The Book of Strange New Things(128)

And you’re clearly not interested.

Peter I’m sorry if it looks like I’m not being sympthaetic to the difficulties that you’re no doubt facinfg in your mission. But you haven’t really told me anything about those difficylties. So I can only imagine. Or more to the point, NOT imagine. All I can see from the few morsels you’ve shared with me, is that you’re having a big adventure up there. You’ve been given the cushiest treatment any Christian missionary has ever had in the entire history of evangelism. Other missionaries have been thrown into prison, spat on, speared, pelted wiuth stones, threatened wiht knives and guns, hacked to death by machetes, crucified upside down. At the very least they’ve been given the cold shoukder and frustrated in every conceivable way. As far as I can tell, you arrived to a hero’s welcome. USIC drives you to the Oasans and picks you up again when you’re ready for a rest. Your congregation all love Jesus already and think you’re the bee’s knees and want nothing from you but Bible study. You supervise building works while getting a suntan, and every now and then, somebody brings you a painting to hang up on the ceiling. It sounds like you’re compiling your very own Sistine Chapel up there! And the latest news I get from you is that you just saw a parade of cute littlw animals.

Peter I know you don’t want to hear this but I’M IN TROUBLE. Things are falling apart at a terrifying rate. Some of it I’ve told you about and a lot of it I haven’t. Any other husband, once he got wind ofg what’s been going on here would have offered to come home by now. Or at least made noises about it.

I#m writing this at 5 AM after a sleepless night and I’m almost hallucinating wioth stress and I will probably regret sending you this when I#ve finally had some sleep. But you’ve alwayts been on my side in the past and now you’re hurting me and I don’t know where to turn. Have you given ANY THOUGHT AT ALL to how it might make me feel when you inform me that Grainger, the person who seems to be closest to you up there, is a female and that you’ve ‘just spent some time with her’ and that she’s very ‘vulnerable’ but you’re happy to report that she ‘opened up’ more today than she’s done for you before? I’m sure it will be a wonderful breakthriough for you both when she lets you call her by her first name and you finally ‘get to the bottom’ of why she’s hurting (maybe it will coincide with the happy day when this other woman you’ve been ministering to, Maneater or whatever she;s called, is ready to ‘take it further’) – but Peter has it occurred to you that I might be just a teensy bit ‘vulnerable’ too!

I know you lovbe me and I#m sure you are not doing anything bad withj Grainger but I wish you thought a bit more cvarefully about the language tyou use when talking about her and you. You devote so much time andf energy to pondering exactly the right words to choose in your Bible paraphrases for the Jesus Lovers but when it comes to communicating with me, your inbfinite attention to nuance deserts you.

It’s nice that you are having such vivid memoeries of our wedding but it would be a lot better for me if you had some vivid memories of the woman you left behibnd a few months ago and what she might need right now.

In tears,

Bea

There was another message, sent a mere two minutes later. He opened it, hoping it might be some sort of retraction or softening of the blow – not an apology exactly, but a step back, a second thought, maybe an admission that she was drunk. Instead, she didn’t even call him by name.

As for the rat, PLEASE let’s not pretend – it was NOT as frighjtened as me. I’m sure it was having a simply marvellous time being a rat and it’s overjoyed that our neighbouirhood is choking on its own waste. I just don’t know what to do. Lots of people are driving tyheir garbage to other parts of town and dumping it anywhere they think noeone will catch them doing it. I wou;ldn’t be surprised if a lot iof the filth that’s scattered over our street comes from drive-by dumpings. The police seem powerless to stop it. They seem powerless to stop anything. Tbey just drive arounfd in their squad cars, talking into their handsets. What use is that? What are we paying them for? They’re just watching us go under.

The washing machine gurgled loudly as it sluiced one load of water away to make room for another. Dense white suds clung to the inside of the glass-fronted door. Too much soap. His fault.

He got up from his chair and wandered aimlessly around the room. His heart was beating hard and his intestines felt heavy as clay in his midriff. A stack of Bible booklets lay ready next to the bed, their spines neatly sewn in colourful thread, a labour of many hours during which he had been blissfully unaware of any bad thing.

Dear Bea, he wrote,

I was devastated to get your letter and I’m sorry I’ve made you feel so hurt. I hope for your own sake – for both our sakes – that the extremity of your distress when you wrote to me was partly due to the state you were in at that moment. All those typos (very unlike you) made me wonder if you’d been drinking. Which is not to suggest that your grief isn’t valid, only that I hope you’re not feeling this much hurt and anger all the time.

But of course the fault is mine. I can’t explain or excuse the way I’ve been treating you. The closest I can come is to say that this journey – the first time we’ve been apart for more than a few days at a time – has revealed a frightening lack in me. I don’t mean a bad attitude (although that’s obviously how you see it) I mean a problem with the way my brain works. I find it almost impossible to keep a grip on things that aren’t in my immediate orbit. We’ve always faced life together and I suppose our togetherness masked this deficiency. When you first met me I was bombarding my system with every toxic substance I could throw at it, and once I cleaned up I blithely assumed that the alcohol and the drugs hadn’t inflicted any permanent damage, but I’m now forced to consider that maybe they have. Or maybe I’ve always been like this. Maybe it’s what sent me off the rails in the first place. I don’t know.