The Book of Strange New Things(146)

Peter recalled the moment when the flesh of his arm sprayed blood, recalled the nauseating pain of the bite to his leg. A convulsion of anger disturbed the numbness of his grief. He considered killing this vicious creature, stamping on its body, grinding its sharp-fanged little skull under his heel – not in revenge but self-defence, or so he could pretend. But no. The thing was pathetic and comical, hesitant in the dark, vulnerable in its aloneness. And the food it smelled was not Peter’s flesh.

Slowly and smoothly, Peter extracted the prize from his knapsack. The creature stopped in its tracks. Peter laid the plastic bag on the ground and shuffled backwards. The creature moved in and punctured the bag with its teeth, releasing a sweetish stench. Then it gobbled up the entire pile, plastic shreds and all. Peter wondered if, as a result, the creature would end up dying a more horrible death than if he’d stomped on its head. Maybe this was what the Hindus meant by karma.

After the satisfied animal had left him, Peter sat and stared at the distant lights of the base, his ‘home away from home’, as Grainger had called it. He stared until the lights turned abstract in his brain, until he could imagine the sun rising in England, and Bea hurrying through the car park of her hospital towards the bus stop. Then he imagined Bea getting into that bus and taking a seat amongst a heterogeneous variety of humans, some chocolate brown, some yellowish, some beige or pasty pink. He imagined the bus travelling along a road crowded with vehicles, until it pulled up in front of a store that sold household knick-knacks, cheap toys and other bargains for 99 pence, round the corner from a street with a launderette on the corner, a hundred and fifty metres from a semi-detached house with no curtains in the front windows, and an internal staircase carpeted in threadbare maroon, leading up to a room in which stood a machine on which Bea could, when she was ready, type the words ‘Dear Peter’. He raised himself to his feet and started walking back.

Dear Peter,

No I have not had a miscarriage and please don’t lecture me about compassion. You just don’t understand how impossible everything has become. It’s all about the scale of a problem and the available energy to deal with it. When someone gets their leg blown off by a bomb, you rush them into surgery, mend the stump, fit them with a prosthetic, give them physiotherapy, counselling, whatever it takes, and a year later, they may be running a marathon. If a bomb blows off their arms, legs, genitals, intestines, bladder, liver and kidneys, IT IS DIFFERENT. We need a certain proportion of things to be OK in order to be able to cope with other things going wrong. Whether it’s a human body or Christian endeavour or life in general, we can’t keep it going if too much of what we need is taken away from us.

I won’t tell you about the other things that were freaking me out in the last week or two. It’s current affairs stories that will only bore you. New wars in Africa, systematic slaughter of women and children, mass starvation in rural China, crackdown on protesters in Germany, the ECB scandal, my pension being wiped out, stuff like that. None of it will seem real to you up there. You are spooning Bible verses into the hungry mouths of Oasans, I appreciate that.

Anyway, what you need to know is that last week, for various reasons, I was stressed out and, as usual when I’m stressed out, Joshua picks up on my vibes. He was cowering under the furniture, dashing from room to room, crying, circling round and round my shins but not letting me pick him up or stroke him. It was the last thing I needed and it was driving me crazy. I just tried to ignore him, get on with some chores. I ironed my uniform. The ironing board was at an awkward angle and the cord didn’t have enough slack and I was too tired and hassled to set it up any other way so I just coped. At one point, I set the iron down and it fell off the edge of the board. Instinctively I jumped backwards. My heel came down hard on something, there was a sickening cracking snapping noise and Joshua screamed, I swear he screamed. Then he was gone.

I found him under the bed, trembling and hyperventilating. Eyes wide in pain and terror. I’d broken his back leg. I could see that. There was not one iota of trust in his eyes, he flinched when I spoke. I was the enemy. I fetched the gardening gloves so that he wouldn’t scratch or bite me and I took hold of his tail and pulled him out. It was the only way. I got him into the kitchen, put him on the table and attached the lead to his collar. He was calmer. I thought he was in shock, maybe in too much pain to do anything except sit there panting. I picked up the phone to call the vet. The kitchen window was open as usual. Joshua shot out as if someone fired him from a cannon.

I looked for him for hours. I covered the same ground over and over until I just couldn’t walk anymore and it was pitch dark. Then I had to go to work (night shift). It was hell. Don’t say anything, it was hell. At 4 am I was wearing two hospital gowns because my uniform was covered in faeces. An obese insane guy had been tossing it out of his bed, smearing it on the bedrails, bellowing the place down. The orderlies were off-duty, it was just me, little Oyama and a new girl who was sweet but kept disappearing. The faeces-tossing guy’s mother was camping out in the visitors’ room through the night – nobody had been able to throw her out. She’s in there with a six-pack of Pepsi and some half-eaten takeaway (this is supposed to be a hospital!) and every so often she pops her head in and checks that we’re taking good care of her boy. ‘You a bitch!’ she yells at me. ‘You cruel! I call police! You not a real nurse! Where the real nurses?’ On and on and on and on.