Michel Faber - The Book of Strange New Things

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

‘Don’t patronise me.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I won’t. I promise.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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