Michel Faber - The Book of Strange New Things

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

Love,

Bea.

At once, he responded:

Dear Bea,

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

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

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

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

Write as soon as you can, I love you,

Peter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After the satisfied animal had left him, Peter sat and stared at the distant lights of the base, his ‘home away from home’, as Grainger had called it. He stared until the lights turned abstract in his brain, until he could imagine the sun rising in England, and Bea hurrying through the car park of her hospital towards the bus stop. Then he imagined Bea getting into that bus and taking a seat amongst a heterogeneous variety of humans, some chocolate brown, some yellowish, some beige or pasty pink. He imagined the bus travelling along a road crowded with vehicles, until it pulled up in front of a store that sold household knick-knacks, cheap toys and other bargains for 99 pence, round the corner from a street with a launderette on the corner, a hundred and fifty metres from a semi-detached house with no curtains in the front windows, and an internal staircase carpeted in threadbare maroon, leading up to a room in which stood a machine on which Bea could, when she was ready, type the words ‘Dear Peter’. He raised himself to his feet and started walking back.

Dear Peter,

No I have not had a miscarriage and please don’t lecture me about compassion. You just don’t understand how impossible everything has become. It’s all about the scale of a problem and the available energy to deal with it. When someone gets their leg blown off by a bomb, you rush them into surgery, mend the stump, fit them with a prosthetic, give them physiotherapy, counselling, whatever it takes, and a year later, they may be running a marathon. If a bomb blows off their arms, legs, genitals, intestines, bladder, liver and kidneys, IT IS DIFFERENT. We need a certain proportion of things to be OK in order to be able to cope with other things going wrong. Whether it’s a human body or Christian endeavour or life in general, we can’t keep it going if too much of what we need is taken away from us.

I won’t tell you about the other things that were freaking me out in the last week or two. It’s current affairs stories that will only bore you. New wars in Africa, systematic slaughter of women and children, mass starvation in rural China, crackdown on protesters in Germany, the ECB scandal, my pension being wiped out, stuff like that. None of it will seem real to you up there. You are spooning Bible verses into the hungry mouths of Oasans, I appreciate that.