The Book of Strange New Things(112)
He paused; recognised that Bea might have reason to doubt he would keep his promise. He racked his brains.
For example, he went on, Jesus Lover Five finally delivered her painting to be hung on the ceiling with the others. (Oh how I wish you could see them.) Her painting shows Salome and the two Marys outside Christ’s tomb, with the risen Jesus manifesting to them. He has His arms spread and He looks as though he’s made of light. It’s dazzling, I don’t know how she managed to achieve this with just pigment and cloth; it hits your eyeballs like car headlights on a dark night. You look up to the ceiling when you’re singing or preaching and you see this crucifix-shaped creature up there, blazing out of the dimness. So that’s Jesus Lover Five. A very talented lady (or maybe gentleman – I’m still not 100% sure).
What else should I tell you? I’m struggling to think, which is incredible because so many significant, precious things have happened on this mission and I see so much evidence of God’s grace during each hour that I spend in these people’s company. So many moments when, if you could only have been by my side, I’m certain we would have exchanged a glance that said: ‘Yes! God is at work here.’
He broke off and stretched. He was coated with sweat, from his greasy brow to the tips of his fingers. His naked buttocks squelched on the vinyl seat. Maybe it had been a mistake to turn off the air conditioning and let this stagnancy take hold. He got to his feet and walked to the window. Another tumbleweed of rain was on its way, swirling across the scrublands towards the base. In five minutes it would be here, streaming down the windows. He looked forward to that. Although there was something sad about enjoying rain on the other side of a glass barrier. He should be out there.
Tired, he threw himself on the bed for a minute. The dishdasha hung between him and the window, silhouetted against the brilliance of daylight. He shielded his eyes with his hands, shuttering his peripheral vision so that he could see the dishdasha without the glare on either side; the garment changed colour from dark grey to white. Optical illusions. The subjectivity of reality.
He thought of Bea’s wedding dress. She’d insisted on getting married in white, in a church, and on him wearing a white suit. An odd decision for two people who usually avoided ostentation and formality. Plus, there would be alcohol at the reception. He’d wondered if it mightn’t be better all round if they just ducked into a registry office in their casuals. No way, said Bea. A registry office wedding would be giving in to shame about their past. As if to say: a guy who used to crawl around in shit-smeared public urinals has no right to repackage himself in a spotless suit; a woman with Bea’s family history should forget all about standing up in a church dressed in white. Jesus died on the cross precisely to wipe out that sort of shame. It was like the angel in Zechariah 3:2–4 taking off the priest’s filthy clothes. Behold, I have caused thine iniquity to pass from thee, and I will clothe thee with change of raiment. A clean slate. And there was no bolder celebration of a clean slate than the wedding of Peter and Beatrice.
And in the end, quite a few of the guests got sloshed but Peter didn’t touch a drop. And everyone read their speeches from pre-prepared scripts and he hadn’t written a thing but when the time came God gave him inspiration and he spoke about his love for Beatrice in elegant, flowing sentences that made people weep.
Then he and his wife went home and Beatrice lay on their bed with her white gown still on, and he thought she was having a rest before getting changed but it soon became obvious that she was inviting him to join her. ‘We might get it dirty,’ he said, ‘and it was so expensive.’ ‘All the more reason,’ she said, ‘not to shove it into a box with a bunch of mothballs after one day. It’s actually a very nice dress. It feels good to touch.’ And she guided his hand.
She must have worn that dress twenty, thirty times after that. Always indoors, always without any ceremonial flourish or spoken allusion to its symbolic significance: merely as though she’d decided, on a mundane whim, to wear a white dress that evening rather than a green one; an embroidered bodice rather than a V-necked jumper. He never wore his wedding suit again, though.
The rain hit the window at last. Peter lay on his bed as the semen cooled on his midriff. Then he got up, showered again, and returned to the Shoot. The cursor on the screen was still blinking under the word .here
18
I need to talk to you, she said
The news that Dr Matthew Everett had died meant nothing to Peter. He’d never met the man. He visited doctors as seldom as possible and, before the obligatory tests that gave him a clean bill of health for the Oasis mission, it had been ages since he’d set foot in any sort of clinic. A doctor had once threatened him that if he continued drinking he would be dead within three months. He’d continued drinking for years. Another doctor, affiliated in some way with the police, had branded him psychopathic and was keen to get him locked up in an institution. Then there was the registrar at Bea’s hospital who’d made trouble for her when she ‘developed an unprofessional attachment to a patient with a history of substance abuse and manipulative behaviour’.
No, doctors and Peter had never got on. Not even in the years since he’d become a Christian. When medical practitioners heard about your faith, they didn’t respond like most people – with bemusement or combative scorn, ready to get into an argument about why-does-God-allow-suffering. Rather, they kept their faces blank and their conversation non-committal, and you felt they were making a mental note in some sort of file on your health issues: Irrational religious beliefs, right under Blepharitis and Rosacea.