Michel Faber - The Book of Strange New Things

Anyway, what you need to know is that last week, for various reasons, I was stressed out and, as usual when I’m stressed out, Joshua picks up on my vibes. He was cowering under the furniture, dashing from room to room, crying, circling round and round my shins but not letting me pick him up or stroke him. It was the last thing I needed and it was driving me crazy. I just tried to ignore him, get on with some chores. I ironed my uniform. The ironing board was at an awkward angle and the cord didn’t have enough slack and I was too tired and hassled to set it up any other way so I just coped. At one point, I set the iron down and it fell off the edge of the board. Instinctively I jumped backwards. My heel came down hard on something, there was a sickening cracking snapping noise and Joshua screamed, I swear he screamed. Then he was gone.

I found him under the bed, trembling and hyperventilating. Eyes wide in pain and terror. I’d broken his back leg. I could see that. There was not one iota of trust in his eyes, he flinched when I spoke. I was the enemy. I fetched the gardening gloves so that he wouldn’t scratch or bite me and I took hold of his tail and pulled him out. It was the only way. I got him into the kitchen, put him on the table and attached the lead to his collar. He was calmer. I thought he was in shock, maybe in too much pain to do anything except sit there panting. I picked up the phone to call the vet. The kitchen window was open as usual. Joshua shot out as if someone fired him from a cannon.

I looked for him for hours. I covered the same ground over and over until I just couldn’t walk anymore and it was pitch dark. Then I had to go to work (night shift). It was hell. Don’t say anything, it was hell. At 4 am I was wearing two hospital gowns because my uniform was covered in faeces. An obese insane guy had been tossing it out of his bed, smearing it on the bedrails, bellowing the place down. The orderlies were off-duty, it was just me, little Oyama and a new girl who was sweet but kept disappearing. The faeces-tossing guy’s mother was camping out in the visitors’ room through the night — nobody had been able to throw her out. She’s in there with a six-pack of Pepsi and some half-eaten takeaway (this is supposed to be a hospital!) and every so often she pops her head in and checks that we’re taking good care of her boy. ‘You a bitch!’ she yells at me. ‘You cruel! I call police! You not a real nurse! Where the real nurses?’ On and on and on and on.

In the morning, I go home, still wearing the two gowns with a cardigan over them. Must have looked like an escapee from a loony bin. I get out of the bus two stops early so I can cut through the park in case I find Joshua there. It’s a long shot and I don’t really have any hope that I’ll see him. But I do.

He’s strung up by the tail from a tree. Alive. Two kids of maybe twelve are hoisting him up and down on a rope, making him spin, jerking him so he twitches. A red haze falls over my eyes. I don’t know what happened next, what I did to these kids, my memory is a blank. I only know I didn’t kill them because they weren’t there anymore when I came to. There’s blood on my fists, under my nails. I wish I’d killed them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know — underprivileged kids, rotten upbringing, in dire need of love and forbearance, why not come to our Outreach programme blah blah blah — THESE EVIL SCUMBAGS WERE TORTURING JOSHUA!

I pick him up. He’s still breathing, but shallowly. The base of his tail is shredded and one eye looks gouged out but he’s alive and I think he recognises me. Ten minutes later I’m at the vet’s. It’s before opening hours but I must have kicked and screamed because they open up for me. He lifts Joshua from my arms and gives him an injection.

‘OK, it’s done,’ he says. ‘Do you want to take him home or leave him here?’

‘What do you mean, take him home?’ I say. ‘Aren’t you going to do anything for him?’

‘I just did,’ he says.

Afterwards, he tells me he had no way of guessing I was willing to pay any amount of money for surgery. ‘Nobody’s bothering with that sort of thing nowadays,’ he says. ‘I can go for five, six hours without anyone coming in, and then when someone finally walks through the door with a sick pet, all they want is for it to be put to sleep.’ He puts Joshua into a plastic bag for me. ‘I won’t charge you,’ he tells me.

Peter, I’m only going to say this once. This experience is not educational. It is not instructive. It is not God moving in mysterious ways, it is not God figuring out exactly what sublime ultimate purpose can be served by me stepping on Joshua’s leg and everything after. The Saviour I believed in took an interest in what I did and how I behaved. The Saviour I believed in made things happen and stopped things happening. I was deluding myself. I am alone and frightened and married to a missionary who’s going to tell me that the fool has said in his heart there is no God, and if you don’t say it it will just be because you’re being diplomatic, because in your heart you’re convinced I made this happen through my faltering of faith, and that makes me feel even more alone. Because you’re not coming back to me, are you? You like it up there. Because you’re on Planet God. So even if you did come back to me, we still wouldn’t be together. Because in your heart you’d still be on Planet God, and I’d be a trillion miles away from you, alone with you by my side.

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.’