Michel Faber - The Book of Strange New Things

She stared at him, uncomprehending.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Sorry to interrupt you again,’ said Peter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Excuse me?’

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

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

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

‘Do you miss your mom?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘And what point is that?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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