Michel Faber - The Book of Strange New Things

He checked the Shoot. Nothing. Who was supposed to read his message anyway? Some off-duty engineer or kitchenhand? What kind of a fucking system was this, where there was no one in charge, no one with an office you could barge into, no one you could grab by the shirt? He paced his quarters some more, breathing too heavily. The floor, the ceiling, the window, the furniture, the bed: it was all wrong, wrong, wrong. He thought of Tuska, delivering his Légion Étrangère spiel, all that stuff about the weaklings who’d gone crazy, climbing the walls, begging to ‘go ho-ome ’. He could still taste Tuska’s sarcasm. Smug bastard!

Eighteen minutes later, on his Shoot, there was an answer from Admin.

Howdy. Forwarded your request to USIC hq. Typical response timelag is 24 hrs (even big shots got to sleep sometimes) but I predict they will say yes. Diplomacywise it might have been good to make some noises about coming back to finish your mission but hey its not my business to tell you how to win friends & influence people. I wasnt scheduled to do my next flight for another month but what the heck Ill make the best of it, maybe get some new tennis shoes, buy an ice cream, visit a steakhouse. Or a whorehouse! Just kidding. Im a fine upstanding pilgrim, you know me. Stand by and Ill give you the word when its time to go. Au reviore, Tuska

As soon as Peter finished reading these words, he leapt up, knocking his chair over, and jumped exultant into the air, clenching his fists like a sportsman granted victory against the odds. He would have yelled Hallelujah , too, if it hadn’t been for the searing spasm that shot through his injured leg. Crying in pain, laughing in relief, he fell to the floor, curled up like a bug, or a thief who’d broken his ankles, or a husband who was clutching his wife’s flesh rather than his own.

Thank you , he breathed, thank you … but who was he thanking? He didn’t know. He only knew that thanks were due.

His name was Peter Leigh, son of James Leigh and Kate Leigh (née Woolfolk), grandson of George and June. He was born in Horns Mill, Hertford, Hertfordshire. The names of his cats, in the order that he’d owned them, were Mokkie, Silky, Cleo, Sam, Titus and Joshua. When he returned home, he would have another cat, from an animal refuge, if such places still existed when he got back. As for his own child, he would call him, or her, whatever name Bea wanted. Or maybe Kate. They would discuss it when the time came. Maybe they’d wait until the baby was born, and see what its personality was. People were individuals from Day One.

He stood as straight as he could in his soul-destroying room in the USIC base and appraised himself in the mirror. He was a thirty-three-year-old English male, deeply tanned as if he’d been on a long holiday to Alicante or some such Mediterranean resort. But he did not look fit. His chin and collarbones were worryingly sharp, sculpted by inadequate diet. He was too thin for the dishdasha, although he looked even worse in Western clothes. There were a few small scars on his face, some of them dating from his alcoholic years, some more recent and delineated with neat crusts. His eyes were bloodshot and there was fear and grief in them. ‘You know what would sort you out?’ a fellow dosser once said to him as they stood in the rain waiting for a homeless shelter to open. ‘A wife.’ When Peter asked him if he spoke from experience, the old wino only smiled and shook his grizzled head.

The USIC corridors that had once seemed like a maze were now familiar — too familiar. The familiarity of a prison. The framed posters hung in their appointed places, marking his progress through the base. As he walked towards the vehicle bay, the glazen images gazed sightlessly down at him: Rudolph Valentino, Rosie the Riveter, the dog in the basket with the ducks, the smiling picnickers by Renoir. Laurel and Hardy caught frozen, stoic, forever interrupted in their hopeless attempt to build a house. And those 1930s construction workers suspended high above New York… they would be suspended there eternally, never finishing their lunch, never falling off their girder, never growing old.

He pushed through the last door and was greeted by the smell of engine grease. For his farewell visit to the สีฐฉั, he wanted to travel to C-2 himself, alone, not as a passenger in someone else’s car. He cast his eyes over the vehicle bay in search of the person who was manning it today, hoping it might be someone he’d never met before, someone who knew nothing about him except that he was the VIP missionary man who should be given whatever he asked for, within reason. But the person bending into the engine of a jeep, canopied by the open hood, had a rump he recognised. It was Craig again.

‘Hi,’ he said, knowing even as he opened his mouth that oratory would get him nowhere.

‘Hi,’ she said, only half-acknowledging him as she continued to slather the engine innards with lubricant.

Their negotiation was short and sweet. He could hardly blame her for refusing to hand over a vehicle, given what happened last time. Maybe she’d been criticised by her fellow USIC personnel for allowing him — clearly off his head — to drive Kurtzberg’s hearse into the night, only to need emergency rescue later, while the vehicle had to be schlepped back to base in a separate trip. Craig was all smiles and casual body language, but the subtext was: You are a pain in the ass .

‘There’s a drug and food exchange scheduled just a few hours from now,’ she said, as she wiped her hands on a rag. ‘Why not go along for the ride?’

‘Because this is goodbye. I’m saying goodbye to the สีฐฉั.’

‘Goodbye to the what?’

‘The Oasans. The native people.’ The freaks in Freaktown, you fat idiot , he thought.

She chewed on this. ‘You need your own vehicle to say goodbye in?’

He hung his head in frustration. ‘If I’m shoulder to shoulder with USIC personnel, it might look like I was using you guys as… uh… bodyguards. Emotional bodyguards, if you see what I mean.’ Craig’s direct yet unfocused stare told him that no, she didn’t see. ‘It might look like I didn’t want to face them on my own.’

‘OK,’ said Craig, idly scratching her snake tattoo. Seconds passed, making it obvious that her ‘OK’ did not mean ‘In that case, I will give you a car’; it did not even mean ‘I understand why that might worry you’; it meant ‘So be it.’

‘Also,’ he said, ‘I’m not sure that Grainger will want to be going out to the settlement today.’

‘Won’t be Grainger,’ said Craig breezily, and consulted a printed roster. ‘Grainger is off-duty for… ’ She flipped pages, scanning for the name. ‘The foreseeable,’ she summarised at last, and flipped back to today. ‘It’ll be… Tuska and Flores.’

Peter looked over her shoulder, at all the greased-up vehicles he could drive out of this place if only she wasn’t in the way.

‘Your choice,’ she grinned, and he understood that sometimes there is no choice at all.

‘I see you standing on the shore of a huge lake,’ Bea had said, the last time he’d held her in his arms. ‘It’s night and the sky is full of stars.’ And she had shared her vision of him preaching to a multitude of unseen creatures in fishing boats, bobbing on the sea. Perhaps they’d both known that it was a dream, that nothing like that would really happen. It was another sunny, torpid day on Oasis, and the natives were dozing in their cots, or making food for their foreign guests, or washing clothes, or spending time with their children, hoping that their flesh would survive unharmed until the sun set and they were cocooned in their cots again. Maybe they were praying.