Michel Faber - The Book of Strange New Things

When he was clean, he continued to stand under the hot stream, and might have remained there for half an hour or more, if the water hadn’t suddenly sputtered to a trickle. An LED display inside the shower dial flashed 0:00. He hadn’t twigged the significance of the gauge until now. Of course! It made perfect sense that duration of water use should be limited by a built-in timer. It’s just that USIC were an American corporation and the idea of a frugal, resource-conscious American corporation almost defied belief.

As soon as the drain stopped gurgling, he was able to discern that a noise he’d been aware of for a while, which he’d attributed to the pipes, was in fact someone knocking at the door.

‘Hi,’ said Grainger when he opened it. Her eyes barely flickered at the sight of him standing there wet, clad only in a bath towel knotted around his waist. She had a dossier clutched to her bosom.

‘Sorry, I couldn’t hear you,’ he said.

‘I knocked real loud,’ she said.

‘I suppose I expected there to be a doorbell, or a buzzer or an intercom or something.’

‘USIC isn’t big on unnecessary technology.’

‘Yes, I’ve noticed that. It’s one of the unexpectedly admirable things about you.’

‘Gee, thanks,’ said Grainger. ‘You say the sweetest things.’

Behind him, the Shoot emitted a soft noise, like an electronic sigh: the sound it made when its screen went dark to conserve power. He remembered North Korea.

‘Have you heard about North Korea?’ he said.

‘It’s a country in… uh… Asia,’ she said.

‘There’s been a terrible cyclone there. Tens of thousands of people are dead.’

Grainger blinked hard; flinched, almost. But a moment later, she’d regained her composure. ‘That’s tragic,’ she said. ‘Nothing we can do about it, though.’ She held the dossier out to him. ‘Everything you always wanted to know about Arthur Severin but were afraid to ask.’

He took the file. ‘Thank you.’

‘The funeral is in three hours.’

‘Right. How long is that in… uh… ’ He gestured vaguely, hoping that a wave of his hand might convey the difference between time as he’d always known it and time here and now.

She smiled, patient with his stupidity. ‘Three hours,’ she repeated, and raised her wrist to display her watch. ‘Three hours means three hours.’

‘I wasn’t expecting quite so little notice,’ he said.

‘Relax. Nobody’s expecting you to write fifty pages of rhyming poetry in his honour. Just say a few words. Everyone understands you didn’t know him too well. That kind of helps.’

‘The impersonal touch?’

‘It’s what the great religions offer, isn’t it?’ And she lifted her wristwatch again. ‘I’ll come and collect you at 1330.’

She left without another word and shut the door behind her, at exactly the instant that his towel fell off.

‘We are gathered here,’ said Peter to the hushed and solemn assembly, ‘to honour a man who, only one sunrise ago, was a living, breathing person just like us.’

He cast a glance towards the coffin that sat on a rack of metal rollers in front of an incinerator. Instinctively, everyone else in the room looked at it, too. The coffin was made of recycled cardboard, with a lustrous gloss of vegetable glaze to give it that solid-wood effect. The rack was just like the ones attached to x-ray machines at airports.

‘A person who drew air into his lungs,’ Peter continued, ‘lungs that were a bit the worse for wear, perhaps, but still working fine, delivering oxygen to his blood, the same blood that’s pumping in all of us as we stand here today.’ His voice was loud and clear without amplification, but lacked the reverb resonance it was granted in churches and assembly halls. The funeral room, while large, was acoustically cramped, and the furnace inside the incinerator generated a noise like a distant jet plane passing by.

‘Listen to your heart beat,’ said Peter. ‘Feel the ever-so-slight tremor inside your chest as your body miraculously keeps functioning. It’s such a gentle tremor, such a quiet sound, that we don’t appreciate how much it matters. We may not have been always aware of it, we may scarcely have given it a thought from day to day, but we were sharing the world with Art Severin, and he was sharing it with us. Now the sun has come up on a new day, and Art Severin has changed. We are here today to face up to that change.’

The mourners numbered fifty-two. Peter wasn’t sure how big a proportion of the total USIC staff this was. There were only six women, including Grainger; the rest were males, making Peter wonder if Severin had failed to win the respect of his female colleagues, or whether this simply reflected the gender distribution of the base. Everyone was dressed in the clothes they might usually wear at work. Nobody wore black.

BG and Tuska stood in the forefront of the crowd. Tuska, clad in a loose green shirt, military camouflage trousers and his trademark tennis shoes, was nevertheless almost unrecognisable, having shaved off his beard. BG was unmistakable as ever, the biggest body in the room, his facial hair maintained with scalpel-fine precision. A white T-shirt clung to his musculature like paint. A wrinkled white sirwal hung off his hips, its cuffs puddling over incongruous polished shoes. His arms were folded across his chest, his face composed and imperiously tolerant. A few people in the ranks behind him were looking more quizzical, nudged off-balance by the eulogy’s opening salvo.

‘Arthur Laurence Severin died young,’ said Peter, ‘but he lived many lives. He was born in Bend, Oregon, forty-eight years ago, to parents he never knew, and was adopted by Jim and Peggy Severin. They gave him a happy and active childhood, mostly in the open air. Jim repaired and maintained campsites, hunting lodges and military outposts. Art could drive a tractor by the time he was ten, operate a chainsaw, shoot deer, all that dangerous stuff that kids shouldn’t be allowed to do. He was all set to take over the family business. Then his adoptive parents divorced and Art started getting into trouble. His teenage years were spent in and out of juvenile corrective institutions and rehabilitation programmes. By the time he was old enough to go to jail, he already had a long record of crack cocaine abuse and DUI offences.’

The mourners were not so blank-faced now. A thrill of unease was passing through them, a thrill of interest and anxiety. Heads tilted, brows knitted, lower lips folding under top ones. Faster breathing. Children drawn in by a story.

‘Art Severin got time off for good behaviour and was soon back on the streets of Oregon. But not for long. Frustrated at the lack of employment opportunities in the US for young ex-crims, he relocated to Sabah, Malaysia, where he started a tool supply business with some drug dealing on the side. It was in Sabah that he met Kamelia, a local entrepreneur who supplied female companionship to the timber industry. They fell in love, married, and, although Kamelia was already in her forties, produced two daughters, Nora and Pao-Pei, always known as May. When Kamelia’s brothel was shut down by the authorities and Art’s business was squeezed by competition, he found work in the timber trade, and it was only then that he first discovered his lifelong fascination with the mechanics and chemistry of soil erosion.’

With measured assurance, Peter began to walk towards the coffin. The hand in which he had been holding his Bible swung at his side, and everyone could see that his thumb was pressed against a small scrap of hand-scribbled paper inside the Scripture.

‘Art Severin’s next life was in Australia,’ he said, gazing down at the casket’s lustrous surface. ‘Sponsored by a company that recognised his potential, he studied geotechnics and soil mechanics at the University of Sydney. He graduated in record time — this young man who’d dropped out of high school only nine years before — and was soon being headhunted by engineering firms because of his deep understanding of soil behaviour, and also because of his custom-made equipment. He could’ve made a fortune in patents, but he never saw himself as an inventor, merely as a worker who, as he put it, “got mad at crap tools”.’