, was balmed over with perspiration within a couple of seconds. She frowned irritably, and sweat twinkled in the lush brown hairs where her eyebrows almost met.

‘Are you really praying for her?’ she said abruptly, just as he was about to climb out of his seat.

‘You mean Coretta?’

‘Yes.’

‘Every day.’

‘But you don’t know her at all.’

‘God knows her.’

She winced. ‘Can you pray for one more person?’

‘Of course. Who?’

‘Charlie.’ She hesitated. ‘Charlie Grainger.’

‘Your father?’ It was a guess, an intuition. Brother was a possibility; son he didn’t think was likely.

‘Yes,’ she said, her cheeks blossoming red.

‘What’s the main concern in his life?’

‘He’s going to die soon.’

‘Are you close?’

‘No. Not at all. But . . . ’ She pulled her scarf down off her head, shook her bared head like an animal. ‘I don’t want him to suffer.’

‘Understood,’ said Peter. ‘Thanks. See you next week.’ And he left her in peace, and walked through the door of his church.

The Oasans had made him a pulpit. God bless them, they’d made him a pulpit, carved and moulded from the same amber material as the bricks. It stood proudly inside the four walls as if it had sprung up from the soil, a tree in the shape of a pulpit, growing in the open air. Just before his departure, Peter had hinted that the roof should be put on as soon as possible, but there was no roof. Nor had any progress been made on the windows, which were still just holes in the walls.

Standing here reminded him of childhood visits to medieval ruins, where tourists would potter around the remains of a once-thriving abbey abandoned to the elements. Except that this church wasn’t a ruin, and there was no need to worry about the effects of exposure. The roof and windows, when they finally came, would be a grand gesture of completion but, in truth, this church had been ready for use since the moment it was conceived. It was never going to be a hermetically sealed bunker like the USIC base. The roof would serve to keep a downpour out, but the air inside would be the same as the air outside, and the floor would still be trampled earth. The church would contain no perishable bric-a-brac or fragile fabrics that could be ruined by weather; the Oasans regarded this place purely as a gathering-point for bodies and souls – which boded well for their growth in Christ.

And yet, they’d made him a pulpit. And they had finished the entrance. The two halves of the door which, when he was here last, had lain flat on the ground, fresh from the kiln, had been lifted into place and affixed. Peter swung them open and closed, open and closed, admiring the smooth motion and the perfectly straight line where the two halves met. No metal hinges or screws had been used; instead, the joints were cleverly dovetailed: finger-like appendages on the inner edges of the doors nestled snugly in matching holes in the jambs. He was pretty sure that if he were to seize hold of these doors and lift them, they would come away from the jambs as easily as a foot from a shoe – and could be replaced just as readily. Was it foolhardy to construct a building in such a way that a mischievous vandal could pull its doors off? Even if there were no vandals here to cause such mischief? And did building a church on this spongy earth qualify as ‘building a house on sand’, as warned against in
Matthew 7:24–26
? He doubted it. Matthew was speaking metaphorically, making a point not about architecture but about faith in action.

The Oasans were slow workers, pathologically careful, but they never gave less than their best. The door had been decorated with intricate carvings. When first carried here across the scrubland, the two halves were smooth as glass. Now they were scored with dozens of tiny crosses, executed in such a variety of styles that Peter suspected each individual Jesus Lover had added one of his or her own. Near the tapered pinnacle of the door were three outsized human eyes, arranged in a pyramid. They had a blind look to them, pictorially elegant but produced without any understanding of what makes an eye an eye. There were also some gouges which might be mistaken for abstract curlicues but which he knew were meant to be shepherds’ staffs – or ‘สีรี่affสี’ as the Oasans had struggled to identify them when they’d discussed it.

He had offered to learn their language, but they were reluctant to teach him and, deep down, he conceded it might be a waste of time. In order to imitate the sounds they produced, he’d probably need to rip his own head off and gargle through the stump. Whereas the Oasans, thanks to the pioneering efforts of Tartaglione and Kurtzberg, and to the zeal of their own faith, had made extraordinary progress in English – a language they were as unsuited to learn as a lamb was unsuited to climb a ladder. Yet they climbed, and Peter felt keenly the pathos of their strivings. He could tell, from the Bible verses they’d managed to memorise, that Kurtzberg had made no concessions to their physical handicaps: whatever was printed in Scripture was what they must voice.

Peter was determined to show more sensitivity than that. During his sleepless week back at the USIC base, he’d done a lot of work translating Bible terms into equivalents that his flock would find easier to pronounce. ‘Pastures’, for example, would be ‘green land’. ‘Righteousness’ would simply be ‘Good’. ‘Shepherd’ would be ‘he who care for me’ (niceties of grammar were less important than the meaning, and anyway, the phrase had quite a poetical ring to it). ‘Staff’ would be ‘care wand’. He’d sweated over that one. The hint of hocus pocus was regrettable, and ‘care wand’ lacked the straightforward vigour of ‘staff’, but it was better than ‘crook’ (too much potential for confusion with the concept of crookedness), it was merciful on the Oasan throat, and it incorporated the right elements of pastoral concern and divine potency.

The fruits of these labours were in his rucksack. He swung it off his shoulder and dumped it next to the pulpit, then sat down next to it. A feeling of tranquility descended, like a warm infusion of alcohol spreading through his system. The awkward drive with Grainger faded from his mind; the earlier conversation with Tuska already seemed long ago; he had difficulty retrieving anything from Bea’s most recent letter except that she intended to take Billy Frame to a cat show. Oddly enough, the Noah’s Ark wall-hanging that Billy and Rachel had made was vivid in his memory, as though it had come on the journey with him and was hanging somewhere nearby.

He was so looking forward to living with the Oasans again. It truly was a privilege. Ministering to his congregation in England was a privilege, too, but it was also difficult sometimes, what with the perverse, immature behaviour that various individuals were liable to spring on you. That Asian woman, Mirah, and her violent husband . . . She giggly and gossipy, he fat and peevish, poncing about like an overfed sultan . . . they were precious souls, sure, but not exactly restful company. The Oasans were a tonic for the spirit.

He sat for a while, in a state of prayer without forming any words, just allowing the membrane between himself and Heaven to become permeable. A small red insect, like a ladybird but with longer legs, settled on his hand. He aligned his fingertips in a triangle and let the creature walk up the incline of one finger and down the slope of another. He let the creature nibble the surplus cells from the surface of his skin. It wasn’t greedy; he barely felt it and then it flew away.

Ah, the power of silence. He’d first experienced it as a small boy, parked next to his mother at her Quaker meetings. A room full of people who were content to be quiet, who didn’t need to defend the boundaries of their egos. There was so much positive energy in that room that he would not have been surprised if the chairs had started to lift off the floor, levitating the whole circle of worshippers to the ceiling. That was how it felt with the Oasans, too.

Maybe he should have been a Quaker. But they had no ministers, and no God – not in any real, fatherly sense. Sure, it was peaceful to sit in a community of companions, watching the play of sunlight on the pullover worn by the old man opposite, allowing yourself to be mesmerised by glowing wool-fibres as the sunlight moved slowly from one person to another. A similar state of peacefulness could sometimes be granted when you were homeless: a time in the afternoon when you’d found a comfortable spot, and you’d managed to get warm at last, and there was nothing to do but watch the sunlight’s incremental shift from one paving-stone to the next. Meditation, some might call it. But in the end, he preferred something less passive.

He took up his position at the pulpit, and rested his fingertips on the burnished toffee-coloured surface where he might spread out his notes. The pulpit was slightly too low, as though the Oasans had made it for as tall a creature as they could imagine but, in his absence, had still underestimated his height. Its design was modelled on the spectacular carved pulpits of ancient European cathedrals, where a massive leatherbound Bible might lie on the spread wing-span of an oaken eagle.

As a matter of fact, the Oasans had a photograph of just such a pulpit, given them by Kurtzberg, torn from an old magazine article. They’d shown it to Peter with pride. He’d tried to reassure them that worship was an intimate communication between the individual and God, nothing grandiose about it, and that any props should reflect the local culture of the worshippers, but this was not an easy concept to get across when you had a crowd of foetus-like heads jostling around you, murmuring their admiration for a fragment of a Sunday supplement as though it was a holy relic.