Michel Faber - The Book of Strange New Things

‘This is my wife,’ he’d said, extracting the topmost of the photographs from the plastic wallet and handing it to Jesus Lover One. ‘Beatrice.’

‘Beaรี่riสี,’ repeated Jesus Lover One, his shoulders contorting with effort.

‘Bea for short,’ said Peter.

‘Beaรี่riสี,’ said Jesus Lover One. He held the photograph gently in his gloved fingers, at a strict horizontal angle, as if the miniature Beatrice posing in her mulberry-coloured jeans and imitation cashmere sweater was in danger of sliding off the paper. Peter wondered if these people could even see in the conventional sense, since there was nothing on their faces he could identify as an eye. They weren’t blind, that was obvious, but… maybe they couldn’t decode two-dimensional images?

‘Your wife,’ said Jesus Lover One. ‘Hair very long.’

‘It was, then,’ said Peter. ‘It’s shorter now.’ He wondered if long hair was attractive or repulsive to those who had none at all.

‘Your wife love Jeสีuสี?’

‘She certainly does.’

‘Good,’ said Jesus Lover One, handing the photograph to the person next to him, who accepted it as though it were a sacrament.

‘This next one,’ said Peter, ‘is the house where we live. It’s in a satellite… uh… a town not far from London, in England. As you can see, our house is much the same as the houses all around it. But inside, it’s different. Just like a person can look the same as those all around him, but inside, because of his faith in the Lord, he’s very different.’ Peter looked up to assess how this simile was going over. Dozens of Oasans were kneeling in concentric circles around him, waiting solemnly for a rectangle of card to be conveyed towards them. Apart from the colours of their robes and some slight variations in height, they all looked the same. There were no fat ones, no musclebound ones, no lanky lunks, no bent-backed crones. No women, no men. Only rows of compact, standardised beings squatting in the same pose, dressed in garments of identical design. And, inside each of their hoods, a coagulated stew of meat that he could not, could not, simply could not translate into a face.

‘Needle,’ said the creature called Jesus Lover Fifty-Four, shuddering. ‘Row of needle. Row of… knife.’

Peter had no idea what he was talking about. The photograph, which showed nothing more than a drab ex-council house and a flimsy metal fence, was handed on.

‘And this one,’ he said, ‘is our cat, Joshua.’

Jesus Lover One contemplated the photo for fifteen or twenty seconds.

‘Jeสีuสี Lover?’ he asked at last.

Peter laughed. ‘He can’t love Jesus,’ he said. ‘He’s a cat.’ This information was greeted with silence. ‘He’s not… He’s an animal. He can’t think… ’ The word ‘self-consciously’ came to his mind, but he rejected it. Too many sibilants, for a start. ‘His brain is very small. He can’t think about right and wrong, or why he’s alive. He can only eat and sleep.’ It felt like a disloyal thing to say. Joshua could do a lot more than that. But it was true he was an amoral creature, and had never worried about why he’d been put on the earth.

‘We love him, though,’ Peter added.

Jesus Lover One nodded.

‘We alสีo love thoสีe who have no love for Jeสีuสี. However, they will die.’

Peter doled out another picture. ‘This one,’ he said, ‘is my church back home.’ He almost repeated BG’s wisecrack about not winning any architecture prizes, but managed to swallow the words. Transparency and simplicity were what was called for here, at least until he figured out how these people ticked.

‘Needle, สีo many needle,’ said one of the Oasans whose Jesus Lover number Peter hadn’t yet learned.

Peter leaned forward to look at the picture upside-down. There were no needles anywhere to be seen. Just the ugly blockish exterior of the church, lent a modicum of style by a faux- Gothic arch in the metal gate surrounding the building. Then he noticed the spikes on the tops of the railings.

‘We need to keep the thieves out,’ he explained.

‘Thief will die,’ agreed one of the Oasans.

Next in the pile was another photo of Joshua, curled up on the duvet with one paw shielding his eyes. Peter shuffled the picture to the back of the pile and selected another.

‘This is the back yard of the church. It used to be a car park. Just concrete. We got the concrete ripped up and replaced with soil. We figured people could walk to church or maybe find parking in the street… ’ Even as he spoke, he knew that half of what he was saying — maybe all of it — must be incomprehensible to these people. Yet he couldn’t stop. ‘It was a risk. But it paid… it was… it led to success. It led to a good thing. Grass grew. We planted shrubs and flowers, even some trees. Now the children play out there, when the weather is warm. Not that the weather is often very warm where I come from… ’ He was babbling. Get a grip .

‘Where you?’

‘Sorry?’

The Oasan held up the photograph. ‘Where you?’

‘I’m not in this one,’ said Peter.

The Oasan nodded, handed the picture to his neighbour.

Peter extracted the next photo from the plastic wallet. Even if the Oasan air had not been so humid, he would have been sweating by now.

‘This is me as a child,’ he said. ‘It was taken by an auntie, I think. The sister of my mother.’

Jesus Lover One examined the snapshot of Peter at age three. In it, Peter was dwarfed by his surroundings but still conspicuous in a bright yellow parka and orange mittens, waving at the camera. It was one of the few family photos found in Peter’s mother’s house when she died. Peter hoped the Oasans didn’t ask to see a photograph of his dad, because his mother had destroyed them all.

‘Very high building,’ commented Jesus Lover Fifty-Four. He meant the tower block in the background of the picture.

‘It was a horrible place,’ said Peter. ‘Depressing. And dangerous, too.’

‘Very high,’ confirmed Jesus Lover Fifty-Four, passing the square of card on to the next in line.

‘We moved to somewhere better not long after that,’ he said. ‘Somewhere safer, anyway.’

The Oasans hummed approvingly. Moving to somewhere better and safer was a concept they could understand.

The already handed-out photos, meanwhile, were making their way among the crowd. One of the Oasans had a question about the photo of Peter’s church. In the picture, a few members of the congregation were gathered outside the building, queuing to enter the blue door. One of them was Ian Dewar, the Afghanistan veteran who got around on crutches, having refused the MoD’s offer of an artificial leg because he valued any opportunity to talk about the war.

‘Man have no leg,’ observed the Oasan.

‘That’s right,’ said Peter. ‘There was a war. His leg was badly injured and the doctors had to cut it off.’

‘Man dead now?’

‘No, he’s fine, he’s perfectly fine.’

There was a communal murmur of wonder, and several utterances of ‘Praiสีe the Lord’.

‘And this,’ said Peter, ‘is my wedding day. Me and my wife Beatrice, on the day we got married. Do you have marriage?’

‘We have marriage,’ said Jesus Lover One. A mildly amused retort? Exasperated? Weary? Simply informative? Peter couldn’t tell from the tone. There was no tone, as far as he could hear. Only the straining of exotic flesh to imitate the action of vocal cords.

‘She introduced me to Christ,’ added Peter. ‘She brought me to God.’

This provoked a more excited reaction than the photos.

‘Your wife find the Book,’ said Jesus Lover Seventy-something. ‘Read, read, read, read before you. Learn the รี่echnique of Jeสีuสี. Then your wife come for you and สีay, I have found the Book of สีรี่range New Thingสี. Read now, you. We สีhall noรี่ periสีh, buรี่ have eรี่ernal life.’