The Book of Strange New Things(167)

‘One of the amazing things about Bea,’ said Peter, ‘is that she wore that dress many times afterwards. At home. Just for us.’

‘That’s so romantic.’ There were tears in Grainger’s eyes.

Peter felt suddenly disconsolate. The memory of Bea’s bitter disappointment with him was more recent than these fond memories he was sharing with Grainger. ‘I suppose it’s just a story I’m telling myself, like Tuska says,’ he said. ‘An old story. Life has moved on. Bea is a different person. You know, not long ago, I wrote to her about the dress, about how much I loved her in it, and she . . . she said I was just being sentimental, focusing on a memory of who she used to be, not who she is now.’

Grainger shook her head. ‘That’s bullshit,’ she said softly. Tenderly, even. ‘Take it from me, Peter, her heart swells up when you talk about that dress. She would be devastated if she thought you’d forgotten about that dress. Can’t you see that? Everybody’s sentimental, everybody. There’s only about fifty people in the whole damn world who aren’t sentimental. And they’re all working here.’

They both laughed. ‘We should try once more to get back,’ said Peter.

‘OK,’ she said, and hauled herself to her feet. Her movements were stiffer than before. His too. They were carbon-based life forms, running low on fuel. An hour or so later, with the USIC base still eluding them, they found a structure of a different kind. It had shimmered in their sights for the longest time, and while heading for it they discussed the possibility that it was a mirage. But it proved real enough: the skeletal remains of a large camping tent. The metal struts were intact, staking out the shape of a house, the kind of house a child would draw. The canvas hung in tatters.

Inside the tent, nothing. No provisions, no bedding, no implements. A square of ground, a blank panel for the imagination to fill.

Behind the tent, planted in the ground and only slightly tilted, a cross. A wooden one, of very modest scale, about knee-height. Where had the wood come from? Not from this world, that’s for sure. It must have been transported, stashed in a ship along with the medicines and the engineering magazines and the raisins and the humans, billions of miles from its point of origin. Just two pine slats, never intended to be nailed together in this manner, two sturdy slices of tree varnished to resemble antique oak. Two nails were driven through the crux: one to join the two pieces of wood together, and another, crudely hammered and bent, to secure two small circlets of metal. Gold. Kurtzberg’s wedding ring, and the wedding ring of the wife he’d lost in another galaxy long, long ago.

On the horizontal slat of the cross, the minister had carved a message, then painstakingly blackened each letter with the flame of a cigarette lighter or some similar tool. Peter expected a motto in Latin or an allusion to faith or Christ or the Afterlife.

FOR ALL THAT I’VE HAD AND SEEN, I AM TRULY THANKFUL, the inscription said.

They stood and looked at that cross for several minutes, while the ragged remains of the tent flapped in the breeze.

‘I’m going home,’ announced Grainger, in a voice shaky with tears, ‘to find my dad.’

Peter put his arm around her shoulders. This was the moment when he was called upon to say the right thing; nothing less than the right thing would do. As a man or as a minister of God, his challenge was the same: to reconcile them both to their fate. There would be no going home; there was no dad to be reunited with; they were lost and soon they would be dead. Lightning had struck them, and they had failed to understand its message.

‘Grainger . . . ’ he began, his mind blank, trusting that inspiration would lend words to his tongue.

But before he could continue, the dull thrum which they’d both imagined was the wind agitating the canvas shreds of the tent grew suddenly louder, and an olive-green military jeep drove past them, slowed to a stop, and reversed.

A brown head with white eyes and white teeth poked out of the window.

‘Are you guys finished here?’ hollered BG, revving the engine. ‘’Cause some of us have work to do.’





26


He only knew that thanks were due


All the way back, Peter could hear – only hear, not see – the weeping and the laboured breathing and the outbursts of anxiety and anger, sometimes incoherent, sometimes lucid. He was in the front passenger seat next to BG, almost shoulder to shoulder with the big man, although his own shoulder looked emaciated in comparison with BG’s bulge of meat and muscle. Invisible in the space behind them, Alexandra Grainger was going through hell.

BG drove in silence. His normally benign face was a grim mask, frozen under the sheen of sweat, as he concentrated, or pretended to concentrate, on the road ahead – the road that was no road at all. Only his eyes betrayed any stress.

‘They’d better not try to stop me,’ Grainger was saying. ‘They can’t keep me here. I don’t care how much it costs. What are they gonna do? Sue me? Kill me? I’ve got to go home. They can keep my salary. Four years for free. That makes us even, right? They’ve got to let me go. My dad is still alive. I know he is. I feel it.’

BG glanced up at the rear-view mirror. Maybe from his angle he could see more than Peter. All Peter could see was a narrow rectangle of black upholstery which, through the distorted veil of the air currents trapped in the cabin, appeared to be pulsing and throbbing.