The Book of Strange New Things(145)
All the patients are poor now. Not a single well-educated middle-class specimen among them. Moira says that anyone with money has abandoned the NHS completely. The rich ones defect to France or Qatar, the average folks find themselves a nice walk-in pay-per-service clinic (there’s loads of them springing up everywhere – whole new communities are forming around them). And our hospital gets the dregs. That’s Moira’s word for them, but to be honest that’s what they are. Stupid, boorish, loud, ugly and very, very frightened. Forget about caritas – it’s a struggle to even keep your cool when you’ve got a drunken lout with blurry tattoos yelling straight into your face and jabbing you in the shoulder with his nicotine-stained finger. It’s an endless parade of bloodshot eyes, acne, smashed noses, slashed cheeks, cracked ribs, scalded babies, botched suicides. I know I used to complain that Goodman was trying to fill our hospital with easy cases but there is a difference between offering all levels of society access to medical care and letting an entire hospital be overrun by a pig-ignorant mob.
Time has run out on me, it’s 6.30, I have to go to work now. I haven’t even told you what happened to make me finally snap but it’s hard for me to face it myself and writing takes so long and I didn’t know I would write this much about other things. I thought I would just come straight out with it, but it will cause you so much pain and I wish so much I could spare you that pain forever. I must go now.
Love,
Bea.
At once, he responded:
Dear Bea,
I am so worried about you, but relieved to hear your ‘voice’. It’s true that we all misunderstand each other – only God has perfect understanding – but we shouldn’t let the grief of that frustration stop us trying. My work with the Oasans confirms this over and over.
The news about Geoff and our church is deplorable but the church does not consist of Geoff or the treasurer or a particular building. This setback may prove to be a blessing in disguise. If we owe money we can repay it and even if we can’t, it’s only money. What goes on in the hearts and souls of human beings is the important thing. It’s encouraging that our congregation wants to start afresh with a new church. Ordinarily, people are terrified of change so this is an amazing example of courage and positivity. Why not start a simple fellowship in someone’s front room? Just like the early Christians. Complicated infrastructure is a luxury, the real essentials are love and prayer. And it’s great that they want you to be pastor. Don’t be angry, I think you would do a superb job.
Your comments about the changes at the hospital are only natural given the increased stress but they confirm my sense that maybe now is not the time for you to be working. You have a baby growing inside you. Or at least I hope you do – have you had a miscarriage? Is that what’s shaken your faith in God? I’m worried sick. Please tell me.
Whatever it is, it has taken you to a very bad place spiritually. Those ‘pig-ignorant’ people who are crowding into your hospital are all precious souls. God doesn’t care whether someone has acne or bad teeth or a bad education. Please remember that when you met me I was an alcoholic waste of space. A deadbeat. If you had treated me with the contempt I deserved I would never have been rescued, I would have just got worse and been ‘proof’ that types like me are beyond redemption. And who knows, some of the women you’re seeing on the wards may have family traumas not a million miles away from what happened to you. So please, no matter how hard it is, try to hang on to your compassion. God can make miracles occur in that hospital of yours. You say yourself that these people are frightened. Deep down, they know they desperately need something that medicine can’t give them.
Write as soon as you can, I love you,
Peter
? was finally going down, turning the horizon golden caramel. There would be a drawn-out dusk of almost wearisome beauty and then it would be night for a long, long time. Peter stowed the putrefying Oasan food in his bag and left the compound.
He walked for a mile or so, in the hope that the USIC base would disappear from his view – or, more to the point, that he would disappear from the view of anyone at USIC who might have seen him leave. But the flat, featureless terrain meant that the buildings remained obstinately in sight, and a trick of perspective made them seem less far-off than they were. Rationally, he knew it was highly improbable he was being watched, but instinctively he felt under constant surveillance. He walked on.
The direction he’d chosen was westward into the wilderness – that is, not towards the Oasan settlement and not towards the Big Brassiere. He’d fantasised that if he walked far enough he would eventually reach mountains, streams, or at least some rocky knoll or marshy bog that would let him know he was elsewhere. But the tundra went on for ever. Level brown earth, occasionally enlivened by a clump of whiteflower luminescing in the sunset, and, whenever he turned to look back, the eerie concrete mirage of the USIC base. Tired, he sat down and waited for ? to sink below the land.
How long he waited, he couldn’t tell. Maybe two hours. Maybe six hours. His consciousness detached itself from his body, hovered above it, somewhere in the ??. He forgot the purpose of his coming out here. Had he decided he couldn’t spend the night in his quarters, and opted to sleep in the open air? His knapsack could serve as a pillow.
When it was almost dark, he sensed he was no longer alone. He squinted into the gloom and spotted a small, pale creature about five metres away. It was one of the bird-like vermin that had consumed the whiteflower harvest and bitten him. Just one, separated from the rest of its kind. It waddled cautiously in a wide circle around Peter, nodding its head. After a while, Peter realised it was not nodding but sniffing: its snout smelled food.