Michel Faber - The Book of Strange New Things

And so the day went on: Bea’s phone ran out of battery and died, the first garage they drove to was shut, the second garage was booked up solid and not interested, a banana they tried to eat for lunch was rotten inside, a perished strap on Bea’s shoe snapped, forcing her to limp, the car’s engine started making a mysterious noise, a third garage gave them the bad news about what a new coat of enamel would cost, as well as pointing out that their exhaust was corroded. In the end it took them so long to get back to Bea’s flat that the expensive lamb chops they’d bought had discoloured badly in the heat. That, for Peter, was the final straw. Rage sped through his nervous system; he seized the tray and was about to throw it into the rubbish bin, throw it with wildly excessive force, to punish the meat for being so vulnerable to decay. But it wasn’t him who’d paid for it and he managed — just — to control himself. He put the groceries away in the fridge, splashed some water on his face and went in search of Bea.

He found her on the balcony, gazing down at the brick wall that surrounded her block of flats, a wall crowned with barbed wire and spikes of broken glass. Her cheeks were wet.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

She fumbled for his hand, and their fingers interlocked.

‘I’m crying because I’m happy,’ she explained, as the sun allowed itself to be veiled in clouds, the air grew milder and a gentle breeze stroked their hair. ‘This is the happiest day of my life.’

‘God bleสี our reunion, Father Peรี่er,’ a voice called to him.

Dazzled by the light, he turned clumsily, almost falling out of the hammock. The approaching Oasan was a silhouette against the rising sun. All Peter knew was that the voice was not Jesus Lover Fifty-Four’s, the only voice he could put a name to without additional clues.

‘Good morning,’ he responded. The ‘God bless our reunion’ had meant no more than that. Oasans invoked the blessing of God for everything, which either meant they understood the notion of blessedness better than most Christians, or not at all.

‘I come รี่o build our ฐurฐ again.’

Two weeks in these people’s midst had sharpened Peter’s ear; he immediately understood that ‘ฐurฐ’ was ‘church’. He mulled over the voice, matched it with the canary-yellow robe.

‘Jesus Lover Five?’

‘Yeสี.’

‘Thank you for coming.’

‘For God I will do whaรี่ever he wiสีheสี, any thing, any รี่ime.’

Even as he was listening to Lover Five speak, Peter wondered what it was that made this voice different from, say, Lover Fifty-Four’s. Not the sound of it, that was for sure. The marvellous variety of voices he was accustomed to back home — or even at the USIC base — was non-existent among the Oasans. There were no sonorous baritones here, no squeaky sopranos, husky altos, nervous tenors. No shades of brightness or dullness, shyness or aggression, sang-froid or seductiveness, arrogance or humility, breeziness or sorrow. Maybe, in his clueless foreignness, he was missing the nuances, but he was pretty sure he wasn’t. It was like expecting one seagull or blackbird or pigeon to squawk differently from the others of its kind. They just weren’t designed to.

What the Oasans could do was deploy language in distinctive ways. Jesus Lover Fifty-Four, for example, was ingenious in avoiding words he couldn’t pronounce, always managing to come up with a sibilant-free alternative. These evasions (‘lay-a-bed’ for ‘sleep’, ‘give knowledge’ for ‘teach’, and so forth) made his speech eccentric but fluent, promoting the illusion that he was at ease with the alien tongue. By contrast, Jesus Lover Five didn’t bother with avoidance; she just tried to speak conventional English and if there were lots of ‘t’s and ‘s’s in the words she needed, well, too bad. Then again, she made less effort to speak clearly than some of the other Oasans — her shoulders didn’t contort as much when she was coughing up a consonant — and this made her more difficult to understand, sometimes.

Her, her, her. Why did he think of her as female? Was it just the canary-yellow robe? Or did he actually sense something, on a level too instinctive to analyse?

‘There’s not much we can do until the others arrive,’ he said, lowering himself out of the hammock. ‘You could have slept longer.’

‘I wake in fear. Fear you will be gone.’

‘Gone?’

‘UสีIC will come รี่oday,’ she reminded him. ‘รี่ake you home.’

‘The USIC base is not my home,’ he said, fastening his sandals. Squatting to do so, he was almost head-to-head with Jesus Lover Five. She was small for an adult. If she was an adult. Maybe she was a child — no, she couldn’t be. Maybe she was incredibly old. He just didn’t know. He knew that she was forthright, even by the standards of Oasans; that she could only work for twenty or thirty minutes at a time before wandering off; and that she was related to someone who was not a Jesus Lover, which caused her sadness, or something he interpreted as sadness. Actually, he couldn’t even swear that this non-believer was a blood relative of hers; maybe it was a friend. And the sadness thing was kind of a hunch on his part; Oasans didn’t weep or sigh or cover their faces with their hands, so she must have said something to make him come to that conclusion.

He tried to recall other things about Jesus Lover Five, but couldn’t. The human brain was like that, unfortunately: it sifted intimacies and perceptions, allowed them to trickle through the sieve of memory, until only a token few remained, perhaps not even the most significant ones.

He really must write more things down, next time.

‘UสีIC will รี่ake you,’ Jesus Lover Five repeated. ‘I fear you will noรี่ reรี่urn.’

He walked to a gap in the wall that would eventually be a door, passed through it, and stood in the shade of his church, to relieve himself on the ground. His pee was a darker orange than before, making him wonder if he was drinking too little. The Oasans drank sparingly and he’d learned to do the same. One long swig of his plastic bottle first thing upon waking, a few swigs at measured intervals throughout the working day, and that was it. The Oasans refilled his bottle without fuss whenever it ran low, walking all the way back to the settlement with it and back again, but he didn’t want to cause them undue bother.

They’d taken superb care of him, really. An intensely private people, who spent the bulk of their time quietly conversing with close friends and family inside their homes, they had nevertheless welcomed him with open arms. Metaphorically speaking. They were not what you’d call touchy-feely. But their goodwill towards him was unmistakable. At intervals throughout each day, as he worked on the church site, he would glimpse someone walking across the scrubland, bearing a gift. A plate of fried globs resembling samosas, a tumbler of lukewarm savoury gloop, a hunk of something crumbly and sweet. His fellow workers seldom ate on site, preferring to take formal meals at home; occasionally someone might pick a few blossoms of whiteflower straight off the ground, if they were newly sprouted and juicy. But the cooked treats, the little offerings, were for him alone. He accepted them with unfeigned gratitude, because he was hungry all the time.

Less so now. Loath to earn a reputation as a glutton, he’d grown accustomed, over the last three hundred and sixty-odd hours, to a sharply reduced calorie intake, and re-learned something that he’d known well during his wasted years: that a man could survive, and even keep active, on very little fuel. If he was forced to. Or too drunk to care. Or — as was currently the case — happily preoccupied.