The Book of Strange New Things(173)

‘Goodbye to the what?’

‘The Oasans. The native people.’ The freaks in Freaktown, you fat idiot, he thought.

She chewed on this. ‘You need your own vehicle to say goodbye in?’

He hung his head in frustration. ‘If I’m shoulder to shoulder with USIC personnel, it might look like I was using you guys as . . . uh . . . bodyguards. Emotional bodyguards, if you see what I mean.’ Craig’s direct yet unfocused stare told him that no, she didn’t see. ‘It might look like I didn’t want to face them on my own.’

‘OK,’ said Craig, idly scratching her snake tattoo. Seconds passed, making it obvious that her ‘OK’ did not mean ‘In that case, I will give you a car’; it did not even mean ‘I understand why that might worry you’; it meant ‘So be it.’

‘Also,’ he said, ‘I’m not sure that Grainger will want to be going out to the settlement today.’

‘Won’t be Grainger,’ said Craig breezily, and consulted a printed roster. ‘Grainger is off-duty for . . . ’ She flipped pages, scanning for the name. ‘The foreseeable,’ she summarised at last, and flipped back to today. ‘It’ll be . . . Tuska and Flores.’

Peter looked over her shoulder, at all the greased-up vehicles he could drive out of this place if only she wasn’t in the way.

‘Your choice,’ she grinned, and he understood that sometimes there is no choice at all.

‘I see you standing on the shore of a huge lake,’ Bea had said, the last time he’d held her in his arms. ‘It’s night and the sky is full of stars.’ And she had shared her vision of him preaching to a multitude of unseen creatures in fishing boats, bobbing on the sea. Perhaps they’d both known that it was a dream, that nothing like that would really happen. It was another sunny, torpid day on Oasis, and the natives were dozing in their cots, or making food for their foreign guests, or washing clothes, or spending time with their children, hoping that their flesh would survive unharmed until the sun set and they were cocooned in their cots again. Maybe they were praying.

Filling in time before the appointed hour for his ride, Peter considered what, if anything, to take with him to the settlement. A stack of half-finished booklets lay on the table, next to some balls of wool. He picked up the nearest, a paraphrase of Revelation, Chapter 21. He’d reduced the number of ‘s’ sounds to four, and gotten rid of all the ‘t’s: that was probably as much as he could achieve.

And there I found a new heaven and a new earth, for the heaven and the earth from before were gone. And I heard a loud voice from heaven declaring, Behold, God will dwell with you, and you will be His very own people, and God will be your very own God. And there will be no more death, no more sorrow, no more pain. And God upon the throne said, Behold, I make everything new.

To avoid the need for explanations that might go nowhere, he’d omitted Jerusalem, the sea, the tabernacle, the apostle John, the bride and the husband, men, and a few other things. The God of this pamphlet no longer wiped tears from eyes, partly because those words were too difficult to pronounce, partly because, after all this time, it was still a mystery whether the ????? had eyes or wept. Peter reconnected with how long he’d sweated to think of an alternative word for ‘true’. All that labour, and for what? The only words he had to offer them now were ‘sorry’ and ‘goodbye’.

‘Beautiful day,’ said Tuska, and it was. The atmosphere was putting on a show for them, as if in honour of a momentous occasion. Two huge columns of unfallen rain, one to the west and the other to the east, had drifted towards each other and were now mingling in their topmost reaches, forming a glistering arch in the sky. It was a long way off yet, miles probably, but it conjured the illusion that they were about to pass under a colossal portal made of nothing more substantial than water droplets.

‘Gotta admit,’ said Tuska, ‘view-wise, that’s a nine out of ten.’

‘Rear windows are shut, I hope?’ said Flores. ‘Don’t want those drugs to get rained on.’

‘Yes, they’re shut,’ said Peter. Tuska and Flores, stationed in the front seats, had barely said a word to him since the jeep had left the compound. He felt like a child stashed in the back, allowed to come along for no better reason than that he couldn’t be left unattended, and with nothing to do on the journey but hope that his parents didn’t quarrel.

The hermetic seal of air conditioning that Grainger tried so diligently to maintain was not Tuska’s style. He kept the front windows open as he drove, allowing the air free access to the vehicle’s interior. The languid agitations of the atmosphere were joined by an artificial breeze from the speed of the vehicle.

‘Where’s Grainger?’ asked Peter.

‘Taking it easy,’ said Tuska, only his shoulder and driving arm visible to Peter.

‘Drunk and incapable,’ said Flores, wholly hidden.

‘She’s been a pretty good pharmacist all these years,’ said Tuska.

‘There are other pharmacists,’ Flores remarked.

‘Well, let’s see what Santa Claus brings, shall we?’ said Tuska, and Flores shut up.

The brilliant arch in the sky had drawn no nearer, so Peter looked out the passenger window instead. The landscape, which he’d grown to love, was still austerely beautiful, but today he saw its simplicity through different eyes, and it disturbed him. He could imagine a farm girl like Grainger scanning the terrain’s serene emptiness, searching in vain for wildlife, plant-life, or any kind of life, to remind her of her childhood habitat.