The Book of Strange New Things(147)

In the morning, I go home, still wearing the two gowns with a cardigan over them. Must have looked like an escapee from a loony bin. I get out of the bus two stops early so I can cut through the park in case I find Joshua there. It’s a long shot and I don’t really have any hope that I’ll see him. But I do.

He’s strung up by the tail from a tree. Alive. Two kids of maybe twelve are hoisting him up and down on a rope, making him spin, jerking him so he twitches. A red haze falls over my eyes. I don’t know what happened next, what I did to these kids, my memory is a blank. I only know I didn’t kill them because they weren’t there anymore when I came to. There’s blood on my fists, under my nails. I wish I’d killed them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know – underprivileged kids, rotten upbringing, in dire need of love and forbearance, why not come to our Outreach programme blah blah blah – THESE EVIL SCUMBAGS WERE TORTURING JOSHUA!

I pick him up. He’s still breathing, but shallowly. The base of his tail is shredded and one eye looks gouged out but he’s alive and I think he recognises me. Ten minutes later I’m at the vet’s. It’s before opening hours but I must have kicked and screamed because they open up for me. He lifts Joshua from my arms and gives him an injection.

‘OK, it’s done,’ he says. ‘Do you want to take him home or leave him here?’

‘What do you mean, take him home?’ I say. ‘Aren’t you going to do anything for him?’

‘I just did,’ he says.

Afterwards, he tells me he had no way of guessing I was willing to pay any amount of money for surgery. ‘Nobody’s bothering with that sort of thing nowadays,’ he says. ‘I can go for five, six hours without anyone coming in, and then when someone finally walks through the door with a sick pet, all they want is for it to be put to sleep.’ He puts Joshua into a plastic bag for me. ‘I won’t charge you,’ he tells me.

Peter, I’m only going to say this once. This experience is not educational. It is not instructive. It is not God moving in mysterious ways, it is not God figuring out exactly what sublime ultimate purpose can be served by me stepping on Joshua’s leg and everything after. The Saviour I believed in took an interest in what I did and how I behaved. The Saviour I believed in made things happen and stopped things happening. I was deluding myself. I am alone and frightened and married to a missionary who’s going to tell me that the fool has said in his heart there is no God, and if you don’t say it it will just be because you’re being diplomatic, because in your heart you’re convinced I made this happen through my faltering of faith, and that makes me feel even more alone. Because you’re not coming back to me, are you? You like it up there. Because you’re on Planet God. So even if you did come back to me, we still wouldn’t be together. Because in your heart you’d still be on Planet God, and I’d be a trillion miles away from you, alone with you by my side.





IV


IN HEAVEN





23


A drink with you



The bites were poisonous after all. He was sure of it. Underneath the bandages, the wounds looked clean, but the damage was done. The network of veins and arteries inside his flesh was industriously polluting all his organs with infected blood, feeding his brain with venom. It was only a matter of time. First he would become delirious – he felt that coming on already – and then his system would shut down, kidneys, liver, heart, guts, lungs, all those mysteriously interdependent globs of meat which needed poison-free fuel to keep functioning. His body would evict his soul.

Still seated at the Shoot, he lifted his face to the ceiling. He’d been staring at Bea’s words so long that they’d burned into his retinas and now re-appeared above him, illegible as mildew. The lightbulb hanging above his head was one of those energy-saving ones, more a coil than a bulb, like a segment of radioactive intestine suspended from a wire. Above that, a thin lid of ceiling and roof, and above that . . . what? Where in the universe was Bea? Was she above him, below him, to his right or to his left? If he could fly, if he could launch himself through space faster than the speed of light, what good would it do him? He had no idea where to go.

He mustn’t die in this room. No, no, not in this sterile cubicle, sealed inside a glorified warehouse of concrete and glass. Anywhere but this. He would go . . . out there. To the ?????. Maybe they had a cure. Some sort of folk remedy. Probably not, given how loudly they’d lamented when they saw him get bitten. But he should die in their company, not here. And he mustn’t see Grainger; he must avoid her at all costs. She would waste what little time he had left, trying to keep him at the base, trying to drag him to the infirmary where he would die under pointless observation and then be reduced to a storage problem, rammed into a shelf of a mortuary refrigerator.

How long have I got, Lord? he prayed. Minutes? Hours? Days? But there were some questions that one must not ask of God. There were some uncertainties one must face alone.

‘Hi,’ he said to the porky woman with the snake tattoo, the gate-keeper to his escape. ‘I don’t think you ever told me your name. But it’s Craig, isn’t it? “B. Craig”, as the nameplate on your door has it. Nice to see you again, B.’

She looked at him as though he was covered in hideous sores. ‘Are you OK?’

‘Just a bit . . . underslept,’ he said, eyeing the vehicles parked behind her in the bay. There were half a dozen, including the one Grainger used for her drug deliveries. He hoped Grainger was fast asleep in bed, drooling into her pillow, keeping those pretty, scarred arms safe under the sheets. He wouldn’t want her to feel responsible for what he was about to do. Better to put pressure on Craig, who, like everyone else here, would be indifferent to his death. ‘What’s the “B” stand for?’ he said.