The Book of Strange New Things(103)

He opened his mouth to reassure her he’d been eating like a king, but realised it wouldn’t be true. ‘I haven’t been eating a lot, I admit,’ he said, laying one palm on his stomach just under the ribs. ‘Just . . . snacks, I suppose you’d call them.’

‘Very good for your cheekbones,’ she said.

As a reflex, he appraised Grainger’s facial features. Her cheekbones weren’t particularly good. She had the sort of face that was beautiful only if she watched her diet and didn’t get much older than she was now. As soon as age or over-indulgence filled out her cheeks and thickened her neck, even a little, she would cross a line from elfin allure into mannish homeliness. He felt sad for her, sad about the ease with which her physical destiny could be read by anyone who cared to cast a glance over her, sad about the matter-of-factness with which her genes stated the limits of what they were willing to do for her in the years to come, sad in the knowledge that she was at her peak now and still not fulfilled. He thought of Beatrice, whose cheekbones were worthy of a French chanteuse. At least, that’s what he’d told her sometimes; he couldn’t actually picture Bea’s cheekbones now. A vaguer, more impressionistic vision of his wife’s face flickered in his brain, half-obliterated by the sunlight beaming through the vehicle’s windscreen and the swirl of recent memories of various Jesus Lovers. Troubled, he strained to envisage her in sharper focus. A string of pearls in the dimness of another time and place, a white bra with familiar flesh inside. Jesus Lover Nine asking to be baptised. The stranger in the fields who’d handed him a scrap of fabric inscribed with the word ??????, patted her (her?) chest and said: ‘My name’. ‘Say it for me again,’ he’d replied, and, when she did so, he’d contorted his mouth, his tongue, his jaw, every muscle in his face and said ‘??????’, or something sufficiently similar for her to clap her gloved hands in approval. ??????. ??????. She would assume that he’d forget as soon as she was out of his sight. He must prove her wrong. ??????.

‘Hello? Are you with us?’ Grainger’s voice.

‘Sorry,’ he said. A delicious smell was wafting up his nostrils. Raisin bread. Grainger had unsealed a packet of it and was eating a slice.

‘Help yourself.’

He took some, self-conscious about his soil-grimed fingernails touching the food. The bread was sliced thick – three times as thick as any Oasan would have it – and felt luxuriously spongy, as though it had come out of the oven fifteen minutes ago. He stuffed it into his mouth, suddenly ravenous.

She chuckled. ‘Couldn’t you have put in a request for some loaves and fishes?’

‘The Oasans took good care of me,’ he protested, swallowing hard. ‘But they’re not big eaters themselves and I just sort of . . . fell in with their routine.’ He extracted another slice of raisin bread. ‘And I’ve been busy.’

‘I’m sure.’

Up ahead, two bodies of rain were coming into view. By chance, the sun was perfectly positioned in the clear space between. The peripheries of each body of rain shimmered with subtle rainbow colours, like an inexhaustible launch of noiseless fireworks.

‘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.’