The Book of Strange New Things(158)

I’ll be back, he’d told Flores, just to shut her up, just to smooth his getaway, but now that he had a chance to think it over, a promise ought to be a promise. Grainger was gone now, the message to Bea was sent. He should find out what Dr Austin had on his mind.

He showered, washed his hair, massaged his scabby scalp. The water swirling around his feet was brownish, gurgling down the plughole like tea. On his two admissions to the USIC infirmary he must have introduced more bacteria into their sterile environment than they’d encountered in all the years previous. It’s a wonder they didn’t dunk him in a vat of disinfectant the size of Tartaglione’s booze bath before consenting to treat him.

Shower finished, he dried himself carefully. The cannula puncture had already healed up. Various scratches from earlier on were crusted over. The bite wound on his arm was doing nicely; the one on his leg stung a bit, and looked a bit swollen, but if it got worse a quick course of antibiotics would fix it. He replaced the bandages and dressed in jeans and T-shirt. His dishdasha was so rank from Tartaglione’s hooch that he considered giving up on it, but he stuffed it in the washing machine instead. The CONSERVE WATER – COULD THIS LOAD BE HAND-WASHED? placard was still in place, complete with its ARE YOU OFFERING, LADY? addendum. He half-expected the graffiti to have been erased by some routine intruder, some multi-tasking engineer or electrician assigned to inspect everybody’s rooms for stuff that might offend the USIC ethos. Nothing would surprise him now.

‘Good to see you,’ said Austin, appraising Peter’s conventional attire with obvious approval. ‘You’re looking much better.’

‘I’m sure I smell better,’ said Peter. ‘I’m sorry I stank up your surgery.’

‘Couldn’t be helped,’ breezed the doctor. ‘Alcohol is evil stuff.’ That was as close as he was going to come to mentioning Grainger’s unprofessional insobriety. ‘You’re walking a bit stiffly,’ he observed, as the two of them moved from the doorway into the consulting room. ‘How are your injuries?’

‘They’re fine. I’m just not used to wearing clothes – these sorts of clothes – anymore.’

Austin smiled insincerely, no doubt adjusting his professional assessment of how well Peter was doing. ‘Yes, there are days I quite fancy coming to work naked,’ he joked, ‘but the feeling passes.’

Peter smiled in return. One of his flashes of pastoral instinct, like the one he’d had about Lover One’s inconsolable sadness, came to him now: this doctor, this ruggedly good-looking New Zealand male, this man called Austin, had never had a sexual relationship with anyone.

‘I want to thank you,’ said Austin, ‘for taking our conversation seriously.’

‘Conversation?’

‘About the natives’ health. About getting them to come to us so we can check them out, diagnose what they’re dying of. Obviously you’ve been spreading the word.’ And he smiled again, to acknowledge the unintended evangelical meaning of the phrase. ‘At long last, one of them has.’

Long last. Peter thought of the distance between the USIC base and the ????? settlement, the time it took to drive there, the time it would take to walk. ‘Oh my . . . gosh,’ he said. ‘It’s so far.’

‘No, no,’ Austin reassured him. ‘Remember Conway? Your Good Samaritan? Apparently he wasn’t satisfied with the signal strength of some doodad he installed at your church. So he went there again, and lo and behold – he came back with a passenger. A . . . friend of yours, I gather.’

‘Friend?’

Austin extended his hand, motioned towards the corridor. ‘Come with me. He’s in intensive care.’

The term stuck a cold spike into Peter’s guts. He followed Austin out of the room, down the hallway a few steps, and into another room marked ‘ICU’.

Only one patient lay in the spotless twelve-bed facility. Tall IV drip stands, gleaming new and with transparent plastic sheaths still hugging their aluminium stems, stood sentinel by each empty bed. The lone patient wasn’t hooked to a drip, nor was he attached to any other tentacles of medical technology. He sat erect against pillows, tucked up to the waist in pure white linen, his faceless, hairless kernel of head-flesh unhooded. In the great rectangle of mattress, designed to accommodate American bodies the size of BG’s, he looked pathetically small. His robe and gloves had been replaced with a thin cotton hospital gown, pale grey-green like stale broccoli, the colour Peter associated with Jesus Lover Twenty-Three, but that didn’t mean he was Jesus Lover Twenty-Three, of course. With a shame so intense it was close to panic, Peter realised he had no way of knowing who this was. All he knew was that the ?????’s right hand was wrapped in a bulbous mitten of white gauze. In the left hand, he clutched a shabby toiletries bag – no, it wasn’t a bag, it was . . . a Bible pamphlet, one of Peter’s hand-sewn assemblages. The paper had been dampened and dried so many times it had the texture of leather; the loose strands of wool were yellow and pink.

Seeing Peter enter, the ????? cocked his head to one side, as if puzzled by the minister’s bizarrely unfamiliar raiment.

‘God ble?? our reunion, Father Pe???er.’

‘Lover Five?’

‘Ye??.’

Peter turned to Austin. ‘What’s wrong with her? Why is she here?’