The Book of Strange New Things(141)

‘Kurtzberg was the same,’ she remarked. ‘And Tartaglione. They looked like skeletons in the end.’

He sighed. ‘We all look like skeletons in the end.’

Grainger grunted irritably. She wasn’t finished chastising him yet. ‘What goes wrong out there in Freaktown? Is it you or them? They don’t feed you, is that it? Or they just don’t eat, period?’

‘They’re very generous,’ Peter protested. ‘They’ve never . . . I’ve never felt that I’m being starved. It’s just that they don’t eat a lot themselves. I think most of what they grow and . . . uh . . . process . . . gets put aside to feed the USIC personnel.’

‘Oh, great! So we’re exploiting them now?’ Grainger veered him round another corner. ‘I tell you, we’ve bent over backwards to do the right thing here. Bent over backwards. There’s too much riding on this to f*ck it up with an imperialist fiasco.’

Peter wished they’d had this conversation a lot earlier, or that they could have saved it for later – any time but now. ‘Uh . . . what’s riding on this?’ he said, struggling to stay upright in the chair.

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake. Isn’t it obvious? Are you that much of a babe in the woods?’

I just do God’s work; my wife asks the penetrating questions, he was about to say. It was true. Bea was always the one who needed to know why, who scratched under the veneer of what she was told, who refused to fall into step with the game everyone else was playing. She was the one who read the fine print in contracts, she was the one who would explain to him why an apparently wonderful opportunity was full of pitfalls, she was the one who could see through a scam even if it came disguised in Christian wrapping. Grainger was right: he was a babe in the woods.

He hadn’t been born one, that’s for sure. He’d turned himself into one, by force of will. There were many ways of becoming a Christian but the way that had worked for him was to switch off his capacity for cynicism, switch it off like a light. No, that was the wrong comparison . . . he’d . . . he’d switched on the light of trust. After so many years of playing games, exploiting everyone he met, stealing and lying and worse, he’d re-made himself into an innocent. God had wiped the slate clean. The man who’d once littered his conversation with casual expletives like ‘Jesus f*cking Christ’ became the man who said ‘gosh’. There was no other way. You were either a raging alcoholic or you didn’t touch drink. Same with cynicism. Bea could handle it – in moderation. He couldn’t.

But then: There is no God. From Bea. Please, Lord, no. Not from Bea.

Bea, too, had trundled him in a wheelchair once, in the hospital where they first met. Exactly like Grainger was wheeling him now. He’d broken both his ankles jumping out of a warehouse window and had spent several days in Bea’s ward with his legs strung up in the air. Then one afternoon she unshackled him, got him into a wheelchair and pushed him to the x-ray department for a post-op assessment.

‘Can you just whizz me through one of these side exits for a minute so I can have a cigarette?’ he’d said.

‘You don’t need nicotine, handsome,’ she’d replied, from a sweet-smelling spot behind and above him. ‘You need your life to change.’

‘Well, here you are,’ said Grainger. ‘Your home away from home.’ They’d reached the door that was labelled P. LEIGH, PASTOR.

As Grainger was helping him to his feet, one of the USIC electricians, Springer, happened to be passing by.

‘Welcome back, preach!’ he called. ‘You want any more wool, you know where to find me!’ And he sauntered on down the hall.

Grainger’s lips were close to Peter’s ear as she said softly, ‘God, I hate this place. And everybody who works here.’

But please don’t hate me, thought Peter as he pushed open the door and they walked in together. The atmosphere that greeted them was stale and slightly sour from two weeks’ lack of air conditioning. Motes of dust, disturbed by the intrusion, swirled in a beam of light. The door fell shut.

Grainger, who’d had one arm on his back in case he lost his balance, threw the other one around him too. In his confusion, he was slow to realise she was embracing him. And not only that: it was a different embrace from the one they’d had before. There was passion and female need in it.

‘I care about you,’ she said, digging her forehead into his shoulder. ‘Don’t die.’

He stroked her awkwardly. ‘I don’t intend to.’

‘You’ll die, you’ll die, I’ll lose you. You’ll go weird and distant and then one day you’ll just disappear.’ She was weeping now.

‘I won’t. I promise.’

‘You bastard,’ she cried softly, holding him tighter still. ‘You scumbag, you lying . . . ’

She broke the embrace. The pale fabric of her clothing was marked with dirt from the harvest fields of the ?????.

‘I won’t drive you to see those freaks again,’ she said. ‘Someone else can do it.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Whatever you want.’ But she was already gone.

There was no further message from Bea. At his command, a network of ingenious technology searched the cosmos for her thoughts and found nothing. Only that same cry of desolation, still glowing on the screen, just those four awful words, hanging in a contextless grey void. No name attached – neither hers or his. Just the raw sentence.