The Book of Strange New Things(143)

He picked up the bottle, read the contents. These pills were stronger than any you could get over the counter in an English pharmacy. But the pain he felt was not in his flesh.

He checked for new messages from Bea. There were none.

The ghost of Bing Crosby was talking when Peter walked into the mess hall. Mucous membranes in a larynx that had once nestled in a human throat, long since dispersed into the soil of Holy Cross Cemetery in Los Angeles, had made some sounds that were captured on magnetic tape in 1945, and that tape, digitised and lovingly reconfigured, was being broadcast through the cafeteria’s public address system. The dozen or so USIC personnel scattered around the armchairs and tables were oblivious, carrying on their conversations or simply focusing on their food and drink. The disembodied voice of Judy Garland – smaller mucous membranes, vibrating more excitedly – joined Crosby’s in a rehearsed off-the-cuff routine about trying on hats, intended to epitomise the gulf between men and women. Stanko, behind the coffee bar, switched on the smoothie machine, drowning out the ancient voices under a whirr of crushed coffee-flavoured ice.

‘What’s good today, Stanko?’ asked Peter when his turn came.

‘Pancakes.’

Bing Crosby, having interrupted the flow of Garland’s prattle, had started singing: ‘When I’ve got my arm around you and we’re going for a walk, must you yah-ta-ta, yah-ta-ta, yah-ta-ta, yah-ta-ta, talk, talk, talk . . . ’

‘Anything savoury?’

Stanko lifted the lid on a metal vat, releasing a hearty smell. ‘Beef stroganoff.’

‘I’ll have that. And a mug of tea.’

‘Aristotle, mathematics, economics, antique chairs,’ warbled Bing. ‘The classics, the comics, darling, who cares?’

Stanko handed Peter a plastic plate of richly hued, steaming food, a plastic beaker of hot water, a paper sachet of dairy powder and a tea bag with a minuscule picture of Buckingham Palace on the tag.

‘Thank you,’ said Peter.

‘Enjoy, bro.’

‘Looks good.’

‘Best stroganoff you can get,’ affirmed Stanko, deadpan. Sardonic humour? Maybe he was on the level. Right now, Peter doubted his own ability to judge.

He walked to a free table – there was just one left – and sat down with his meal. While Bing Crosby pretended to annoy Judy Garland with chatter about golf, Peter began to eat the beef, which he knew was whiteflower that had been pounded with a stone and then dried and fried. The sauce tasted wrong – too sweet, too cloying. Fragments of young whiteflower stalk had been dyed bright orange to resemble carrot and there were blanched slivers of half-mature whiteflower leaf that were supposed to be onions. He wished USIC would ditch these faked concoctions and just eat whiteflower the way the ????? ate it. There were so many good, wholesome recipes going unused here.

‘When there’s music softly playing,’ crooned Judy Garland, ‘and I’m sitting on your lap, must you yah-ta-ta, yah-ta-ta, yah-ta-ta, yah-ta-ta, yap, yap, yap . . . ’

‘Mind if I sit here?’ A real, living female voice in competition with a dead, long-ago one.

He looked up. It was Hayes. He motioned her to go ahead, apprehensive that she would ask him how he was, a question he wasn’t sure he could answer without breaking down and telling the whole story. But as soon as Hayes took her seat, it became clear that she was only interested in the surface of the table, to rest a thick book on. Glancing at the pages as he ate his food, Peter identified the patterns of Sudoku, Kakuro, Hitori, Fillomino and other mathematical puzzles, neatly completed in pencil. Hayes bent over the book with an eraser clutched between her thumb and forefinger. With fastidious care, she began to rub out the pencil marks.

‘It’s so nice to close your lips with mine,’ cooed Bing and Judy in perfect harmony.

Five minutes later, Peter’s plate was empty and Hayes’s iced coffee was untouched, forgotten. She was hunched over, absorbed in her task. Her mouth was slightly open, her downcast eyes had soft, luxurious lashes; she impressed Peter as prettier and more soulful than he’d previously thought. He was touched, deeply touched, deeply moved all of a sudden, by her altruistic labour.

‘That’s very considerate of you,’ he heard himself say.

‘Excuse me?’

‘Very community-minded.’

She stared at him, uncomprehending.

‘Rubbing out the pencil marks,’ he explained, wishing he hadn’t spoken. ‘It gives other people a chance to do the puzzles.’

She wrinkled her brow. ‘I’m not doing it for other people. I’m gonna do these puzzles again myself.’ And she returned to the work at hand.

Peter sat back and drank his tea. Hayes’s serene focus no longer struck him as attractive. Instead, there was something creepy about it. OK, he wasn’t a puzzle man himself, so the appeal of filling in those squares was already mysterious to him, but he appreciated that it presented a pleasant challenge for other minds. But doing the same puzzle over and over . . .

A burst of laughter from the other side of the room failed to disturb Hayes’s concentration. It came from Tuska, Maneely and the guy who’d escorted Peter back from the settlement, what was his name – Conway. They appeared to be playing a game of rudimentary magic with three plastic cups and a rivet. ‘How’d you do that? How’d you do that?’ Conway kept saying, to Tuska’s delight. Elsewhere, USIC personnel reclined in armchairs, flipping through Fly Fishing, Classic Cartoons, Vogue and The Chemical Engineer. Peter remembered Tuska’s ‘Légion étrangère’ lecture: It’s best if you’ve got a team of individuals who can deal with being in permanent limbo. People who won’t go crazy. Maybe Hayes was a prime example of a person who wouldn’t go crazy. Someone who did her job, caused no trouble beyond a few pages torn out of a lesbian porn magazine, and, when she retired to her quarters, could while away the hours and days and months on perpetually erased puzzles.