The Book of Strange New Things(105)

Sorry, I’m rambling. Usually I’m the one who teases you about ruminations like this, and here I am indulging in it myself. Maybe I’m trying to fill the silence with my own imitation of your voice! Or maybe it’s true what they say, that married people end up blurring their identities, finishing each other’s sentences.

Today was the day that the Frame family moved house. Sheila dropped Billy off with me, as agreed. I took him to the cat show. It was a hoot and he seemed to enjoy it immensely despite whispering to me how stupid it all was and how ridiculous the handlers looked. But as I’d hoped, the charm of the animals won him over! And I must admit I was gawping happily at all those different moggies too. God must have had such terrific fun designing all those distinct varieties of furry mammal. (Although maybe I’m showing my own prejudices there. Maybe he had even more fun with the fish and the insects and so on.)

Anyway, Billy and I kept the conversation light most of the day, but just before his mum came to fetch him, he opened up. I asked him how he felt about his father going to another country. He said, ‘My dad says there aren’t any countries anymore. They don’t exist. England and Romania are just different parts of the same thing.’ For a moment I thought, how nice, Mark is reassuring his kid that we’re all one world-wide community. But no. Billy said Mark asked him to visualise the world map as a huge thick sheet of plastic floating on the sea, like a raft, with crowds of people balancing on it. And sometimes too many people stand together on one bit and it starts to sink. You just run to another bit where it’s better, he said. Then when THAT bit starts to sink, you move again. There’s always places where things aren’t so bad: cheaper accommodation, cheaper food, cheaper fuel. You go there and it’s OK for a while. Then it stops being OK and you get the hell out. It’s what animals do, he said. ‘Animals don’t live in countries, they just inhabit territory. What do animals care if a place has a name? Names don’t mean shit.’ That’s the word Billy used, so I presume that’s the word his father used. Quite a heavy lecture in geopolitics for a little boy to swallow! And of course the bit that Mark left out of his analysis was the bit about going off with a 27-year-old concert promoter called Nicole. Who happens to be Romanian. But enough of that.

I’ve got a blanket over my knees as I type this. You’re probably expiring from the heat but it’s cold here and I’ve been without gas for a week now. Not because of any accident or failure in the supply, just because of sheer bureaucratic insanity. The gas company we’re with – used to be with, I should say – was being paid by direct debit out of our Barclays bank account. But when Barclays went under and we changed over to Bank of Scotland, something went wrong with the debit arrangement. A computer glitch. And suddenly I got this final demand. I tried to pay it, but here’s where it gets insane – they wouldn’t talk to me, because I’m not the ‘account holder’. I kept offering to pay them, and they kept saying ‘Sorry madam, we need to speak to the account holder’, ie, you, Peter. I must have spent hours on the phone about this. I considered getting the next door neighbour to pop round and talk into the phone in a deep voice, which would have been morally wrong, of course, but they probably would have asked him your mother’s maiden name. In the end, I had to concede that it just wasn’t possible to fix. I’ll wait until they take us to court and hope it gets sorted out then. In the meantime, I’ve signed with a different gas supplier but it will be a few days before they can come and connect it. They say that the freak weather in various parts of England has been causing havoc with utilities and (to quote the engineer I spoke to) ‘there’s engineers dashing about all over the place like chickens with their heads cut off’. Give that man a job in PR!

Do you remember Archie Hartley? I bumped into him in the cafeteria of the hospital the other day and he

Again he rested his head back against the seat, breathed deeply. Despite the dry cool of the air conditioning, he was sweating. Droplets tickled his forehead and ran into his eyebrows.

‘Finished already?’ said Grainger.

‘Uh . . . just a minute . . . ’ He felt as though he might be in danger of passing out. ‘Bad news?’

‘No, I . . . I wouldn’t say that. It’s just . . . You know, there’s a lot to catch up on . . . ’

‘Peter, listen to me,’ said Grainger, enunciating each word with earnest emphasis. ‘This happens. This happens to all of us.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You’re here. She’s there. It’s natural.’

‘Natural?’

‘The rift,’ she said. ‘It grows and grows, and finally . . . there’s too much of it to cross. It’s like . . . ’

Words failed her, and she resorted to a gesture instead. Releasing her grip on the steering wheel for a few seconds – a safe enough risk, given that the ground was flat and there was nothing visible in any direction to collide with – she held up her hands, palms parallel, separated by a few inches, as though about to press them together in medieval prayer. But instead, she parted them wider, letting the fingers splay limply, as though each hand was toppling off an axis, falling through space.





17


Still blinking under the word ‘here’


Without Peter inside it, the dishdasha hung like a ghost from the ceiling. Its frayed lower parts swelled gradually with water and began to release drips from the sleeves and hem, slow as melancholy teardrops, even though Peter had wrung the fabric as hard as he could. Never mind: it would dry quickly. He’d adjusted the air conditioning of his quarters, allowing the temperature to rise to the level of the air outside. That was the way he wanted it, even if he hadn’t had wet washing to dry. He felt disoriented enough, back in the USIC environment, without the additionally confusing sensation of being trapped in an artificial bubble of chilled oxygen.