Michel Faber - The Book of Strange New Things

‘Are you aware,’ asked Grainger, ‘that the tops of your ears are burnt to a crisp?’

‘My ears?’ He felt them with his fingertips. The texture of the outer lobes was rough. Like fried bacon, toughened on a forgotten plate overnight.

‘There’s gonna be scars,’ prophesied Grainger. ‘I can’t believe that didn’t hurt like hell when it was happening.’

‘Maybe it did,’ he said.

The two bodies of rain had moved much nearer now, their approach given the illusion of greater acceleration by the car’s speedy progress towards them. A slight turn of the steering wheel, dictated by the navigation computer, meant that the sun had slipped behind a watery veil.

‘Are you OK?’

‘Yes, yes,’ he said. He wished she wouldn’t interrupt the wonder of nature so often; it buzzed his nerves. Then, in an effort to communicate with her sincerely, he mused: ‘I don’t actually think about whether I’m OK or not. I just… am.’

‘Well, that’s just dandy,’ she said. ‘But I recommend you take some sunscreen next time. And look in the mirror occasionally. You know, just to check that all your bits are still intact.’

‘Maybe I should leave that up to you.’ Neither of them meant this exchange as a bawdy pun, but once it was spoken it hung in the air, and they both smiled.

‘I didn’t think they’d have you doing heavy labour,’ said Grainger. ‘I thought they wanted you for, like, Bible study and stuff like that.’

‘It wasn’t their idea for me to work in the fields. It was mine.’

‘Well, I guess you’ll get a tan. Once the sunburn settles down.’

‘The thing was,’ he persisted, ‘I realised that the food that gets loaded onto this truck each week doesn’t come out of nowhere — even though it might seem that way to USIC.’

‘As a matter of fact, I grew up on a farm,’ said Grainger. ‘So if you’ve got me tagged as one of those people who think corn is made in the nachos factory, you’ve got it wrong. But tell me: these fields you were working in: where are they? I’ve never seen them.’

‘They’re right in the centre.’

‘The centre?’

‘Of the settlement. That’s why you haven’t seen them. They’re hidden by the buildings.’

She shook her head. ‘Well, I’ll be damned.’

‘The town is built in a circle around the arable land,’ he explained. ‘Which means that whenever there’s work to be done, the people come from all directions and converge in the middle, and they’ve all got a more or less equal distance to walk. It’s a beautifully logical idea, don’t you think? I can’t imagine why it never occurred to all the generations of humanity.’

She shot him a come-off-it glance. ‘You really can’t imagine? It’s because farming is tough, boring work and most people would rather somebody else did it for them. Preferably someplace far away. Because in the city, they need the space for a shopping mall.’

‘Is that what USIC has planned here?’

It was the sort of comment that might have offended her before, but she seemed unconcerned. ‘No,’ she sighed. ‘Not for the foreseeable future. Our brief is to build a sustainable environment first. Clean water. Renewable power. A team that gets along. A native population that doesn’t hate our guts.’

‘Noble aims,’ he said, leaning back in his seat, hit by a wave of weariness. ‘Funny no one thought of them before.’

They drove into the rain. The windscreen was dry one second, inundated the next. Elaborate raindrop patterns criss-crossed the glass until swept aside by the wipers. He was inside a metal and glass shell, in an artificially maintained atmosphere of cool air, divided off from the rain that could wash him clean. He should be out there, standing naked under it, letting it flow across his scalp, letting it blur his vision, letting it pelt the bony surfaces of his feet.

‘Are you really OK?’

‘Yes, I’m fine,’ he said, with effort. ‘It just feels a bit… strange… being enclosed in such a small space.’

She nodded, unconvinced. He could tell she was worried about him. He regretted not having insisted that she wait a little longer back at the settlement, so that he could prepare a little better for this return to the base. He would have been in much better shape if he could have had even ten, fifteen minutes to himself before stepping into the vehicle.

‘We’re within Shoot range now,’ she said, after a long silence.

He looked at her uncomprehendingly, as if she’d just told him that they were liable to be killed by snipers.

‘The Shoot. The messaging system,’ she said. ‘You could check if there’s anything from your wife.’

Not yet , he thought. Not yet .

He considered saying, ‘Thanks, but I’d prefer to wait until I’ve had a shower, changed my clothes, unwound a bit… ’ It would be the truth. But this truth would make him appear, in Grainger’s eyes, less than eager to know how his wife was getting on. He didn’t want her to doubt his love for Bea. And besides, here was Grainger showing sensitivity to his needs, or what she guessed his needs might be. She should be rewarded for that.

‘Yes, please,’ he said. The windscreen wipers were squeaking against the glass: the sky was clear above them. Peter twisted in his seat to look at the vista receding behind the vehicle. The rains were on their way to C-2. Soon they would unleash their sweet sussurus on the roof of his church.

‘OK, we’re connected,’ said Grainger. Keeping one hand on the steering wheel, she used the other to swivel the Shoot screen over his lap, ready for him to use.

He typed in his password, followed the instructions as usual. There were at least a dozen messages from Bea, maybe even twenty. They were electronically dated, but the dates made no sense to him. He opened the oldest. A large quantity of print swarmed onto the screen. His wife was telling him she loved him. Peter, I love you, she said. He re-read her greetings several times, not to savour them, but to wait until the words were something more than pixels configured on a plastic screen, until he could hear her voice.

Just found out why the supermarket was closed. It’s gone bust! Incredible. This is Tesco we’re talking about, one of the biggest corporations in the world! They had huge fortunes to play with — which was what brought them down, apparently. There was a full report on one of the news sites, a sort of post-mortem, which made me realise it was bound to happen — totally inevitable. It’s just that the inevitable can still come as a surprise, can’t it? A vast amount of Tesco’s money was tied up with ExxonMobil, who’ve been in trouble ever since the Chinese grabbed the oilfields in Iraq, Iran and Kazakstan (sp?). They also had big interests in shipping companies, which have been hammered by the upsurge in piracy, also a lot of their empire was based in Thailand until the military coup. Plus they were hit hard when Barclays went down the plughole a few years back and took Tesco Stakeholder and Tesco Swipe down with it. Those are the bits I remember from the programme, there was a lot more to it. The corporation had its fingers in a hundred pies, all sorts of businesses you wouldn’t think of when you’re walking down the pet food aisle looking for Joshua’s niblets, and suddenly a critical number of those businesses went pear-shaped and hey presto, no more Tesco. ‘The end of an era,’ as a news presenter put it — rather pompously, I thought.

Have you ever noticed the way news presenters always round off their reports with a resonant phrase? They even modulate their voices when they’re reading the last couple of lines of the script. It’s a special kind of vocal music that signals ‘The End’.