Michel Faber - The Book of Strange New Things

He smiled at the thought of it. He had never been a particularly strong man before. In a past life, he’d been beaten up by other alcoholics, and tossed casually into the lock-up by police. Once, he had done his back in attempting to carry Bea to bed. (‘I’m too fat! I’m too fat!’ she’d cried, thus compounding the embarrassment all round when he was forced to let her fall.) Here, among the Oasans, he was a mighty creature. Here, he stood at the mortar vat and churned its contents with a giant spoon, admired by the weaker beings around him. It was ridiculous, he knew that, but there was something very morale-boosting about it, nonetheless.

The whole process of constructing a house was absurdly simple here, yet effective. The mortar-vat, primitive as a cauldron and stirred by hand, was typical of the level of sophistication. In the church walls as they took shape, there was no skeletal infrastructure: no metal stanchions, no wooden framework. The lozenge-shaped bricks were simply glued to the foundations and then fastened one to the other, layer upon layer. It seemed a dangerously simpleminded way to construct a building.

‘What if there’s a storm?’ he’d asked Jesus Lover One.

‘สีรี่orm?’ The upper parts of the cleft in Lover One’s face — the foreheads of the babies, so to speak — contorted gently.

‘What if a very great wind comes? Will it blow the church to the ground?’ Peter puffed hard and loud through his lips, waved his hands, and mimed the collapse of a building.

Lover One’s grotesque face contorted a little further, into a shape that might signal amusement, or bemusement, or perhaps meant nothing. ‘Bond break never,’ he said. ‘Bond สีรี่rong, oh very สีรี่rong. Wind like… ’ He reached out and stroked Peter’s hair, barely ruffling it, to show how ineffectual the wind was.

The reassurance was no less childlike than the construction method, but Peter decided to trust that the Oasans knew what they were doing. Their settlement, while not exactly impressive architecturally, seemed stable enough. And he had to admit that the mortar which bound the bricks was amazingly strong. When freshly spread, it looked like maple syrup, but within an hour it was hard as amber, and the join was unbreakable.

There was no scaffolding employed in the construction of this church, no ladders, nothing made of wood or metal. Instead, access to the higher reaches of the walls was provided by a method that was at once grossly cumbersome and beautifully practical. Large carved blocks of hardened moss — the same material as was used for the Oasans’ beds — were assembled into staircases, stacked against the outside of the building. Each staircase was about two metres wide and as high as it needed to be; additional steps could be affixed as the level of the bricklaying moved higher off the ground. Over the last few days, the staircases had grown in scale until they were twice Peter’s height, but despite their bulk they were obviously temporary, a building tool that was no more a part of the final conception than a ladder would have been. They were even portable — just. They could be shifted sideways if everyone pitched in. Peter had helped to shift a staircase several times, and although he couldn’t confidently estimate how much it weighed because of the communal musclepower pushing against it, he didn’t think it was heavier than, say, a refrigerator.

The utter simplicity of the technology charmed him. Granted, it wouldn’t be adequate to the task of building a skyscraper or a cathedral, unless the surrounding area could accommodate a staircase the size of a football stadium. But for building a modest little church, it was blindingly sensible. The Oasans would simply walk up the steps, each carrying a single brick. They would pause at the summit of their makeshift staircase and cast their eyes (or eye, or viewing cleft, or whatever) over the wall’s top layer, surveying it as a concert pianist might contemplate his keyboard. Then they would glue the next brick in its correct spot, and walk down the steps again.

By any standards, the work method was labour-intensive. There were perhaps forty Oasans on site at the busiest time of day, and Peter had the impression that there would have been even more were it not for the risk of getting in each other’s way. The work was conducted in an orderly fashion, unhurriedly, but without pause — until each Oasan reached what was evidently his (or her?) limit, and went home for a while. They worked in silence mostly, conferring only when there was some new challenge to master, some risk of getting something wrong. He could not tell if they were happy. It was his fervent intention to get to know them well enough to know if they were happy.

Were they happy when they sang? You would think that if singing was torture for them, they wouldn’t do it. As their pastor, he certainly hadn’t expected them to greet him with a massed chorus of ‘Amazing Grace’, and they could easily have arranged some other gesture of welcome. Maybe they needed a channel for their joy.

Happiness was such an elusive thing to spot: it was like a camouflaged moth that might or might not be hidden in the forest in front of you, or might have flown away. A young woman, newly in Christ, had said to him once, ‘If you could’ve seen me a year ago, going out on the piss with my mates, we was so happy, we was laughing our heads off, we never stopped laughing, people was turning their heads to see what’s so funny, wishing they could be having as good a time as us, we was flying, I was on top of the world, and all the time underneath I was thinking, God help me, I am so fucking lonely, I am so fucking sad, I wish I was dead, I cannot stand this life one minute longer, you know what I mean?’ And then there was Ian Dewar, ranting about his time in the military, complaining about the cheapskates and the beancounters who’d robbed the troops of essential supplies, ‘buy your own binoculars, mate, here’s one flak jacket for every two guys, and if you get your foot blown off take two of these wee tablets ’cause we’ve not got any morphine for you.’ Fifteen minutes into one of these rants, mindful that there were other people patiently waiting to speak to him, Peter had interrupted: ‘Ian, forgive me, but you don’t need to keep revisiting this stuff. God was there. He was there with you. He saw it happen. He saw everything.’ And Ian had broken down and sobbed and said he knew that, he knew that, and that’s why underneath it all, underneath the complaining and the anger, he was happy, truly happy.

And then there was Beatrice, on the day when he proposed to her, a day on which every conceivable thing had gone wrong. He’d proposed at 10.30 in the morning, in sweltering heat, as they stood at an automatic teller machine in the high street, preparing to do some grocery shopping at the supermarket. Maybe he should have gone down on one knee, because her ‘Yes, let’s’ had sounded hesitant and unromantic, as though she regarded his proposal as nothing more than a pragmatic solution to the inconvenience of high rents. Then the teller machine had swallowed her debit card and she’d had to go into the bank to sort it out, which involved a meeting with the manager and a lamentable episode in which she was grilled for half an hour as if she was an imposter trying to defraud another Beatrice whose card she had stolen. This humiliation ended with Bea cancelling her relationship with the bank in a righteous fury. They’d gone shopping then, but were able to afford barely half the things on their list, and, when they emerged into the car park, they found that a vandal had scratched a crude swastika into the paintwork of their car. If it had been anything other than a swastika — a cartoon penis, a swear word, anything — they would probably have just lived with it, but this they had no choice but to get fixed, and it would cost them a fortune.