Michel Faber - The Book of Strange New Things

‘You and I,’ said the Oasan. ‘Never before now.’ The vertical cleft in the middle of his face squirmed slightly as he formed the words. The foetuses rubbed knees, so to speak. Peter smiled but could not summon a response.

‘He means he hasn’t met you before,’ said Grainger. ‘In other words, he’s saying hello.’

‘Hello,’ said Peter. ‘I’m Peter.’

The Oasan nodded. ‘You are Peรี่er. I will remember.’ He turned back to Grainger. ‘You bring mediสีine?’

‘A little.’

‘How liรี่le?’

‘I’ll show you,’ said Grainger, walking around to the back of the vehicle and lifting the hatch. She rummaged in the jumbled contents — bottles of water, toilet paper, canvas bags, tools, tarps — and extracted a plastic tub no bigger than a schoolchild’s lunch-box. The Oasan followed every movement, although Peter was still unable to work out which parts of the face were its eyes. His eyes, sorry.

‘This is all I could get from our pharmacy,’ said Grainger. ‘Today is not one of the official supply days, you understand? We’re here for a different reason. But I didn’t want to come with nothing. So this’ — she handed him the tub — ‘is extra. A gift.’

‘We are diสีappoinรี่ful,’ said the Oasan. ‘And in the สีame breath we are graรี่eful.’

There was a pause. The Oasan stood holding his plastic tub; Grainger and Peter stood watching him hold it. A ray of sunlight found its way to the roof of the vehicle, making it glow.

‘So… uh… How are you?’ said Grainger. Sweat twinkled in her eyebrows and on her cheeks.

‘I alone?’ enquired the Oasan. ‘Or I and we รี่ogether?’ He gestured vaguely at the settlement behind him.

‘All of you.’

The Oasan appeared to give this a great deal of thought. At last he said: ‘Good.’

There was another pause.

‘Is anyone else coming out today?’ asked Grainger. ‘To see us, I mean?’

Again, the Oasan mulled over the question as though it were immensely complex.

‘No,’ he concluded. ‘I รี่oday am only one.’ He gestured solemnly at both Grainger and Peter, in acknowledgement, perhaps, of his regret for the 2:1 imbalance between number of visitors and welcoming party.

‘Peter here is a special guest of USIC,’ said Grainger. ‘He’s a… he’s a Christian missionary. He wants to… uh… live with you.’ She glanced at Peter for uneasy confirmation. ‘If I’ve got that right.’

‘Yes,’ said Peter, brightly. There was a glistening, champignon-like thing roughly halfway down the central cleft of the Oasan’s face that he’d decided was the Oasan’s eye, and he looked straight at that, doing his best to radiate friendliness. ‘I have good news to tell you. The best news you’ve ever heard.’

The Oasan cocked his head to one side. The two foetuses — no, not foetuses, his brow and cheeks, please! — blushed, revealing a spidery network of capillaries just beneath the skin. His voice, when it came, was even more asthmatic-sounding than before. ‘The Goสีpel?’

The words hung in the whispering air for a second before Peter was able to take them in. He couldn’t believe he’d heard correctly. Then he noticed that the Oasan’s gloved hands had been pressed together in a steeple shape.

‘Yes!’ Peter cried, dizzy with elation. ‘Praise Jesus!’

The Oasan turned to Grainger again. His gloved hands were trembling against the tub he held. ‘We have waiรี่ed long for the man Peรี่er,’ he said. ‘Thank you, Grainger.’ And without further explanation he hurried through the doorway, leaving the crystalline beads swinging in his wake.

‘Well I’ll be damned,’ said Grainger, yanking her scarf loose and wiping her face with it. ‘He never called me by name before.’

They stood waiting for twenty minutes or so. The sun continued to rise, a sliver of brilliant burning orange, like a great bubble of lava on the horizon. The walls of the buildings glowed as if each brick had a light inside.

At last, the Oasan returned, still clutching the plastic tub, which was now empty. He handed it back to Grainger, very slowly and carefully, only letting it go when her grip on it was secure.

‘Mediสีine have all gone,’ he said. ‘Gone inสีide the graรี่eful.’

‘I’m sorry there wasn’t more,’ said Grainger. ‘There’ll be more next time.’

The Oasan nodded. ‘We abide.’

Grainger, stiff with unease, walked to the rear of the vehicle to stow the tub back in the trunk. As soon as her back was turned, the Oasan sidled up to Peter, bringing them face to face.

‘Have you the book?’

‘The book?’

‘The Book of สีรี่range New Thingสี.’

Peter blinked and tried to breathe normally. Up close, the Oasan’s flesh smelled sweet: not the sweet of rot, but sweet like fresh fruit.

‘You mean the Bible,’ he said.

‘We สีpeak never the name. Power of the book forbid. Flame give warmth… ’ With outstretched hands, he mimed the action of warming oneself on a fire, getting too close, and being burned.

‘But you mean the Word of God,’ said Peter. ‘The Gospel.’

‘The Goสีpel. The รี่echnique of Jeสีuสี.’

Peter nodded, but it took him a few seconds to decode the last word from its impeded passage through the Oasan’s head cleft.

‘Jesus,’ he echoed in wonder.

The Oasan reached out one hand, and, with an unmistakably tender motion, stroked Peter’s cheek with the tip of a glove. ‘We pray Jeสีuสี for your coming,’ he said.

Grainger’s failure to rejoin them was, by now, obvious. Peter glanced round and saw her leaning on the back of the vehicle, pretending to study the gadget with which she’d unlocked the trunk. In that fraction of a second before he turned back to the Oasan, he felt the full intensity of her embarrassment.

‘The book? You have the book?’ the Oasan repeated.

‘Uh… not on me right now,’ said Peter, chastising himself for leaving his Bible back at the base. ‘But yes, of course. Of course!’

The Oasan clapped his hands in a gesture of delight, or prayer, or both. ‘Comforรี่ and joy. Glad day. Come back สีoon, Peรี่er, oh very สีoon, สีooner than you can. Read for uสี the Book of สีรี่range New Thingสี, read and read and read unรี่il we underสีรี่and. In reward we give you… give you… ’ The Oasan trembled with the effort of finding adequate words, then threw his hands wide, as if to indicate everything under the sun.

‘Yes,’ said Peter, laying a reassuring hand on the Oasan’s shoulder. ‘Soon.’

The Oasan’s brow — the heads of the foetuses, so to speak — swelled slightly. Peter decided that this, in these miraculous new people, was a smile.

Dear Peter, wrote Beatrice.

I love you and hope you are well but I must start this letter with some very bad news.

It was like running towards an open doorway in a state of high enthusiasm and colliding with a pane of glass. He had spent the entire journey back to the base almost levitating with excitement; it was a wonder he hadn’t floated straight through the roof of Grainger’s vehicle. Dear Bea… God be praised… We ask for a small break and God gives us a miracle… these were some of the ways he’d thought of beginning his message to Beatrice upon returning to his room. His fingers were poised to type at delirious speed, to shoot his delight through space, mistakes and all.

There has been a terrible tragedy in the Maldives. A tidal wave. It was the height of the tourist season. The place was teeming with visitors and it’s got a population of about a third of a million. Had. You know how when disasters happen, usually the media talks about how many people are estimated to have died? In this one, they’re talking about how many people may be LEFT ALIVE. It’s one vast swamp of bodies. You see it on the news footage but you can’t take it in. All those people with individual quirks and family secrets and special ways of wearing their hair, etc, reduced to what looks like a huge bog of meat that goes on for miles.